  We construct and test a quasi-perfect lattice action for staggered fermions.
The construction starts from free fermions, where we suggest a new blocking
scheme, which leads to excellent locality of the perfect action. An adequate
truncation preserves a high quality of the free action. An Abelian gauge field
is inserted in d=2 by effectively tuning the couplings to a few short-ranged
lattice paths, based on the behavior of topological zero modes. We simulate the
Schwinger model with this action, applying a new variant of Hybrid Monte Carlo,
which damps the computational overhead due to the non-standard couplings. We
obtain a tiny ``pion'' mass down to very small \beta, while the ``\eta'' mass
follows very closely the prediction of asymptotic scaling. The observation that
even short-ranged quasi-perfect actions can yield strong improvement is most
relevant in view of QCD.
