Last Bus to Wisdom by Ivan Doig
The bus lurched into immediate motion, as if my fanny hitting the cushion was the signal to go, and I settled into eating my candy bar and sneaking looks sideways at my traveling companion. He was dressed not all that different from me, in blue jeans and a western shirt with snap buttons. All resemblance ended there, though. His buckskin face could have posed for the one on nickels, and then there were those braids. I envied him his straw cowboy hat, beat-up and curled almost over on itself at the brim and darkly sweat-stained from what I would have bet was life on one of the small ranches scattered around on the reservation, riding Appaloosa horses and hunting antelope and dancing at powwows and a million other things that beat anything I had been through at the Double W.
Mind your manners no matter what, so people won’t think you were born in a barn, I could all but hear Gram reciting in my ear, and so I politely turned away to the window to wait until we were out of town and freewheeling toward the reservation before striking up a conversation about him being an Indian and my second name or nickname or whatever it was being Red Chief. That ought to get the palaver going. Then when obsidian arrowheads became the topic, should I tell him, just sort of casually, that I had one in my suitcase? For all I knew, possessing such a rarity maybe made a person special in the tribe. Possibly I was already a sort of honorary chieftain and didn’t know it, from whatever sacred quality—to me, that meant pretty much the same as magic—a glistening dark treasure like that carried.
Yet there was another consideration, wasn’t there. While I was surer than sure that Wendell Williamson did not deserve an arrowhead older than Columbus, what about the Indians from that time on? What if my braided seatmate were to tell me the black arrowhead was a lucky piece that they worshipped, and there was a whole long story about how tough life had been for Indians ever since it was lost? I’d feel bad about having it. I decided I’d better play it safe at first and start with his autograph.
Finally the bus labored out of the last of Havre and we were rolling ahead on the open prairie. Expectantly I turned toward my braided seat partner for conversation to be initiated, by me if not him.
The straw cowboy hat was pulled down over his eyes. Oh no! Phooey and the other word, too! He was sound asleep.
I was stymied. Talk about manners and Gram’s commandment. I couldn’t very well poke a total stranger in the ribs and tell him, “Hey, wake up, I want to palaver with you.” That was born-in-a-barn behavior, for sure. However, if I accidentally on purpose disturbed his slumber, that was a different matter, right?
Retrieving another Mounds from a coat pocket, I noisily unwrapped it, crumpling the wrapper as loudly as possible while I munched away. No result on the sleeper.
I coughed huskily. He still didn’t stir. Not even working myself into a fake coughing fit penetrated his snooze.
I squirmed in my seat, jiggled the armrest between us, made such a wriggling nuisance that I bothered myself. Sleeping Bull, as I now thought of him, never noticed. The man could have dozed through a cavalry charge.
Well, okay, Red Chief, you’d better figure this out some, I told myself. After all, the prize sleeper was not the only autograph book candidate and possible conversation partner on the packed dog bus, by far. If I wanted Indians, a small tribe of them was scattered up and down the aisle, entire families with little kids in their go-to-town clothes and cowboy-hatted lone men sitting poker-faced but awake, all of them as buckskin-colored as the one parked next to me. Then at the back of the bus, a white-bibbed workgang, off to some oil field where a gusher had been struck according to their talk, was having a good time, several of them playing cards on a coat spread across a couple of laps, others looking on and making smart remarks. From snatches I could hear, there wasn’t any doubt I could pick up the finer points of cussing and discussing from them just as I’d done with my buddies the soldiers, last seen shouldering their duffel bags to head in the direction of Korea, poor guys. A new gold mine of names and all that came with them was right there up the aisle waiting, if I could only reach it.
I gauged my seatmate, who seemed to have expanded in his sleep. Getting by him posed a challenge, but I figured if I stretched myself just about to splitting, I could lift a leg over him into the aisle and the other leg necessarily would follow.
Here goes nothing fom nowhere, another of Gram’s old standards, got me perilously up and with one leg spraddled over his round midriff, as if mounting a horse from the wrong side, when the fact struck me. Moron, there aren’t any empty seats. I’d have to stay standing as I went along the aisle. Already I saw in the rearview mirror that the driver had his eye on me.
Defeated, I dropped back in my seat, silently cussing to the limits of my ability. To console myself, I ate my last Mounds. Maybe my luck would change at the next stop, I told myself. Surely the bus would let some passengers off in Chinook. In the meantime, punch-drunk on candy, I must have caught the sleeping sickness from my hibernating seatmate, as my eyelids grew heavy and the rhythm of the bus wheels on the flat open road lulled me off into a nap—only until something happened, I drowsily promised myself.
• • •
“TWENTY-MINUTE STOP, FOLKS.”
The driver’s droning announcement that we could disembark if we so wished and take advantage of the conveniences of the Greyhound terminal jerked me out of a nightmare. It was one of those bad dreams where you try to hide but never get anywhere, in this case in some big awful building where Wendell Williamson was after me, but every time I ran down a long hallway or up a staircase, he would barge out of a room and demand, “Where’s that arrowhead? Hand it over or I’ll tell your folks.” Groggily I looked up and down the aisle of the bus, trying to come to grips with my surroundings. Then looked again, blinking, to see whether I still was in a dream, not a good one.
The Indians had vanished. Likewise the oil field crew. The passenger load was down to a precious few, myself and one of those tourist couples out to see the world on the cheap and a man in a gabardine suit of the kind county extension agents and livestock buyers wore. All the rest of the seats, including the one next to me, were empty.
I couldn’t get my bearings. The bus already had slowed to town speed, but this was no drop stop as Chinook or Fort Belknap would be. I whirled to see out the window to the street. A Stockman Bar, a Mint Bar, a Rexall Drug, a Buttrey’s grocery, those could be anywhere. Then I spotted a storefront window with the old-fashioned lettering GLASGOW TOGGERY—MEN’S WEAR AND MORE. Glasgow! I had slept away a sizable portion of Montana. The Indians, including my seatmate, must have got off long since, the oil roughnecks likewise. I felt ridiculously cheated, yet with no one to blame but myself. Staying awake on a once-in-a-lifetime journey should not be that hard a job, I could about hear Gram chiming in.
Kicking myself about all the unfulfilled pages of the autograph book and the lost chance to palaver about the black arrowhead, I scrambled off for the restroom the moment the bus door whished open, vowing to get the Kwik-Klik into action from here on, no matter what it took.
• • •
WHEN PASSENGERS FILED on again, things looked more promising, several fresh faces, although no obvious Indians. I was nothing if not determined, singling out seats I could pop in and out of as the autograph book and I made the rounds. Itching to start, I waited impatiently for the driver to finish some paperwork he was doing on his lap. All at once, I saw him look up in surprise, spring the bus door open, and address someone outside.
“Afternoon, Sheriff. Prize customer?”
“A steady one, for damn sure,” an irritated voice replied. “Returning him to the stony lonesome at Wolf Point again. He’s their prisoner. Supposed to be anyhow, if the escape artist didn’t keep showing up here. I’ll catch the local back after I dump him.”
Sheriff. Prisoner. The stony lonesome, which meant jail. I sat up sharply.
Sure enough, up into the bus stepped a rangy man with strong features and
He, though, unfortunately was not the sheriff, according to the handcuffs on his wrists. Right behind him came a sawed-off guy not much more than half his size, wearing the biggest kind of crow-black Stetson and a star badge. “Here, Romeo,” the runty one directed. “Across from the kid will do.”
Oh man! Not only had my luck changed, the rush of it flattened me back against my seat as the pair of them settled in and the bus started into motion, the prisoner by the window and the sheriff on the aisle. The butt of a revolver protruded out of a well-worn holster on his hip like a place to hang his hat.
Noticing me gaping, the sheriff cackled a little. “Getting an eyeful of law enforcement, bucko?”
“Yeah! How come you take him by bus?”
The lawman grimaced as if he’d been asking himself that very question. “My deputy’s out on a domestic dispute call, and the jail’s full of rangutang drunks from Saturday night. Not the way I want, doing this by Hound.” He looked around the bus with distaste. “But it’d be just like the master criminal here to bail out of the patrol car if I drove him. Tried that last time, didn’t you.”
“We weren’t going that fast.”
The sheriff laughed nastily. “Not gonna be bailing out of the bus, are you.”
“To tell the truth, I don’t see how.”
“Damn right you don’t. You’re on a one-way ticket back to behind bars and that’s that.”
“You needn’t be quite so tickled about it. I’m not exactly public enemy number one.”
“Oh, hurting your feelings, am I. Ain’t that just too damn bad.” The sheriff glanced up at the composed figure nearly a head taller than him and complained, “I’ve got a whole hell of a lot of better things to do than pack you back to Wolf Point, you know. Do you have to be such a pain in the britches? First you get in a fight with some fool bartender because you think you’ve been shortchanged and tear up the bar.” So much for my imagining this was an escaped murderer, being delivered to the cold scales of justice. “Then you keep breaking out of that half-assed excuse for a jail they have over there and showing up back here in my jurisdiction.” With his face squinched like one of those apple dolls that have dried up, the sheriff groused, “Can’t you for christ sakes light out in some other direction for a change? Go get yourself a haying job somewhere? Stacking hay is about your speed, Harv.”
“I explained that, Carl,” the prisoner said patiently. “My girlfriend Letty waits tables in Great Falls. How else am I supposed to get to see her?”
“I KNOW HER! Leticia, I mean, it was right there in pink!”
My bray startled both men, their heads whipping around to scrutinize me. “She was here on the bus, see,” I gave out the news as fast as I could talk, “so I met her and we talked for a long way and she was really nice to me, boy, she’s a piece of work.” I reported further to the surprised prisoner, “She told me all about you, sort of. The trucker part.”
“Oh, swell,” the sheriff said sardonically. “Now she’s running around the countryside, too. What is it about you two, claustrophobia?”
The prisoner ignored the sarcasm, leaning forward to see around the sheriff. “Why was she on the bus, my friend? Start at the beginning.”
It seemed a good time to keep the beginning close to the end. “She got sick and tired of uppity customers at the Buster hotel, so she’s gonna try Havre.”
“Havre.” The men looked at each other as if that were the bottom of the barrel.
Harv recovered enough to maintain, “Letty’d have her reasons.”
“Eh, her,” the sheriff scoffed. “The cause of all this. Isn’t that so, loverboy?”
“Only because you arrested me when I was on my way to go see her in Great Falls, before Havre came up,” the prisoner said, patient as paint. “I was hitchhiking just fine until I had to stop for a bite to eat.”
“For crying out loud,” his captor groused. “I leave the office for lunch at the Highliner Cafe like usual, and there you come waltzing up the street, big as life. What was I supposed to do?”
“You could have looked down the street.”
“Oh, sure, wink and let a jailbreaker run around loose, even if it’s you.” The sheriff shook his head in disgust. A mean little smile crept in after that expression. “Anyway, this Letty sounds like she isn’t waiting for you, Harv old kid.”
“We’ll fetch up together, sooner or later,” the big quiet man in cuffs vowed calmly, and jailbreaker notwithstanding, I found myself pulling for that to be true.
The sheriff sighed in exasperation. “You’re being a fool for love, worst kind. Honest to God, Harv, if brains was talcum powder, you couldn’t work up a sneeze.”
Aware that my fascination with all this showed no sign of letting up, the sheriff tipped his hat back a fraction with his finger as if to have a clearer look at me. I had already noticed in life that shrimpy guys didn’t like the idea of being shrimpy guys, and so they acted big. The sheriff still wasn’t much bigger than I was when he fluffed himself up to ask suspiciously, “What about you, punkin, what’s a little shaver like you doing on here by yourself? Where’s your folks?”
“Me? I’m, uhm, I’m going to visit our relatives,” which I hoped was just enough truth to close the topic.
His eye level the same as mine, this tough kernel of a man simply stared across the aisle at me. “Traveling on the cushions, huh? Pretty good for a kid your age. Where you from?”
“Gros Ventre,” I said distinctly, as people from over east, which was most of the rest of Montana, sometimes didn’t know it was pronounced Grove On.
“That’s some ways from here. I didn’t hear you say how come your folks turn you loose to—” The bus suddenly humming in a different gear, it dropped down in a dip and showed no sign of coming out, the road following the Missouri River now. The broad river flowing in long lazy curves with thickets of diamond willows and cottonwood trees lining the banks impressed me, but the sight seemed to turn the sheriff’s stomach. Beside him, though, his handcuffed seat partner smiled like a crack in stone.
“There ’tis, Carl. What’s left of the river, hmm?”
“Shut up, Harv, I don’t need to hear about it.” Sounding fit to be tied, the sheriff shot a look over to where I still was taking in everything wide-eyed, and growled, “We’re just past Fort Peck Dam, the outlaw is talking about.” His mouth twisted. “Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn’t think the Missouri River worked good enough by itself, so he stuck in a king hell bastard of a dam,” a new piece of cussing for me to tuck away.
“Biggest dirt dam in Creation.” The sheriff was becoming really worked up now. “Biggest gyp of the American taxpayer there ever was, if you ask me.” He scrunched up worse yet, squinting at the river as if the grievance still rubbing him raw was the water’s fault. “Every knothead looking for a nickel came and signed on for a job, and next thing I knew, I’m the law enforcement having to deal with a dozen Fort Peck shantytowns with bars and whorehouses that didn’t shut down day or night.”
“I know.” I nodded sagely. “I’m from there.”
That was a mistake. His apple-doll face turning sour, the sheriff spoke as if he had caught me red-handed. “You wouldn’t be pulling my leg, would you?”
• • •
SO MUCH FOR the value of the unvarnished truth.
For it was absolute fact that I was born in one of those damsite shantytowns the sheriff despised. By then, 1939, the Fort Peck Dam work was winding down but there still was employment for skilled heavy equipment operators like my father, Bud Cameron, catskinner. Young and full of beans, he was one of those ambitious farmboys raring to switch from horses to horsepower, and he must have been something to see sitting up tall on the back of a bumblebee-yellow C
I may as well tell the rest of the Cameron family story, what there is of it. My mother, teenage girl with soft eyes and fashionably bobbed dark hair according to the Brownie box camera photos from the time, was waitressing there at the damsite in an around-the-clock cafe where Gram was day cook. I imagine Gram met it with resignation when, much as her younger self Dorothea Smythe had met roustabout Pete Blegen in the cook tent of a Glacier Park roadwork construction camp twenty years earlier, her daughter Peggy fell for the cocky young catskinner across the counter. Fell right into at least one of his capable arms, I can guarantee, because this live wire who became my father always had a necker knob, the gizmo that clamped onto the steering wheel for handy one-fisted driving, on every car he ever owned, from Model A to final Ford pickup.
Marriage came quick, and so did I. I had my footings poured, to use the Fort Peck term, in a thrown-together shacktown called Palookaville. Later, whenever we were living at some construction site or in another crude housing, my parents would think back to that time of a drafty tar paper shack between us and weather of sixty below, and say, “Well, it beats Palookaville anyway.” Once the Fort Peck work shut down for good, we began a life of roving the watersheds along the Rockies. My father was six feet of restlessness and after the Depression there were irrigation and reservoir projects booming in practically every valley under the mountains, where a man who knew his stuff when it came to operating heavy equipment could readily find work. For her part, my mother learned bookkeeping, and jointly employable Bud and Peg Cameron moved from one construction camp to the next, with me in tow.
The war interrupted this pattern. In 1943 my father went in—enlisted or drafted, I have never known; it is one of the mysteries of him—and at Omaha Beach on D-Day he was badly shot up in the legs. He spent months in a hospital in England where surgeons put in rods and spliced portions of tendon from elsewhere in him into his knees and on down. Eventually he came home to my mother and me, at least to Fort Harrison hospital in Helena, where he advanced from casts to crutches to learning to walk again. Perhaps it says most about my father that he went right back to being a catskinner, even though you operate a bulldozer as much with your legs, working the brake pedals, as with your hands. Whatever it cost him in pain and endurance, Bud Cameron never veered from that chosen line of work, and in a way his stubborn climb from a cripple’s life summed up our family situation, because we were always getting on our feet. Money was tight when earthmoving jobs shut down for the winter, and Montana winters are long. Hopping to whatever water project was first to hire skinners when the ground thawed, with me attending whatever one-room school happened to be anywhere around, my folks had hopes of moving up from wages to contracting projects on their own. They had managed to take out a loan on a Caterpillar D-10 dozer and were on their way to the Cat dealer in Great Falls to sign the final papers, when the drunk driver veered across the centerline on the Two Medicine hill.