Last Bus to Wisdom by Ivan Doig
Since we were too broke to afford a room even if Wisdom had any, our only course of action was staring us in the face. “Okay, we’re gonna have to jungle up with the rest of them.” I shook myself out of my poorfarm stupor. “First thing is, we don’t look right.”
Pulling him behind a clump of brush where we were out of sight from the campfire, I rolled up our pants cuffs to the tops of our shoes and generally mussed our clothes up, pulling our shirttails out some to look baggy and so on.
Lifting my Stetson off, I punched my fist up into the crown to take out the neat crimp and make it more like what the hoboes wore. I held out my hand for Herman’s eight-gallon pride and joy.
“Do we got to?” he groaned.
“Damn betcha,” I said, reaching up for it so he wouldn’t have to commit the crime against it himself. “We don’t want to stand out like dudes at a testicle festival.”
I beat up his hat against the willows, then rubbed it in the dirt for good measure as he watched in agony.
“There you go.” I handed him the limp, abused Stetson and clapped my own on my head. “Ready?” I inclined my head to the campfire.
“One Eye is with you, Snag,” he said, as if swallowing hard.
• • •
HATS BEATEN UP and hearts beating fast, we headed into the hobo jungle in the brush beside the Big Hole River. The kip, as they called it, turned out to be a gravel bar down from a state highway department gravel pit and storage area, where culverts and bridge beams and steel guardrails were stacked. Bunched there in the open-air kip, maybe twice as many as were on the bus with us, was a band of men sitting around rolling their smokes in brown cigarette paper. Like beached pirates, was my thought, to go with Herman’s roguish missing eye. Imagination aside, it was written in the sparks flying upward from the open campfire and the bubbling of the blackened stewpot hung over the flames that we were joining the bottom end of society, manual laborers with leather gloves stuck in a hind pocket, maybe their only possessions beyond a bindle and a bedroll. Now I was the one swallowing hard.
Blessedly, Highpockets intercepted us before we reached the campfire circle.
“Now, I’m not saying you two don’t know how to take care of yourselves,” that point made itself in his tone of voice. “But after dark here, it’s colder than old Nick.” Night was fast coming on, and I was remembering the gripping chill outside the Old Faithful Inn. Highpockets shifted his gaze significantly to my scanty suitcase and Herman’s sagging duffel. “I don’t notice any bedroll makings on you. Better do something about that.”
“Ja, what is your recommend?” Herman surprised us both.
“Doesn’t speaka the English, eh?” Highpockets gave me an unblinking look. “That’s your own business. Uptown at the merc, they sell bedroll fixings, old army blankets and the like.”
“I will get fixings,” Herman startled me further. Chicken hunter he may have been, but Wisdom did not seem to offer much prospect along that line.
I would worry about that later, right now I had a basic concern about getting any kind of shelter over us for the night. “Ah, Mr. Highpockets, I was wondering—”
“No misters in the Johnson family,” he said not unkindly.
“Okay, sure, uhm, Pockets. Do you suppose Gramps and me could have dibs on one of those culverts?”
“That’s inventive, anyway. Sling your plunder in there to stake your claim,” he gave his blessing, turning away toward the kip. “Then better come on down for mulligan before it’s gone.”
I hustled to the nearest steel shelter with my suitcase, Herman following with his duffel and looking thoughtful at the prospect of the metal tunnel just large enough to hold us if we slept end to end. “Go be acquainted,” he more or less shooed me to the hobo gathering. “I will be a little while in town.”
Another worry popped out of me. “What are you gonna use for money? We’re just about broke again, remember?”
“Nothing to worry. I have eye-dea.”
• • •
WHATEVER IT WAS, I left him to go to town with it, in all meanings of the phrase, while I made my way down to the kip and its inhabitants. But beforehand, at the edge of the brush I encountered Pooch hunched over like a bear as he scrounged dry branches along the riverbank for firewood. When I asked if I could help, he replied, “Damn straight,” without looking up, and I started tromping downed cottonwood limbs in half until I had a good armful.
I don’t know that it would be in any book of etiquette, but I was a lot more welcome walking into the hobo gathering with an armload of firewood than if I had merely strolled in with my face hanging out. “Good fella,” said Midnight Frankie, stirring the black pot of mulligan, a stew found in no recipe book. I dumped my armload on the firewood pile and retreated to the farthest spot on one of the logs that served as seating surrounding the campfire, wishing Herman was with me to provide moral support or at least company.
“For any of you who didn’t have the pleasure of his company on the last bus, this here’s Snag.” Highpockets did the honors of making me known to the other batch of hoboes and them to me. Similar to our busload, they had names all over the map, Candlestick Bill and Buttermilk Jack and Dakota Slim and the Reno Kid—not to be confused with the California Kid—and Left-handed Marv, who had an empty sleeve where his right arm should have been, and so on through enough others to confuse St. Peter at the gate. My presence as a kid with no kind of a capital K did not seem to bother anyone since Highpockets vouched for me and he clearly was the topkick of the whole bunch. The Big Ole, as I soon learned this unelected but acknowledged type of boss was called. Why the hobo community fashioned an oversize Swede as the last word in leadership, I hadn’t the foggiest idea—it was their lingo, not mine—but in any case, Highpockets saw to things that needed seeing to, including keeping the peace now when Peerless Peterson and the Reno Kid scuffled over which of them had claimed the spot under a favorable cottonwood first. With that settled by Highpockets’s threat to knock their heads together, things went toward normal, the wine bottles appearing out of bindles every so often lubricating a general conversation that ran toward the unfairness of a world run by fat-cat capitalists and sadistic small-town sheriffs.
By now I was nervously glancing out into the dark, wondering what was delaying Herman and kicking myself for not going with him into town and keeping him out of trouble, or at least being on hand when it happened. Goddamn-it-to-hell-anyway, could even this remotest of towns conceivably be plastered with MOST WANTED posters, and had he been thrown into whatever variety of jail the Big Hole held? I was torn between holding our spot in the campfire community and plunging into the darkness to go searching for him.
In the meantime, the hoboes were loosened up by the circulating bottles to the extent there was now a jolly general demand. “C’mon, Shakespeare, give us one.”
“My kingdom for a source,” that individual half comically, half dramatically put a hand to his brow as if seeking inspiration. Mimicking a high-powered thinker—or maybe there was no mimicking to it, with him—he pondered aloud, “Now, what immortal rhyme would a distinguished audience of knights of the road wish to hear, I wonder?”
“Quit hoosiering us and deliver the goods, Shakey,” Highpockets prodded him.
“As you like it, m’lord,” the response pranced out, over my head and probably all the others as well. Crossing his legs and leaning on his knees with his arms, the learned hobo lowered his voice confidentially enough to draw his listeners in, me included.
“There was an old lady from Nantucket—”
Audience cries of “Hoo hoo hoo” greeted this promising start.
“Who had a favorite place to tuck it.”
The way this was going, I was momentarily glad Herman was not there.
“It slid in, it slid out—” The recital bounced the springs toward its climax, there is no more apt way to say it. I
“Slick and sure in its route—” An artful little pause to build suspense, I noted for future reference. Then the culmination:
“Under the bed. Her night bucket!”
“Ye damn fancifier, here we thought we was gettin’ somethin’ educational,” the Jersey Mosquito called out while other critics hooted and kicked dirt in Shakespeares’s direction and told him where to stick the old lady’s chamber pot. As the merriment went on, I was giggling along until I glanced over my shoulder for any sign of Herman yet and saw a flashlight beam headed straight for our culvert.
I knew it! Herman had been nabbed uptown, and here came a cop to confiscate our belongings. With a feeling of doom, I slipped away from the campfire circle and stumbled up the road embankment, frantically rehearsing pleas to the law officer now shining his light at the mouth of the culvert and pawing around in there.
And found it to be Herman, stowing two sets of blankets and wraps of canvas to roll them in. He kept dumping goods from his armload. A Texas tux work shirt for each of us. Leather gloves, ditto. Changes of underwear, even. Not to mention the flashlight. “So, Donny,” he said after a flick of the beam showed him it was me panting up to the culvert. “We have fixings to be haymakers.”
“Holy wow, how’d you get that much? Weren’t we next thing to broke?”
He fussed with a bedroll a bit before answering. “Old-timey wicker will just surprise you, how much it brings.”
It took me a moment for that to fully penetrate, but when it did—
“You sold the suitcase? Gram will skin me alive!”
“Don’t be horrorfied,” he begged. “It was that or the moccasins. No choice did I have. Had to get bedrolls, can’t sleep bare on something like this.” He knocked a knuckle against the corrugated metal culvert, making it ring hollowly. “Take it from an old soldier who has slept on everything but bed of nails, ja?”
“I guess so,” I muttered, taking it a different thing from having to like it. “But my moccasins and the rest—what’d you do with my things?”
“In duffel.” He messed around with the bedroll a bit more without looking up. “I selled my Karl May books, too, to make room.”
So we both had sacrificed mightily, for the privilege of living like hoboes.
24.
WE REACHED THE campfire circle in time for mulligan, served in tin billies from a stash somewhere in the kip, along with spoons that no doubt were missing from many a cheap cafe. Both of us feeling starved—candy bars had been a long time ago—we dug into the stew nearly thick as gravy and featuring chunks of potato and lumps of some meat everyone knew better than to ask about. Amid the concentrated eating and mild conversing, Highpockets suddenly lifted his head, Skeeter doing the same. Clicks of someone walking on gravel could be heard, and across the campfire from where we sat, a rangy man stepped out of the night into the fireshine. He had something about him that made the circle of hoboes stir nervously.
“Got room for one more?” he drawled in a spare way I’d heard before.
I blinked, but he didn’t change. It was Harv the jailbreaker. Who was supposed to be in that stony lonesome at the far end of the state.
Highpockets responded by unfolding to his full height, hitching up his pants, and maybe even standing on this tiptoes a little, the Big Ole to the life, but he still didn’t match the height and breadth of Harv Kinnick.
But doing what he had to, he challenged: “You smell the grub and figured you’d mooch? Or you got something more permanent in mind?”
“Might have,” said the newcomer, still as a statue.
“Sort of a nightbird, aren’t you,” Highpockets spoke the guarded curiosity of the hobo contingent.
“Takes a while to get here by boxcar and thumb,” Harv mentioned.
Highpockets gazed across the leaping flames of the campfire at the taller man for some moments, sensed the unspoken vote of the group, and said, “If you’re bunking rough like the rest of us, there’s enough of the great outdoors to go around. Come on in and plant yourself. Any scrapings in that pot for him, Midnight?”
As the man who looked like Gregory Peck if you closed an eye a little strode in with that purposeful amble of a town tamer and took a seat on a community log when the resident hoboes shifted over for him, the Jersey Mosquito recited the who-be-ye. The newcomer considered the question with that distant look of a soldier or, as Herman’s nudge and whisper conveyed to me, a knight, and came up with:
“Harv will have to do, I guess.”
All eyes except his shifted to Highpockets again, who could be seen weighing whether an actual given name was up to hobo code.
“Whatever a man wants to go by is his own business, I reckon,” he decided.
Peerless Peterson couldn’t stop from meddling a little. “You don’t have any too much to say for yourself, do you.”
“Still waters can bust dams,” Harv drawled, spooning into the billy of stew remnants Midnight Frankie had handed him. After an unsure moment, general laughter broke out. “Stick that in your rear aperture and smoke it,” the Jersey Mosquito joshed Peerless, who grinned painfully and retreated into silence while conversation built back up to normal among everyone else. Harv in the meantime silently kept at his mulligan.
“Come on,” I tugged at Herman, “let’s scooch around there to him.”
He was as intrigued as I was. “Ja, he is some man, you can see from here.”
I circled around, Herman on my heels, and edged down on the log next to the newest hobo on earth, making us into old-timers. “Hi again.”
He chewed a bit before saying, “You’re the kid with the autograph book.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Kinnick,” I swiftly used his name to emphasize I full well remembered who he was, back there in handcuffs, too.
“Harv,” he corrected quietly but in a way that told me not to forget it.
Herman cleared his throat, a signal that prompted me to introduce him as One Eye, my grandfather from the old country and so on, and on a hunch that we would be wise to have on our side someone with a knack for evading lawmen, I leaned close as I could to Harv, considerably above my head as he was, and confided, “Gramps is sort of staying out of the way of the, uhm, authorities, too.”
Herman stiffened at first, then caught up with my thinking and Harv’s apparent circumstances. “We are not much liking jail, either.”
“Then we have a lot in common,” Harv said, proffering a hand even larger than Herman’s outsize mitt.
After the handshakes, I had to ask. “How’d you spring yourself from Wolf Point this time?”
“Wasn’t that tough, as jailbreaking goes,” the veteran at it reflected, both of us listening keenly but Herman with real reason to. “They have a habit there of making the prisoner mop the cell, and when Baldy, that’s the deputy,” he said, as if the jailer was an old acquaintance, “had to go to the toilet, I reached the key ring off the wall peg with the mop handle. I was out and hightailing it down to the tracks by the time Baldy pulled his pants up, I guess. Caught the next freight going west and linked up with Lettie after her shift at that Le Havre.” The mention of his girlfriend brought a pining expression, which he resolutely shook off. “Had to move on from Havre, of course,” summing up in an aside to me. “You can guess how Carl is when he heard I’m out free again.” Did I ever, the half-pint sheriff on the bus suspiciously grilling me as if I were a runaway when I wasn’t—yet—still a memory I wished I didn’t have.
From Harv, this had grown to a speech of practically Bible length, and he wasn’t through yet. “I sort of wish C
“Yeah, he’s a mean little bugger,” I said boldly, Herman’s good eye policing me not to go too far. “He sure did you dirty, back there on the bus to Wolf Point.”
“Aw, Carl maybe means well,” said Harv out of brotherly, or at least step-brotherly, loyalty. “It’s just that you put a big badge on a little guy, his head swells along with it.”
After that evident truth, he turned reflective again.
“Still and all, he had something there on the bus, that I should go haying. Taking him up on it, though he doesn’t know it,” he concluded. He shifted attention to us. “Do I savvy you’re here to make hay, too?”
“You bet I am. I mean, we are,” I hastily included Herman.
“I thought you were getting sent someplace back east.”
“That, uh, didn’t work out. See, One Eye is my closest relative from back there, and he wanted to see the West.”
“Ought to be able to get your fill of it around here.” Harv smiled a little.
“Can I ask”—I maybe shouldn’t have pressed the question but he was the one who had racily all but drawn her into the autograph album—“what about Lettie? I mean, you’re here and she’s there, all the way up in Havre.”
That cast him into silence for some seconds, evidently dealing with his longing until he could put it into words. “We’re working on that. I’m going to save my wages and she’s putting away her tips, and after haying we’ll get married and find some way where I’m not running from jail all the time.”
Herman looked as if he would have liked to add advice to that, but only nodded silently.
• • •
AT THAT MOMENT—I’ll never forget it, it is clocked into memory as if with a stopwatch dividing that night of my life—came an outcry from Fingy, stumbling into camp still buttoning his pants from taking a leak in the bushes. “We got company! The town whittler.”