Last Bus to Wisdom (44 page)

Unsteady but unconcerned, Herman winked at me with his glass eye, wrapped a hand around the first shot glass, unleashed the toast “The Devil's eyedrops cure sorrow!” and lifted the Great Fall Select to his lips.

Eyes half-shut in concentration as I called out the name of each one, he sipped his way through the preliminary beers. When he was done and jovially declared that Montana beer at least was better than the product of any horse, as quick as the laughter died down Skeeter flapped some money under Deacon's nose and flopped it down on the bar as the start of the pot. “Now, about them bets, if ye haven't lost your nerve.”

•   •   •

E
XPERIENCE SOMETIMES
lives up to its reputation as a teacher. From my time of hanging around the Double W bunkhouse and its card sharks, I was keeping an eye on Midnight Frankie. When he stayed perfectly poker-faced but flipped a nice fresh twenty-dollar bill into the pot—a lot of money, on our wages—saying, “Let's get some skin in the game,” I tremblingly stroked the arrowhead pouch for luck and dug out twenty dollars from the front of my pants and secured the same from Herman's change lying on the bar without him noticing. Nor was I the only one following Midnight Frankie's lead. Highpockets thumbed out the sum with the declaration “I'm in for a double sawbuck, too,” and Harv, thinking it over for a moment, silently did the same, followed in quick succession by Peerless, Shakespeare, Fingy, and Pooch.

“There's our chunk of the jackpot, Deacon,” Skeeter crowed in challenge. “Decorate the mahogany or say uncle.”

Faced with our crew's total backing of Herman, the Tumbling T outfit looked uneasily at one another, but when Deacon demanded, “C'mon, don't let this gang of broken-down blanket stiffs buffalo us,” they all matched our bets. Just like that, nearly three hundred dollars lay in a green pile on the bar.

“All right, One Eye, hoist 'em and name 'em off,” Skeeter led the roof-raising chorus of encouragement from our side. But before Babs could move to the taps to repeat the beers, Deacon stopped her and everything else with a shrill two-fingered whistle, evidently a hobo signal for something like stop, look, and listen.

In the immediate silence, the Tumbling T chieftain swelled up with the full attention he had drawn and sprang his demand. “Nothing against PeeWee here”—that again! I could have been put on trial for the murderous look I gave him—“but I want to handle them shot glasses and slips of paper myself, starting behind there at the taps. Just so there's no wrong impression of anything funny taking place along the way. You mind, Babs?”

The bartender backed away to lean against her cash register. “Since whichever bunch of you wins that jackpot is going to pay full price for shot glasses of beer, you can keep on all night for all I care.”

Highpockets checked with Herman, who replied that as far as he was concerned, any fool who wanted to could pour the beer. Establishing himself at the taps, Deacon made a big deal of drawing the six small glasses of beer, as I hung over the bar watching to make sure he assigned the right slip of paper to each one. Then he arranged the setup on the bar, five glasses in a row in front of Herman with one held back, the hole card, so to speak, so Herman could not figure out the final sample by process of elimination. “We'll let him off with five out of six, if I have the option of switching this one in”—Deacon peeked secretively at the slip under it—“so he don't pull some memorization trick on us. Fair enough?”

Skeeter and Highpockets mulled over the proposition but could see nothing wrong with it, while Herman pitty-patted the bar impatiently to start the tasting. It was agreed that as Herman named off the brand of beer, I would read out its slip of paper to verify he had it right, or heaven and earth forbid, he didn't. With a flourish, Deacon mixed around the shot glasses, along with their accompanying slips, to his contentment and the great drink contest got underway.

Reciting “Ready on right, ready on left, ready on firing line!” in soldierly fashion, Herman reached for the first slug of beer, swilled it briefly before swallowing, and declared, “Bee-yoot!” which I verified as the Butte brew. “Attaway, One Eye!” and “Show 'em what the Diamond Buckle stands for!” came the shouts of encouragement from our crew, while the Tumbling T outfit groaned in disbelief.

So it went, down the line, each beer identified correctly at the first sip, until there stood the last two shot glasses, the one Deacon was holding back and the other resting in front of Herman.

Grinning tipsily but still in command of himself, he threw the challenge to Deacon. “Which one is to tickle my tonsils?”

“You're lucky so far,” Deacon said sourly, “but let's see if that luck ain't due to run out about now.” So saying, he switched the hole-card shot glass in for the other one.

This beer I couldn't even guess at. A darker, foamy brew than the others, it had to be either Yellowstone Brew or Avalanche Ale, but with everything riding on Herman's final feat of swilling a mouthful and identifying it, fifty-fifty odds all of a sudden didn't seem anything like a cinch. But quite nonchalantly, he raised the shot glass, said, “Bottoms upside,” and in one motion swigged the mystery beer.

To my alarm, he chugged it too much, more of it going down him than the other beers had. Not for long, because what was left in his mouth he spewed onto the bar, his face contorted. Gagging and trying to speak, he was making a
k-k-k
sound like a car trying to start on a cold morning, as our crew watched in horror, me most of all. Whatever was wrong with him was calamity enough, but I could also see a major portion of our wages about to vanish in front of our eyes.

“Told you,” Deacon crowed as he moved along the bar toward the pot. “Wore out his gullet after so many beers. Let's have that money and we'll even buy you a consolation round, Pockets.” He couldn't hide his smirk.

“Herman, what is it?” I quavered as he kept trying to work his throat. “What's wrong?” Not knowing what else to do, I slammed him across the top of his back with my open hand as hard as I could.

The blow must have loosened up something somehow. “C-c-c-cough drop,” he spluttered, pointing shakily at the offending shot glass.

“Deacon, you cheating bastard.” Highpockets caught on to the dodge ahead of the rest of us, but not by much. “Grab him.” Harv already had accomplished that, locking the protesting Deacon to his chest from behind as casually as gathering an armful of hay. “Frisk him good,” Highpockets ordered, with Midnight Frankie and Shakespeare quick on the job.

Into sight came an orange box bearing the words
OLD RECIPE MENTHOL COUGH DROPS LEMON FLAVOR
.

“I'd say you just forfeited, Deacon,” Highpockets pronounced, while I did my best to attend to Herman as he stayed bent over the bar, wheezing and still trying to clear his voice box.

“Can't you take a joke?” Deacon squawked in Harv's steely grip. “Let's call it a draw and just scrap the bet.”

“Draw, my rosy-red butt.” That brought Peerless into it in full mode. “You can't pull a fast one like that and crawl out of it like a snake on ice.”

His Tumbling T equivalent argued right back. “Hey, your fella tumbled to the cough drop, but he never did name the beer. So by rights, we win the bet.”

“Tell it in church, ye whistledick,” the Jersey Mosquito put a stop to this. “We're claimin' the pot fair and square,” he declared, whipping off his hat and scooping the pile of money into it. Then with surprising agility, he hoisted his bony old rump onto the bar, swung his legs over as the Tumbling T gang made futile grabs at him and Babs screeched a protest, and disappeared down among beer barrels and such, clutching the hatful of cash to him.

That set off general mayhem.

Each crew charged at the other, swearing and squaring off. Harv seemed to be in his element, flooring one Tumbling T opponent with a roundhouse punch and taking on the next without drawing a breath. Fingy and Pooch between them were fending with a burly member of the other crew. As befitted their leadership positions, Highpockets and Deacon singled each other out, locked together in a revolving grapple along the length of the bar that sent beer glasses shattering and stools tumbling like dominoes. Peerless and Midnight Frankie and Shakespeare each were honorably engaged in tussles of their own with Tumbling T bettors yowling for their money back.

Amidst the battle royal I saw Babs pull out a pool stick sawed off to the right length to make a good club and start around the end of the bar to put it to use.

Taking that as a signal this was getting serious, I tugged at Herman for us to clear out of there. Blinking his good eye at the melee around him, he resisted my pulling, saying thickly, “Wait, Donny. Oops, Scotty. You know who I mean. Let's don't go, I have to help fellas fight.”

“Nothing doing. You've had your war,” I gritted out, and hauled at him with all my might, yanking him off the bar stool in the direction of the door. In my death grip on his arm, he stumbled after me as we skinned along the bar, ducking and dodging swinging fists and reeling bodies as much as we could, out into the street to where the pickup was parked, and got him seated on the running board. “Don't move,” I said. “Sing a song, say poetry, do something.”

“Good eye-dea,” he said dreamily, and began to recite the rhyme we fashioned on the last bus:

When you take a look in your memory book

Here you will find the lasting kind,

Old rhymes and new, life in review,

Roses in the snow of long ago.

Lovely sentiments, but I had to leave him deposited there while I raced off to the mercantile, on the chance Jones might still be in there buying groceries. I couldn't help looking wildly this way and that along the moonlit street of Wisdom, hoping that the deputy sheriff would not choose now to pay the hoboes another visit.

As I burst into the store, Jones glanced around in surprise from chucking an armload of loaves of bread onto the counter while the storekeeper kept tally. Before he could ask what my rush was, I stammered, “The fellas are ready to go back to the ranch.”

“What, they drank the town dry already? Pretty close to a new record, I'd say.” He turned away to grab boxes of macaroni off a shelf. “Tell them I'll be there by the time they can piss the beer out of theirselves. I'm not stopping every two minutes on the way to the ranch so somebody can take a leak.”

“Uhm, if you could hurry. They're sort of in a fight. With the Tumbling T crew.”

Jones swore blue sparks into the air, instructed the storekeeper to load the groceries in the pickup, and took off at a high run for the bar, with me trying to keep up.

“STOP IT!” he roared before he was even half through the swinging doors. “Or I'll see to it that every one of you sonofabitches of both outfits is fired and your asses run out of town before morning!”

That put a halt to everything, except a belated “Yow!” from Peerless, who had received the latest whack from Babs's pool stick. Sitting on Deacon's chest, where he had him pinned to the floor, Highpockets looked down at his adversary. “Your call.”

Deacon squirmed as much as he could, very little, then managed to turn his head toward Jones. “Since you put it that way, we're peaceable.”

“Us, too,” Highpockets agreed, climbing off him. “You heard what the man said, boys. Let's take our winnings and evaporate out of here. Right, Skeeter?” He whirled around, looking in every corner. “SKEETER? Where the hell did he and that hatful of money go?”

The Jersey Mosquito popped up from behind the far end of the bar, grinning devilishly and holding the upside-down hat as if it were a pot of gold. “Just bein' our Fort Knox till you fellas got done socializin'. See you on the Ma and Pa sometime, Deacon,” he called over his shoulder as he scampered out of the bar to jump in the back of the pickup.

•   •   •

F
OLLOWING HIS LEAD,
laughing and hooting like schoolboys, the Diamond Buckle crew piled into the box of the pickup, Jones counting us with chops of a hand like you do sheep. He came up one short. “Who's missing?”

Skeeter giggled. “Smiley, natcherly.”

“He cut out of the saloon through the back door soon as his check was cashed,” Peerless testified. “Wouldn't even stay and have one drink with us, the stuck-up bugger.”

“Then where the hell is the knothead?”

Silence. Until Skeeter further provided:

“Gettin' his ashes hauled.”

That puzzled me but not Herman, who let out a wild drunken laugh. Revelation came when Highpockets swiped a hand toward the sheepwagons where the salesladies had set up shop.

Jones checked his watch. “Ever since we hit town, the sonofabitch has been at it? That don't take forever.”

“More's the pity,” said Shakespeare, to stifled laughs from the hobo audience.

Catching a second wind of swearing, Jones clambered into the driver's seat, saying the goddamn fornicator could walk back to the ranch with his pants around his ankles, for all he cared.

•   •   •

T
HE RIDE
to the Diamond Buckle was riotous, as fight stories were traded on their way into legend. You would have thought the Watering Hole was the Little Bighorn, and our crew was the victorious Indians. Better yet, under the watchful eye of Highpockets the jackpot winnings were being counted out by Skeeter, hunched over so the cash would not blow out of his hat and carefully holding up greenbacks one by one in the moonlight to determine whether they were sawbucks or twenties, doling out the proceeds of the bet evenly among us. Fingy clutched his with all eight fingers as if he could not believe his good fortune. Pooch burst into more words than he ordinarily issued in a week: “First time we ever come back from town with more moolah than we went in with.”