Last Bus to Wisdom (17 page)

“Good. Then you can learn canasta and fill in for Minnie.”

I don't know if my hair stood straight on end at that or what.

Aunt Kate busily began dismissing my swarm of doubts before I could sputter them out, cranking her chairback higher with every burst of sentence. “There's no way around it, we need a fourth for canasta and that's that.”

Upright in the chair by now and facing me dead-on, she manufactured a sort of smile. “You needn't look so alarmed, kitten. I'll teach you the ins and outs of the game. We have an entire week for you to learn, isn't that lucky? It will help take your mind off your imagination, mmm?”

Still speechless, I tried to think how to head her off in more ways than one as she heaved herself out of the recliner and quickstepped over to me. “Now then. It's too bad, but we need the card table.”

Before I could come out of my stupor, she was crumbling the sky-blue edge and George Washington's forehead and scooping the pieces along with the rest of the puzzle into its box. “Don't worry, child, you can start over on it once you've learned canasta.”

T
HE PUZZLE PIECES
were barely settled in the box before Aunt Kate was pulling up across the table from me and had the cards flying as she dealt a stream to each of us and to our absent opponents. Herta and Gerda—even their names sounded mean. Helplessly watching her deliver the valentines, as the poker game regulars in the Double W bunkhouse termed it, I felt unsure of myself but all too certain that turning me into a Minnie Zettel for hen parties was going to test the limits of both of us. And this was before I had any inkling that a contest of hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades could become such a dangerous game.

While she was rifling the cards out, Herman wandered by the living room and took a peek at what was happening, which sent his eyebrows way up and quickened his step until he was safely past and out the back door. No rescue from that direction, so I cussed silently and kept stuffing cards into my overloaded hand.

Finishing dealing with a flourish, Aunt Kate slapped the deck down squarely in the middle of the table and sang out, “Now then, honeybun, the first thing is, you have to catch up a weensy bit by learning a few rules, mmm?”

•   •   •

T
H
AT BEGAN
a spell of time when the high point of my days was the sugar on my cereal.

Far from being the adventure I had been so excited about when I was met at the bus station by the living image of Kate Smith, my Wisconsin summer bogged down into the same old things day after day. Afternoons were canasta, canasta, canasta, and mornings veered from boredom when, after getting up hours earlier than anyone else and doctoring some puffed rice with enough spoonfuls of the white stuff, all I could find to do was to hole up in the living room reading an old
National Geographic
brought down from the attic, until the time came to tread carefully around the first of the battles of the Brinker household. Every day, Aunt Kate and Herman had a fight to go with breakfast. Generally it was her to start things off with a bang. “Can't you quit that?” Her first salvo would make me jump, even though it was not aimed at me. “It's childish and a nasty habit, how many times do I have to tell you?”

“Is not,” he would pop right back. “Toast is made for such things.”

“That is absolutely ridiculous. Why can't you just
eat
?”

“Hah. It goes in my mouth, same as you push it in yours.”

“It is not the same! Oh, you're impossible.”

The one constant in the repeated quarrels was Aunt Kate holding her ground in the kitchen, while Herman retreated elsewhere, waiting to scrap over toast scraps another breakfast time. Eventually, when it sounded safe, I would abandon the green leather couch and
National Geographic
—even the attractions of people pretty close to naked in “Bali and Points East” can hold a person only so long—and creep across the living room to peek into the kitchen. The remains of the daily toast war, which might still be sitting there at lunch or beyond, I could not figure out. Sometimes on what had to be Herman's plate would be nothing but crusts, other times a pale blob of toast from the middle of a slice. In any case, I would face the inevitable and call out “Good morning” and she'd look around at me as if I'd sprung up out of the floor and ask, “Sleep well, honeykins?” and I'd lie and reply, “Like a charm,” and that was pretty much the level of conversation between us.

I have to hand it to Aunt Kate, she was a marvel in her own way. To say she was set in her habits only scratches the surface. Regular as the ticks and tocks of the kitchen clock, she maintained her late start on the day, parked that way at the breakfast table, dawdling over the newspaper sensations and coffee refills, yawning and humming stray snatches of tunes, until at nine sharp she arose and clicked the radio on and one soap opera after another poured out, the perils of Ma Perkins and Stella Dallas and the others whom she worried along with at every devious plot turn.

Needless to say, monotony was not my best mode. Herman's, either, fortunately. During the soap opera marathon, he hid out in the greenhouse, where I sooner or later would join him so as not to have radio performers' woes piled atop my own.

“What do you know for sure, podner?” he would greet me, as no doubt one cowboy in a Karl May western would drawl to another.

Actually not a bad question, because the one thing I was sure of was what a mystifying place Manitowoc was, from toast fights to smoky portrait sitters inhabiting greenhouse windows to Manitou walking around dead to the strange nature of the neighborhood. I mean, I seemed to be the only kid anywhere. As used as I was to being in grown-up company at the Double W, now I apparently was sentenced to it like solitary confinement, with the street deadly quiet, no cries of Annie-I-over or hide-and-seek or boys playing catch or girls jumping rope, nobody much making an appearance except a gray-haired man or woman here and there shuffling out to pick up the morning paper or position a lawn sprinkler. It made a person wonder, did every youngster in Wisconsin get shipped off to some dumb camp to hunt frogs?

In any case, the sleepy neighborhood was getting to me, so I finally had to put the question to Herman as he fiddled with a cabbage plant. “Aren't there any other kids around here at all?”

“Like you?” I was pretty sure I heard a note of amusement in that, but he soon enough answered me seriously. “Hah uh, kids there are not. The Schroeders on the corner got boys, but they're older than you and don't do nothing but chase girls.” Taking the stogie out of his mouth, so as not to spew ashes on the cabbage leaves, he shook his head. “Except them, this is all old folks.”

I still had a hard time believing it. “In this whole part of town? How come?”

“Shipyard housing, all this. From when Manitowoc builds submarines in the war. The last one,” he said drily, I supposed to mark it off from the one going on in Korea. “People did not go away, after. Now we are long in the tooth,” he mused. He gave me a wink with his artificial eye. “Or ghosts.”

That was that, one more time. I pulled out a fruit box and settled in while he went on currying the cabbages.

Under the circumstances, with no other choice except Aunt Kate, hanging around with Herman in the greenhouse suited me well enough. Whenever he wasn't pumping me about ranch life or telling me some tale out of Karl May's squarehead version of the West, I was free to sit back and single out some family or man and woman in the photographic plates overhead, catching them on the back of my hand thanks to a sunbeam, and daydream about who they might have been, what their story was, the digest version of their lives. It made the time pass until lunch, when I'd snap out of my trance at Herman's announcement, “The Kate will eat it all if we don't get ourselfs in there.”

After lunch, though, inevitably, the nerve-racking sound in the living room changed from soap opera traumas to the slip-slap of the canasta deck being shuffled and the ever so musical trill, “Yoo hoo, bashful,” and all afternoon I'd again be a prisoner of a card game with more rules than a stack of Bibles.

•   •   •

“N
O, NO,
NO
!
” She put a hand to her brow as if her mind needed support, a familiar gesture by this third or fourth day—I was losing track—of card game torture. “What did I tell you about needing to meld a full canasta before you can go out?”

“I was thinking about something else, excuse me all to pieces. What do I do now?”

“For a start, pay attention, pretty please.”

I suppose I should have, but nothing was really penetrating me except the something else I kept thinking about. My money. The disastrous shirt-in-the-garbage episode that left me broke as a bum. No mad money meant no going to a show, no comic books, not even a Mounds bar the whole summer, for crying out loud. But that wasn't nearly the worst. It bothered me no end that if I went back to Montana in the fall without the school clothes Gram had expressly told me to stock up on, I would have to go to class looking like something the cat dragged in. People noticed when a kid was too shabby, and it could lead to official snooping that brought on foster care—next thing to being sentenced to the orphanage—on grounds of neglect. Gram would never neglect me on purpose, but if she simply couldn't work and draw wages after her operation, how was she supposed to keep me looking decent? With all that on my mind, here was a case where I could use some help from across the card table, and I didn't mean canasta. The one time I had managed to broach the subject of school clothes and so on between her morning loafing at the breakfast table and soap opera time, Aunt Kate flapped her fingers at me and said, “Shoo now. We'll figure out what to do about that later.” But when?

•   •   •

B
Y EVERY SIGN,
not while I was stuck with a mittful of canasta cards. Back to brooding, I sucked on my chipped tooth as draw-and-discard drearily continued.

A little of that and Aunt Kate was grimacing in annoyance. “Don't they have dentists in Montana? What happened to that tooth, anyway?”

“Nothing much.” I sat up straight as a charge went through me, my imagination taking off in the opposite direction from those modest words. “I got bucked off in the roundup, is all.”

“From a
horse
?” She made it sound like she had never heard of such a thing.

“You betcha,” I echoed Herman, pouring it on more than I had to, but a person gets carried away. “See, everybody's on horseback for the roundup, even Sparrowhead,” I stretched the matter further. “I was riding drag, that's at the rear end of the herd, where what you do is whoop the slowpoke cows and calves along to catch up with the others. Sort of like
HYAH HYAH HYAH
,” I gave her a hollering sample that made her jerk back and spill a few cards.

“Things were going good until this one old mossie cow broke off from the bunch”—the story was really rolling in me now—“and away she went with her calf at her heels. I took out after them, spurring Snipper—he's a cutting horse, see—and we about got the herd quitters headed off when Snipper hit an alkali boghole and started bucking out of it so's not to sink up to his, uhm, tail. I'm usually a real good rider”—modesty had to bow out of this part—“but I blew a stirrup and got thrown out of the saddle. I guess I hit the ground hard enough that tooth couldn't take it. I was fine otherwise, though.” I couldn't resist grinning at her with the snag fully showing.

“Good grief,” my listener finally found her voice. “That's uncivilized! Poor child, you might have been damaged any number of ways!”

“Aw, things like that happen on the ranch a lot.”

That put the huff back into Aunt Kate in a hurry. “Whatever has gotten into Dorie?” she lamented, catching me off guard. “That sister of mine is raising you to be a wild cowboy, it sounds like. Tsk,” that tail end of the remark the kind of sound that says way more than words.

“Oh, it's not that bad,” I tried to backtrack. “Gram sees me with my nose in a book so much she says my freckles are liable to turn into inkspots.”

“Does she.” As if looking me over for that possibility, she scanned my earnest expression for a good long moment, with what might have been the slightest smile making her jowls twitch.

“All right then, toothums. Let's see if that studious attitude can turn you into a canasta player.” Laying her cards facedown, she scooped up those of the phantom Gerda, drew from the deck, hummed a note of discovery, then discarded with a flourish, saying, “My, my, look at that.”

A fourspot, what else. I perked up, ready to show her that I knew what was what in this damn game. With a flourish I melded some fours and other combinations to get on the board, and then as she watched with that pinched expression for some reason deepening between her eyes, I flashed the one fourspot I'd held back and a joker to scoop in the pile when the voice across the table rose like a siren.

“No, no, no! Wake up, child. You can't take that without a natural pair.”

“Huh? Why not?”

Rollng her eyes, she put a hand to the peanut brickle plate. Finding it empty, she bit off instead: “Because it's a rule. How many times have I gone over those with you? Mmm? Can't you put your mind to the game at all?”

At that, our eyes locked, her blue-eyed stare and my ungiving one right back. If she was exasperated enough to blow her stack, so was I.

“There are too many rules! This canasta stuff goes through me like green shit through a goose!”

•   •   •

I
KNOW IT
is the mischief of memory that my outburst echoed on and on in the room. But it seemed to. At first Aunt Kate went perfectly still, except for blinking a mile a minute. Then her face turned stonier than any of those on Mount Rushmore. For some seconds, she looked like she couldn't find what to say. But when she did, it blew my hair back.

“You ungrateful snot! Is this the thanks I get? That sort of talk, in my own house when I've, I've taken you in practically off the street? I never heard such—” Words failed her, but not for long. “Did you learn that filth from him?” She flung an arm in the direction of the greenhouse and Herman.

“No!” I was as shrill as she was. “It's what they say in the bunkhouse when something doesn't make a lick of sense.”

“Look around you, mister fellow,” she blazed away some more. “This is not some uncivilized bunkhouse on some piddling ranch in the middle of nowhere. Dorie must be out of her mind, letting you hang around with a pack of dirty-mouthed bums. If she or somebody doesn't put a stop to that kind of behavior, you'll end up as nothing more than—”

She didn't finish that, simply stared across the table at me, breathing so heavily her jowls jiggled.

“All right.” She swallowed hard. Then again, “All righty right. Let's settle down.”