Last Bus to Wisdom (24 page)

I must have given my now sworn enemy a gaze with hatred showing.

“Please don't look at me that way.” She fussed at creases in the newspaper that needed no fussing at. “The nuns will help out if need be. They'll have to, when you show up. Now eat up, and we'll have to be going.”

I pushed aside my breakfast, too sick at heart to eat, and went for my suitcase for hundreds upon hundreds of miles of travel agony ahead.

•   •   •

W
E WERE AT
the car before I came out of my shellshock enough to realize the missing part in all this. “Wh-where's Herman? Isn't he coming with us?”

“You shouldn't ask.” She sure couldn't wait to tell me, though, as she impatiently gestured for me to climb in the DeSoto. “He sneaked off on the city bus for that ‘medicine' of his. Threw the car keys to me and told me to do my—my dirty work myself.”

She got the rest off her chest, more than a figure of speech as she heaved herself into position behind the steering wheel and said over the grinding sound of the starter, “That man. He says he can't bear to tell you good-bye. I don't know why not, it's just a word.”

Another piece of my heart crumbled at that. Abandoned even by Herman the German. I meant less to him than a couple of beers at the Schooner. Brave survivor of Höhe Toter Mann, hah. If there was a Coward's Corner on Boot Hill, that's where he deserved to end up.

•   •   •

A
T THE BUS DEPOT,
everything was all too familiar, benchfuls of people sitting in limbo until their Greyhound was ready to run, the big wall map of
THE FLEET WAY
routes making my journey loom even longer. Forced to wait with me until my bus was called, Aunt Kate turned nervous and, probably for her sake as much as mine, tried to play up what lay ahead of me. “Just think, you'll be there in time for the Fourth. They'll have fireworks and sizzlers and whizbangs of all kinds, I'm sure.”

“I don't give a rat's ass about whizbangs,” I said loudly enough to make passing busgoers stare and veer away from us.

“Donal, please.” She looked around with a false smile as if I were only being overly cute. “This is the kind of thing I mean. You can see it just isn't right for you here.”

It would take a lot to argue with that, but before I even had any chance, she had her purse up and was diving a hand into it. “Oh, and take this.” She pressed some folded money into my hand. In amazement, I turned the corners of the bills back, counting. Three tens. The exact same sum as had been pinned inside my discarded shirt.

“What—how come—”

“No, no, don't thank me,” she simpered, while all I was trying to ask was why she hadn't done this in the first place, like maybe as soon as we both realized she had thrown my summer money in the garbage.

All at once she burst into tears. “Donny, I wish this would have worked out. But you see how things are, Herman and I have all we can do to keep ourselves together. I—I may be a selfish old woman, I don't know, but my nerves just will not take any more aggravation. Not that I blame you entirely, understand. It's the, the circumstances.” Still sniffling, she pulled a hanky from her purse and blew her nose. “This is the best thing all around. You'll be back there where people are more used to you.”

Yeah, well, it was way late for any apology, if that's what this amounted to. All it did was delay us from the departure gate where passengers already were piling onto the bus with
MILWAUKEE
on its roller sign. For me, there'd be another one with
WESTBOUND
after that. I did not look back at her as I handed my ticket to the driver for punching, left the wretched old suitcase for him to throw in the baggage compartment, and climbed aboard to try to find a seat to myself.

•   •   •

I
F SHE HADN'T CRIED,
I would have given in to tears. As it was, I sat there trying to hunch up and take it, one more time. Two days and a night ahead on the dog bus, doom of some kind waiting at the Great Falls depot. Convinced that everything that could go wrong was going wrong, I sent a despairing look up the aisle of the bus. All the situation needed now was something like that bunch of hyena campers to torment me. But no, my fellow passengers mainly were men dressed up for business, a Manitowoc
Herald Times Reporter
up in front of someone like a last mocking farewell reminder of Aunt Kate, and a few couples where the women were as broad-beamed as seemed to be ordinary in Wisconsin. Nothing to worry, I thought bitterly of Herman's wording.

The bus was at the outskirts of Manitowoc, the radius of my summer failure, when I heard the
oof
of someone dropping down next to me. Oh, swell. Exactly what I did not need, a gabby seat changer. With so much else on my mind, I'd forgotten to place my jacket in that spot and now it was too late. Two full hours ahead to Milwaukee yet, and I was in for an overfriendly visit from some stranger with nothing better to do than talk my ears off. Goddamn-it-all-to-hell-anyway, couldn't life give me any kind of a break, on this day when I was being kicked down the road like an unwanted pup? I didn't even want to turn my head to acknowledge the intruder, but sooner or later I had to, so it might as well be now.

“Hallo.”

Out from behind the newspaper, Herman the German was giving me the biggest horsetooth smile.

I rammed upright in my seat. “What are you doing on here?”

“Keeping you company, hah?” he said, as if I had issued an invitation. “Long ride ahead, we watch out for each other.”

“Y-you're going to Montana with me?”

His shoulders went way up, the most expressive French salute yet. “Maybe not to Big Falls. We must discuss.”

So flustered was I trying to catch up with things in no particular order, I craned my neck back toward Manitowoc as if Aunt Kate were on our trail. “Does she know you're here?”

“Puh.” That translated different ways, as “Of course not” and “It doesn't matter,” take my choice. “Left her a note saying I am gone back to Germany, we are you-know-what.”
Kaput?
I goggled at him. Just like that, he could walk out of a marriage and hop on a bus in some other direction from where he said he was going? Man oh man, in comparison I was a complete amateur at making stuff up.

“Today was last straw on camel's back,” he said. I listened open-mouthed as Herman continued in a more satisfied tone. “The Kate will run around like the chicken with its head chopped off awhile, but nothing she can do. I am gone like the wind.” He looked at me with the greatest seriousness. “Donny, this is the time if I am ever to see the West and how it was the Promised Land for people. I must do so now, or I am going to be too soon old.” To try to lighten that heavy thought, he winked at me with his bad eye. “So, we are on the loose, ja?”

“I guess
you
are. But Hippo Butt—I mean the Kate—got it all set up that my grandmother has to stick me in a foster home ahead of the orphanage as soon as I get to Great Falls and—”

“No, she does not. Silly eye-dea. I kiboshed.”

He had to repeat that for it to make any sense to me. As best I could follow, what it came down to was that he had guessed what she was up to when he saw her writing a letter. “Unnotcheral behavior,” he sternly called it. The rest was pretty much what you would think, him sneaking around from the greenhouse after she put the letter to Gram out in the mailbox, swiping it and reading it and, he illustrated triumphantly to me by fluttering his hands as if sprinkling confetti, tearing the thing up. “Evidence gone to pieces, nobody the wiser, hah?”

•   •   •

I
T SANK IN
on me. No one in the entire world knew that the two of us were free as the breeze. Herman wasn't merely flapping his lips; we really were footloose, crazily like the comic strip characters in
Just Trampin
' who were always going on the lam, hopping on freight trains or bumming rides from tough truck drivers to stay a jump ahead of the sheriff. Or at least bus-loose—the fleet of Greyhounds ran anywhere we wanted to go. It was a dizzying prospect. Good-bye, battle-ax wife, for him, and no Hello, orphanage, for me—it was as simple as sitting tight in a bus seat to somewhere known only to us, the Greyhound itself on the lam from all we were leaving behind.

I tell you, scratch a temptation like that between the ears and it begins to lick your hand in a hurry. “You mean, just keep going?” As excited as I'd ever been, the question squealed out of me. “Like for all summer?”

“Betcha boots, podner. Who is to know?”

“Yeah, but, that'll cost a lot.” A shadow of reality set in. “I don't know about you, but I've only got thirty dollars.”

“Nothing to worry. I am running over with money.” Seeing my disbelief, he patted the billfold spot in the breast pocket of his jacket, where there did seem to be a bulge.

“Really truly? How much?”

“Puh-lenty,” said he, as if that spelled it out for me. “Cashed in all my settlement, I did, then went to the bank and taked my share from there. Half for her, half for me, right down center. What is the words for that, same-sam?”

“Uhm, even-steven. But I thought from what Aunt Kate said, you guys were about broke.”

“Pah. Woman talk. We will live like kings, Donny. Here, see.” He took out the fat wallet from inside his coat and spread it open for me. Lots and lots of the smaller denominations, of course, but I hadn't even known fifty and hundred bills existed, as maybe half the wad consisted of. “Outstanding!” I yelped at the prospect of money raining down after my spell of being flat broke.

There was a catch to simply taking off into the yonder, though, isn't there always? “See, Gram has me write to her every week,” I fretted. “She'll know right away I'm not back there with you and Hippo—the Kate—like I'm supposed to be, if those are mailed from any old where.”

Even before I finished speaking, Herman had that look that usually produced eye-dea, but this time what came out was scheme. “Mailed from Manitowoc, they can be. Ernie owes me favor.” He spieled it as if it were a sure thing, me writing enough letters ahead to cover the rest of the summer, the batch then sent to the bartender at the Schooner with instructions to mail one each week. “I stick ten dollarses in with, Ernie would jump over moon if I ask,” he impressed upon me. “Your
grossmutter
hears from you regular, what you are doing,” he finished with infectious confidence. “Postmark says Manitowoc if she looks.”

“You mean,” I asked in a daze, “make up the whole summer?”

“Ja, tell each week the way you like. Make it sound good so she is not to worry.”

And that clinched it. The chance to condense the disastrous season spent with Aunt Kate entirely according to my imagination was too much to resist.

“Woo-hoo, Herman!” I enlisted in his plan so enthusiastically he shushed me and took a quick look around at the other passengers, luckily none close enough to have overheard. Whispering now, I asked eagerly, “But where will we go?”

With a sly grin, he leaned back in his seat as if the dog bus were the latest in luxury. “Anywheres,” he said out the side of his mouth so only I could hear. “Just so it is”—he made the cocked-finger gesture and pointed that pistoleer finger toward the west—“thataway.”

June 30–August 16, 1951

L
IKE A STUCK
compass needle, Herman's fixation held us to a single arrow-straight direction. To the Karl May territory of Indian knights and pistoleer cowboys, if you were Herman. To anywhere out there short of “the other side of the mountains” and a poorfarm for kids called an orphanage, if you were me. To the west, or rather, the West, capitalized in both our minds as the Promised Land, where we could be rid of the Kate and her bossy brand of life.

Old gray duffel bag on his shoulder, my new companion of the road marched through the crowd in the waiting room of the Milwaukee depot without deviating an inch either way, the wicker suitcase and me trying to keep up, dead-ahead until reaching the long and tall wall map topped with
COAST TO COAST
—
THE FLEET WAY
. Over our heads loomed the outline of America, which, I swear, seemed to grow as we stared up at the numerous Greyhound routes extending to the Pacific Ocean.

Our silent gawking finally was broken by a thin voice. Mine.

“So where do we start?”

“Big question,” said Herman, as if he didn't have any more of a clue than I did. I could see him giving the subject a little think. “Maybe takes some
Fingerspitzengefühl
, hah?”

Unable to get my ears around that, I started to tell him to talk plain English because we didn't have time to fool around, but he got there first, more or less. Tilting his head to peer down at me as much with his glass eye as his good one, he uttered—and I still was not sure I was hearing right—“You got
Fingerspitzengefühl
, I betcha.”

My hands curled as if he had diagnosed some kind of disease. “That doesn't sound like something I want to got—I mean, have.”

“No choice do you have. It comes notcheral, once in great while,” he said, as if it were perfectly normal to be singled out by some crazy-sounding thing. “Generals who think with their fingers, like Napoleon, born with it. Clark and Lewis maybe, explorers like us, ja?” The more he spoke, the more serious he seemed to grow, and I could feel my goose bumps coming back. Passengers overhearing him while they checked out their routes on the map were giving us funny looks and stepping away fast.

“Captain Cook, how about, sailing the world around and around.” He still was cranking it out. “Must of had
Fingerspitzengefühl
, or
pthht
, shipwreck.”

•   •   •

I
SINCE HAVE LEARNED
that what he was trying to describe with that jawbreaker word might best be called intuition in the fingertips, something like instinct or born genius or plain inspired guesswork tracing the best possible course up from map paper there at the end of the hand. A special talent of touch and decision that comes from who knows where.

•   •   •

H
E COCKED
that glass-eyed look at me as if I were something special. “You are some lucky boy, Donny, to got it.”

Unconvinced and uncertain, I rubbed my thumbs against my fingertips, which felt the same as ever. “And wh-what if I do?”

“Easy. You find us where to go.” In demonstration, he waggled his fingers as if warming up to play the piano and shifted his gaze to the map over our heads.

I did not want any part of this. “Herman, huh-uh. Even if I stand on a bench I can't reach anything but Florida, and that's way to hell and gone in the wrong direction.”

“Tell you what,” he breezed past my objection, “I get down, you get up.” Then and there, he squatted low as he could go.

I realized he wanted me to straddle his shoulders. Skittish, I couldn't help glancing at people pouring past in as public a place as there was, a good many of them staring as if we already were a spectacle. “Hey, no, really, I don't think I'd better,” I balked. “Won't we get arrested?”

“Pah,” he dismissed that. “America don't know hill of beans about arresting people. You should see Germany. Come on, up the daisy,” he finished impatiently, still down there on his heels. “Pony ride.”

Feeling like a fool, I swung my legs onto his shoulders and he grunted and lifted me high.

Up there eight feet tall, the West was mapped out to me as close as anyone could want, for sure. Finger-spitty-thinger or not, I had to go through the motions. Pressing my hand against the map surface, I tried to draw out inspiration from one spot or another, any spot. Certain the eyes of the entire depot were on me, I felt around like that blind man exploring the elephant. Easy, this absolutely wasn't. If Herman's Apache knight was anywhere around Tucson or Albuquerque, he didn't answer the call. Nor did any Navajo cousin of Winnetou, around the four corners where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado all met. Automatically my hand kept following the bus routes traced in bright red, drifting up, on past Denver, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne. Whatever the right sensation of this silly Hermanic stunt was supposed to be, it was not making itself felt.

By now I was stretching as far as I could reach, the Continental Divide at my elbow, with Herman swaying some as he clutched me around the legs.

“Donny, hurry. Getting heavy, you are.”

“I'm trying, I'm trying.” At least my hand was, moving as if of its own accord. I could tell myself I didn't believe in the finger-guh-fool stuff all I wanted, but all of a sudden my index finger went as if magnetized to the telltale spot over the top of Wyoming.

“I got it!”

“Whereabouts?”

“Montana!”

“Good! Where in Montana?”

“Down from Billings a little.”

“What is there?”

“Crow Fair.”

“Hah? Go see birds? Donny, try again.”

“No! Let me down, I'll tell you about it.”