Last Bus to Wisdom (36 page)

“Yeah, well”—I didn't have time to think up any other explanation for Herman's tasting talent as displayed in the Schooner and now in these circumstances, so a sample of the actual story had to serve—“in the old country he worked in one of those places where they make beer, see, and that was part of his job, guzzling all the other beers to see how those stacked up against theirs. It tuned up his taster, you might say.”

“That's the job I want in the next life,” Fingy was heard from, clasping his hand and a half in prayer.

•   •   •

G
ENERAL ACCLAMATION FOLL
OWED
that, along with the bottle passing to ready volunteers turning bugler until it ran dry. I sat back to collect myself, the already more than full day, which was winding to somewhere along a tightrope-wide back road pressing in on me, filling me with that feeling of being transported in more ways than one. This back-road trip was not the longest of my life, yet was taking me farther than I had ever dreamed. Letty's inscription in the autograph book promised
Life is a zigzag journey
, and as she said, truer words were never. By now Manitowoc, the Crow rodeo grounds, the marooned time at Old Faithful, scary Butte, each and every one was in the memory book in my head as well as the one in my pocket, while an unforeseen chapter waited ahead. On the one hand, what was happening now tingled in me as a kind of off-kilter excitement, similar to that dreamy daze between sleep and waking in the morning, when what is real and what the mind has manufactured in the night are not clearly divided. At this point, Gram would have told me not to get red in the head and over-imagine things, but this last bus carrying Herman and me and our rough-and-ready gang of new companions inevitably made my mind fly around. Here we were, on a journey my imagination couldn't resist playing with, like being on a stagecoach—if the dog bus didn't qualify sufficiently as the modern version, the Rocky Mountain Stage Line and Postal Courier surely did—packed with the equivalent of owl hoots, the roamers and ramblers, taking new names for themselves as they pleased, out to experience everything of the West.

•   •   •

M
Y REVERIE
was broken when Peerless Peterson, whose nickname became self-evident as he stuffed a chaw in his cheek from a packet of Peerless tobacco, leaned toward me and asked confidentially:

“Hey there, Snag, what was it that happened to your grampop's peeper?”

“Knife fight.”

That impressed all those listening in as much as I'd hoped. Herman, as surprised as anyone, thought fast and joined the spirit of things. He took me by the ear one more time but only to tug me close so he could go on at whispered length. I almost could not believe what he was coming up with. It was perfect! Herman at his absolute little-think best beat Karl May by a mile, and when he was finished now, I gave my brightest snaggy smile and reported:

“Gramps says to tell you our last name is Schneider, not that it counts for anything in the here and now, we savvy. But he wants you to know
Schneider
means tailor in the old country, so all he did was cut the other guy some new buttonholes. In his hide.”

The whole busload roared approval of that description, which no doubt went straight into hobo lingo. Relieved, I sat back, surreptitiously stroking the medicine pouch beneath my shirt, thanking the arrowhead for the luck of encountering Mae and Joe and the generous doctor and their fortunate name, while Herman accepted accolades for the tale with a grin halfway back to Germany.

Things settled down then, the passengers trading gripes about railroad bulls who patrolled the switchyards like it was a sin to climb onto a perfectly inviting empty boxcar, and countless other indignities the Johnson family had to suffer. I started to relax somewhat, deciding maybe the bus was not going to topple into the river and drown us just yet, although I did not quit stroking the arrowhead every little while to ward that off. But then, as I kept catching snatches of conversation as the Jersey Mosquito yakkety-yakked with Fingy while Overland Pete swapped observations on humanity with Oscar the Swede, a certain feeling came over me. It was unmistakable, and it had me clasping what lay half forgotten in my coat pocket as if it were a precious rediscovery. I had hit the jackpot, I realized. An entire busload of all kinds, here for the taking with a Kwik-Klik.

Excitedly I nudged Herman, drawing a grunt and an inquisitive look. “You know what?” I said close to his ear, resisting the urge to grab it as he had grabbed mine. “I need to get these guys in the autograph book. Nobody else has names anything like them.”

“Except maybe racehorses,” he spiked that with a guttural laugh. “Ja, fill your book with odd Johnsons.” He yawned, the Wild Irish Rose perhaps having its effect. “Busy day. While you are gitting them to write, I am going to catch winks.”

I still don't know how he could do it, popping off to sleep like that aboard a bus snorting its exhaust and rattling like crazy on the washboard road, but there he went, soundly slumbering by the time I had my pen and album ready and intentions sorted out.

I had brains enough to start with Highpockets, and staggered my way down the aisle to his front seat as the bus bucked along. Ordinarily nothing seemed to surprise him, but this did. He eyed the white album none too trustfully as I squatted by him and reeled off my request known by heart. “If I was to dab something in for you,” he questioned, “how would you want it signed?”

“Just with, you know, your moniker.” Then I got inspired. “How about
Highpockets, on the last bus to Wisdom.
”

“Fair enough.” He took the Kwik-Klik and, as I had hoped, made a little music on the page.

There's a land somewhere

so pretty and fair,

with rivers of milk and shores of jelly,

where every man has a millionaire belly.

“There you go, the hobo anthem, verse number about a hundred and fifty probably.” He loosened up into almost a smile as he shifted the album back to me.

“It's nice. I like it.” Now I had to try Bughouse Louie sitting next to him, who had been feigning disinterest all the while Highpockets was writng. First, though, I needed my curiosity satisfied. “Can I ask you something?” I stuck with Highpockets. “How come you and the other ho—haymakers wait to take the last bus?”

“I might ask you and One Eye the same,” he said mildly, but still giving my heart a flutter as the
MOST WANTED
poster loomed into the picture. “But I won't.”

He leaned back, his big frame squashing the seatback cushion, and with the practiced eye of a lifetime traveler, scanned the hard-used and unmaintained interior of the bus, which in that respect matched its exterior. “Not exactly soft, swift, and smooth, is it, going by dog in the last of the pack.” The bus shuddered across the metal rails of a stock crossing in answer. “But the reason we hold off,” he resumed, “to catch this old crate on its last run is because that puts us past the green hay, when ranchers who never learn any better start mowing too soon and try to stack the cut before it dries like it ought to. Haying is tough enough without the stuff being heavy and slippery.” He glanced at me to see if I knew that, which I did.

“Uh-huh, real smart,” I confirmed, thinking past that seasonal maneuver to the larger matter of Wisdom and the Big Hole and the reputation as a valley of prosperity. “But don't any of you ever, ah, hole up there? I mean, stick around in jobs besides haying?”

Highpockets emphatically shook his head. “Hoboes don't stick,” he put it in simplest terms. “We're not barnacles.”

Bughouse Louie backed that with a smile that displayed gums instead of teeth. “I sure ain't.”

Their point fully made, I thanked the one for honoring my album and was about to ask the other to do the same when I was flatly turned down. “Can't possibly,” Bughouse Louie cramped a hand to show me. “Got the arthritics.”

•   •   •

D
ISAPPOINTED BUT EXPRESSING
my sympathy, I moved on from what would have been that terrific name on the page to someone I figured would have no such trouble wielding a pen, the plain-looking hobo called Shakespeare. By appearance, he might have been anything from a bank teller to an actual whey-faced minister but for his hat stained dark from sweat and the faded gray Texas tux work shirt. Accepting the album as if by natural right, he scanned the verse Highpockets had written and sniffed, “Pockets sticks to the tried and true.” Not him, according to the way he waved the pen over the waiting page while he thought, his lips moving, straining his brain from the looks of it. Then when he had the rhyme or rhythm or something, he wrote lines like a man possessed.

The king called for his fiddlers three.

He bade them, “Play for me your fiddle-diddle-dee.”

The fiddlers cried, “Oh no, sire, not we!”

The queen giggled and said, “They only fiddle that with me.”

—an original rime by Shakespeare

Sort of dirty though that seemed to me, I minded my manners and thanked its author—you don't get the name Shakespeare in an autograph book just any old day—and let the sway of the bus carry me to the next candidate along the row, Overland Pete. Seeing me coming with the Kwik-Klik and the open album, he shook a hand as pitiful looking as Bughouse Louie's. “I'll pass. Arthritis is acting up something fierce.”

Huh. I had never heard of an epidemic of that, but it seemed to be hitting half the people on the bus. Before I could choose my next candidate, I heard an urgent
“Psst.”
The Jersey Mosquito several seats back crooked a finger at me.

When I went and knelt by him, he brought his face of crinkles and wrinkles down almost to mine to confide, “Ye want to be a leetle keerful with that book of yours, Snag. The learnin' of some of the boys didn't happen to have readin' and writin' in it.”

“I'm sorry.” My face flamed. “I should have thought of that. B-but I really want to get anybody I can.”

“Then all's you need to do is wait till payday and keep an eye out then,” the man known as Skeeter counseled. “Them that takes their wages in hard money prob'ly can't write their names to endorse a check. The rest of us is regular scholars enough to cash our skookum paper right there in the Watering Hole, that's the bar in town. More eefficient that way.”

I thanked him for that vital lesson and scooted back to my seat. Goddamn-it-to-hell-anyway, I hunched there stewing to myself, was there no limit to what I had to learn by hand, this summer like no other? Feeling sorry for myself and the autograph book, I was fanning through the empty pages that would never know Overland Pete and Bughouse Louie and maybe too many others to make the pursuit worthwhile, when Herman came to the rescue.

“Donny, nothing to worry. Other people will write in your book up to the full, I betcha.” I hadn't even known he was awake—it was twice as hard to tell, after all, with only one eye to judge by—but now, same as ever, he took in the passing landscape as if the West still was the Promised Land, rough road to get there or not. “Tell you what,” he eased my disappointment, whispering low to not attract further attention from the hoboes in their rounds of bottle and gab, “I will say to you by heart an old German verse and we will make it into English, or something like.” That sounded like it was worth a try, and I perked up as he and I went back and forth over how words looked and what they meant, until we were both satisfied.

When you take a look in your memory book

Here you will find the lasting kind,

Old rhymes and new, life in review,

Roses in the snow of long ago.

“Wow, that's pretty nice,” I said when the final version stood out on the album page in Herman's scrawly handwriting, “although I'm not sure if I get it all.”

“Nothing to worry, you will someday.” He stretched from the exertions of this day, but grinning as he did so. “Last bus is gitting somewheres at last. See, looking more like Promised Land.” He drew my attention to a broad gap ahead that the river and the road both relaxed into, so to speak, the landscape turning into the best ranching country I had ever seen. In life along the Rocky Mountain Front, I was used to unbroken cliffs and crags always towering to the clouds in the west, but here the mountains circled the entire skyline, an unforgettable surround of peaks painted beautiful with streaks of snow and the blue of distance. My heart dancing, I gazed around and around at the ring of natural wonders, always coming back to the long valley of ranches and their patterns on the land, where the first hayfields lay tawny in the sun.

T
HE SCATTER OF
buildings the bus pulled into at our destination did not look like much of a town. Much of anything.

While the tired dog bus chugged along a wide spot in the highway that was the main street, I tallied a couple of gas stations, a mercantile, a farm equipment dealership, a post office, the Watering Hole saloon as mentioned by the Jersey Mosquito, a supper club that looked like it had started life as a hash house, and a sprinkle of houses around. I had to admit, I'd seen Palookavilles that amounted to more. Yet the community of Wisdom famously carried one of the best names ever, by way of Lewis and Clark, who were thinking big when they passed through on their expedition and grandly dubbed three nearby rivers the Philosophy, the Philanthropy, and the Wisdom. None of those graftings lasted through time and local reference—the Wisdom became simply the Big Hole River, which proved to be the roundabout torrent our road had hugged so closely, and still was flowing good and wide here at our destination—but the little town picked up the name and used its remote location to good advantage as the provision point for the great hay valley; the nearest municipality of any size, Dillon, was sixty-five miles away through a mountain range.

I mention this only because there was something about Wisdom, scanty as it looked from a bus window, that immediately appealed to me. Anticipation can cause that, but somehow I felt Herman and I had arrived at a place that did not make too much of itself nor too little, and that felt about right. So, I was alarmed when Hoppy the driver did not even slow down as we passed the black-and-white enameled
GREYHOUND
sign hung to one side of the mercantile's display window.

“Hey, wait, he missed the depot!” I burst out, Herman jerking to attention beside me.

Overland Pete and the California Kid and some others hooted as if that were the funniest thing they'd ever heard, but Skeeter again rescued me from further embarrassment. “We ain't there yet, Snag. The one thing special about this excursion is, Hoppy dumps us off right where we're puttin' up for the night.”

Soon enough, those words bore truth. The bus jounced off the highway onto a stub dirt road, heading straight for the brush along the river. “We want the beachfront accommodations down the road, Hoppy,” Highpockets ordered up. Which drew the peevish response, “I know, I know. How god-many times have I druv the passel of you there?”

Not far from town, near a hidden-away clearing in the thick diamond willows, we rolled to a stop. “Everybody off, far as the golden chariot goes,” the driver recited, as I'd have guessed he did every year.

As everyone piled into the aisle and out, Herman and I were the last off the bus, and the final ones to have our belongings hurled out of the baggage compartment by Hoppy, who wished us luck with a shake of his head. We turned to have our first good look at a hobo jungle.

Herman, who had witnessed the Depression, chewed the side of his mouth before saying, “Hooverville without shacks, even.”

The poorfarm without walls or a roof, was my own spooked reaction to the scene of rough-dressed men strewn around a campfire in the dusk as our own bunch from the bus joined them, pitching their bindles and bedrolls into whatever nooks in the brush they could find. I was horribly afraid Herman was going to remind me it was my eye-dea that brought us to this—he sure was entitled to—but he confined himself to “Find ourselfs a place for the night, we better.”

Since we were too broke to afford a room even if Wisdom had any, our only course of action was staring us in the face. “Okay, we're gonna have to jungle up with the rest of them.” I shook myself out of my poorfarm stupor. “First thing is, we don't look right.”

Pulling him behind a clump of brush where we were out of sight from the campfire, I rolled up our pants cuffs to the tops of our shoes and generally mussed our clothes up, pulling our shirttails out some to look baggy and so on.

Lifting my Stetson off, I punched my fist up into the crown to take out the neat crimp and make it more like what the hoboes wore. I held out my hand for Herman's eight-gallon pride and joy.

“Do we got to?” he groaned.

“Damn betcha,” I said, reaching up for it so he wouldn't have to commit the crime against it himself. “We don't want to stand out like dudes at a testicle festival.”

I beat up his hat against the willows, then rubbed it in the dirt for good measure as he watched in agony.

“There you go.” I handed him the limp, abused Stetson and clapped my own on my head. “Ready?” I inclined my head to the campfire.

“One Eye is with you, Snag,” he said, as if swallowing hard.

•   •   •

H
ATS BEATEN UP
and hearts beating fast, we headed into the hobo jungle in the brush beside the Big Hole River. The kip, as they called it, turned out to be a gravel bar down from a state highway department gravel pit and storage area, where culverts and bridge beams and steel guardrails were stacked. Bunched there in the open-air kip, maybe twice as many as were on the bus with us, was a band of men sitting around rolling their smokes in brown cigarette paper. Like beached pirates, was my thought, to go with Herman's roguish missing eye. Imagination aside, it was written in the sparks flying upward from the open campfire and the bubbling of the blackened stewpot hung over the flames that we were joining the bottom end of society, manual laborers with leather gloves stuck in a hind pocket, maybe their only possessions beyond a bindle and a bedroll. Now I was the one swallowing hard.

Blessedly, Highpockets intercepted us before we reached the campfire circle.

“Now, I'm not saying you two don't know how to take care of yourselves,” that point made itself in his tone of voice. “But after dark here, it's colder than old Nick.” Night was fast coming on, and I was remembering the gripping chill outside the Old Faithful Inn. Highpockets shifted his gaze significantly to my scanty suitcase and Herman's sagging duffel. “I don't notice any bedroll makings on you. Better do something about that.”

“Ja, what is your recommend?” Herman surprised us both.

“Doesn't speaka the English, eh?” Highpockets gave me an unblinking look. “That's your own business. Uptown at the merc, they sell bedroll fixings, old army blankets and the like.”

“I will get fixings,” Herman startled me further. Chicken hunter he may have been, but Wisdom did not seem to offer much prospect along that line.

I would worry about that later, right now I had a basic concern about getting any kind of shelter over us for the night. “Ah, Mr. Highpockets, I was wondering—”

“No misters in the Johnson family,” he said not unkindly.

“Okay, sure, uhm, Pockets. Do you suppose Gramps and me could have dibs on one of those culverts?”

“That's inventive, anyway. Sling your plunder in there to stake your claim,” he gave his blessing, turning away toward the kip. “Then better come on down for mulligan before it's gone.”

I hustled to the nearest steel shelter with my suitcase, Herman following with his duffel and looking thoughtful at the prospect of the metal tunnel just large enough to hold us if we slept end to end. “Go be acquainted,” he more or less shooed me to the hobo gathering. “I will be a little while in town.”

Another worry popped out of me. “What are you gonna use for money? We're just about broke again, remember?”

“Nothing to worry. I have eye-dea.”

•   •   •

W
HATEVER IT WAS,
I left him to go to town with it, in all meanings of the phrase, while I made my way down to the kip and its inhabitants. But beforehand, at the edge of the brush I encountered Pooch hunched over like a bear as he scrounged dry branches along the riverbank for firewood. When I asked if I could help, he replied, “Damn straight,” without looking up, and I started tromping downed cottonwood limbs in half until I had a good armful.

I don't know that it would be in any book of etiquette, but I was a lot more welcome walking into the hobo gathering with an armload of firewood than if I had merely strolled in with my face hanging out. “Good fella,” said Midnight Frankie, stirring the black pot of mulligan, a stew found in no recipe book. I dumped my armload on the firewood pile and retreated to the farthest spot on one of the logs that served as seating surrounding the campfire, wishing Herman was with me to provide moral support or at least company.

“For any of you who didn't have the pleasure of his company on the last bus, this here's Snag.” Highpockets did the honors of making me known to the other batch of hoboes and them to me. Similar to our busload, they had names all over the map, Candlestick Bill and Buttermilk Jack and Dakota Slim and the Reno Kid—not to be confused with the California Kid—and Left-handed Marv, who had an empty sleeve where his right arm should have been, and so on through enough others to confuse St. Peter at the gate. My presence as a kid with no kind of a capital
K
did not seem to bother anyone since Highpockets vouched for me and he clearly was the topkick of the whole bunch. The Big Ole, as I soon learned this unelected but acknowledged type of boss was called. Why the hobo community fashioned an oversize Swede as the last word in leadership, I hadn't the foggiest idea—it was their lingo, not mine—but in any case, Highpockets saw to things that needed seeing to, including keeping the peace now when Peerless Peterson and the Reno Kid scuffled over which of them had claimed the spot under a favorable cottonwood first. With that settled by Highpockets's threat to knock their heads together, things went toward normal, the wine bottles appearing out of bindles every so often lubricating a general conversation that ran toward the unfairness of a world run by fat-cat capitalists and sadistic small-town sheriffs.

By now I was nervously glancing out into the dark, wondering what was delaying Herman and kicking myself for not going with him into town and keeping him out of trouble, or at least being on hand when it happened. Goddamn-it-to-hell-anyway, could even this remotest of towns conceivably be plastered with
MOST WANTED
posters, and had he been thrown into whatever variety of jail the Big Hole held? I was torn between holding our spot in the campfire community and plunging into the darkness to go searching for him.

In the meantime, the hoboes were loosened up by the circulating bottles to the extent there was now a jolly general demand. “C'mon, Shakespeare, give us one.”

“My kingdom for a source,” that individual half comically, half dramatically put a hand to his brow as if seeking inspiration. Mimicking a high-powered thinker—or maybe there was no mimicking to it, with him—he pondered aloud, “Now, what immortal rhyme would a distinguished audience of knights of the road wish to hear, I wonder?”

“Quit hoosiering us and deliver the goods, Shakey,” Highpockets prodded him.

“As you like it, m'lord,” the response pranced out, over my head and probably all the others as well. Crossing his legs and leaning on his knees with his arms, the learned hobo lowered his voice confidentially enough to draw his listeners in, me included.

“There was an old lady from Nantucket—”

Audience cries of “Hoo hoo hoo” greeted this promising start.

“Who had a favorite place to tuck it.”

The way this was going, I was momentarily glad Herman was not there.

“It slid in, it slid out—” The recital bounced the springs toward its climax, there is no more apt way to say it. I could see Pooch moving his lips in repetition to catch up with the words, while Midnight Frankie smirked like a veteran of such moves. Other hoboes banged fists on their knees along with the rhythm of the limerick or leaned back grinning expectantly. By now I was thankful Shakespeare's contribution to the autograph book was only vaguely smutty.

“Slick and sure in its route—” An artful little pause to build suspense, I noted for future reference. Then the culmination:

“Under the bed. Her night bucket!”

“Ye damn fancifier, here we thought we was gettin' somethin' educational,” the Jersey Mosquito called out while other critics hooted and kicked dirt in Shakespeares's direction and told him where to stick the old lady's chamber pot. As the merriment went on, I was giggling along until I glanced over my shoulder for any sign of Herman yet and saw a flashlight beam headed straight for our culvert.

I knew it! Herman had been nabbed uptown, and here came a cop to confiscate our belongings. With a feeling of doom, I slipped away from the campfire circle and stumbled up the road embankment, frantically rehearsing pleas to the law officer now shining his light at the mouth of the culvert and pawing around in there.

And found it to be Herman, stowing two sets of blankets and wraps of canvas to roll them in. He kept dumping goods from his armload. A Texas tux work shirt for each of us. Leather gloves, ditto. Changes of underwear, even. Not to mention the flashlight. “So, Donny,” he said after a flick of the beam showed him it was me panting up to the culvert. “We have fixings to be haymakers.”

“Holy wow, how'd you get that much? Weren't we next thing to broke?”

He fussed with a bedroll a bit before answering. “Old-timey wicker will just surprise you, how much it brings.”

It took me a moment for that to fully penetrate, but when it did—

“You sold the suitcase? Gram will skin me alive!”

“Don't be horrorfied,” he begged. “It was that or the moccasins. No choice did I have. Had to get bedrolls, can't sleep bare on something like this.” He knocked a knuckle against the corrugated metal culvert, making it ring hollowly. “Take it from an old soldier who has slept on everything but bed of nails, ja?”

“I guess so,” I muttered, taking it a different thing from having to like it. “But my moccasins and the rest—what'd you do with my things?”