Last Bus to Wisdom by Ivan Doig
A flea and a fly in a flue
Were caught, what could they do?
“Let us flee,” said the fly.
“Let us fly,” said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.
“Tough competition,” she laughed again. The cigarette met its fate with the other mashed-out ones as she surprised me with a drawn-out sigh. “Sure, I’ll dab something in for you, why not. Your tough luck it’s me instead of her, huh?” She flourished the movie magazine, open to a picture of Elizabeth Taylor with a cloud of hair half over one sultry eye and nothing on above her breastbone.
“Aw, anybody can be named Elizabeth,” I spouted, feeling brave as I extended the open autograph book and special ballpoint to her. “But Leticia, whew, that’s something else.”
Solving the pen with no trouble at all, she gave me a sassy grin. “Had your eye on the tittytatting, have you,” she teased. “Letting the customers get to know you right up front on the uniform helps the tips like you wouldn’t believe.”
“I think it’s a really great idea,” I got caught up in a rush of enthusiasm. “I wish everybody did that. Had their name sewn on them, I mean. See, mine is Donal without a d on the end, and hardly anybody ever gets it right at first, but if it was on my shirt, they couldn’t mess it up like they always do.”
Listening with one ear while she started to write, she pointed out a drawback to having yourself announced on your breast. “Like when some smart-ass leans in for a good look and asks, ‘What’s the other one’s name?’”
It took me a moment to catch on, then several to stop blushing. Thankfully, she still had her head down in diligence over the autograph page. She had whipped off her glasses and stuck them in her purse—she looked a lot younger and better with them off—and I couldn’t contain my curiosity.
“How come you wear your glasses to read but not to write?”
“Don’t need ’em for either one,” she said offhandedly. “They’re just windowpane.”
“So why do you wear them ever?”
Another one of those grins. “Like it probably says in the Bible somewhere: Guys don’t make passes at gals who wear glasses.” She saw I wasn’t quite following that. “Honey, I just want to ride from here to there without every man who wears pants making a try at me. The silly specs and the ciggies pretty much do the trick—you don’t see those GIs sniffing around, do you.”
“They’ve got something else on their minds,” I confided as if wise beyond my years. “They’re afraid they’re going to get their asses shot off in Korea.”
Frowning ever so slightly, she made a shooing motion in front of her face. “Flies around the mouth,” she warned me off that kind of language. She glanced over her shoulder toward the soldiers, shaking her head. “Poor babies.” Going back to her writing, she finished with a vigorous dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s, and handed book and pen back to me. “Here you go, pal. Signed, sealed, and delivered.”
I saw she had done a really nice job. The handwriting was large and even and clear, doubtless from writing meal orders.
Life is a zigzag journey, they say,
Not much straight and easy on the way.
But the wrinkles in the map, explorers know,
Smooth out like magic at the end of where we go.
“That’s pretty deep for me,” I admitted, so far from the end of my unwanted journey that I could not foresee anything remotely like magic smoothing the way. More like a rocky road ahead, among people as foreign to me as a jungle tribe. Still, I did not want to hurt her feelings and resorted to “You really know how to write.”
“Learned that ditty in school, along with the one about burning your candle at both ends. Funny how certain things stick with you,” she mused as I was reluctantly about to thank her and excuse myself. But then I stiffened, staring into the autograph book. “What’s the matter, kiddo?” she asked offhandedly, her next cigarette on the way to her lips. “Did I spell something wrong?”
What had stopped me cold was her rhyming signature. Letty Minetti.
“The truck stop at Browning,” I blurted, “did you work there?”
In the act of lighting up, she went stock-still with the cigarette between the fingers of one hand and the Zippo in the other. “Okay, Dick Tracy, I give.” She turned and studied me narrowly now. “How come you’re such an expert on me?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that, expert, I mean,” my sentences stumbled in retreat. “More like interested, is all. See, my grandmother used to cook there, and she couldn’t help talking about those times. She thought you were the greatest at being a waitress, ‘out front’ as she called it.”
Letty, as she was to me now, sucked in her cheeks as if tasting the next sentence before she said it. “So you’re him.”
Him? What him? I looked at her in confusion.
“Don’t take me wrong,” she said quickly. “All I meant, Dorie told me what was up when she had to quit the truck stop. To take on raising you, at that cow outfit.”
Blank with surprise, I stared back at the waitress who suddenly was the expert on me.
Letty nibbled her lip, disturbing the lipstick a bit, then uttered the rest. “When she left to be with you, she had me put flowers on the crosses every month.”
• • •
WHITE AS BONES, the roadside trio of short metal crosses stood in memoriam on the long slope up from the Two Medicine River. One for my father, one for my mother, and although I could not see why he deserved the same, one for the drunk driver whose pickup drifted across the centerline and hit theirs head-on. Only once had I seen the crosses, on a school trip to the Blackfoot museum in Browning not long after the funeral, and I had to swallow sobs the rest of the trip. I almost wished the American Legion post would quit marking highway deaths like that—for some of us, too much of a reminder—but my father had been a favorite at Legion halls, someone who came out of the D-Day landing badly wounded but untouched in his personality, ready with a laugh and a story anytime he and my mother blew in for a drink and a nice supper and some dancing. The flowers, which I remembered were yellow, must have been Gram’s own ongoing remembrance, by courtesy—a great deal more than that—of Letty Minetti.
A jolt went through me like touching the hot wire of something electric. Connected by accident, she and I were no longer simply strangers on a bus. This woman with the generous mouth knew all about me, or at least enough, and I was catching up with her circumstances. Wherever she was headed with her name on her uniform, it was not to work the counter at the Browning truck stop, a hundred miles in the other direction. “You do that anymore?” I rushed out the words, then hedged. “The flowers, I mean?”
Letty shook her head and lit the interrupted cigarette. “Couldn’t, sorry. Been in the Falls a year or so,” she expelled along with a stream of smoke, “busting my tail in the dining room at the Buster. You know it?”
Surprisingly, I did. The Sodbuster Hotel was a fancy place where the Williamsons stayed during the Great Falls rodeo, so Wendell could oversee—or according to Gram, mess with—the handling of the Double W’s string of bucking horses. My new confidante let out her breath, nothing to do with smoking this time. “It didn’t work out. I’ll tell you something. The more dressed up people are, the harder they are to wait on,” laughing as she said it, but not the amused kind. “I missed the Browning gang. The rez boys tip good when they have a few drinks in them, you’d be surprised. And truckers leave their change on the counter. It adds up.”
What wasn’t adding up was her presence on this bus with the rest of us nomads, so I outright asked. “What are you doing on here, in this direction?”
She flicked me a look, but answered readily enough. “Taking a job in Havre. New town, fresh start. That’s the way it goes.”
That didn’t sound good. People were always saying about Havre, off by itself and with not
Something of that reputation must have been on Letty’s mind, too. “Hey, you know any French?”
“‘Aw river,’ maybe.”
“Nah, more than that. See, the place where I’ll be working is called, capital T, The Le Havre Supper Club.” She nibbled her lip. “Something doesn’t seem quite right about that, don’t you think? Anyway, that’s why I’m wearing my work shirt,” meaning the uniform top with the prominent stitching, “in case I have to go on shift right away. Some morons”—she pronounced it mo-rons, with the same note in her voice as when Gram would say “Sparrowhead”—“put you to slinging coffee almost before your keister is through the doorway, would you believe.”
I made a sympathetic noise, but my attention wasn’t in it. By now I had a crush on her. Oh, man, my thinking ran, wouldn’t it be great if she and Gram could get a job together at the Top Spot cafe back in Gros Ventre, if Havre didn’t pan out for her and if Gram was as good as new after her operation and if I made it through whatever waited in Wisconsin, and we could all share a real house together, not a cook shack, right there in town? When you are as young as I was then, a world of any kind begins at the outskirts of your imagination, and you populate it with those who have proven themselves to you. The unknowns are always lying in wait, though. Trying not to, I kept glancing at Letty’s hand and the wedding ring that showed itself with every drag on her cigarette.
She caught me at it. “You don’t miss much, do you.” She flexed that finger away from the others. “My husband’s still in Browning. Tends bar there, chases women on the side. We made a great pair.”
She shrugged as if the next didn’t matter, although even I knew it was the kind of thing that always does. “We split. He was jealous. There was this one trucker, Harv, I got a little involved with. Harv’s some piece of work,” she grinned a way that said more than she was saying. “The strong silent type straight out of the movies, you know? Doesn’t say much, but when he does, it’s right on the money.” The grin humorously tucked in on itself. “Even looks a little like Gregory Peck if you close one eye a little.” Then her face clouded. “Trouble is, he’s sort of hard to keep up with because he’s on the road so much, trucking here and there. But when he’s around”—her voice dropped to a confidential level—“sparks fly.”
“Holy wow,” I said, as if I knew anything about such matters. “He sounds like a real boyfriend.”
“Real as they come.” She blew a smoke ring as I drifted along on the romantic mood. “We’re more or less engaged, or will be when that husband of mine gets it through his thick head to agree to a divorce.” Dabbing the ash off her cigarette, she mused, “Haven’t seen Harv lately, though. Hated to do it, but I had to leave word for him at the Buster that I’d moved on to The Le Havre.” Then her grin sneaked back infectiously. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder, truer words were never. Harv’s good at catching up on things.”
“I bet he is,” I endorsed him sight unseen, talented as he sounded in areas a little beyond me.
“Anyway, what’s done is done,” she said briskly. “You ought to have that in your book.” She mashed out the latest cigarette. “Hey, enough of the story of my life. How’s Dorie these days? Why isn’t she with you?”
“She’s got to have an operation.” I poured out everything, the cook shack and charity nuns and Wisconsin and all, my listener taking it in without saying anything.
When I finally ran down, Letty bit her lip again. “Jeez, that’s rough on both of you. Tough deal all around.” The bus changed speed as the driver shifted gears on a hill, bobbing us against our seatbacks, and when that stopped, Letty still rocked back and forth a little. “You know what? You need something else to think about.”
Reaching in her purse, she took out a compact and redid her lipstick, which surprised me because she’d already been wearing quite a gob. Working her lips together to even it out the way women do, when she was satisfied she snapped the compact shut and asked:
“Ever been kissed?”
“Well, sure,” I stammered. “Lots.”
“Besides nighty-night?”
“Uh, not really, I guess.”
“Scooch down a little like you’re showing me something real interesting in the book there, and turn this way, and we’ll do something about that.” She craned around to make sure no one was watching, and I really hoped the nun wasn’t.
Dazed, I did as she said. And she did what she said, bringing her warm lips to mine in a kiss I felt to the tips of my ears. She tasted like tobacco and lipstick, but a lot more than that, too, although I was too young to put a name to such things.
We broke apart, her first. “There you go, kiddo, that’s for luck.” Grinning broadly, she opened the compact again to show me myself plastered with the red imprint of her lips, as if I needed any evidence, before tenderly wiping away the lipstick with her hanky. “First of many smackeroos in your career,” she said huskily. “You’ll get good at it. Betsa bootsies you will. Now you better scoot back to your own seat, sugar, we’re just about there.” That was true of her and the pink tittytatting that pointed the way. I still was trying to catch up with the dizzying twists and turns of the day.
4.
“HAVRE, the Paris of the prairie,” the lanky driver called out in a mechanical way. “You may disembark if you so wish and stretch your legs. The Greyhound bus depot, proud to serve you, has full conveniences.”
To me that meant the one that flushes, and with Gram’s number-one instruction for riding the dog bus in comparative comfort urgently in mind—Every stop, you make sure you get in there and go before the bus does—I was the first one off and into the station, fantastic Letty first giving me a good-bye pat on the cheek and wishing me all the luck in the world.
I could have used some by the time I emerged from the men’s restroom and tried to navigate the waiting room crowded with families of Indians and workgangs of white guys in bib overalls and a mix of other people, the mass of humanity causing me to duck and dodge and peer in search of something to eat. My meal money, a five-dollar bill Gram had tucked into my jeans, was burning a hole in my pocket. Besides that, on the principle that you never want to be separated from your money while traveling among strangers, I had a stash under my shirt, three ten-dollar bills that she had folded snugly and pinned behind the breast pocket with a large safety pin, assuring me a pickpocket would need scissors for hands to reach it. These days, it is hardly conceivable that three perforated ten-spots and a fiver felt to me like all the cash in the world, but at the time a cup of coffee cost only a dime, as did that stimulant for the younger set like me, comic books, and a movie could be seen for a quarter, and a pair of blue jeans would set you back two bucks and a half at most.
Be that as it may, besides providing me with a little to spend during the Wisconsin stay—“mad money,” Gram’s words for it probably fitting my tendencies all too accurately—the shirt stash was meant to outfit me with school clothes back there to come home with as well. School clothes were a big deal then, no real family wanting to look stingy about it. So, scraping that much cash together to send me off with was no easy thing—it amounted to half of Gram’s last monthly paycheck from the tight fist of Sparrowhead—and that’s why I had firm instructions from her to stretch the pocket fiver through the trip by confining lunches to a sandwich. No milkshakes, no pieces of pie, no bottles of pop, in other words no getting rambunctious with the tantalizing five-spot.
Which sounded okay in theory, but less so in a thronged bus depot when I was hungry as a wolf. Wouldn’t you know that the lunch counter, offering greasy hamburgers if a person did not want runny egg salad sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, was jam-packed by the time I could get there and service was slow as ring-around-the-rosy. Havre really needed Letty.
Desperately looking around as my stomach growled, I spied the newsstand that so
I hurried over, one eye on the clock. No one else was buying anything, but the gum-chewing woman clerk had to tend to freight parcels as well as the candy counter, and it took a very long couple of minutes to get her to wait on me. “A Mounds bar, please”—dark chocolate with coconut inside, you can’t beat that—I said as rapidly as I could. Then I remembered that suppertime would not be until North Dakota, as distant to me as the cheese side of the moon. “Make it three.”
• • •
THE GREYHOUND had its motor running when I dashed out of the terminal, peeling a Mounds as I ran. The door was open, but the driver was resting a hand on the handle that operated it. “Cutting it pretty close, sonny,” he said, giving me the stinkeye as I panted up the steps, the door sucking shut behind me.
To my amazement, the bus had filled up entirely, except where I had saved my window spot with my cord jacket. And if I could believe my eyes, there next to it sat a big-bellied Indian with black braids that came down over his shoulders.
Oh man, here was my chance! A seatmate I could talk to about all kinds of Indian things! The Fort Belknap Reservation was somewhere in this part of Montana, I knew, and he and the Indian families taking up about half the bus must be headed home there. My head buzzed with the sensation of double luck. Here delivered right to me was not only someone really great for the autograph book, but who could palaver—that’s what Indians did, didn’t they?—with me about the black arrowhead if I went about it right. What a break!
“Hi!” I chirped as I joined him.
“Howdy,” he said in a thrilling deep voice that reverberated up out of that royal belly—maybe he was a chief, too!—as he moved his legs enough for me to squeeze by to my window seat.