Last Bus to Wisdom by Ivan Doig
“But what are we gonna do after that?” I spread my arms helplessly.
He gazed off into the distance, as he must have gazed countless miles that way since that night in a Munich beer hall. “We take a leap of fate.”
Believe me, I have looked this up, and the roots of fate and faith are not the same. Nonetheless, I picked up my wicker suitcase to follow Herman the German into the Old Faithful Inn.
• • •
EVER STEPPED into an aircraft hangar? The lobby of the elaborate old Inn was like that, only roomier, largely higher. In the big open area I had to tip my head way back to count balcony after balcony held suspended by beams thick as logs, the supports all the way to the towering roof peak positioned each on top of the one below like those circus acrobats standing on one another’s shoulders. Incredibly, except for a mountainous stone fireplace, every single thing in the Inn—walls, balcony railings, chairs, benches, ashtray stands, light fixtures—seemed to be made of timber, actual trees, freaks of the forest according to the fantastic twists and turns of some of the trunks and limbs. Dimly lit only by old electric candles that threw about as much light as Christmas tree bulbs, the place struck me as creepy, as in those fairy tales where bad things happen to travelers in shadowy old inns.
Herman seemed unperturbed. “Like the Kaiser’s hunting lodge, but built by beavers” was his estimate of the pine-forest lobby as we entered, baggage in hand.
“So, Donny, do like I told,” he whispered as we headed toward the front desk. “Pretend you own the place, whole schmier is your vacation palace.” Before coming in, he had dug down in the duffel bag and found his tie, the out-of-date one with mermaids twined coyly in seaweed, but a tie. He similarly dressed me up by making me put on my moccasins. “Now we are not looking like hoboes so much,” he appraised us with a lot more confidence than I felt.
Or for that matter, the sleepy night clerk, who blinked himself more alert at the sight of us, glancing with a growing frown at his reservation book and our approach. He did take a second look at my impressive moccasins, although that may have been canceled out by his beholding Herman’s dangling mermaids. Whatever he thought, he cleared his throat and addressed our coming:
“Checking in late, sir? Name, please?”
“No, no, got room this afternoon.” Herman waved a hand at the first question and simultaneously erased the second. “Der Junge can’t sleep, so watched the geezer go off and off, and now we are bringing his souvenir collection from the car and laundry bag along with,” he accounted for our conspicuous odd suitcase and duffel. “Back to room we go, everything fine and jimmy-dandy.”
“Oh, say, Grandpa,” I spoke my part, as we had to march right by the clerk’s still inquisitive scrutiny, “did you lock the Caddy?”
“Ja, don’t want bears in the Cadillac, hah?” Herman laughed in such jolly fashion it infected the clerk.
Chuckling, the man behind the desk all but ushered us past. “You’re a hundred percent right about that, sir. Good night and sleep tight.”
Up the plank-wide stairs we went, climbing to the absolute top and darkest balcony and passing by rows of rooms until reaching a far corner, as Herman had calculated, out of sight from the front desk. Also as he had counted on, there was more of that wildwood furniture, massive chairs made out of lodgepole, along the balcony for lobby-watching. Grunting and straining, between us we wrestled two of those into our corner and tucked the duffel and suitcase in behind. Ourselves we tried to fit into the rigid wooden seats in some semblance of bedtime positions. “Beds a little hard tonight,” Herman tried to joke, patting the tree limbs under the not very thick cushions.
“About like sleeping on a lumber pile, yeah,” I muttered, squirming in vain to get comfortable at all, missing the upholstered seats of the dog bus as if they were the lap of luxury. But I had to admit, we were in for the night, flat broke though we were.
• • •
HERMAN SHOOK ME awake when the first hints of dawn shown in the upmost windows of the timbered lobby, whispering, “Up and at. Outside we must get before hotel people come around.”
After peering cautiously into the canyon of the lobby to make sure a different desk clerk had come on duty, we headed down, with Herman saying, “Leave to me. We must go out like kings.”
Or freeloaders to be arrested on sight, I thought to myself.
As we approached the obstacle of the front desk again, I tried to appear as prosperous as royalty who went around in Blackfoot moccasins, meanwhile hoping the clerk would be impressed by a matching suitcase woven out of willows.
Striding as if he genuinely did own the place, erect as the timber of the lobby and his nose in the air, Herman gave the clerk the barest of nods and a guttural “Guten morgen.”
“Ah, good morning to you, too. May I help—”
“Checked out, we already are,” Herman growled impatiently, throwing in some more gravelly German. “How you say, grabbing early bus.”
“Wait, your room number is—?”
Herman threw over his shoulder some rapid incomprehensible number in German and a farewell wave. “Auf Wiedersehen.”
• • •
WITH THAT, we were outside in the fresh Yellowstone morning, fresh enough to make my teeth chatter.
“Lived through the night, hah, Donny?” I could see Herman’s breath as he made this pronouncement.
I simply looked the real question to him: Now what?
A whoosh growing louder and louder in the still air, Old Faithful percolating out of the mound again, spared him from answering that. “Notcheral wonders we are not short of, anyways,” he stuck with, gazing at the plumes of hot water shooting skyward.
Yeah, right. Stranded and broke in a natural wonderland was still stranded and broke. Stiff and sore and tired of Old Faithful butting in every time I pressed Herman for some way out of the hot water we were in, I was feeling out of sorts. Doubly so, actually. Because along with our predicament, something about Yellowstone itself kept tickling my mind, to put it in Herman’s terms. One of those itches in the head that a person can’t quite scratch. Some out-of-this-world fact from Believe It or Not? Something digested way too deep from a Condensed Book? But whatever the teaser was, it kept refusing to come out from behind the immediate matter of Herman and me being the next thing to hoboes and maybe even having crossed that line.
• • •
AS IF to rub it in, the tourist world was comfortably coming to life, people moseying out onto the deck from breakfast, while my stomach was gnawing my backbone, and tour buses were pulling up in front of the Inn with baggage wranglers busily piling suitcases into luggage compartments. I watched the buses with envy, another gnawing sensation, longing for a Greyhound to take us somewhere, anywhere.
Herman read my mind. “Better look for a safe harbor, hah?”
“Right,” I said crankily, “let’s go see where we could go if we only could.”
Trying to appear like travelers actually able to buy tickets, we hefted our baggage over to the loading area, skirting a line of chattering tourists boarding to see mud volcanoes and other sights, as we made our way to the extensive bulletin board where in routes of red sheeted over with weatherproof plastic, THE FLEET WAY once again was promised.
“Guess what, Donny,” Herman began as we approached the map, waggling his fingers piano-player fashion to encourage mine, “time for you to—”
“Huh-Huh-Herman!” I gasped. Unable to get out the actual word. “Look!”
I pointed an unsteady finger, not at the map but toward the opposite end of the bulletin board.
Like me, he stared in disbelief, then shock. There, past the park’s announcements of the day’s activities and its lists of don’ts and tacked-up tourist messages to other tourists, was a lineup of FBI MOST WANTED posters of the kind that kept a gallery of criminals scowling from the wall of every post office i
A soft strangled sound, which I suspected must be the German cussword of all cusswords, escaped from his lips. Recovering before I did, he glanced around and around, pulling me close as he did so. Whispering, “What we must do, quick, quick,” he rapidly told me how to proceed, and I followed his instructions as blankly as a sleepwalker, edging along the bulletin board as though every piece of paper was of surpassing interest, with him leaning over my shoulder. Reaching the MOST WANTED lineup, he shielded me with his body, checked around again to make sure no one was looking, and when he whispered, “Now!” I ripped down the poster with the awful words ENEMY ALIEN and VIOLATION OF and CONTACT YOUR NEAREST FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION OFFICE AT ONCE IF YOU SPOT THIS SUSPECT and stuffed it inside my jacket.
• • •
DEED DONE, we grabbed up our luggage and retreated to the deck of the Inn yet again, depositing ourselves in a corner farthest from the latest batch of sitters waiting for Old Faithful to live up to its name, which I could have told them it relentlessly would. With a ragged sigh, Herman held out his hand for the poster. Both of us studied the slightly crumpled likeness of the sailor Dutch, as he was then, and the paragraph of official language fully describing him and his offense. He shook his head in despair at the MOST WANTED treatment, definitely the wrong kind of being famous. “You would think I am Killer Boy Dillinger, Public Enemy Number Eins.”
“One,” I automatically corrected. “But why are they after you so bad?”
He passed a hand over his face as if to clear something away, although from his expression it wouldn’t go. “Wisconsin has a senator, like they say, who sees Red anywheres he looks. ‘Foreign’ spells ‘Communist’ to him. And here was I, mystery man with no proof of being American, under his nose all this time?” He bit out the next words. “The FBI, excuse how I must say it, is kissing this Senator McCarthy’s hind end by making me big fugitive.”
“Yeeps, Herman! That’s not fair!”
“No, is politics gone crazy.” He fell silent, looking downcast, the WANTED poster trembling a little in his hand. At last he said almost inaudibly, “Turned me in, she did.”
It took me a moment to gather that in. “Aunt Kate? Aw, she couldn’t, could she? I mean, isn’t there a law or something? What the hell, Herman, she’s your wife.”
He stared at the WANTED poster in his big hands as if asking the same of it, then looked away from the photo of his younger self, from me, from anything except the question that invaded the beautiful park, taking over his voice.
“Who said we are married?”
• • •
YOU COULD HAVE knocked me over with the blink of an eye. Speechless at first, I tried to get my mind around the pair of them living under the same roof, sleeping in the same bed, fighting the same battle every breakfast, all these years without ever—as the saying was—disturbing the preacher.
Thickly I managed to stammer, “But she’s a Brinker, like you. You’ve got to be married for that, don’t you?”
He shook his head. “She took the name, is all. Easier that way. Keep people from thinking we are living”—he really gave his head a shake now, as if trying to clear it—“in sin, hah. More like, in duty. Drafted soldiers, both of us, if you would imagine,” he put it in starkest terms. “From time of Witch of November when—”
• • •
THE STORY WAS, when Fritz Schmidt was lost in the storm that sent the Badger Voyager to the bottom of Lake Michigan and Herman survived but with an eye gone, the new widow Kate, stranded now in her waterfront waitress job, came to see him in the hospital. “All broke up, crying like cloudburst. Tells me she knows what friends Fritz and I was, how hard it is for me, like her. And this”—he tapped alongside the substitute eye—“meant I was without job.” You can about hear her, he mused, declaring this was too much on both of them, it wouldn’t hurt them one time in their lives to do something out of the ordinary. “Said if I wanted place to stay,” he drew the tale to an end, “I could come to the house.” Gazing off, maybe looking back, he shrugged. “Never left.”
Bewildered anew, I blurted, “But all the time I was there, the two of you fought like—”
“—alley cats at table scraps. Not at first,” he tempered that, his look at me a plea for understanding. “But you think about it, the Kate was used to Fritz away most of time, on boat. I was not away, ever, and it got on nerves. Me on hers, her on mine, fair to say.” He spread his hands, as if balancing choices. “Not good way to live together, but both too stubborn to give in to situation. Until—”
He did not have to say the rest. Until I showed up, a stranger off the dog bus, bringing with me old baggage in more ways than one for Gram’s sister and a jolt of imagination for the man going through life not being Dutch, not being an actual husband, not really grounded in much of anything but dreams of adventure in the Promised Land, out west.
Feeling I was to blame, while trying strenuously to deny it to myself, I started to throw a fit. “Goddamn-it-all-to-hell-anyway, why didn’t you and her get married in the first place like you were supposed to and we wouldn’t any of us be in this fix and, and—”
My tantrum dwindled as the answer caught up with me. “The alien thinger?”
“Ja,” he acknowledged wearily. “Marriage license could not be got without notcheralization paper. Not worth the risk to go and say, after all the years, here I am, how do I make myself American?” With a last blink at the WANTED poster, he creased it to put in his pocket, still speaking softly. “The Kate believed same as I did, more so, even. As much her eye-dea as mine, pretend we’re married. Worth it to have a man around, she telled me, somebody she can boss like she is used to with Fritz. Joke at the time,” he sighed, “but she meant it, you maybe noticed.”
I was listening for all I was worth, but Aunt Kate’s bossy tendency that had driven both of us batty shrank to nothing compared to picking up the phone and turning in her imitation husband to the FBI. That truth rattled through me—the clank of a jail door closing behind Herman—shaking me to the core. The hard knocks of history were not done with him yet. Or for that matter, with me. Eleven going on twelve abruptly seemed way too young to be the seasoned accomplice of a fugitive, or when you came right down to it, a criminal whom the FBI put up there with the bank robbers and murderers as some breed of desperado. But what else was I?
The one thing clear was that the face of Herman the German, enemy alien, was plastered here, there, and everywhere on bulletin boards throughout Yellowstone National Park, as public as the sun. “Now we really need to get out of here,” my voice broke, Herman chiming, “Ja, ja, ja,” as I scrambled to my suitcase and he to his duffel. That was as far ahead as either of us could think. That and the FLEET WAY map back at the bulletin board.
• • •
SKIRTING THE TOUR bus lines and trying not to notice the bare spot among the MOST WANTED posters, seeming to gape with guilt pointing our direction, we edged up to the Greyhound map in search of inspiration as much as destination. We needed a fortunate break in some direction, north, south, east, west, it didn’t matter. Somewhere to hole up, until people’s possible memories of a horse-faced man with a German accent waned. But where? Make a run for the coast, to Portland or Seattle or Frisco? Hide out in some Palookaville? Hightail it to Canada, on the chance that up there they wouldn’t know an enemy alien when they saw one?
Still putting his faith in Fingerspitzengefühl—not that we had much else to draw on—Herman began waggling his fingers again to encourage mine. “Ready, Donny? Find us somewheres to git to?”
“Nothing doing.” I tucked my hands in my a
“Then must git us out, hah?” Herman said a little testily.
Hard to argue with that. But Fingerspitzengefühl and its outcomes unnerved me and I determinedly kept shaking my head—Nothing doing, absolutely not, you do it for a change—when a certain dot of all those on the map caught my attention. Before I quite knew what I was doing, my finger flew to it.
“Here,” I said, decisive as Napoleon or any of those, “this is what we want.”
• • •
STARTLED BY my abrupt choice, Herman peered at the map as if my finger were pulling the wrong kind of trick. Making sure of the small lettering beside the tiny red dot of a bus stop, he turned huffy. “Funny as a stitch, Donny. No time for piddling around, please.”
“I’m not!” My exasperation at his shortsightedness, both kinds, boiled over. “You’re the one who’s piddling!”
He retorted to that, and I retorted to his retort, and in no time we were in a slam-bang argument, the kind where tempers go at one another with all they have until someone’s hits its limit and backs off. In this case, Herman’s.
“You are not making joke like I thought, hah?” he finally more or less conceded. “And maybe your finger is on the nose about where we must git to,” he went even further, after I’d insisted that the arrowhead in its pouch under my shirt was showing it was big medicine.
“Powerful sure about spot on map, you are.” Eyeing me in my most rambunctious red-in-the-head state of mind, Herman spoke very carefully. “Big question is, Donny, how to git anywheres.” He glanced over his shoulder at the busloads of tour groups coming and going as free as the four winds. “Can’t talk sweet to a driver, don’t we wish it was easy as pies, and go on dog bus like seeing the sights, tra la la,” he said with a deep and helpless longing for our old days as comparatively innocent cross-country passengers.
• • •