Last Bus to Wisdom (11 page)

“How about guns?”

My question silenced them for a full several seconds.

Mannie was the first to recover and break out a sneer. “What, cap pistols? Little-kid games ain't for us.”

“That's not what I mean,” I responded, innocent as the devil filing his fingernails, as a Gram saying best put it. “Remington single-shot .22s. Like I use, at the ranch.”

“Yeah?” Kurt sat up and a little away from me. “Use on what?”

“Magpies.”

“Yeah? What's those?”

“Birds. Big black-and-white ones that would just as soon peck your eyes out as look at you.” He flinched back as I spread my hands in a sudden gesture. “With tails about yay long. Don't you have those here?”

“Naw, I don't think so.” He looked across uncertainly at Gus and Mannie, who were shaking their heads in slack-jawed ignorance of one of the most common birds in Creation. Talk about having a wire down; if any of these three had a brain that worked, it would be lonesome.

“Then how do you make any money?” I pressed my advantage, Kurt still leaning away as if his ass might get shot off from my direction. “See, there's a bounty on magpies, on account of they eat the eyeballs right out of calves and lambs and things, and”—I had a moment of inspiration—“they really do gobble gopher guts.” At that, my audience was agog, if slightly green around the gills.

“So what you do,” I continued in expert style, “after you shoot them, you cut off their legs with your jackknife and turn those in for the bounty. Fifty cents, just like that.” I snapped my fingers like a shot, if a person imagined a little. “They're pretty easy to shoot, I got seventeen so far this year,” I concluded, as if dead magpies were notches on my gun belt.

By now I was being looked at as if I was either a gunslinging hero of the eleven-year-old set or the biggest liar on the face of the earth. But it was totally true that Wendell Williamson, tightwad that he was, ponied up for dirty little birdy feet, magpies being the hated nuisance they were on ranches, after Gram vouched that my father had taught me how to shoot the .22 and she swore I was responsible enough to hunt along the creek willows without endangering the cattle.

My listeners stirred uncertainly. Gus's lips were moving as he worked out fifty cents times seventeen, while Mannie gauged me more warily than before. It was up to Kurt to rally the campers.

“Yeah, well, bows and arrows can kill stuff, too. Like, uh, frogs. We're goin' frog huntin' the first night at camp, ain't we, guys.”

“We'll murder the buggers!” and “Frog legs for breakfast!” from across the aisle backed that up as if hunting hopping amphibians in the dark, Indian-style, was a tried-and-true camp activity, which I seriously doubted.

Now even the would-be holy terrors of the frog world fell still as an announcement boomed out from the driver that we were not stopping in Sheboygan as scheduled, because no one was ticketed to there and no more passengers could be taken on. Actually, I suspected he was in a hurry to get rid of the mess of campers. No doubt to put minds at rest, so to speak, about a restroom, he added, “Manitowoc in fifteen short minutes.”

Really? The comprehension began to sink in that I was nearly there at last. Fifteen minutes truly did sound like no time after all my hours on the bus, the never-to-be-forgotten encounters I'd had, close calls especially. In an odd way, I started to miss all that, the bits and pieces of my immense journey coming to mind while my latest companions thought it was a big deal to go up the road a skip and a jump to the same dumb camp year after year. But the mind does funny things, and half listening to their razzing back and forth about which of them was most likely to shoot himself in the foot with an arrow, I had a sudden itch toward the autograph book. After all, here was my last chance on the dog bus for who knew how long, and three candidates right here handy. So what if they behaved like nose pickers, when they knew stuff like that campers' song. Goofiness had its place in the pages of life, too.

Impulsively I pulled out the album, its cream-colored cover somewhat smudged from so much handling but overall less the worse for the trip than I was, and showed it off to Kurt.

“Yeah?” his answer to almost everything. He fanned through the pages like a speed-reader. “So you want us all to put somethin' in it.”

I said I sure did, which brought about quite a reaction across the aisle. Gus giggled in Mannie's face. “Gonna write
My name is Manfred Vedder, I'm an old bed wetter
, ain'tcha?”

“Sure, dipshit, just like you're gonna sign yours
Augustus Dussel, that's me, I barely have brains enough to pee
,” Mannie jeered back.

Nervously I pasted on a grin at their name-calling contest. Whatever their parents had been thinking in saddling them with those wacky christenings, these brats would be a different kind of material for the autograph book, for sure. And I couldn't help but wonder what Kurt the leading loudmouth was going to come up with when he committed ink to paper.

Meanwhile he still was toying his way through the pages, and to get things going, I was about to hand him the Kwik-Klik and explain how it worked, when he clapped the book shut and held it out to show Gus and Mannie. “Gotta better idea. We'll take it to camp and everybody there can write in it for ya. The counselors, even.” All three of them snickered at that, you can bet. “Don't blow your wig,” Kurt said, as if I shouldn't have a care in the world, “we'll send it back to you in Monta-a-a-na when it's full.”

“Hey, no! I need to keep it, I just want you guys to write in it.”

“We'll get around to it,” he breezed by that. “Letcha know how the frog huntin' goes.”

Getting really worried, I made a grab for the book. With a laugh, he tossed it across the aisle to Gus, who whooped and shoveled it to Mannie as if this were a game of keep-away.

In desperation, I shoved the heel of my hand into Kurt's surprised face and kicked my way past him—he didn't amount to much of a barrier compared to the braided Indian or the man in the bad-fitting suit—and launched myself onto the giggling pair across the aisle, calling them dickheads and sonsofbitches and whatever other swearwords came to my tongue. It was two against one, but they were underneath and I was all over them with flailing limbs. In the scuffle, I elbowed Gus hard enough to take the giggle out of him. Mannie was chanting “Uh uh uh, don't be grabby!” when I got on top of him enough to knee him in a bad place and snatch the album back.

By now the grown-ups who supposedly were in charge of this band of thieves had floundered onto the scene and were pulling me off a howling Mannie, while the bus driver bellowed, “Everybody siddown!”

Still cussing to the best of my ability, I was grappled by one of the adults into the seat across the aisle, Kurt having retreated to the window as far as he could get from me.

“We wasn't gonna keep it, honest,” he whined, the liar, as I furiously checked things over. The autograph book miraculously had survived without damage, but my shirt was wrecked all to hell, a pocket dangling almost off—fortunately not the one with the money pinned to it—and a number of buttons were missing, and I could feel a draft from rips under the arms and long tears down the back as if I'd been fighting clawed animals, which I pretty nearly was.

About then I spat something out. A piece of tooth. My tongue found the chipped spot. One of the sharp teeth next to my bottom front ones. Sharper now. Baring my choppers at him, I gave Kurt another murderous look, and he whimpered, the fearless frog hunter.

While I was trying to take inventory, catch my breath, nurse my tooth, and pull my ruined shirt together enough for decency, the bus abruptly slowed and steered off to one side. I reared up, blinking, looking around for Manitowoc. But no, we were braking to a halt on a roadside pullover, the parking lot for a picnic area, and the driver had something else in mind. Climbing out from behind the steering wheel with grim determination, his mustache bristling, he stalked down the aisle to the four of us dead-still in various states of apprehension.

“You.” He pointed a finger at me and then jerked a thumb toward the front of the bus. “Up there, where I can keep an eye on you.”

My ears burning, I followed him to the seat nearest the steps, swapping with some unlucky camper about to have Kurt inflicted on him. I guess by the same token, the kid in the window seat next to my new spot shrank away from me like he'd been put in a cage with a wild beast.

•   •   •

A
CTUALLY,
I discovered much, much too late, I'd been banished to the best seat on the bus. Why didn't I think of this at, say, Havre? Up there with nothing in front but the dashboard and the doorwell, I could see everything the driver could, every particle of road and scenery, clear as if the bus-wide windshield were a magnifying glass. Except for the chipped tooth my tongue kept running over, all of a sudden I felt like a new person. For the next some minutes I sat entranced as the world opened ahead of me, no longer sliding past a side window. And so it was that I had the best possible view of my destination from the outskirts on in.

•   •   •

B
Y THEN
I
HAD
seen sixteen hundred miles' worth of towns, from Palookavilles to the Twin Cities busy as double beehives to gray soppy Milwaukee spiked with churches. At this first sight of Manitowoc, though, I did not know what to think. The houses looked old, many of them small and with gray siding, on streets with some flower gardens fringing the lawns but none of the overtowering cottonwood groves of Gros Ventre or Great Falls. Nothing about the tight-packed neighborhoods appeared even remotely familiar except Chevys and Fords dotting the streets, and those were strangely pulled in sideways—parallel parking had not converted Montana. Plenty of church steeples here, too, like arrow tips in the hide of the sky. As for the people out and about, they were not as dressed up as in Minneapolis, yet the women looked like they had on nylons, which not even Meredice Williamson wore on an everyday basis at the ranch, and the men sported hats that would scarcely keep the sun off at all, not a Stetson among them.

My eyes stayed busy as could be, my mind trying to keep up with all the different sights and scenes—Gram had been right about that, I had to admit—as the bus approached the more active downtown section, with long lines of mystifying storefronts. We passed a business calling itself a
SCHNAPPS SCHOP
, which looked like a bar, and the bars I could recognize all had a glowing blue neon sign in the window proclaiming
SCHLITZ, THE BEER THAT MADE MILWAUKEE FAMOUS
, which was news to me—it hadn't done so in Montana—while what looked like restaurants commonly had the word
SCHNITZEL
painted on the plate glass, and an apparent department store had
SCHUETTE'S
, a very strange-sounding product if it wasn't a name, spelled in large letters above its show windows. I was no whiz at other languages, but I had the awful growing suspicion that if ghosts walked in Manitowoc, they had better speak German to find their way around this weird town.

Like a thunderclap following that realization, the bus rumbled across a drawbridge over a murky river, with half-killed weeds clinging to its banks, and on past huge shed-like buildings with signs saying they were enterprises unknown to me, such as boiler works and coal yards. Fortunately I caught a reassuring glimpse of a sparkling gray-blue lake that spilled over the horizon, and the best thing that had yet come into sight, a tremendously long red-painted ship in the harbor with
ORE EMPRESS
in big white letters on its bow.

Then the bus was lurching into the driveway of the depot, and the next thing I knew, the driver killed the engine, swung around in his seat with relief written on his face, and announced:

“Manitowoc, the pearl of Lake Michigan. Everybody off.”

I was thunderstruck, but not for long.

“HEY, NO, EVERYBODY SIT TIGHT! YOU'RE NOT THERE YET!”

My outcry halted the driver and probably everyone else on the bus. “You're taking them to Camp Winniegoboo!” I instructed the open-mouthed man at the wheel. “They told me so!”

He recovered enough to sputter, “What're you yapping about? A camp bus picks them up here.” I went numb. “They're off my hands,” he briskly brushed those together, disposing of me at the same time. “Besides, what do you care? You're ticketed to here like everybody else, aren't you? End of the line, bub. Come on.”

I nodded dumbly, and followed him off the bus into the unloading area. There still was a chance, if I could grab my suitcase and hustle into the waiting room ahead of the throng of campers. But of course at Milwaukee mine had been the first one stowed in the baggage compartment, and as infallibly as Murphy's Law that anything that can go wrong is bound to go wrong, every camping kid received his bag and filtered into the depot before the wicker suitcase was reached. Directly ahead, as I slogged in dead last, Kurt and his gang looked back and gave me various kinds of the stink eye, but stayed a safe distance away.

•   •   •

I
NSIDE THE DEPOT,
it was just as I feared. The waiting room was jammed with the camp kids madly swirling around until their bus arrived, everything in total confusion, redheads bobbing everywhere in the milling herd, and I knew, absolutely positively knew, picking me out was impossible. Tucking in my shredded shirttail as best I could and trying to cover torn seams with my elbows, I stood there, desperately looking around, but while there were all kinds of grown-ups mixed in with the crowd, for the life of me I couldn't see anyone I imagined to be an Aunt Kitty or an uncle named Dutch.

When my greeters didn't show up and didn't show up, I decided there was only one thing to do. Resort to the slip of paper with their phone number. Not that I knew squat about using the instrument evidently hidden in the forbidding closet-size booth with
GREAT LAKES PAY PHONE
on it, all the way across the terminal. Pay phone? Like a jukebox, was that, where you stuck coins in and a bunch of machinery was set in motion in the guts of the apparatus, or what? Everywhere I had lived, the construction camps, the ranch, telephones were a simple party line where you merely picked up the receiver and dinged two longs and two shorts or whatever the signal was for whoever you were calling. This was not the best time to have to figure out strange new equipment, especially if you were as close to having the heebie-jeebies as I was.