Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig

  “Captain Cook, how about, sailing the world around and around.” He still was cranking it out. “Must of had Fingerspitzengefühl, or pthht, shipwreck.”

  • • •

  I SINCE HAVE LEARNED that what he was trying to describe with that jawbreaker word might best be called intuition in the fingertips, something like instinct or born genius or plain inspired guesswork tracing the best possible course up from map paper there at the end of the hand. A special talent of touch and decision that comes from who knows where.

  • • •

  HE COCKED that glass-eyed look at me as if I were something special. “You are some lucky boy, Donny, to got it.”

  Unconvinced and uncertain, I rubbed my thumbs against my fingertips, which felt the same as ever. “And wh-what if I do?”

  “Easy. You find us where to go.” In demonstration, he waggled his fingers as if warming up to play the piano and shifted his gaze to the map over our heads.

  I did not want any part of this. “Herman, huh-uh. Even if I stand on a bench I can’t reach anything but Florida, and that’s way to hell and gone in the wrong direction.”

  “Tell you what,” he breezed past my objection, “I get down, you get up.” Then and there, he squatted low as he could go.

  I realized he wanted me to straddle his shoulders. Skittish, I couldn’t help glancing at people pouring past in as public a place as there was, a good many of them staring as if we already were a spectacle. “Hey, no, really, I don’t think I’d better,” I balked. “Won’t we get arrested?”

  “Pah,” he dismissed that. “America don’t know hill of beans about arresting people. You should see Germany. Come on, up the daisy,” he finished impatiently, still down there on his heels. “Pony ride.”

  Feeling like a fool, I swung my legs onto his shoulders and he grunted and lifted me high.

  Up there eight feet tall, the West was mapped out to me as close as anyone could want, for sure. Finger-spitty-thinger or not, I had to go through the motions. Pressing my hand against the map surface, I tried to draw out inspiration from one spot or another, any spot. Certain the eyes of the entire depot were on me, I felt around like that blind man exploring the elephant. Easy, this absolutely wasn’t. If Herman’s Apache knight was anywhere around Tucson or Albuquerque, he didn’t answer the call. Nor did any Navajo cousin of Winnetou, around the four corners where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado all met. Automatically my hand kept following the bus routes traced in bright red, drifting up, on past Denver, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne. Whatever the right sensation of this silly Hermanic stunt was supposed to be, it was not making itself felt.

  By now I was stretching as far as I could reach, the Continental Divide at my elbow, with Herman swaying some as he clutched me around the legs.

  “Donny, hurry. Getting heavy, you are.”

  “I’m trying, I’m trying.” At least my hand was, moving as if of its own accord. I could tell myself I didn’t believe in the finger-guh-fool stuff all I wanted, but all of a sudden my index finger went as if magnetized to the telltale spot over the top of Wyoming.

  “I got it!”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “Montana!”

  “Good! Where in Montana?”

  “Down from Billings a little.”

  “What is there?”

  “Crow Fair.”

  “Hah? Go see birds? Donny, try again.”

  “No! Let me down, I’ll tell you about it.”

  16.

  “THESE CROWS ARE INDIANS, see, and Crow Fair is their big powwow.” Back to earth, or at least the depot floor, I talked fast while Herman listened for all he was worth. “They always hold it between the strawberry moon and the buck moon, something to do with when berries are done growing but buck deer grow new antlers.” I could tell I had lost Herman more than a little there. “That’s this time of year, get it? We learned a bunch of Indian stuff like that in social studies class at Heart Butte. Anyhow,” I rushed on, absolute grade-school expert that I was on such matters, “Crow Fair is really something, it lasts until they’re powwowed out after about a week, and I bet we can get there while it’s still going on.”

  Fingerspitzengefühl notwithstanding, he squinted dubiously up at the little red artery of Greyhound route to the Crow Reservation, way out west from Milwaukee certainly, but also in the apparent middle of nowhere, until I kicked in, “And all kinds of Indians show up for Crow Fair, honest.”

  Herman’s thick glasses caught a gleam. “All kinds Indians? You are sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure. Hundreds of them. Thousands.”

  “Even Apaches like Winnetou?”

  “There’s gotta be,” I professed. “They wouldn’t stay home from a powwow like that, the other Indians would think they’re sissies.”

  That settled it. Declaring there could be no such thing as sissy Apaches, Herman nodded decisively. “Crow Fair is where we go. Pick up your suitcase, Donny.”

  • • •

  IN MY EXPERIENCE, there is no other thrill quite like disappearing, the way Herman and I were about to, aboard the dog bus. Who would not be excited at the prospect of walking away—no, better, riding away at high speed almost as if the racing hound beneath our side window was carrying us on its back in some storybook—from what we faced in that household where you couldn’t even eat toast in peace? This is hindsight, always 20/20, but given my nearly dozen years of living more or less like an underage vagabond in construction camps and cookhouse, I had been through enough to grasp that with every mile flying past we would be borne away from Palookaville existences—Manitowoc ruled by the Kate in his case, foster home and orphanage limbo in mine—to life of our own making in the wide-open map of the West. An idea as freeing as a million-dollar dream and a whole hell of a lot more appealing than waiting on your knees for your soul to be snatched to heaven, right? So I still have to hand it to Herman, vanishing as we did was an inspiration right up there with the Manitou walkers going about their business in ghostly invisibility.

  Not that erasing ourselves from where we were supposed to be was as easy as a snap of the fingers and the two of us gone in a cloud of tailpipe exhaust. Right away there in the Milwaukee bus terminal, Herman had me keep out of sight while he did the buying of the tickets to the map dot called Crow Agency—as he said, so any busybody would not remember us traveling together. “No tracks behind do we leave,” he told me as if we were as stealthy as the Apaches themselves.

  • • •

  WHICH HELD TRUE only if Apaches greeted anyone sitting across from them on a Greyhound bus with “Hallo, you are going where?”

  Something I had not counted on was that my newly conceived comrade in travel would be an adventure himself on the long trip west. This came through to me almost the minute our fannies hit the bus seats, when Herman struck up a conversation with whoever happened to be seated opposite us, or for that matter, in front or behind. Evidently he had stored up bushels of talk those hours in the greenhouse all by his lonesome, and did he ever let the surplus out now, much of it given to bragging up the two of us as adventurers of the highway.

  “My nephew, some traveler he is,” time after time he presented me, grinning back skittishly through my freckles, to whatever listener happened to be captive at the moment. “Seeing the land, we are.”

  Now, I had palavered plenty with total strangers on my trip to Manitowoc, for sure, but I was not trying to cover my tracks at the time. So while I was constantly jumpy about us somehow being tracked down—fairly or not, in my imagination the busybody who might do so had the plentiful face of Aunt Kate—Herman without a qualm gabbed away along a tricky line of conversation to maintain, keeping things approximate enough to be believed yet skipping the troublesome truth that we amounted to voluntary fugitives.

  Runaways, when you came right down to it, as the mean little Glasgow sheriff had wrongly acc
used me before I was even out of Montana on my first cross-country journey. It does make a person think: Had the runty lawman with his sour squint spied something in me that I didn’t recognize in myself? Being seen through is never welcome, and thank heaven or Manitou or whatever weird power seemed to guide Herman, because despite my nerve flutters, whenever someone expressed curiosity about where we were going, he always derailed the question with a goofy grin and the observation “Somewheres south of the moon and north of Hell, if we are lucky.”

  • • •

  AND SO, state by state, as the bus rolled up the miles then and beyond, if we were remembered at all by the young honeymooners giggling their way to Wisconsin Dells or the retired Mayo Clinic doctor and his pleasant wife who reminded me of the kindly Schneiders or the Dakotan couple off the hog farm to shop in town, any of the Greyhound riders across the aisle would have recalled the pair of us only as a pared-down family of tourists out to see things.

  That, at least, held a lot of truth, because with Wisconsin behind me I belatedly was ready to heed Gram—although not nearly in the manner she had so strenuously advised back there in the cookhouse—and step out in the world eager for new scenes and experiences, while Herman was as complete a sightseer as a one-eyed person can be. “Donny, look!” he’d point out any stretch of land open enough to hold a horse or cow. Even across cactusless Minnesota, he declared the countryside the perfect setting for a Karl May shoot-’em-up.

  Then about the time I’d had all of those exclamations I could stomach, I would glance over and he’d be snoring away—literally in the blink of an eye he could sleep like a soldier, anytime and anywhere—restoring himself for the next stint of gabbing and gawking. But no sooner would I be taking the quiet opportunity to snack on a Mounds bar or pull out the autograph album to coax an inscription from some promising passenger than I’d hear from beside me, “You got work done, Donny?”

  The yawning question as he came awake would be my signal to sigh and get back at what needed to be done, thanks to his big eye-dea on our ride out of Manitowoc. That is, corresponding with Gram from well into the future. I will say, when Herman put his mind to something like that, he did it all-out. In the shop at the Milwaukee terminal that sold everything from toothpaste to shoelaces, he had bought me a tablet with stiff backing, envelopes, and stamps, everything needed “for you to write like a good boy.” Then, of course, it was up to me, the storier that I hoped Gram would be more glad of this time than others. As towns and their convenience stops came and went—Fond du Lac, Eau Claire, Menomonee, the Twin Cities, where I made damn sure we caught the next bus in plenty of time—I composed letter upon letter describing how my summer in the company of Aunt Kitty and Uncle Dutch was supposedly going. Creating my ghost self, I suppose it could be said, existing with the Manitowocers roaming around in the afterlife.

  If my imagination and I were any example, there may be something to the notion that life on the road lends itself to rambling on the page. Putting the Kwik-Klik into action, I would begin with some variation of Dear Gram—I am fine, I hope you are better. The weather here in Wisconsin is hot. I am having a good time. Then I’d bring my foe into the picture, week by week disguised as the swellest great-aunt ever. For the Fourth of July we went to the park where they played music like “God Bless America” and shot off fireworks and everything. . . . Today Aunt Kitty took me to the circus. Those acrobats are really something. . . . Guess what, Aunt Kitty bought a collie dog named Laddie to keep me company. She is always doing things like that. . . .

  I scarcely mentioned Herman, not wanting to get into his change from Dutch and the glass eye he could play a tune on and all that, and he seemed not to mind being left out. He read each of my compositions with his finger, very much as Gram would do when it arrived to her, occasionally questioning a word—“Looks funny, trapeze is spelled with z?”—before sealing it up and putting it in precise order in the packet to go to Ernie, the Schooner bartender, for mailing onward to the Columbus Hospital pavilion in Great Falls once a week. And I would go on to make up the next feature of my pretended summer on the Lake Michigan shore where Manitou held sway. Aunt Kitty and I went to the Manitou Days celebration. It is a big deal here, with a parade like at a Montana rodeo and everything, because back in Indian times he was their Great Spirit, sort of like God to them, maybe. You know how the Blackfeet go on vision quests, up to Chief Mountain or someplace wild like that, to see if they can get visited by a spirit of some kind. That’s like a dream when they are not sure they are asleep, if I savvy it right. I know it sounds spooky, but Aunt Kate said if we can’t believe in that, we can at least believe in Indians. . . .

  Old Hippo Butt would have been surprised all the way to her back teeth at the number of kindly endeavors my imagination provided her.

  • • •

  I CAN’T ACTUALLY call it a waking dream that proved real, but definitely a visitation of the spirited sort sought me out that first night of our journey, in the most ordinary of dog bus circumstances. As happens in the monotony of night travel, passengers up and down the aisle had gradually nodded off until the bus was stilled to the sounds sleeping people make, Herman leading the chorus. While I dozed off and on, I was too keyed up by our daring escape from Aunt Kate and all she represented to really conk off. Somewhere in the long stretch beyond the Twin Cities to the even longer stretch of South Dakota, around three in the morning, I came to once again, with a strange little comet of light joining my reflection in the pitch-black window beside me. Blinking at its mysterious appearance there, I realized it was coming from inside the bus rather than up in the sky.

  I sat up to look around, and across from us, where a couple who must have got on at a recent stop was sitting, a narrow beam of light poked down into the lap of the man in the aisle seat. The woman next to him was curled up kittenishly as she slept, while he was writing for all he was worth, just like I’d been during the day, but into a slick-looking hardbound notebook with sky-blue pages. While the rest of the bus was thoroughly dark, his fancy writing gear was illuminated by that tiny spotlight from someplace. At first I couldn’t figure it out, but as my eyes adjusted, I realized he had a penlight, about the size of my Kwik-Klik, clipped to his shirt collar and aimed down. This stranger kept on writing like a demon, his hand never stopping to change or erase anything, a lit-up page no sooner filled than he flipped to the next and was giving it his all.

  Holy wow. This was too good to pass up. I nudged Herman awake with a start. “Hsst. Trade seats with me.”

  “If it makes you happy,” he mumbled grumpily, and we switched in that clownish way when there is not enough room to maneuver. Herman at once slumped against the window and back into slumber. He’d have to sleep for both of us, I was not going to miss out on this. More wide awake than ever, I half hung over the arm of the seat, in a way designed to catch the man’s attention.

  When the ceaselessly writing passenger felt my eyes on him and turned my direction to look, the flashlight dimly revealing our faces to each other, I whispered eagerly, “Hi. Do you do that a lot? Write on the bus, I mean.”

  “Funny you should ask, man,” he replied in a heavy smoker’s voice, low enough not to wake the curled-up woman. “Got the divine curse.” Shoulders on him like a football player, he shrugged comically nearly up to his ears. “The old itch for which the only cure is pencil-in.”

  “Wow.” I was impressed in more ways than one. His playful way with language reminded me of Gram somehow. Feeling an immediate kinship, I kept right on: “So are you gonna write all night?”

  “Until the brain runs dry, let’s just say.” From the look of him, like he’d had too much coffee, that could be a real long while yet. He patted the open notebook on his lap. “Have to resort to tabula rosy here, because my machine is in the baggage.”

  My silence must have told him I was trying to decipher that. “My typin’writer.” He grinned fast and friendly. “Old Hellspout.”


  “Oh, sure.” Ceaseless writing gave me my opening, sort of. “I wrote a whole bunch myself, today. To my grandmother. She’s in the hospital, back in Montana. She had to have an awful operation, and send me away”—I nodded toward snoozing Herman in more or less explanation of the two of us together—“until she gets better.”

  “That’s a tough go, buddy,” this man I had never seen before was all sympathy right away. Full face to me now, he took me in intently, yet with a sort of gentleness, as if we were old companions on the hard road of getting by. What he offered next could not be called encouragement exactly, yet I heard a kind of call to courage within it. “Life is what it throws at you.”

  That fit pretty well with Hunch up and take it, I thought. Stranger that he was, he seemed to instinctively understand a loco time like this summer of mine, so much so that I had no qualm about getting personal with him. “Can I ask? When you’re writing like that, do you ever make stuff up, a little?”

  Amused, he cut a quick caper with the pen-size light, pretending to write wildly in the air with its beam. “Anything goes, when you razz the matazz into one of those alphabet boxes called a book.”

  Book! That was way beyond any number of letters. My excitement grew. “Ever write those Reader’s Digest ones? Condensed Books, I mean?”

  “Phwaw,” he expelled air like a hair ball. “That’s a pregnant thought.” From his expression after that burst I couldn’t tell whether he was grinning or grimacing. He had a face like that, more than one thing going on at a time. In the glow of the penlight, his high forehead shown pale and his nose seemed to come down straight from it, but with a mashed look at the end, as if he’d been worked over in a fight. He had quick eyes, like a cat’s, as he met mine. I couldn’t be sure, but he might have winked in answering, “Condensation is only fog on the windshield for me. What I write, man, is as long as this highway.”