Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig

  “The Pockets is right.” Herman loomed into the room, there is no other word for it, knuckles clenched white on his straight razor as he fixed a snake-killing look on Smiley. “Scotty is good boy. I will take care of his educating.”

  “Don’t get your dander up.” Smiley backed down at the sight of Herman and that razor. “I was only funnin’ with the boy, no harm in that, huh?”

  “Do your funnying on somebody else.” Herman’s warning hit home on the now wordless Smiley, most of the rest of the crew sitting up and watching, with Highpockets and Harv half onto their feet to head matters off if that razor came into play. But Herman, with a contemptuous “Puh” at Smiley, crossed the room to his duffel bag and tucked the ivory-handled cutter away, snapping me to attention with “Let’s catch air. Come help me with sickles.”

  Neither of us said anything as we crossed the yard to the blacksmith shop in the waning daylight, our long shadows mixing together on the ground in our strides. I felt guilty, although not sure why, and sneaking a look at Herman’s set face was no help.

  I trailed him into the blacksmith shop past the grindstone, sickles much too plainly not the first thing on his mind. He pulled out a pair of stout boxes from under the workbench and upended them for us to sit on. The sagging old shop, which had been a shambles at first, littered with stray tools and rusting pieces of metal and anything else that collects from breakdowns and repairs on a ranch, he had made tidy as a hardware store between his sessions of sharpening sickles. It has taken me until now to fully realize he had repeated the greenhouse, far, far from Manitowoc—an orderly haven for himself.

  “Donny”—he made no pretense at Scotty or Snag—“I am having doubts about this place.”

  “W-why?” The Big Hole was showing off in the evening light, the mountaintops still goldenly sunlit while dusk softened the valley of hayfields to buckskin color, with the first town lights of Wisdom sparkling in the distance. To me, the Diamond Buckle ranch right then could not be beat, in any way I could think of.

  Herman crouched forward toward me, as if making sure his words penetrated. “Bad company, you are keeping. Not your fault. My own.”

  “Aw, come on, Herman, don’t let what happened in there get you down,” I pooh-poohed the bunkhouse episode. “Smiley is as loose as the spool on a shithouse door and you shut him up good and that’s that.”

  Herman passed a hand over his face. “There is some of what I mean. You are picking up language like from the garbage dump.”

  “So what?” If he was wrought up, so was I. “Goddamn-it-to-hell-anyway, this is what it’s like on a ranch. I know the bunkhouse guys cuss like crazy and carry on like outlaws sometimes and all that. But they’ve been places and done things.” I looked him straight in the eye, the good one. “Like you have.”

  “I have been”—his voice rose, then dwindled—“maybe too much places.” He gazed off into the mountain shades of evening, as he must have gazed into many a night since that one in a Munich beer hall. “I am not example to follow. Life plays me big tricks—”

  “Not your fault,” I defended him against himself.

  “—and I do not want same happening to you.”

  That jolted me. “Look at me here,” he went on in the same grim tone, “and you with me, holed up like two Killer Boy Dillingers.”

  “But it’s working out okay, isn’t it?” I mustered in response. “We’ve got jobs, we’re making wages, you’re safe from the cops—Herman, what more do you want?”

  He was searching so hard for how to say the next I could see it on him. “I am thinking you should go back to your Grossmutter some way.”

  That, I was relieved to shrug right off. “Well, sure, we both know that. After haying and when school starts, if Gram is . . . is herself again, I’ll have to. But that’s a real while yet.”

  “Now, I mean.”

  His Hermanic word horrorfied exactly fit my reaction. “Just up and leave you? W-why?”

  Behind his glasses he was blinking hard, and I realized his eyes were moist. “I am doing poor job at being grandpa. You are living with men who have no home except the boxcars, and are always after by sheriffs, and speak I don’t know what language, and the Smiley who is all dirty mouth. It can not be good for you, in bunkhouse. And I can not do anything about it except put the Smiley in his place once in blue moon.”

  “Skip it. I’m not leaving.”

  That stopped him cold. “Not yet anyhow,” I rushed on to keep him that way. “Not until after haying, and then we can figure out what we’re gonna do. Each.” I was not far from tears, either, at the thought of going our separate ways. But that was not going to happen for as long as I could put it off. “Don’t let the bunkhouse stuff throw you, okay? I won’t listen any too much, I promise.” I tried a ridiculous grin to help both our moods.

  Herman wiped the corners of his eyes, blew his nose, sighed a deep surrender. “You are loyal. What can I do but try be same.” He reached over and gripped my shoulder in a way that said more than words could. Both of us were one sniffle from breaking down.

  He managed to be first at swallowing away the emotion, saying huskily, “Donny, if you are not going to your Gram, very least you must call her, ja? If she does not hear from you sometimes, she will worry too much and call Manitowoc, and there the Kate is and you are not. And then we are—”

  “I know, I know. Kaput.” Did I ever have that terribly in mind. Nun, Gram, Jones, they lined up like poles of the telephone line, and all scared me. One wrong word to any of them could do us in. Put yourself in my place: Gram was not even supposed to exist, according to what I had told Jones about me and Herman being all each other had, and any slipup on my part that let on to Gram about the Diamond Buckle ranch would be surefire disaster, and even Sister Carma Jean as suspicious keeper of the phone was no cinch to get past unscathed.

  No surprise, then, that I lamely alibied to Herman, “I—I’m working on it. Gonna tackle Jones somehow about using the phone in the boss house, honest. Just haven’t got around to it.”

  He appeared no more eager than me to tackle a foreman who was as gruff as any top sergeant, but gamely volunteered, “Ask him for you, can I, you think?”

  “Better let me.” I could see no way around the risky business of negotiating a phone call. “He still thinks you don’t know diddly about things in this country and can barely spikka the language. We need to keep him thinking that.”

  “Ja, do not upset the cart of apples,” Herman resigned himself to our situation. We stood up, man and boy and more than that through the bonds tying us together this life-changing summer, and he squinted wryly at the bunkhouse as if seeing through the walls to its inhabitants. “Sickles can wait until morning. Let’s go be Johnson family.”

  Just as we were about to step into the yard, however, we heard the whump a car makes crossing a cattle guard too fast, then the crushy sound of tires speeding on the gravel road.

  Putting a protective arm to me, Herman stepped back into the shop doorway exclaiming, “Emergency, some kind? Look at it kick up the dust.”

  The car swept into the ranch yard past the outbuildings, scattering the chickens Smiley had neglected to put to roost yet, and easy as the toss of a hat, glided to a halt in front of the boss house.

  “Emergency, nothing,” I yelped. “It’s Rags!”

  28.

  THE PURPLE CADILLAC pulled up to the house and Rags climbed stiffly out from behind the wheel, still in his classy bronc-riding clothes. For once he was not the absolute feature, though, because with him was a black-haired beauty who instantly made me think of Letty, except that this one’s uniform as she popped out of the convertible with a flounce and a laugh was a fringed white leather rodeo outfit like palomino troupe riders wear.

  Herman and I tried not to gawk, without success. “Go on in and make yourself comfortable, darling,” we heard Rags shoo her into the hous
e with her ditty bag. “I need to act like a rancher a little bit. Catch up with you in no time.”

  “Promise?” said she, the word dripping with honey.

  As she sashayed on in, Jones came hustling up to greet Rags. “Got a visitor, I see. Another buckle bunny?”

  “Naw, she’s a performer,” Rags drawled, flicking a fleck of arena dust off his lavender shirt.

  “I bet,” Jones said with a straight face.

  “Suzie Q there,” Rags said offhandedly, “is only gonna be here overnight until we pull out for the Reno show, first thing in the morning. She’s an exhibition rider, stands up in the saddle at full gallop and that sort of thing. Came along with me because she says she needs a refreshing whiff of country air.”

  Jones actually laughed. “Is that what it’s called these days?”

  “Don’t have such a dirty mind, Jonesie,” Rags drawled. Herman’s expression said he wished he’d kept me in the man talk in the bunkhouse. “Saw on the way in you’re managing to put up some hay,” we heard Rags turn businesslike in his casual way. “How’d you make out on the hiring?”

  “Old hands from the jungle, same as ever, except for”—Jones swept a hand toward where we were standing stock-still as doorposts in the shop doorway—“our Quiz Kid stacker driver and his one-eyed grandpa from the Alps.”

  “That’s different. Gives the place a little foreign flavor.” Rags cocked a look across the yard at Herman and me. “Let me take a wild guess,” he said as he came over to shake hands, “which of you is the Alpine one-eyed jack.”

  “Hah! I fit that description, right up to the glass peeper,” Herman proclaimed, delivering him a handshake that made him wince.

  “Hey, be careful,” Rags protested good-naturedly enough, “that’s the hand I dance with.”

  Pumped up as I was in other ways, I took care to shake with him almost soft as Indian style, blurting, “We saw you ride at Crow Fair!”

  “Did you now.” Rags showed a long-jawed grin. “You had to look quick, the way that hoss had me coming and going.”

  “Buzzard Head!” Herman exclaimed. “You rided him until the whistler.”

  “I’m a fortunate old kid,” the best bronc rider on earth said modestly. “Old Buzzard could have piled me half a dozen times in that ride, but I could feel every move he was gonna make just a hair ahead of when he’d do it. It’s all in the timing, you know, making the right move at the right time.”

  • • •

  HOLY WOW. Hearing the inside skinny from Rags Rasmussen on a winning ride had both Herman and me listening open-mouthed.

  “Well, glad to have you on the crew,” Rags said by way of excusing himself as he turned to head for the house. “Got company waiting.”

  “Tell you what,” Herman said under his breath when Rags was just out of earshot. “Ask for making the phone call, before he goes in.”

  I was flustered. “Ask Rags? Right now?”

  “He is like Winnetou, a knight of the West,” Herman whispered into my ear, as if this were a sure thing, like Fingerspitzengefühl. “Hurry, ask.”

  “Uhm, can I please ask sort of a favor?” My voice was so loud and shrill it halted Rags halfway across the yard. “I need to make a phone call real bad. I mean, I won’t get in your way with the company or anything, honest.”

  Jones had been heading for his own quarters, but my request whirled him back toward us. “Hey, you, anybody who’s ever been on a ranch ought to know better,” he put me in my place with a warning finger and simultaneously accused Herman with a scowl. “We can’t run the damn outfit with every yayhoo in the bunkhouse trotting up here whenever he wants and tying up the phone and costing us—”

  “Simmer down, Jonesie.” Rags held up a hand to quell the outburst and asked me curiously, “What’s all the hurry-up on a phone call?”

  “To my sick grandma.” Seeing Jones look suspiciously at Herman, supposedly my only relative, I hastily inserted, “On the other side of my family. She’s in the hospital in Great Falls, from an awful operation she had to have. It’s a way long story.”

  Rags rubbed his jaw, a gesture I have always associated with sharpening what comes out the mouth next, as smart guys seem to do it. “Sounds like you have reason enough to get on that phone. Come on in.” He held up a soothing hand to stop Jones’s sputtering protest. “It’s all right, Jonesie. The exception proves the rule, or something like that.”

  On our way to the house, Rags limped more than a little, which alarmed me no end. Manners flung to hell, I outright asked the worst: “Did a bronc bust you up, there in Helena?”

  “Naw, I drew a sidewinder hoss called Snow Snake that gave me a bad time and sort of banged my knee against the chute gate coming out, is all.” He grimaced in a way that had nothing to do with the knee as we climbed the porch steps. “What’s worse, I rode the crowbait, but only placed.” He raised his eyebrows to indicate upstairs, where a certain somebody was getting herself comfortable. “Luckily a consolation prize was waiting.”

  Noticing my open-mouthed worship of his every word and move, he paused there on the porch to give me a pearl of wisdom. “Putting yourself on dodgy horses all the time is a tough go, amigo. I hope you don’t have your heart set on being a bronc rider.”

  “Never. I mean, you’re awful good at it and all, but I don’t think I could be.” His long legs and rider’s body next to my chunky build pretty well confirmed that at a glance. “Can I tell you something, though? What I most in the world want to be is a rodeo announcer.” I sent my voice as deep as it would go. “Coming out chute four, it’s Rags Rasmussen, champion of the world, on a bundle of trouble called Snow Snake. Like that.”

  Then the most wonderful thing. The greatest rodeo cowboy on earth, who had heard announcers all the way from rickety roping-club arenas to Madison Square Garden, paused at the screen door and offered his hand. His grave experienced eyes met mine. “Let’s shake on you making it to the top, son. I think you have the gift.” In a trance, I shook his hand. “I’m sure not gonna bet against you.”

  • • •

  IN THE MAGIC of that moment, the dream began to turn real. With his spirit in the world of rodeo as great as that of Manitou in the ghostland of the past, the vision never left me. I could foretell it clear as seeing into a mirror, the fancily painted broadcast crew bus with the bright red lettering emblazoned on its side where the silver dog used to run.

  THE VOICE OF THE ARENA

  SCOTTY CAMERON

  BRINGS YOU THE WORLD OF RODEO

  Fame and wealth, along with the cartoon tribute in Believe It or Not! For the hundreds upon hundreds of rodeos witnessed at the announcing microphone, those became within reach with that extended hand of Rags Rasmussen. I have had but to live up to what he called the gift.

  Way ahead of that, I had to deal with a phone call I did not want to make, hiding my whereabouts and Herman’s very existence from Gram.

  • • •

  NO SOONER were we in the house than a gale in woman form swept down the hallway to us. Not, unfortunately, the trick performer but the cook, Mrs. Costello, who liked to have her nose in everything.

  “Oh, Mr. Rasmussen, you’re home! What a relief, I always worry about you.” A rawboned woman who looked like she could fight a bear with a switch, she normally ran a backyard laundry in Wisdom, but was a last-minute desperation hire by Jones. When Highpockets, on behalf of the crew, took the foreman aside after one too many servings of the cooked liver the hoboes called gator bait and asked if there wasn’t better grub to be had somehow, Jones threw up his hands and said he had scoured all the way to Butte for a haying-season cook with no luck, they were all taken. Which left us with Mrs. Costello, as addicted to radio soap operas as Aunt Kate, chronically resorting to dishes featuring canned tomatoes, and making a racket in the kitchen as if the pots and pans were taking a beating while she hashed meals togeth
er. Milking time brought another uproar almost daily. She and Smiley hated each other, with her regularly complaining loudly about the splatters of manure on the milk buckets the choreboy would bring in after milking Waltzing Matilda. I have read that the finest Persian carpets would have one strand deliberately left astray, to avoid the sin of pride that perfection might bring. Mrs. Costello was something like that loose thread in the pattern of the Double Buckle, and of course I regarded her as poor material compared to Gram.

  But that was neither here nor there; Mrs. Costello obviously had to be put up with, as I could read in Rags’s face as she butted in on us now.

  “Can I get you and your guest”—she didn’t mean me—“some rhubarb pie with whipped cream and coffee?”

  “No thanks, we’ll save our appetites,” Rags said politely. “Excuse us, we both have business to do.”

  With a final lingering curious look at me, off she went down the hall, next making an anvil chorus of pots and pans as she started doing the dishes.

  Rags wagged his head and said something under his breath which sounded like “It takes all kinds.” He pointed me to the wall phone and said to make myself at home, which was like telling me I had come a long way from a hobo kip in the willows. I wished Herman was in there with me to share the giddy experience.

  Somewhere upstairs a radio was going, nice and soft. Rags winked at me and headed for the stairs, calling, “I’m coming, Delilah.”

  • • •

  “DONNY? In the name of heaven as they say around here, is that you?”

  “Yeah, hi, Gram.”

  Gram exclaimed over what a treat it was to hear my voice, and I stammered the same to her. My throat tight with emotion and apprehension, I blurted the question:

  “H-how are you?”

  “I’m sewn up like an old quilt, but I’ll be good as new. It just takes time.”

  “Are you gonna be all right? I mean, like your old self?”

  “You’ll see. I’ll be a holy terror again.” She tried to sound like her old self, but the strain in her voice came through despite her best effort. My uncharacteristic silence made her try it over. “The only thing about it is, I have so many stitches that the doctor doesn’t want me exerting myself any for a while yet.”