Herman spoke up. “The boy made a notcheral mistake. It could happen to Einstein.”
“Another country heard from,” she snapped at him. Worry written large on her—there was plenty of space for it—she studied me again but not for long, her mind made up. Whirling to the stove, she set the pot off the burner and turned back to me, with a deep, deep breath that expanded her even more into Kate Smith dimension, in my opinion. “Sweetiekins, come.” She marched into the living room, killed the radio, planted herself on the davenport on an entire cushion, and patted the one beside her. I went and sat.
She looking down and me looking up, we gazed at each other in something like mutual incomprehension. I squirmed a little, and not just from the clammy touch of the davenport through the seat of my pants. Dismayed as I was, she too appeared to be thrown by the situation, until with a nod of resolve she sucked in her cheeks, as much as they would go, and compressed her lips to address the matter of me.
“Now then, lambie pie, there’s nothing to be ashamed of,” her tone became quite hushed, “but has your grandmother or anyone, a teacher maybe, ever said to you there might be a little bit something”—she searched for the word—“different about you?” Another breath from her very depths. “Just for example, do you get along all right in school?”
“Sure,” I replied defensively, thinking she had figured out the shirt-shredding battle royal with the campers. “I’m friends with kids in more schools than you can shake a stick at, back home.”
“No, no.” Her bosom heaved as she gathered for another try at me. “What I mean is, have you ever been set back in school? Failed a grade, or maybe even just had teensy-weensy trouble”—she pincered her thumb and first finger close together to make sure I understood how little it would be my fault—“catching on to things in class?”
I understood, all right, shocked speechless. She figured I had a wire down. Aghast at being classified as some kind of what Letty termed a mo-ron, I sucked air like a fish out of water, until my voice came back.
“Me? No! I get straight A’s! In deportment, even!” I babbled further, “I heard Miss Ciardi, that’s my teacher, say to Gram I’m bright enough to read by at night.”
My frantic blurts eliciting the throaty response “I see,” although she didn’t seem to, Aunt Kate tapped her hand on her thigh the jittery way she’d done in the car when I assumed singing to all of America was upmost on her mind.
Before she could say anything more, Herman stuck up for me from the kitchen doorway.
“Notcheral, like I telled you.” His guttural assertion made us both jump a little. “Donny is not first to find the resemblance, yah? If it bothers you so great to look like the other Kate, why do you dress up so much like you could be her?”
“When I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it,” she flared, giving him a dirty look. “A person should be able to dress the way she likes. And if Kate Smith happens to resemble me, that is her good luck, isn’t it?” A sentiment that made her draw herself up as if double-daring him to contradict it. I breathed slightly easier. If they were going to have a fight, at least that might put me on the sideline temporarily.
Not for long. Aunt Kate shifted a haunch as she turned toward me, a movement that tipped me into uncomfortably close range. “Honey bear,” she tried to be nice, the effort showing, “if you’re that intelligent, then you have quite the imagination.”
“Maybe a little bit more than most,” I owned up to.
My modest admission, she rolled over like a bulldozer. “You mustn’t let it run away with you,” her voice not Kate Smith–nice now. “You know why you’re here, because of Dorie’s—your grandmother’s—operation. We can’t have you going around with your head in the clouds while you’re with us, we all just need to get through this summer the best we can.” Another glare in the direction of the kitchen doorway. “Isn’t that so, Brinker?”
Looking almost as caught as I was, Herman protectively hugged the book he was holding. “Donny and I will be straight shooters, bet your boots.”
From the look in her eye, she was making ready to reply to that reply when I pulled the album out from behind my back. “All I wanted was your autograph when I thought you were you-know-who.” I knew to put as much oomph into the next as I could, even though the same enthusiasm wasn’t there. “I still want it, for sure. And Herman’s.”
“I see,” she said, a little less dubiously this time. She certainly helped herself to an eyeful of the memory book as she took it from me, her lips moving surprisingly like Gram’s in silently reading that cover inscription, YE WHO LEND YOUR NAME TO THESE PAGES SHALL LIVE ON UNDIMMED THROUGH THE AGES. “So that’s what this is about,” she said faintly to herself in flipping to one of the entries. I hoped not the Fort Peck sheriff’s about keeping your pecker dry.
On pins and needles, I waited for her reaction as she dipped into the pages until she had evidently seen enough. “I need an aspirin.” She spoke with her eyes clamped shut, pinching the bridge of her nose. “And then we are going to eat dinner with no more interruptions.” That last, I sensed, was spoken as much for Herman’s benefit as mine.
“Sweetie”—once more she made the effort to be nice to me, handing back the autograph book before heaving herself off the davenport and marching to the kitchen—“we’ll be sure to write in it for you, but it can wait. Now then, come to the table, we’ll eat as long as we’re able.” She summoned the other two of us with an obvious lift of mood, improving with every step toward the dinner pot.
No sooner was the tube steak meal ingested if not digested than Aunt Kate declared in a sweetened mood, “Chickie, you look tuckered out from your trip,” which I didn’t think I did, but she topped that off with the message impossible to miss, “Your room is ready for you.”
The night was still a pup compared to the Greyhound’s long gallop through the dark, but if she wanted to settle me in the cozy sewing room with that nice cot, I was ready for that anytime. “It’s best for you to have a room all to yourself,” she said, leading the way into the hall—Wow, I thought, she’s really putting herself out, giving up her sewing room for my sake—“so we have fixed a place for you, haven’t we, Brinker.”
He oddly answered, “Yah, you come to Manito Woc and rough it like a cowboy, Donny. Make you feel at home, hah?”
And whiz, just like that, I was bypassing the cubbyhole sewing room and instead trooping upstairs behind Herman, with him insisting on lugging my suitcase—“You are the guest, you get the best”—while in back of us, Aunt Kate strenuously mounted one tread at a time. And as the stairs kept going, quite a climb by any standard, the suspicion began to seep in on me as to where we were headed, even before Herman shouldered open the squeaky door.
• • •
TO THIS DAY, that “room,” up where the hayloft in a barn would be, is engraved in me. Aunt Kate could call it what she wanted, but I had bounced around enough with my parents in makeshift quarters to recognize this as nothing more than the attic. Bare roofbeams and a sharply sloping underside of the roof and probably mice and spiders, the whole works.
The first thing to strike me in my shock was the frilly bedspread flowered with purple and orange blossoms the size of cabbages, instead of the cozy quilts Gram and I slept under every night of our lives, and pillows, pillows, pillows, the useless small square ones with tassels and gold fringe and sentiments stitched on such as IT TAKES TWO LOVEBIRDS TO COO. To give Aunt Kate the benefit of good intentions, which I was not about to do, I suppose all that was an attempt to camouflage the suspect bed, which I could tell from its ancient iron legs would skreek every time a person turned over. The rest of the furniture amounted to a cheap fiberboard dresser, a rickety straight-backed chair, and a bedstand holding a lamp with a stained shade. The remainder of the space was taken up by a sagging bookcase shelved with the unmistakable yellow spines of many years’ worth of National Geographics, and stacks of
storage boxes labeled Xmas tree lights & curtain material and such.
A kind of concentrated Palookaville, in other words. But veteran of makeshift quarters that I was from life with Gram and my folks in construction camp circumstances, I could have put up with my so-called home for the summer but for one thing. “The thing on the wall,” I immediately thought of it as, and still do. That dimestore plaster-of-Paris wall plaque no kid old enough to be acquainted with death wants to have to see the last thing before the lights are put out, the pale kneeling boy in pajamas with his hands clasped and eyes closed perhaps forever, praying a prayer guaranteed to sabotage slumber:
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
There could not have been a worse verse facing down on me with Gram somewhere between living and dying in a faraway hospital. That spine-chilling ode to death in the night, making it out to be no big deal as long as you got on your knees right before going to bed, unhinged me so badly that if someone had written it in the autograph book, I honestly believe I would have scissored it out.
As things were, I had trouble tearing my eyes away from the praying boy as Aunt Kate swirled around in the confined quarters, instructing me where to put things, while Herman stood well back out of the line of fire.
“There now,” she said when I was installed to her satisfaction, “and you know where the bathroom is.” Yeah, about a mile downstairs. “Kiss kiss.” She patted her cheek in a particular spot. I kissed Gram good night every bedtime, but only reluctantly put my lips to where I was ordered in these circumstances. Gram always returned the kiss, but Aunt Kate wasn’t about to. “Nighty-night, sleep tight,” and away she went, clumping down the stairs one by one. Kate Smith would not have left me with anything that babyish, I knew with a sinking heart, but at least Herman came through with “Have a good shut-eye” and another of those half-cockeyed man-to-man glances as he followed her into the stairwell.
• • •
BUNKHOUSE VOCABULARY FAILED me as I undressed for bed, faced with endless nights ahead stuck up under the rafters like another piece of junk. I could have cried, and maybe should have, but instead, cold dismay welled in me. How did I land in this fix? More to the point, why? Did this whopper of a woman who was my last remaining relative after Gram hate me at first sight? Was I asking for it by showing up looking more like a stray hobo than the little gentleman she wanted me to be? What was I going to do all summer long, be kicked around in this household where the grown-ups bickered like magpies? Try as I might to think my way out of this tough situation, captive to an aunt who not only was not Kate Smith but thought I must be missing a part between my ears, the only advice I could find for myself was that bit whispered from those interrupted existences Gram kept in touch with. Hunch up and take it.
Everything churning in me that way, I lay there like the corpse promised in the thing on the wall if Manitowoc did me in before morning, until finally the exertions of the day caught up with me and I drowsed off.
Only to shoot awake at a tapping on the door and Herman’s hoarse whisper:
“Donny? Are you sleeping?”
“I guess not.”
“Good. I come in.”
Furtively he did so, closing the door without a sound and flipping the light on, grinning at me from ear to ear. “Soldier pachamas, I see,” he noted my undershirt when I sat up in bed wondering as a person will in that situation, Now what?
“The Kate is in the bath,” he explained, as if we had plotted to meet in this secret fashion. With the same odd glint he’d had at the Greyhound station, he scooted the chair up to my bedside, displaying the book he’d been paging through earlier, thumb marking a place toward the middle. “What I wanted to show you, Deadly Dust, it is called in English.”
This was a case where you could tell a book by its cover, with cowboys riding full-tilt while firing their six-shooters at a band of war-painted Indians chasing them in a cloud of dust. At first glimpse it might have been any of the Max Brand or Luke Short or Zane Grey shoot-’em-ups popular in the Double W bunkhouse, but the name under the title was a new one on me. Recalling my earlier encounter with the kind of person who spelled his perfectly ordinary name with a K, I asked skeptically, “Who’s this Karl May guy?”
“‘My’ is how you say it,” said Herman. “Great writer. All his books, I have. Flaming Frontier. The Desperado Trail. Lots others. Same characters, different stories.” He bobbed his head in approval. “You don’t know Winnetou and Old Shatterhand?” He tut-tutted like a schoolteacher. “Big heroes of The West.” I could hear his capital letters on those last two words.
Maybe so, but when he opened the book in evidence, in his squarehead language as it was and fancy-lettered like in an old Bible, not a single word was recognizable to me. That didn’t matter a hoot to Herman as he proudly showed me the illustration he had hunted down in the middle of the book, translating the wording under it.
“On the bound-less plains of Montana,” he read with great care, adjusting his glasses, “the tepee rings of the Blackfoot, Crow, and Ass-in-i-bone tribes—”
“I think that’s Assiniboine,” I suggested.
He thanked me and read on. “—are the eternal hunting tracks of following the buffaloes, the be-he-moths of the prairie.”
Triumphantly he turned the book so I could not miss the full effect of the picture, which looked awfully familiar, similar to a Charlie Russell painting seen on endless drugstore calendars. It depicted Indian hunters in wolf skins sneaking up on foot to stampede a herd of buffalo over a cliff, the great hairy beasts cascading to the boulders below.
“There you go, hah?” Herman whispered in awe at the spectacle. “Such a place, where you are from.”
It took all the restraint I had, but I didn’t let on that right over there in my pants was a little something from Montana that might have slain many a buffalo. This Herman was wound up enough as it was; the night might never end if we got off on more or less lucky arrowheads and so on. I stuck to the strictly necessary. “Can I tell you something? It’s Mon-TANA, not MONT-ana.”
“Funny things, words. How they look and how they say.” He broke off, glancing toward his feet. Letting out an exclamation I couldn’t decipher, he reached down and picked up one of my moccasins.
“I stepped on it!” he cried out, as if he had committed a crime. “I hope I didn’t break it none.”
I could tell by a quick look that the decorative fancy-dancer still had all his limbs and that the rest of the beadwork had survived, too, so I reassured Herman no harm had been done, while scooping the other moccasin out of range of his big feet.
“Fascinating,” he said under his breath, pronouncing it faskinating, lovingly turning over and over in his hands the deerskin footwear he had tromped on. When he right away had to know what the beaded stick figure cavorting there on the toe and instep was supposed to be, I explained about fancy-dancing contests at big powwows.
Still fondling the moccasin as if he couldn’t let go, he asked in wonder, “You got from Indians?”
“As Indian as they come.” This time I couldn’t resist. Before I could stop myself, I was repeating the tale I’d told the ex-convict about the classy moccasins having been made for a great Blackfoot chief, temperately leaving out the part about my having won them in a roping contest on a dude ranch and instead circling closer to the truth by saying Gram had lucked onto them on the reservation. Herman did not need to know they’d been hocked at a truck stop by a broke Indian.
“How good, you have them. You are some lucky boy.” Maybe so, if the rotten sort was counted along with the better kind, I thought darkly to myself there on the skreeky bed.
He ran his fingers over the beadwork and soft leather one more time and carefully put the moccasin side by side with the other one
.
“So, now you know about Winnetou and I know about fancy-dancing. Big night!” He grinned in that horsy way and clapped Deadly Dust shut. Evidently gauging that Aunt Kate’s bath was about done, he rose from his chair. “We palaver some more tomorrow, yah?” he whispered from the stairwell as he sneaked back downstairs.
I sank onto the swayback pillow, wide-awake in the darkness of a summer that was showing every sign of being one for Believe It or Not!
10.
I WAS AN old hand at waking up in new places, worlds each as different from the last one as strange planets visited by Buck Rogers while he rocketed through the universe in the funny papers. In fact, when my father’s series of dam jobs landed us at the Pishkun reservoir site, we were quartered in an abandoned homestead cabin wallpapered with years’ worth of the Great Falls Tribune’s Sunday funnies. The homesteader must have had insulation on his mind more than humor, randomly pasting the colorful newspaper sheets upside down or not. Little could match the confusion of blinking awake in the early light to the Katzenjammer Kids inches from my nose going about their mischief while standing on their heads. But that first Manitowoc morning, opening my eyes to attic rafters bare as jail bars, the thing on the wall hovering like a leftover bad dream, my neck with a crick in it from the stove-in pillow, I had a lot more to figure out than why Hans and Fritz were topsy-turvy.
Such as how to get on the good side of the Kate, as Herman tellingly designated her. Plainly she was something unto herself, by any measure.
And so, determined to make up for my dumb jump to the wrong conclusion last night—although was it my fault both she and Kate Smith were the size of refrigerators and shared jolly numbers of chins and dimples and all in all looked enough alike to be twins?—I dressed quickly and headed downstairs.
Nice manners don’t cost anything, Gram’s prompting followed me down the steps. C’mon, Donny, Donal, Red Chief, I pulled myself together, it shouldn’t be all that hard to remember to be polite and to speak mainly when spoken to and to not mix up when to look serious and when to smile, and similar rules of the well-behaved. Hadn’t I gotten along perfectly fine with tons of strangers on the dog bus? Well, a couple of drivers, the ex-convict, and one fistfight aside.