Last Bus to Wisdom by Ivan Doig
“Big Tiny Little Junior,” replied Herta, although I wasn’t sure I had heard right. She took pity on my mystified expression. “Oh my, don’t you know? Big Tiny Little Junior is the most divine piano player with the Lawrence Welk orchestra. They make ‘champagne music’ and play here every year for the Fourth of July observance in the park and at the county fair and everything of the sort. And the name Big Tiny Little Junior just seemed so right for a parakeet. The little dear is a budgerigar, you know.” I didn’t have a clue that was what a shrunken parrot was called, and my face must have given me away because Herta gave a little giggle of compassion and spelled out, “So there you have it, don’t you see? Biggie the budgie. He even knows his name.” To prove it, she twittered across the room, “Pretty bird, who’s my pretty bird?” The wild-eyed parakeet cocked its head and squeaked, “Big-ee, Big-ee” over and over.
During this, Gerda was dealing out cards with mere flicks of her fingers, faster than I could pick them up. We had barely started and already I was scared half sick at the way this so-called game was shaping up. Characters such as Old Shatterhand in Herman’s shoot-’em-ups faced situations all the time where a person’s fate could be decided on the turn of a card. But in real life, my future with Aunt Kate rested just as precariously on my gameness, to call it that in all possible senses, to cope with great big handfuls of canasta cards.
For it had dawned on me during the hen party chitchat before we sat up to the card table why she was so determined—savagely so, I thought at the time—to drill canasta into me. From the evidence of framed family photographs lined up over on the glistenng sideboard, Herta was the matriarch of a whole slew of sharp-looking Schepkes, and Gerda ever so casually kept working into the conversation remarks about the latest achievement of a grandson here, a granddaughter there, the cream of her crop no doubt rising in the world. And Aunt Kate was stuck with me, her lone such twinkling star of the younger generation, supposedly bright enough to read by at night, to be shown off at last. If I didn’t prove to be too dim to grasp a card game old ladies played like riverboat gamblers. By now I knew Aunt Kate well enough that if that were to happen, any attempt at shining me up to match Herta’s and Gerda’s golden offspring would be doused at once and she would devote her efforts to conveying to the others what a complete moron she was nobly putting up with. She could go either way. I was in big trouble if I did not play my cards right.
• • •
NO SOONER had Gerda finished dealing than she reached down for the purse beside her chair and took out a roll of coins, plunking it down beside her. Aunt Kate simultaneously did the same, each woman thumbing open the bank wrap to spill a stock of quarters in front of them.
“Time to feed the kitty,” Aunt Kate said musically, evidently a usual joke.
“We’ll see about that, Kittycat,” Gerda declared.
“Here’s my half, Gerd,” Herta thrust a five-dollar bill across the table, which vanished into Gerda’s purse. I blinked at that transaction, which indicated each roll of quarters was ten dollars’ worth, plopped down here casually as if this were a game of marbles.
“Are we playing for blood?”
My shrilled question, straight from bunkhouse poker lingo, made all three women recoil. It was up to Aunt Kate to set me straight, the pointed looks at her from Gerda and Herta made plain.
“If you mean are we gambling, dearie, you most certainly are not,” she set in on me with a warning frown. “I am standing your share, aren’t I,” underscoring the point by picking up a wealth of quarters and letting them trickle from her hand. “The Minnie share, we can call it.”
The other two tittered appreciatively at that. “As to our teensy wagers,” Aunt Kate spoke, as if this might be hard for me to follow but I had better try hard, “we are simply making the game more interesting, aren’t we, girls. To liven things up a little, mm?”
So saying, she shoved a quarter each for herself and me, the would-be Minnie Zettel, out next to the deck to form the kitty, Gerda did the same for her and Herta, and that was supposed to be that.
• • •
WITH MONEY RIDING on the game, added to all else circling in my head as I stuffed cards into my hand fifteen deep, I sneaked looks right and left, sizing up our opponents. Both women were cut from the same cloth as Aunt Kate, which was to say spacious. Gerda was squat and broad, Herta was tall and broad. The halfway similar names and wide builds aside, they were not sisters, merely cousins, and old acquaintances of Aunt Kate from some ladies’ club way back when, I gathered. Both were widows, Herman holding the firm belief that they had talked their husbands to death. Widders, in the bunkhouse pronunciation I had picked up. Melody Roundup on the Great Falls radio station sometimes played a country-and-western song that backed Herman’s theory to a considerable extent: “Widder women and white lightning, what they do to a man is frightening.” That tune crazily invaded through my head, too, as I tried to force myself to remember the countless rules of canasta.
Almost as if peeking into my mind, Herta right then chose to ask with a certain slyness, “Are you musical, like your auntie who even talks like there’s a song in her voice?”
“Oh, now, Hertie, don’t get carried away,” Aunt Kate responded, as if she were being teased with that as well as me.
I answered up to Herta’s dig or whatever it was. “Naw, I’m the kind who can only play one instrument. The radio.” I fell back on the old joke, which did not go over as big as I’d hoped.
“Are we playing cards or musical chairs?” Gerda asked pointedly.
“Don-ny,” Aunt Kate prompted, with a smile seeking forgiveness from the Herta-Gerda partnership, “any red threes to meld?”
Not a good start. “Sure, I was just about to.”
I grabbed the trey of hearts I had stuck at the far end of my hand without a thought and flopped it on the table. Aunt Kate leaned back and smiled at me with a hint of warning in her eyes that I had almost cost us a hundred points by not playing the damn three in the first place, and Gerda looked at me slyly as she flipped me the replacement card. “My, my, aren’t you something, you’re beating the pants off us already,” Herta said in the same dumbed-down tone she used in talking to the bird.
After that I tried to keep my mind fully on draws and discards and Herman’s eye-deas for bushwhacking and the rest, but the hen party combination on either side of me, not even to mention Biggie the budgie squealing away, was really distracting. Herta actually clucked, making that thwock sound with her tongue against the roof of her mouth when she exclaimed over something, which was often. That was bad enough, but her partner presented an even worse challenge. The last name of Gerda was Hostetter, which was so close to Horse Titter that I couldn’t get that out of my mind, either. I had learned by way of Gram to call grown-ups I didn’t know well Mr. and Mrs., and every time I addressed the widder to my right it came out something like “Mrs. Horssstetter.”
“Oh, don’t, snicklefritz,” she killed that off after the first few times. “Just call me Gerda, please.” Making a discard that I had absolutely no use for, as she uncannily almost always did, she idly glanced at me, saying, “I understand you’re from a ranch. Is it one of those fancy dude ones?”
“No-o-o, not exactly. It’s more the kind with cows and horses and hayfields,” that last word came out wistfully.
“I suppose you’re glad to be here because there’s not much for a boy like you to do there,” said Gerda, as if that were the epitaph on my ranch life.
“Aw, there’s always something going on,” I found myself sticking up for the Double W. All three women were eating the cheese-and-cracker nibbles as if they were gumdrops, so it must have been their obvious devotion to food that brought what I considered an inspiration. “You know, what’s really fun on a ranch is a testicle festival.”
That stopped everyone’s chewing and drew me full attention from three directions, so I thought I ha
“It happens at branding time, see, when the male calves have to be taken care of. It’s nut cutting, there’s no way around calling it anything but that. Well, castration, if you want to be fancy. Anyway, all these testicles get thrown in a bucket to be washed up and then cooked over the fire right there in the corral. There’s plenty to feed the whole branding crew. Two to a calf, you know,” I spelled out, thinking from the blank expressions around the table that maybe they weren’t that knowledgeable about livestock.
“Don-ny,” Aunt Kate spoke as if she had something caught in her gullet, “that’s very interesting, but—”
Herta blurted, “You actually eat those?”
“Oh sure, you can guzzle them right down. Rocky Mountain oysters, they’re real good. You have to fry them up nice, bread them in cornmeal or something, but then, yum.”
“Yum” did not seem to sit well with the ladies. Thinking it might be because they were used to nibbles, as Aunt Kate called the candy gunk, which bite by bite didn’t amount to much and Herta’s crackers-and-cheese treat that tasted like dried toast and library paste, I kept trying to present the case for Rocky Mountain oysters despite the discreet signals from across the table that enough was enough. Not to me, it wasn’t. I had an argument to make.
“Honest, you can fix a whole meal out of not that many nu—testicles—see. They’re about yay long,” I held my fingers four or so inches apart, the size of a healthy former bull calf’s reproductive items.
Herta seemed to take that in with more interest than did Gerda, who just looked at me as if sorting me out the ruthless way she did cards. Apparently deciding I could be coaxed off the topic, Herta crooned in practically birdie talk, “That tells us so much about ranch life. Anyway, aren’t you cuter than sin in your cowboy shirt.”
Without meaning to—much, anyway—I gave her the full snaggle smile for that, the one like I might bite.
“Heavens!” She jerked her cards up as if shielding herself from me. “What in the world happened to that boy’s t—”
“He fell while he was working on the ranch.” Aunt Kate wisely did not go into the roundup tale. “They have a favorite dentist back there and his grandmother is taking him to be fixed up good as new, the minute he gets home from the summer to Montana,” she topped that off smooth as butter. This was news to me, but not the kind intended. My supposedly no-nonsense aunt could story as fast and loose as I could.
• • •
AFTER THAT PERFORMANCE on my part, as I knew Aunt Kate was going to level the word at me later, the game dragged on with the score steadily mounting against us and the quarters in the kitty regularly being scooped in by Gerda. It turned out that livening things up a little, as Aunt Kate called it, included many an ante during play as well as the payoff for winning each hand. Natural canastas, without wild cards, brought groans and a forfeit of quarters, as did things Aunt Kate characterized as Manitowoc rules, such as melding all black aces. I watched with apprehension as Aunt Kate’s stake of quarters dwindled. In bunkhouse terms, we were up against sharpies. Gerda was a terrifying player, seeming to know which cards each of the rest of us held as if she had X-ray vision. Herta was no slouch, either. As I desperately tried to keep up with what cards were played and the passel of rules, I was concentrating nearly to the point of oblivion when I heard the word green, followed by stamps.
I snapped to. Herta was going on about a certain lawn chair featured in the window at the Schermerhorn furniture store downtown. “It has the nicest blue plastic weave and is so light, made of aluminum, and you can fold right down flat in it to sun yourself,” she enthused. “It costs something fierce, though. So I’m hoping I can get it if I can build up my Green Stamps before too awfully long, while summer is still going good.”
“Oh, those, I never bother with them,” Aunt Kate pooh-poohed the trading stamps. “They’re so little use, you can’t even trade them in for decent clothes.”
“We all have ravishing clothes, Kitty,” Herta responded with a bland glance at Aunt Kate’s muumuu of many colors. “What I want is that lawn chair. Free and for nothing and with not even a fee, as the saying is.” All three tittered at that. Then Herta sighed and consoled herself with a nibble. “I’ve been saving up and saving up, but it’s a slow process.”
“You watch and see,” Gerda put in, “you’ll be eligible for that lawn chair about the time a foot of snow comes. I’m with Kitty, those silly stamps aren’t worth the trouble. It’s your draw, snicklefritz,” and, bang, we were right back at playing canasta for blood.
I watched and waited for the discard pile to grow, while dipping my hand into my pants pocket to work on the lucky arrowhead. Gerda noticed me at it, as she did everything, and asked none too nicely, “What’s the attraction down your leg there?”
Before I could make up an excuse, Aunt Kate spoke up. “Oh, he insists on carrying some piece of rock he thinks is his secret lucky charm, it’s harmless.”
Luckily enough, that took care of that, and on the next go-round, my ears ringing with Herman’s advice—Hold back, discard one like you don’t got any use for it, and watch for same kind of card to show up on pile in your turn. Bullwhack the hens—I discarded one of the five sevenspots I had built up. Sure enough, two rounds later, Gerda the human card machine operated on memory and tossed onto the pile what should have been an absolutely safe seven of spades. Saying nothing and maintaining a poker face if not a canasta one, I produced my double pair of sevens and swept up the pile.
There was a stunned silence from Gerda and Herta and a tongue-in-cheek one from Aunt Kate as I pulled in the rich haul of cards. Finally Gerda could not stand it and said, in a tone very much as if she had been bushwhacked, “Just as a point of the obvious, you do know you discarded a seven a bit ago.”
“Uh-huh,” I played dumb although I also kept spreading sevens and other melds across the table, “but this way I got it back.” Aunt Kate conspicuously said nothing, merely watching me meld cards right and left as if our good fortune was an accident of luck, which it was, but not in the way she thought.
• • •
THAT AND A few other stunts I came up with that drew me black looks from Gerda and surprised ones from Aunt Kate saved our skin and our stake somewhat, but I was running out of tricks according to Hoyle and Herman, and several hands later Aunt Kate and I still trailed on the score sheet, and worse, in the kitty. Another ridiculous thing about canasta was that the game went on and on until one set of partners had scored a total of five thousand points. The way this was going, Herta and Gerda would reach that in another hand or two and wipe us out good and plenty. My partner across the table wore an expression of resignation tinged with exasperation, and I did not look forward to the ride home with her. Before the next hand was dealt, though, we were temporarily saved by the luck or whatever it was of me sneaking the last cracker-and-cheese and downing it.
“Goodness, we’ve gone through the nibbles, haven’t we.” Herta immediately noticed the empty plate and felt her hostess duty. “What do you say we take a wee little break and I’ll fix some more.”
“And a little wee break,” said Aunt Kate, surprisingly reckless, as she pronto headed out to what in these circumstances seemed to be called the powder room. Gerda called dibs on the next visit, and went over to wait by cooing to the parakeet.
Here was my chance, slim as it was. As if merely looking around, I wandered into the kitchen, where Herta was industriously dipping a table knife into a freshly opened jar of pimento cheese spread and daubing some on cracker after cracker to build a pyramid on the plate. She glanced around at me with an eyebrow raised, humorously maybe. “After all that talk of oysters, too hungry to wait, are we?”
“Huh-uh. It’s not that.” I peeked back into the living room to make sure we couldn’t be overheard. Gerda was babytalking to the parakeet, which answered her with unending screeches of “Big-ee,
“Oh, do you?” A glob of cheese spread had smeared onto the edge of the plate and she cleaned it off with her finger and ate it, with a wrinkle of her nose at me that said it would be just our secret, wouldn’t it. Thinking I was making too much of too little, she kept her voice low in saying, “You must have been with Kitty or that husband of hers at one of those gas stations where they give out a few for a fill-up, is that it?”
“Uh-uh. I have a whole book, pasted in and everything.”
She sucked her finger while studying me with deepened interest. “What’s a boy like you doing with all those?”
Sixteen hundred and one hard-earned miles on the bus, that was what. But I only said, “I got them with my ticket here. So I was wondering if we could sort of make a trade, since they’re called trading stamps, right?”
“A trade, you say,” she inquired in a lowered voice, nibbles forgotten now. “Such as?”
“Well, see, I know how much you’d like to have that lawn chair. And you know how much Aunt Kate likes to win. If you could help that along a little, so she and I come out on top today, I could bring you my book of Green Stamps next time we play. That way, you get your free lawn chair and I don’t get my fanny chewed about canasta all week.”
“Goodness gracious, you do have a way of putting things.” She thought for a couple of seconds, calculating what she would lose in the kitty against the fierce price tag on the lawn chair, then craned her neck to check on the living room, with me doing the same. Gerda was taking her turn in the powder room, and Aunt Kate now was stationed at the birdcage, whistling at Biggie and receiving squeaks and scratchy chirrups in return.