Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig

  A while yet. That was what I needed, too, to stick with Herman until haying was finished. Before I could think how to wish her well and simultaneously tell her to take her time at it, her voice rallied again. “Donny, this is quite some surprise, hearing from you like this.”

  “Yeah, well, Aunt Kate and I were wondering how you are, and she told me to pick up the phone and find out, just like that.”

  “Wasn’t that thoughtful of her. Put her on please, I’d like to tell her so myself.”

  “Oh, she’s not here.” I had the receiver practically in my mouth and my hand over it to keep nosy Mrs. Costello from hearing. “She went to the grocery store for bread to make toast for breakfast.”

  “I’m glad you’re getting along so well with her. She can be a handful.” Hearing that, I was elated, justified in lighting out for the Promised Land with Herman. I was so jubilant I almost missed what Gram was saying next. “I’d ask what you’ve been doing, but your wonderful letters describe it all so well. How are you and Laddie doing?”

  In that summer of many names, Donal and Donnie and Red Chief and Snag and Scotty, and Dutch and Herman and One Eye and Fritz, not even to mention the hoboes’ variety, I drew a blank on that one. “Uh, who’d you say, again?”

  “The collie dog Aunt Kate got for you, it’s right here in your letter, silly.”

  “Oh, Laddie. You know what, he ran away. Quit the country.” I dropped my voice. “Couldn’t take any more of Aunt Kate, I guess. She ordered him around all the time, poor pooch. Anyway, nobody knows where he went.”

  “That’s awful,” she exclaimed, “the poor thing just loose like that.”

  “Yeah, but maybe he’s better off, without being bossed to death like that.”

  That carried us through, until we wished each other the very best and hung up until the next time.

  29.

  THE GOOD WEATHER of that Big Hole summer and the bountiful windrows of a record hay crop turned the Diamond Buckle crew into haymaking fiends, the loaf-shaped stacks rising in the fields fast enough to please even Jones. Harv really did prove to be a man and a half on the stack, handling many tons a day with his tireless pitchfork. Some days we skidded the stacker to three new fields, we were such scorching haymakers.

  Those days fell away like fleeces, and I was caught by surprise when payday abruptly arrived, along with lifted spirits in the bunkhouse that it happened to be a Saturday night and time to go to town. Which of course meant to the Watering Hole.

  • • •

  I WAS ECSTATIC at getting my first paycheck. Until I looked at it and looked again, made out as it of course was to Scotty Schneider.

  For an instant, Herman raised an eyebrow at Fritz Schneider on his, then grinned. “The Kate would have a cat fit, if she could see.”

  “Yeah, but,” I still was seeing trouble, “what are we going to do with these? I mean, since they’re not in our real names, isn’t it forgery or something to cash them?”

  “Ja, probably,” he met that crime with the usual salute. “But no choice do we have if we want our money.” Seeing that this didn’t reassure me one least bit, he tried a lighter approach. “One more name maybe can’t hurt, Red Chief.”

  “You’re the one who made us into Schneiders,” I reminded him shrilly.

  “Scotty,” he bore down on the word, “calm down some, please. All is not lost. Maybe they do not ask any too much questions in Watering Hole. Isn’t that how they do in the West?”

  “It still feels to me like something against the law,” I muttered.

  “Hah. Add to the list,” said the most wanted man in the Big Hole.

  • • •

  GOING TO TOWN on a Saturday night meant spiffing up, baths having been taken in a galvanized tub filled from buckets on the stove—we cut cards for first water, and Midnight Frankie with mysterious inevitability won the right to squat and bathe in the clean tubful with the rest of us to follow in the increasingly gray bathwater. Now what passed for town clothes had been dug out, clean shirts and hair slickum so prevalent on the crew it was remindful of kids dressed up for the first day of school. Herman was the true fashion plate, sporting the mermaid tie, which drew winks and remarks about what he was fishing for with it. My rodeo shirt, somewhat faded and showing wear from its summer of long bus rides and strenuous occasions, was the best I could do, but I was trying to buff my stubble-scuffed shoes into respectability when I happened to notice that my moccasins were not where I kept them beneath the foot of my bunk.

  Alarmed, I scrambled down onto hands and knees to search under the bed, but they were definitely missing.

  Seeing me down there on all fours looking stricken, Herman caught on immediately. Jumping to his feet from his bunk, he shook the bunkhouse rafters with the outcry “Someone is thief! Scotty’s moccasins is gone. I thought Johnson family does not take from its own.”

  Everything stopped. Skeeter and Pooch and Midnight Frankie and Shakespeare and Fingy and Harv halted in mid-motion at whatever they were doing, their eyes cutting to one another for some kind of answer to Herman’s charge. It was bad luck that Highpockets had gone out to make sure with Jones that the crew would have a goodly amount of time to carouse in town, leaving Peerless to niggle at the moccasin matter as Herman stood there with clenched fists. “Now, now, don’t get carried away, One Eye. Maybe them slippers just got misplaced. What makes you think any of us—”

  “WAHHOO!” resounded from the crapper, and as we all jerked around in that direction, Smiley came prancing out, wearing only his shorts with a towel tucked in like an Indian loincloth, and my moccasins.

  The spectacle was as grotesque as it was unexpected, his big belly jiggling over the scanty loincloth and his stark bony bad leg stuck out stiff, as if he were half tub of lard and half stick figure. Poking two fingers up behind his head like feathers, he cavorted around in a crazy lopsided dance, the beautiful beadwork fancy-dancers captive on his big feet with him warhooping and bellowing, “Wampum night! Hot time in town! Big chief Geronimo hitting the warpath!”

  At first too stunned to do anything, the next thing I knew I had let out a howl of my own and launched into Smiley, grabbing him at the knees. Herman was right behind me, jamming him against the wall as I tried to wrest the moccasins off.

  “Hey, don’t you know entertainment?” Smiley croaked out, struggling against Herman’s grasp. He was a large and fleshy man, almost too much for the two of us, but we heard Peerless warn the others of the crew, “Better stay out of it, this isn’t any of our business.”

  “I’m making it mine,” Harv’s voice reverberated, or at least I felt it so. In no time the bigger, better-muscled man had Smiley squashed so tight against the wall he couldn’t even squirm, as Herman lifted one of his feet like the hoof of a horse and I stripped the moccasin off, and we did the same on the other foot.

  Right then coming through the bunkhouse doorway to be met by the three of us grappling with the various parts of the nearly naked Smiley, Highpockets let out, “What in tunket is going on?”

  “High jinks of the wrong kind,” drawled Harv.

  “Joke not funny one least little bit,” Herman attested.

  “The dickhead swiped my moccasins,” I made the matter clear.

  “You’re the crappiest audience I ever been around,” Smiley complained, yanking the towel out from the vicinity of his private parts. “Hell, I was only trying to draw a laugh, get everybody in the mood for town.”

  “Ye dumb damn piece of maggot bait,” Skeeter piped up. “Don’tcha know better than to put your meat hooks on somebody else’s property in a kip like this? People’ve been knifed for less than that. Ain’t I right, One Eye?”

  Taking the cue, Herman drew down the eyelid over his glass eye and thrust a hand into his pants pocket as if fondling something there besides lint, sounding amazingly menacing in uttering, “Lost count of stitches I have
schneidered, ja.”

  “Gramps means he’s next thing to a killer,” I furthered the bluff, rewarded by seeing the ex-clown’s fat red face drain of color until it matched his lardy body.

  “Nobody told me he packs a shiv,” Smiley whined.

  Highpockets took all this in and restored order. “Everybody shape up or Jones won’t let us off the place. Throw some clothes on,” he bossed Smiley, even though the choreboy did not belong to the hobo contingent, “and let’s get to town.”

  • • •

  THE RIDE INTO WISDOM was a carefully spaced truce, with Smiley hunkered broodily near the tailgate and Herman and me with our backs against the pickup cab and everyone else between as a buffer, and the miles down the valley of green haystacks passed as agreeably as a picnic outing, the soft and warm summer evening a rare pleasure for men who roughed it in the weathers of hobo life. Naturally Jones drove like the pickup was on fire, and quickly enough the little town made itself known, beer signs glowing in most colors of the rainbow at the Watering Hole, and the milk-white false front of the mercantile standing out in the dusk. Additionally, there were a couple of sheepwagons that hadn’t been there before, prominent now in the vacant lot between the saloon and the gas station. Fingy was the nearest of our bunch to me and I asked in curiosity, “What’re those doing here? I thought this was cattle country.”

  “It’s where, ehh, some salesladies from Butte set up shop on Saturday nights,” he answered delicately, and at least I knew enough not to ask what they were selling.

  Jones pulled in right at the swinging doors of the Watering Hole. As the crew filed into the joint, joshing and laughing, I held back, uncertain. Herman had no such hesitation.

  “Wages, remember, Mr. Scotty Schneider?” he said firmly, guiding me with his hand on my back to the entrance to I didn’t know what.

  • • •

  THE WATERING HOLE inside stopped the two of us in our tracks, maybe even thrust us back a step and much farther than that in remembering. Festooned with lariat ropes and leather reins draped in graceful arcs from the ceiling and the side wall hung end to end with bridles and harness and tacked-up ten-gallon hats beyond their days and even angora chaps remniscent of the leggings I had worn in the fancy-dancing exhibition, the ageless old saloon was like a western dryland cousin of the Schooner, back in Manitowoc. Herman made it official with the exclamation, “Is like home!”

  As the crew trooped to the long bar, Skeeter by seniority took the lead, comically doffing his hat and holding it over his heart as he addressed the woman of about Gram’s age standing ready at the cash register. “If it ain’t Babs, my favoritist bartender in all of Creation.”

  “My, my, if it don’t look like they let the rogues’ gallery loose,” she bantered back. “How’s tricks, Skeets?” Spotting the Diamond Buckle hatband on him and the rest of us, she let out a teasing hoot. “Oh ho ho, fellas, you’ve come up in the world.”

  “We like to think so.” The Jersey Mosquito dropped his hat on the bar to claim his drinking spot as the rest of the crew settled onto bar stools like a flock of birds alighting. “And just to prove it, tune up your cash register, Babs honey, we have got checks galore to cash.”

  “Again this year,” the bespectacled bartender sighed, “fancy that.” She fussed with her cash register, lifting out the coin drawer entirely for the fat stash of cash underneath. “Okeydoke, high rollers, the First National Bank of Babs is now open.”

  Herman still was gazing affectionately around at the saloon trappings, but I watched furtively as Pooch slipped his paycheck to Highpockets to endorse for him, recalling Skeeter’s admonition on the last bus that certain people’s education did not necessarily include reading and writing. Well, hell, that told me, if forgery was in the works we weren’t the only ones, and I got on line with Herman close behind me.

  Only to have the bartender pin my check to the bar with an unyielding hand before I could endorse it. “Uh-uh, not so fast.” She peered at me through her wire-rim glasses. “What’s the story here, Pockets, you taken on a mascot these days?”

  “Our stacker driver,” Highpockets right away spoke up for me, with Skeeter pitching in, “I’s his age when I hit the road, so that just goes to show you he’s a functionin’ employee.”

  She was unmoved. “By rights, I’m not supposed to allow kids in here, let alone be shoveling money to them.”

  “Hey,” I tried indignantly, “I’m thirteen.” Herman nodded maybe too vigorously in backing that up.

  “And I’m the Queen of Romania. Sorry, sonny, but I can’t accommodate you.”

  “Aw, cut him a break, Babs, he’s with us,” Highpockets stuck up for me in the good name of the Johnson family insofar as that existed.

  “Pockets, I can only cash checks for paying customers or I’d be bankering for the whole town right down to the dogs and cats.”

  “Nothing to worry,” Herman asserted with the smack of a hand on the bar so loud everyone jumped a little. “Bar maiden, enough business for us both and then some, I will give you.”

  The bar maiden, gray-haired as could be, smirked with pleasure at the compliment, intended or otherwise. “You sound like you mean business, sure enough, buster,” she allowed, looking him over from the mermaid tie to his strong eyeglasses that pretty much matched hers. “All right, everybody saw the miracle, the flower of youth here grew up while we were watching.” She lifted her hand off my paycheck with the freeing instruction: “Dab your name on it and hand it over.”

  Fingers mentally crossed, I wrote Scotty Schneider on the back of the check. The bartender did not even look at the signature, simply stashed it in the cash register with the others and counted out my wages in nice green bills. “Here you go, angel.”

  Angel. That was a new one.

  As I soaked that in, she cashed Herman’s check the same way she’d done mine, and suddenly we were flush with money of the sort we had not seen since the fingersmith preacher robbed us. Herman now was in the best of moods, twirling his finger double speed at his temple as if strenuous thinking were required for the big decision he was making.

  “Guess what, Scotty. I am having a schooner, hah”—he cocked his eye at the line of spigots along the bar with blazoned handles that were a far cry from the labels of the multiple beers of Great Lakes ports, but indisputably promised the same intoxicant—“to celebrate that we are haymakers, got the smackers to prove it.” He dropped his voice. “And no posters of Killer Boy Dillinger out easy to be seen, I watched buildings careful on way in. Saving my neck, the Big Hole is.” He grinned triumphantly. “Drink to that, let us.”

  Signaling the bartender from where she was busy setting up glasses of beer for the rest of the crew, he sunnily included me. “You want bottle of Crushed Orange, I betcha.”

  “Not now, maybe later.” I had been weighing watching people guzzle beer against what was nagging at me, and conscience was winning out. “What I need to do is go call Gram. I haven’t for a while, and Jones doesn’t like me doing it at the ranch.”

  Herman shooed me toward the swinging doors. “Go, do. I will hold fort here.”

  • • •

  AS I WAS PRETTY sure of, the Wisdom store had an arrangement common to mercantiles in those days before telephones were everywhere, a nook in the back where a wall phone was available along with an egg timer, so you could pay for the length of your call on your way out.

  The familiar hum of distance, the suppressed ring at the other end, which always went on for a long time at the Columbus Hospital pavilion ward, until some busy nun set aside a bedpan or some other ministration for the nuisance of the phone, as I imagined it. Then Sister Carma Jean, who by now was getting used to my calls, briskly told me Gram would be there in a minute.

  When Gram promptly came on and sounded like her old self in declaring she’d been waiting for me to call so she could share the nicest conceivable surp
rise with me, she skipped right past my hello to go right to her news. “I’m up and around and helping in the kitchen. Between you and me, nuns are terrible cooks.”

  “Jeez, Gram,” my voice topped out in relief, “that’s really terrif—”

  “That’s not the surprise, though,” she busted right in as if the other news wouldn’t keep. “You’ll never guess who I’ve heard from.” She could not have been more right about that. “Letty. She called me from Glasgow in her new job there.”

  I was boggled by that, the entire picture of the lipstick-implanted bus encounter scrambled in my head. “What happened to Havre?”

  “A boss who pinched her bottom one time too many. Like once. Donny, why in heaven’s name didn’t you tell me in one of your letters you met up with her on the dog bus?”

  “Uhm, I had a lot I was trying to get in the letters”—utterly true—“and must have missed out on that somehow.”

  “She thinks the world of you, anyway. Said you were real good company riding the bus together.” My pride started to swell at that, but Gram was not nearly done spilling the surprise. “She’s working at the Glasgow Supper Club now. Here’s even better news. She can get me on as night cook.”

  “In Glasgow?” I asked dumbly. “Just like that?”

  “Didn’t I say so?” she retorted, as if I’d better wash out my ears. More of me than that needed clearing to hold what she said next.

  “I know it’s different country over there for us and we’d rather be on a ranch”—her voice turned honestly dubious for a moment—“but we’ll have to tough through it. Letty and I have things worked out. There’s an apartment right by hers. When you get home from Aunt Kate’s for school, we’ll be together under one roof. Doesn’t that beat all?”