Last Bus to Wisdom (16 page)

“We will eat like kings,” he answered, puttering with a tomato plant.

“Just so it isn't like jokers wild,” she deadpanned, which I had to admit was pretty good. “Toodle-oo, you two,” she left us with. “I'll be back when you see me coming,” another echo of Gram that surprised me.

I watched her pick her way to the DeSoto and drive off speedily. Showing less interest in the tomato plant now, Herman peered at me through his specs. “She is off to her hen party. They will yack-yack for hours. Now then,” he luxuriously mimicked that word combination of hers that made less sense the more you thought about it, patting around on himself to find his matches and light up another cigar, as if in celebration of the Kate being gone. He gave me a man-to-man grin. “So how do you like Manito Woc?”

There it was again. “How come you say it that way?”

And again the bucktooth grin turned ever so slightly sly. “It is where Manito walks, you don't think?”

I shrugged, although I could feel something about this conversation creeping up on me. “Who's Manito?”

“To be right, it is Manitou,” he amended, spelling it. “You don't know Manitou?” I couldn't tell whether he was teasing or for real. “From Indian?”

I was hooked. “Huh-uh. Tell me.”

He blew a stream of smoke that curled in the heavy air. “Gitche Manitou is the Great Spirit.”

“Gitchy,” I echoed but dubiously, wondering if my leg was being pulled.

“Yah, like Gitche Gumee, from the poem?” He looked saddened when I had to tell him I was not up on Hiawatha.

“
By the shore of Gitche Gumee
,” he recited, his accent thumping like thunder. Again, I had to shrug. “
By the shining Big-Sea Water,”
he persisted. I shook my head, wishing he would try me on something like
“A flea and a fly in a flue . . .”

Despairing of my lack of literary education, he held up crossed fingers. “Longfellow and Karl May were like so. Poets of Gitche and Winnetou.”

“Good for them,” I tried faking hearty agreement to clear dead poets out of the growing crowd of specters in the greenhouse, and get to what I saw as the point. “Then where are any Indians in Manitowoc?”

“Gone.” He waved a hand as if tossing a good-bye. “That is why it is said the spirits walk, hah?”

•   •   •

S
UPPOSEDLY IT TAKES
one to know one, right? So, then and there, my own sometimes overly active mind, red in the head or however the condition of seeing things for more than they are can best be described, was forced to acknowledge that this odd bespectacled yah-saying garden putterer and henpecked husband, fully five times older than me, had a king hell bastard of an imagination. Possibly outdoing my own, which I know is saying a lot. Wherever Herman Brinker got it from, he'd held on to the rare quality that usually leaves a person after a certain number of years as a kid, to let what he had read possess him. I saw now why Aunt Kate was forever at him about taking to heart too much the stories of Karl May in what seemed to be, well, squarehead westerns. Not that I wanted to side with her, storyteller of a sort that I sometimes turned into. But from my experience of his mental workings so far, notions Herman had picked up out of books did not appear to be condensed from their imaginative extent any at all, let alone properly digested.

•   •   •

P
UT IT WHATEVER WAY,
this was getting too thick for me, people dead and gone but still strolling around in my cigar-smoking host's telling of it, as well as shadows on glass flaring to life like lit matches, Manitowocers here, Manitou walkers there—a lot more than potted plants flourished in this greenhouse of his.

I shifted uncomfortably on my fruit box. “Spirits like in ghosts, you mean? Herman, I'm sorry, but I don't think we're supposed to believe in those.”

“We can believe in Indians, I betcha.” He had me there. I could see him thinking, cocking a look at the dappled shed's glassy figures, and as it turned out, beyond. “So, paleface cow herders, you know much of. How about—?” He patted his hand on his mouth warwhoop style, mocking the Kate's charge that he had cowboys and Indians on the brain.

With an opening like that, how could I resist?

“Well, sure, now that you mention it,” that set me off, “I've been around Indians a lot,” skipping the detail that the last time, I'd slept through most of a busload of them. Trying to sound really veteran, I tossed off, “I even went to school with Blackfoot kids most of one year at Heart Butte.”

“Heart? Like gives us life, yah?”

“Yeah—I mean, yes, same word anyhow.”

Herman leaned way toward me, cigar forgotten for the moment. “Heart Bee-yoot. Bee-yoot-iffle name. Tell more.”

I didn't bother to say that was the only thing of any beauty at the remote and tough little Blackfoot reservation school where, around Dwayne Left Hand and Vern Rides Proud, I wisely kept my trap shut about my Red Chief nickname and endured being called Brookie for the freckles that reminded them of the speckles on eastern brook trout. That Heart Butte schoolyard with its rough teasing and impromptu fistfights was at least as educational as the schoolroom. But if Herman was gaga about things Indian, here was my perfect chance to confide the Red Chief nickname to him.

He was impressed, more so than he really needed to be, I noted somewhat apprehensively when I was done. “Up there with Winnetou, you are,” he exclaimed, slapping his knee. “Young chiefs. No wonder you got the fancy moccasins.”

“Yeah, but”—I stole an uneasy glance at the pile of Karl May books—“who's this Winnetou anyway? What tribe he's from, even?” If he was Blackfoot, my Red Chief tag might as well shrink back to Heart Butte invisibility in comparison.

Herman puffed on his cigar, maybe seeking smoke signals, as he gave it a think about how best to answer. Finally he said, “An Apache knight, he was.”

I tried to sort that out, never having heard of an Indian clanking around in a suit of armor, and said as much.

Herman laughed. “Not iron clothes, hah. Leather leggings and a hunting shirt, he dressed in, and, best yet”—he nodded approvingly at me—“fancy moccasins.” Turning serious again, he went on. “Karl May calls him a knight because he was honorable. His word you could trust. He fought fair. Like a chief supposed to, yah.” He nodded at me gravely this time.

“Uhm, Herman, you better know.” In all this Indian stuff, I didn't want to end up chewing more than I could bite off. “I haven't had much practice at any of that, see. I mean, with me, you can tell where the Red came from”—I flopped my hair—“but the Chief thinger is just from my dad. Sort of kidding, in a way, is all.”

“Maybe not all.” He gave me one of his cockeyed glances through the thick glasses. “Maybe he thought the name fit more than”—he kept a straight face, but it still came out sly—“your scalp.”

O
NE THING ABOUT
hanging around with Herman, time went by like a breeze. That noontime, with Aunt Kate gone to canasta, the house was without commotion as Herman assembled lunch, laying out the kind of store bread that came sliced and without taste, but announcing we would have plenty of sandwich meat, which to me meant good old baloney slathered with mayonnaise and had me licking my lips, after the menu in this household so far. I stayed out of the way by reading the funnies in the newspaper until he called me to the table. “Meal fit for an earl.”

When I looked blank at that, he winked and said, “Earl of Sandwich, invented guess what.”

Some sense of caution caused me to peek under the top slice of bread, revealing a gray slab pocked with gelatin and strange colonies of what might be meat or something else entirely. “Is this”—I couldn't even ask without swallowing hard—“headcheese?”

“Yah. A treat.” Herman took a horsebite mouthful. “The Kate won't eat it,” he said, chewing. “She calls it disgusting, if you will imagine.”

I was entirely with her on that, for I had seen the ingredients of headcheese, each more stomach-turning than the next, come off the hog carcass at butchering time when the animal's head and feet and bloody tongue were chucked in a bucket for further chopping up. But at any mealtime, Gram's voice was never far distant—
If it's put in front of you, it's edible at some level—
and by not looking at the jellied pork rubbish between the sandwich bread, I got it down.

This Wisconsin incarceration evidently requiring digestive juices of various kinds, I stayed at the table stewing on matters, trying to assimilate what all had happened since my arrival into this unnerving household, while Herman pottered at washing up our few dishes. When he was done and hanging up the dish towel in a fussy way not even the Kate could criticize, I ventured: “Can I ask you a sort of personal thing?”

“Shoot, podner,” he responded agreeably enough, pointing a finger and cocked thumb at me like a pistol, which I figured must be something he picked up from a Karl May western.

“Right. How come you don't go by the name ‘Dutch' anymore?”

He pursed his lips a couple of times as if tasting the inquiry, then came and sat at the table with me before answering, if that's what it was. “Down with the ship, it went.”

He appeared to be serious.
Oh man,
I thought to myself,
first the Gitchy something or other, walking around dead, now this. Was this some squarehead joke?

“Sounds funny, yah?” Herman conceded. “But when the
Badger Voyager
sinked, my name ‘Dutch' was no more, after.” Again he made the
pthht
sound. He folded his big hands on the table as he looked straight across at me in that uneven gaze of his. “Onshore, ‘Herman' got new life.”

I still didn't grasp that swap, and said so.

Herman grabbed for the sugar bowl with sudden purpose. “You know about ore boats any, Donny?”

At the shake of my head, he instructed, “This is ore boat.
Badger Voyager
, pretend. Table is Great Lakes. Gee-oh-graphy lesson, hah?”

Plotching a hand here and there across the tabletop, he named off the bodies of water—Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, Ontario—while I paid strict attention as if about to be called on in class.

He steered the sugar bowl toward me. “Where you sit is Duluth. Full of iron mines. How it works,
Badger Voyager
comes, loads ore, takes it maybe here, maybe there”—he maneuvered the sugar bowl in winding routes to various ports of call, where he told me the ore was turned into steel, Chicago, Cleveland, all the way to Buffalo.

Very instructive, yes, if you could make yourself interested in that kind of thing. “But what about—”

“‘Dutch,' yah. Coming to that.”

He peered at the sugar bowl through his strong glasses as if encouraging me to have a close look, too. “He is on the ore boat, see. Me, I mean. Twenty years.” Pride shone out of him as he sat back, shoulders near square enough to burst out of his shirt. “A stoker I was.”

I puzzled over that. Like stoking a stove? A cook's helper, like I sometimes was in kitchen chores for Gram? He pawed away that supposition, explaining a stoker's job in the boiler room of a ship. “Mountains of coal have I shoveled.”

“But you don't do that anymore,” I said, thinking of Aunt Kate's mocking response when I'd asked about his job.

“Hah, no. I am onshore, so ‘Dutch' is no more. No shipmates to call me that. I change to ‘Herman,' who I was before.”

This was a whole lot more complicated than my Red Chief nickname coming and going at will, I could see. Still, something had been left out of the story, and my guarded silence must have told him I knew it had. Herman, who looked to me as if he could still stoke coal all day long if he wanted to, read my face with that unsettling cockeyed gaze. “The Kate did not blabber it to you? Something wrong. Her tongue must be tied up.”

He sat back again and folded his arms as if putting away the hands that fit a coal shovel. “A settlement I have.”

Thinking the word through, I took it apart enough to ask hesitantly, “Wh-what got settled? Like a fight?”

“I show you.”

He navigated the sugar bowl back to the Lake Superior territory of the table, then began wobbling it so drastically I thought it would spill.

“Straits of Mackinaw,” he pronounced the word that is spelled
Mackinac
. For some moments, he didn't say anything more, a tic working at the corner of his eye as if he had something in it, all the while staring at the imaginary piece of water. At last he said in a strained voice: “Bad place any old time. Bad and then some, when Witch of November comes.”

Another one of those? One more Great Spirit of Gitche Gumee or whatever, I didn't need. My skin was starting to crawl again.

All seriousness, he cupped his hands around the sugar bowl as if protecting it. “Witch of November is big storm. Guess what time of year.”

He drew a breath as if girding himself for that mean-sounding storm. “When Witch of November comes, you are on the boat, no place to go”—opening his hands to expose the fragile sugar bowl—“and waves big like hills hitting the deck, send you over the side if you don't hang on hard as you can. Drown you like a kitten katten in a bag, it will.”

That description did make quite a bit of an impression, I had to admit. But we still weren't anywhere near how the name Dutch went down with the ship and Herman was sitting here big as life. Maybe I was being a sucker, but I said, “Go on.”

“Night of thirtieth of November,
Badger Voyager
gets to Straits of Mackinac,” his voice growing husky as he maneuvered the sugar bowl. “We feel lucky, no Witch that year, nineteen and forty-seven. Then it starts storming, middle of night—Witch of November saving up all month, hah? Worst I was in, ever. Lost an old friend, the bosun.” Teeth clenched, he girded himself again for telling this. “We sailed together maybe hundred times on the Lakes. This time, bad luck is with him. One minute he is giving orders like ever, and the next, the Witch takes him in biggest wave yet and he is gone.” Sugar shook from the bowl, he quivered it so hard. “After that, the
Badger Voyager
sinked, like I say. Big waves broke her in half.” He lifted his hands and mimicked snapping a branch.

You can bet I was on the edge of my chair for the next part. “Raining and wind blowing like anything when order comes, ‘Abandon ship.'” He continued slowly, as if retelling it to himself to make sure he got it right. “I go to climb in the lifeboat, and a pulley swings loose from the davit and hits me, like so.”

All too graphically, he clapped a hand over his left eye and I couldn't help recoiling in horror.

“Hits ‘Dutch,' yah?” he made sure I was following all the way. Now he removed his glasses, set them aside, and took the spoon out of the sugar bowl. Reaching up to his left eye with his free hand, he held his eyelids apart. My own eyes bugged as he lightly tapped his eyeball with the spoon handle,
plink plinkety-plink-plink plink-plink
distinct as anything.

Immediately enthralled, I let loose with “Holy wow, doesn't that hurt at all?”

Grinning and even winking with that false eye, he shook his head.

“Herman, that's out the far end!” The squint of his good eye questioned me. “That's soldier talk, it means something is really something! Can you do it again?”

He obliged, this time with the recognizable rhythm of
Hap-py birth-day to you
. I couldn't get over the stunt; the carnival sideshow that set up camp in Gros Ventre at rodeo time didn't have tricks nearly as good as playing
shave and a haircut, four bits
and the birthday song and who knows what else on an eyesocket. Still overcome with enthusiasm, I pointed to its eyeball or whatever its substitute ought to be called. “What's it made of?”

“Glass,” he said with a half wink this time, donning the eyeglasses again. “Like a greenhouse of the head, hah? Only it grows this, from the ship company.” He rubbed his thumb and fingers together, which with a penniless pang I recognized meant money. “Dutch is name buried at sea,” he dropped his voice as if at a funeral. “Herman stays on land, no more Witches of November.”

•   •   •

T
HAT WAS
H
ERMAN
in the ways most meaningful that first adventurous day, or so I thought. I can't really say a glass eye sold me on spending a stifling summer in Wisconsin, but he did make things more interesting than expected.

Aunt Kate was another matter, a sizable one in every way. After the morning's catastrophe with my money and our general lack of meeting of minds—if she even credited me with one—I didn't know what I was going to be up against when she returned from canasta, but suspected it probably would not be good.

So when Herman went off for a nap—“Shut-eye is good for the digestion”—I figured I had better show some progress on the jigsaw puzzle. Spilling out the pieces that half covered the card table and sorting the ones of different colors with my finger, I had quite a stretch of the sky-blue top edge fitted into place, strategy recalled from having done the damn thing before, working my way down onto George Washington's acre of forehead, when I heard the DeSoto groaning up the driveway and then Aunt Kate's clickety high heels on the kitchen floor, instantly stilled when she reached the plush living room rug.

“Yoo hoo,” she called as she swung through on her way to hang up her purse in the sewing room, as if I wasn't just across the room from her.

“Yeah, hi.” Figuring it couldn't hurt, could help, I tried a slight initiative that might be construed as politeness. “How was the, uh, card party?”

“A disaster,” she moaned, flinging a hand to the vicinity of her heart. “It ruins the whole summer. Of all the bad luck, why, why, why did this have to happen on top of everything else?”

Continuing the drama, she dropped heavily into the recliner beneath the Manitowoc sampler, whipped around to face me where I was stationed at the card table, and cranked the chair back until she was nearly sprawling flat. In the same stricken voice, she addressed the ceiling as much as she did me: “It's enough to make a person wonder what gets into people.”

Apprehensively listening, a piece of George Washington in my hand, I contributed, “What happened? Didn't you win?”

Now she lifted her head enough to sight on me through the big V of her bosom. “It's ever so much worse than that,” she went on in the same tragic voice. “Years and years now, the four of us have had our get-together to play canasta and treat ourselves to a little snack.
Religiously
,” she spiked on for emphasis, “every Monday. It starts the week off on a high note.”

To think, Kate Smith might have uttered those exact last couple of words. But this decidedly was not America's favorite songstress, with me as the only audience trying to take in what kind of catastrophe a dumb card game could be.

“And now, can you believe it, Minnie Zettel is going off on a long visit,” Aunt Kate mourned. “Why anyone would go gadding off to Saint Louis in the summertime, I do not know. She will melt down until there is nothing left of her but toenails and shoe polish, and it will serve her right.”

Her chins quivered in sorrow or anger, I couldn't tell which, but maybe both—they were double chins, after all—as she fumed, “The other girls and I are beside ourselves with her for leaving us in the lurch.”

Having been beside herself with me not that many hours ago, she was having quite a day of it, all right. Getting left in the lurch seemed pretty bad, whatever it meant. I made the sound you make in your throat to let someone know they have a sympathetic audience, but maybe I didn't do it sufficiently. Still flat in the recliner, Aunt Kate blew exasperation to the ceiling, wobbled her head as if coming to, and then her sorrowful eyes found me again, regarding me narrowly through that divide of her chest.

“Donal,” she startled me by actually using my name, which I think was a first time ever, “do you play cards?”

“Only pitch, a real little bit,” I said very, very carefully. All I needed was gambling added to the rest of my reputation with her. “Gram and me at night sometimes when there's nothing on the radio but preachers in Canada.”

“Mmm, I thought so.” She mustered the strength to nod her head. “When we were girls, Dorie was always one to haul out a deck of cards when nothing else was doing. I must have caught it from her.”

That'd be about the only thing she and Gram were alike in, I morosely thought to myself, minding my manners by nodding along in what I took to be her bid for sympathy while I kept at the jigsaw, nine hundred and fifty or so pieces to go, when all at once she swelled up and exhaled in relief.