Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig

  “Donny,” she warned, all her face including the chins set in the kind of scowl as if she were battling with Herman over toast, “you are getting into dangerous territory and had better mind your manners, or—”

  “The boy is right. Why do you have to be money pincher so much it is ridiculous?”

  The figure in the doorway now was Herman, in pajama bottoms and undershirt.

  Aunt Kate lost no time in turning the furious scowl on him. “Brinker, this does not concern you.”

  “Pah. Why do you talk so silly? You like being wrong?” A thrill went through me when he didn’t back down, one hunter of what was needed to survive coming to the aid of another, if I wanted to get fancy about it. “I live here, Donny lives here, and as far as anybody in whole wide world knows, he is my grandnephew, too.” I couldn’t sort out the tangle in the middle of that sentence, but it didn’t seem to matter as Herman kept at her. “You talk big to him about behavior, but you should fix up your own while he is our guest.”

  Aunt Kate had to work her mouth a few times to get the words out, but inevitably she managed, double-barreled. “That is enough out of both of you. We will sort this out in the morning. Donny, put that money back and go to bed. As for you, Brinker, keep your opinions to yourself if you’re going to share my bed.”

  Neither of us wanting to fight her all night when she showed no sign of being reasonable, we complied. Herman waited at the doorway and put his hand on my shoulder as I trudged to the stairs, saying low enough that Aunt Kate couldn’t hear as she fussed around with the sewing machine and the change drawer, “Don’t let silly woman throwing a fit get you down, podner.”

  • • •

  IT DID, THOUGH. The next couple of days were a grind, with me sulking in my attic version of the stony lonesome or spending every minute I could out in the greenhouse with Herman.

  Saturday came, after those days of Aunt Kate and I being as cautious as scalded cats around each other, and I could hardly wait to go with Herman again on his “medicine” run for a change of scenery, not to mention atmosphere. This morning, she was more than fully occupying her chair in the kitchen as usual but fully dressed for going out. Herman was nowhere around, but that was not out of the ordinary after their customary breakfast battle. In any case, Hippo Butt, as I now thought of her, actually smiled at me, a little sadly it seemed, as I fixed my bowl of soupy cereal, and naturally I wondered what was up.

  I found out when she cleared her throat and said almost as musically as ever:

  “Donny, I have something to tell you. After breakfast, pack your things. I’m sending you home.”

  Home? There was no such thing. Didn’t she know that? Why else was I here? I stared at her in incomprehension, but her set expression and careful tone of voice did not change. “Hurry and eat and get your things, so we don’t miss your bus.”

  “You can’t just send me back!” My shock and horror came out in a cry. “With Gram laid up, they’ll put me somewhere! An orphanage!”

  “Now, now.” She puffed herself up to full Kate Smith dimensions as she looked at me, then away. “This hurts me as much as it does you,” which was something people said when that wasn’t the case at all. “After the sewing room incident, I wrote to your grandmother saying I have to send you back, without telling her that was the reason, so you’re spared that. I didn’t tell you before now because I didn’t want you to be upset.”

  Talk about a coward’s way out. She did the deed by letter instead of telephone so there could be no argument on Gram’s part. And to keep clear of that starchy nun Carma Jean asking where her sense of charity was. And “upset”? How about overturned and kicked while I was down?

  “But, but, it’s like you’re sending me to jail, when you’re supposed to let me be here all summer.” Life had flipped so badly I was desperately arguing for Wisconsin.

  She had the decency to flinch when I flung that charge at her, but she also dodged. “Donny, dear, it won’t be as bad as you think. We have to believe that your grandmother will recuperate just fine and be able to take care of you again, don’t we. But in the meantime, there are foster homes that take in children for a while.” I knew those to be little more than a bus drop stop on the way to the orphanage. “To make sure, I went to the county welfare authorities here and got a list of such places in Great Falls. It’s all there in the letter I sent. Your grandmother will only have to fill out a form or two, and you’ll have a temporary home until she gets well.”

  I must have given my now sworn enemy a gaze with hatred showing.

  “Please don’t look at me that way.” She fussed at creases in the newspaper that needed no fussing at. “The nuns will help out if need be. They’ll have to, when you show up. Now eat up, and we’ll have to be going.”

  I pushed aside my breakfast, too sick at heart to eat, and went for my suitcase for hundreds upon hundreds of miles of travel agony ahead.

  • • •

  WE WERE AT the car before I came out of my shellshock enough to realize the missing part in all this. “Wh-where’s Herman? Isn’t he coming with us?”

  “You shouldn’t ask.” She sure couldn’t wait to tell me, though, as she impatiently gestured for me to climb in the DeSoto. “He sneaked off on the city bus for that ‘medicine’ of his. Threw the car keys to me and told me to do my—my dirty work myself.”

  She got the rest off her chest, more than a figure of speech as she heaved herself into position behind the steering wheel and said over the grinding sound of the starter, “That man. He says he can’t bear to tell you good-bye. I don’t know why not, it’s just a word.”

  Another piece of my heart crumbled at that. Abandoned even by Herman the German. I meant less to him than a couple of beers at the Schooner. Brave survivor of Höhe Toter Mann, hah. If there was a Coward’s Corner on Boot Hill, that’s where he deserved to end up.

  • • •

  AT THE BUS DEPOT, everything was all too familiar, benchfuls of people sitting in limbo until their Greyhound was ready to run, the big wall map of THE FLEET WAY routes making my journey loom even longer. Forced to wait with me until my bus was called, Aunt Kate turned nervous and, probably for her sake as much as mine, tried to play up what lay ahead of me. “Just think, you’ll be there in time for the Fourth. They’ll have fireworks and sizzlers and whizbangs of all kinds, I’m sure.”

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass about whizbangs,” I said loudly enough to make passing busgoers stare and veer away from us.

  “Donal, please.” She looked around with a false smile as if I were only being overly cute. “This is the kind of thing I mean. You can see it just isn’t right for you here.”

  It would take a lot to argue with that, but before I even had any chance, she had her purse up and was diving a hand into it. “Oh, and take this.” She pressed some folded money into my hand. In amazement, I turned the corners of the bills back, counting. Three tens. The exact same sum as had been pinned inside my discarded shirt.

  “What—how come—”

  “No, no, don’t thank me,” she simpered, while all I was trying to ask was why she hadn’t done this in the first place, like maybe as soon as we both realized she had thrown my summer money in the garbage.

  All at once she burst into tears. “Donny, I wish this would have worked out. But you see how things are, Herman and I have all we can do to keep ourselves together. I—I may be a selfish old woman, I don’t know, but my nerves just will not take any more aggravation. Not that I blame you entirely, understand. It’s the, the circumstances.” Still sniffling, she pulled a hanky from her purse and blew her nose. “This is the best thing all around. You’ll be back there where people are more used to you.”

  Yeah, well, it was way late for any apology, if that’s what this amounted to. All it did was delay us from the departure gate where passengers already were piling onto the bus with MILWAUKEE on its rol
ler sign. For me, there’d be another one with WESTBOUND after that. I did not look back at her as I handed my ticket to the driver for punching, left the wretched old suitcase for him to throw in the baggage compartment, and climbed aboard to try to find a seat to myself.

  • • •

  IF SHE HADN’T CRIED, I would have given in to tears. As it was, I sat there trying to hunch up and take it, one more time. Two days and a night ahead on the dog bus, doom of some kind waiting at the Great Falls depot. Convinced that everything that could go wrong was going wrong, I sent a despairing look up the aisle of the bus. All the situation needed now was something like that bunch of hyena campers to torment me. But no, my fellow passengers mainly were men dressed up for business, a Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter up in front of someone like a last mocking farewell reminder of Aunt Kate, and a few couples where the women were as broad-beamed as seemed to be ordinary in Wisconsin. Nothing to worry, I thought bitterly of Herman’s wording.

  The bus was at the outskirts of Manitowoc, the radius of my summer failure, when I heard the oof of someone dropping down next to me. Oh, swell. Exactly what I did not need, a gabby seat changer. With so much else on my mind, I’d forgotten to place my jacket in that spot and now it was too late. Two full hours ahead to Milwaukee yet, and I was in for an overfriendly visit from some stranger with nothing better to do than talk my ears off. Goddamn-it-all-to-hell-anyway, couldn’t life give me any kind of a break, on this day when I was being kicked down the road like an unwanted pup? I didn’t even want to turn my head to acknowledge the intruder, but sooner or later I had to, so it might as well be now.

  “Hallo.”

  Out from behind the newspaper, Herman the German was giving me the biggest horsetooth smile.

  I rammed upright in my seat. “What are you doing on here?”

  “Keeping you company, hah?” he said, as if I had issued an invitation. “Long ride ahead, we watch out for each other.”

  “Y-you’re going to Montana with me?”

  His shoulders went way up, the most expressive French salute yet. “Maybe not to Big Falls. We must discuss.”

  So flustered was I trying to catch up with things in no particular order, I craned my neck back toward Manitowoc as if Aunt Kate were on our trail. “Does she know you’re here?”

  “Puh.” That translated different ways, as “Of course not” and “It doesn’t matter,” take my choice. “Left her a note saying I am gone back to Germany, we are you-know-what.” Kaput? I goggled at him. Just like that, he could walk out of a marriage and hop on a bus in some other direction from where he said he was going? Man oh man, in comparison I was a complete amateur at making stuff up.

  “Today was last straw on camel’s back,” he said. I listened open-mouthed as Herman continued in a more satisfied tone. “The Kate will run around like the chicken with its head chopped off awhile, but nothing she can do. I am gone like the wind.” He looked at me with the greatest seriousness. “Donny, this is the time if I am ever to see the West and how it was the Promised Land for people. I must do so now, or I am going to be too soon old.” To try to lighten that heavy thought, he winked at me with his bad eye. “So, we are on the loose, ja?”

  “I guess you are. But Hippo Butt—I mean the Kate—got it all set up that my grandmother has to stick me in a foster home ahead of the orphanage as soon as I get to Great Falls and—”

  “No, she does not. Silly eye-dea. I kiboshed.”

  He had to repeat that for it to make any sense to me. As best I could follow, what it came down to was that he had guessed what she was up to when he saw her writing a letter. “Unnotcheral behavior,” he sternly called it. The rest was pretty much what you would think, him sneaking around from the greenhouse after she put the letter to Gram out in the mailbox, swiping it and reading it and, he illustrated triumphantly to me by fluttering his hands as if sprinkling confetti, tearing the thing up. “Evidence gone to pieces, nobody the wiser, hah?”

  • • •

  IT SANK IN on me. No one in the entire world knew that the two of us were free as the breeze. Herman wasn’t merely flapping his lips; we really were footloose, crazily like the comic strip characters in Just Trampin’ who were always going on the lam, hopping on freight trains or bumming rides from tough truck drivers to stay a jump ahead of the sheriff. Or at least bus-loose—the fleet of Greyhounds ran anywhere we wanted to go. It was a dizzying prospect. Good-bye, battle-ax wife, for him, and no Hello, orphanage, for me—it was as simple as sitting tight in a bus seat to somewhere known only to us, the Greyhound itself on the lam from all we were leaving behind.

  I tell you, scratch a temptation like that between the ears and it begins to lick your hand in a hurry. “You mean, just keep going?” As excited as I’d ever been, the question squealed out of me. “Like for all summer?”

  “Betcha boots, podner. Who is to know?”

  “Yeah, but, that’ll cost a lot.” A shadow of reality set in. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve only got thirty dollars.”

  “Nothing to worry. I am running over with money.” Seeing my disbelief, he patted the billfold spot in the breast pocket of his jacket, where there did seem to be a bulge.

  “Really truly? How much?”

  “Puh-lenty,” said he, as if that spelled it out for me. “Cashed in all my settlement, I did, then went to the bank and taked my share from there. Half for her, half for me, right down center. What is the words for that, same-sam?”

  “Uhm, even-steven. But I thought from what Aunt Kate said, you guys were about broke.”

  “Pah. Woman talk. We will live like kings, Donny. Here, see.” He took out the fat wallet from inside his coat and spread it open for me. Lots and lots of the smaller denominations, of course, but I hadn’t even known fifty and hundred bills existed, as maybe half the wad consisted of. “Outstanding!” I yelped at the prospect of money raining down after my spell of being flat broke.

  There was a catch to simply taking off into the yonder, though, isn’t there always? “See, Gram has me write to her every week,” I fretted. “She’ll know right away I’m not back there with you and Hippo—the Kate—like I’m supposed to be, if those are mailed from any old where.”

  Even before I finished speaking, Herman had that look that usually produced eye-dea, but this time what came out was scheme. “Mailed from Manitowoc, they can be. Ernie owes me favor.” He spieled it as if it were a sure thing, me writing enough letters ahead to cover the rest of the summer, the batch then sent to the bartender at the Schooner with instructions to mail one each week. “I stick ten dollarses in with, Ernie would jump over moon if I ask,” he impressed upon me. “Your grossmutter hears from you regular, what you are doing,” he finished with infectious confidence. “Postmark says Manitowoc if she looks.”

  “You mean,” I asked in a daze, “make up the whole summer?”

  “Ja, tell each week the way you like. Make it sound good so she is not to worry.”

  And that clinched it. The chance to condense the disastrous season spent with Aunt Kate entirely according to my imagination was too much to resist.

  “Woo-hoo, Herman!” I enlisted in his plan so enthusiastically he shushed me and took a quick look around at the other passengers, luckily none close enough to have overheard. Whispering now, I asked eagerly, “But where will we go?”

  With a sly grin, he leaned back in his seat as if the dog bus were the latest in luxury. “Anywheres,” he said out the side of his mouth so only I could hear. “Just so it is”—he made the cocked-finger gesture and pointed that pistoleer finger toward the west—“thataway.”

  THE PROMISED LAND

  June 30–August 16, 1951

  15.

  LIKE A STUCK compass needle, Herman’s fixation held us to a single arrow-straight direction. To the Karl May territory of Indian knights and pistoleer cowboys, if you were Herman. To anywhere out there short of
“the other side of the mountains” and a poorfarm for kids called an orphanage, if you were me. To the west, or rather, the West, capitalized in both our minds as the Promised Land, where we could be rid of the Kate and her bossy brand of life.

  Old gray duffel bag on his shoulder, my new companion of the road marched through the crowd in the waiting room of the Milwaukee depot without deviating an inch either way, the wicker suitcase and me trying to keep up, dead-ahead until reaching the long and tall wall map topped with COAST TO COAST—THE FLEET WAY. Over our heads loomed the outline of America, which, I swear, seemed to grow as we stared up at the numerous Greyhound routes extending to the Pacific Ocean.

  Our silent gawking finally was broken by a thin voice. Mine.

  “So where do we start?”

  “Big question,” said Herman, as if he didn’t have any more of a clue than I did. I could see him giving the subject a little think. “Maybe takes some Fingerspitzengefühl, hah?”

  Unable to get my ears around that, I started to tell him to talk plain English because we didn’t have time to fool around, but he got there first, more or less. Tilting his head to peer down at me as much with his glass eye as his good one, he uttered—and I still was not sure I was hearing right—“You got Fingerspitzengefühl, I betcha.”

  My hands curled as if he had diagnosed some kind of disease. “That doesn’t sound like something I want to got—I mean, have.”

  “No choice do you have. It comes notcheral, once in great while,” he said, as if it were perfectly normal to be singled out by some crazy-sounding thing. “Generals who think with their fingers, like Napoleon, born with it. Clark and Lewis maybe, explorers like us, ja?” The more he spoke, the more serious he seemed to grow, and I could feel my goose bumps coming back. Passengers overhearing him while they checked out their routes on the map were giving us funny looks and stepping away fast.