Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig

  On the dust cloud raised by the pack of dancing kids, my moment of fame forever with me, I jigged my way from the arena as the exhibition ended and on out the gate of the rodeo grounds, still hopping and writhing, past the stern-faced Indian police watching for a purple shirt and red hair.

  • • •

  HERMAN WAS WAITING a little way beyond the gate, and immediately gathered me in front of him, herding me to the parking lot near the tepees. “Quick fast. Louie has camper out, you can change there.”

  Sweat running off me in streams, as tired as I had ever been, I stood there slack like a horse being unharnessed as Louie took the costume off me piece by piece.

  “You did pretty good for a redhead,” he allowed. As I slowly dressed in my own clothes, he excused himself, saying he had to try to wangle the same booth spot out of the Crows for the next day, it was a sort of lucky location.

  That left Herman, sitting on the narrow bunk at the front of the camper cabin with his arms folded across his chest, saying nothing as he watched me button my rodeo shirt and settle my Stetson on my head. The last thing I did was to make sure the freed arrowhead hung straight in the medicine pouch under my shirt, where it felt like it belonged. My watcher still had said nothing. Timidly I broke the silence.

  “Are—are we gonna keep on?”

  Herman took off his glasses, breathed on one lens and then the other and cleaned both with deliberation, using the tail of one of Louie’s costume garments lying there. Settling the eyeglasses back in place, he gazed at me as if newly clear-sighted. “On with what, Donny?”

  “On with our trip?” My voice was uncertain. “On the bus?”

  Deliberately or not, he kept me in suspense a while more. Finally he said, “More to see out west here, there is. Dog bus is how to git”—natural as breathing, he had absorbed the word from Louie— “there, ja?”

  Overcome with relief, I still had to make sure. “You’re not too mad at me for getting us in that fix? By taking the arrowhead, I mean?”

  He shifted on the bunk, his glasses catching what light there was in the cabin. “I am giving it a think, sitting here while you was putting clothes on. You know what, Donny? Not for me to decide, how right or wrong you taking the arrowhead comes to. You are some good boy where it counts, by sticking with me. I must do same by you, hah?”

  I just about cried with—what, gratitude, happiness? Some feeling beyond that, inexpressible elation that he and I would hit the road together again? In any case, it was the kind of situation where you duck your head because there is no way to say thanks enough, and move on.

  “Yeah, well, gee, Herman—what do you want to see next?”

  “Something without police breathing on us,” he thought. “Notcheral wonders, how about.”

  19.

  FOR ANOTHER TWENTY smackers, Louie Slewfoot’s going rate for saving our skins, he drove us to Billings, a safe distance from Crow Fair and its cops in braids, and dropped us at the Greyhound station there.

  “You fellows sort of make a full day,” he remarked as he handed down the now dusty suitcase and duffel bag from the back of the camper, with dusk giving way to dark. Life with Herman packed a lot into the hours, I was definitely finding out.

  “Take good care of that arrowhead, chiefie, so it’ll take care of you,” Louie advised me with a sly wink as he took his leave of us with a slam of the camper door. But not before, big medicine or whatever doing its work, I coaxed him into an autograph and more.

  Say, do you remember the time

  I slipped on a banana peeling

  and hit the ceiling

  while wondering why

  I had a stye in my eye

  and how in hell

  my nose runs while my feet smell?

  Oh, I was in tough condition

  because life’s a rough proposition—

  but at least it makes a nice rhyme.

  Louie Slewfootb

  Off the rez and on the go—

  “Not Longfellow, but not shabby,” Herman approved, reading over the inscription from a genuine Indian that I had finally proudly attained. “More to him than meets an eye. Too bad he is not Apache.”

  Handing me back the autograph book, he switched his attention to the old standard, the red-webbed route map on the Greyhound depot wall. “Scenery everywheres, I betcha,” he observed about the many roads trending west. “So, Donny, what does your fingers say?”

  This was almost too easy. On tiptoes, I jabbed a finger to the most famous spot west of Crow Fair.

  “Yahlahstone,” Herman ratified thoughtfully, looking over my shoulder. “Old Faithful geezer is there?”

  Fixing his pronunciation, I assured him that besides geysers there were bound to be natural wonders popping up all over the place in Yellowstone National Park.

  “Not only that,” it must have been the big medicine still working in the pouch around my neck that had me thinking so expansively. “See there, then we can go on through the park”—my finger confidently traveled down the spine of the West, arriving in Arizona—“all the way to where the Apaches live, how about.”

  “Now you are speaking,” he enthusiatically took up the prospect.

  First thing was to get us on our way, and I drew Herman’s attention to the schedule board, showing that the bus we wanted was about to go. “C’mon, or we’re gonna miss it.”

  “Donny, wait,” he held back, concerned. “We have not had bite to eat since breakfast.”

  “Never mind,” I took care of that, seasoned bus hopper that I was, “we’ll grab candy bars.”

  • • •

  SCRAMBLING ONTO THE BUS at the last minute with a handful of Mounds bars apiece, scanning the rows of mostly filled seats in that game of chance of where to sit, we even so were not the last to board. Just as the driver had shut the door with the departing whoosh, there was a polite tapping on it, and here came a wisp of a man, hardly enough of him to withstand being blown away by the wind; gray-headed and with a silvery mustache sharp over his lip like a little awning; well-dressed in a mild way, his plain brown suit obviously far from new. He thanked the driver kindly for letting him board, and evidently to make no more fuss deposited himself in the first seat available, which happened to be across from us.

  As the bus pulled out, for once someone got the jump on Herman, with the latecomer leaning across the aisle and inquiring in a cultivated voice, “Where are you gentlemen headed, may I ask?”

  “Yahlahstone Park, next on list,” replied Herman, triggered into his usual spiel that he and I were out to see the West, but perhaps in deference to the man’s oh-so-polite demeanor, he left off the part about ending up somewhere south of the moon and north of Hell.

  “Oh, good for you and the young man there.” His visitor approved our intentions with an odd click of his mouth. “Endless things to see in the park,” he went on in that same refined tone but clickety at the end of each string of words, “all the marvels of nature. I’m passing through there myself, on my way to visit my daughter in Salt Lake City.” By now I had caught on that his false teeth clacked.

  “Ah-huh,” Herman stalled, like me thinking over the prospect of several hours of clickety-clack conversation like this from across the aisle. “You got some big miles to go.”

  “So I have, you put it so well.” The fine-boned man, on second look maybe not as elderly as he first appeared, smiled under the cookie-duster mustache. “But that’s the story of life, isn’t it. Keeping on across the unknowable distances that at the end of it all add up to that mystical figure of three score and ten,” click-click.

  I had heard Herman’s gabs with strangers across the aisle so many times I was only half listening to this exchange, more interested in devouring Mounds bars and catching my breath, mentally at least, after the narrow escape from Sparrowhead. But that sizable serving of heavy thought from the litt
le gent drew my attention. By now Herman, too, was cocking a speculative look at him.

  “Please forgive me,” this daintiest of passengers touched the area of the knot of his tie. “There I go again, with my preaching collar on. You see, I’m a minister. Answered the call all those years ago”—a smile peeped from under the mustache again—“those big miles ago, and even though I’m retired, the pulpit still beckons at odd moments.” He laughed at himself, ever so apologetically. “I suppose folks like you unlucky enough to listen to my ramblings are my congregation now. I didn’t mean to intrude, my heart was simply warmed by the sight of the pair of you traveling together.”

  Back there at the word minister, I stiffened. Dearie dearie goddamn. Why this, why now, why why why? On one of the biggest days of my life, the question of my taking the arrowhead had attached itself to me like a telltale shirttail that hung out no matter how I tried to tuck it. I mean, I still believed I in no way amounted to a real thief, whatever grabby-guts Wendell Williamson thought, because discovering the arrowhead after it had lain there unclaimed since before Columbus amounted to my luck and his loss, didn’t it? And I deserved half of our canasta winnings just as much as Aunt Kate, didn’t I? Shouldn’t old Hippo Butt and Sparrowhead both know when they were beat, and fold their cards like canasta losers? Yet if the situation was that clearcut, why did it keep bugging me? Now whoosh, and right here on the dog bus the latest stranger proved to be a man of the cloth, as I knew from something I’d read such people were called, whose occupation it was to provide answers to things like that, in church and out, from the looks of it.

  • • •

  OLD-TIMER ON THE DOG bus that I was from sixteen hundred and one miles going back east to Wisconsin and now many hundreds more westward with Herman, I had the crawly feeling that this particular passenger across the aisle was too close for comfort. This was way worse than the nun at the start of my trip to Manitowoc or the attic plaque of the kid on his knees bargaining with death in the night, this was as if the big mystery called God was using the bus-hopping minister like siccing a sheepdog onto strays. “Go get ’em, Shep, herd them close. Nip ’em good. Here, take this new set of teeth.” Maybe a limited dose of religion never hurt anyone, but bumping into the small-fry minister this way bugged me. For some reason, the wispy figure an arm’s length away reminded me of the little sheriff who’d arrested Harv. Trouble came in small sizes as well as large, I was learning.

  • • •

  “NO, NO, IS OKAY,” Herman was busy assuring the kindly minister he wasn’t intruding on us, although he sure as hell was, pardon my French. I could tell Herman, too, was thrown by the religious wraith’s sudden appearance. For if my conscience had a few uncomfortable things on it, the one in the seat next to mine must have been considerably weighted down with the phony tale of going back to Germany and this entire disappearing act he had thought up for the two of us.

  “May I ask how you two are related?” the minister pressed on. “I see such a striking resemblance.”

  He did? Was I growing to be like Herman that much? Oh man, there was another weighty question—good or bad, to take on the homely yet compelling characteristics of somebody so one-eyed, horse-toothed, and, well, Hermanic?

  “Great-uncle only, I am,” he postponed the matter as best he could, with a glassy glance at me. “Donny is best grandnephew ever made.”

  “How fortunate you are, sir,” a click and a chuckle from across the aisle. “Great by dint of the fruit of the family tree.”

  “No bad apples on our branch, hah, Donny?” Herman fended.

  “By the way, my parishioners called me Reverend Mac” came next, with an extended hand of introduction. “It’s from my middle name, Macintosh,” which had quite a clack to it as he said it.

  Seeing no way out of it, Herman and I shook hands with him and introduced ourselves back, and the Reverend Mac promptly followed up with just what we did not want to deal with.

  Smiling to the fullest under the rim of mustache, he made the modest gesture toward his collar again. “A contribution I can still make to the good cause is to distribute Bibles into hotel rooms,” he confided. “I have been doing so in Billings, which needs all the salvation it can get.” He gave another clickety chuckle, Herman and I trying to politely match it with heh-hehs. I think we both were a little afraid of what was coming, rightfully so. Slick as a carnival barker, the man of the cloth or whatever he was now pulled out a black book with gilt lettering, unmistakably a Bible, saying, “I happen to have an extra, and would be gratified if you gentlemen would accept it as a gift from a fellow traveler.”

  With it deposited on him that way, Herman had to take the offering, mumbling a thanks and shoveling the Bible along to me as if I were its natural audience. I gave him a look, but he wouldn’t meet my eye, attending instead to the minister’s rambling about the inevitable good that the Good Book would do in those dens of sin, hotel rooms. What he gave us proved to be a flimsy paperback version with typeface about the size of flyspecks, but it still unnnerved me enough that I didn’t want it paired with the autograph book, and quick as I could, stuck it in my opposite coat pocket.

  “It does provide its rewards, spreading the good word.” The minister still was holding forth to us as if we were in a church on wheels. “And that brings me to a question, if I may”—Herman and I both braced, now really knowing what was coming—“are you followers of the Lord, in your own way?”

  The bus saved us, barely, gearing down into the town of Laurel at that moment, followed by the driver’s announcement of a ten-minute stop to pick up passengers. As the Greyhound pulled over at the hotel serving as depot, I pleaded to Herman, “I need to go,” although the urge wasn’t really about using the convenience. “Real bad.”

  “Me, too.” He was out of his seat as if his pants were on fire, with me right after.

  “I’ll mind your seats for you,” Reverend Mac obligingly called after us.

  • • •

  MAKING USE of the restroom since we were there anyway, we spraddled side by side to discuss the minister matter. Escaping a preacher may not sound like the worst problem there is, but you have to admit it is among the trickier ones.

  “Sky pilot, Old Shatterhand would call him,” said Herman, buttoning up.

  “Nosy old Holy Joe, Gram would call him,” I said, doing the same.

  “Ja, he is sniffing awful close to us.”

  “Guess what. I’ve got an idea.”

  Hearing me out as we headed back to the bus, Herman brightened up and paid me the ultimate compliment, saying I had a good think.

  “You do it first, then I do same,” he whispered before we stepped on. As we took our seats, Reverend Mac, his hands peacefully folded, welcomed us back.

  He looked as if he’d been jolted in his prayer bones when, first thing, I leaned across Herman and thrust the autograph book at him, asking him ever so nicely to contribute some words of wisdom.

  “My goodness, this is quite an honor,” he recovered quickly enough, “and I had better make the most of it, hadn’t I.” He stroked his mustache as he studied the opened album, apparently sorting through holy thoughts. Then he began to write, surprisingly like a schoolboy toiling away at a handwriting exercise.

  The Good Book is a stay against the darkness

  a source of wisdom

  and a comfort in troubled times.

  Yours in the fellowship of man

  Isaac M. Dezmosz

  “Written with a pen of iron and with the point of a diamond. That’s biblical,” he said, handing me back the Kwik-Klik with that click of his own. “Hallelujah, brother, I thank you for the chance to get those words down.” It seemed to me sort of a preachy inscription and didn’t even rhyme, but what else could I expect, I figured.

  “I see you wondering about the last name,” he provided next, noticing Herman’s puzzlement as he studied the inscr
iption over my shoulder. No wonder the man went by Reverend Mac, was my own reaction to what looked like a line from an eye chart.

  “A touch of Poland in the family, way back.” He smiled as if we all knew what a tangle the family could be. “Mankind is such a mixture sometimes.”

  Herman could readily agree to that, yawning prodigiously some more as he had made sure to do while the reverend wrote.

  Yawns are of course catching, and following his, mine were absolutely epidemic, according to my plan. “You know what,” I stretched drowsily, which did not take much pretending, “I’m all in but my shoelaces.”

  “Ja, we are feeling it,” Herman did his part, patting away another yawn as if doing a war whoop. “South Dakota is a long ride,” he borrowed the jackrabbit territory of the day before.

  If the Reverend Mac was disappointed in not pinning us down about whether we were with the Lord, he did not show it. “By all means, go to your rest.” He could not have been more gracious about excusing us to slumber. “Bus travel takes it out of a person.”

  He said a mouthful there. Naturally Herman was asleep almost the instant he shut his eyelids, and I was more than ready to doze off as well, with the bus heading due west through the Yellowstone valley into a sunset of colored clouds and shafts of sunlight that had the driver pulling his windshield visor all the way down. The dainty minister sat back, smiling to himself, one more Bible inflicted on potential sinners or proven ones, to his evident satisfaction. The last thing I remember before sleep claimed me, he was humming to himself, more than likely a hymn.

  • • •

  “OLD FAITHFUL INN, the Waldorf Astoria of Yellowstone National Park. You may disembark if you so wish—”