Last Bus to Wisdom

ALSO BY IVAN DOIG

FICTION

The Sea Runners

English Creek

Dancing at the Rascal Fair

Ride with Me, Mariah Montana

Bucking the Sun

Mountain Time

Prairie Nocturne

The Whistling Season

The Eleventh Man

Work Song

The Bartender's Tale

Sweet Thunder

NONFICTION

This House of Sky

Winter Brothers

Heart Earth

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

Copyright © 2015 by Ivan Doig

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Doig, Ivan.

Last bus to wisdom : a novel / Ivan Doig.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-101-63453-0

1. Boys—Fiction. 2. Uncles—Fiction. 3. Travelers—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3554.O415L37 2015 2015014721

813'.54—dc23

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

To Tony Angell
For friendship as enduring as stone

 

What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?—it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

—
JACK KEROUAC
,
On the Road

June 16–17, 1951

T
HE TOWN OF
G
ROS
V
ENTRE
was so far from anywhere that you had to take a bus to catch the bus. At that time, remote locales like ours were served by a homegrown enterprise with more name than vehicles, the Rocky Mountain Stage Line and Postal Courier, in the form of a lengthened Chevrolet sedan that held ten passengers besides the driver and the mailbag, and when I nervously went to climb in for the first time ever, the Chevy bus was already loaded with a ladies' club heading home from an outing to Glacier National Park. The only seat left was in the back next to the mailbag, sandwiched between it and a hefty gray-haired woman clutching her purse to herself as though stage robbers were still on the loose in the middle of the twentieth century.

The swarm of apprehensions nibbling at me had not included this. Sure enough, no sooner did we pull out for the Greyhound station in Great Falls than my substantial seatmate leaned my way enough to press me into the mailbag and asked in that tone of voice a kid so much dreads, “And where are you off to, all by your lonesome?”

How things have changed in the world. I see the young people of today traveling the planet with their individual backpacks and weightless independence. Back then, on the epic journey that determined my life and drastically turned the course of others, I lived out of my grandmother's wicker suitcase and carried a responsibility bigger than I was. Many, many miles bigger, as it turned out. But that lay ahead, and meanwhile I heard myself pipe up with an answer neither she nor I was ready for: “Pleasantville.”

When she cocked her head way to one side and said she couldn't think where that was, I hazarded, “It's around New York.”

To this day, I wonder what made me say any of that. Maybe the colorful wall map displaying Greyhound routes
COAST TO COAST—THE FLEET WAY,
back there in the hotel lobby that doubled as the Gros Ventre bus depot, stuck in my mind. Maybe my imagination answered for me, like being called on in school utterly unready and a whisper of help arrives out of nowhere, right or not. Maybe the truth scared me too much.

Whatever got into me, one thing all too quickly led to another as the woman clucked in concern and expressed, “That's a long way to go all by yourself. I'd be such a bundle of nerves.” Sizing me up in a way I would come to recognize, as if I were either a very brave boy or a very ignorant one, she persisted: “What takes you so awful far?”

“Oh, my daddy works there.”

“Isn't that interesting. And what does he do in, where's it, Pleasantville?”

It's funny about imagination, how it can add to your peril even while it momentarily comes to your rescue. I had to scramble to furnish, “Yeah, well, see, he's a digester.”

“You don't say! Wait till I tell the girls about this!” Her alarming exclamation had the other ladies, busy gabbing about mountain goats and summertime snowbanks and other memorable attractions of Glacier National Park, glancing over their shoulders at us. I shrank farther into the mailbag, but my fellow passenger dipped her voice to a confidential level.

“Tries out food to see if it agrees with the tummy, does he,” she endorsed enthusiastically, patting her own. “I'm glad to hear it,” she rushed on. “So much of what a person has to buy comes in cans these days, I've always thought they should have somebody somewhere testing those things on the digestion—that awful succotash about does me in—before they let any of it in the stores. Good for him.” Bobbing her head in vigorous approval, she gave the impression she wouldn't mind that job herself, and she certainly had the capacity for it.

“Uh, actually”—maybe I should have, but I couldn't let go of my own imaginative version of the digestive process—“it's books he does that to. At the
Reader's Digest
place.”

•   •   •

T
HERE WAS
a story behind this, naturally.

I lived with my grandmother, who was the cook at the Double W, the big cattle ranch near Gros Ventre owned by the wealthy Williamson family. One of the few sources of entertainment anywhere on the ranch happened to be the shelf of sun-faded
Reader's Digest
Condensed Books kept by Meredice Williamson in the otherwise unused parlor of the many-roomed house, and in her vague nice way she permitted me to take them to the cook shack to read, as long as Gram approved.

Gram had more than enough on her mind without policing my reading, and lately I had worked my way through the shipboard chapters of
Mister Roberts
, not so condensed that I couldn't figure out what those World War Two sailors were peeking at through binoculars trained on the bathroom onshore where nurses took showers. Probably during that reading binge my eye caught on the fine print
PLEASANTVILLE NY
in the front of the book as the source of digested literature, and it did not take any too much inspiration, for me at least, to conjure a father back there peacefully taking apart books page by page and putting them back together in shortened form that somehow enriched them like condensed milk.

•   •   •

“W
HY,
I have those kind of books!” my fellow passenger vouched, squeezing her purse in this fresh enthusiasm. “I read
The Egg and I
practically in one sitting!”

“He's real famous back there at the digest place,” I kept on. “They give him the ones nobody else can do. What's the big fat book,
Go like the Wind
—”

“
Gone with the Wind
, you mean?” She was properly impressed any digester would tackle something like that. “It's as long as the Bible!”

“That's the one. See, he got it down to about like yay.” I backed that up with my thumb and finger no more than an inch apart.

“What an improvement,” she bought the notion with a gratified nod.

That settled matters down, thanks to a wartime story cooked down to the basics of bare-naked nurses and a helping of my imagination. The spacious woman took over the talking pretty much nonstop and I eased away from the U.S. mail a bit in relief and provided
Uh-huh
or
Huh-uh
as needed while the small bus cruised at that measured speed buses always seem to travel at, even in Montana's widest of wide-open spaces. There we sat, close as churchgoers, while she chatted away the miles in her somber best dress that must have seen service at funerals and weddings, and me in stiff new blue jeans bought for the trip. Back then, you dressed up to go places.

And willing or not, I was now a long-distance traveler through time as well as earthbound scenery. When I wasn't occupied providing two-syllable responses to my seatmate, this first leg of the journey was something like a tour of my existence since I was old enough to remember. Leaving behind Gros Ventre and its green covering of cottonwoods, Highway 89 wound past the southmost rangeland of the Two Medicine country, with Double W cattle pastured even here wherever there were not sheepherders' white wagons and the gray sprinkles of ewes and lambs on the foothills in the distance. Above it all, the familiar sawtooth outline of the Rocky Mountains notched the horizon on into Canada. There where the South Fork of English Creek emerged from a canyon, during the Rainbow Reservoir construction job my folks and I had crammed into a humpbacked trailer house built for barely two. I had to sleep on the bench seat in back of the table, almost nose to nose with my parents squeezed into their bunk. But the thrill of being right there as bulldozer operators such as my father—the honest-to-goodness one, I mean—rode their big yellow machines like cowboys while building the dam that bottled the creek into the newest lake on earth never wore off.

Next on the route of remembering, however, butted up against a rocky butte right at the county line as if stuck as far out of sight as possible, a nightmare of a place reappeared, the grim rambling lodging house and weather-beaten outbuildings of the county poorfarm—we pronounced it that way, one word, as if to get rid of it fast. Once upon a time my father had graded the gravel road into the place and dozed out ditches and so on while my mother and I spent creepy days looking out a cabin window at the shabby inmates, that lowest, saddest category of people, wards of the county, pottering listlessly at work that wasn't real work, merely tasks to make them do something.

Seeing again that terrifying institution where the unluckiest ended up gave me the shivers, but I found I could not take my eyes off the poorfarm and what it stood for. In most ways I was just a dippy kid, but some things get to a person at any age, and I fully felt the whipsaw emotions of looking at the best of life one minute, and this quick, the worst of it.

Mercifully the highway soon curved and we passed Freezout Lake with its islands of snowy pelicans, within sight of the one-room Tetonia school where I went part of one year, marked mainly by the Christmas play in which I was the Third Wise Man, costumed in my mother's pinned-up bathrobe. A little farther on, where the bus route turned its back on the Rockies to cross the Greenfield Canal of the huge irrigation project, I was transported once more to a summer of jigging for trout at canal headgates.

What a haze of thoughts came over me like that as memory went back and forth, dipping and accelerating like a speedometer keeping up with a hilly road. Passing by familiar sights with everything known ahead, maybe too much of a youngster to put the right words to the sensation but old enough to feel it in every part, I can only say I was meeting myself coming and going, my shifting life until then intersecting with the onrushing days ahead.

That near-stranger who was me, with his heart in his throat, I look back on with wonder now that I am as gray-haired as my talky companion on the Chevy bus was. The boy I see is a stocky grade-schooler, freckled as a spotted hyena, big for his age but with a lot of room to grow in other ways. Knowing him to be singled out by fate to live a tale he will never forget, I wish that things could have been different enough then to let him set off as if on a grand adventure, turned loose in the world at an age when most kids couldn't unknot themselves from the apron strings of home. He has never been out of Montana, barely even out of the Two Medicine country, and now the nation stretches ahead of him, as unknown and open to the imagination as Pleasantville. And he knows from Condensed Books that unexpected things, good about as often as bad, happen to people all the time, which ought to be at least interesting, right? On top of it all, if worse comes to worst, tucked in those new blue jeans is a round-trip ticket home.

But that was the catch. Home to what, from what?

•   •   •

I
MUST HAVE BEEN
better than I thought at hiding my double-edged fear, because the chatterbox at my side seemed not to notice anything troubling me until I shifted restlessly in my seat because the object in my pants pocket had slipped down to where I was half sitting on it and was jabbing me something fierce. “Aren't you comfortable? Heavens to Betsy, why didn't you say so? Here, I'll make room.” With a grunt she wallowed away from me a couple of inches.

“Huh-uh, it's not that,” I had to confess as she watched my contortions with concern, because I still needed to squirm around and reach deep into my pants to do something about the matter. Knowing I dare not show it to her, I palmed the thing and managed to slip it into my jacket pocket sight unseen while I alibied, “My, ah, good luck charm sort of got caught crosswise. A rabbit's foot on a key chain,” I thought up, hoping that would ward her off.

“Oh, those,” she made a face. “They sell the awful things so many places these days I'm surprised the bunnies have any tootsies left.” With that, to my relief, she went back to dishing out topic after topic in her chirpy voice.

“Donal,” she eventually got around to pondering my name as if it were one of the mysteries of the ages. “Without the
d
on the end? That's a new one on me.”

“It's Scotch, is why,” I came to life and informed her quick as a flash. “My daddy said—says—the Camerons, see, that's us, were wearing kilts when the English still were running around buck-naked.”

From the way her eyebrows went up, that seemed to impress her. Emboldened, I confided: “You know what else, though? I have an Indian name, too.”

Her eyebrows stayed lofted as, for once, I leaned in her direction, and half whispered, as if it were just our secret: “Red Chief.”

She tittered. “Now you're spoofing.”

People can be one surprise after another. Here she hadn't let out a peep of doubt about anything I'd reeled off so far, but now when I told her something absolutely truthful, she clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth the funny way that means
That's a good one.

“No, huh-uh, honest!” I protested. “It's because of my hair, see?” My floppy pompadour, almost always in need of a haircut, was about as red as anything from the Crayola box. And if that didn't earn me a tribal alias, I didn't know what did. Maybe, as Gram would tell me when I got carried away with something, this was redheaded thinking. It seemed only logical to me, though. If Donal was tagged on me when I came into the world bald as a baby can be, didn't it make sense to have a spare that described how I turned out? Indians did it all the time, I was convinced. In the case of our family, it would only have complicated things for my listener to explain to her that my alternate name had come from my father's habit of ruffling my hair, from the time I was little, and saying, “You've got quite a head on you, Red Chief.”

My seatmate had heard enough, it seemed, as now she leaned toward me and simpered, “Bless your buttons, I have a grandson about your age, a live wire like you. He's just thirteen.” Eleven going on twelve as I was, I mutely let “about” handle that, keeping a smile pasted on as best I could while she went on at tireless length about members of her family and what I supposed passed for normal life in the America of 1951.