Last Bus to Wisdom (38 page)

“Cousin,” said Harv offhandedly. “First cousin.” He glanced at the deputy sheriff barely an instant as if that were the issue.

Mallory's jaw came up an inch, but he did not challenge Harv's version of family life. He turned to Herman, studying the ruined side of his face where the eye had been and the facial wrinkles that looked deeper than ever in the flicker of the firelight. “Must be nice to have a helper in raising the youngster out in the rough like this, huh, old-timer?” His question was not without sympathy.

Giving the lawman a sad sweet smile, Herman uttered, “Ja,” which for once I was really glad sounded close enough to good old American “Yeah.”

“Well, I've seen worse bunches of renegades,” the deputy tried joking again, making a move toward leaving but not before a conciliatory nod to Highpockets and a general one to the rest of us. “Just don't tear the town up on Saturday night and you won't see my smiling face again.”

•   •   •

“H
ERMAN?
” M
Y VOICE
sounded hollow in the confine of the culvert where we were stretched feet to feet. “Do you think that deputy sheriff believed Harv?”

“Does not matter much.” He, too, sounded like he was at the bottom of a well.

“Mister Deputy made believe he did. Sometimes make-believe is as good as belief, hah?” I heard him shift inch by inch to try to get anywhere near comfortable on the corrugated metal, the bedrolls literally saving our skins. “Better catch winks, Donny. Tomorrow might be big day.”

T
HEY ALL WERE
big days, in the Big Hole. And I was among the first to see this one come, at least as represented in human form.

Herman and I crawled out of the culvert at earliest daylight, stiff in every joint and sore in corrugated bands across our bodies, the morning chill making us ache all the more. Were we ever thankful that down at the kip Skeeter was already up—hoboes do not sleep late—and rebuilding the fire while Midnight Frankie was working on mush of some kind in the mulligan pot. The encampment was gradually coming to life as its inhabitants groaned their way out of their bedrolls, abandoning the bed of earth to face another day. Harv could be seen rolling up a bedroll no doubt provided by loyal Lettie. As we crossed the road to head on down for whatever this day would bring, Herman blearily said he was going to the river to wash up, while I needed to take a pee so badly after the night of confinement in the culvert that my back teeth were swimming. Off he went to the gravel bar and I ducked into the brush below the road.

I was relieving myself when someone came thrashing through the willows, swearing impressively, right into the path of what I was at. He cut a quick detour, giving me an annoyed look. “Hey, PeeWee. Watch where you're aiming that thing.”

“Oops, sorry.”

Still swearing enough to cause thunder, he plowed on through the brush toward the encampment, leaving me red with embarrassment, but what was worse, slapped with that tag. There it was. PeeWee, peeing in wee fashion in the bushes, homeless as a tumbleweed. Nowhere near making
Believe It or Not!
but already dubbed into the funnies. My shameful fallen state in life, a tramp, a shrimpy one at that.

No, damn it, a hobo. A haymaker, I resolved nearly to my bursting point, if anyone would just let me. Buttoning up quickly, on a hunch I set off after the visitor crashing his way toward the campfire.

•   •   •

A
S HE BURST
through the brush into the clearing with me close behind, the tandem of us drawing the attention of the entire kip, I saw he was wearing good but not fancy cowboy boots and a stockman Stetson with a tooled leather hatband complete with a miniature clasp. He probably was around forty years old, although his brown soup-strainer mustache was tinged with gray. Halting on the opposite side of the campfire from where Highpockets and Harv and others were lining up for Midnight Frankie's version of breakfast, he held his palms toward the blaze to take the chill off. “Morning, men.”

“We can agree with both of those,” Highpockets acknowledged, the rest of the hoboes risking no commitment beyond silent nods. “What's on your mind otherwise?”

“Putting up hay fast and furious, what the hell else?”

By now Herman had silently joined me, ruddy from the cold water of the river and with his glass eye in and his eyeglasses on. I can't say he looked like a new person, but at least he looked like the old Herman the German, the one ready to hop a bus for the Promised Land somewhere south of the moon and north of Hell. His strong hand on my shoulder lent support as we found a place in the growing circle of hoboes crowding around to hear what came next from the man warming himself by the fire.

Identifying himself as foreman on a ranch plentiful with those Big Hole hayfields, the new arrival glanced around the circle, right over me and past Herman, sorting faces with his quick eyes.

“I'm hoping some of you are the genuine haymaking article, unlike your pals next door.” He jerked his head in disgust toward some kip farther up the river. “They don't want to hear about anything but tractors and power mowers. You'd think they were all mechanical geniuses.” He paused, studyng the waiting faces more intently. “What I'm saying, we're still a horse outfit.”

Can a person jump for joy standing still? Not really. But his words set off that kind of upspring of elation in me. At last! Surely an outfit like that would need a stacker team driver, wouldn't it? If only one of the older hoboes didn't beat me out for the job. In an onrush of anxiety at that and wild with desire at the same time, I seesawed so nervously that Herman couldn't help but notice my agitation and whispered, “Stand steady as a soldier, Donny.”

“We don't have anything in particular against horses so long as they don't have anything against us,” Highpockets was saying. “Am I right, boys?” Amid answers such as “Pretty much” and “More or less,” Peerless took care to specify, “Although we ain't no bronco busters, either.”

“Don't worry, that's taken care of.” The ghost of a smile visited under the foreman's mustache. “Here's the setup,” he brusquely went on. “The spread I work for used to be the Hashknife—maybe some of you put in some time there?” On our side of the campfire, someone muttered, “That sure as hell fit the grub there. All knife, no hash.”

“Don't get your feathers up,” the foreman forged on. “The spread is under new management. Fresh owner, wants things done right. I was brought in to cut loose anything that wasn't working, which meant just about every stray sonofabitch on the place. So, but for a few riders summering the cows and calves up in the hills, my crew is out of whack.”

“Enough said,” Highpockets took over. “Try us.”

“First of all, I'm looking for a man who isn't allergic to hay by the load and hard work.”

A number of the hoboes took a half step forward. “What's the work?”

“Stack man.”

The Jersey Mosquito, who looked like it would be all he could do to push around an empty pitchfork let alone one shoving swads of heavy fresh hay into place, asked possibly out of pure mischief, “Do ye favor building them haystacks big as Gibraltar?”

“Sizable” was as close to that as the foreman would come, but it was admission enough.

The hoboes, even Highpockets, stepped back to where they were. “A strong back and a weak mind, is what he means,” Shakespeare expounded.

“Donny, what are they talking?” Herman whispered worriedly. “Nobody wants haymaking job?”

“Shh. Watch Harv.”

Without twitching a muscle, the fugitive from the Wolf Point stony lonesome still seemed to be studying the first pronouncement, before the strong back and weak mind wisecrack. Then, slowly he stepped forward as if to take the world on his shoulders. “I suppose that'd be me. Up top of that Gibraltar.”

The foreman sized him up as if he were too good to be true. “You've stacked hay before?”

“Tons of it.”

Inasmuch as any haystack held several tons, that was not as impressive as it might have been. But seeing no chance of a miraculous stack man materializing among the rest of us, the foreman made up his mind. “Well, hell, you look the part anyhow. What's your name?”

“Harv.”

The foreman waited, then gave up. “If that's the way you want it, I guess I can stand the suspense until your first paycheck to find out if that's a first name or a last or what you call yourself when the moon is full.” The wisp of a smile appeared under his mustache again. “Who am I to talk? I go by Jones myself, one hundred percent.” Even to the hobo nation that mocked society by calling itself the Johnson family, going through life as just a Jones sounded like quite a dare, but the man by the fire wore the moniker with bulldog authority.

With that out of the way, Jones scanned the collection of ragtag individuals beyond Harv, his gaze passing me—did he show a flicker of interest at how I was all but falling out of my shoes with eagerness?—as he briskly ticked off on his fingers. “Now, I need two mower men and a couple of buckrakers and dump rakers each and a scatter raker. Any of you balls of fire ambitious enough some for that?”

“Bucking,” Highpockets got his bid in. Followed by Peerless Peterson: “I can handle a mower team if they ain't runaways.”

The Jersey Mosquito laid his claim. “Maybe it don't look it, but I c'n still climb onto a rake seat.” Pooch mustered, “Damn straight. Me, too.” Midnight Frankie chose driving a mowing machine and Fingy, the simpler task of riding a dump rake, while Shakespeare, the last person I would have picked out as a teamster, announced he was a buckraking fool. So tense that my skin felt tight, I prepared to spring up the instant when the man doing the hiring would realize he was one haymaker short and announce he lastly required a stacker team driver.

Instead came the awful words “Good enough. That finishes the crew, so let's get a move on. The pickup's parked up the road.” Jones gestured beyond the brush of the hobo jungle. “Come on up when you've got your bindles together and I'll pull out the daybook to talk wages and catch whatever you're using for names. Soon as we're squared away on that, we'll go make hay.”

•   •   •

A
S
H
IGHPOCKETS
and Harv and the others started making their farewells to Oscar the Swede and Snuffy and Overland Pete and Bughouse Louie and the California Kid and the others from the last bus who would wait for other haying jobs to come along, I turned as numb as a cigar store Indian. This was clearly inconceivable, that a Big Hole horse outfit would not use a teamster but some automotive monstrosity like a Power Wagon on the stacker. Yet it all too evidently was about to occur that bright-as-a-new-penny Jones was committing the same kind of sin against common sense as dumb Sparrowhead on the Double W. Some lofty writer who probably had never held an honest job once claimed that the ability to grapple with two contrary facts at the same time was the mark of higher intelligence, but I must not have been marked that way. Trying to do so only made my head swim.

Seeing how stricken I looked, Herman leaned down anxiously, telling me there were other ranches, nothing to worry, we would be haymakers yet somewheres.

Then I glimpsed it when the foreman stopped to check on something with Highpockets and turned his head a certain way, the wink of morning light as the sun caught the small silvery clasp, not much bigger than a locket but distinct as anything, that held his fancy hatband together.

I grabbed Herman's arm so fiercely he drew back from me in a pained squint. “We absolutely have to get on this crew.”

“Hah? How?”

That, I had no idea of, but I knew our best chance in the Big Hole was about to be lost if we didn't try something. “C'mon, grab our stuff, we need to catch up with him.”

•   •   •

W
E DID SO,
crashing our way out of the hobo jungle so loudly the foreman looked around at us in surprise as he reached his pickup. “Hey, wait, Mr. Jones, sir. Didn't you maybe forget you need a stacker team driver?”

The ranch honcho leaned against a rear fender, crossing his arms at my challenge. “Not really. I figure to handle that myself, be right there at the stack with the crew that way.”

“But then what if there's a breakdown and you have to go to town for parts or somebody's cows get into a field and you have to go and dog them out or there's a runaway and a dump rake goes all skoogey from hitting a ditch and maybe the raker does, too?” I started down a well-remembered list of the Double W haying mishaps. “Or what if the cook throws a fit and quits and—”

“Hey, hey, I have enough keeping me awake at night already,” the foreman put a stop to my onslaught.

Thinking over what I'd reeled off, he pushed away from the pickup and turned to Herman, who was trying to encourage our way onto the crew with nods and shrugs and grins while keeping a silence and leaving things to me. “Your boy here makes a pretty good argument for you. It's not necessarily nutty to have somebody else drive the stacker team and free me up for whatever the hell else happens. You do look like you've had experience of some kind”—maybe too much experience, from his tone as he eyed Herman's lined face and general muss from sleeping in a culvert—“but where'd you last do your teamstering?”

“Not him,” I rushed the words before Herman could say something guaranteed to confuse the issue. “Me.”

“Yeah?” Jones laughed. “You're the horseman of the family?”

“Oh sure, you bet. I've been a stacker driver since I was eight. On a big ranch. Up north.”

“Eight, huh.” He played that around in his mustache as he studied me. “Just how old does that make you as we're standing here on the green earth?”

I was perpetually being told I was big for my age. Wasn't it logical for that number to grow to catch up with the rest of me, in this instance? “Thirteen,” I said. He looked skeptical. “My next birthday.” The next after that, at least. An approximation.

He waited for me to say more, but when I didn't, he let it go. Now he scanned Herman from his city shoes to his eyeglasses. “How about the mister here, who you seem to do the talking for? I don't hear him owning up to advanced years like some.”

“He's my grandfather, but he married young.” I hoped that would help in my fudging away from whatever Herman's age was. “See, we're all each other has,” I laid that on thick while Herman instinctively stayed mute, “and we're sort of on hard times. We really, really need jobs.”

The foreman still hesitated. “Nothing against you, but you're still just a kid, and you can't have been around workhorses any too many years, whatever you say.”

“Make you a deal,” I scrambled to come up with. “If I can't harness a team the way you like, as fast as anybody else on the place, and show you I can handle the reins, you can fire me right away and we'll walk back to town.”

The man called Jones settled his hat and perhaps his mind. “Now you're talking about something. I could stand that kind of guarantee on this whole damn crew—these hoboes are sometimes the teamsters they say they are and sometimes not. You're on. Toss your stuff in the pickup and I'll test you out soon as we're at the ranch.”

He started toward the pickup cab for his daybook as Highpockets and Harv and the others emerged from the kip in the brush, swinging their bindles and bedrolls at their sides. “One more thing,” I said quick, stopping him in mid-reach for the door handle. “My grandfather has to come with me. Watch out for me and so on. I'm a, you know, minor.”