Last Bus to Wisdom (5 page)

While I was hung up trying to decide, blue puffs rose steadily as ever from the passenger in front of me as if she were putting up smoke signals.

Making up my mind, I leaned way forward to the crack between the seats. I could just see the side of the woman's face as she smoked away, eyes down on her movie magazine.

“Uh, can I bother you?” I spoke into the narrow gap. “Talk to you about something, I mean? It'll only take a jiffy. Honest.”

Somewhere between curious and skeptical, she took a peek at me through the crack. “A jiff, huh? In that case, I guess come on up and let's hear it.”

Scooping her coat off the seat and stuffing it down beside her purse as I slid in next to her, she gave me a swift looking-over. Up close, she was eye-catching in spite of the raccoon glasses, I was somewhat surprised to see, with big dark eyes that went with her glossy black hair, and quite a mouth, full-lipped with cherry-red lipstick generously applied. From the sassy tilt of her head as she sized me up, I could imagine her giving as good as she got if someone smarted off to her, which was not going to be me if I could help it.

Before I could utter a word, she dove right in. “What's on your mind, buttercup? You're quite a jumping bean, you know. First time on a bus?”

Uncomfortably I owned up to “Almost.”

“Takes some getting used to, especially in the sit bones,” she said with a breezy laugh. Just then a flashy Cadillac of the kind called a greenback special—Wendell Williamson had one like it, of course—passed us like the wind. “What has big ears and chases cars?” she playfully sent my way, not really asking. “A Greyhound full of elephants.”

I giggled so hard I hiccuped. So much for being businesslike with the autograph book. My partner in bus endurance, as she seemed to be, didn't bat an eye at my embarrassing laughing fit. Still treating me as if I were an old customer, she tapped me on the knee with the movie magazine. “Don't wear yourself out worrying, hon, this crate will get you there. Always has me anyway. Betsa bootsies, there's always a bus to somewhere.”

With all that said, she plucked up her cigarette from amid the lipstick-stained butts in the armrest ashtray and took a drag that swelled her chest. Trying not to look too long at that part of her, my eyes nonetheless had to linger to figure out the spelling of the name stitched there in pink thread.
Leticia
, which stood out to me in more ways than one. Determinedly lifting my gaze to meet her quizzical expression, I rattled out my pursuit of autographs to remember my trip by, producing the creamy album in evidence.

“So that's what's got you hopping,” she laughed, but nicely. Taking that as encouragement, I fanned open the pages to her. “See, people write all kinds of stuff. Here's my favorite, just about. It's from Miss Ciardi, best teacher I ever had.” Together we took in the deathless composition:

A flea and a fly in a flue

Were caught, what could they do?

“Let us flee,” said the fly.

“Let us fly,” said the flea.

So they flew through a flaw in the flue.

“Tough competition,” she laughed again. The cigarette met its fate with the other mashed-out ones as she surprised me with a drawn-out sigh. “Sure, I'll dab something in for you, why not. Your tough luck it's me instead of her, huh?” She flourished the movie magazine, open to a picture of Elizabeth Taylor with a cloud of hair half over one sultry eye and nothing on above her breastbone.

“Aw, anybody can be named Elizabeth,” I spouted, feeling brave as I extended the open autograph book and special ballpoint to her. “But Leticia, whew, that's something else.”

Solving the pen with no trouble at all, she gave me a sassy grin. “Had your eye on the tittytatting, have you,” she teased. “Letting the customers get to know you right up front on the uniform helps the tips like you wouldn't believe.”

“I think it's a really great idea,” I got caught up in a rush of enthusiasm. “I wish everybody did that. Had their name sewn on them, I mean. See, mine is Donal without a
d
on the end, and hardly anybody ever gets it right at first, but if it was on my shirt, they couldn't mess it up like they always do.”

Listening with one ear while she started to write, she pointed out a drawback to having yourself announced on your breast. “Like when some smart-ass leans in for a good look and asks, ‘What's the other one's name?'”

It took me a moment to catch on, then several to stop blushing. Thankfully, she still had her head down in diligence over the autograph page. She had whipped off her glasses and stuck them in her purse—she looked a lot younger and better with them off—and I couldn't contain my curiosity.

“How come you wear your glasses to read but not to write?”

“Don't need 'em for either one,” she said offhandedly. “They're just windowpane.”

“So why do you wear them ever?”

Another one of those grins. “Like it probably says in the Bible somewhere: Guys don't make passes at gals who wear glasses.” She saw I wasn't quite following that. “Honey, I just want to ride from here to there without every man who wears pants making a try at me. The silly specs and the ciggies pretty much do the trick—you don't see those GIs sniffing around, do you.”

“They've got something else on their minds,” I confided as if wise beyond my years. “They're afraid they're going to get their asses shot off in Korea.”

Frowning ever so slightly, she made a shooing motion in front of her face. “Flies around the mouth,” she warned me off that kind of language. She glanced over her shoulder toward the soldiers, shaking her head. “Poor babies.” Going back to her writing, she finished with a vigorous dotting of
i
's and crossing of
t
's, and handed book and pen back to me. “Here you go, pal. Signed, sealed, and delivered.”

I saw she had done a really nice job. The handwriting was large and even and clear, doubtless from writing meal orders.

Life is a zigzag journey, they say,

Not much straight and easy on the way.

But the wrinkles in the map, explorers know,

Smooth out like magic at the end of where we go.

“That's pretty deep for me,” I admitted, so far from the end of my unwanted journey that I could not foresee anything remotely like magic smoothing the way. More like a rocky road ahead, among people as foreign to me as a jungle tribe. Still, I did not want to hurt her feelings and resorted to “You really know how to write.”

“Learned that ditty in school, along with the one about burning your candle at both ends. Funny how certain things stick with you,” she mused as I was reluctantly about to thank her and excuse myself. But then I stiffened, staring into the autograph book. “What's the matter, kiddo?” she asked offhandedly, her next cigarette on the way to her lips. “Did I spell something wrong?”

What had stopped me cold was her rhyming signature.
Letty Minetti
.

“The truck stop at Browning,” I blurted, “did you work there?”

In the act of lighting up, she went stock-still with the cigarette between the fingers of one hand and the Zippo in the other. “Okay, Dick Tracy, I give.” She turned and studied me narrowly now. “How come you're such an expert on me?”

“Oh, I wouldn't say that, expert, I mean,” my sentences stumbled in retreat. “More like interested, is all. See, my grandmother used to cook there, and she couldn't help talking about those times. She thought you were the greatest at being a waitress, ‘out front' as she called it.”

Letty, as she was to me now, sucked in her cheeks as if tasting the next sentence before she said it. “So you're him.”

Him? What him? I looked at her in confusion.

“Don't take me wrong,” she said quickly. “All I meant, Dorie told me what was up when she had to quit the truck stop. To take on raising you, at that cow outfit.”

Blank with surprise, I stared back at the waitress who suddenly was the expert on me.

Letty nibbled her lip, disturbing the lipstick a bit, then uttered the rest. “When she left to be with you, she had me put flowers on the crosses every month.”

•   •   •

W
HITE
AS
BONES
,
the roadside trio of short metal crosses stood in memoriam on the long slope up from the Two Medicine River. One for my father, one for my mother, and although I could not see why he deserved the same, one for the drunk driver whose pickup drifted across the centerline and hit theirs head-on. Only once had I seen the crosses, on a school trip to the Blackfoot museum in Browning not long after the funeral, and I had to swallow sobs the rest of the trip. I almost wished the American Legion post would quit marking highway deaths like that—for some of us, too much of a reminder—but my father had been a favorite at Legion halls, someone who came out of the D-Day landing badly wounded but untouched in his personality, ready with a laugh and a story anytime he and my mother blew in for a drink and a nice supper and some dancing. The flowers, which I remembered were yellow, must have been Gram's own ongoing remembrance, by courtesy—a great deal more than that—of Letty Minetti.

A jolt went through me like touching the hot wire of something electric. Connected by accident, she and I were no longer simply strangers on a bus. This woman with the generous mouth knew all about me, or at least enough, and I was catching up with her circumstances. Wherever she was headed with her name on her uniform, it was not to work the counter at the Browning truck stop, a hundred miles in the other direction. “You do that anymore?” I rushed out the words, then hedged. “The flowers, I mean?”

Letty shook her head and lit the interrupted cigarette. “Couldn't, sorry. Been in the Falls a year or so,” she expelled along with a stream of smoke, “busting my tail in the dining room at the Buster. You know it?”

Surprisingly, I did. The Sodbuster Hotel was a fancy place where the Williamsons stayed during the Great Falls rodeo, so Wendell could oversee—or according to Gram, mess with—the handling of the Double W's string of bucking horses. My new confidante let out her breath, nothing to do with smoking this time. “It didn't work out. I'll tell you something. The more dressed up people are, the harder they are to wait on,” laughing as she said it, but not the amused kind. “I missed the Browning gang. The rez boys tip good when they have a few drinks in them, you'd be surprised. And truckers leave their change on the counter. It adds up.”

What wasn't adding up was her presence on this bus with the rest of us nomads, so I outright asked. “What are you doing on here, in this direction?”

She flicked me a look, but answered readily enough. “Taking a job in Havre. New town, fresh start. That's the way it goes.”

That didn't sound good. People were always saying about Havre, off by itself and with not much going for it but the railroad that ran through,
You can have 'er
.

Something of that reputation must have been on Letty's mind, too. “Hey, you know any French?”

“‘Aw river,' maybe.”

“Nah, more than that. See, the place where I'll be working is called, capital
T
, The Le Havre Supper Club.” She nibbled her lip. “Something doesn't seem quite right about that, don't you think? Anyway, that's why I'm wearing my work shirt,” meaning the uniform top with the prominent stitching, “in case I have to go on shift right away. Some morons”—she pronounced it
mo-rons
, with the same note in her voice as when Gram would say “Sparrowhead”—“put you to slinging coffee almost before your keister is through the doorway, would you believe.”

I made a sympathetic noise, but my attention wasn't in it. By now I had a crush on her. Oh, man, my thinking ran, wouldn't it be great if she and Gram could get a job together at the Top Spot cafe back in Gros Ventre, if Havre didn't pan out for her and if Gram was as good as new after her operation and if I made it through whatever waited in Wisconsin, and we could all share a real house together, not a cook shack, right there in town? When you are as young as I was then, a world of any kind begins at the outskirts of your imagination, and you populate it with those who have proven themselves to you. The unknowns are always lying in wait, though. Trying not to, I kept glancing at Letty's hand and the wedding ring that showed itself with every drag on her cigarette.

She caught me at it. “You don't miss much, do you.” She flexed that finger away from the others. “My husband's still in Browning. Tends bar there, chases women on the side. We made a great pair.”

She shrugged as if the next didn't matter, although even I knew it was the kind of thing that always does. “We split. He was jealous. There was this one trucker, Harv, I got a little involved with. Harv's some piece of work,” she grinned a way that said more than she was saying. “The strong silent type straight out of the movies, you know? Doesn't say much, but when he does, it's right on the money.” The grin humorously tucked in on itself. “Even looks a little like Gregory Peck if you close one eye a little.” Then her face clouded. “Trouble is, he's sort of hard to keep up with because he's on the road so much, trucking here and there. But when he's around”—her voice dropped to a confidential level—“sparks fly.”

“Holy wow,” I said, as if I knew anything about such matters. “He sounds like a real boyfriend.”

“Real as they come.” She blew a smoke ring as I drifted along on the romantic mood. “We're more or less engaged, or will be when that husband of mine gets it through his thick head to agree to a divorce.” Dabbing the ash off her cigarette, she mused, “Haven't seen Harv lately, though. Hated to do it, but I had to leave word for him at the Buster that I'd moved on to The Le Havre.” Then her grin sneaked back infectiously. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder, truer words were never. Harv's good at catching up on things.”