Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig

  • • •

  PERHAPS IT GOES without saying that my fame fever was a product of imagination, but there was greatly more to it than that. Call me a dreamer red in the head back then, but becoming famous looked to me like a way out of a life haunted by county poorfarm and orphanage the other side of the mountains. A change of luck sort of like winning a real jackpot, in other words. Wouldn’t we all take some of that, at eleven going on twelve or any other age? The missing detail, that I had no fixed notion of what I might best be famous at—the talent matter—other than a world-record autograph collection, maybe even constituted an advantage, giving me more chances, as I saw it.

  I became more engrossed in the faces of fame than I knew. When I remembered to check the clock, I looked twice, the second time in shock. The hour was up, the bus would be leaving in less than a minute.

  I ran as hard as a frantic human being can with a depot full of travelers in the way as I raced for the departure gate.

  But too late. By the time I scrambled through the maze of passengers lined up out in the loading bays for other buses, I could see mine rumbling onto the street and pulling away.

  I stopped dead, which right then I might as well have been. There I was, in a strange city, with only the clothes on my back, while my every other possession—including the slip of paper with Aunt Kitty and Uncle Dutch’s address and phone number tucked into the autograph book in my coat pocket left on my seat—sped away in a cloud of exhaust. Helpless is pretty close to hopeless, and right then I felt both. For the second time that rugged day, eleven years old seemed much too young to be facing the world all by myself.

  Too overcome even to cuss, I was only dimly aware of the thickset man, who’d been dropping bundles of newspapers off at the stand while I still was deep in the magazines, now wheeling an empty hand truck out to his van, whistling carelessly as he came. “’Scuse, please, comin’ through,” he made to get past me on the walkway, but halted when he had a look at my face. “Whasamatter? You sick? Gonna throw up, better get over to the gutter.”

  “I missed my bus,” I babbled, “it left without me and my suitcase is on it and my jacket and autograph book and moccasins and—”

  “Them puppy bus dickheads,” he said with disgust. “At’s about like them. Which way you goin’?”

  “W-W-Wisconsin.”

  He waved me toward the green van with TWIN CITIES NEWS AGENCY on its side as he trundled the hand truck over and heaved it in with a clatter. “Hop in, kiddo.”

  “Are you gonna take me there? To Wisconsin?”

  “Naw, can’t quite do that.” He gestured so urgently I jumped in the open-sided van. “C’mon, we’ll catch ’em in Saint Paul.”

  “Is it very far?”

  He gave me a look as if I was mentally lacking. “They don’t call these the Twin Cities for nothin’.” Crouched over the steering wheel and shifting gears fast and furious, he goosed the van out into the street traffic, blaring the horn at anything in our way. I hung on to one of the newspaper bin dividers behind him as we went clipping past the big buildings and fancy stores at daredevil speed.

  “Don’t that beat all,” my Samaritan kept up a one-sided conversation as he willy-nilly changed lanes and ran stoplights on the blink between green and red. “Pullin’ out without even lookin’ around for you any. What kind of bus drivin’ is that?” He shook his head at the state of Greyhound affairs. “Dickheads,” he repeated.

  I held my breath as we swerved around a yellow taxicab and zoomed through an intersection with a few warning honks of the horn. When I could speak, I felt compelled to stick up for the earlier bus driver who had saved my skin at Lake Itasca. “They aren’t all like that, honest.”

  “Hah. You don’t know the half of it.”

  Before I could ask about the half I was missing, I was distracted by the high bridge we were atop without warning, over a river that seemed to go on and on. Which is basically what the Mississippi does. As the van rumbled across the seemingly endless bridge and the chasm below, I kept my death grip on the divider and leaned down to speak into my escort’s ear. “So how come you think they’re all”—I tried out the new word—“dickheads?”

  “They ain’t union.” He pointed to an encased certificate up by the visor. By squinting, I at least could read the large type, INTERNATIONAL BROTHERHOOD OF TEAMSTERS.

  At last, something I knew about! “Horses!” I burst out as a hayfield teamster, if only anyone would let me. “You drive those, too?”

  He cast me a grin over his shoulder. “In the old days, every Teamster did, you bet your pucker string they did.”

  “Me, too! I mean, I know how to harness up and drive a team and everything. See, I wouldn’t be here at all if Sparrowhead back at the ranch in Montana had let me drive the stacker team like I know I can and—”

  “Life’s tough, ain’t it?” He held up a hand as if letting the air rush through his fingers. “Feel better? We’re in Saint Paul.”

  “Really?” It looked the same as Minneapolis to me, the Identical Twin Cities evidently. The van kept up its rapid clip, the rush of wind through the open side making my eyes water. I had to hope my fellow teamster could see all right, as we were cutting in and out of lanes of traffic by the barest of space between us and other vehicles. “Smooth move!” I let out like one race driver complimenting another when he skimmed us around a double-parked delivery truck by inches and blazed on through a changing traffic light. “Nothin’ to it,” he claimed, flooring the gas pedal in a race to beat the next light. “You just gotta keep on the go.

  “Lemme think now,” I heard him calculate as we wove our way through downtown traffic, the street checkered with shadows thrown by the high buildings. “When we reach the station, you be ready to jump off and tell that doggy driver you belong on the bus, ’kay?”

  “S-s-sure,” I said uncertainly. I didn’t have time to worry about how I would do at that, because ahead in blinking neon was a towering sign that read from top to bottom, GREYHOUND.

  “Goddamn-it-to-hell-anyway,” the teamster addressed the unwavering red light that held us up at the cross street. On the other side, so near and yet so far, the St. Paul terminal, which was fancied up with plaster-like decorations of fruit and flowers, appeared to be older and smaller than the Minneapolis one and must not have dealt in as many passengers, because fewer buses with the racing dog on the side were backed into the loading area in the open-arched driveway. I had eyes only for one, with MILWAUKEE in the roller sign above the windshield, and I spotted it immediately, its door cruelly folding closed as if shutting me out.

  “There it is! It’s leaving again!”

  “That’s what he thinks, the dickhead.” The newspaper van revved and so did the teamster, bouncing slightly in his seat, as the stoplight took agonizingly long to change.

  The instant it did, we shot across the street and along the arches of the terminal driveway, directly toward the warning sign at the far end, reading in red letters of descending order EXIT WRONG WAY DO NOT ENTER.

  “Hang on!” shouted the teamster, and whipped the van around the curb into the exitway, jamming us to a halt, nose to nose with the bus.

  By reflex, the wide-eyed driver of the bus had hit the brakes, and even more so the horn. “Here you go, kiddo. Have a nice trip,” said my Good Samaritan daredevil at the wheel, giving the Greyhound driver the finger. In the blare resounding in the arched driveway, I could barely be heard thanking the van-driving teamster as I leaped out and he gave me a little bye-bye wave.

  Peering down at me through the broad windshield, his eyebrows dark as thunderclouds, the bus driver at last let up on the deafening horn as I edged through the slit of space between the facing vehicles and popped out at the bus door. With faces watching curiously in every window above the ever-running streamlined dog, I wildly pantomimed that I needed in, until the driver, keeping his hand dubiously on the
door lever, cracked things open enough that I could make myself heard.

  “You left me! In Minnesota, I mean Minneapolis. My jacket was holding my seat like always, see, but I stayed in the bus station a minute too long and when I ran to where the bus was, it wasn’t there and—”

  “That’s yours?” Looking more upset than ever, the driver fished my jacket from behind his seat. “You should have kept better track of it, junior. I didn’t see it in time or I’d have turned it in back there before we started.”

  As I gulped at one more near miss, he pointed a further accusing finger at me. “And technically, if a passenger misses the bus, it’s his own tough luck.” I was so afraid of exactly that, I couldn’t form words. “It says right in the regulations,” he kept on reading me the dog bus version of the riot act, “it is the passenger’s responsibility to—”

  Just then a sharp blast of horn from the van made him jerk his head around, glowering back and forth from me to the motionless teamster, unbudging as a bulldog.

  In exasperation, he yanked the bus door open. “Okay, okay, step on and show me your ticket.”

  7.

  TO MY INTENSE RELIEF, I found the autograph book safe and sound in the jacket and simply huddled in my seat with an arm wrapped around them both as if they might get away again, until the bus finally trundled out of the last of St. Paul and its troublesome twin and the tires were making the highway humming sound. Naturally the other passengers had gawked for all they were worth as I scrambled aboard and ducked into the first vacant set of seats—where I was sitting before was occupied by a mother with a fussy baby, I saw with a pang—so I wouldn’t be pestered by a seatmate about the whole experience. From the tone of remarks that followed my adventurous arrival, I could tell that my fellow riders were divided between thinking I was lucky beyond belief in catching up with the bus the way I had or a menace to society for missing it in the first place. I wasn’t going to argue with either point of view. And until dog bus life settled down a great deal more, I would stay quiet and still and have nothing to do with anybody.

  I reckoned without the elderly couple across the aisle from me.

  “Tsk,” first I heard the woman. “It just makes me want to take and shake him. Imagine doing what he did.”

  “Dang right. Must have been a star pupil in fool school, is all I can think,” her husband pitched in.

  From the corner of my eye, I apprehensively studied the couple, way up there in years, clucking their tongues about me now. Both of them were short and sparely built, like a matched pair that had shrunk over time. Actually the woman reminded me of Gram, even to the skinny wire eyeglasses emerging from the cloud of gray hair bunched in no particular identifiable hairdo. She had on what looked like a churchgoing dress, the darkest blue there is with touches of white trim and what resembled a really valuable carved ivory rose brooch, which she wore with about the same authority as the Glasgow sheriff did his badge. Her husband also was dressed in Sunday best, a baggy brown suit and wide green tie with watermelon stripes. Bald and small-headed and with his skinny glasses perched on the knobby end that old noses sometimes form into, he didn’t look like much, a druggist or something. But when he leaned forward to scrutinize me further through the tops of his glasses, I glimpsed the hat line where his forehead turned from suntanned to pearly pale. Ranchers and farmers had that mark of lifelong weathering, and I didn’t know any others who did. This added another hayload to my mortification. People who ought to have recognized me for what I was, if I only had been wearing my rodeo shirt instead of slopping syrup on it, were against me. My best hope was that the tsk tsking pair of old busybodies was getting off at the next stop, and it couldn’t come too soon.

  “I tell you, a soul can’t simply sit by after seeing that without saying something,” the woman was definitely saying, in that hen-yard voice. “It runs contrary to common decency.”

  “You’re right as rain,” her husband vigorously bobbed endorsement to that. “Speak your piece, it’s entirely called for in this dang kind of a situation.”

  With that, here she came across the aisle as if catapulted out of her seat, landing right next to me while I cringed back to the window.

  “We want to let you know”—she leaned right in so close on me I could smell Sen-Sen on her breath—“we think it was downright awful of the fool up there in the driver’s seat to go off and leave you like that.”

  I sat up like a gopher popping out of its hole. “Really? You do?”

  “Bet your britches we do,” the man chipped in, sliding over into her seat on the aisle and sticking his head turtle-like across toward us. “It was uncalled for, that dang kind of behavior when it’s up to him to be on the lookout for his passengers, is what I say.”

  I barely resisted contributing “Well, yeah, he’s a dickhead,” but condemnation of the guilty party humped over the steering wheel seemed to be going along just fine with dangs. All of a sudden, the dog bus was the top of my world again, given these unexpected backers. Fortunately, the three of us were far enough from the driver that he couldn’t make out what we were saying about him, although he was watching us plenty in the rearview mirror, looking sore that the commotion back and forth across the aisle plainly involved me one more time.

  • • •

  IN THE BURST of introductions, they made themselves known to me as Mae and Joe Schneider, and I recited by heart Donal without a d and how it dated back to Scotland and Cameron kilts and buck-naked Englishmen, which seemed to interest them to no end. They in turn lost no time filling me in on the Schneider clan, as they called it, three boys with children of their own, one son who ran what they referred to as “the ride” at the place they were going to, Wisconsin Dells, and another they had just visited who was a doctor in Yellowstone Park, treating people who fell into scalding pools or were mauled by bears. Wow, I thought, talk about being famous, he must be the talk of the park every time he patched up some dumb tourist like that. A third son, it turned out, ran the family farm in Illinois—somewhere called Downstate, which from my fuzzy geography I guessed had nothing to do with Chicago—while, as Mrs. Schneider said, she and Joe “trotted around having the time of our lives.”

  Trotting around by dog bus for the fun of it was a new notion to me, and as I listened to one and then the other peppily telling of their travels, I longed for the cushion of family that was theirs, in contrast to Gram and me on our own with only the distant relatives—literally—that I was being packed off to like a fruitcake at Christmas.

  Something of this must have shown through in me, because Mr. Schneider interrupted himself to ask, wrinkled with concern, “Now, where is it you’re going, Donal?”

  “Manitowoc.”

  The Schneiders glanced at each other as if their hearing had failed.

  I repeated the tricky word. “My grandmother says it means ‘Where ghosts live’ in Indian.” That didn’t seem to help.

  “Don’t know it at all. You, Mae?”

  “Not a bit. Where in heaven’s sake is it, somewhere far? Back east?”

  The other somewheres of my trip—Pleasantville, Decatur, Chicago—the map dots of my imagination, my protection against the unknown that awaited me in one last bus depot where I was to give myself over to strangers, glimmered for a wistful moment and passed into simple memory. These two honest old faces could not be storied to, nor did I want to, hard truth the destination I had to face now.

  “No, no, it’s in Wisconsin, honest, see.” Producing the autograph book from my jacket pocket, I showed them the precious piece of paper with the Manitowoc address and phone number. And more than that, I told them the whole story, Gram’s scary operation and my parents killed by the drunk driver and the summer ahead of me in the hands of relatives who might as well be ghosts for all I knew about them, and the dog bus proving out Gram’s prediction that it gets all kinds, like the huffy little sheriff who thought I was a runaway and
the slick convict who almost made off with my suitcase—it spilled out of me in a flood, although I did hold back being soundly kissed by a vagabond waitress with Leticia stitched on her breast.

  “Whew,” Mr. Schneider whistled when I finally ran down, “you’re a trouper for not letting anything throw you,” and Mrs. Schneider added a flurry of tsks, but the good kind that marveled at all I had been through. They put their heads together and figured out where Manitowoc must be from my ticket that showed I’d have to change buses in Milwaukee and ride for only a couple hours beyond that, which indicated that the place must be on Lake Michigan. That made them fret somewhat less. As Mr. Schneider put it, the town didn’t sound like it was off at the rear end of nowhere.

  Time flew in their company, comfortable as they were with a boy from having raised three of their own, and I felt next thing to adopted as our chatter continued across the miles. I could just see their prosperous farm, with a few horses still on the place for old times’ sake, and no Power Wagon or Sparrowhead to ruin a summer. The saving grace of an uncorked imagination such as mine was that it always carried me away, as Gram all too well knew, waking dreams that I could more than halfway believe in if life would only correct itself in the direction of good luck instead of bad for her and me. I knew with everything in me Joe Schneider would have given me a chance to harness up a team of workhorses and prove myself in the fine fields of Illinois instead of running me off like an underage hobo, and Mae Schneider would never be a tightwad about kitchen matters. In my trance during the valuable time with this sage old couple—wizened must have had something to do with wisdom, mustn’t it?—I could hardly bear not to ask if they needed a teamster and a cook.