Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig

  My listeners stirred uncertainly. Gus’s lips were moving as he worked out fifty cents times seventeen, while Mannie gauged me more warily than before. It was up to Kurt to rally the campers.

  “Yeah, well, bows and arrows can kill stuff, too. Like, uh, frogs. We’re goin’ frog huntin’ the first night at camp, ain’t we, guys.”

  “We’ll murder the buggers!” and “Frog legs for breakfast!” from across the aisle backed that up as if hunting hopping amphibians in the dark, Indian-style, was a tried-and-true camp activity, which I seriously doubted.

  Now even the would-be holy terrors of the frog world fell still as an announcement boomed out from the driver that we were not stopping in Sheboygan as scheduled, because no one was ticketed to there and no more passengers could be taken on. Actually, I suspected he was in a hurry to get rid of the mess of campers. No doubt to put minds at rest, so to speak, about a restroom, he added, “Manitowoc in fifteen short minutes.”

  Really? The comprehension began to sink in that I was nearly there at last. Fifteen minutes truly did sound like no time after all my hours on the bus, the never-to-be-forgotten encounters I’d had, close calls especially. In an odd way, I started to miss all that, the bits and pieces of my immense journey coming to mind while my latest companions thought it was a big deal to go up the road a skip and a jump to the same dumb camp year after year. But the mind does funny things, and half listening to their razzing back and forth about which of them was most likely to shoot himself in the foot with an arrow, I had a sudden itch toward the autograph book. After all, here was my last chance on the dog bus for who knew how long, and three candidates right here handy. So what if they behaved like nose pickers, when they knew stuff like that campers’ song. Goofiness had its place in the pages of life, too.

  Impulsively I pulled out the album, its cream-colored cover somewhat smudged from so much handling but overall less the worse for the trip than I was, and showed it off to Kurt.

  “Yeah?” his answer to almost everything. He fanned through the pages like a speed-reader. “So you want us all to put somethin’ in it.”

  I said I sure did, which brought about quite a reaction across the aisle. Gus giggled in Mannie’s face. “Gonna write My name is Manfred Vedder, I’m an old bed wetter, ain’tcha?”

  “Sure, dipshit, just like you’re gonna sign yours Augustus Dussel, that’s me, I barely have brains enough to pee,” Mannie jeered back.

  Nervously I pasted on a grin at their name-calling contest. Whatever their parents had been thinking in saddling them with those wacky christenings, these brats would be a different kind of material for the autograph book, for sure. And I couldn’t help but wonder what Kurt the leading loudmouth was going to come up with when he committed ink to paper.

  Meanwhile he still was toying his way through the pages, and to get things going, I was about to hand him the Kwik-Klik and explain how it worked, when he clapped the book shut and held it out to show Gus and Mannie. “Gotta better idea. We’ll take it to camp and everybody there can write in it for ya. The counselors, even.” All three of them snickered at that, you can bet. “Don’t blow your wig,” Kurt said, as if I shouldn’t have a care in the world, “we’ll send it back to you in Monta-a-a-na when it’s full.”

  “Hey, no! I need to keep it, I just want you guys to write in it.”

  “We’ll get around to it,” he breezed by that. “Letcha know how the frog huntin’ goes.”

  Getting really worried, I made a grab for the book. With a laugh, he tossed it across the aisle to Gus, who whooped and shoveled it to Mannie as if this were a game of keep-away.

  In desperation, I shoved the heel of my hand into Kurt’s surprised face and kicked my way past him—he didn’t amount to much of a barrier compared to the braided Indian or the man in the bad-fitting suit—and launched myself onto the giggling pair across the aisle, calling them dickheads and sonsofbitches and whatever other swearwords came to my tongue. It was two against one, but they were underneath and I was all over them with flailing limbs. In the scuffle, I elbowed Gus hard enough to take the giggle out of him. Mannie was chanting “Uh uh uh, don’t be grabby!” when I got on top of him enough to knee him in a bad place and snatch the album back.

  By now the grown-ups who supposedly were in charge of this band of thieves had floundered onto the scene and were pulling me off a howling Mannie, while the bus driver bellowed, “Everybody siddown!”

  Still cussing to the best of my ability, I was grappled by one of the adults into the seat across the aisle, Kurt having retreated to the window as far as he could get from me.

  “We wasn’t gonna keep it, honest,” he whined, the liar, as I furiously checked things over. The autograph book miraculously had survived without damage, but my shirt was wrecked all to hell, a pocket dangling almost off—fortunately not the one with the money pinned to it—and a number of buttons were missing, and I could feel a draft from rips under the arms and long tears down the back as if I’d been fighting clawed animals, which I pretty nearly was.

  About then I spat something out. A piece of tooth. My tongue found the chipped spot. One of the sharp teeth next to my bottom front ones. Sharper now. Baring my choppers at him, I gave Kurt another murderous look, and he whimpered, the fearless frog hunter.

  While I was trying to take inventory, catch my breath, nurse my tooth, and pull my ruined shirt together enough for decency, the bus abruptly slowed and steered off to one side. I reared up, blinking, looking around for Manitowoc. But no, we were braking to a halt on a roadside pullover, the parking lot for a picnic area, and the driver had something else in mind. Climbing out from behind the steering wheel with grim determination, his mustache bristling, he stalked down the aisle to the four of us dead-still in various states of apprehension.

  “You.” He pointed a finger at me and then jerked a thumb toward the front of the bus. “Up there, where I can keep an eye on you.”

  My ears burning, I followed him to the seat nearest the steps, swapping with some unlucky camper about to have Kurt inflicted on him. I guess by the same token, the kid in the window seat next to my new spot shrank away from me like he’d been put in a cage with a wild beast.

  • • •

  ACTUALLY, I discovered much, much too late, I’d been banished to the best seat on the bus. Why didn’t I think of this at, say, Havre? Up there with nothing in front but the dashboard and the doorwell, I could see everything the driver could, every particle of road and scenery, clear as if the bus-wide windshield were a magnifying glass. Except for the chipped tooth my tongue kept running over, all of a sudden I felt like a new person. For the next some minutes I sat entranced as the world opened ahead of me, no longer sliding past a side window. And so it was that I had the best possible view of my destination from the outskirts on in.

  • • •

  BY THEN I HAD seen sixteen hundred miles’ worth of towns, from Palookavilles to the Twin Cities busy as double beehives to gray soppy Milwaukee spiked with churches. At this first sight of Manitowoc, though, I did not know what to think. The houses looked old, many of them small and with gray siding, on streets with some flower gardens fringing the lawns but none of the overtowering cottonwood groves of Gros Ventre or Great Falls. Nothing about the tight-packed neighborhoods appeared even remotely familiar except Chevys and Fords dotting the streets, and those were strangely pulled in sideways—parallel parking had not converted Montana. Plenty of church steeples here, too, like arrow tips in the hide of the sky. As for the people out and about, they were not as dressed up as in Minneapolis, yet the women looked like they had on nylons, which not even Meredice Williamson wore on an everyday basis at the ranch, and the men sported hats that would scarcely keep the sun off at all, not a Stetson among them.

  My eyes stayed busy as could be, my mind trying to keep up with all the different sights and scenes—Gram had been right about that, I had to admit—as the
bus approached the more active downtown section, with long lines of mystifying storefronts. We passed a business calling itself a SCHNAPPS SCHOP, which looked like a bar, and the bars I could recognize all had a glowing blue neon sign in the window proclaiming SCHLITZ, THE BEER THAT MADE MILWAUKEE FAMOUS, which was news to me—it hadn’t done so in Montana—while what looked like restaurants commonly had the word SCHNITZEL painted on the plate glass, and an apparent department store had SCHUETTE’S, a very strange-sounding product if it wasn’t a name, spelled in large letters above its show windows. I was no whiz at other languages, but I had the awful growing suspicion that if ghosts walked in Manitowoc, they had better speak German to find their way around this weird town.

  Like a thunderclap following that realization, the bus rumbled across a drawbridge over a murky river, with half-killed weeds clinging to its banks, and on past huge shed-like buildings with signs saying they were enterprises unknown to me, such as boiler works and coal yards. Fortunately I caught a reassuring glimpse of a sparkling gray-blue lake that spilled over the horizon, and the best thing that had yet come into sight, a tremendously long red-painted ship in the harbor with ORE EMPRESS in big white letters on its bow.

  Then the bus was lurching into the driveway of the depot, and the next thing I knew, the driver killed the engine, swung around in his seat with relief written on his face, and announced:

  “Manitowoc, the pearl of Lake Michigan. Everybody off.”

  I was thunderstruck, but not for long.

  “HEY, NO, EVERYBODY SIT TIGHT! YOU’RE NOT THERE YET!”

  My outcry halted the driver and probably everyone else on the bus. “You’re taking them to Camp Winniegoboo!” I instructed the open-mouthed man at the wheel. “They told me so!”

  He recovered enough to sputter, “What’re you yapping about? A camp bus picks them up here.” I went numb. “They’re off my hands,” he briskly brushed those together, disposing of me at the same time. “Besides, what do you care? You’re ticketed to here like everybody else, aren’t you? End of the line, bub. Come on.”

  I nodded dumbly, and followed him off the bus into the unloading area. There still was a chance, if I could grab my suitcase and hustle into the waiting room ahead of the throng of campers. But of course at Milwaukee mine had been the first one stowed in the baggage compartment, and as infallibly as Murphy’s Law that anything that can go wrong is bound to go wrong, every camping kid received his bag and filtered into the depot before the wicker suitcase was reached. Directly ahead, as I slogged in dead last, Kurt and his gang looked back and gave me various kinds of the stink eye, but stayed a safe distance away.

  • • •

  INSIDE THE DEPOT, it was just as I feared. The waiting room was jammed with the camp kids madly swirling around until their bus arrived, everything in total confusion, redheads bobbing everywhere in the milling herd, and I knew, absolutely positively knew, picking me out was impossible. Tucking in my shredded shirttail as best I could and trying to cover torn seams with my elbows, I stood there, desperately looking around, but while there were all kinds of grown-ups mixed in with the crowd, for the life of me I couldn’t see anyone I imagined to be an Aunt Kitty or an uncle named Dutch.

  When my greeters didn’t show up and didn’t show up, I decided there was only one thing to do. Resort to the slip of paper with their phone number. Not that I knew squat about using the instrument evidently hidden in the forbidding closet-size booth with GREAT LAKES PAY PHONE on it, all the way across the terminal. Pay phone? Like a jukebox, was that, where you stuck coins in and a bunch of machinery was set in motion in the guts of the apparatus, or what? Everywhere I had lived, the construction camps, the ranch, telephones were a simple party line where you merely picked up the receiver and dinged two longs and two shorts or whatever the signal was for whoever you were calling. This was not the best time to have to figure out strange new equipment, especially if you were as close to having the heebie-jeebies as I was.

  Then I slapped my pants pocket, remembering. I’d spent the last of my loose change buying Tuffies for the arrowhead. To get coins to call with, I would need to break a ten-dollar bill from the stash under my remaining shirt pocket, which meant undressing even further right here in the most public place there was, where anyone like the convict in the suit and tie could be watching. I didn’t dare retreat to the men’s room to do it out of sight—that was a guaranteed way to miss Aunt Kitty and Uncle Dutch should they show up looking for me. This was becoming like one of those nightmares in which the predicament gets deeper and deeper until you think you never will wake up back to sanity.

  Trying to fight down the jitters, I cast another wild gaze around the teeming waiting room, hoping for salvation in the form of anyone who might resemble Gram enough to be her sister. No such luck, not even close. People of every shape and form and way of dress, but none showed me any recognition and of course I couldn’t to them. I must have been looked past hundreds of times, as if I were too ragged for anyone to want to pack home. I was stuck.

  There was no help for it, I was going to have to throw myself on the mercy of GREAT LAKES PAY PHONE. Setting down my suitcase to try to get things in order, especially myself, I first of all reached out the autograph book from my jacket pocket and flipped through the pages to find the slip of paper with the phone number. Then again. My fingers began to shake.

  The piece of paper was gone. It must have fallen out when the campers, the grabby bastards, were tossing the album around.

  Distress hit like an instant paralysis, as a terrible omission caught up with me. Worse, what might be called the commission of an omission. I hadn’t bothered to so much as glance at the phone number or street address even when showing those to the Schneiders. Now I stood rooted there, feeling worse off even than I was when stranded in Minneapolis—unmet, my clothing half torn off, as good as lost in a weird city, with night coming on and not even the dog bus as a haven anymore. Rough introduction into being a total orphan, it felt like.

  I was dissolving into utter surrender, tears next, when I heard the melodious voice behind me.

  “So here you are, sweetie pie. We wondered.”

  I whirled around to the woman and man who evidently had appeared from nowhere. “How do you know I’m me?” I blurted.

  The woman trilled a laugh. “Silly, you look just like Dorie, two peas from the same pod.” Gram and me? Since when?

  In the meantime the man was giving me a bucktoothed expression of greeting, like a horse grinning. “Looks run in the family, hah?” he said in a voice as guttural as hers was musical. “Hallo.” He shook hands, mine swallowed in his. “I am Herman.” Not Dutch? Gram had said he was something else, but not that he was something you couldn’t put a name to for sure. Seeing my confusion, he grinned all the more. “You are thinking of how I used to be called, I betcha. Herman fits me more now.”

  Blinking my way out of one surprise after another, I simply stood planted there, gawking at the two of them, one tall and slope-shouldered, the other nearly as broad as the fat lady in a carnival. Long-faced and with that horsy grin and glasses that made his eyes look larger than human, with an odd glint to them, he was quite a sight in his own right, but it was her I was stupefied by. I could only think Gram hadn’t spelled her out to me to save the surprise. Oh, man! She was in our family, what there was of it? This was like a wish come true, life all of a sudden springing the better kind of trick for a change.

  I still almost couldn’t believe it, but the more I looked at this unexpected personage, the more excited I became. I would have known her anywhere, an unmistakable figure in more ways than one, big around as a jukebox, jolly double chins, wide-set doll eyes, hairdo as plump as the rest of her, the complete picture. The exact same face I had seen big as life—well, Life, really, the picture magazine that showed what was what in the world every week—just that same day at the Minneapolis newsstand, and the melodious voice, familiar
as if it were coming out of the radio that very moment. My Aunt Kitty was clearly none other than what the magazine cover described with absolute authority as America’s favorite songstress, and unless a person was a complete moron and deaf to boot, recognizable as the treasured vocalist of every song worth singing, Kate Smith.

  At last, I had it knocked.

  WHERE MANITOU WALKS

  June 17–30, 1951

  9.

  IT MADE PERFECT sense to me. Although the mention went in one ear and out the other at the time, hadn’t Gram herself spoken of her little dickens of a sister—although that description was quite a few sizes too small anymore—as “the great Kate,” in saying the two of them just could not make music together from girlhood on? Well, who could, with a singer whose voice carried her to the very top? Back then, I could not have defined palpitations, but did I ever have them, so excited was I to possess this famous woman for an aunt. Great-aunt, but close enough. I gazed raptly up at her, top-heavy as she was with that mighty chest but as cool and composed there in the hubbub of the bus station as if posing for her picture in a magazine. And wasn’t she smart to condense Smythe, her and Gram’s maiden name that looked to me like one of those trick words in a spelling contest, to good old Smith to sing under? Believe It or Not! disclosed this kind of thing all the time, you could hardly read the Sunday funnies without learning that Patti Page before she reached the hit parade with songs like “Tennessee Waltz” was plain Clara Ann Fowler, a name switcheroo if there ever was one. Besides, as Red Chief myself, I was naturally in favor of sprucing up what you called yourself in any way possible.