Last Bus to Wisdom (21 page)

I watched and waited for the discard pile to grow, while dipping my hand into my pants pocket to work on the lucky arrowhead. Gerda noticed me at it, as she did everything, and asked none too nicely, “What's the attraction down your leg there?”

Before I could make up an excuse, Aunt Kate spoke up. “Oh, he insists on carrying some piece of rock he thinks is his secret lucky charm, it's harmless.”

Luckily enough, that took care of that, and on the next go-round, my ears ringing with Herman's advice—
Hold back, discard one like you don't got any use for it, and watch for same kind of card to show up on pile in your turn. Bullwhack the hens
—I discarded one of the five sevenspots I had built up. Sure enough, two rounds later, Gerda the human card machine operated on memory and tossed onto the pile what should have been an absolutely safe seven of spades. Saying nothing and maintaining a poker face if not a canasta one, I produced my double pair of sevens and swept up the pile.

There was a stunned silence from Gerda and Herta and a tongue-in-cheek one from Aunt Kate as I pulled in the rich haul of cards. Finally Gerda could not stand it and said, in a tone very much as if she had been bushwhacked, “Just as a point of the obvious, you do know you discarded a seven a bit ago.”

“Uh-huh,” I played dumb although I also kept spreading sevens and other melds across the table, “but this way I got it back.” Aunt Kate conspicuously said nothing, merely watching me meld cards right and left as if our good fortune was an accident of luck, which it was, but not in the way she thought.

•   •   •

T
HAT AND A
few other stunts I came up with that drew me black looks from Gerda and surprised ones from Aunt Kate saved our skin and our stake somewhat, but I was running out of tricks according to Hoyle and Herman, and several hands later Aunt Kate and I still trailed on the score sheet, and worse, in the kitty. Another ridiculous thing about canasta was that the game went on and on until one set of partners had scored a total of five thousand points. The way this was going, Herta and Gerda would reach that in another hand or two and wipe us out good and plenty. My partner across the table wore an expression of resignation tinged with exasperation, and I did not look forward to the ride home with her. Before the next hand was dealt, though, we were temporarily saved by the luck or whatever it was of me sneaking the last cracker-and-cheese and downing it.

“Goodness, we've gone through the
nibbles
, haven't we.” Herta immediately noticed the empty plate and felt her hostess duty. “What do you say we take a wee little break and I'll fix some more.”

“And a little wee break,” said Aunt Kate, surprisingly reckless, as she pronto headed out to what in these circumstances seemed to be called the powder room. Gerda called dibs on the next visit, and went over to wait by cooing to the parakeet.

Here was my chance, slim as it was. As if merely looking around, I wandered into the kitchen, where Herta was industriously dipping a table knife into a freshly opened jar of pimento cheese spread and daubing some on cracker after cracker to build a pyramid on the plate. She glanced around at me with an eyebrow raised, humorously maybe. “After all that talk of
oysters
, too hungry to wait, are we?”

“Huh-uh. It's not that.” I peeked back into the living room to make sure we couldn't be overheard. Gerda was babytalking to the parakeet, which answered her with unending screeches of
“Big-ee, Big-ee.”
“Those stamps you were talking about, the green ones? You know what? I've got some that aren't doing me any good.”

“Oh,
do
you?” A glob of cheese spread had smeared onto the edge of the plate and she cleaned it off with her finger and ate it, with a wrinkle of her nose at me that said it would be just our secret, wouldn't it. Thinking I was making too much of too little, she kept her voice low in saying, “You must have been with Kitty or that
husband
of hers at one of those gas stations where they give out a few for a fill-up, is that it?”

“Uh-uh. I have a whole book, pasted in and everything.”

She sucked her finger while studying me with deepened interest. “What's a boy like you doing with
all those
?”

Sixteen hundred and one hard-earned miles on the bus, that was what. But I only said, “I got them with my ticket here. So I was wondering if we could sort of make a trade, since they're called trading stamps, right?”

“A
trade
, you say,” she inquired in a lowered voice, nibbles forgotten now. “Such as?”

“Well, see, I know how much you'd like to have that lawn chair. And you know how much Aunt Kate likes to win. If you could help that along a little, so she and I come out on top today, I could bring you my book of Green Stamps next time we play. That way, you get your free lawn chair and I don't get my fanny chewed about canasta all week.”

“Goodness gracious, you
do
have a way of putting things.” She thought for a couple of seconds, calculating what she would lose in the kitty against the fierce price tag on the lawn chair, then craned her neck to check on the living room, with me doing the same. Gerda was taking her turn in the powder room, and Aunt Kate now was stationed at the birdcage, whistling at Biggie and receiving squeaks and scratchy
chirrup
s in return.

Clucking to herself as clicking onto a decision, Herta leaned all the way down to my nearest ear and murmured:

“It
would
be a good joke on Kittycat, wouldn't it.”

“A real funnybone tickler, you bet.”

“
Just
between us, of course.”

“Cross our hearts and hope to die.”

She giggled and whispered. “We'll
do
it.”

•   •   •

S
INCE THERE WASN'T
much time to waste before Herta and Gerda would reach a winning score just in the ordinary way of things, at the first chance I had when the discard pile grew good and fat and all three women were waiting like tigers to pounce and pick it up, I discarded a deuce, the wild card under Manitowoc rules, crosswise onto the pile.

Aunt Kate leaned over the table toward me. “Honeybunch, that freezes the pile, you know.”

“I know.”

“You are sure that is the card you want to play, that way.”

“You betcha.” The spirit of Herman must have got into me to sass her that way.

“Mmm hmm.” Stuck for any way to dislodge me from my stubborn maneuver, she tried to make the best of it by shaking her head as if I were beyond grown-up understanding. “Girls, it appears we have a frozen deck.”

“Doesn't it, though,” Gerda said through tight lips. “Someone has been putting ideas in this boy's head.” Aunt Kate sat there looking like she couldn't imagine what got into me, nor could she. “Well, we have no choice, do we,” Gerda reluctantly conceded. “Your draw, Hertie.”

The pile built and built more temptingly as we all drew and discarded several more times, until Herta drew, stuck the card away and as if distracted by Biggie's latest rant of chirrups, discarded an ace of spades. Immediately she went into flutters and the full act of “Oh, did I play
that
card? I didn't mean to!”

She made as if to pick it back up, which Aunt Kate headed off so fast her hand was a blur as she protected the pile.

“Oh no you don't. Against the rules, Hertie, you know perfectly well.” Tossing down her natural pair of aces, she gobbled up the whopping number of cards and began melding, the black aces side bet and rainbows of other high-scoring combinations across half the table, canastas following canastas, while Gerda squirmed as if enduring torture and Herta tried to look remorseful, although with little glances sideways at me marking our secret. I pressed my cards to my chest with one hand, nervously rubbing the arrowhead in its sheath with the other to summon all the luck I could. It must have worked. Finally done laying down cards, Aunt Kate looked around the table with a smile that spread her chins.

“Guess what, girls. Donny and I seem to have fifty-one hundred points, also known as out.” She reached for the stream of silver Gerda was unhappily providing by yielding up quantities of quarters while Biggie screamed as if celebrating our triumph.

•   •   •

I
FELT LIKE
a winner in every way as my triumphant partner, humming away as pleased as could be, started to drive us back to the house. Victory over the canasta hens! Herman would get a great kick out of that. And winnings, actual money, the first gain of that kind since I had alit in Manitowoc. Manitou's town itself was even showing a more kindly face, leafy streets and nice houses surounding us as Aunt Kate took a different way than we had come because of the “nasty traffic” of the shift change at the shipyard.

So I was caught by surprise when my attention, racing ahead of the DeSoto's leisurely pace, suddenly had to do a U-turn when I heard the words “Donal, I have something to say to you, don't take it wrong.”

In my experience as a kid, there wasn't much other way to take something that started like that. I waited warily for whatever was coming next.

She provided it with a look at me that took her eyes off the road dangerously long. “Has your grandmother ever,
ever
suggested circumstances in which you should”—she paused for breath and emphasis and maybe just to think over whether there was any hope of changing my behavior—“hold your tongue?”

Was I going to admit to her that frequent warning of Gram's,
Don't be a handful?
Not ever. “Naw, you know how Gram is. She calls a spade a shovel, dirt on it or not, like she says, and I guess I'm the same.”

From her pained expression, she apparently thought that described her sister all too well and me along with it. She drew a breath that swelled her to the limit of the driver's seat and began. “I'm not laying blame on your grandmother, I know she's done the best she could under the”—she very carefully picked the word—“circumstances.”

That could only mean Gram putting up with my redheaded behavior, and now I was really wary of where this was heading. Once more Aunt Kate took her eyes off the road to make sure I got the message. “So this is for your own benefit”—which was right up there in the badlands of being a kid with
don't take this wrong
—“when I say you are a very forward youngster.”

I hadn't the foggiest notion of what that meant, but I risked: “Better than backward, I guess?”

She stiffened a bit at that retort, but a lot more when I couldn't stop myself from saying, “And I can't help it I'm a
young
ster.”

“There's the sort of thing I mean,” she emphasized. “You're Dorie, all over again. Chatter, chatter, chatter.” She took a hand off the wheel to imitate with her arched fingers and thumb something like Biggie the budgie's nonstop beak. “One uncalled-for remark after another.”

Ooh, that stung. Was my imagination, as she seemed to be saying, nothing more than a gift of gab?

I was getting mad, but not so mad I couldn't see from her expression that I had better retreat a little. “Yeah, well, I'm sorry if Herta and Mrs. Horssstetter took the testicle festival the wrong way. I thought they'd be interested in how we do things in Montana.” Figuring a change of topic would help, I went directly to “Anyhow, we beat their pants off, didn't we. How much did we win?”

“Mm? Ten dollars.” She reached down to her purse between us on the seat and shook it so it jingled. “Music to the ears, isn't it,” she said with a dimpled smile that would have done credit to Kate Smith.

“And how!” I couldn't wait one more second to ask. “When do I get my half?”

“Sweetheart, it is time we had a talk about money.” The smile was gone that fast. “To start with, I was the one who put up our stake, wasn't I. By rights, then, the winnings come to me, don't they.”

“But we were partners! We won the canasta game together! And I didn't
have
any money to put up, remember?”

That accusation, for that's what I meant it to be, only made her wedge herself more firmly behind the steering wheel of the DeSoto. “Now, now, don't make such a fuss. If I were to give you your share, as you call it, what would you spend it on? Comic books, movies, things like that, which are like throwing money away.”

Things like that were exactly what I wanted to spend mad money on, and I tried to say so without saying so. “I can't go through the whole summer just sitting around the house doing nothing.”

“That is hardly the case,” she didn't give an inch. “I'll take you shopping with me, you can be my little helper at the grocery store and so on. Then there's the jigaw puzzle now that you've learned canasta, and always the greenhouse to visit, isn't there.” Her voice went way up musically as she said the next. “Don't worry, bunny, you won't lack for entertainment if you just put your mind to it. And here's a surprise for you.” By now she was cooing persuasion at me. “On the Fourth, we'll go to the park, where they'll have fireworks and sizzlers and whizbangs and all those things, and hear that wonderful Lawrence Welk orchestra Herta talked about. Won't that be nice?”

Talking to me that way, who did she think I was, Biggie the budgie? But before I could think up a better retort, she let out an alarming sigh as if the air were going out of her. I saw she was stricken, for sure, but not in an emergency way. Everything about her appeared normal enough, except her eyes were not on the road, her attention seized by something we were passing.

“I'm sorry, buttercup,” she apologized in another expulsion of breath, “but the sight of it always almost does me in.”

I jerked my head around to where she was looking, expecting a hospital or cemetery at the worst, some place ordinarily sad to see. But no, I saw why the sight so unnerved her, as it did me. The forbidding old building set back from the street was spookily familiar, even though I was positive I had never seen it before. The sprawling structure, rooms piled three stories high, each with a single narrow window, seemed leftover and rundown and yet clinging to life like the skinny little trees, maybe a failing orchard, that dotted its grounds like scarecrows.