Last Bus to Wisdom (7 page)

“We weren't going that fast.”

The sheriff laughed nastily. “Not gonna be bailing out of the bus, are you.”

“To tell the truth, I don't see how.”

“Damn right you don't. You're on a one-way ticket back to behind bars and that's that.”

“You needn't be quite so tickled about it. I'm not exactly public enemy number one.”

“Oh, hurting your feelings, am I. Ain't that just too damn bad.” The sheriff glanced up at the composed figure nearly a head taller than him and complained, “I've got a whole hell of a lot of better things to do than pack you back to Wolf Point, you know. Do you have to be such a pain in the britches? First you get in a fight with some fool bartender because you think you've been shortchanged and tear up the bar.” So much for my imagining this was an escaped murderer, being delivered to the cold scales of justice. “Then you keep breaking out of that half-assed excuse for a jail they have over there and showing up back here in my jurisdiction.” With his face squinched like one of those apple dolls that have dried up, the sheriff groused, “Can't you for christ sakes light out in some other direction for a change? Go get yourself a haying job somewhere? Stacking hay is about your speed, Harv.”

“I explained that, Carl,” the prisoner said patiently. “My girlfriend Letty waits tables in Great Falls. How else am I supposed to get to see her?”

“I KNOW HER! Leticia, I mean, it was right there in pink!”

My bray startled both men, their heads whipping around to scrutinize me. “She was here on the bus, see,” I gave out the news as fast as I could talk, “so I met her and we talked for a long way and she was really nice to me, boy, she's a piece of work.” I reported further to the surprised prisoner, “She told me all about you, sort of. The trucker part.”

“Oh, swell,” the sheriff said sardonically. “Now she's running around the countryside, too. What is it about you two, claustrophobia?”

The prisoner ignored the sarcasm, leaning forward to see around the sheriff. “Why was she on the bus, my friend? Start at the beginning.”

It seemed a good time to keep the beginning close to the end. “She got sick and tired of uppity customers at the Buster hotel, so she's gonna try Havre.”

“Havre.” The men looked at each other as if that were the bottom of the barrel.

Harv recovered enough to maintain, “Letty'd have her reasons.”

“Eh, her,” the sheriff scoffed. “The cause of all this. Isn't that so, loverboy?”

“Only because you arrested me when I was on my way to go see her in Great Falls, before Havre came up,” the prisoner said, patient as paint. “I was hitchhiking just fine until I had to stop for a bite to eat.”

“For crying out loud,” his captor groused. “I leave the office for lunch at the Highliner Cafe like usual, and there you come waltzing up the street, big as life. What was I supposed to do?”

“You could have looked
down
the street.”

“Oh, sure, wink and let a jailbreaker run around loose, even if it's you.” The sheriff shook his head in disgust. A mean little smile crept in after that expression. “Anyway, this Letty sounds like she isn't waiting for you, Harv old kid.”

“We'll fetch up together, sooner or later,” the big quiet man in cuffs vowed calmly, and jailbreaker notwithstanding, I found myself pulling for that to be true.

The sheriff sighed in exasperation. “You're being a fool for love, worst kind. Honest to God, Harv, if brains was talcum powder, you couldn't work up a sneeze.”

Aware that my fascination with all this showed no sign of letting up, the sheriff tipped his hat back a fraction with his finger as if to have a clearer look at me. I had already noticed in life that shrimpy guys didn't like the idea of being shrimpy guys, and so they acted big. The sheriff still wasn't much bigger than I was when he fluffed himself up to ask suspiciously, “What about you, punkin, what's a little shaver like you doing on here by yourself? Where's your folks?”

“Me? I'm, uhm, I'm going to visit our relatives,” which I hoped was just enough truth to close the topic.

His eye level the same as mine, this tough kernel of a man simply stared across the aisle at me. “Traveling on the cushions, huh? Pretty good for a kid your age. Where you from?”

“Gros Ventre,” I said distinctly, as people from over east, which was most of the rest of Montana, sometimes didn't know it was pronounced
Grove On
.

“That's some ways from here. I didn't hear you say how come your folks turn you loose to—” The bus suddenly humming in a different gear, it dropped down in a dip and showed no sign of coming out, the road following the Missouri River now. The broad river flowing in long lazy curves with thickets of diamond willows and cottonwood trees lining the banks impressed me, but the sight seemed to turn the sheriff's stomach. Beside him, though, his handcuffed seat partner smiled like a crack in stone.

“There 'tis, Carl. What's left of the river, hmm?”

“Shut up, Harv, I don't need to hear about it.” Sounding fit to be tied, the sheriff shot a look over to where I still was taking in everything wide-eyed, and growled, “We're just past Fort Peck Dam, the outlaw is talking about.” His mouth twisted. “Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't think the Missouri River worked good enough by itself, so he stuck in a king hell bastard of a dam,” a new piece of cussing for me to tuck away.

“Biggest dirt dam in Creation.” The sheriff was becoming really worked up now. “Biggest gyp of the American taxpayer there ever was, if you ask me.” He scrunched up worse yet, squinting at the river as if the grievance still rubbing him raw was the water's fault. “Every knothead looking for a nickel came and signed on for a job, and next thing I knew, I'm the law enforcement having to deal with a dozen Fort Peck shantytowns with bars and whorehouses that didn't shut down day or night.”

“I know.” I nodded sagely. “I'm from there.”

That was a mistake. His apple-doll face turning sour, the sheriff spoke as if he had caught me red-handed. “You wouldn't be pulling my leg, would you?”

•   •   •

S
O MUCH FOR
the value of the unvarnished truth.

For it was absolute fact that I was born in one of those damsite shantytowns the sheriff despised. By then, 1939, the Fort Peck Dam work was winding down but there still was employment for skilled heavy equipment operators like my father, Bud Cameron, catskinner. Young and full of beans, he was one of those ambitious farmboys raring to switch from horses to horsepower, and he must have been something to see sitting up tall on the back of a bumblebee-yellow Caterpillar bulldozer, manipulating the scraper blade down to the last chosen inch of earth, on some raw slope of the immense dam.

I may as well tell the rest of the Cameron family story, what there is of it. My mother, teenage girl with soft eyes and fashionably bobbed dark hair according to the Brownie box camera photos from the time, was waitressing there at the damsite in an around-the-clock cafe where Gram was day cook. I imagine Gram met it with resignation when, much as her younger self Dorothea Smythe had met roustabout Pete Blegen in the cook tent of a Glacier Park roadwork construction camp twenty years earlier, her daughter Peggy fell for the cocky young catskinner across the counter. Fell right into at least one of his capable arms, I can guarantee, because this live wire who became my father always had a necker knob, the gizmo that clamped onto the steering wheel for handy one-fisted driving, on every car he ever owned, from Model A to final Ford pickup.

Marriage came quick, and so did I. I had my footings poured, to use the Fort Peck term, in a thrown-together shacktown called Palookaville. Later, whenever we were living at some construction site or in another crude housing, my parents would think back to that time of a drafty tar paper shack between us and weather of sixty below, and say, “Well, it beats Palookaville anyway.” Once the Fort Peck work shut down for good, we began a life of roving the watersheds along the Rockies. My father was six feet of restlessness and after the Depression there were irrigation and reservoir projects booming in practically every valley under the mountains, where a man who knew his stuff when it came to operating heavy equipment could readily find work. For her part, my mother learned bookkeeping, and jointly employable Bud and Peg Cameron moved from one construction camp to the next, with me in tow.

The war interrupted this pattern. In 1943 my father went in—enlisted or drafted, I have never known; it is one of the mysteries of him—and at Omaha Beach on D-Day he was badly shot up in the legs. He spent months in a hospital in England where surgeons put in rods and spliced portions of tendon from elsewhere in him into his knees and on down. Eventually he came home to my mother and me, at least to Fort Harrison hospital in Helena, where he advanced from casts to crutches to learning to walk again. Perhaps it says most about my father that he went right back to being a catskinner, even though you operate a bulldozer as much with your legs, working the brake pedals, as with your hands. Whatever it cost him in pain and endurance, Bud Cameron never veered from that chosen line of work, and in a way his stubborn climb from a cripple's life summed up our family situation, because we were always getting on our feet. Money was tight when earthmoving jobs shut down for the winter, and Montana winters are long. Hopping to whatever water project was first to hire skinners when the ground thawed, with me attending whatever one-room school happened to be anywhere around, my folks had hopes of moving up from wages to contracting projects on their own. They had managed to take out a loan on a Caterpillar D-10 dozer and were on their way to the Cat dealer in Great Falls to sign the final papers, when the drunk driver veered across the centerline on the Two Medicine hill.

If the big-hatted lawman poking his nose into my life asked about any of that, I was ready to tell him.

•   •   •

T
HE SHERIFF SNIFFED
as if smelling something he didn't like after I protested that I really had been born at Fort Peck, honest.

“That's as maybe,” he allowed, leaning toward me as if to get a better look. “Tell me something, laddie boy.” His tone turned into something I did not like to hear. “You don't happen to be running away from home, do you?”

“No! The other way around! I mean, Gram and me got kicked out of the cookhouse and so we don't have anywhere, and she's sending me off to these people like I told you for someplace to go, honest!”

Characters in the funnies sometimes act out a situation to the fullest and whenever the
Just Trampin'
hobo PeeWee and his buddies encountered a sheriff like this, they squawked, “Yeeps! It's the constabulary!” and their hair stood on end. I can't prove the top of my head was a red pompadour reaching for the sky, but it felt that way as I faced the scowling little lawman across the aisle. I was as dumbfounded as I was scared. Could a person be arrested for riding a Greyhound bus? And if so, would my suitcase be searched? How could I explain the obviously precious black arrowhead to a sheriff already full of suspicion?
It's really mine, see, because I
found it, but my grandmother made me hand it over
to Sparrowhead and so I got it back when he
wouldn't let me stay on the ranch and
— That sounded fishy even to me, let alone a skeptical law enforcement officer. Then and there, with that star badge full in my face, the consequences of my impulsive grab at the Double W went through me like a fever spasm.

Afflicted as I was by something I'd done without thinking, now I had to strain my brain for how to head off the inquisitive sheriff. The prisoner sent me a knowing look of sympathy that didn't help. Somehow I needed to dodge incrimination—the first step to getting back to Gros Ventre and turned over to the authorities, I was sure—by proving I actually was going to visit relatives like I'd said. “Here, see?” Frantically I dug out the autograph book from my jacket pocket and produced the slip of paper Gram had written the Wisconsin address on.

Still spooked to my eyeballs, I held my breath as the sheriff studied Gram's spidery handwriting.

“Hell if I know what people are thinking anymore, the things they do these days,” he muttered as he kept squinting at the scrawl. Finally the evidence seemed to convince him, if reluctantly. Handing back the scrap of paper, he rasped, “It's still bad business, I say, turning a kid young as you loose in the world.”

The prisoner Harv rumbled a laugh. “How old do you always say you were, when you set out on your own? Barely out of short pants, right?”

“Nobody asked you, Harvey,” the sheriff snapped. His attention diverted from me, he folded his arms on his chest and shook his head at the lovelorn suitor in his custody and the dammed river that had saddled him with wide-open boomtowns, the things a lawman had to put up with.

Although I was still shaky from the close call, my impulse was to get back to an even footing as a legitimate Greyhound passenger if I possibly could. Screwing up my courage, I took a gamble. “Uh, sir?” I tried to keep the squeak out of my voice. “I've never had anything to do with a sheriff before, so how about signing my autograph book for me, please, will you, huh?”

That seemed to amuse him to no end. “Kind of a feisty squirt, hnn?” he cackled. “I can believe you was hatched at Fort Peck.” In the next blink, though, habit or something set in and he made a face and pushed away the opened album I was trying to give him. “I don't have time for foolishness.”

Harv came to my rescue. “Aw, come on, Carl. Don't you remember at all what it was like to be a kid?”

The sheriff shot him a look, but for once didn't snap “Shut up.” Shifting uncomfortably, he muttered, “Oh hell, give the thing here.” He took the album as if it might bite him, fumbled with the pen until I showed him how to click it, then bent his head and wrote.