Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig

  Clucking to herself as clicking onto a decision, Herta leaned all the way down to my nearest ear and murmured:

  “It would be a good joke on Kittycat, wouldn’t it.”

  “A real funnybone tickler, you bet.”

  “Just between us, of course.”

  “Cross our hearts and hope to die.”

  She giggled and whispered. “We’ll do it.”

  • • •

  SINCE THERE WASN’T much time to waste before Herta and Gerda would reach a winning score just in the ordinary way of things, at the first chance I had when the discard pile grew good and fat and all three women were waiting like tigers to pounce and pick it up, I discarded a deuce, the wild card under Manitowoc rules, crosswise onto the pile.

  Aunt Kate leaned over the table toward me. “Honeybunch, that freezes the pile, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “You are sure that is the card you want to play, that way.”

  “You betcha.” The spirit of Herman must have got into me to sass her that way.

  “Mmm hmm.” Stuck for any way to dislodge me from my stubborn maneuver, she tried to make the best of it by shaking her head as if I were beyond grown-up understanding. “Girls, it appears we have a frozen deck.”

  “Doesn’t it, though,” Gerda said through tight lips. “Someone has been putting ideas in this boy’s head.” Aunt Kate sat there looking like she couldn’t imagine what got into me, nor could she. “Well, we have no choice, do we,” Gerda reluctantly conceded. “Your draw, Hertie.”

  The pile built and built more temptingly as we all drew and discarded several more times, until Herta drew, stuck the card away and as if distracted by Biggie’s latest rant of chirrups, discarded an ace of spades. Immediately she went into flutters and the full act of “Oh, did I play that card? I didn’t mean to!”

  She made as if to pick it back up, which Aunt Kate headed off so fast her hand was a blur as she protected the pile.

  “Oh no you don’t. Against the rules, Hertie, you know perfectly well.” Tossing down her natural pair of aces, she gobbled up the whopping number of cards and began melding, the black aces side bet and rainbows of other high-scoring combinations across half the table, canastas following canastas, while Gerda squirmed as if enduring torture and Herta tried to look remorseful, although with little glances sideways at me marking our secret. I pressed my cards to my chest with one hand, nervously rubbing the arrowhead in its sheath with the other to summon all the luck I could. It must have worked. Finally done laying down cards, Aunt Kate looked around the table with a smile that spread her chins.

  “Guess what, girls. Donny and I seem to have fifty-one hundred points, also known as out.” She reached for the stream of silver Gerda was unhappily providing by yielding up quantities of quarters while Biggie screamed as if celebrating our triumph.

  • • •

  I FELT LIKE a winner in every way as my triumphant partner, humming away as pleased as could be, started to drive us back to the house. Victory over the canasta hens! Herman would get a great kick out of that. And winnings, actual money, the first gain of that kind since I had alit in Manitowoc. Manitou’s town itself was even showing a more kindly face, leafy streets and nice houses surounding us as Aunt Kate took a different way than we had come because of the “nasty traffic” of the shift change at the shipyard.

  So I was caught by surprise when my attention, racing ahead of the DeSoto’s leisurely pace, suddenly had to do a U-turn when I heard the words “Donal, I have something to say to you, don’t take it wrong.”

  In my experience as a kid, there wasn’t much other way to take something that started like that. I waited warily for whatever was coming next.

  She provided it with a look at me that took her eyes off the road dangerously long. “Has your grandmother ever, ever suggested circumstances in which you should”—she paused for breath and emphasis and maybe just to think over whether there was any hope of changing my behavior—“hold your tongue?”

  Was I going to admit to her that frequent warning of Gram’s, Don’t be a handful? Not ever. “Naw, you know how Gram is. She calls a spade a shovel, dirt on it or not, like she says, and I guess I’m the same.”

  From her pained expression, she apparently thought that described her sister all too well and me along with it. She drew a breath that swelled her to the limit of the driver’s seat and began. “I’m not laying blame on your grandmother, I know she’s done the best she could under the”—she very carefully picked the word—“circumstances.”

  That could only mean Gram putting up with my redheaded behavior, and now I was really wary of where this was heading. Once more Aunt Kate took her eyes off the road to make sure I got the message. “So this is for your own benefit”—which was right up there in the badlands of being a kid with don’t take this wrong—“when I say you are a very forward youngster.”

  I hadn’t the foggiest notion of what that meant, but I risked: “Better than backward, I guess?”

  She stiffened a bit at that retort, but a lot more when I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “And I can’t help it I’m a youngster.”

  “There’s the sort of thing I mean,” she emphasized. “You’re Dorie, all over again. Chatter, chatter, chatter.” She took a hand off the wheel to imitate with her arched fingers and thumb something like Biggie the budgie’s nonstop beak. “One uncalled-for remark after another.”

  Ooh, that stung. Was my imagination, as she seemed to be saying, nothing more than a gift of gab?

  I was getting mad, but not so mad I couldn’t see from her expression that I had better retreat a little. “Yeah, well, I’m sorry if Herta and Mrs. Horssstetter took the testicle festival the wrong way. I thought they’d be interested in how we do things in Montana.” Figuring a change of topic would help, I went directly to “Anyhow, we beat their pants off, didn’t we. How much did we win?”

  “Mm? Ten dollars.” She reached down to her purse between us on the seat and shook it so it jingled. “Music to the ears, isn’t it,” she said with a dimpled smile that would have done credit to Kate Smith.

  “And how!” I couldn’t wait one more second to ask. “When do I get my half?”

  “Sweetheart, it is time we had a talk about money.” The smile was gone that fast. “To start with, I was the one who put up our stake, wasn’t I. By rights, then, the winnings come to me, don’t they.”

  “But we were partners! We won the canasta game together! And I didn’t have any money to put up, remember?”

  That accusation, for that’s what I meant it to be, only made her wedge herself more firmly behind the steering wheel of the DeSoto. “Now, now, don’t make such a fuss. If I were to give you your share, as you call it, what would you spend it on? Comic books, movies, things like that, which are like throwing money away.”

  Things like that were exactly what I wanted to spend mad money on, and I tried to say so without saying so. “I can’t go through the whole summer just sitting around the house doing nothing.”

  “That is hardly the case,” she didn’t give an inch. “I’ll take you shopping with me, you can be my little helper at the grocery store and so on. Then there’s the jigaw puzzle now that you’ve learned canasta, and always the greenhouse to visit, isn’t there.” Her voice went way up musically as she said the next. “Don’t worry, bunny, you won’t lack for entertainment if you just put your mind to it. And here’s a surprise for you.” By now she was cooing persuasion at me. “On the Fourth, we’ll go to the park, where they’ll have fireworks and sizzlers and whizbangs and all those things, and hear that wonderful Lawrence Welk orchestra Herta talked about. Won’t that be nice?”

  Talking to me that way, who did she think I was, Biggie the budgie? But before I could think up a better retort, she let out an alarming sigh as if the air were going out of her. I saw she was stricken, for sure, but not
in an emergency way. Everything about her appeared normal enough, except her eyes were not on the road, her attention seized by something we were passing.

  “I’m sorry, buttercup,” she apologized in another expulsion of breath, “but the sight of it always almost does me in.”

  I jerked my head around to where she was looking, expecting a hospital or cemetery at the worst, some place ordinarily sad to see. But no, I saw why the sight so unnerved her, as it did me. The forbidding old building set back from the street was spookily familiar, even though I was positive I had never seen it before. The sprawling structure, rooms piled three stories high, each with a single narrow window, seemed leftover and rundown and yet clinging to life like the skinny little trees, maybe a failing orchard, that dotted its grounds like scarecrows.

  “What is that place?” I heard my own voice go high.

  “Just what it looks like,” Aunt Kate responded, speeding up the car to leave the ghostly sight behind. “The poorhouse.”

  • • •

  THE WORD STRUCK me all the way through as I stared over my shoulder at the creepy building. Put a rocky butte behind it and weather-beaten outbuildings around it and it was the county poorfarm of my nightmares. As if caught up in the worst of those even though I was awake, I heard Aunt Kate’s pronouncement that made my skin crawl.

  “And that’s another reason I must be careful, careful, careful with money and impress on you to do the same. I sometimes think we’ll end up there if a certain somebody doesn’t change his ways.”

  “Y-you mean Herman?”

  “Him himself,” she said, squeezing the life out of the steering wheel.

  “But—why?” I was stupefied. “How’s he gonna end you up in the poorfarm—I mean house?”

  “Have you ever seen that man do a lick of work? If only,” she said grimly. Another sigh as if she were about to collapse scared me as much as the first one. “To think, what a difference it would make if Fritzie was here.”

  “Huh? Who?”

  “Oh, the other one,” she tossed that off as if it were too sad to go into.

  No way was she getting away with that. My burning gaze at her was not going to quit until she answered its question, The other what?

  She noticed, and said offhandedly, “Husband, who else?”

  I gaped at her. She seemed like the least likely person to believe the plural of spouse is spice, as I’d overheard grown-ups say about Mormons and people like that.

  “You’ve got another one besides Herman? They let you do that in Wisconsin?”

  “Silly. Before Brinker, I mean.” She gazed through the windshield. “Fritz Schmidt. A real man.”

  Herman seemed real enough to me. “What happened to him? The other one, I mean.”

  “I lost him.” She made it sound as if he had dropped out of her pocket somewhere.

  Not satisfied, I again stared until she had to answer. “Storm, slick deck.”

  “Really?” Strange how these things work, but Herman’s shake of the sugar bowl that spilled some over the side when he was showing me the fate of the Badger Voyager combined with her words to make my pulse race. Trying not to sound eager, though I was, I leaned across the seat and asked, “Like when the Witch of November came?”

  “He’s been filling your head out there in the garden shed with his old sailor tales, hasn’t he. All right, you want the whole story.” No sighing this time, actually a little catch in her voice. “My Fritz was bosun on the Badger Voyager. Washed overboard in the big November storm of ’47.”

  I thought so! The same storm and ship that took Herman’s eye! That Witch of November coincidence inundated me in waves of what I knew and didn’t know. Her Fritzie was Herman’s best friend on the doomed ore boat. No problem with that, I could savvy the pair of them as bunkhouse buddies or whatever the living quarters were on a ship. But then how in the world had someone she would not even call by his first name get to be the replacement husband? Someone she thought was so worthless they’d end up in the poorhouse? Where that embattled matchup came from, my imagination could not reach at all.

  All this whirling in my head after her news about Fritzie’s sad fate, I miraculously managed to hold my exclamation to a high-pitched “That’s awful!”

  “Yes, it’s a tragedy.” She gazed steadily ahead at the road. “But that’s in the past, we have to put up with life in the here and now, don’t we,” she said, as if she didn’t want to any more than I did. As if reminded, she glanced over at me and patted her purse enough to make it jingle again in a sort of warning way. “You did fine in today’s game, honeybunch, but stay on your toes. Next time, the party is at our house and we’ll do as usual and play two out of three.”

  14.

  Dear Gram,

  The dog bus was really something, with all kinds of people like you said. Aunt Kate, as I call her but everybody else says Kitty, and Uncle Herman, who does not go by Dutch anymore, found me in the depot fine and dandy and we went to their house and had what they called a Manitowoc dinner, what we call supper. It takes some getting used to here.

  Gram had made me promise, cross my heart and so on, to write to her every week, but doing so when she was in the middle of complications after her operation stayed my hand from so much I really wanted to say, none of it good news as far as I was concerned. Carefully as I could, I was doctoring, so to speak, life with Aunt Kate. If word ever came from that intimidating nun, Sister Carma Jean, that the patient was better, maybe I could somehow sneak a phone call to let Gram know I was being bossed unmercifully, from being kept flat broke to being stuck in the attic. On the other hand, what could she do about it from a hospital bed when Aunt Kate was right here, always looming, seeming as big as the house she dominated top and bottom and in between.

  Already she had stuck her head in to make sure I was keeping at it on a space of the card table that didn’t have presidents from Mount Rushmore staring at me with scattered jigsaw eyes. She left me to it but not before singing out, “Don’t forget to tell her the funny story of mistaking me for Kate Smith, chickie,” which wild horses could not drag out of me to put on paper. Instead:

  Aunt Kate and I play cards some, not pitch like we did in the cook shack but a different game I’ll tell you about sometime.

  Herman wore a broad grin when I told him he and Hoyle had bushwhacked Herta and especially Gerda, to the Kate’s satisfaction. “Did you know they play canasta for money?”

  “For two bitses, pthht. Hens play for chickenfeed, notcherly.”

  It was laborious to fill the whole page of stationery with anything resembling happy news. Herman’s greenhouse gave me a chance to list vegetable after vegetable growing under glass, which helped, and I recounted the antics of Biggie the budgie as if Aunt Kate and I had simply paid a social visit to old friends of hers. There was so much I had to skip not to worry Gram in her condition—the Green Stamps secret deal with Herta, Herman’s out-of-this-world talent at tasting beer, my impressive broken front tooth from the scuffle with the campers, and most of all, Aunt Kate heedlessly throwing away every cent of my money—it would have filled page upon page of writing paper. But if Reader’s Digest could condense entire books, I supposed I could shrink my shaky start of summer likewise.

  The Fourth of July is coming, and Aunt Kate is taking me to the big celebration here where they will shoot off fireworks of all kinds and a famous band whose leader is Lawrence Somebody will play music. It should be fun. I hope you are getting well fast and will be up and around to enjoy the Fourth like I will.

  Your loving grandson,

  Donny

  “Oh, I was going to look it over to check your spelling.” Aunt Kate clouded up when I presented her the sealed and addressed envelope for mailing. The look-it-over part I believed, which is why I’d licked the envelope shut.

  “Aw, don’t worry about that. I win all the spelling bees in school,” I sai
d innocently. “Miss Ciardi says I could spell down those Quiz Kids that are on the radio.”

  “Well, if she says so,” Aunt Kate granted dubiously. “All righty, I’ll stamp it and you can put it out in the box for the mailman. There now, you can get right back to your puzzle, mm?”

  • • •

  THE REAL PUZZLE, of course, was how I was going to endure a summer of thousand-piece jigsaws, old National Geographics, and canasta without being bored loco or something worse. Especially seeing as once I’d paid off the bribe to Herta by slipping her my Green Stamps, I was going to be no match for the merciless sharpies in not one canasta game but two, and it took no great power of prediction to guess Aunt Kate’s reaction to that. The Witch of November in a muumuu was on that horizon.

  So the next couple of days after writing Gram how fine and dandy everything was in Manitowoc, I hung around with Herman in the greenhouse as much as possible to keep my morale up. He was good company, better and better in fact, as he read up some more from Karl May and other books in his corner stash and gabbed with me about cayuses and coyotes—relying on me to straighten him out on which were horses and which were canines—and the wonders of Winnetou as a warrior and the spirit of Manitou living on and on and making itself felt in mysterious ways. “Here you go, Donny, Indians believed Manitou lived in stones, even, and could come out into a person if treated right, if you will imagine.” With the fervor of an eleven-year-old carrying an obsidian arrowhead in his pocket, I certainly did turn my imagination loose on that, seeing myself riding the dog bus west sooner than later to a healthy and restored Gram, her with a job cooking on some ranch where the rancher was no Sparrowhead, me back at things I was good at like hunting magpies and following the ways of cowboys, poorfarm and orphanage out of our picture. In other words, in more luck than I was used to lately.

  • • •

  IT IS SAID a blessing sometimes comes in disguise, but if what happened in the middle of that week was meant to be any kind of turn of luck, it made itself ugly beyond all recognition when it came.