by Ivan Doig
• • •
NO SOONER had our whispered conversation ended than a shout from down the aisle roused the Jersey Mosquito, sitting across from us. “Hey, Skeeter, you old skinflint, pass the bugle,” the Johnson family member known as Peerless Peterson, if I remembered the roll call right, piped up, spitting a tobacco plug onto the floor, evidently to clear his mouth.
Not for the purpose it sounded like, though. “I’m the man what can, ye damn moocher,” Skeeter yipped back, but instead of a musical instrument he fumbled out from somewhere something long and slim wrapped in a paper bag. Seeing me onlooking in confusion, Skeeter paused to explain, “Hoppy ain’t supposed to see any bottles on the bus. This way, he don’t. Right, Hop?”
“You have got the only Greyhound driver with blinders on,” Hoppy agreed to that, perilously close to the truth according to the way he hunched over the wheel to peer fixedly through the windshield as the bus shimmied on the washboard road.
Skeeter, proper host, was screwing the top off the hidden bottle when he noticed Herman craning over in curiosity along with me. “Hey there, One Eye, you want a swig? This is giggle juice you don’t get just any old where, it’s—”
“Wait, don’t tell him,” I jumped in barely in time. “He’ll tell you.”
Herman received the sacked bottle from the surprised Skeeter, nodded his thanks, tipped it up like sounding the bugle charge, and chugged enough of a drink to swirl in his mouth good and plenty. He swallowed as if the contents were tough going down, but when he got his voice, he announced without a shade of a doubt:
“Fruit wine, plenty fermented. Wild Irish Rose, I betcha.”
“Damned if he ain’t right,” Skeeter said, pop-eyed with awe. “How’d ye do that? Boys, we got a miracle worker here. At the hooch store I asked for Rosie in a skirt”—he displayed the bagged bottle Herman had without hesitation handed back to him—“I was gonna have some fun with you fellas whose tongues has been worked to leather by too much Thunderbird. But One Eye nailed it first taste. Beat that!”
Highpockets, who didn’t seem to miss anything, shifted in his seat and pinned a penetrating look on me. “What’s more, his English improves around a bottle, eh? Usually that operates the other way.”
“Yeah, well”—I didn’t have time to think up any other explanation for Herman’s tasting talent as displayed in the Schooner and now in these circumstances, so a sample of the actual story had to serve—“in the old country he worked in one of those places where they make beer, see, and that was part of his job, guzzling all the other beers to see how those stacked up against theirs. It tuned up his taster, you might say.”
“That’s the job I want in the next life,” Fingy was heard from, clasping his hand and a half in prayer.
• • •
GENERAL ACCLAMATION FOLLOWED that, along with the bottle passing to ready volunteers turning bugler until it ran dry. I sat back to collect myself, the already more than full day, which was winding to somewhere along a tightrope-wide back road pressing in on me, filling me with that feeling of being transported in more ways than one. This back-road trip was not the longest of my life, yet was taking me farther than I had ever dreamed. Letty’s inscription in the autograph book promised Life is a zigzag journey, and as she said, truer words were never. By now Manitowoc, the Crow rodeo grounds, the marooned time at Old Faithful, scary Butte, each and every one was in the memory book in my head as well as the one in my pocket, while an unforeseen chapter waited ahead. On the one hand, what was happening now tingled in me as a kind of off-kilter excitement, similar to that dreamy daze between sleep and waking in the morning, when what is real and what the mind has manufactured in the night are not clearly divided. At this point, Gram would have told me not to get red in the head and over-imagine things, but this last bus carrying Herman and me and our rough-and-ready gang of new companions inevitably made my mind fly around. Here we were, on a journey my imagination couldn’t resist playing with, like being on a stagecoach—if the dog bus didn’t qualify sufficiently as the modern version, the Rocky Mountain Stage Line and Postal Courier surely did—packed with the equivalent of owl hoots, the roamers and ramblers, taking new names for themselves as they pleased, out to experience everything of the West.
• • •
MY REVERIE was broken when Peerless Peterson, whose nickname became self-evident as he stuffed a chaw in his cheek from a packet of Peerless tobacco, leaned toward me and asked confidentially:
“Hey there, Snag, what was it that happened to your grampop’s peeper?”
“Knife fight.”
That impressed all those listening in as much as I’d hoped. Herman, as surprised as anyone, thought fast and joined the spirit of things. He took me by the ear one more time but only to tug me close so he could go on at whispered length. I almost could not believe what he was coming up with. It was perfect! Herman at his absolute little-think best beat Karl May by a mile, and when he was finished now, I gave my brightest snaggy smile and reported:
“Gramps says to tell you our last name is Schneider, not that it counts for anything in the here and now, we savvy. But he wants you to know Schneider means tailor in the old country, so all he did was cut the other guy some new buttonholes. In his hide.”
The whole busload roared approval of that description, which no doubt went straight into hobo lingo. Relieved, I sat back, surreptitiously stroking the medicine pouch beneath my shirt, thanking the arrowhead for the luck of encountering Mae and Joe and the generous doctor and their fortunate name, while Herman accepted accolades for the tale with a grin halfway back to Germany.
Things settled down then, the passengers trading gripes about railroad bulls who patrolled the switchyards like it was a sin to climb onto a perfectly inviting empty boxcar, and countless other indignities the Johnson family had to suffer. I started to relax somewhat, deciding maybe the bus was not going to topple into the river and drown us just yet, although I did not quit stroking the arrowhead every little while to ward that off. But then, as I kept catching snatches of conversation as the Jersey Mosquito yakkety-yakked with Fingy while Overland Pete swapped observations on humanity with Oscar the Swede, a certain feeling came over me. It was unmistakable, and it had me clasping what lay half forgotten in my coat pocket as if it were a precious rediscovery. I had hit the jackpot, I realized. An entire busload of all kinds, here for the taking with a Kwik-Klik.
Excitedly I nudged Herman, drawing a grunt and an inquisitive look. “You know what?” I said close to his ear, resisting the urge to grab it as he had grabbed mine. “I need to get these guys in the autograph book. Nobody else has names anything like them.”
“Except maybe racehorses,” he spiked that with a guttural laugh. “Ja, fill your book with odd Johnsons.” He yawned, the Wild Irish Rose perhaps having its effect. “Busy day. While you are gitting them to write, I am going to catch winks.”
I still don’t know how he could do it, popping off to sleep like that aboard a bus snorting its exhaust and rattling like crazy on the washboard road, but there he went, soundly slumbering by the time I had my pen and album ready and intentions sorted out.
I had brains enough to start with Highpockets, and staggered my way down the aisle to his front seat as the bus bucked along. Ordinarily nothing seemed to surprise him, but this did. He eyed the white album none too trustfully as I squatted by him and reeled off my request known by heart. “If I was to dab something in for you,” he questioned, “how would you want it signed?”
“Just with, you know, your moniker.” Then I got inspired. “How about Highpockets, on the last bus to Wisdom.”
“Fair enough.” He took the Kwik-Klik and, as I had hoped, made a little music on the page.
There’s a land somewhere
so pretty and fair,
with rivers of milk and shores of jelly,
where every man has a millionaire belly.
“There you go, the hobo anthem, verse number about a hundred and fifty probably.” He loosened up into almost a smile as he shifted the album back to me.
“It’s nice. I like it.” Now I had to try Bughouse Louie sitting next to him, who had been feigning disinterest all the while Highpockets was writng. First, though, I needed my curiosity satisfied. “Can I ask you something?” I stuck with Highpockets. “How come you and the other ho—haymakers wait to take the last bus?”
“I might ask you and One Eye the same,” he said mildly, but still giving my heart a flutter as the MOST WANTED poster loomed into the picture. “But I won’t.”
He leaned back, his big frame squashing the seatback cushion, and with the practiced eye of a lifetime traveler, scanned the hard-used and unmaintained interior of the bus, which in that respect matched its exterior. “Not exactly soft, swift, and smooth, is it, going by dog in the last of the pack.” The bus shuddered across the metal rails of a stock crossing in answer. “But the reason we hold off,” he resumed, “to catch this old crate on its last run is because that puts us past the green hay, when ranchers who never learn any better start mowing too soon and try to stack the cut before it dries like it ought to. Haying is tough enough without the stuff being heavy and slippery.” He glanced at me to see if I knew that, which I did.
“Uh-huh, real smart,” I confirmed, thinking past that seasonal maneuver to the larger matter of Wisdom and the Big Hole and the reputation as a valley of prosperity. “But don’t any of you ever, ah, hole up there? I mean, stick around in jobs besides haying?”
Highpockets emphatically shook his head. “Hoboes don’t stick,” he put it in simplest terms. “We’re not barnacles.”
Bughouse Louie backed that with a smile that displayed gums instead of teeth. “I sure ain’t.”
Their point fully made, I thanked the one for honoring my album and was about to ask the other to do the same when I was flatly turned down. “Can’t possibly,” Bughouse Louie cramped a hand to show me. “Got the arthritics.”
• • •
DISAPPOINTED BUT EXPRESSING my sympathy, I moved on from what would have been that terrific name on the page to someone I figured would have no such trouble wielding a pen, the plain-looking hobo called Shakespeare. By appearance, he might have been anything from a bank teller to an actual whey-faced minister but for his hat stained dark from sweat and the faded gray Texas tux work shirt. Accepting the album as if by natural right, he scanned the verse Highpockets had written and sniffed, “Pockets sticks to the tried and true.” Not him, according to the way he waved the pen over the waiting page while he thought, his lips moving, straining his brain from the looks of it. Then when he had the rhyme or rhythm or something, he wrote lines like a man possessed.
The king called for his fiddlers three.
He bade them, “Play for me your fiddle-diddle-dee.”
The fiddlers cried, “Oh no, sire, not we!”
The queen giggled and said, “They only fiddle that with me.”
—an original rime by Shakespeare
Sort of dirty though that seemed to me, I minded my manners and thanked its author—you don’t get the name Shakespeare in an autograph book just any old day—and let the sway of the bus carry me to the next candidate along the row, Overland Pete. Seeing me coming with the Kwik-Klik and the open album, he shook a hand as pitiful looking as Bughouse Louie’s. “I’ll pass. Arthritis is acting up something fierce.”
Huh. I had never heard of an epidemic of that, but it seemed to be hitting half the people on the bus. Before I could choose my next candidate, I heard an urgent “Psst.” The Jersey Mosquito several seats back crooked a finger at me.
When I went and knelt by him, he brought his face of crinkles and wrinkles down almost to mine to confide, “Ye want to be a leetle keerful with that book of yours, Snag. The learnin’ of some of the boys didn’t happen to have readin’ and writin’ in it.”
“I’m sorry.” My face flamed. “I should have thought of that. B-but I really want to get anybody I can.”
“Then all’s you need to do is wait till payday and keep an eye out then,” the man known as Skeeter counseled. “Them that takes their wages in hard money prob’ly can’t write their names to endorse a check. The rest of us is regular scholars enough to cash our skookum paper right there in the Watering Hole, that’s the bar in town. More eefficient that way.”
I thanked him for that vital lesson and scooted back to my seat. Goddamn-it-to-hell-anyway, I hunched there stewing to myself, was there no limit to what I had to learn by hand, this summer like no other? Feeling sorry for myself and the autograph book, I was fanning through the empty pages that would never know Overland Pete and Bughouse Louie and maybe too many others to make the pursuit worthwhile, when Herman came to the rescue.
“Donny, nothing to worry. Other people will write in your book up to the full, I betcha.” I hadn’t even known he was awake—it was twice as hard to tell, after all, with only one eye to judge by—but now, same as ever, he took in the passing landscape as if the West still was the Promised Land, rough road to get there or not. “Tell you what,” he eased my disappointment, whispering low to not attract further attention from the hoboes in their rounds of bottle and gab, “I will say to you by heart an old German verse and we will make it into English, or something like.” That sounded like it was worth a try, and I perked up as he and I went back and forth over how words looked and what they meant, until we were both satisfied.
When you take a look in your memory book
Here you will find the lasting kind,
Old rhymes and new, life in review,
Roses in the snow of long ago.
“Wow, that’s pretty nice,” I said when the final version stood out on the album page in Herman’s scrawly handwriting, “although I’m not sure if I get it all.”
“Nothing to worry, you will someday.” He stretched from the exertions of this day, but grinning as he did so. “Last bus is gitting somewheres at last. See, looking more like Promised Land.” He drew my attention to a broad gap ahead that the river and the road both relaxed into, so to speak, the landscape turning into the best ranching country I had ever seen. In life along the Rocky Mountain Front, I was used to unbroken cliffs and crags always towering to the clouds in the west, but here the mountains circled the entire skyline, an unforgettable surround of peaks painted beautiful with streaks of snow and the blue of distance. My heart dancing, I gazed around and around at the ring of natural wonders, always coming back to the long valley of ranches and their patterns on the land, where the first hayfields lay tawny in the sun.
23.
THE SCATTER OF buildings the bus pulled into at our destination did not look like much of a town. Much of anything.
While the tired dog bus chugged along a wide spot in the highway that was the main street, I tallied a couple of gas stations, a mercantile, a farm equipment dealership, a post office, the Watering Hole saloon as mentioned by the Jersey Mosquito, a supper club that looked like it had started life as a hash house, and a sprinkle of houses around. I had to admit, I’d seen Palookavilles that amounted to more. Yet the community of Wisdom famously carried one of the best names ever, by way of Lewis and Clark, who were thinking big when they passed through on their expedition and grandly dubbed three nearby rivers the Philosophy, the Philanthropy, and the Wisdom. None of those graftings lasted through time and local reference—the Wisdom became simply the Big Hole River, which proved to be the roundabout torrent our road had hugged so closely, and still was flowing good and wide here at our destination—but the little town picked up the name and used its remote location to good advantage as the provision point for the great hay valley; the nearest municipality of any size, Dillon, was sixty-five miles away through a mountain range.
I mention this only because there was something about Wisdom, scanty as it looked from a bus window, that
immediately appealed to me. Anticipation can cause that, but somehow I felt Herman and I had arrived at a place that did not make too much of itself nor too little, and that felt about right. So, I was alarmed when Hoppy the driver did not even slow down as we passed the black-and-white enameled GREYHOUND sign hung to one side of the mercantile’s display window.
“Hey, wait, he missed the depot!” I burst out, Herman jerking to attention beside me.
Overland Pete and the California Kid and some others hooted as if that were the funniest thing they’d ever heard, but Skeeter again rescued me from further embarrassment. “We ain’t there yet, Snag. The one thing special about this excursion is, Hoppy dumps us off right where we’re puttin’ up for the night.”
Soon enough, those words bore truth. The bus jounced off the highway onto a stub dirt road, heading straight for the brush along the river. “We want the beachfront accommodations down the road, Hoppy,” Highpockets ordered up. Which drew the peevish response, “I know, I know. How god-many times have I druv the passel of you there?”
Not far from town, near a hidden-away clearing in the thick diamond willows, we rolled to a stop. “Everybody off, far as the golden chariot goes,” the driver recited, as I’d have guessed he did every year.
As everyone piled into the aisle and out, Herman and I were the last off the bus, and the final ones to have our belongings hurled out of the baggage compartment by Hoppy, who wished us luck with a shake of his head. We turned to have our first good look at a hobo jungle.
Herman, who had witnessed the Depression, chewed the side of his mouth before saying, “Hooverville without shacks, even.”
The poorfarm without walls or a roof, was my own spooked reaction to the scene of rough-dressed men strewn around a campfire in the dusk as our own bunch from the bus joined them, pitching their bindles and bedrolls into whatever nooks in the brush they could find. I was horribly afraid Herman was going to remind me it was my eye-dea that brought us to this—he sure was entitled to—but he confined himself to “Find ourselfs a place for the night, we better.”