Last Bus to Wisdom (6 page)

“I bet he is,” I endorsed him sight unseen, talented as he sounded in areas a little beyond me.

“Anyway, what's done is done,” she said briskly. “You ought to have that in your book.” She mashed out the latest cigarette. “Hey, enough of the story of my life. How's Dorie these days? Why isn't she with you?”

“She's got to have an operation.” I poured out everything, the cook shack and charity nuns and Wisconsin and all, my listener taking it in without saying anything.

When I finally ran down, Letty bit her lip again. “Jeez, that's rough on both of you. Tough deal all around.” The bus changed speed as the driver shifted gears on a hill, bobbing us against our seatbacks, and when that stopped, Letty still rocked back and forth a little. “You know what? You need something else to think about.”

Reaching in her purse, she took out a compact and redid her lipstick, which surprised me because she'd already been wearing quite a gob. Working her lips together to even it out the way women do, when she was satisfied she snapped the compact shut and asked:

“Ever been kissed?”

“Well, sure,” I stammered. “Lots.”

“Besides nighty-night?”

“Uh, not really, I guess.”

“Scooch down a little like you're showing me something real interesting in the book there, and turn this way, and we'll do something about that.” She craned around to make sure no one was watching, and I really hoped the nun wasn't.

Dazed, I did as she said. And she did what she said, bringing her warm lips to mine in a kiss I felt to the tips of my ears. She tasted like tobacco and lipstick, but a lot more than that, too, although I was too young to put a name to such things.

We broke apart, her first. “There you go, kiddo, that's for luck.” Grinning broadly, she opened the compact again to show me myself plastered with the red imprint of her lips, as if I needed any evidence, before tenderly wiping away the lipstick with her hanky. “First of many smackeroos in your career,” she said huskily. “You'll get good at it. Betsa bootsies you will. Now you better scoot back to your own seat, sugar, we're just about there.” That was true of her and the pink tittytatting that pointed the way. I still was trying to catch up with the dizzying twists and turns of the day.

“H
AVRE,
the Paris of the prairie,” the lanky driver called out in a mechanical way. “You may disembark if you so wish and stretch your legs. The Greyhound bus depot, proud to serve you, has full conveniences.”

To me that meant the one that flushes, and with Gram's number-one instruction for riding the dog bus in comparative comfort urgently in mind—
Every stop, you make sure you get in there and go before the bus does
—I was the first one off and into the station, fantastic Letty first giving me a good-bye pat on the cheek and wishing me all the luck in the world.

I could have used some by the time I emerged from the men's restroom and tried to navigate the waiting room crowded with families of Indians and workgangs of white guys in bib overalls and a mix of other people, the mass of humanity causing me to duck and dodge and peer in search of something to eat. My meal money, a five-dollar bill Gram had tucked into my jeans, was burning a hole in my pocket. Besides that, on the principle that you never want to be separated from your money while traveling among strangers, I had a stash under my shirt, three ten-dollar bills that she had folded snugly and pinned behind the breast pocket with a large safety pin, assuring me a pickpocket would need scissors for hands to reach it. These days, it is hardly conceivable that three perforated ten-spots and a fiver felt to me like all the cash in the world, but at the time a cup of coffee cost only a dime, as did that stimulant for the younger set like me, comic books, and a movie could be seen for a quarter, and a pair of blue jeans would set you back two bucks and a half at most.

Be that as it may, besides providing me with a little to spend during the Wisconsin stay—“mad money,” Gram's words for it probably fitting my tendencies all too accurately—the shirt stash was meant to outfit me with school clothes back there to come home with as well. School clothes were a big deal then, no real family wanting to look stingy about it. So, scraping that much cash together to send me off with was no easy thing—it amounted to half of Gram's last monthly paycheck from the tight fist of Sparrowhead—and that's why I had firm instructions from her to stretch the pocket fiver through the trip by confining lunches to a sandwich. No milkshakes, no pieces of pie, no bottles of pop, in other words no getting rambunctious with the tantalizing five-spot.

Which sounded okay in theory, but less so in a thronged bus depot when I was hungry as a wolf. Wouldn't you know that the lunch counter, offering greasy hamburgers if a person did not want runny egg salad sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, was jam-packed by the time I could get there and service was slow as ring-around-the-rosy. Havre really needed Letty.

Desperately looking around as my stomach growled, I spied the newsstand that sold magazines and cigarettes and other sundries. Gram had not thought to say anything about candy bars.

I hurried over, one eye on the clock. No one else was buying anything, but the gum-chewing woman clerk had to tend to freight parcels as well as the candy counter, and it took a very long couple of minutes to get her to wait on me. “A Mounds bar, please”—dark chocolate with coconut inside, you can't beat that—I said as rapidly as I could. Then I remembered that suppertime would not be until North Dakota, as distant to me as the cheese side of the moon. “Make it three.”

•   •   •

T
HE
G
REYHOUND
had its motor running when I dashed out of the terminal, peeling a Mounds as I ran. The door was open, but the driver was resting a hand on the handle that operated it. “Cutting it pretty close, sonny,” he said, giving me the stinkeye as I panted up the steps, the door sucking shut behind me.

To my amazement, the bus had filled up entirely, except where I had saved my window spot with my cord jacket. And if I could believe my eyes, there next to it sat a big-bellied Indian with black braids that came down over his shoulders.

Oh man, here was my chance! A seatmate I could talk to about all kinds of Indian things! The Fort Belknap Reservation was somewhere in this part of Montana, I knew, and he and the Indian families taking up about half the bus must be headed home there. My head buzzed with the sensation of double luck. Here delivered right to me was not only someone really great for the autograph book, but who could palaver—that's what Indians did, didn't they?—with me about the black arrowhead if I went about it right. What a break!

“Hi!” I chirped as I joined him.

“Howdy,” he said in a thrilling deep voice that reverberated up out of that royal belly—maybe he was a chief, too!—as he moved his legs enough for me to squeeze by to my window seat.

The bus lurched into immediate motion, as if my fanny hitting the cushion was the signal to go, and I settled into eating my candy bar and sneaking looks sideways at my traveling companion. He was dressed not all that different from me, in blue jeans and a western shirt with snap buttons. All resemblance ended there, though. His buckskin face could have posed for the one on nickels, and then there were those braids. I envied him his straw cowboy hat, beat-up and curled almost over on itself at the brim and darkly sweat-stained from what I would have bet was life on one of the small ranches scattered around on the reservation, riding Appaloosa horses and hunting antelope and dancing at powwows and a million other things that beat anything I had been through at the Double W.

Mind your manners no matter what
,
so people won't think you were born in a barn,
I could all but hear Gram reciting in my ear, and so I politely turned away to the window to wait until we were out of town and freewheeling toward the reservation before striking up a conversation about him being an Indian and my second name or nickname or whatever it was being Red Chief. That ought to get the palaver going. Then when obsidian arrowheads became the topic, should I tell him, just sort of casually, that I had one in my suitcase? For all I knew, possessing such a rarity maybe made a person special in the tribe. Possibly I was already a sort of honorary chieftain and didn't know it, from whatever sacred quality—to me, that meant pretty much the same as magic—a glistening dark treasure like that carried.

Yet there was another consideration, wasn't there. While I was surer than sure that Wendell Williamson did not deserve an arrowhead older than Columbus, what about the Indians from that time on? What if my braided seatmate were to tell me the black arrowhead was a lucky piece that they worshipped, and there was a whole long story about how tough life had been for Indians ever since it was lost? I'd feel bad about having it. I decided I'd better play it safe at first and start with his autograph.

Finally the bus labored out of the last of Havre and we were rolling ahead on the open prairie. Expectantly I turned toward my braided seat partner for conversation to be initiated, by me if not him.

The straw cowboy hat was pulled down over his eyes. Oh no! Phooey and the other word, too! He was sound asleep.

I was stymied. Talk about manners and Gram's commandment. I couldn't very well poke a total stranger in the ribs and tell him, “Hey, wake up, I want to palaver with you.” That was born-in-a-barn behavior, for sure. However, if I accidentally on purpose disturbed his slumber, that was a different matter, right?

Retrieving another Mounds from a coat pocket, I noisily unwrapped it, crumpling the wrapper as loudly as possible while I munched away. No result on the sleeper.

I coughed huskily. He still didn't stir. Not even working myself into a fake coughing fit penetrated his snooze.

I squirmed in my seat, jiggled the armrest between us, made such a wriggling nuisance that I bothered myself. Sleeping Bull, as I now thought of him, never noticed. The man could have dozed through a cavalry charge.

Well, okay, Red Chief, you'd better figure this out some,
I told myself. After all, the prize sleeper was not the only autograph book candidate and possible conversation partner on the packed dog bus, by far. If I wanted Indians, a small tribe of them was scattered up and down the aisle, entire families with little kids in their go-to-town clothes and cowboy-hatted lone men sitting poker-faced but awake, all of them as buckskin-colored as the one parked next to me. Then at the back of the bus, a white-bibbed workgang, off to some oil field where a gusher had been struck according to their talk, was having a good time, several of them playing cards on a coat spread across a couple of laps, others looking on and making smart remarks. From snatches I could hear, there wasn't any doubt I could pick up the finer points of cussing and discussing from them just as I'd done with my buddies the soldiers, last seen shouldering their duffel bags to head in the direction of Korea, poor guys. A new gold mine of names and all that came with them was right there up the aisle waiting, if I could only reach it.

I gauged my seatmate, who seemed to have expanded in his sleep. Getting by him posed a challenge, but I figured if I stretched myself just about to splitting, I could lift a leg over him into the aisle and the other leg necessarily would follow.

Here goes nothing fom nowhere,
another of Gram's old standards, got me perilously up and with one leg spraddled over his round midriff, as if mounting a horse from the wrong side, when the fact struck me.
Moron, there aren't any empty seats.
I'd have to stay standing as I went along the aisle. Already I saw in the rearview mirror that the driver had his eye on me.

Defeated, I dropped back in my seat, silently cussing to the limits of my ability. To console myself, I ate my last Mounds. Maybe my luck would change at the next stop, I told myself. Surely the bus would let some passengers off in Chinook. In the meantime, punch-drunk on candy, I must have caught the sleeping sickness from my hibernating seatmate, as my eyelids grew heavy and the rhythm of the bus wheels on the flat open road lulled me off into a nap—only until something happened, I drowsily promised myself.

•   •   •

“T
WENTY-MINUTE S
TOP, FOLKS.
”

The driver's droning announcement that we could disembark if we so wished and take advantage of the conveniences of the Greyhound terminal jerked me out of a nightmare. It was one of those bad dreams where you try to hide but never get anywhere, in this case in some big awful building where Wendell Williamson was after me, but every time I ran down a long hallway or up a staircase, he would barge out of a room and demand,
“Where's that arrowhead? Hand it over or I'll tell your folks.”
Groggily I looked up and down the aisle of the bus, trying to come to grips with my surroundings. Then looked again, blinking, to see whether I still was in a dream, not a good one.

The Indians had vanished. Likewise the oil field crew. The passenger load was down to a precious few, myself and one of those tourist couples out to see the world on the cheap and a man in a gabardine suit of the kind county extension agents and livestock buyers wore. All the rest of the seats, including the one next to me, were empty.

I couldn't get my bearings. The bus already had slowed to town speed, but this was no drop stop as Chinook or Fort Belknap would be. I whirled to see out the window to the street. A Stockman Bar, a Mint Bar, a Rexall Drug, a Buttrey's grocery, those could be anywhere. Then I spotted a storefront window with the old-fashioned lettering
GLASGOW TOGGERY
—
MEN'S WEAR AND MORE
. Glasgow! I had slept away a sizable portion of Montana. The Indians, including my seatmate, must have got off long since, the oil roughnecks likewise. I felt ridiculously cheated, yet with no one to blame but myself. Staying awake on a once-in-a-lifetime journey should not be that hard a job, I could about hear Gram chiming in.

Kicking myself about all the unfulfilled pages of the autograph book and the lost chance to palaver about the black arrowhead, I scrambled off for the restroom the moment the bus door whished open, vowing to get the Kwik-Klik into action from here on, no matter what it took.

•   •   •

W
HE
N PASSENGERS FILED
on again, things looked more promising, several fresh faces, although no obvious Indians. I was nothing if not determined, singling out seats I could pop in and out of as the autograph book and I made the rounds. Itching to start, I waited impatiently for the driver to finish some paperwork he was doing on his lap. All at once, I saw him look up in surprise, spring the bus door open, and address someone outside.

“Afternoon, Sheriff. Prize customer?”

“A steady one, for damn sure,” an irritated voice replied. “Returning him to the stony lonesome at Wolf Point again. He's their prisoner. Supposed to be anyhow, if the escape artist didn't keep showing up here. I'll catch the local back after I dump him.”

Sheriff. Prisoner. The stony lonesome, which meant jail. I sat up sharply.

Sure enough, up into the bus stepped a rangy man with strong features and dark expressive eyebrows and a set mouth as if he were on a mission. He looked like he could carry a six-gun natural as anything, and know the right way to use it.

He, though, unfortunately was not the sheriff, according to the handcuffs on his wrists. Right behind him came a sawed-off guy not much more than half his size, wearing the biggest kind of crow-black Stetson and a star badge. “Here, Romeo,” the runty one directed. “Across from the kid will do.”

Oh man! Not only had my luck changed, the rush of it flattened me back against my seat as the pair of them settled in and the bus started into motion, the prisoner by the window and the sheriff on the aisle. The butt of a revolver protruded out of a well-worn holster on his hip like a place to hang his hat.

Noticing me gaping, the sheriff cackled a little. “Getting an eyeful of law enforcement, bucko?”

“Yeah! How come you take him by bus?”

The lawman grimaced as if he'd been asking himself that very question. “My deputy's out on a domestic dispute call, and the jail's full of rangutang drunks from Saturday night. Not the way I want, doing this by Hound.” He looked around the bus with distaste. “But it'd be just like the master criminal here to bail out of the patrol car if I drove him. Tried that last time, didn't you.”