Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig

  • • •

  ONCE UNDERWAY, the bus lived up to that tirelessly loping emblem on its side. In short order, the country along the highway turned to grainfield, miles of green winter wheat striped with the summer fallow of strip farming and tufted here and there with low trees planted around farm buildings as windbreaks. I stayed glued to the window, which for a while showed the blue-gray mountains I had been used to all my life, jagged tops white with snow left over from winter. All too soon, the familiar western peaks vanished behind a rise and did not come back. Apparently everything this side of the Rockies was dwarfed in comparison and only any good for plowing, not a cow or horse anywhere in sight. I could just imagine Wisconsin, the whole place a cornfield or something.

  Watching the miles go by, with no company but my indistinct reflection, loneliness caught up with me. It had been held off by the woman talking a blue streak at me on the ride from Gros Ventre and then the confusion of getting settled on the Greyhound, but now if I could have seen myself, hunched in that seat amid the rows of passengers confined within themselves by the cocoon of travel, surely I matched the picture of despair conjured by one of those sayings of Gram’s, lonely as an orphan on a chamber pot.

  Eleven going on twelve is a changeable age that way. One minute you are coltish and sappy, and the next you’re throwing a fit because you’re tired or hungry or something else upsetting is going on inside you. Right then my mood churned up a storm. Things had been tossed turvy, and although I was the one cast out alone onto a transcontinental bus, home was running away from me, and had been ever since some doctor’s dire words to Gram. For if I lost the last of my family to the poorfarm or worse, with that went everything connected to the notion of home as I had known it, and I would be bound for that other terrifying institution, the orphanage.

  Full of instinct and intrigue as a schoolyard is, kids grasp to a terrifying extent what losing the world you have known means. Too many times had I heard the whisper race through recess, jackrabbit telegraph, that so-and-so was “going to the other side of the mountains.” Packed up and dumped in the state-run orphanage over at Butte, that meant, across the Continental Divide where the sun went down and so did kids’ lives. Designation as an orphan truly did sound to me fatal in a way, the end of a childhood in which my parents, in their shortened lifetimes, literally moved earth, and would have done the same with heaven had it been within immediate reach, to keep me always with them no matter how unhandy the circumstances.

  So, right then it did not seem at all imaginary that life was turning against me, Gram and me both, to an awful extent. I resented the human plumbing or whatever it was in her case that produced this situation. If that nun back there playing with her beads or whatever wanted to do something useful, why didn’t she pray up a better system of women’s insides so a boy wouldn’t worry himself sick about losing his grandmother, all he had, to some kind of operation?

  And getting booted out of the cook shack and off the ranch like we were nobody—if that wasn’t enough cause for resentment, I didn’t know what qualified. I could have driven that stacker team in haying time just fine, and if Wendell Williamson didn’t think so, he needed his sparrow head examined.

  The list didn’t stop there. These shirttail relatives I was going to be stuck with for an endless summer—why hadn’t this Kitty and Dutch pair, the Brinkers by name, ever visited us, so I’d at least know what they looked like? Even if they were dried-up old coots who probably kept their teeth in a glass at night, as I figured they must be, it would have helped if I could picture them at all.

  • • •

  I COULD HAVE gone on and on like that, nose against the window and feeling sorry for myself, but that gets old, too. Stirring myself so plowed fields would not bore me out of my skull, to be doing anything I took out the autograph book. It opened to In the game of life, don’t lose your marbles. Right. If you were lucky enough to own any marbles to start with. Moodily I moved on from the Double W brand of advice, flipping to the front of the book. Naturally, Gram’s was the very first inscription. Wouldn’t a person think, in a nice autograph book that she’d spent real money for, she would have carefully written something like To my one and only grandson . . . ? Instead, in her scrawl that barely did for grocery lists:

  My love for you shall flow

  Like water down a tater row.

  Your Gram,

  Dorie Blegen

  I was finding out that people came up with surprising things like that almost automatically when presented with the autograph book. It was as if they couldn’t resist putting down on the page—their page, everyone got his own, I made sure—something of themselves, corny though it might be, and happily signing their name to it. Wistfully thumbing through the inscriptions, I lost myself for a while in the rhymes and remarks of my school friends and teachers and the ranch hands and visitors like the veterinarian and, when I hit it lucky, a big shot like Senator Ridpath when he spoke in the Gros Ventre park on the Fourth of July. That was my prize one so far; the senator was surely famous, if for nothing more than having been in office almost forever. What a pretty piece of writing his was as I looked at it with admiration again, every letter of the alphabet perfectly formed, and the lines about the pen being mightier than the sword composed there as balanced as a poem.

  The senator’s elegant citation was even more fitting than he could have known, because along with the autograph book, Gram had given me my very own ballpoint pen—not the plain old type then that was an ink stick with a cap on the end, but a fancy new retractable kind called a Kwik-Klik. It wrote in a purplish hue that seemed to me the absolute best color for an autograph collection, and I made sure to have people use it when composing their ditties rather than just any old writing instrument. Of course, there were exceptions—Wendell Williamson was represented in that deathly black Quink fountain pen stuff—but page to page, the creamy paper showed off the same pleasing ink, like a real book.

  And then and there, the way a big idea sometimes will grow from a germ of habit, it dawned on me that a dog bus full of passengers, as captive as I was, presented a chance to fill a good many more of those pages with purplish inscriptions.

  Sitting up as if I’d had a poke in the ribs, I snuck a look toward the back of the bus for likely candidates. The soldiers were talking up a storm, joking and laughing. The tourists yakked on across the aisles. A number of passengers were napping. The only ones not occupied, so to speak, were the nun and the sheepherder.

  Mustering my courage, I stacked my jacket to save my seat and started down the aisle, swaying when the bus did. Saying “Excuse me” a dozen times, I made my way past pair after pair of aisle-sitting conversationalists. As if reading my mind, the sheepherder dragged himself upright and lopsidedly grinned at me as if he were thirsty for company. But just as I reached his vicinity, the bus rocked around a curve and I lurched into the empty seat behind him, like a pinball into a slot.

  The big soldier who had been sitting by himself raised a bushy eyebrow at my abrupt arrival beside him. “Hi,” I piped up as I recovered, the top of my head barely reaching the shoulder patch of his uniform.

  “What’s doing, buddy?” he wondered.

  My voice high, I hurriedly told him, displaying the autograph book. His eyebrow stayed parked way up there, but he sort of smiled and broke into my explanation.

  “Loud and clear, troop. If there’s a section in there for Uncle Sam’s groundpounders, you’ve got them up the yanger here.” Holding out a hand that swallowed mine, he introduced himself. “Turk Turco.” The soldiers across the aisle sent me two-fingered salutes and chipped in their names, Gordon in the near seat and Mickey by the window.

  “Mine’s Donny,” I said to keep things simple. “Where you guys going?”

  The one called Gordon snickered. “Sending us east to go west, that’s the army for you. We catch the train at Havre. Then it’s Fort Lewis, good old Fort Screw U
s, out by Seattle. And after that it’s”—he drew out the next word like it was sticky—“Ko-re-a.”

  “Where we’ll get our asses shot off,” Mickey said glumly.

  Turk sharply leaned over, just about obliterating me. “Lay off that, will you, numb nuts. You’re scaring the kid. Not to mention me.”

  The thought that the Korean War, which like any American youngster of 1951 I’d grasped only from G.I. Joe comic books and radio reports, could claim the lives of people I’d met face-to-face, had never occurred to me. It struck with lightning force now. Glancing guiltily around at the three soldiers in their pressed khakis, I almost wished I had lit in with the mussy sheepherder, who could be heard carrying on a muttered conversation with himself in front of us.

  “I’m just saying,” Mickey stayed insistent. “Think about it, there’s Chinese up the wazoo over there”—I was fairly sure that amounted to the same as up the yanger and could not be good—“must be a million of the bastards, then there’s us.”

  “And the whole sonofabitching rest of the army,” Turk pointed out. “C’mon, troop, this is no time to come down with a case of nervous in the service.”

  Mickey was not to be swayed. “I wish to Christ they were shipping us to some base in Germany where we wouldn’t get our asses shot off, is all.”

  That startled me. The Chinese were an enemy I had not quite caught up with, but Germans still were the bad guys from the last war, as far as I was concerned. Fiends all the way up to Hitler, and down to the enemy soldiers my family had a personal reason to hate forever.

  “Yeah, right, Mick.” Gordon rolled his eyes about Germany for me. “Over there where you could put on your jockstrap spats and wow the fräuleins.”

  “Go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut, Gordo.”

  I was starting to realize what a long way I had to go to be accomplished in cussing.

  Snickering again, Gordon maintained that if anybody’s ass was going to get shot off, it could not possibly be his. “Mine’s gonna be the size of a prune, from the pucker factor.” All three soldiers roared at that, and while I didn’t entirely get it, I joined in as best I could.

  When the laughter died down, I figured maybe I ought to contribute something. “My daddy was in the war,” I announced brightly. “The last one. He was on one of those boat kind of things at Omaha Beach.”

  “A landing craft?” Turk whistled through his teeth, looking at me a different way. “Out the far end!” he exclaimed, which took me a moment to savvy as soldier talk for outstanding and then some. “D-Day was hairy. Came back in one piece, did he? Listen up, Mick.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell them the truth about that. “He always, uh, says he’s in pretty good shape for the shape he’s in.”

  Gordon leaned across the aisle. “So what’s your old man do?”

  “He’s a”—it’s amazing what a habit something like this gets to be—“crop duster.”

  “No crap?” Gordon sounded envious. “Grainfield flyboy, is he. Then how come you have to travel by dog? Why doesn’t he just give you a lift in his airplane?”

  “It’s too far. See, I’m going to visit my rich aunt and uncle. They live back east. In Decatur, Illinois.”

  “Never heard of the place. What’s there?”

  “The Cat plant.” That drew three blank looks. “Where they make bulldozers and graders and stuff like that.” I was developing a feel for the perimeter of story that could be got away with. A detail or two expanded the bounds to a surprisng extent, it seemed like.

  So, there it went, again. Out of my mouth something unexpected, not strictly true but harmlessly made up. Storying, maybe it could be called. For I still say it was not so much that I was turning into an inveterate liar around strangers, I simply was overflowing with invention. The best way I can explain it is that I was turned loose from myself. Turned loose, not by choice, from the expected behavior of being “a good kid,” which I was always a little restless about anyway. “You’re being a storier,” Gram would warn whenever I got carried away spinning a tale about one thing or another. Now, with no check on my enthusiasm when it started playing tricks upstairs in me—the long bus trip seemed to invite daydreaming, mine merely done out loud—I was surprising myself with the creations I could come up with. I mean, what is imagination but mental mischief of a kind, and why can’t a youngster, particularly one out on his own, protectively occupy himself with invention of that sort before maturity works him over? One thing for sure, the soldiers on their way to their own mind-stretching version of life ahead did not doubt my manufactured one in the least.

  Shoulders shaking with laughter, Mickey forcefully nudged Gordon. “If it was the cat house, you’d know all about it, huh, Gordo?”

  Gordon turning the air blue in response, Turk nudged me for the autograph book. “Somebody’s got to go first.” I instructed him in the mystery of the Kwik-Klik, and with it in hand, he balanced the book on his knee and wrote for a good long time. When he was through, I passed things across to Gordon, who looked over Turk’s entry with a mocking expression but didn’t say anything before writing his own.

  Mickey balked when the autograph collection reached him. “I don’t know about this happy horseshit of writing in here. What am I supposed to say?”

  “Pretend it’s your coloring book,” Gordon wisecracked. But Turk took right in on the reluctant penman. “Get with the program, troop. If the kid’s good enough to give a damn about us, the least we can do is put some ink on the page for him.”

  Without looking up, Mickey did so, and after laboring through, passed the autograph book and pen across to me. Gratefully thanking the three of them up, down, and sideways, I retreated to my own seat to catch my breath.

  • • •

  GIDDY WITH SUCCESS, I read the soldiers’ inscriptions over and over, the pages as distinct from each other as handwriting could possibly be.

  Life is like a deck of cards.

  When you are in love it’s s.

  Before you are married it’s s.

  After you are married it’s s.

  When you are dead it’s s.

  May your long suits be hearts and diamonds.

  Alvin “Turk” Turco, Pfc.

  TIME FLIES LIKE AN ARROW,

  WHY I’VE NEVER UNDERSTOOD.

  FRUIT FLIES LIKE A BANANA,

  NOW THAT SOUNDS PRETTY GOOD.

  Gordon Jones

  General Nuisance, U.S. Army

  Mickey O’Fallon is my name

  America is my nation

  Butte, Montana, is my home

  Korea is my destination.

  Like the Turk one had said, Out the far end! Three fresh pages of inscriptions, just like that. Now, though, I faced a dilemma. Stretch my luck and go back for Kwik-Klik tidbits from other passengers, or quit while I was ahead? The bus was belting along through nondescript country with nothing much to show for itself except a brushy creek and flat buttes, so Havre or any place else was not in the picture for a while yet, and I had time if I wanted to brave the gauntlet of strangers again. But if I wasn’t mistaken, the nun had looked about ready to pounce as I hustled past to stop me from keeping company with the swearing soldiers. Was it worth it to risk falling into her clutches, or for that matter, end up with some talky tourist bunch like the ladies’ club on the Chevy bus?

  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 th
e 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: