Last Bus to Wisdom (12 page)

Then I slapped my pants pocket, remembering. I'd spent the last of my loose change buying Tuffies for the arrowhead. To get coins to call with, I would need to break a ten-dollar bill from the stash under my remaining shirt pocket, which meant undressing even further right here in the most public place there was, where anyone like the convict in the suit and tie could be watching. I didn't dare retreat to the men's room to do it out of sight—that was a guaranteed way to miss Aunt Kitty and Uncle Dutch should they show up looking for me. This was becoming like one of those nightmares in which the predicament gets deeper and deeper until you think you never will wake up back to sanity.

Trying to fight down the jitters, I cast another wild gaze around the teeming waiting room, hoping for salvation in the form of anyone who might resemble Gram enough to be her sister. No such luck, not even close. People of every shape and form and way of dress, but none showed me any recognition and of course I couldn't to them. I must have been looked past hundreds of times, as if I were too ragged for anyone to want to pack home. I was stuck.

There was no help for it, I was going to have to throw myself on the mercy of
GREAT LAKES PAY PHONE.
Setting down my suitcase to try to get things in order, especially myself, I first of all reached out the autograph book from my jacket pocket and flipped through the pages to find the slip of paper with the phone number. Then again. My fingers began to shake.

The piece of paper was gone. It must have fallen out when the campers, the grabby bastards, were tossing the album around.

Distress hit like an instant paralysis, as a terrible omission caught up with me. Worse, what might be called the commission of an omission. I hadn't bothered to so much as glance at the phone number or street address even when showing those to the Schneiders. Now I stood rooted there, feeling worse off even than I was when stranded in Minneapolis—unmet, my clothing half torn off, as good as lost in a weird city, with night coming on and not even the dog bus as a haven anymore. Rough introduction into being a total orphan, it felt like.

I was dissolving into utter surrender, tears next, when I heard the melodious voice behind me.

“So here you are, sweetie pie. We wondered.”

I whirled around to the woman and man who evidently had appeared from nowhere. “How do you know I'm me?” I blurted.

The woman trilled a laugh. “Silly, you look just like Dorie, two peas from the same pod.” Gram and me? Since when?

In the meantime the man was giving me a bucktoothed expression of greeting, like a horse grinning. “Looks run in the family, hah?” he said in a voice as guttural as hers was musical. “Hallo.” He shook hands, mine swallowed in his. “I am Herman.” Not Dutch? Gram had said he was something else, but not that he was something you couldn't put a name to for sure. Seeing my confusion, he grinned all the more. “You are thinking of how I used to be called, I betcha. Herman fits me more now.”

Blinking my way out of one surprise after another, I simply stood planted there, gawking at the two of them, one tall and slope-shouldered, the other nearly as broad as the fat lady in a carnival. Long-faced and with that horsy grin and glasses that made his eyes look larger than human, with an odd glint to them, he was quite a sight in his own right, but it was her I was stupefied by. I could only think Gram hadn't spelled her out to me to save the surprise. Oh, man!
She
was in our family, what there was of it? This was like a wish come true, life all of a sudden springing the better kind of trick for a change.

I still almost couldn't believe it, but the more I looked at this unexpected personage, the more excited I became. I would have known her anywhere, an unmistakable figure in more ways than one, big around as a jukebox, jolly double chins, wide-set doll eyes, hairdo as plump as the rest of her, the complete picture. The exact same face I had seen big as life—well,
Life
, really, the picture magazine that showed what was what in the world every week—just that same day at the Minneapolis newsstand, and the melodious voice, familiar as if it were coming out of the radio that very moment. My Aunt Kitty was clearly none other than what the magazine cover described with absolute authority as America's favorite songstress, and unless a person was a complete moron and deaf to boot, recognizable as the treasured vocalist of every song worth singing, Kate Smith.

At last, I had it knocked.

June 17–30, 1951

I
T MADE PERFECT
sense to me. Although the mention went in one ear and out the other at the time, hadn't Gram herself spoken of her little dickens of a sister—although that description was quite a few sizes too small anymore—as “the great Kate,” in saying the two of them just could not make music together from girlhood on? Well, who could, with a singer whose voice carried her to the very top? Back then, I could not have defined palpitations, but did I ever have them, so excited was I to possess this famous woman for an aunt. Great-aunt, but close enough. I gazed raptly up at her, top-heavy as she was with that mighty chest but as cool and composed there in the hubbub of the bus station as if posing for her picture in a magazine. And wasn't she smart to condense
Smythe
, her and Gram's maiden name that looked to me like one of those trick words in a spelling contest, to good old
Smith
to sing under?
Believe It or Not!
disclosed this kind of thing all the time, you could hardly read the Sunday funnies without learning that Patti Page before she reached the hit parade with songs like “Tennessee Waltz” was plain Clara Ann Fowler, a name switcheroo if there ever was one. Besides, as Red Chief myself, I was naturally in favor of sprucing up what you called yourself in any way possible.

So the great Kate Smith, dressed in a peach-colored outfit that made her look like a million dollars, monumental in every way as she peered down at me with a perfectly plucked eyebrow arched, represented rescue, relief, reward, a miraculous upward turn in my circumstances. And I needed whatever I could get, ragged and snaggle-toothed as my appearance was. Her expression turned to puckered concern as she tallied my missing buttons, dangling pocket, and the rest of my shirt more or less torn to shreds. “Heavens, child, you look like you've been in a dogfight.”

Well, yeah, that pretty close to described scuffling with the pack of campers, and there was a story that went with that, but this did not seem like the time for it. I looked down as if apologizing to my shirt. “It got caught on something, is all.”

“We'll have to get you changed”—she noted the heavy traffic into the men's restroom, and frowned—“later.” A new note of worry crept in at my general disarray and the wicker suitcase, which itself was looking the worse for wear, if that was possible. “You did bring something presentable, I hope?”

“Sure thing,” I defended my and Gram's packing, “I have a clean shirt left. My rodeo one sort of needs washing, though.”

“Road-ee-oh,” came a guttural expression of interest from her silent partner, up to this point. “Not ro-day-oh, hah?”

Paying no attention to that, she seemed to make up her mind to smile at me, the extra chin and the famous chubby dimples involved. She had the bluest eyes, which mine swam in guilelessly. “If you're ready, honeybunch,” she was saying in that voice so melodious I was surprised she could pass herself off in public as Aunt Kitty at all, “we may as well go.”

I nodded eagerly. Herman—somehow I had trouble applying Uncle to him, without Dutch to go with it—insisted on taking my suitcase.

Out we went, he and I trailing her as she plowed through the depot crowd, drawing second looks every step of the way. At the curb, I was glad to see, an idling bus that was not even a Greyhound was filling with the kids going to camp, the poor saps. If there was any justice, Kurt, Gus, and Mannie were in there watching and eating their weasel hearts out at my royal welcome.

Herman hustled ahead to the car, not the limousine I was looking forward to but a big old roomy four-door DeSoto, I supposed because someone the size of Kate Smith required a lot of room.

I fully expected her, and if I was lucky, me, to establish in the backseat, the way rich people did. But while Herman was putting my suitcase in the trunk, she drew herself up by the front passenger door and stood there as if impatient for it to open itself, until I realized I was supposed to be the one to do it.

When I leaped and did it, she enunciated, “That's a little gentleman,” but still didn't budge until I caught on further and scrambled in to the middle of the seat. She followed, the car going down on its springs on that side under her weight, until Herman evened things up somewhat by settling himself behind the steering wheel.

Doing so, he slipped me a sly grin and I heard him say what sounded like “Welcome to Manito Woc,” as if the town were two words.

I was about to ask if that was actually how to pronounce it when the Kate Smith voice hit a note of warning. “Brinker, don't fool around. Look at the time—we have to go to the station.”

“Yah, Your Highness,” he answered as if used to being ordered around, and the DeSoto came to life after he pulled out the throttle a little and the choke farther than that and stepped hard on the starter and did another thing or two.

Meanwhile it was all I could do not to bounce up and down with delight at her pronouncement. The station! The dog bus, that loping mode of transportation full of starts and stops and disruptions and tense connections, somehow had delivered me right in time for her radio show.
Kate
Smith Sings
, all anyone needed to know about it.

I glanced at her hopefully. Maybe she even could slip into the program some hint that I had arrived, and Gram would hear it in her hospital room and know I had come through my harrowing journey safe and sound, mostly. I didn't want to ask that yet, shy about bothering someone getting ready to perform for a national audience. I would not have been surprised if she exercised her vocal cords right there in the car, but the only sign she gave of impending performance was humming to herself while she tapped a hand on the round rise of one thigh as steadily as a telegraph operator in a shoot-'em-up western.

I figured she was entitled to a few jitters. What had that first seatmate of mine, the stout woman on the Chevy bus, said?
I'd be such a bundle of nerves.
And that was merely about my supposed journey to Pleasantville, nothing like facing a radio microphone and a live audience and singing for the thousandth time “God Bless America” the way everyone coast-to-coast was waiting to hear again. If I was a trouper like Joe Schneider had said, the famous entertainer sitting right here at my elbow was the biggest example imaginable. It must run in the family.

“How is Montana?”

Herman's question out of nowhere jostled me out of that line of thought, and somewhat nervously—maybe it was catching—I responded, “In pretty good shape for the shape it's in, I guess.”

“Yah, I betcha. Like Old Shatterhand would say, up on its hind legs and still going, hah?”

His laugh came from the bottom of his throat, like his words. His lingo threw me a little at first, but I knew I'd get used to it, accustomed as I was to hired hands in the bunkhouse or the barracks at a construction camp who were called Swede or Ole or Finnigan if from Finland, and spoke “that broken stuff,” as it was called. Squarehead was the catch-all term for such types. Herman's accent and name I guessed must have come straight from Holland with its tale of Hans Brinker and the silver skates and all that, and it only added to the surprise of my sensational arrival. His choppy voice now reached a wistful register as he declared, “Out in cowboy land, you are in luck.”

“Pretty please”—from the other direction came a prompt response with not the usual sweet intonation on that phrase—“don't be filling the boy's mind with nonsense.”

“No, it's fine,” I spoke up, trying to sit tall enough to be a factor between them. “I'm around those all the time, see. On the ranch. Cowboys, I mean. I'd be there in the bunkhouse with them right now if Sparrowhead—Wendell Williamson, I mean—had let me be stacker driver on the haying crew like I asked to.”

It took them each a few moments to put that together, and I'm not sure he ever did get there. She, though, said as if thinking the matter over, “But instead you're very much here, dumpling.”

“Yeah!” Only minutes before, I would have had to fake this kind of answer, but landing in the spacious lap of Kate Smith, in a manner of speaking, I had no trouble whatsoever being enthusiastic. “This is so much better than there, it knocks my socks off.”

Just then the DeSoto pulled off the street, Herman steering with his hands wide apart like the captain at a ship's wheel, and I craned for the first sight of the radio station. But he had only stopped for gas, and went inside to use what he called the man's room while the attendant filled the tank and checked the oil and wiped the windshield, whistling all the while as if he had caught the musical spirit from the great Kate beside me. Staring off into the night, she continued to hum to that fitful pitty-pat rhythm on her mound of thigh.

With only the two of us in the car, I couldn't help feeling this was my chance. It was all I could do not to yank the autograph book out of my coat pocket and ask her to write in it, right then and there, in the greenish-yellow glow of the gas station's pump lights. And of course I would want her to sign it
Kate Smith
, not something like
Your devoted Aunt Kitty
, to elevate the autograph collection toward true
Believe It or Not!
territory. I bet she knew all kinds of other celebrities who would write their famous names in it for me, too. Talk about a jackpot! Herman had said a mouthful, about my being in luck. The sacred black arrowhead could not have been doing its job better. I cleared my throat to make my request. “Can I ask you for a real big favor?”

She jumped a little at the sound of my voice, nerves again, understandably. Glancing down at me, she composed herself and said, not entirely clearly to me, “That depends on how big is real big, doesn't it.”

The autograph book was burning a hole in my pocket, but something about her answer stayed my hand. Quick like a bunny, I switched to:

“Can I call you Aunt Kate? Instead of Kitty, I mean.”

“Why, of course you can, adorable.” She nodded into her second chin in relief. “It's my given name, after all. That sister of mine started the ‘Kitty' thing when we were girls, and heaven knows why, it stuck.”

I squirmed at anything said against Gram, but maybe that was the way sisters were.

Herman returned and went through the dashboard maneuvers and what else it took to start the DeSoto. “Home to the range,” he sang out, earning a sharp look from Aunt Kate.

As we pulled out of the gas station, I felt dumb as they come. Obviously I had the wrong night about the radio show. Now that I thought about it, back at the Greyhound terminal Aunt Kate most certainly would have said something like “We have a surprise for you tonight, dear,” if I was going to be part of the audience for
Kate Smith Sings
, wouldn't she. Sheepish, I fell back to the early bus habit of “Uh-huh” and “Huh-uh” as Herman tried to make conversation on the drive to their house.

•   •   •

I
T WAS DARK
by the time the DeSoto rocked into a bumpy driveway. The house, painted that navy gravy-gray shade like in pictures of battleships and with a peaked roof and lit sort of ghostly by the nearest streetlight, appeared big as a ranchin' mansion to me after the cook shack, although looking back, I realize that only meant it had an upstairs as well as a downstairs.

As we went in, Aunt Kate instructed Herman to leave my suitcase at the foot of the stairs, to be dealt with after dinner. Since it was pitch-black out, I deduced that must mean supper, another Wisconsin mystery like schnitzel and schnapps and going to camp with a bunch of boy hoodlums.

“You can change your shirt in our bedroom,” she told me, definitely more than a hint. “Just drop that and your other one in the laundry chute, I'll do them with our washing in the morning.” Herman showed me the chute in the hallway. These people knew how to live—when their clothes got dirty, they mailed them to the basement.

I stepped into the indicated bedroom, and too timid to put the light on, swapped shirts as fast as I could. Straining to take in the exact place where Kate Smith slept, even in the dimness I was convinced I could see a telltale sag in the near side of the double bed.

Hurrying so as not to miss anything in this remarkable household, I dispatched my needy shirts into the laundry chute and followed promising sounds into the kitchen. Fussing with cooking pots, Aunt Kate was humming again when I presented myself, fully buttoned and untorn. “Now then. We're having a Manitowoc specialty.” She beamed at me to emphasize the treat as she put on an apron twice the size of any of Gram's. “Sauerkraut and franks. I know you like those. Boys do, don't they.”

Not this boy, because Gram viewed frankfurters—wienies by another name, right?—with dire suspicion whenever she was forced to boil up a batch to feed the crew toward the end of a month's kitchen budget, convinced that the things were made from leavings lying around the butcher shop. “Tube steak,” she'd mutter as she plopped wienies by the handful into the pot. “You might as well be eating sweepings from the slaughterhouse.” Not the best thing to build an appetite for frankfurters. But my stomach and my hunger had no time to debate that, as I was shooed out of the kitchen and told I was free to look around the house while dinner was being fixed.

I edged into the living room and onto a pea-green rug so deep I left footprints wherever I stepped. It was like walking on a mattress. Intimidated, I crept across the room, studying the unfamiliar surroundings. A big, long leathery davenport, also green but closer to that fakey shade of lime Kool-Aid, sat prominently in front of a bay window, where the sill was crammed with potted plants of kinds I couldn't recognize. On an end table next to the arm of the davenport rested a phone, pink as bubblegum, of another type I had no experience of, with a cradled receiver and a circular dial full of numbers and letters. Whatever else this strange territory of the summer proved to be like, it definitely did not seem to be party-line country.