Last Bus to Wisdom (15 page)

“Why don't you start on your puzzle,” she said darkly, heading for the basement again.

“Maybe later.” By now I felt the right to sulk. Even if I had been in the wrong about not retreiving the money from that shirt, I didn't think I was the only one, and I was not going to let myself be sent to the permanent dunce corner, which the card table with Mount Rushmore in a thousand pieces amounted to. It occurred to me that, with this woman as mad at me as a spitting cat, it would really help to have someone on my side, or at least another target to draw her fire. “Where'd Herman go?” I wondered, hoping he might show up any moment to get me off the hook.

No such luck. Gone to “work,” where else, she forgot about the basement long enough to circle back and huff, the quotation marks speaking loudest. When I asked what his job was, she sorted me out on that in a hurry.

“Job?” She drew the word out mockingly as she clattered stray breakfast dishes into the sink in passing. “That will be the day. The old pooter”—that bit of Gram's language out of her startled me—“is out in that greenhouse of his again.” My mention of him did change matters, though, because at the cellar stairs she whipped around to me, with a different look in her doll eyes.

“You can go help him, dearie, wouldn't that be nice?” she suggested, suspiciously sweet all of a sudden. “Make yourself useful as well as ornamental.” Gesturing around as if chores were swarmng at her and I was in the way, she exclaimed that life was simply too, too busy. “After I deal with the laundry, I have to get ready.” She didn't bother to say for what, and from the set of her chins, I could tell she did not want to hear anything more out of me but footsteps as I hustled my fanny to that greenhouse.

“Maybe I'll go say hi,” I mumbled, and trooped out to the backyard, where the odd shed of glass gleamed in the sun. Already at that time of the morning, the Wisconsin air felt heavy to me, as if it could be squeezed out like a sponge, and I plucked at my one wearable shirt of the moment and unbuttoned my sleeves and rolled them back onto my forearms for a bit of ventilation as I crossed the lawn, Herman's big footprints ahead of me fading with the last of the dew.

I had been curious about the mystifying structure when the DeSoto's headlights reflected off it the night before, which now seemed a lifetime ago. Halfway hidden in a corner of the hedge at the rear of the yard, the greenhouse, as I now knew it, seemed like it ought to be transparent but somehow could not actually be seen through, whatever the trick of its construction was.

It did not reveal much more about itself in broad daylight as I approached past a neatly marked-out vegetable patch, the small glass panels that were the walls and roof of the shed frame splotchy as if needing a good washing. Funny way to grow things, the soot smears or whatever they were blocking out full light that way, I thought. Weird old Wisconsin, one more time.

“Knock knock,” I called in, not knowing how to do otherwise when everything was breakable.

“Hallo” issued from I didn't know where in the low jungle of plants, until Herman leaned into sight amid the greenery, where he was perched on a low stool while spooning something into a potted tomato as if feeding a baby. “Come, come,” he encouraged me in, “meet everybody.”

There certainly was a crowd of plants when I ducked in, all right, and according to their names written on markers like Popsicle sticks in the clay pots, several kinds you could not grow in Montana in a hundred years, green peppers and honeydew melons and such. I also spotted, at the other end of edibility, a miniature field of cabbage seedlings, sauerkraut makings.

Properly impressed with his green thumb, I stood back and watched Herman fuss over his crop, pot by leafy pot. Pausing to tap the ash off a smelly cigar that undoubtedly would not have been allowed into the house, he made a face that had nothing to do with the haze of smoke that had me blinking to keep my eyes from watering. “You have escaped with your scalp, yah? I heard the Kate on the warpath again.”

“Yeah, well, she's sort of pee oh'd at me,” I owned up to, making plain that the feeling was mutual.

Herman listened with sympathy, as best I could tell behind his heavy glasses and the reeking cigar, while I spilled out the story of the torn shirt and the fatally safety-pinned bills. He tut-tutted over that, saying throwing money in the garbage was not good at all. But he didn't lend me any encouragement as to how I was supposed to get through the summer flat broke.

“The purse is the Kate's department,” he said with a resigned puff of smoke. Reflecting further, he expressed effectively: “She is tight as a wad.”

I must have looked even more worried, if possible, for he added, as if it would buck up my spirits, “Sometimes she barks worse than she bites. Sometimes.”

By way of Gram, that was the kind of statement I had learned to put in the category of free advice and worth just what it cost. At the moment there was nothing I could do about an aunt who either barked or bit, so I took a look around to see what “helping” Herman in the greenhouse might consist of. Except for possibly scrubbing the blotchy windows, nothing suggested itself, inasmuch as he had turned the glass shed into a greatly more cozy place than, say, my rat hole of an attic. Long wooden shelves along either side handily held not only the miniature forest of plants he had started in pots, but garden trowels and snippers and other tools and a colorful array of fertilizer boxes and so on, a coffee thermos, a cigar box, and a stack of books by Karl May, who evidently had more
Deadly Dust
up his sleeve after that Montana buffalo hunt. Stashed in a corner was an old gray duffel of the seabag sort, doubtless holding more treasures the Kate had banned from the house.

Growing interested in spite of myself, I made the offer the lukewarm way—“Uhm, anything I can do?”—a person does just to be polite.

“Yah, keep me company.” He dragged out a wooden fruit box from under the shelf for me to sit on. “Tell me about Montana,” he pronounced it pretty close to right. “Cowboy life.”

•   •   •

T
HAT GOT ME STARTED,
almost as if I was back on the dog bus telling yarns free and easy. I regaled Herman with this, that, and the other about life on the Double W, from riding out with the actual cowboys to check on the cattle, to hunting magpies along the creek, making him exclaim I was a pistoleer, by which I figured he meant gunslinger. Puffing away on his stogie and babying his plants with spoonfuls of fertilizer and careful irrigation from a long-necked watering can—a couple of times I interrupted myself to go and fill it for him from the spigot at the back of the house—Herman listened to all of it as though I were a storyteller right up there with his idol who wrote the pile of books about cowboys and Indians.

In the end, my storying naturally led around to the whole thing, Gram and me being chucked out of the cook shack and her into the charity ward and me onto the dog bus, when I could just as well have been earning wages in the hayfield the entire summer, and while I couldn't quite bring myself to lay out my full fear about the poorfarm looming in her future if medical things did not go right, and orphanage starkly in mine, he grasped enough of the situation to tut-tut gravely again.

“A fix, you are in,” he said with a frown that wrinkled much of his face. “The Kate didn't tell me the all.”

Somehow I felt better for having poured out that much of the tale, even if it went into squarehead ears, so to speak. At first I was suspicious that Herman resorted to a kind of Indian speakum in talking about anything western, but no, it became clear that was genuinely his lingo from the old country mixed in with the new. Whatever the travels of his tongue, I was finding this big husky open-faced man to be the one thing about Wisconsin that I felt vaguely comfortable with, despite his evident quirks and odd appearance. In most ways, he was homely as a pickle. That elongated face and the prominent teeth, taken together with the cockeyed gaze magnified by his glasses, gave him the look of someone loopy enough that you might not want to sit right down next to, although of course there I was, plotched beside him like just another potted plant. Together with everything else in the humid greenhouse, he himself seemed to have sprouted, his shoulders topping my head as he stretched from his stool here and there to reach into his menagerie of vegetation, his big knuckles working smoothly as machine parts in crimping a leaf off a tomato plant near its root—“Pinch their bottoms is good for them,” he told me with a naughty grin—or tying a lagging bean stalk to a support stick. The dappled light streaming through the glass ceiling and walls brought out the silver in his faded fair hair, which I suspected made him older than Aunt Kate, although there was no real telling. I'd have bet anything gray hair did not stand a chance on her; she would rather, as not much of a joke had it, dye by her own hand.

About then, as I was yammering away with Herman, I noticed a strange smudge of some sort on the back of my hand. Dirt is to be expected in a greenhouse, so I went to brush it off, but when that didn't get rid of it, I peered more closely. Then gasped. A ghostly scrap of face, an eye clear and direct, feminine eyebrow and ladylike cheekbone distinct in outline, had scarily materialized on my skin. Yanking my hand away as if burned, I sent Herman one hell of a look. Whatever this stunt was, I didn't like having it pulled on me.

“Surprises your daylights out, yah?” he said, unperturbed. “They do that.” He pointed upward with the cigar between his fingers. “Photo graphic plates,” he spoke it as three words.

I tipped my head back and must have gaped, my eyes adjusting even if my brain was lagging. When looked at closely, reversed faces spookily gazed down from every glass pane, eyes and hair empty of color while the rest of the countenance was dark as night. Bygone people, for I could make out old styles of men's collars and women's hairdos—the lady who appeared on my hand again when I hesitantly put it out and held it at the right distance to bring her portrait pose into full miniature was done up in marcel curls, her probably black tresses tumbling ever so neatly down the sides of her head.

Agog, I kept looking back and forth from her image there on me to the shadowy section of glass overhead, still not seeing how this worked. “These—these things were in cameras? How?”

Patiently Herman explained, enlightening me that photographic plates made to fit in large box cameras that stood on tripods were the way pictures used to be developed, before there were film negatives. “Old-timey, but they last good and long,” he concluded. That was for sure. The gallery of little windows faithfully saved for posterity milk-complexioned women and bearded men and sometimes entire families down to babies in arms, everyone in their Sunday best, sitting for their portraits way back when and now turned into apparitions keeping company with the pair of us and the vegetable kingdom.

“So, Donny,” the master of the house of glass went on with a squint that was all but a wink. “When Schildkraut's Photography Shop went
pthht
,” he made the noise that meant kaput, “these are for the dump but I get there first. The Kate thinks I am crazy to do it, but glass is glass, why not make a greenhouse, hah?” He tapped his forehead, his eyebrows lifted toward the plates pintoed dark with people. “I give a little think whether to scrape people off. Nuh-uh, leave them like so. Makes it not too hot in here.” He had a point. Without those clever dabs of shade and a pair of hinged windows that let some air through, the greenhouse would have been an oven by the afternoon.

Along with me, Herman gazed up at the ranks of panes of glass with their memories showing. Picking up a box lid large enough to catch more than a single phantom photo from overhead, he now showed me that the smoky blotches turning into recognizable pictures like the one on me were a trick of the brightening sunshine as the day went along, the rays hitting the photographic substance a certain way like a darkroom enlarger.

I more or less grasped that, but still was spooked enough to ask in nearly a whisper:

“Who are they?”

“Manitowocers,” he said around the stub of his cigar, or maybe “Manito Walkers,” I couldn't be sure which he meant. At the time, I assumed he merely meant those in the old days who had but to gallivant around town to think they were hearing their blest souls talk, according to the cross-stitched sampler hanging in the living room. I was disappointed the figures preserved in glass were as ordinary as that, but maybe that was Manitowoc for you, nothing to do but hoof around being airy.

Just then, the back door of the house banged like a shot, making me nearly jump out of my skin, Herman reacting with a jolt, too, the ash spilling off his cigar. A dressed-up Aunt Kate was advancing on us with quick little steps, high heels tricky on the lawn. Again my heart twinged, that someone who was such a perfect mirror reflection of Kate Smith was not the real thing.

I did not have time for much of that kind of regret, as she minced right up to the doorway of the greenhouse—plainly she was not setting foot in the place—and announced, “I'm off to canasta. You two are on your own if you think you can stand it.”

At first I thought she was picking up and leaving for another town with one of those Wisconsin names, which raised my spirits no little bit, until Herman said without a trace of expression, “Cut the deck thin and win,” and I realized she was only off to a card game.

Tugging at her lemon-colored outfit, which was as tight on her as fabric would allow, she addressed me on my fruit box as if having sudden second thoughts about dispatching me to the care of Herman and the greenhouse. “I hope he isn't talking your ear off about cowboys and Indians, sweetie. He has them on the brain.”

“Oh, no, he's been introducing me to the vegetables, is all.”

That drew me a swift look from her, but her attention reverted to Herman. “Don't forget, Brinker, you'll need to fix lunch,” she told him as if he'd better put a string around his finger.