Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig

  After lunch, though, inevitably, the nerve-racking sound in the living room changed from soap opera traumas to the slip-slap of the canasta deck being shuffled and the ever so musical trill, “Yoo hoo, bashful,” and all afternoon I’d again be a prisoner of a card game with more rules than a stack of Bibles.

  • • •

  “NO, NO, NO!” She put a hand to her brow as if her mind needed support, a familiar gesture by this third or fourth day—I was losing track—of card game torture. “What did I tell you about needing to meld a full canasta before you can go out?”

  “I was thinking about something else, excuse me all to pieces. What do I do now?”

  “For a start, pay attention, pretty please.”

  I suppose I should have, but nothing was really penetrating me except the something else I kept thinking about. My money. The disastrous shirt-in-the-garbage episode that left me broke as a bum. No mad money meant no going to a show, no comic books, not even a Mounds bar the whole summer, for crying out loud. But that wasn’t nearly the worst. It bothered me no end that if I went back to Montana in the fall without the school clothes Gram had expressly told me to stock up on, I would have to go to class looking like something the cat dragged in. People noticed when a kid was too shabby, and it could lead to official snooping that brought on foster care—next thing to being sentenced to the orphanage—on grounds of neglect. Gram would never neglect me on purpose, but if she simply couldn’t work and draw wages after her operation, how was she supposed to keep me looking decent? With all that on my mind, here was a case where I could use some help from across the card table, and I didn’t mean canasta. The one time I had managed to broach the subject of school clothes and so on between her morning loafing at the breakfast table and soap opera time, Aunt Kate flapped her fingers at me and said, “Shoo now. We’ll figure out what to do about that later.” But when?

  • • •

  BY EVERY SIGN, not while I was stuck with a mittful of canasta cards. Back to brooding, I sucked on my chipped tooth as draw-and-discard drearily continued.

  A little of that and Aunt Kate was grimacing in annoyance. “Don’t they have dentists in Montana? What happened to that tooth, anyway?”

  “Nothing much.” I sat up straight as a charge went through me, my imagination taking off in the opposite direction from those modest words. “I got bucked off in the roundup, is all.”

  “From a horse?” She made it sound like she had never heard of such a thing.

  “You betcha,” I echoed Herman, pouring it on more than I had to, but a person gets carried away. “See, everybody’s on horseback for the roundup, even Sparrowhead,” I stretched the matter further. “I was riding drag, that’s at the rear end of the herd, where what you do is whoop the slowpoke cows and calves along to catch up with the others. Sort of like HYAH HYAH HYAH,” I gave her a hollering sample that made her jerk back and spill a few cards.

  “Things were going good until this one old mossie cow broke off from the bunch”—the story was really rolling in me now—“and away she went with her calf at her heels. I took out after them, spurring Snipper—he’s a cutting horse, see—and we about got the herd quitters headed off when Snipper hit an alkali boghole and started bucking out of it so’s not to sink up to his, uhm, tail. I’m usually a real good rider”—modesty had to bow out of this part—“but I blew a stirrup and got thrown out of the saddle. I guess I hit the ground hard enough that tooth couldn’t take it. I was fine otherwise, though.” I couldn’t resist grinning at her with the snag fully showing.

  “Good grief,” my listener finally found her voice. “That’s uncivilized! Poor child, you might have been damaged any number of ways!”

  “Aw, things like that happen on the ranch a lot.”

  That put the huff back into Aunt Kate in a hurry. “Whatever has gotten into Dorie?” she lamented, catching me off guard. “That sister of mine is raising you to be a wild cowboy, it sounds like. Tsk,” that tail end of the remark the kind of sound that says way more than words.

  “Oh, it’s not that bad,” I tried to backtrack. “Gram sees me with my nose in a book so much she says my freckles are liable to turn into inkspots.”

  “Does she.” As if looking me over for that possibility, she scanned my earnest expression for a good long moment, with what might have been the slightest smile making her jowls twitch.

  “All right then, toothums. Let’s see if that studious attitude can turn you into a canasta player.” Laying her cards facedown, she scooped up those of the phantom Gerda, drew from the deck, hummed a note of discovery, then discarded with a flourish, saying, “My, my, look at that.”

  A fourspot, what else. I perked up, ready to show her that I knew what was what in this damn game. With a flourish I melded some fours and other combinations to get on the board, and then as she watched with that pinched expression for some reason deepening between her eyes, I flashed the one fourspot I’d held back and a joker to scoop in the pile when the voice across the table rose like a siren.

  “No, no, no! Wake up, child. You can’t take that without a natural pair.”

  “Huh? Why not?”

  Rollng her eyes, she put a hand to the peanut brickle plate. Finding it empty, she bit off instead: “Because it’s a rule. How many times have I gone over those with you? Mmm? Can’t you put your mind to the game at all?”

  At that, our eyes locked, her blue-eyed stare and my ungiving one right back. If she was exasperated enough to blow her stack, so was I.

  “There are too many rules! This canasta stuff goes through me like green shit through a goose!”

  • • •

  I KNOW IT is the mischief of memory that my outburst echoed on and on in the room. But it seemed to. At first Aunt Kate went perfectly still, except for blinking a mile a minute. Then her face turned stonier than any of those on Mount Rushmore. For some seconds, she looked like she couldn’t find what to say. But when she did, it blew my hair back.

  “You ungrateful snot! Is this the thanks I get? That sort of talk, in my own house when I’ve, I’ve taken you in practically off the street? I never heard such—” Words failed her, but not for long. “Did you learn that filth from him?” She flung an arm in the direction of the greenhouse and Herman.

  “No!” I was as shrill as she was. “It’s what they say in the bunkhouse when something doesn’t make a lick of sense.”

  “Look around you, mister fellow,” she blazed away some more. “This is not some uncivilized bunkhouse on some piddling ranch in the middle of nowhere. Dorie must be out of her mind, letting you hang around with a pack of dirty-mouthed bums. If she or somebody doesn’t put a stop to that kind of behavior, you’ll end up as nothing more than—”

  She didn’t finish that, simply stared across the table at me, breathing so heavily her jowls jiggled.

  “All right.” She swallowed hard. Then again, “All righty right. Let’s settle down.”

  If sitting there letting her tongue-lash the hide off me without so much as a whimper wasn’t what might be called settled down, I didn’t know what was. My tight lips must have told her so, because her tone of voice lessened from ranting to merely warning: “That is enough of those words out of you, understand?”

  My face still closed as a fist, I nodded about a quarter of an inch, a response she plainly did not like but took without tearing into me again. “That’s that,” she said through her teeth, and to my surprise, threw in her hand and began gathering in all the other cards on the table.

  “I need to go and have my hair done, so we won’t try any more cardsie-wardsie today. Now then”—she shoved the cards together until they built into the fat deck ready for my next day of reckoning—“while I’m out, find something to do that you don’t have to swear a blue streak about.”

  • • •

  NATURALLY I RESORTED to Herman. He was sitting there, book in han
d, in the greenhouse, comfortable as a person can be on a fruit box, smoking a cigar while he read. As soon as I called out “Knock, knock” and sidled in, he saw I was so down in the mouth I might trip over my lower lip. Squinting over his stogie, he asked as if he could guess the answer. “How is the canasta?”

  “Not so hot.” Leaving out the part about what went through the goose, I vented my frustration about endless crazy rules. “I try to savvy them, really I do, but the cards don’t mean what they’re supposed to in the dumb game. Aunt Kate is half pee oh’d at me all the time for not doing better, but I don’t know how.” I ended up dumping everything into the open. “See, she’s scared spitless her card party is gonna be a mess on account of me. So am I. But she’s got it into her head that she can teach me this canasta stuff by then.”

  “The Kate. Sometimes her imagination runs off with her,” said the man paging through Winnetou the Apache Knight.

  Herman nursed the cigar with little puffs while he thought. “Cannot be terrible hard,” he reasoned out canasta with a logic that had eluded me, “if the Kate and the hens can play it. Betcha we can fix.” Telling me, cowboy-style, by way of Karl May, to pull up a stump while he searched for something, he dragged out the duffel bag from the corner of the greenhouse.

  Dutiful but still dubious, I sat on a fruit box as ordered and watched him dig around in the duffel until he came up with a deck of cards that had seen better days and a well-thumbed book of Hoyle. “We reconnoiter the rules, hah?” A phrase that surprised me, even though I pretty much knew what it meant. But we needed more than a rulebook, I told him with a shake of my head.

  “We’re still sunk. Aunt Kate and them play partners, so it takes two decks.”

  “Puh. Silly game.” He swung back to the duffel bag, stopped short, turned and gave me a prolonged look as if making up his mind. Then thrust an arm in again. Scrounging through the bag up to his shoulder, he felt around until he grunted and produced another deck of cards even more hard-used than the first.

  “The Kate is not to know,” he warned as he handed me the deck and pulled out a box to serve as a table. “Man-to-man, yah? Here, fill up your eyes good.”

  I was already bug-eyed. The first card, when I turned the deck over for a look, maybe was the queen of hearts all right, but like none I had ever seen—an old-time sepia photograph of a woman grinning wolfishly in a bubble bath, her breasts out in plain sight atop the soapy cloud like the biggest bubbles of all.

  With a gulp, I spread more of the cards faceup on the box table, which meant breasts up, legs up, fannies up, pose after pose of naked women or rather as close to naked as possible without showing the whole thinger. Who knew there were fifty-two ways of covering that part up? That didn’t even count the joker, a leggy blonde wearing a jester’s cap and coyly holding a tambourine over the strategic spot. Mingled with the Manitowocers’ shadow pictures from the photographic panes overhead, the frolicsome set seemed to be teasing the portrait sitters into what a good time could be had if they simply took all those clothes off and jumped into bathtubs and swimming pools bare naked.

  “French bible,” Herman defined the fleshy collection with a shrug, as I still was pop-eyed at it. Scooping the deck in with the tamer one, he shuffled them together thoroughly, the kings and queens and jacks now keeping company with their nude cousins and the ghostly Manitowocers.

  He had me read out canasta rules from Hoyle while he dealt hands of fifteen cards each as if four of us were playing, the same as Aunt Kate had just tried, but that was the only similarity, the cards flying from his fingers almost faster than the eye could follow. I felt justified to hear him let out an exasperated “Puh” at the various rules that threw me. After scooping up his hand and studying it and then doing the same with the other two and mine, he instructed me to sort my cards into order, from kings—in the girly deck, even those were naked frolickers around a throne or doing something pretty close to indecent with a crown—on down, left to right, with aces and wild cards and any jokers off the end together for easy keeping track, something Aunt Kate had never bothered to tip me off to. I will say, the bare parts of the French ladies peeking from behind the usual queens and jacks garbed to their eyebrows did cause me to pay a good deal more attention to the display of my cards.

  His eyeglasses glinting with divine calculation—or maybe it was a beam of light focused through a photographic pane of glass overhead—Herman lost no time in attacking our phantom opponents. “First thing after everybody melds, freeze the pile, yah? Throw on a wild card or a joker even, so they must have a natural pair to take what is discarded. Get your bluff in, make it hard for the hens to build their hands.”

  That made more sense than anything Aunt Kate had dinned into me in all the afternoons. I had to part with a wild-card deuce featuring a sly-looking brunette skinny-dipping in a heart-shaped swimming pool, but reluctantly figured it was worth it to place her crosswise on the discard pile to indicate it was frozen.

  About then, Herman noticed my hand visiting deep in my pants and tut-tutted with a frown. “Donny, sorry to say, but this is not time for pocket pool.”

  Turning red as that seven of hearts, I yanked my hand out at the accusation. “No, no, it’s not that, honest. What it is, I carry, uh, a lucky charm and it’s got to be rubbed for, you know, luck.”

  He cocked his head in interest at my hasty explanation. I still was flighty about letting anyone see the arrowhead. But something moved me, maybe the spirit of Manitou, and I suppose somewhat ceremoniously I dug out the arrowhead and peeled back its sheaf of Tuffies enough to show him.

  He laughed and laughed when I explained the need for protection from the sharp edges. “First time in history ever those are used that way, I betcha.” When I handed him the condom pouch with the arrowhead catching enough light through the glass panes to glisten like a black jewel, he fell silent for a minute, holding it in the palm of his hand as if it were precious beyond any saying of it. At last he murmured, “Bee-yoot-iffle,” and handed it back to me with great care. “Where did you get such a thing?”

  I told him about finding it in the creek, right where some Indian dropped it, way back before Columbus, adding none too modestly, “It’s rare.”

  “Goes with your moccasins, you are halfway to Indian,” he puffed up my estimate of myself even further. His long face crinkled in a surprisingly wise smile. “You are right to use it as lucky piece and rub it often. Luck is not to be sniffled at, wherever it comes from.”

  Stoking up with a fresh cigar, Herman turned back to Hoyle and how to arm me for the hen party, running his finger down the canasta page black with rules. “Hah, here is oppor-tun-ity. Hoyle don’t say you got to put meld down anytime quick.” Reaching over, he grabbed up the cards I had melded and tucked them back in my hand. “Bullwhack the hens. Hide what you will do, yah?”

  It took me a few blinks to rid myself of the mental picture that conjured and figure out he meant “bushwhack.” Then to grasp his idea of an ambush, by holding back meld cards so Gerda and Herta wouldn’t have a clue to what was in my hand, until the twin card-playing demons blindly discarded something I had a bunch of and could snatch up the pile and put together melds like crazy.

  “Eye-dea is, surprise their pants off,” he formulated, already tracing through the dense print for further stunts I could pull. I giggled. That would put them in the same league as the undressed womanhood peeking various parts of themselves out from card to card. Canasta Herman-style was proving to be worth ever so much more close attention than that of Aunt Kate.

  • • •

  IN OUR SESSION THE NEXT DAY, my amazed partner praised my new powers of concentration and confidence and what she unknowingly termed a better feel for canasta. “That’s more like it,” she declared, celebrating with a chunk of peanut brickle. “Honeybun, I knew you could do it. All it takes is patience, mmm?” If you didn’t count whatever could be squeezed out of a French b
ible and a lucky arrowhead wearing condoms.

  “All righty right,” she munched out the words, “you’ve learned the hard way what a canasta is. Let’s don’t futz with it anymore today.”

  My ears must have stood straight out at that. Hearing one of Gram’s almost cusswords come from high-toned Aunt Kate shocked me all the way through.

  Nor, it turned out, was that the end of her capacity to surprise. After popping another piece of brickle into her mouth, one for the road, she rose from her chair and beckoned me to follow her. “Come see, honeybunch. A certain seamstress has been working her fingers off,” she all but patted herself on the back, “and I have something to show you in the wardrobe department.”

  Wardrobe. I knew that meant clothing, and lots of it, and instantly I envisioned what must be awaiting in the sewing room.

  Oh man! Suddenly, something made sense. The sewing machine zinging away during the soap operas, her shooing me off when I tried to bring up the matter of the missing money—all this time, she’d been busy making shirts and the rest to surprise me with. Those baby-blue stares of hers sizing me up in the best sort of way, when I’d unkindly thought she was in the habit of eyeing me as if I were a stray left on the doorstep. What a relief. I wouldn’t have to go back to school in the fall looking like something the cat dragged in, after all.

  Giddy with this turn of events, I revamped my attitude about everything since I arrived. No wonder she stuck me away in the attic, in order to have the sewing room produce what I most lacked, a wardrobe! Forgiving her even for canasta, I nearly trod on her heels as she paraded us across the living room, dropping smiles over her shoulder.