Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig

  WHO KNOWS how these things happen, what whiz of a trick the mind will pull when you’re least expecting it. Suddenly my thinking apparatus was jogged, the teasing smidgen about Yellowstone standing out clear as purple ink on the white paper of the autograph book. “Herman, I’ve got it! What you just said! Idea!”

  Misunderstanding me, he shook his head so hard it was a wonder his hat didn’t fall off. “Donny, no! We cannot go begging drivers for tickets or sneaking on bus or such. They will report us, snap like that”—he snapped his fingers like a shot—“to rangers and rangers to sheriff and sheriff to FBI and I will be locked up until cows trot home and you, you will be put in—” He hesitated to even speak my jail word, orphanage.

  “Huh-uh, that’s not what I meant,” I feverishly shook off his concern in turn. “I just finally got reminded of something. Listen up, okay?”

  Duly hanging on my every word as I explained my brainstorm, he couldn’t help still being dubious.

  “It better work right. Or ptfft—” He nodded an inch, plenty indicative, to a passing pair of park rangers looking as seriously loaded with authority in their flat hats and badges as any Crow cops.

  • • •

  WITH NO OTHER real choice, he accompanied me to the park headquarters, and in we went to the WONDERS OF YELLOWSTONE exhibit, and up to the information counter manned by a gray-headed ranger who no doubt had heard every possible tourist tale of mishap, including the one we were about to try on him. It didn’t help, either, that despite my coaching, Herman pronounced what we needed as the infirm-ary.

  Maybe his sympathy was simply feigned, but the ranger did peer over the counter as I made myself look miserable as possible, and accorded me, “Oh, the poor kid.” Poor, yeah, little did he know. Anyway, he directed us to the infirmary, and down a couple of hallways and around enough corners, we came to a door with that sign on it.

  As he found a place to sit and wait outside the office, Herman had some last jitters about me doing this alone, but I pointed out that we didn’t want the enemy alien matter to crop up somehow due to a mess of paperwork, did we, and he had to agree he’d better stay absent. “Be brave as anything, like Winnetou and Red Chief,” he resorted to again. I fished the necessary item out of the duffel and into my jacket pocket, and with heart pounding, bravely I hoped, stepped into where they treated the infirm.

  In the waiting room, a full-lipped and generously lipsticked young woman who reminded me strongly of Letty, except her crisp uniform was a nurse’s and I could not spot her name stitched on in the best place, was busy opening up for the day. Probably figuring I had taken a wrong turn in seeking the restroom, she smiled at me in a seasoned way. “Hello there, can I help you find something?”

  “Fishbone,” I croaked, pointing to my throat.

  “My goodness”—her manner changed that quick—“we need to take care of that, don’t we.” Plucking up an admittance form and sitting right down to administer it, she peeked past me, beginning to look perturbed. “Isn’t there anyone with you?”

  “They’re at the geyser.” I gagged some more. “I was supposed to catch up. Slept late, breakfast was slow.”

  The perturbed expression did not leave her, but she dropped the form. “We’ll have to get you on paper afterward, it sounds like. Right this way.” Her uniform swishing, she escorted me to the office off the waiting room and stuck her head in. “Throat case, Doc, the rainbow trout special strikes again. Give a shout if I’m needed, I’m still catching up at the desk.”

  The doctor was slipping on his starchy-clean white office coat as I entered the medical inner sanctum trying to keep my chin up like the bravest Indian who ever walked in moccasins. Not anything like I expected, with a surprising amount of gray in his crew cut and a twinkle in his eye, he greeted me with a smile as professional as the nurse’s even though I was a surprise patient.

  “Hello, buddy. Don’t I wish the dining room would stick with hotcakes and eggs for breakfast.” Busying himself with a tray of instruments to explore my throat, he maintained a soothing manner, observing that swallowing a fishbone was not a good way to start the day but at least I was not scalded or mauled.

  Ready, he patted the operating table that I couldn’t help looking at without thinking of Gram. “Hop up here, friend, and open wide so I can have a look.”

  “Uhm,” I jerked back to reality, “it’s no use.” The doctor stopped short at picking up a tongue depressor so he could go to work down my gullet. “I mean, I didn’t swallow a fishbone or anything.”

  Accustomed as he must have been to all kinds of odd cases, he nonetheless scrutinized me with a puzzled frown. “Then what’s your problem, hmm? Nothing broken, I hope?”

  “Yeah, that’s it! Me,” I seized my opening. “Flat broke.”

  “Are you telling me,” his tone turned as starchy as his medical coat, “you came in here to ask for—”

  “Eleven dollars and forty cents, is all.” I made it sound as reasonable as possible.

  That brought me a stare nearly strong enough in itself to throw me out of the office. “Starting kind of young, aren’t you?” he said along with it, more sternly yet. “At bumming?”

  “No, no, this isn’t that!” I protested, my voice taking off toward the high country. Prepared as I thought I was in asking for the money as nicely as I could, I fell apart at being thought some kind of a moocher.

  “What it is,” I sort of whimpered out, “I know Mae and Joe.” Shakily I pointed to the nameplate on his desk identifying him as PAUL SCHNEIDER, M.D., his gaze following my gesture uncomprehendingly. “Your mom and dad?” I provided as if he needed reminding of the fact.

  He still looked so baffled that I yanked out the Bible in desperation. “See, I’ll swear on it.” I clapped a hand over the chintzy paper cover. “We were friends right away fast. They were awful good to me, took my side against the dumb bus driver and everything, so I thought maybe you would be, too, at least a little bit, and really, all I need is eleven dollars and—”

  “Whoa, slow down.” A strapping guy as big as both of his parents put together, Dr. Schneider bent way down with his hands on his knees as if I needed closer examination. “The folks? Where do they come into this?”

  “On the dog bus. Just before the rollycoaster.” Herman’s lucky mention of the Greyhound driver community and seeing the sights, tra la la, popped the happily traveling Schneiders from that itch spot in my mind, along with their vital mention of a son who fixes up people who fall into hot pools or get mauled by grizzlies in Yellowstone. None of what I’d tried to say so far enlightened the doctor son nearly enough, I could tell, but desperation sometimes grows into inspiration. “Here, look, they wrote in my memory book.”

  To some extent, amusement replaced bafflement in his expression, I was relieved to see. “You’re a regular traveling library, aren’t you,” he kidded—at least I took it as kidding. Carefully grasping the autograph album, he studied the pair of inscriptions while rubbing a hand through his iron-gray bristle of hair. “That sounds like the old man, all right. And that mother of mine—” He silently read over the neatly composed lines, as did I, my eyes moist.

  I won’t say her contribution to poetry ranks up there with Longfellow, but I still think Mae Schneider’s tidy verse is beautiful.

  When twilight drops a curtain

  and pins it with a star,

  Remember that you have a friend

  Though she may wander far.

  After that, again bending close to listen when I told of getting robbed on the last Greyhound by the sonofabitching phony preacher, whom I barely restrained myself from calling that and more, the doctor frowned as if still working on his diagnosis. “Then where’s this uncle of yours? Why isn’t he here with you?”

  “Uhm, he’s sort of, you know”—I twirled my forefinger at my temple—“from the war. Scared of people in uniform. Like rangers. Or your nur
se, even. What do they call it, ‘nervous in the service’?”

  He mm-hmmed the way someone does to acknowledge they’ve heard what you’ve said, whether or not they believe it. “Why eleven dollars and forty cents?”

  “Bus fare. Like my uncle says, we’re just trying to get someplace south of the moon and north of Hell.”

  “Your uncle has a strange sense of geography,” he was half laughing. Turning serious again, he parked his hands in the side pockets of his office coat the way doctors do when they’re about to deliver the news, good or bad.

  “I’ve had some dillies come in here, but you beat all.” I swallowed real hard at that. Then that twitch of a smile showed up on him again. “Nellie,” he called out to the front desk. “I’ve invented a new cure. Bring me a ten and a five from the cash drawer, please.”

  Looking at me curiously, the nurse swished in, handed him the money, gave me another look, and left. Dr. Schneider started to pass me the ten-dollar bill and fiver, but then hesitated, giving me a heart flutter. “If you’re so confounded broke, what are you eating on?”

  “Nothing, really.”

  “Nellie,” he called through the doorway again, “the case has grown more serious. Bring me another five.”

  Adding that fiver, he handed me what amounted to a junior fortune, compared with my situation a minute before. Thanking him six ways to Sunday, I pocketed the money in a hurry and held out the autograph book. “Write down your address, please, huh? We’re gonna pay you back, honest.”

  “Are you. When Uncle Wiggily gets over being nervous in the service, hmm?” Skeptical as he may have been, he wrote his name and address in, topping it with what he said was a prescription for a conditon like mine.

  I met a boy with hair so red

  it lit up whatever he said.

  He does not need a lucky star,

  his gift of gab will carry him far.

  Passing the album back, Dr. Schneider gave me a last curious look as if still searching for a diagnosis. “You haven’t told me, buddy, where that bus fare is supposed to take you.”

  When I did so, he half laughed again, ending up with what I hoped was just a snatch of philosophy or something. “Good luck and Godspeed. Normally it takes most of a lifetime to reach there.”

  21.

  HERMAN HARDLY LET our newfound wealth rest in his hand before buyng bus tickets out of the natural wonderland of Yellowstone, but then tucked away the remainder of the money, this time in a shirt pocket that buttoned tightly, with the firm pronouncement “Belly timber must wait, up the road. No candy bars even, until we git where we go.”

  • • •

  SO IT WAS that we arrived worse for wear, inside as well as out, several hours and a couple of bus changes and long stretches of highway later and not done yet, at the Greyhound terminal in Butte, of all places, with Herman unshaven and me in a rodeo shirt showing every sign that I had been living in it day and night. Grooming was not foremost on our minds, however. Hunger was making me so cranky Herman had to relent on the candy bars, and he wolfed into the first of his as readily as I did mine while we hustled from the newsstand on into the waiting room. For once, we did not have to run eyes and fingers over the almighty map lettered COAST TO COAST—THE FLEET WAY for our connection and destination. Up on the Departures board along with bus times to Denver and Seattle and Portland and Spokane and other metropolises of the West was all we needed to know.

  3:10 TO WISDOM.

  • • •

  “DONNY, NO TIME to smart ourselves up like Einsteins,” Herman had scolded me in our slambang argument outside the Old Faithful Inn when I blurted that what we needed was Wisdom. “They throw me in the stony lonesome, like you say,” he grumbled with another furtive look over his shoulder. “I will have plenty time to git wise.”

  “No, no, not that kind,” I held rock-solid to my inspiration, surer than sure. “Wisdom is a real place we can go to, honest! See, it’s a town called that.” My finger had punched the map dot beside the name as if it were the doorbell button to the Promised Land. “Wisdom must amount to something, it has a bus depot and everything, way down there in the Big Hole.”

  Leaning in and skeptically adjusting his glasses, Herman tried to fathom all this. “Something been digged deep, and the town fell in?”

  “Huh-uh, the Big Hole is a sort of a—oh, what do they call it—a nice long valley out away from everything. It’s famous in Montana, honest.”

  “Famous, what for?”

  “Hay.”

  • • •

  THAT HAD SET him off again. “Cow food? Donny, are you lost in your mind? What good is hay to us? We cannot be cow farmers.”

  He continued to balk like that until I managed to spell out to him jobs on a ranch in the best hay country under the sun. “That’s the really great thing about the Big Hole,” I pressed my argument. “There’s hay up the yanger there, they’ll be putting it up the whole rest of the summer. Time enough for—”

  “Killer Boy Dillinger to go away from public eyes,” he thought out the rest for himself, nodding his head. “I take back that you left your mind, Donny,” he apologized with a sort of laugh dry as dust. “Let’s go to Wisdom place. Maybe some rub off, hah?”

  • • •

  SO HERE we were, only a pair of dog bus tickets short of the half-hidden town that was the gateway to hay heaven. I couldn’t wait to get there, brimming as I was with visions of driving the stacker team on some well-run ranch with no Wendell Williamson to say Nuhhuh, horsepower over horses, the birdbrain, while Herman was hired on as—well, that would have to be determined. Now that we had made it as far as Butte and one last change of buses, the ride of what appeared from the route map to be only a couple of hours at most should be a snap of the fingers for seasoned travelers like us.

  On the other hand, the distance to the ticket office on the far side of the jam-packed waiting room gave us both cause to pause. From the moment we stepped in through the ARRIVALS swinging doors, the Butte bus depot looked like a tough proposition. Throughout the waiting room, hard-eyed men with bent shoulders and faces with an awful lot of mileage on them, the best description was, were slouched on benches that would never be mistaken for church pews, and the women perched next to them in their none-too-good Sunday best for traveling did not look much better. Even more unsettling to me were scruffy boys my age roving through the crowd, shrilly hawking newspapers at the top of their voices. Orphans! was my immediate thought, captives of the state orphanage right here in the infamous mining city. Around the corner with its door wide open and just waiting . . .

  Looking back I realize that citizens of a famously tough copper company town with neighborhoods called Muckerville and Dublin Gulch, where miners with names like Maneater Duffy and Monkey Wrench Mike and Luigi the Blaster and hundreds of others worked in mines such as the Destroying Angel and the Look Out, were not likely to be a greeting committee of fashion plates. But we were not mistaken in there was a prickly feeling that we had better watch our step—that was Butte for you, if you were an outsider—as we cautiously moved off from the Departures board toward the ticket office.

  And then we both saw it at once. The bulletin board alongside the ticket window with all manner of things posted as usual, but standing out like a billboard to us the bold black lettering NEW THIS WEEK FROM YOUR FBI and that lineup of posters with Herman’s mug prominent on the very end.

  • • •

  STOPPING DEAD in his tracks, he stared at himself across the distance of the long waiting room. “Are they after me everywheres?” a whisper of despair escaped him.

  Did it ever seem so, at our each and every turn, but since then I have caught up with the lore that the dictatorial boss of the Federal Bureau of Investigation at the time, J. Edgar Hoover, used Butte as a Siberia for agents who had fallen out of his favor. Having too little else to do, this band of exiles was notoriou
s for plastering the city and the country around with the latest MOST WANTED posters, apparently in the hope of netting criminals in the backwaters of Montana. It was simply our rotten luck of the moment that, with his face here, there, and anywhere, their most likely catch was Herman the German.

  • • •

  “HERE.” I tried to disguise him by handing him what little was left of my candy bar. “Hold this in front of your face and pretend to eat it while we go across there. We’re running out of time to get tickets.” Queerly, the schedule board did not show any Wisdom bus beyond the one, even the next day. If I had learned anything from experience, it was to catch the bus first and deal later with whatever came along.

  Herman may have agreed in principle, but as we set out to edge through the waiting room without attracting notice, all at once he faded like a shadow into the men’s restroom, leaving me abandoned with “Donny, wait here. I be right back.”

  • • •

  OH, GREAT. The worst possible time for a call of nature. Now I was stranded there trying to seem inconspicuous while minding the duffel bag and wicker suitcase, both of which looked suspiciously ratty even alongside the Butte mode of dusty old luggage. Right away I caught Herman’s case of jumpiness. My imagination could feel the entire depot population looking at me, especially those sharp-eyed newsboys roaming the waiting room like coyotes on the hunt.

  “Hey, looka the greeny,” one of them jeered as they circled past me.

  “Yah, fresh off the boat,” laughed another. “Probably got that willow yannigan from his granny in the old country.”

  Determinedly looking casual, I tried to kill time by gazing around and around the terminal with surpassing interest except at the incriminating bulletin board. No Herman, no Herman, as minutes ticked away. What the hell was he doing in there all this time? Had he been rolled by some thug?

  At last, thanks be, Herman emerged, still in one piece. Although not quite. I had to look twice to be sure of what I was seeing. Surprise enough, he did not have his eyeglasses on, which he all but slept with. But the shocker was that he had taken out his glass eye.