Last Bus to Wisdom (26 page)

Amused, he cut a quick caper with the pen-size light, pretending to write wildly in the air with its beam. “Anything goes, when you razz the matazz into one of those alphabet boxes called a book.”

Book! That was way beyond any number of letters. My excitement grew. “Ever write those
Reader's Digest
ones? Condensed Books, I mean?”

“Phwaw,” he expelled air like a hair ball. “That's a pregnant thought.” From his expression after that burst I couldn't tell whether he was grinning or grimacing. He had a face like that, more than one thing going on at a time. In the glow of the penlight, his high forehead shown pale and his nose seemed to come down straight from it, but with a mashed look at the end, as if he'd been worked over in a fight. He had quick eyes, like a cat's, as he met mine. I couldn't be sure, but he might have winked in answering, “Condensation is only fog on the windshield for me. What I write, man, is as long as this highway.”

“Whoo, really?” About then the woman at his side stirred in her sleep. I couldn't see much of her except quite a bit of bare leg. But emboldened by the dark, I asked, “Is that your wife?”

That set him off into another “Phwaw” exclamation. Shaking his head as if it was a question he had never been up against before, he speculated, “Only in the cosmic sense, bride of the slave to lust, you might say.” He reached around and tickled her approximately in the ribs. “Aren't you, Sweet Adeline.”

“Mmm.” In a sleepy pout she leaned his way and gave him a kiss right in the ear. “Aren't you done scribbling yet?” the woman teased, still going at the ear. “You need to rest up for better things, Jean-Louis de K.” She snuzzled—if that was a word, because it sure looked like it fit what she was up to—herself into his side until she was practically joined on to him, before drowsing off again with another pouty “Mmm.”

Gazing broodily across to me, he spoke perfectly man-to-man. “The ladies. You know how it is. Can't do without 'em, can't do with 'em.”

He said a mouthful there. Out of nowhere, which was just like her, Aunt Kate abruptly clouded out Letty, and I hurried to change the topic. “How far are you and the, uh, lady going?”

“Califrisco, Sanifornia,” he quacked it, which if I wasn't mistaken was the address of Scrooge McDuck in the funnies, or at least I laughed like it was. He quit clowning right away, though, soberly thinking out loud in that tobacco-smoked voice. “Babylon by the Bay, yowser. We'll crash with some of the Frisco cats awhile, then drop down to Big Sur. The little lady here”—if I wasn't mistaken, he was tickling the inside of her thigh now—“has never seen the blue Pacific, west of the West.” Although the tickle, tickle, didn't stop, his voice deepened, I'd almost say darkened. “Been a while for me, too, to see where it all begins and ends, kerplosh.”

To the best of my geography book knowledge, I worked out where they were headed. “Isn't this sort of out of the way?”

“A standard deviation,” he replied, which I didn't get at all. As if reminded of the extent of highway ahead, he leaned into the aisle to peer toward the windshield and the stretch of blacktop lit by the bus's headlights. Restlessly passing a hand through his hair, which started at a widow's peak but turned so thick and dark it made up for it, he asked, as if I'd been keeping better track than he had: “Where are we, anyway? Shouldn't civilization be showing up?”

The way the bus was keeping to eternal bus speed, we still had a lot of South Dakota to go yet, so I gave that the French salute. “He'd say,” I pointed over my shoulder to Herman, “we're somewhere south of the moon and north of Hell.”

“That's solid, man,” my partner in conversation let out, as if he wished he'd thought of it first. His exclamation roused the sleeping woman, who wriggled against him in a way that couldn't help but get his attention. “
Excusez-moi
, buddy,” he apologized in a whisper, closing his notebook and putting a hand to her somewhere I could not quite see. “Need to tend the home fire.”

“Uh, first, since you're writing so much anyway, could you put something in my autograph book just real quick?” I asked before the chance slipped away. He gazed at me across the aisle again, question replacing mood in his deep-set eyes. “It has Senator Ridpath in it and everything,” I hurried to say. “He's called the cowboy senator because he's from Montana.”

“Well, bust my britches,” he faked a cowboy drawl. “Hand that there thang over, pardner.”

Curiosity getting the best of him, he focused his little flashlight on the album pages and read a couple at random. With a hand on his drowsing ladyfriend's thigh marking his place there, he split his attention to keep paging through the inscriptions and signatures, smiling here and there at the purple penmanship. Totaling up the contents, he whistled softly. “You laying this on people wherever you go?”

“Betsa bootsies I am,” I answered boldly, as one inspired traveler to another, the darkness helping my courage. “I want to collect so much of what they write it'll make
Believe It or Not!
”

“Man, that's so far out it's in,” he said wisely, or at least I interpreted it that way.

Next thing I knew, he was rapidly filling the album page with slanted handwriting. At the speed he was giving it, I grew alarmed that he might fill a whole bunch of pages.

But finally he signed off near the bottom with a last burst and handed the album back to me. “
Toot sweet and adoo
, buddy,” he excused himself to tend to business at his side. “See you down the road.” The penlight snapped off, leaving me in the dark.

You think about what actually happened, you tell friends long stories about it, you mull it over in your mind, you connect it together at leisure, then when the time comes to pay the rent again you force yourself to sit at the typewriter, or at the writing notebook, and get it over with as fast as you can.

Advice free for the taking if you want to live life as she be in this mad bad buggered old contraption of a country called Uhmerica. Hang in there, buddy, and take it as it comes.

It evens out in the end.

Jack Kerouac
On the road somewhere south of the moon and north of Hell

“‘B
UGGERED
.' B
AD LANGUAGE.
”

Herman wore an upset expression not entirely due to the South Dakota version of bus depot breakfast as he read over what, unbeknownst to either of us in the literary dark back then, would turn out to be as famous a set of words as I could ever hope to coax into the autograph book.

“He must have meant ‘boogered,' don't you think?” I stuck up for my fellow long-distance writer. “Sort of snotted up like with a bad cold, maybe?”

Herman opened his mouth, but chose not to enlighten me. By then I was already on to the next thing that threw me, that signature, the strange name which sort of quacked its way around in the alphabet. “I thought from what the lady said he was John Louie de Something.”

Herman gave it that salute. “The French.”

By then we were in the linoleum-floored cafe section of the otherwise dead Greyhound depot in Aberdeen, the breakfast stop before the long remainder of South Dakota ahead. To my disappointment, the fully named Jean-Louis de Kerouac and his Sweet Adeline had vanished. If I had to guess, to an accommodation more horizontal than a bus seat.

•   •   •

I
DID NOT THINK
anything much out of the ordinary in bus depot experience when our none-too-appetizing meal arrived. My stack of hotcakes was burned to a crisp around the edges, and the ham and eggs must have come from tough pigs and pygmy chickens. Nonetheless I tied into the victuals, because food is food. Herman at his, though, turned out to be what Gram would have called a pecky eater, and then some.

That is, when his order of scrambled eggs and toast arrived, he ate the somewhat runny eggs in regular enough fashion, but then I noticed him nibbling away and nibbling away at an overdone piece of toast. More accurately, taking bites tinier than nibbles, whatever those might be, which was quite a sight with his chisel-like teeth.

While this peculiar performance across the table did not cause me to throw a fit as it so regularly did Aunt Kate at Manitowoc breakfast times, I do have to say such behavior was sort of disturbing, hard to watch and harder not to.

Herman kept at it, turning the toast this way and that to take those squirrelly little bites, discarding crust onto the edge of his plate, until finally putting down what was left of the slice and sitting back in apparent satisfaction. Figuring it was none of my business if a person wanted to eat a piece of toast like it was bird food, I worked away at my singed hotcakes without saying anything.

He wasn't letting me off that easy. “So, Donny, look,” he prompted, indicating the remains of his meal. “Where is it, do you think?”

What kind of nutty question was that? Giving him a funny look, I pointed my fork at the limp remainder of toast, so chewed over it had ended up vaguely like the outline of a discarded boot, nibbled-out instep between heel and toe and all. “What, are your peepers going bad?” I spouted off, not the best thing I could have said to someone with a glass eye. “I mean, what you were chewing on is right there in your plate, if it was a snake it'd bite you.”

“Hah-uh. Think bigger.” When I didn't catch on, he hinted: “Gee-oh-graphy.”

Still perplexed, I peered harder at the crustless gob of toast. Then it dawned on me, not vague at all when a person really looked.

“Italy?”

Herman slapped the table in triumph. “Smart boy. You got it, first try.”

Where Aunt Kate thought his way with toast was disgusting, I was totally impressed. “Out the far end, Herman! Can you do other countries?”

“Everything in the book,” he claimed grandly. “On ship and in army, you pass time best you can, so I learned world of toast.” He grinned about wide enough to fit a piece of it in. “Winned lots of bets that I could not do Australia or somewheres, too.”

Add that to playing a tune with a spoon on his glass eye and chicken-hunting behind the lines at places like Dead Man's Hill and surviving the Witch of November in the Straits of Mackinac and recognizing any beer at first taste and stocking up on Indian lore from Gitche Gumee to Winnetou, and I realized I was in the company of someone whose surprises just did not stop coming. This was a treat of a kind I could never have dreamed of, but also a challenge. Life with Herman was a size larger than I was used to, like clothing I was supposed to grow into.

•   •   •

C
OME SUPPERTIME,
it was my turn to do the surprising. Almost from the start of the trip, Herman kept pestering me to know, “When are we in the West?” That evening, when we had reached Miles City, far enough into Montana that the neon signs on bars showed bucking broncs kicking up their heels, I finally could give the answer he wanted to hear. “Guess what.” I pointed out the window of the cafe section of the Greyhound depot to that evidence. “We're there now.”

“Hah!” said Herman, his eyes lighting up and following mine to the flashing sign on The Buckaroo bar across the street, with a rider waving his cowboy hat back and forth with the bronc's every blinking jump. “Feels different already! Map of Montana at breakfast, I make.”

I'll say for myself that I knew inspiration when I saw it. “Guess what again.” I caught Herman's attention by gobbling the last of my piece of pie and shoving the plate away. “Now that we're here, we need hats like that guy's. C'mon, the bus isn't leaving for a while yet.”

Herman was like a kid on Christmas morn as we rushed across to the
WRANGLERS WESTERN WEAR
, conveniently right next to the bar with the flashing bronc and rider. As we went in the store, he was gamely peeking into his wallet until I told him, “Put that away, this is on me.” It was rambunctious of me, because I had handed over my thirty dollars to him for safekeeping since I had no safety pins and a history of money somehow getting away from me. But the smaller sign I had spotted on the storefront was irresistible:
S&H GREEN STAMPS ACCEPTED
. Tough luck about that lawn chair, Herta, but fate made our deal kaput.

In the merchandise-packed place of business, one of those rambling old enterprises that smelled like leather and saddle grease and spittoons, every manner of western regalia from ordinary cowboy boots to fancy belts slathered with turquoise was on display and I had to herd Herman closely to keep him from stopping and exclaiming at each bit of outfit. But I managed to navigate us to the redemption desk at the back of the store, where the clerk, a bald man with a sprig of mustache who looked more like he belonged in Manitowoc than Montana, pooched his lip as my pages of stamps counted up and up. Finally he pushed a catalog across the counter, fussily instructing us that we needed to shop through it for what we wanted—I saw with dismay it was page after page of lawn chairs and the like—and as soon as the item was shipped in we could return and pick it up.

“No no no,” for once I simulated Aunt Kate, waving off the catalog as if batting a fly. “We're not interested in mail-order stuff, we want hats.”

“Cowboys ones,” Herman contributed.

“In-store merchandise is outside the redemption program,” the clerk stated.

“That's not fair,” I said.

“It's policy,” said the clerk.

“Proves it is not fair,” said Herman, the veteran of Der Kaiser's army.

“Folks, I just work here,” the clerk recited.

To my surprise, Herman leaned halfway across the counter, the clerk gravitating backward as he did so. “You maybe know who Karl May is,” Herman leveled at him curtly. “Writes famous books about the Wild West?”

“I've heard of the person, of course,” the clerk tried to fend, his mustache twitching in a rabbity way. “The Zane Grey of Germany or something like that.”

“Austria, but does not matter. You are looking at him in the face.” Now the clerk appeared really worried, running a hand over his bald head. “Sane Grey, pah,” Herman puffed up in righteous Karl May indignation. “I can write whole story about Old Shatterhand while Grey fellow is taking a leak in the morning.”

The clerk was speechless, kept that way by Herman's spiel about how I, favorite nephew accompanying him on one of his countless trips from Vienna to the land of Old Shatterhand and the like, had collected Green Stamps all the way across America with my heart set on obtaining cowboy hats for the two of us when we reached the real West, which was to say Miles City, and now here we were and being offered rubbish like lawn chairs instead. “I hope I don't got to tell my million readers Green Stamps are not worth spitting on.”

I held my breath, watching the clerk shift nervously. “Mr.—uh, Herr May, let's be reasonable,” he pleaded. “The problem is, it takes a special transaction form to substitute anything for catalog merchandise. It's only done when the item you want is out of stock, but that doesn't quite fit this—”

“Close enough, I betcha,” Herman closed him off. “Let's have action form, my nephew will fill it out in big jiffy.”

I did exactly that, and the defeated clerk led us over to the selection of Stetsons. Quickly I picked out a pearl-gray Junior Stockman model, the dress-up kind without a high crown or wide brim—even President Truman had one like it—while Herman glommed on to a white floppy ten-gallon type until I convinced him he'd look like the worst duded-up greenhorn this side of Hopalong Cassidy in it, and talked him down to about an eight-gallon one in sensible tan. Without a whimper the clerk shaped the hats for us, working the brims in the steam machine until we each had what we wanted—mine with a neat downward crimp in front, Herman choosing to have his curled up on the sides like the cowboys on the cover of
Deadly Dust.

Next to each other, we gazed at ourselves in the full-length mirror. “Get you,” I laughed to Herman. “You look pretty good in Mr. Stetson's shade.”

“Not so bad your own self,” he grinned back at me in the reflection. “We can go be punchers of cows now, ja?”

“Huh-uh, not quite yet,” I declared. Whipping out the autograph book, I laid it open on the counter, startling the clerk morosely compiling the paperwork of our transaction. All the cross-country letter writing had kept me too busy to hunt inscriptions on the bus to the extent I wanted and I was bound and determined to make up for it. Seeing what I was up to, Herman started to say something, but held back. “People have been putting stuff in it for me all during our trip, see,” I reeled off to the clerk staring at the spread pages in confusion. “I'm getting a real good collection, but I don't have any Green Stampers in it yet, so can you write something?”

The clerk stood on one foot and then the other, as if he couldn't decide even that much. “I've never been asked for this before. I don't know what to put in it, except—” He dipped his head shyly. “There's our song. We sing it at company picnics. Will that do?”

“Sure! Anything!”

Oh, S&H, S&H,

What would I do without you

To stretch my wage?

To trade for stuff

Page by page?

Everybody craves 'em,

I bet even Jesus saves 'em.

Little green stamps, little green stamps!

Sperry & Hutchinson

Does wonders for my purchasin'.

My book is full at last,

I better spend 'em fast.

I'll get that lamp with the frilly shade,

I'll fill the tub with free Kool-Aid.

Oh, those bonus-givin'

Guaranteed high-livin',

Super-excellent little green stamps!