Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig

  If the big-hatted lawman poking his nose into my life asked about any of that, I was ready to tell him.

  • • •

  THE SHERIFF SNIFFED as if smelling something he didn’t like after I protested that I really had been born at Fort Peck, honest.

  “That’s as maybe,” he allowed, leaning toward me as if to get a better look. “Tell me something, laddie boy.” His tone turned into something I did not like to hear. “You don’t happen to be running away from home, do you?”

  “No! The other way around! I mean, Gram and me got kicked out of the cookhouse and so we don’t have anywhere, and she’s sending me off to these people like I told you for someplace to go, honest!”

  Characters in the funnies sometimes act out a situation to the fullest and whenever the Just Trampin’ hobo PeeWee and his buddies encountered a sheriff like this, they squawked, “Yeeps! It’s the constabulary!” and their hair stood on end. I can’t prove the top of my head was a red pompadour reaching for the sky, but it felt that way as I faced the scowling little lawman across the aisle. I was as dumbfounded as I was scared. Could a person be arrested for riding a Greyhound bus? And if so, would my suitcase be searched? How could I explain the obviously precious black arrowhead to a sheriff already full of suspicion? It’s really mine, see, because I found it, but my grandmother made me hand it over to Sparrowhead and so I got it back when he wouldn’t let me stay on the ranch and— That sounded fishy even to me, let alone a skeptical law enforcement officer. Then and there, with that star badge full in my face, the consequences of my impulsive grab at the Double W went through me like a fever spasm.

  Afflicted as I was by something I’d done without thinking, now I had to strain my brain for how to head off the inquisitive sheriff. The prisoner sent me a knowing look of sympathy that didn’t help. Somehow I needed to dodge incrimination—the first step to getting back to Gros Ventre and turned over to the authorities, I was sure—by proving I actually was going to visit relatives like I’d said. “Here, see?” Frantically I dug out the autograph book from my jacket pocket and produced the slip of paper Gram had written the Wisconsin address on.

  Still spooked to my eyeballs, I held my breath as the sheriff studied Gram’s spidery handwriting.

  “Hell if I know what people are thinking anymore, the things they do these days,” he muttered as he kept squinting at the scrawl. Finally the evidence seemed to convince him, if reluctantly. Handing back the scrap of paper, he rasped, “It’s still bad business, I say, turning a kid young as you loose in the world.”

  The prisoner Harv rumbled a laugh. “How old do you always say you were, when you set out on your own? Barely out of short pants, right?”

  “Nobody asked you, Harvey,” the sheriff snapped. His attention diverted from me, he folded his arms on his chest and shook his head at the lovelorn suitor in his custody and the dammed river that had saddled him with wide-open boomtowns, the things a lawman had to put up with.

  Although I was still shaky from the close call, my impulse was to get back to an even footing as a legitimate Greyhound passenger if I possibly could. Screwing up my courage, I took a gamble. “Uh, sir?” I tried to keep the squeak out of my voice. “I’ve never had anything to do with a sheriff before, so how about signing my autograph book for me, please, will you, huh?”

  That seemed to amuse him to no end. “Kind of a feisty squirt, hnn?” he cackled. “I can believe you was hatched at Fort Peck.” In the next blink, though, habit or something set in and he made a face and pushed away the opened album I was trying to give him. “I don’t have time for foolishness.”

  Harv came to my rescue. “Aw, come on, Carl. Don’t you remember at all what it was like to be a kid?”

  The sheriff shot him a look, but for once didn’t snap “Shut up.” Shifting uncomfortably, he muttered, “Oh hell, give the thing here.” He took the album as if it might bite him, fumbled with the pen until I showed him how to click it, then bent his head and wrote.

  Like they say at Fort Peck, keep your pecker dry

  Carl Kinnick, Sheriff,

  Hill County, Montana

  “Gee, that’s a good one,” I managed to more or less thank him. “Can I get his, too?”

  The sheriff laughed meanly. “What do you say to that, Harv? I bet you’re not used to writing your John Hancock except to bounce checks.” Entertained, he passed the autograph book to the handcuffed prisoner.

  With great concentration, the arrested man went to work at writing. It took him a long time, even considering the contorted way he had to hold the pen and book. “What in hell-all are you writing, the Bible?” the sheriff derided.

  Finally the prisoner thrust his manacled hands across to give me the finished product, only to have it intercepted, the sheriff growling, “Not so fast. Let me see that.”

  Reading it with a pinched look, the sheriff at first couldn’t seem to believe his eyes, saying to himself, “Huh. Huh.” Finishing, he burst out: “Harv, you’re hopeless! That’s schoolhouse mush if I ever saw any.”

  Unperturbed, Harv stated, “Letty is worth every word of it.”

  Sourly the sheriff passed the opened album for me to take in the painstakingly shaped words.

  Holy wow, I thought to myself, that pretty well described Letty, except for the pink stitching.

  The sheriff was still expressing disgust with his prisoner. “Where’d you pick up that list of schoolkid stuff, loverboy?”

  “Belowdecks on a troop carrier headed for the Guam invasion,” Harv countered, with a level gaze at his captor.

  Somewhere amid their back-and-forth and my thrilled admiration of his construction on the page, I finally fully took in the signature beneath.

  Harvey Kinnick, serving time in this life.

  I blurted, “Y-you’ve got the same last name?”

  “We’re brothers,” the prisoner specified. “Aren’t we, Carl.”

  The sheriff folded his arms on his chest in practically a pout. “Step-brothers.”

  5.

  THE PAIR of them got off at Wolf Point, a town so scrimpy it was no surprise that it could not hold Harv the jailbreaker. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, button,” the sheriff left me with. I thought to myself, as I have ever since, that left a large margin for error, given the behavior of certain adults.

  Wolf Point seemed to be the cutoff between what is generally thought of as Montana and the notion of North Dakota, farms sprinkled across a big square of land. By now passengers had dwindled drastically—there wasn’t much of anywhere to pick someone up until the supper stop at Williston, a couple of hours away—and I managed to gather only the autographs and inscriptions of a Rural Electrification troubleshooter and two elderly Dakota couples retired from wheat farming and moved to town, so much alike right down to the crow’s-feet wrinkles of their prairie squints that they could have been twins married to twins. Maybe inspiration flattens out along with the countryside, because they all tended to come up with sentiments along the lines of Remember me early, remember me late, remember me at the Golden Gate. But every page filled went toward my goal of a world-famous collection.

  At the Williston depot, for once the driver beat me in getting off, handing over the paperwork to the next driver at the bottom of the bus steps. As I scooted for the restroom, I overheard him say to the new man, “Carrying a stray,” and the response, “I’ll keep an eye on him.”

  That exchange made my guts tighten. Was that what I was, a stray? Like a motherless calf? That was not the kind of fame I wanted, and unfair besides. I had Gram yet, and like it or not, the unknown great-aunt and -uncle ahead in Wisconsin. It was only between here and there that I was unclaimed, I tried telling myself.

  But I was further unsettled when the lunchroom’s supper offerings did not include chicken-fried steak or anything remotely like it, only stuff such as macaroni and cheese or meatloaf that wasn
’t any kind of a treat, anytime. In direct violation of Gram’s orders, feeling guilty but fed, I had a chocolate milkshake and a piece of cherry pie, à la mode. Maybe Minnesota, on tomorrow’s stretch of the trip, would feed better.

  The bus added a dozen or so passengers in Williston, but I was too played out by the full day to go up and down the aisle with the autograph book. Instead, I settled in for the night, which took a long time coming in horizontal North Dakota. First thing, making sure no one was watching, I took out my wallet and put it down the front of my pants, another of Gram’s strict orders. It felt funny there in my shorts, but nobody was going to get it while I slept. Then I remembered the Green Stamps, of inestimable or at least unknown worth, and stuck those down there to safety, too.

  Bundling my jacket for a pillow, I made myself as close to comfortable as I could and thought back on the day while waiting for sleep to come. Oh man, was Gram ever right that the dog bus gets all kinds. The soldiers going to meet their fate in Korea. The nun and the sheepherder, both of whom I had miraculously escaped. That hibernating Indian. Heavenly Letty. The cantankerous little sheriff and his gallant prisoner. And that didn’t even count the digestive woman back at the start of the trip. They all filled in the dizzying span of my thoughts like a private version of Believe It or Not! And wherever life took them from here on, most of them had left a bit of their existence in my memory book. A condensed chapter of themselves, maybe, to put it in Pleasantville terms. I had much to digest, in more ways than one, as I lay back in the seat.

  • • •

  WITH THE SUN glinting in the panel window my jacket pillow was crammed against, I woke up confused about where I was. Blinking and squinting, I wrestled myself upright until it all began to become familiar, the ranks of seats around me, some with heads showing and some not, the road hum of the bus tires, the countryside—greener than it had been the day before—flying past at a steady clip.

  “Uh, sir?” I called to the latest driver, still foggy. “Where are we?”

  “Minnie Soda,” he responded in a mock accent. “Meal stop coming up in Bemidji.”

  What language was that? Actually, my stomach didn’t care. It was ready for one of Gram’s prescriptions that I could obey to the letter—stuff myself with a big breakfast.

  • • •

  HE MUST HAVE singled me out there by myself at a side table as I wolfed down bacon and eggs and hotcakes. The man in the ill-fitting suit, who has haunted me to this day.

  As misfortune would have it, my classy western shirt caught a dribble of maple syrup from a forkful of hotcake, and stayed sticky no matter how I wiped at it. Not wanting to draw flies for the rest of the trip, I checked around the depot for the bus driver and spotted him in conversation with the ticket agent. Finishing off my breakfast as fast as I could, I scurried over to ask if I could please have my suitcase long enough to change shirts. That drew me a look, evidently my reputation among bus drivers as a stray not helping any, but he took pity on me and out we went to the luggage compartment. “Better hurry, freckles, I have to keep to the schedule,” he warned as I hustled to the restroom with the suitcase.

  In there, a lathered guy was shaving over a sink and a couple of others were washing up, and there was what I thought was only the usual traffic to the toilet stalls, so I didn’t feel too much out of place opening the wicker suitcase on the washbasin counter and stripping off my snap-button shirt and whipping on a plain one. Tucking the syruped shirt away in the suitcase, I did the same with the batch of Green Stamps, a nuisance to carry around. Then I had to dash for the bus, but the driver was waiting patiently by the luggage compartment, and I wasn’t even the last passenger. Behind me was the man, who must have been in a toilet stall while I was busy at my suitcase.

  I desposited myself in my same seat, feeling restored and ready for whatever the day brought. I thought.

  “Hello there, cowboy. Mind some company?” The man, whom I had not really been aware of until right then, paused beside the aisle seat next to me, looking around as if I were the prize among the assortment of passengers.

  “I guess not.” For a moment I was surprised, but then realized he must have noticed my bronc rider shirt, as Gram called it, before I changed. He appeared to be good enough company himself, smiling as if we shared a joke about something, even though he did remind me a little of Wendell Williamson in the way he more than filled his clothes. Wearing a violet tie and pigeon-gray suit—I figured he must have put on weight since buying it and I sympathized, always outgrowing clothes myself—he evidently was fresh from the barbershop, with a haircut that all but shined. Easing into the seat next to mine, he settled back casually as the bus pulled out and did not say anything until we left Bemidji behind and were freewheeling toward Minneapolis, some hours away. But then it started.

  Crossing his arms on his chest with a tired exhalation, he tipped his head my direction. “Man alive, I’ll be glad to get home. How about you?”

  “Me, too,” I answered generally, for I would be glad beyond measure to have Wisconsin over and done with, and the return part of my round-trip ticket delivering me back to Gram and whatever home turned out to be, if that could only happen.

  “Life on the road. Not for sissies.” He shook his head, with that smile as if we both got the joke. “You’re starting pretty young, to be a traveler.”

  “Twelve going on thirteen,” I stretched things a little, and for once my voice didn’t break.

  He maybe showed a tic of doubt at that, but didn’t question it. Himself, he was going gray, matching the tight-fitting suit. He had a broad, good-natured face, like those cartoons of the man in the moon, although, as Gram would have said, he must have kept it in the pantry; his complexion was sort of doughy, as if he needed to be outdoors more. “I’m all admiration,” he said with that confiding shake of his head. “Me, I’m on the go all the time for a living, and anybody who can do it for pleasure gets my vote.”

  I must have given him a funny look, although I tried not to. The only thing about my trip that had anything to do with pleasure was phony Pleasantville, so I steered the conversation back to him. “What do you do to keep the sheriff away?”

  “Eh?” He glanced at me as if I’d jabbed him in the ribs.

  “See, that’s what my father always says when he wants to know what a person does for a living.”

  “Sure, sure,” he laughed. Gazing around as if to make sure no one heard but me, even though I couldn’t see anyone paying any attention to us—the driver in particular had no time to eye us in the rearview mirror, Minnesota crawling with traffic in comparison with North Dakota—he lowered his voice as if letting me in on a secret. “I sell headbolt heaters, the Minnesota key chain. Bet you don’t know what those are.”

  I thrust out my hand so quickly to take the bet he batted his eyes in surprise. “You take a bolt out of the engine block and stick the headbolt thinger in there and plug it in all night and you can start your car when it’s colder than a brass monkey’s balls,” I couldn’t help showing off and getting in some cussing practice.

  “You’re something else, aren’t you.” He tugged at his tie as he appraised me. “Where’ve you been anyway, donkey school?”

  Mystified, I furrowed a look at him.

  “You know, where they teach you to be a wiseass?” He nudged me, smiling like a good fellow to show he was just kidding.

  “Oh man, that’s a good one,” I exclaimed, wishing I had it in the autograph book. If only the sleeping Indian had been this talkative! Taken with the back-and-forth, I said in the spirit of things, “I skipped wiseass school, see, for a dude ranch. Out west.”

  “That so?” Still with a sort of a grin, he prodded: “Saddled up Old Paint, did you, to go with that cowboy shirt I saw?”

  The idea seemed to entertain him, so I expanded it for him. “Sure thing. I won it in the roping contest. That and the jackpot.” I was having so
much fun, I threw that in as if it were prize money in a regular rodeo; Gram had been teasing about people thinking I was a bronc rider, but twirling a lasso didn’t seem beyond me. I built it up a touch more: “The other dudes couldn’t build a loop worth diddly-squat, so yeah, I hit the jackpot.” I couldn’t help grinning at the slick double meaning. Carried away even further, I confided, “And there was another prize, too, even better.”

  “You don’t say. The grand prize to boot?” he said in a kidding voice, although I could tell he was impressed.

  To keep him that way, it was on the tip of my tongue to airily say the prize was nothing less than an arrowhead blacker than anything and older than Columbus. But something made me hold that in, for the time being. Instead I resorted to:

  “You pretty close to guessed it. Beaded moccasins.”