Last Bus to Wisdom (32 page)

“Ja, we are feeling it,” Herman did his part, patting away another yawn as if doing a war whoop. “South Dakota is a long ride,” he borrowed the jackrabbit territory of the day before.

If the Reverend Mac was disappointed in not pinning us down about whether we were with the Lord, he did not show it. “By all means, go to your rest.” He could not have been more gracious about excusing us to slumber. “Bus travel takes it out of a person.”

He said a mouthful there. Naturally Herman was asleep almost the instant he shut his eyelids, and I was more than ready to doze off as well, with the bus heading due west through the Yellowstone valley into a sunset of colored clouds and shafts of sunlight that had the driver pulling his windshield visor all the way down. The dainty minister sat back, smiling to himself, one more Bible inflicted on potential sinners or proven ones, to his evident satisfaction. The last thing I remember before sleep claimed me, he was humming to himself, more than likely a hymn.

•   •   •

“O
LD
F
AITHFUL
I
NN,
the Waldorf Astoria of Yellowstone National Park. You may disembark if you so wish—”

Herman and I alit in the dim parking lot after the driver's done-it-a-hundred-times announcement with a cluster of tourists already exclaiming over this and that. Still trying to yawn ourselves fully awake as we waited for our baggage to be dug from their mountain of suitcases, I looked around for the talkative minister, suspicious that he would hop off to stretch his legs and have another go at us. But there remained no sign of the soul-hunting demon, to mix terms in an unholy way. The little Bible-pusher had disappeared from the seat across from us whenever I cracked an eye open from my series of naps as the bus traveled through the dark, probably to farther back in the aisle where religious pickings might be better, and I figured he must be staying aboard to work on some poor Salt Lake City–bound soul who needed directions to the Lord.

Hallellujah, brother, now the Reverend Mac was digested into the memory book, and that was enough of him for me. Quickly putting aside the churchy bus experience, Herman and I turned to our much-awaited surroundings. Smell that piney air, feel that high altitude! We had made it to glorious Yellowstone, free as knights and Apaches and other roaming spirits, and in silent agreement we grinned at each other and took a minute to marvel at it all.

Some distance away, with black forest as a backdrop, floodlights picked out a mound of earth, nearly as white as salt, which we divined must be where the famous geyser would make its appearance. Out and around in what looked like a geyser kitchen, steaming water bubbled out of the ground as if from gigantic boiling pots. Oh man, nature was really cooking here, in all senses of the phrase. And magically, a star brighter than all the others—probably the planet Venus, I now realize—was pinned right there over the geyser site, as Mae Schneider's ditty in the autograph book promised. Yellowstone already was putting on a show for us, as Herman's mile-wide grin attested. Nearly as splendid as the natural wonders for our current purpose was the colossal Old Faithful Inn overlooking all this, several stories high like an elaborate fortress made of logs, with gables everywhere and a sloping roof as long as a ski jump. By now it was long past suppertime and a place as grand as that surely would have a menu fit for the gods, or at least us, and then a nice warm room for the night.

“Notcheral wonders and fancy eats and feathery beds, hah, Donny?” Herman exulted as he shouldered his duffel bag and I hefted my suitcase.

“Yeah, finger-spit knew what it was doing, didn't it,” I crowed happily as we started off after everbody else to check in to the fancy Inn and head for supper.

“Donny, wait!”

What I heard in Herman's voice stopped me cold. When I glanced back, he had dropped the duffel bag and was clutching his chest. Having never seen a heart attack, I nearly had one myself at this sight.

“Herman!” In a stumbling panic, I rushed to him. “Y-you're not gonna die on me, are you?”

“No, not that. My wallet.” He kept searching his coat pockets over and over. “Is gone.”

“How can it be? Didn't you put it down the front of your pants when you were sleeping?”

“I didn't think.”

I could barely squeak out the next. “Was all our money—?”

“Ja.”

“Fuck and phooey, Herman!” my voice came back. “You mean we're skunk broke?”

“Hah?” He looked so anguished I was afraid he really might have a heart attack. “If that means all gone, ja again.” He slapped his pants pocket, which did not jingle one bit. “Spent the chickenfeed on candy bars, even,” he moaned.

I still was in shock. This was a hundred times worse than the ex-convict trying to steal my suitcase at that Minnesota Palookaville. “Who—how—” We needed to do something, but what? “Let's ask on the bus, maybe Reverend Mac saw somebody—”

“Not just yet, hah-uh,” he stopped me. He still looked stricken but in a different way. “Something is tickling my mind. Quick, your book. Let me see.”

Blankly I handed over the autograph album, and peered along with him in the barely lit parking lot as he flipped pages to Reverend Mac's inscription. With some kind of swearing in German, he put his thumb next to the signature,
Isaac M. Dezmosz
.

“Should have seen. Dismas was thief crucified with Christ.” It took me a moment to put together the initials with that pronunciation and come up with it:
I Am Dismas
.

“Lying in his false teeth, he was,” Herman bleakly summed up the so-called Reverend Macintosh.

I blew my top. “The smart-ass little sonofabitch of a thief! Distributing Bibles, my butt! C'mon, we'll show him troubled times.”

I tore across the parking lot to where the bus was idling, ready to go, Herman galloping after me. I banged on the door, and Herman joined in as if he would tear it open with his bare hands.

The driver opened and considerately asked, “Forget something, boys?”

Without answering, I lunged up the steps and into the aisle, Herman right behind, both of us furiously searching for a distinctive gray head and silvery mustache.

Neither of which was in evidence on any of the remaining passengers, from front of the bus to the back as I careened up the aisle in search, Herman blocking the way in back of me in case the little Bible-spouting weasel tried to make a break for it. “Where'd that goddamned preacher go?” I demanded at the top of my voice, glaring at the rows of startled faces, none of them the right one.

“Who, the nice little minister?” the driver called down the aisle to us, perplexed by our invasion. “He got off at Livingston, a ways back. Said he had a train to catch.”

“Sinked, we are,” Herman said huskily, putting a hand on my shoulder to steady me, or maybe himself.

Retreating to the front of the bus, we laid out our situation to the driver, who could only shake his head as if now he had heard everything and offer the commiseration, “Tough break, boys, better report it at park headquarters and they'll get the sheriff in on it.”

S
TILL AS MAD
as could be, I piled off the bus to do that very thing, my view of law enforcement having come around full circle in the past few minutes, with Herman more slowly following.

“Hurry up,” I called over my shoulder, half frantic or maybe more, as he lagged on the way across the parking lot, “let's get some kind of cops after the thieving bastard.”

“Donny, hold back. Over here, please.”

Disconcerted by the detour, I uncertainly trailed after as he veered off to the gigantic wooden deck at the geyser side of the Inn, where people could sit out to watch Old Faithful display itself, although at that time of night we were the only ones anywhere around.

He dropped his duffel bag in a corner away from where everyone else was sitting, so I set my suitcase there, too, until it would become clear what this was about. More and more unnerved, I whispered when I didn't have to, “Why're we wasting time here when he's getting away with—”

“Shhh, notcheral wonder is coming,” he gently shut me up.

Unstrung as I was anyway by Herman behaving this way, now I was hearing what sounded like low thunder and heavy rain mixed together, although the night sky remained cloudless. I thought I felt the earth tremble, but it might have been only me. We turned together toward the source of the sound, a boiling hiss from the whitish mound, and, as we watched, in its center what looked like a giant fountain started up, the cascades of steaming water billowing and falling, but steadily and incredibly shooting higher and higher, until the ghostly white column stood taller than the tallest trees, almost touching the single bright star, it looked like.

Yet magnificent as the sight was, it did little to change my anxious mood. Old Faithful was an eyeful, for sure, but so what? It faithfully would be blowing off steam again in an hour or so, after we'd had time to spill our story to whatever passed for cops under these circumstances, but Herman was making no move whatsoever in that direction.

Instead, he motioned wordlessly for me to take a seat in the deck chair next to the one he claimed. Scratching a match on the arm of the chair, he lit a cigar and gazed fixedly at Old Faithful's rising and falling curtains of water as he puffed. Had he gone loco? This I could not understand at all, the two of us planting ourselves there, sightseeing the geyser fading slowly back into the ground, while the thief who'd left us skunk-broke except for a cheap Bible was making a getaway free as the breeze.

Finally he extinguished his cigar and murmured, as if coming out of his deepest think yet, “Guess what, Donny. Not a good eye-dea, to go to police.”

“Not a—? Sure it is. We've got to, they're the ones to chase down the sonofabitching phony religious—”

“Many questions, they will have.”

“So what?”

“Donny, listen one minute.”

Something in his voice warned me to prepare myself for what was coming. Not that I possibly could, because what he was leading up to saying was:

“I am not American on paper.”

That took some digesting. At first I didn't know what to make of it. “Then what are you?”

“German.”

“Well, yeah, sure, we been all through that. But who cares about something of that sort anymore?”

“
Citizen
of Germany, yet,” he spelled out, his voice growing strained. “Here I am something called alien.”

Giving this news what I thought it deserved, the French salute, I asked what was wrong with being one of those, whatever they were.

“
Enemy
alien,” he fit the two words together with a grimace.

That hit me where it counted. It put things right back to when I learned he was Herman the German and feared he was one of the Hitler demons who shot my father's legs to pieces at Omaha Beach. Was I right the first time?

Fearfully I trembled out, “How—how are you an enemy?”

He threw up his hands. “By not showing my face when World War
Zwei
”—wincing, he corrected that to
Two
—“got America in. Some big danger I ever was, hah?”

•   •   •

I
LISTENED DUMBSTRUCK
to the rest, how having had enough of war in the first one, the second time around he quietly shipped out on ore boats like the
Badger Voyager
where no questions were asked as long as you could shovel heaps of coal, keeping himself at sea or whatever the Great Lakes were, and, beyond that, essentially hiding out in plain sight. “Manitowoc is German sort of place, you maybe noticed,” he said whimsically. “Government was not going to declare whole town an enemy.”

The meaning was sinking in on me now, all right. “You're not supposed to be in this country at all? They'd kick you out?”

“Not at first,” he raised my hopes. But then: “Put me in prison, they would.”

I was horrorfied, as Herman's word best said such a thing. “You're that much of an”—I couldn't bring myself to say
enemy
—“alien?”

“By stupid law, ja,” he spat out. Given how law enforcers seemed to automatically side with Sparrowhead against me, I couldn't blame him for feeling picked on. “But if you're still stuck being a—a German,” I was back to circling in confusion, “how'd you get here at all?”

He laughed, the hollow empty kind.

“Took French leave.”

Unsteadily I told him I didn't quite know what that meant.

“Long story, Donny.”

•   •   •

“H
ITLER, PAH.
Too bad I did not break his neck when he was close as me to you, that night.”

And so in the next unforgettable minutes, there in an American national wonderland, I learned that “French leave” meant desertion, although in this case not from any army but an entire country. Germany, that is, when it was falling to pieces after losing World War One and the Nazis were coming out of the woodwork. As his searching words led me through, my imagination transformed the hunched figure clasping his hands between his legs into a young veteran like my own father coming home from combat. Aunt Kate may have thought Herman had no ambition, but it sounded to me as if he had been smart as an Einstein in his choice of livelihood after his term as a soldier on the losing side: making beer where they drank it like water. “In Munich were beer halls like you would not believe, big as this, almost.” He pointed a thumb to the whopping Inn behind us. “And Oktoberfest there, two-week festival of foods and beers.” He gave that hollow laugh again. “Crow Fair for drunkards. Good place to be a
Braumeister
.” From what he said, that was a vital task in the brewing of beer, sampling and comparing to the competition, and he had enough knack at it to work up to a job at a famous place, although I had never heard of it until his chilling telling.

“The Buergerbraukeller, biggest in Munich.” He paused, the night just before Armistice Day in 1923 coming back to him as it brought me to the edge of my deck chair. “Not always a good idea to be where history gets made.” He ducked his head as if dodging too late. “Packed hall that night, thousands drinking beer, government people there to say the country is not going to the dogs, if anybody would believe them. I am notcherly curious, so I come out from where brew vats are, to listen. Bring stein of beer for myself, why not, and sit at table near the back, where people have left.” All of a sudden he flung an arm up as if firing a pistol at the sky, making me nearly jump out of my hide. “Right in time for Hitler to come through door and climb on table and shoot in the air, like some cowboy. Close as me to you,” he repeated, shaking his head at how history brushed past him. “But when I try to reach across table to grab him, pull the feet from under this crazy person up there shooting, make him fall on his face like fool he is, Hitler keeps dancing around like cat on a stove, he is so nervous, and I miss him this far.” He held his fingers inches apart. “Before I can try again, whole bunch of brownshirts with guns out jump on me and others around, goverment people and all.” Drawing a breath, he husked out the rest of the recitation. “Hitler takes those to a room, the rest of us is held at point of guns, told shut up and drink beer. When myself and some others say what is happening is not right, we get knocked around and told we are now on list to be shot.” Talk about spellbound; I was as much all ears as when he'd told about being swept up by the Witch of November, only this November rough weather was called Adolf Hitler.

“A putsch, it was,” which he defined as a gamble at taking over everything. “Did not work that time, Nazi march on rest of Munich failed the next day, so putsch collapsed, good thing. But I had two eyes then,” he made a wan face, “and did not like look of things in Germany. Beer hall bullies, Hitler bunch was, but maybe more than that if they ever got hold of government, hah? On list to be shot reminded me too much of Höhe Toter Mann”—the specter of Dead Man's Hill sent a chill up my spine. “
Pthht
, to that,” he rid himself of his homeland. Leaning toward me as if that would bring me nearer to understanding, he tapped his temple, where little thinks came from. “Listen, Donny, this is the how of it. Find a safe harbor, is good saying. In Germany then, that meant small ports on the Baltic, where Nazis was not thick on the ground yet. Always ships going out the Baltic Sea, to all places of the world.” This I could follow almost as though I were at his side escaping from the Nazis and that sonofabitch of all sonsofbitches, Hitler. “I give the ship engineer a little something,” he went on, rubbing his fingers together in that familiar gesture meaning money. “He lets me hide in tool room, down where boilers are. Nobody topside comes ever, and I make friends with stokers by helping out. Learn to shovel coal. When we dock in America, jumped ship, I did.”

•   •   •

I
N THREE PARAGRAPHS,
there it was, not so long after all. One for
Believe It or Not!—
the man who came within the length of his fingers of stopping Hitler. Not only that, the history that had made him an enemy of Germany for real and an enemy of America on paper, both at the same time.

Almost dizzy with the size of the fix he was in—
we
were in—one more thing I had to check on.

“Jumped ship. Is—is that against the law, too?”

“Could say so,” came the not unexpected reply. “Stowaway, is that word,” he ruefully added it to the growing list of other offenses charged to Herman Brinker.

“Aunt Kate,” I whispered again, for no reason but the weight of the question, “was she in on this? You being an alien and all?”

He nodded slowly. “She knew, all the time. Had to. House in her name, car in her name. She is the one that counted, on paper.” He shrugged, helplessly resigned to the one-sided situation. “No identification papers can I show for anything.”

And she had called
me
a storier? What about living under false pretenses with a husband who was not anything he appeared to be? Busy piling that up against her, it took a few moments for that last part to fully register on me. I thought we were bad off when we simply didn't have any money. Now we didn't even have a real Herman.

He turned to me, his expression the most serious yet. This next, I will never forget.

“Donny, I am so much sorry”—if spoken words ever shed tears, it happened now in his broken apology—“for what is happened. Miles from anywheres, we are, and money gone, trip kaput.” In that moment he looked so much older, the way people do when they are terribly sad. I felt as awful as he looked.

“Hey, it wasn't just you,” I felt compelled to take my share of the blame, “it was my bright idea for us to go to sleep to get rid of the goddamn minister. If I hadn't thought that up—”

“
If
is biggest word there is,” he saved me from myself. Or maybe himself along with it. As I watched, he dry-washed his face, holding his head in his hands while trying to think. For some moments I held my breath, until he came up with “No sense beating ourselfs like dead horse, hah?”

Just like that, he straightened up, unhunching his shoulders for the first time since the words
enemy
and
alien
, and tipped his cowboy hat back, if not the Herman of the dog bus again a pretty good imitation of it. “We got to git in for the night”—cocking his good eye toward the fancy Inn—“into the Waldorfer, someways, Donny.”

“But what are we gonna do after that?” I spread my arms helplessly.

He gazed off into the distance, as he must have gazed countless miles that way since that night in a Munich beer hall. “We take a leap of fate.”

Believe me, I have looked this up, and the roots of
fate
and
faith
are not the same. Nonetheless, I picked up my wicker suitcase to follow Herman the German into the Old Faithful Inn.

•   •   •

E
VER STEPPED
into an aircraft hangar? The lobby of the elaborate old Inn was like that, only roomier, largely higher. In the big open area I had to tip my head way back to count balcony after balcony held suspended by beams thick as logs, the supports all the way to the towering roof peak positioned each on top of the one below like those circus acrobats standing on one another's shoulders. Incredibly, except for a mountainous stone fireplace, every single thing in the Inn—walls, balcony railings, chairs, benches, ashtray stands, light fixtures—seemed to be made of timber, actual trees, freaks of the forest according to the fantastic twists and turns of some of the trunks and limbs. Dimly lit only by old electric candles that threw about as much light as Christmas tree bulbs, the place struck me as creepy, as in those fairy tales where bad things happen to travelers in shadowy old inns.

Herman seemed unperturbed. “Like the Kaiser's hunting lodge, but built by beavers” was his estimate of the pine-forest lobby as we entered, baggage in hand.