Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig

  I grabbed Herman’s arm so fiercely he drew back from me in a pained squint. “We absolutely have to get on this crew.”

  “Hah? How?”

  That, I had no idea of, but I knew our best chance in the Big Hole was about to be lost if we didn’t try something. “C’mon, grab our stuff, we need to catch up with him.”

  • • •

  WE DID SO, crashing our way out of the hobo jungle so loudly the foreman looked around at us in surprise as he reached his pickup. “Hey, wait, Mr. Jones, sir. Didn’t you maybe forget you need a stacker team driver?”

  The ranch honcho leaned against a rear fender, crossing his arms at my challenge. “Not really. I figure to handle that myself, be right there at the stack with the crew that way.”

  “But then what if there’s a breakdown and you have to go to town for parts or somebody’s cows get into a field and you have to go and dog them out or there’s a runaway and a dump rake goes all skoogey from hitting a ditch and maybe the raker does, too?” I started down a well-remembered list of the Double W haying mishaps. “Or what if the cook throws a fit and quits and—”

  “Hey, hey, I have enough keeping me awake at night already,” the foreman put a stop to my onslaught.

  Thinking over what I’d reeled off, he pushed away from the pickup and turned to Herman, who was trying to encourage our way onto the crew with nods and shrugs and grins while keeping a silence and leaving things to me. “Your boy here makes a pretty good argument for you. It’s not necessarily nutty to have somebody else drive the stacker team and free me up for whatever the hell else happens. You do look like you’ve had experience of some kind”—maybe too much experience, from his tone as he eyed Herman’s lined face and general muss from sleeping in a culvert—“but where’d you last do your teamstering?”

  “Not him,” I rushed the words before Herman could say something guaranteed to confuse the issue. “Me.”

  “Yeah?” Jones laughed. “You’re the horseman of the family?”

  “Oh sure, you bet. I’ve been a stacker driver since I was eight. On a big ranch. Up north.”

  “Eight, huh.” He played that around in his mustache as he studied me. “Just how old does that make you as we’re standing here on the green earth?”

  I was perpetually being told I was big for my age. Wasn’t it logical for that number to grow to catch up with the rest of me, in this instance? “Thirteen,” I said. He looked skeptical. “My next birthday.” The next after that, at least. An approximation.

  He waited for me to say more, but when I didn’t, he let it go. Now he scanned Herman from his city shoes to his eyeglasses. “How about the mister here, who you seem to do the talking for? I don’t hear him owning up to advanced years like some.”

  “He’s my grandfather, but he married young.” I hoped that would help in my fudging away from whatever Herman’s age was. “See, we’re all each other has,” I laid that on thick while Herman instinctively stayed mute, “and we’re sort of on hard times. We really, really need jobs.”

  The foreman still hesitated. “Nothing against you, but you’re still just a kid, and you can’t have been around workhorses any too many years, whatever you say.”

  “Make you a deal,” I scrambled to come up with. “If I can’t harness a team the way you like, as fast as anybody else on the place, and show you I can handle the reins, you can fire me right away and we’ll walk back to town.”

  The man called Jones settled his hat and perhaps his mind. “Now you’re talking about something. I could stand that kind of guarantee on this whole damn crew—these hoboes are sometimes the teamsters they say they are and sometimes not. You’re on. Toss your stuff in the pickup and I’ll test you out soon as we’re at the ranch.”

  He started toward the pickup cab for his daybook as Highpockets and Harv and the others emerged from the kip in the brush, swinging their bindles and bedrolls at their sides. “One more thing,” I said quick, stopping him in mid-reach for the door handle. “My grandfather has to come with me. Watch out for me and so on. I’m a, you know, minor.”

  “Damn it, you’re going to have me hiring the whole hobo jungle before you’re done.” He thought for a second. “All there’d be is grinding sickles and mending broke-down stuff, sort of second fiddle to the choreboy. Not much of a job, general handyman is what it amounts to.”

  It was going to take some serious stretching, but I was about to try to make the case that Herman, who never in his life had been on a ranch outside the Germanic pages of Karl May, could somehow be generally handy, when he startled us both with the exclamation “Sickles!” and gave the hiring foreman the thumb and finger OK sign. “Ho ho, handled hundreds sickles in the old country.”

  Both the foreman and I drew back our heads to look at Herman in a new way, Jones eyeing him now with curiosity or suspicion or both. “I thought your grandkid here did the talking for you. That sounded like you found your tongue all of a sudden.”

  “I talk broken, but apprehend some, the English,” Herman said blandly.

  I pitched in, “He means he pretty much savvies what you’re saying.”

  “That’s welcome news.” He looked hard at me and then at Herman. “You can talk American, but he can’t? How’s that come to be?”

  “My granddad hasn’t been here that long from the old country,” I made up offhandedly. I still was worried about Herman at large on a ranch. “There’s a little something maybe you better know.” I dropped my voice. “He needs to keep out of the way of the livestock. See, he doesn’t speak enough of our language for the horses to understand him, just for instance.”

  “What old country is that, anyway?” Jones demanded. “I’d have thought ‘Giddyup’ and ‘Whoa’ were pretty much the same anywhere.”

  “Switzerland,” I chose willy-nilly out of Herman’s world of toast maps.

  “No hooey? A yodeleer, is he?” The foreman seemed entertained by the idea, insofar as I could tell past his mustache. “All right, you’re both hired, long enough to prove yourselves, anyhow. Let’s get you down in the daybook.” He reached into the seat of the pickup for a big ledger. “Start with you, teamster whiz. You’re—?”

  “Snag.” I bared the sharp stump at him in what I hoped was a grin.

  His mouth twitched. “When you’re not being a knight of the road.”

  “Scotty.” He waited for more and I produced, “Scotty Schneider.”

  With a sense of wonder or something very much like it, I saw that instant new name go into ink as he wrote it down. “And what’s his?”

  “Uh, Gramps.”

  “You got to do better than that.”

  “Fritz Schneider, I am,” Herman spoke up, and if I kept a straight face, I don’t know how.

  “There, you’re both on the payroll.” The foreman jotted down Herman’s alias or whatever it was to join mine. Done with us at last, he turned to do the same for the rest of the crew waiting in curiosity at the rear of the pickup, first sorting out me and Herman. “Youth and beauty up front with me. The rest of you, dump your plunder in back and jump in.”

  • • •

  “THAT WAS A GOOD think by you,” Herman murmured as we settled into the pickup seat to wait for our new employer. “Some Swiss speak German.”

  “They do? I figured they talked Switzer or something. Whoo, that was lucky.”

  “Luck is the star we steer by,” he invoked for the how manyeth time. I was in agreement for once.

  “You know what, Herman?” My mood was so high it was a wonder my head wasn’t hitting the roof of the pickup. “We’ve maybe got it knocked, once and for all.”

  “Donny, you are extra happy. These jobs are that good?”

  “Didn’t you see the clasp in his hatband? The livestock brand?”

  The French salute, meaning No.

  “It’s the Diamond Buckle. Guess
who owns the ranch.”

  26.

  ALL BUT EXPLODING with excitement, I managed to pass the harnessing test—I will say, avoiding a ten-mile walk back to town is no small incentive—even though in the team of workhorses I was given, I had to stretch higher than I thought possible to struggle various straps into place on the lofty back of the huge mare, Queen.

  Panting as I finished up on the other workhorse, a sleepy-looking black gelding called Brandy, I couldn’t help asking about the gray mare looming out of her stall like the giant mother of the horse race. “How come she’s called something nice like Queen instead of Big Mama or something?”

  All during my flinging on of harness and scrambling to buckle up this and that, Jones was leaning against the barn wall with his hands in his pockets, critically observing. “The owner’s idea, from cards,” he replied, appropriately poker-faced. “Named her that way because he always draws to a queen, thinks it brings him luck. Worthwhile females being as scarce in poker as they are in life generally, according to him.”

  “Hah, he is some thinker.” Herman, nervous spectator, took that way of warning me not to point out half of that problem could be solved with the French bible deck in his duffel.

  Curiosity got the best of me, all this talk of “the owner” as if it were some deep dark secret. Feeling invincible after my harnessing success, I rashly brought the matter out into the open.

  “Is Rags around?”

  The foreman looked at me sharply, then included Herman. “All right, geniuses. How’d you already figure out the place is his? Most of these ’boes could be working for Hopalong Cassidy, for all they know.”

  When I related sighting the purple Cadillac at Crow Fair and what ensued, and with Herman chiming in about what a bee-yoot-iffle ride Rags had made, Jones relaxed his scrutiny of us somewhat. “Well, good for you. I don’t advertise who owns this outfit, right off the bat, because guys can get the idea somebody like Rags ought to pay higher wages. No worries about that with you two who are just lucky to be here, am I right?” He secured headshakes from Herman and me as if Oh no, any notion of a larger paycheck would never cross our minds.

  “Anyway, Rags is riding the circuit” the topic was finished off. “He’ll pull in here big as life sooner or later.” Shoving off from the wall, the foreman headed out of the barn saying gruffly, “Leave the team tied up until I get the rest of this world-beating crew lined out on their jobs. Come on, let’s go to the bunkhouse and settle you in.”

  • • •

  MY FEET BARELY tickled the ground, I was on such a cloud as I crossed the yard of the ranch owned by the champion saddle bronc rider of the world. Was this perfect or what? Miles better than my try at talking Gram into letting me hang on at the Double W back at the start of summer. Look at all that had happened since—in the giddiness of the moment I folded the high points of dog bus life over the low ones—and hadn’t I gained not only the black arrowhead that was big medicine, but Herman, who was something of a found treasure himself except for being a few kinds of a fugitive? Out here he was hidden away, in hobo company, where nobody inquired too closely about one’s past. To top it all, even if I didn’t have a framed certificate to prove it like the gallant Twin Cities newspaper van driver, I now was a teamster!

  Accordingly, I was half into another world, one totally without any Bible-dispensing pickpocket nor MOST WANTED posters nor the kid prison called an orphanage—nor for that matter, Aunt Kate—when Herman gradually dropped back a few steps behind Jones’s purposeful strides toward the bunkhouse and I heard a significant “Ssst.”

  Slowing until I was next to him, surprised at his perturbed expression, I whispered, “What’s the matter?”

  “We are hired, ja?” he made sure in a return whisper. “Knocked, we have got it?”

  “Yeah! Out the far end!”

  “Good, good. But one something is on my mind,” he fretted, quite a change from his usual Nothing to worry.

  Before Herman could go on, Jones glanced back at the pair of us. “Just to scratch my curiosity itch, where do the pair of you fetch up after haying? Where’s home?”

  “Oh, where we live when we’re not with the Johnson family, you mean,” I had to do my best to field that because Herman’s face went as lifeless as a MOST WANTED poster. “About the time school starts we’ll have to go back east to—” Herman went even more rigid. “Pleasantville. It’s around New York, you know. Gramps has a job there, he’s the handyman at the Reader’s Digest place.”

  Jones chewed his mustache as he contemplated us. “So he’s got a job there and a job here, does he. Lucky, lucky him.” Reciting straight out of the put-upon ranch foreman’s book of rules on dealing with the odder elements of a crew, he let us know, “Out here, we’re not big on previous, wherever or whatever a person comes from, understand? Just so’s you can do this job.”

  “Ja, we savvy,” Herman forced out more loudly than needed. I gave him a look, wondering what could be spooking him when everything was going so slick.

  Before I could nudge him aside and ask that question, Jones halted us, saying, “Hold on a sec, here’s somebody you might as well meet and get it out of the way.” He called across the yard to a man limping along toward the chickenhouse carrying a pan of feed. “New hands, Smiley, come get acquainted.”

  The choreboy, as I recognized him to be and Herman was destined to find out, swerved toward us swinging a leg held out stiff. Holy wow, I thought to myself, first Louie Slewfoot and then the gimpy bus driver Hoppy, and now this lame specimen, all in one summer. Yeeps. Maybe they came in threes, like when famous people died, according to Gram.

  • • •

  NOW CAME OUR INTRODUCTION to Smiley, former rodeo clown, whose name outside the costume might as well have been Cranky as Hell. Clowns as I have known them, essential performers at rodeos in drawing bulls and mean horses away from bucked-off riders at the risk of their own lives, those entertainers in baggy overalls and whiteface makeup stayed physically fit from all the running and ducking and dodging in the soft dirt of the arena. This one had gone to flab and deeper ruin from the look of him, with a beer gut that might have looked comical in a costume but in ranch jeans hung precipitously over his belt. Facially he seemed to be sucking on something sour all the time, lips twisted and eyes narrowed. An encounter with a Brahma bull, we discovered soon enough from bunkhouse gossip, left him with what is called a cowboy leg, crooked and off at an angle, causing that stiff-limbed gait. He seemed to resent the world of the able-bodied with every step he took. Certainly he acknowledged Herman and me with minimum enthusiasm, muttering, “How ya doin’” without interest and immediately turning to Jones to demand, “When you gonna let me shoot that cow?”

  “How many times do I have to tell you,” the foreman gritted out, “no one is shooting any livestock on a ranch owned by Rags Rasmussen. He’ll can you so fast your head will swim. Waltzing Matilda is the best milker on the place, so don’t you touch her except pulling those tits,” Jones went on, as if this had been said too many times before, too.

  “A bitch from hell, is what she is,” Smiley whined. “Shat on me again.” The evidence was fresh and green all over the bottom half of his pant leg. “Did her best to kick me, too. I tell you, she’s a killer.”

  “It is your job to milk the cows, no matter what. Waltzing Matilda included. Enough said,” Jones declared.

  Unsatisfied, Smiley scowled—a severe contradiction in terms, but that was Smiley for you—toward a pasture next to the barn where three cattle were grazing as peacefully as a Wisconsin dairy picture, or rather two of them were. The other was a bony brown-and-white Guernsey with jutting hip bones and a sort of outlaw longhorn look about her, even though she had been dehorned to stubs. Merely from the way she swished her tail, as if spoiling for a target to use it on, I would have bet solid money that was Waltzing Matilda. Herman, maybe from his own alien notoriety, studied the scan
dalous cow with interest.

  “I have some actual good news for you, if you’ll simmer down a minute and listen,” Jones informed the would-be cow shooter, who dubiously clammed up and waited. “You’re off of grinding sickles. One Eye here will be handling that chore.”

  “Ja,” Herman put in, as if sickles were his ordinary diet. “Like in the old country.”

  “He’s welcome to all those sonofabitching things in the whole god-blasted world as far as I’m concerned,” Smiley accepted that with a fresh twist of the lips and lumbered crookedly off to the chickenhouse, bawling in a voice that had not lost any of its arena volume, “Chick, chick, chick, come and get it, you damn featherdusters.”

  Well, evidently not everyone thought the Diamond Buckle ranch was perfect.

  • • •

  ALTHOUGH HERMAN was furrowing his brow again after the encounter with Smiley, it took more than a used-up rodeo clown to dent my spirits, and I nearly trod on the foreman’s heels into the bunkhouse. The one long single room was the ranch standard in those days, never any bargain, with discolored tan beaverboard walls and bare wooden floor and iron-frame cots in two rows and a potbellied stove and a battered table with chairs that had rungs missing. Merely quarters for drifting laborers who came and went with the seasons, the bunkhouse for me was a palace where I’d be in with grown men, actual haymakers, a full-fledged member of the crew. Beat that, at eleven going on twelve.

  Gab stopped as the foreman stepped in, the hoboes apparently not short of conversation anytime and anywhere. As Herman and I closely followed Jones in, I looked around real quick in concern about the bunk situation, and saw there were two empty ones off in a corner. Highpockets told me with a simple shift of his eyes in that direction that he had saved those for us, and we lost no time in unrolling our bedrolls and chucking the duffel out of the way.

  “We’ll get going on the machinery pretty quick, the mowers and stacker can be greased up and the rakes can have new teeth put in, any fix-up you see that needs doing,” the foreman was addressing us all. “First order of business, though, is right here.” Reaching into his hip pocket, he began handing out small leather belts of a kind Herman and I alone recognized.