Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig

  Into sight came an orange box bearing the words OLD RECIPE MENTHOL COUGH DROPS LEMON FLAVOR.

  “I’d say you just forfeited, Deacon,” Highpockets pronounced, while I did my best to attend to Herman as he stayed bent over the bar, wheezing and still trying to clear his voice box.

  “Can’t you take a joke?” Deacon squawked in Harv’s steely grip. “Let’s call it a draw and just scrap the bet.”

  “Draw, my rosy-red butt.” That brought Peerless into it in full mode. “You can’t pull a fast one like that and crawl out of it like a snake on ice.”

  His Tumbling T equivalent argued right back. “Hey, your fella tumbled to the cough drop, but he never did name the beer. So by rights, we win the bet.”

  “Tell it in church, ye whistledick,” the Jersey Mosquito put a stop to this. “We’re claimin’ the pot fair and square,” he declared, whipping off his hat and scooping the pile of money into it. Then with surprising agility, he hoisted his bony old rump onto the bar, swung his legs over as the Tumbling T gang made futile grabs at him and Babs screeched a protest, and disappeared down among beer barrels and such, clutching the hatful of cash to him.

  That set off general mayhem.

  Each crew charged at the other, swearing and squaring off. Harv seemed to be in his element, flooring one Tumbling T opponent with a roundhouse punch and taking on the next without drawing a breath. Fingy and Pooch between them were fending with a burly member of the other crew. As befitted their leadership positions, Highpockets and Deacon singled each other out, locked together in a revolving grapple along the length of the bar that sent beer glasses shattering and stools tumbling like dominoes. Peerless and Midnight Frankie and Shakespeare each were honorably engaged in tussles of their own with Tumbling T bettors yowling for their money back.

  Amidst the battle royal I saw Babs pull out a pool stick sawed off to the right length to make a good club and start around the end of the bar to put it to use.

  Taking that as a signal this was getting serious, I tugged at Herman for us to clear out of there. Blinking his good eye at the melee around him, he resisted my pulling, saying thickly, “Wait, Donny. Oops, Scotty. You know who I mean. Let’s don’t go, I have to help fellas fight.”

  “Nothing doing. You’ve had your war,” I gritted out, and hauled at him with all my might, yanking him off the bar stool in the direction of the door. In my death grip on his arm, he stumbled after me as we skinned along the bar, ducking and dodging swinging fists and reeling bodies as much as we could, out into the street to where the pickup was parked, and got him seated on the running board. “Don’t move,” I said. “Sing a song, say poetry, do something.”

  “Good eye-dea,” he said dreamily, and began to recite the rhyme we fashioned on the last bus:

  When you take a look in your memory book

  Here you will find the lasting kind,

  Old rhymes and new, life in review,

  Roses in the snow of long ago.

  Lovely sentiments, but I had to leave him deposited there while I raced off to the mercantile, on the chance Jones might still be in there buying groceries. I couldn’t help looking wildly this way and that along the moonlit street of Wisdom, hoping that the deputy sheriff would not choose now to pay the hoboes another visit.

  As I burst into the store, Jones glanced around in surprise from chucking an armload of loaves of bread onto the counter while the storekeeper kept tally. Before he could ask what my rush was, I stammered, “The fellas are ready to go back to the ranch.”

  “What, they drank the town dry already? Pretty close to a new record, I’d say.” He turned away to grab boxes of macaroni off a shelf. “Tell them I’ll be there by the time they can piss the beer out of theirselves. I’m not stopping every two minutes on the way to the ranch so somebody can take a leak.”

  “Uhm, if you could hurry. They’re sort of in a fight. With the Tumbling T crew.”

  Jones swore blue sparks into the air, instructed the storekeeper to load the groceries in the pickup, and took off at a high run for the bar, with me trying to keep up.

  “STOP IT!” he roared before he was even half through the swinging doors. “Or I’ll see to it that every one of you sonofabitches of both outfits is fired and your asses run out of town before morning!”

  That put a halt to everything, except a belated “Yow!” from Peerless, who had received the latest whack from Babs’s pool stick. Sitting on Deacon’s chest, where he had him pinned to the floor, Highpockets looked down at his adversary. “Your call.”

  Deacon squirmed as much as he could, very little, then managed to turn his head toward Jones. “Since you put it that way, we’re peaceable.”

  “Us, too,” Highpockets agreed, climbing off him. “You heard what the man said, boys. Let’s take our winnings and evaporate out of here. Right, Skeeter?” He whirled around, looking in every corner. “SKEETER? Where the hell did he and that hatful of money go?”

  The Jersey Mosquito popped up from behind the far end of the bar, grinning devilishly and holding the upside-down hat as if it were a pot of gold. “Just bein’ our Fort Knox till you fellas got done socializin’. See you on the Ma and Pa sometime, Deacon,” he called over his shoulder as he scampered out of the bar to jump in the back of the pickup.

  • • •

  FOLLOWING HIS LEAD, laughing and hooting like schoolboys, the Diamond Buckle crew piled into the box of the pickup, Jones counting us with chops of a hand like you do sheep. He came up one short. “Who’s missing?”

  Skeeter giggled. “Smiley, natcherly.”

  “He cut out of the saloon through the back door soon as his check was cashed,” Peerless testified. “Wouldn’t even stay and have one drink with us, the stuck-up bugger.”

  “Then where the hell is the knothead?”

  Silence. Until Skeeter further provided:

  “Gettin’ his ashes hauled.”

  That puzzled me but not Herman, who let out a wild drunken laugh. Revelation came when Highpockets swiped a hand toward the sheepwagons where the salesladies had set up shop.

  Jones checked his watch. “Ever since we hit town, the sonofabitch has been at it? That don’t take forever.”

  “More’s the pity,” said Shakespeare, to stifled laughs from the hobo audience.

  Catching a second wind of swearing, Jones clambered into the driver’s seat, saying the goddamn fornicator could walk back to the ranch with his pants around his ankles, for all he cared.

  • • •

  THE RIDE to the Diamond Buckle was riotous, as fight stories were traded on their way into legend. You would have thought the Watering Hole was the Little Bighorn, and our crew was the victorious Indians. Better yet, under the watchful eye of Highpockets the jackpot winnings were being counted out by Skeeter, hunched over so the cash would not blow out of his hat and carefully holding up greenbacks one by one in the moonlight to determine whether they were sawbucks or twenties, doling out the proceeds of the bet evenly among us. Fingy clutched his with all eight fingers as if he could not believe his good fortune. Pooch burst into more words than he ordinarily issued in a week: “First time we ever come back from town with more moolah than we went in with.”

  “Hee hee, stick with me and I’ll have you boys livin’ on the plush,” Skeeter took all due credit. He judiciously handed a fistful of money to me instead of Herman, slumped against the back of the pickup cab singing softly to himself in German. “Here be your and his share, Snag.”

  For a long wonderful moment I clutched the winnings in triumph. Then, grinning back at the moon over the Promised Land that was the Big Hole, I stuck the folded bills down the front of my pants for safety.

  • • •

  THE CREW hit the bunkhouse still high as kites, but mostly from exuberance rather than what they had poured into themselves at the Watering Hole. The chilly ride in the back of the pic
kup had even sobered up Herman appreciably, so much so that he made it to his bunk without my help. He sank onto it, rubbing his head with both hands as if to get things operating fully in there. “Big night, hah?” he said thickly, blinking at me as I proudly patted the wad of cash pouched down there in my underwear. “How much did we winned?”

  “Enough to get married on,” Harv’s serene answer took care of that, from where he was already fixing up an envelope to mail his windfall to Letty. The rest of the crew all were in the crapper at once, oddly enough. It sounded like some kind of hobo palaver going on in there, maybe something mysteriously connected to Skeeter’s ability to generate a jackpot. Pretty quick, Highpockets could be heard checking with the bunch one by one—“You for it?”—and the answering “Yeahs!” and “Yups!”

  They filed into the bunk room like men with a mission, Highpockets in the lead, the others crowding behind him with a mix of expressions, from Skeeter’s crinkled countenance to Shakespeare looking wise to Pooch wearing an anxious attempt at a grin.

  “The Johnson family has had a little powwow,” Highpockets announced as the hoboes gathered around us. “One Eye, we’re hoping you can stick with us after haying. Wheat country next, threshing out in Washington.” His gaze shifted to me. “Snag is welcome to come along, too, if that’s in the cards.”

  Herman was unable to say anything for some seconds. “Honored, I am,” he finally got out. “Good eye-dea, for me.” He struggled even more for the next words. “The boy”—he swallowed so hard that it brought an awful lump to my throat, too—“has somebody to go to.”

  “Any way you two work it out,” Highpockets left it at and turned away. “Let’s hit the sack, boys. Jones will be on a tear in the morning to make us earn those wages.”

  • • •

  NOW HERMAN and I adjourned to the crapper. He put a steadying hand on the sink and studied his somewhat haggard reflection in the mirror, my drained one alongside his.

  “Donny, it is for best if I go with them. When haying is over, no more sickles, and I am ptttht here.”

  “I know.”

  “Will miss you like everything.”

  “Me, too. I mean, I—I’ll miss you, too.” It took all I could do to stay dry-eyed and keep my voice from breaking. “Walk tall, podner.”

  “You do same,” he managed. Tall over me, he looked down at me, the miraculous glass eye and the good one blinking with the same emotion as mine. “We were good pair on the loose, Red Chief.”

  • • •

  AMID THE SETTLED snores and nose-whistlings of the sleeping crew, I lay sleepless for a long, long time, as haunted as I’d been by that damnable plaque in Aunt Kate’s attic. This time by life, not death. For the first time since the Double W cookhouse I whined, only to myself, but the silent kind is as mournful as the other. The miles upon miles of my summer, the immense Greyhound journey right down to the last bus to Wisdom, were simply leaving me torn in two, between Herman and Gram. She and Letty seemed like, what, mirages, distant and beckoning, but Herman had been my indispensable partner, from the depths of the Manitowoc stay to the ups and downs of the open road.

  Imagination failed me as I tried to conceive of life without him, or his without me. How can you ever forget someone you will think of every time you eat a piece of toast? Or whenever you touch a map, your fingers bringing memory of red routes once followed to adventure of whatever kind? Or even catching the wink of an eye, sparkling as glass, from someone you are devoted to?

  As bereft as I was for myself, I was just as afraid for what waited ahead for him, on the move with the hoboes and on the run at the same time, always with the threat of some yard bull or hick dick matching him up with a MOST WANTED poster, and without me and my tall tales there to rescue him.

  As for counting on luck to help us out of our divided fate, phooey and you-know-what. In my misery I felt I might as well throw the black arrowhead into the Big Hole River. The cheerful sentiments in the autograph book seemed sickly against the true messages of life. Loco things happened without rhyme or reason, and that was that. The most hard-hearted set of words in the language, and the only ones that seemed to count in the end. Overwhelmed with these bleak thoughts, I gradually drowsed off, clinging to what I would possess forever, the time of dog bus enchantment when Herman the German pointed a finger west and said, “Thataway.”

  30.

  IN THE BIG HOLE, there was something to the saying that when it rains, it pours, because sometime later that night, the heavens opened up, one of those sudden summer storms that flash through with crackles of lightning and rolls of thunder half drowned out by the downpour drumming on the roof. And the next morning came the deluge of the other sort, events cascading on the Diamond Buckle ranch as if the clouds had brought in every reckoning waiting to happen.

  It began at breakfast, where black coffee was the main course as hangovers were nursed. I was groggy myself from the restless night of rainbursts and so much on my mind. Along the table, Skeeter had the shakes so bad he used both hands to lift his coffee cup, but still was grinning like the wisest monkey in the tree. Highpockets managed to look as capable as ever except for bloodshot eyes. The rest of the crew was in states of morning-after between those extremes. Except, that is, for Herman, who appeared not much the worse for wear, an advantage he had by always looking somewhat hard-used. Meanwhile Mrs. Costello made a nuisance of herself by nagging about the lack of enthusiasm for the runny fried eggs and undercooked side pork, until Jones snapped at her that the crew wasn’t in a mood for hen leavings and pig squeals this morning, and she stomped back to the kitchen.

  Despite the aftereffects, the triumphant night in Wisdom cast a good mood felt by everyone but Jones, grumpy over being rained out of haying. “Looks like the bunch of you have the day off,” he conceded with a sniff at the weather, “mostly.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Highpockets was on the case at once.

  Jones jerked a thumb at the empty chair next to his. “Smiley is no longer employed at the Diamond Buckle.” That sank into me as almost too good to be true, my jubilant reaction mirrored on the faces around the table.

  “So,” Jones said, “I need a volunteer to be choreboy until I can drive to Butte and scare up a new one. The rest of you, sure, you can pitch horseshoes or lay around and scratch your nuts or whatever you want to do with the day, but somebody’s got to step up and do the chores.”

  Peerless lawyered that immediately. “That would include getting a milk pail under Waltzing Matilda?”

  “She’s a cow,” Jones tried to circle past that, “so she needs tending to like the others.”

  “I’m not milking any crazy cow,” Peerless stated his principle.

  Grinning, Fingy waved a hand lacking enough fingers to squeeze a teat. “I’m out.”

  Harv silently shook his head an inch or so.

  “I’m allergic to titted critters,” Skeeter announced, drawing a volley of hooty speculations about how far that allergy extended and when it had set in.

  So it went, man by man, around the long table, no one willing to risk limb if not life in taking on the treacherous dairy cow. “Damn it,” Jones seethed, “all in hell I’m asking is for some one of you to pitch a little hay to the horses, slop the hogs, gather the eggs—”

  “—and milk an animal you won’t go anywhere near yourself,” Peerless inserted with a smirk.

  “Now, listen here,” Jones tried to shift ground from that accusation, “it’s only for a couple of days. It won’t hurt—I mean, embarrass—any of you to be choreboy that long.”

  He looked pleadingly at the one last figure that gave him any hope. “Pockets, can’t you talk them into—?”

  Highpockets was as firm as the others. “The boys are in their rights. We hired on to put up hay. Nothing else.”

  Whether it was that or inspiration circling until I could catch up with it, I s
uddenly realized: Wide open for the taking, the job of choreboy would not end with haying. Before the chance was lost, I crept my foot over to Herman’s nearest one and pressed down hard on the toe of his shoe, causing him to jerk straight upright. Now that I had his attention, I cut a significant look toward Smiley’s empty chair. He followed my gaze and after a squint or two, my thinking.

  Clearing his throat as if he had been saving up for this announcement, Herman spoke out. “Nothing to worry. I am champ milker. Famous in old country.”

  “You are? I mean, are you.” Jones turned to me, as he so often did when it came to figuring out Herman.

  “Yeah, well, if Gramps says he can do a thing,” I put the best face on it I could, “he generally pretty much can.”

  The foreman took one more look at Herman, sitting there with a grin skewed up toward his glass eye. “O-kay,” he dragged the word out, “let’s see how they do it in the old country. He can even yodel if he wants. Snag, go get the milk pails for him.”

  Need I say, the breakfast table was abandoned in a hurry and the barn gained a full audience to watch Herman take on Waltzing Matilda.

  • • •

  DAIRY COWS NORMALLY plod willingly to their stanchions, ready to stick their necks into captivity in exchange for being relieved of their milk. The other two cows did so, nice and docile, when Herman and I herded them in to the milking area, while the angular brown-and-white Guernsey lived up to her name by dancing sideways and snorting a shot of snot toward us and the stanchion. Bawling like she was being butchered, Waltzing Matilda then backed into a corner and rubbed a stub of horn on the barn wall as if trying to sharpen it.

  “So-o-o, bossy.” Herman approached her using the handle of a pitchfork to prod her out of the corner. I crept along right behind him, wishing he had the sharp end of the pitchfork at the ready. Giving another snort, Waltzing Matilda plowed past the two of us as we jumped back and, as if it were her own idea, plugged along to the waiting stanchion.