Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig

  “I do hope you like what I’ve done,” she was saying as we entered the snug room full of piles of fabrics, “I put so much work into it.” She plowed right into the stack on the daybed.

  “Ready?” she trilled, keeping up the suspense. “Usually I have a better idea of the size, so I had to guess a little.” Of course she did, unaccustomed to making things for someone eleven going on twelve.

  “I bet it’ll all fit like a million dollars,” I loyally brushed away any doubt.

  “You’re too much,” she tittered. “But let’s see.”

  Proudly she turned around to me with an armful of cloth that radiated colors of the rainbow, and, while I gaped, let what proved to be a single garment unfold and descend. It went and went. Down past her cliff of chest. Unrolling along the breadth of her waist, then dropping past her hamlike knees without stopping, until finally only the tips of her toes showed from beneath the curtain of cloth, striped with purple and yellow and green and orange and shades mingling them all, that she held pressed possessively against her shoulders.

  “My party outfit,” she said happily. “The girls will get their say, but I wanted you to see it first.”

  It was a sight to be seen, all right, the whole huge buttonless sheath of dress, if that’s what it was. Straight from the needle of Omar the Tentmaker, it looked like.

  Still holding the wildly colored outfit up against herself, she confided, “They wear these in Hawaii. I came across a picture of one in a National Geographic.” Crinkling her nose with the news, she informed me: “It’s called a muumuu.”

  “It’s—it’s sure something.”

  Beyond that, words failed me, as the same old situation sank in, no school wardrobe, no mad money, no hope of prying either one out of the clotheshorse preening over her creation. Or was there?

  Sweeping the creation over her shoulders to try to get a look at herself from behind in the full-length mirror, she asked, as if my opinion actually counted for something: “What do you think, dearie? Does it look all right from behind?”

  The muumuu made her rear end look like the butt of a hippo, but I kept myself to “It’s, ah, about like the front. Fits where it touches. Like Gram would say.”

  “Oh, you. But you’re right, it is supposed to fit loosely.” Humming full-force as she twirled this way and that in front of the mirror that was barely big enough to accommodate her and the tent of fabric both, she was in her own world. Not for long, if I had anything to do with it.

  “Gee, yeah, the moo dress will look awful nice on you,” I fibbed wholeheartedly. “And you know what, I sure wish I had any good clothes to go along with it at the card party.” I furthered the cause of a spiffy homemade wardrobe by angling my head at the sewing machine. “I wouldn’t want to look like something the cat dragged in, when you’re so dressed up,” I clucked as if we couldn’t stand that.

  That took the twirls out of her in a hurry. She frowned at the reflection of the two of us in the mirror, seeing my point. My hopes shot up as she chewed on the matter, studying back and forth from the crazily colored muumuu to me dressed dull as dishwater as usual. I cast another longing look around at the waiting sewing machine and stacks of enough material to outfit me twenty times over, but she was not going to be outfoxed that easily.

  “I just remembered, sweetums,” she exclaimed as if reminding me, too. “You have your wonderful rodeo shirt to wear, don’t you.” She smiled victoriously. “We’ll put on a fashion show for the girls, mmm?”

  • • •

  WITH HEN PARTY day looming beyond and me not one stitch better off than I’d been, Saturday arrived, with the soap opera characters taking the day off to recuperate from their harrowing week—I could sympathize with them—and I was leery that Aunt Kate might have second thoughts about any canasta futzing and sit me down for one last drill all forenoon. Instead she let me know in no uncertain terms that she had things to do to get herself ready for the party and I needed to find some way to occupy myself. “You can do that if you put your mind to it a weensy bit, I’m sure.”

  I was puzzled. “Can’t I be in the greenhouse with Herman like always?”

  “Hmpf,” she went, pretty much her version of his Puh. “Him? Didn’t the old poot tell you? He won’t be here.”

  Just then Herman appeared from the direction of their bedroom, surprisingly dressed up, at least to the extent of wearing a blue-green tie with mermaids twined coyly in seaweed floating all over it. “She is right, can you imagine. Time to go take my medicine.” He stuck a few small bills she must have doled out to him into his wallet, saying, “It is not much, Your Highness.”

  She answered that with a dirty look and “It’s the usual, it will have to do—there’s no such thing as a raise when there’s no income, is there.”

  He shrugged that off, but juggling the car keys, he halted across the kitchen table from her. “Donny can come with, why not?”

  Aunt Kate snorted and barely glanced up from the scandals of the Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter. “Brinker, he is only eleven years old, that’s why not.”

  “Old enough. We both knowed what was what in life by then, yah?” Not waiting for whatever she had to say to that, probably plenty, he turned to me with a wink of his glass eye. “Up to Donny, it should be. What do you say, podner?”

  A trip along to a doctor’s office did not sound any too good. On the other hand, it might help the case of cabin fever I was coming down with from my shacky attic room and the allures of Bali and other boundless places shown in the National Geographics.

  “Sure, I guess so,” I said, as if I didn’t care one way or the other, hoping that would keep me on the straight and level with Aunt Kate. According to the parting snort she gave as Herman and I headed out to the DeSoto, it didn’t.

  • • •

  IN NO PARTICULAR HURRY, Herman drove in that sea captain fashion, his big knuckly hands wide apart on the steering wheel while he plied me with questions about Montana and the Double W ranch and as many other topics wild, woolly, and western as he and Karl May could come up with. All of it was really on his mind, to the point where he asked how long my folks and Gram and hers had been out west. Oh, practically forever as far as I knew, I told him, Gram’s grandfather having been a Wegian—Herman gave me a hard look until I explained that was bunkhouse talk for Norwegian—who packed up and came from the old country to homestead, which explained the wicker suitcase. And my father’s side of the family, the Campbells, I guessed had similarly been in Montana for as long as Montana had been around.

  “Must have been like Canaan for them, maybe,” he thought out loud. “Like in Bible—the Promised Land, I betcha.”

  “How do you know all this stuff?” I had reached the point of popping questions like that, since he never hesitated to bring up things out of nowhere. “The Bible and Longfellow and Karl May and so on?”

  “Plenty of time to read on the ore boats,” he answered soberly. “Badger Voyager and the others gived me my learning, in manner of speaking.”

  • • •

  I DIDN’T DOUBT THAT, and let the matter go as I tried for some learning of my own, trying to figure out Manitowoc if I was going to be stuck there for the whole long summer. It appeared to be an even more watery place than I’d thought, the river with the same name as the town taking its time winding here and there—Gitche Manitou really got around on his spirit walks—before finding Lake Michigan. When we reached downtown, street after street of stores occupied brick buildings grimy with age—if this was the pearl of Lake Michigan, it needed some polishing. An exception was the movie theater with a marquee full of colored lightbulbs brightly spelling out the current show—TOMAHAWK—with Van Heflin and Yvonne De Carlo, which I immediately set my heart on seeing until I remembered I was broke.

  As Herman puttered us through the downtown traffic, I passed the time noting more of those stores with the same calib
er of names that I’d spotted from the dog bus, as if anyone going into business had to line up way down the alphabet. Schliesleder Tailoring. Schröeter Bakery. The schushy sound of the town sounded awful German to me, and I tried to savvy at least a little of it.

  “Hey, Herman? What’s schnitzel?”

  He worked on that as we pressed on past the main-street buildings toward the more grubby waterfront ones. “What are little cattles in English?”

  “Calves? You mean the schnitz stuff is a way of saying calf meat? Veal, that’s all it is?”

  “Yah. Fixed fancy with stuff on, you got schnitzel. Old German recipe.”

  “What’s schnapps, then?”

  “Firewater, Red Chief. Old German drink.”

  “Boy oh boy, those dumb old Germans really went for some funny stuff, didn’t they.”

  “Story of mankind,” he gave a blanket answer to that.

  That was not nearly as many definitions as I’d wanted, but another matter quickly had me wondering as the DeSoto pottered across the drawbridge of the weedy river and on past the coal sheds and boiler works. This doctor’s office was in an odd part of town and I tried to think what kind of ailment Herman needed to be treated for in a run-down neighborhood. Firmly built right up to the gray summit of his head, he looked healthy enough to me. “Uhm, this medicine of yours, what exactly is it?”

  “Neck oil.”

  Now he had me. I didn’t see anything stiff about the way he swung his head to give me a big bucktoothed smile—not the usual attitude that preceded a visit to the doctor, anyway.

  Revelation arrived when he turned the car onto the last waterfront street, a block with the lake actually lapping under buildings held up by pilings, and parked at a ramshackle establishment with a sign over its door in weathered letters, THE SCHOONER. This I did not need to ask about, the Schlitz sign glowing in the window telling me all I needed to know.

  Herman escorted me in as if the porthole in the door and the sawdust on the floor were perfectly natural furnishings where you go to take medicine, ha ha. I had been in bars before, what Montana kid hadn’t? But this one looked like it had floated up from the bottom of the harbor. Sags of fishnets hung from the entire ceiling like greenish-gray cloudbanks. Above the doorway were wicked-looking crossed harpoons, and the wall opposite the gleaming coppertop bar was decorated with life preservers imprinted with Northwind and Pere Marquette and Nanny Goat and Chequamegon and other wonderful ships’ names. Into the mix around the rest of the long barroom were walrus tusks carved into intricate scrimshaw, and long-handled grappling hooks that looked sharp as shark’s teeth, and those bright yellow slicker coats called sou’westers, as if the wearers had just stepped out to sniff the sea air. To me, the place was perfect from the first instant, and I could tell Herman felt at home simply entering its briny atmosphere.

  Still setting up for the day, the man behind the bar was so round in his various parts that in the wraparound apron and white shirt he looked more like a snowman than a bartender, but plainly knew his business when he turned with towel and glass in hand to greet Herman. “Well, well, it’s the Dutcher. Must be ten o’clock of a Saturday.” Me, he eyed less merrily. “Uh oh, Herm, who’s your partner in crime?”

  I waited for the guttural response I knew was going to turn my stomach, that I was his wife’s sister’s grandson, practically worse than no relative at all. Instead, I heard proudly announced, “Ernie, please to meet my grandnephew Donny from a big cowboy ranch in Montana.”

  There. My full pedigree. Stuff that in your pink telephone, why don’t you, Aunt Kate.

  I grew an inch or two and swaggered after Herman to a bar stool just like I belonged. As I scooted on, Ernie met me with a belly laugh—he had the full makings for it—while saying he didn’t get many cowboys in the Schooner and warning me not to get drunk and tear up the place. Just then the building shook, and I started to bolt for dry land.

  “Sit tight, happens all the time.” Herman was chuckling now as he caught my arm before I could hit the floor running. Ernie informed me it was only the ferry to Michigan going out and the joint had never floated away yet, although it kept swaying thrillingly as I gawked at the gray steel side of a ship sweeping by the porthole windows facing the harbor and lake. Oh man, I loved this, almost the sense of sailing on the Great Lakes as Herman had so heroically done.

  As the slosh of the ferry’s wake died down and the building quit quivering, Ernie snapped his towel playfully in Herman’s direction. “Ready to take your medicine? Gonna beat you this time.”

  “Always ready for that, and it will be first miracle ever if you beat me,” Herman replied breezily. Laughing up a belly storm, the bartender moved off along the line of beer spigot handles extending half the length of the bar, running a hand along them the way you do a stick in a picket fence. The assortment made me stare, beer tap after beer tap of brands I had never heard of, nor, I would bet, had even the most seasoned drinkers in Montana. Rhinelander. Carling Black Label. Bavarian Club. Stroh’s. Schlitz, naturally, but then Blatz, followed by Pabst, for some reason spelled that way instead of Pabzt. On and on, down to the far end, where Ernie stopped at a handle with a towel draped over it so it couldn’t be read. “No peeking, Dutcher,” he sang out. “You either, Tex.”

  “No reason to peek,” Herman replied with utter confidence and gazed off into the fishnets and such, the mermaids on his tie looking perfectly at home. I had no problem joining him in losing myself in the nautical trappings, knowing full well a ship did not have a bunkhouse, but this was the most comfortably close to such a thing since the Double W.

  Shortly, Ernie came back scooting a shotglass of beer along the bar between thumb and forefinger. “Here you go, just up to the church window like always.” I saw he meant by that it was only up to the jigger line, not even a full shotglass. Huh. Herman must be a really careful drinker, I thought.

  Sure enough, he took the little glass of beer in a long slow sip, almost like you do drinking creek water out of your hand. Swirled it in his mouth as if thinking it over, then swallowed with satisfaction. “Hah, easy—Olde Rhine Lager.”

  The bartender slapped the copper top of the bar with his towel in mock fury. “Goddamn it, Herm, how do you do it? I had that brought in all the way from Buffalo to fool you.”

  “Takes more than Buffalo,” Herman said with the simple calm of a winner and still champion, and set the shotglass aside like a trophy while the bartender trooped back to the hitherto mystery tap and drew a genuine glass of the beer, which is to say a schooner. “What about Cowboy Joe here?” he asked as he presented Herman the free beer. “I might as well stand him one, too, while I’m giving away the joint.”

  “Name your poison, podner,” Herman prompted me, as if we were in a saloon with Old Shatterhand, and so I nursed a bottle of Orange Crush while the two men gabbed about old times of the Great Lakes ore fleet and its sailors, Herman soon buying a beer to even things up a bit in the tasting game and a second Orange Crush for me, adding to the general contentment. I was drifting along with the pair of them to the Straits of Mackinac and Duluth and Thunder Bay and other ports of call, when I heard Ernie utter:

  “So how’s Tugboat Annie?”

  I went so alert my ears probably stood straight out from my head. Somehow you just know a thing like that out of the blue, or in this case, the fishnets. Aunt Kate, he meant.

  Herman took a long slug of beer before answering. “Same same. Thinks she is boss of whole everything.”

  Ernie laughed, jowls shaking like jelly. “She was that way even when she was slinging hash down here on the dock, remember? Order scrambled eggs and they’d just as apt to come fried and she’d say, ‘Eat ’em, they came from the same bird that cackles, didn’t they?’” He let out a low whistle and propellored his towel somehow sympathetically. “You got yourself a handful in her, Herm.”

  “Armloads, sometimes,” said He
rman, not joking at all.

  Wait a minute. I was trying to catch up. The Tugboat Annie part I got right away, that rough-and-tough, hefty waterfront character in stories in the Saturday Evening Post. But was Aunt Kate ever a waitress? Snooty as she was now, with her Kate Smith wardrobe and insistence on good manners and all? It almost was beyond my ability to imagine her, twice the size of shapely Letty, with her name sewn in big sampler letters on the mound of her chest, bawling meat orders from behind a cafe counter to someone like Gram in the kitchen. And strangely enough, in their breakfast battles over slices of toast, Herman never threw that chapter of the past in her face.

  • • •

  EVENTUALLY WE DEPARTED the Schooner, Ernie vowing he would stump Herman the next time and Herman telling him he could try until the breweries ran dry, with me still wowed by that beer-tasting stunt. Before we reached the car, I asked, “How’d you learn to do that?”

  Herman was maybe somewhat tanked up on Olde Rhine Lager, but his answer was as sober as it comes. “Job I had in old country. Story for another time, when you want your hairs raised. Get in, Donny. We must go home and face the Kate.”

  13.

  NERVOUS AS A cross-eyed cat, I took my place across the card table from Aunt Kate. It was the fateful turn of Herta Schepke, seated to my left, to host the weekly canasta party and she had really put herself into it, the heavy old dark living room furniture burnished with polish, the rose-and-thistle-patterned rug vacuumed until every tuft stood and saluted, the “nibbles” plate impressively stacked with Ritz crackers spread with pimento cheese. Even the parakeet in a cage by the window shone dazzlingly, preening its green and gold feathers in the sunlight as it squawked and whistled for attention.

  “That’s some bird,” I thought I’d make polite, safe conversation while Gerda shuffled and reshuffled the fat deck of cards in expert fashion and Aunt Kate inaugurated the nibbles plate with an Mmm mm and two bites that did in a cheese-topped cracker. “What’s its name?”