Last Bus to Wisdom (14 page)

A kind of concentrated Palookaville, in other words. But veteran of makeshift quarters that I was from life with Gram and my folks in construction camp circumstances, I could have put up with my so-called home for the summer but for one thing. “The thing on the wall,” I immediately thought of it as, and still do. That dimestore plaster-of-Paris wall plaque no kid old enough to be acquainted with death wants to have to see the last thing before the lights are put out, the pale kneeling boy in pajamas with his hands clasped and eyes closed perhaps forever, praying a prayer guaranteed to sabotage slumber:

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

There could not have been a worse verse facing down on me with Gram somewhere between living and dying in a faraway hospital. That spine-chilling ode to death in the night, making it out to be no big deal as long as you got on your knees right before going to bed, unhinged me so badly that if someone had written it in the autograph book, I honestly believe I would have scissored it out.

As things were, I had trouble tearing my eyes away from the praying boy as Aunt Kate swirled around in the confined quarters, instructing me where to put things, while Herman stood well back out of the line of fire.

“There now,” she said when I was installed to her satisfaction, “and you know where the bathroom is.” Yeah, about a mile downstairs. “Kiss kiss.” She patted her cheek in a particular spot. I kissed Gram good night every bedtime, but only reluctantly put my lips to where I was ordered in these circumstances. Gram always returned the kiss, but Aunt Kate wasn't about to. “Nighty-night, sleep tight,” and away she went, clumping down the stairs one by one. Kate Smith would not have left me with anything that babyish, I knew with a sinking heart, but at least Herman came through with “Have a good shut-eye” and another of those half-cockeyed man-to-man glances as he followed her into the stairwell.

•   •   •

B
UNKHOUSE VOCABULARY F
AILED
me as I undressed for bed, faced with endless nights ahead stuck up under the rafters like another piece of junk. I could have cried, and maybe should have, but instead, cold dismay welled in me. How did I land in this fix? More to the point, why? Did this whopper of a woman who was my last remaining relative after Gram hate me at first sight? Was I asking for it by showing up looking more like a stray hobo than the little gentleman she wanted me to be? What was I going to do all summer long, be kicked around in this household where the grown-ups bickered like magpies? Try as I might to think my way out of this tough situation, captive to an aunt who not only was not Kate Smith but thought I must be missing a part between my ears, the only advice I could find for myself was that bit whispered from those interrupted existences Gram kept in touch with. Hunch up and take it.

Everything churning in me that way, I lay there like the corpse promised in the thing on the wall if Manitowoc did me in before morning, until finally the exertions of the day caught up with me and I drowsed off.

Only to shoot awake at a tapping on the door and Herman's hoarse whisper:

“Donny? Are you sleeping?”

“I guess not.”

“Good. I come in.”

Furtively he did so, closing the door without a sound and flipping the light on, grinning at me from ear to ear. “Soldier pachamas, I see,” he noted my undershirt when I sat up in bed wondering as a person will in that situation,
Now what?

“The Kate is in the bath,” he explained, as if we had plotted to meet in this secret fashion. With the same odd glint he'd had at the Greyhound station, he scooted the chair up to my bedside, displaying the book he'd been paging through earlier, thumb marking a place toward the middle. “What I wanted to show you,
Deadly Dust
, it is called in English.”

This was a case where you could tell a book by its cover, with cowboys riding full-tilt while firing their six-shooters at a band of war-painted Indians chasing them in a cloud of dust. At first glimpse it might have been any of the Max Brand or Luke Short or Zane Grey shoot-'em-ups popular in the Double W bunkhouse, but the name under the title was a new one on me. Recalling my earlier encounter with the kind of person who spelled his perfectly ordinary name with a
K
, I asked skeptically, “Who's this Karl May guy?”

“‘My' is how you say it,” said Herman. “Great writer. All his books, I have.
Flaming Frontier. The Desperado Trail.
Lots others. Same characters, different stories.” He bobbed his head in approval. “You don't know Winnetou and Old Shatterhand?” He tut-tutted like a schoolteacher. “Big heroes of The West.” I could hear his capital letters on those last two words.

Maybe so, but when he opened the book in evidence, in his squarehead language as it was and fancy-lettered like in an old Bible, not a single word was recognizable to me. That didn't matter a hoot to Herman as he proudly showed me the illustration he had hunted down in the middle of the book, translating the wording under it.

“On the bound-less plains of Montana,”
he read with great care, adjusting his glasses,
“the tepee rings of the Blackfoot, Crow, and Ass-in-i-bone tribes—”

“I think that's Assiniboine,” I suggested.

He thanked me and read on.
“
—
are the eternal hunting tracks of following the buffaloes, the be-he-moths of the prairie.”

Triumphantly he turned the book so I could not miss the full effect of the picture, which looked awfully familiar, similar to a Charlie Russell painting seen on endless drugstore calendars. It depicted Indian hunters in wolf skins sneaking up on foot to stampede a herd of buffalo over a cliff, the great hairy beasts cascading to the boulders below.

“There you go, hah?” Herman whispered in awe at the spectacle. “Such a place, where you are from.”

It took all the restraint I had, but I didn't let on that right over there in my pants was a little something from Montana that might have slain many a buffalo. This Herman was wound up enough as it was; the night might never end if we got off on more or less lucky arrowheads and so on. I stuck to the strictly necessary. “Can I tell you something? It's Mon-TANA, not MONT-ana.”

“Funny things, words. How they look and how they say.” He broke off, glancing toward his feet. Letting out an exclamation I couldn't decipher, he reached down and picked up one of my moccasins.

“I stepped on it!” he cried out, as if he had committed a crime. “I hope I didn't break it none.”

I could tell by a quick look that the decorative fancy-dancer still had all his limbs and that the rest of the beadwork had survived, too, so I reassured Herman no harm had been done, while scooping the other moccasin out of range of his big feet.

“Fascinating,” he said under his breath, pronouncing it
faskinating
, lovingly turning over and over in his hands the deerskin footwear he had tromped on. When he right away had to know what the beaded stick figure cavorting there on the toe and instep was supposed to be, I explained about fancy-dancing contests at big powwows.

Still fondling the moccasin as if he couldn't let go, he asked in wonder, “You got from Indians?”

“As Indian as they come.” This time I couldn't resist. Before I could stop myself, I was repeating the tale I'd told the ex-convict about the classy moccasins having been made for a great Blackfoot chief, temperately leaving out the part about my having won them in a roping contest on a dude ranch and instead circling closer to the truth by saying Gram had lucked onto them on the reservation. Herman did not need to know they'd been hocked at a truck stop by a broke Indian.

“How good, you have them. You are some lucky boy.” Maybe so, if the rotten sort was counted along with the better kind, I thought darkly to myself there on the skreeky bed.

He ran his fingers over the beadwork and soft leather one more time and carefully put the moccasin side by side with the other one.

“So, now you know about Winnetou and I know about fancy-dancing. Big night!” He grinned in that horsy way and clapped
Deadly Dust
shut. Evidently gauging that Aunt Kate's bath was about done, he rose from his chair. “We palaver some more tomorrow, yah?” he whispered from the stairwell as he sneaked back downstairs.

I sank onto the swayback pillow, wide-awake in the darkness of a summer that was showing every sign of being one for
Believe It or Not!

I
WAS AN
old hand at waking up in new places, worlds each as different from the last one as strange planets visited by Buck Rogers while he rocketed through the universe in the funny papers. In fact, when my father's series of dam jobs landed us at the Pishkun reservoir site, we were quartered in an abandoned homestead cabin wallpapered with years' worth of the Great Falls
Tribune
's Sunday funnies. The homesteader must have had insulation on his mind more than humor, randomly pasting the colorful newspaper sheets upside down or not. Little could match the confusion of blinking awake in the early light to the Katzenjammer Kids inches from my nose going about their mischief while standing on their heads. But that first Manitowoc morning, opening my eyes to attic rafters bare as jail bars, the thing on the wall hovering like a leftover bad dream, my neck with a crick in it from the stove-in pillow, I had a lot more to figure out than why Hans and Fritz were topsy-turvy.

Such as how to get on the good side of the Kate, as Herman tellingly designated her. Plainly she was something unto herself, by any measure.

And so, determined to make up for my dumb jump to the wrong conclusion last night—although was it my fault both she and Kate Smith were the size of refrigerators and shared jolly numbers of chins and dimples and all in all looked enough alike to be twins?—I dressed quickly and headed downstairs.

Nice manners don't cost anything,
Gram's prompting followed me down the steps. C'mon, Donny, Donal, Red Chief, I pulled myself together, it shouldn't be all that hard to remember to be polite and to speak mainly when spoken to and to not mix up when to look serious and when to smile, and similar rules of the well-behaved. Hadn't I gotten along perfectly fine with tons of strangers on the dog bus? Well, a couple of drivers, the ex-convict, and one fistfight aside.

Surely those didn't count toward the main matter, which was to survive for the time being in a household where Aunt Kate seemed to wear the pants and Herman tended to his knitting in the company of beings with names like Winnetou and Old Shatterhand.

In the light of day it was clear that if I knew what was good for me, I had better fit somewhere in between them, tight as the fit might be, and strolling in at breakfast with a sunny “Good morning!” and the white lie “I slept real good” ought to be the place to start.

Only to be met, before I even was out of the stairwell, by raised voices.

“Will you kindly quit playing with your food? How many times have I told you it's disgusting.”

“Same number I telled you, it helps with the digestion.”

“Toast does not need help!”

“Hah. Shows what you know. More to it than feed your face like a cow.”

Whoa. I backed off to the bathroom, out of range of the blowup in the kitchen, in a hurry. Staying in there a good long while, I ran the faucets full blast and flushed the toilet a couple of times to announce my presence, and finally cracked the door open to test the atmosphere. Not a sound of any kind. Deafening silence, to call it that, was spooky in its own way and maybe not an improvement, but I couldn't stay in the bathroom permanently. Mustering myself, I approached the deadly quiet kitchen.

Herman was nowhere to be seen. Aunt Kate was sitting by herself there, in a peppermint-striped flannel robe and fuzzy pink slippers that would never be mistaken for part of Kate Smith's wardrobe, drinking coffee while reading the newspaper spread open on the table. “There you are, sugarplum.” She looked up as if reminding herself of my existence, before I could say anything. That voice made the simplest greeting musical. “Did you sleep all right, poor tired thing?”

Nervously I met that with “Like a petrified log.”

There may have been a surprising amount of truth in that, because sunshine was streaming through the window at quite a steep angle. I checked the clock over the stove and was shocked to see it was nearly nine. On the ranch, breakfast was at six prompt, and no small portion of my shock, beyond sleeping in halfway to noon, was that she and Herman started the day so late and casually. Their plates, one littered with dark crusts of toast, still were on the table. I was no whiz about schedules, but I doubted that time zones alone accounted for such a difference.

“Now then,” Aunt Kate said with no urgency, licking her finger and turning a page of the newspaper, “what in the realm of possibility can we get you for breakfast, mmm?”

I answered with more manners than good sense. “Oh, just whatever you've got.”

Aunt Kate barely had to budge to honor that, reaching to the counter for a cereal box I had not seen in time. Puffed rice, the closest thing to eating air. Swallowing on that fact, if not much else, I found a bowl in the cupboard as she directed and a milk bottle in the refrigerator and spied the sugar bowl and did what I could to turn the puffed stuff into a soup of milk and sugar. A parent would have jumped right on me for that, but she paid no attention.

Evidently the kind of person who did not have much to say in the morning—although that was not what it had sounded like from the stairwell—she kept on drinking coffee and going through the paper, occasionally letting out a high-pitched hum of interest or exasperation at some item, as I spooned down the puffed-up cereal. The scatterings of crust on what must have been Herman's plate seemed like a fuller meal than mine.

Finally I saw no choice but to ask, polite or not. “Suppose I could have a piece of toast, please?”

That drew me a bit of a look, but I was pointed to where the bread was kept and warned about the setting on the toaster. “He likes it incinerated,” Aunt Kate made plain as she pushed off to answer the phone ringing in the living room.

“This is she.” I learned a new diction while attending to my toast. That voice of hers turned melodious even in talking on the phone, rising and falling with the conversation. “Yes. Yes. You're very kind to call. That's good to know.” Wouldn't it be something if people sounded like that all the time, halfway to music? “I see. No, no, you needn't bother, I can tell him.” Her tone sharpened. “She did? Oh, all right, if you insist.” Industriously buttering my toast, I about dropped the knife when I heard:

“Donny, come to the phone.”

•   •   •

L
IKE THE FIRST
time of handling the reins of a horse or the gearshift of a car, things only grown-ups touched previous to then, I can still feel that oblong plastic pink receiver as I tentatively brought it close to my mouth.

“Hello? This is . . . he.”

“I am Sister Carma Jean,” the voice sounding exactly like you would imagine a nun's came as crisp as if it were in the room, instead of fifteen hundred miles away at Columbus Hospital. I was dazed, unsure, afraid of what I might hear next.

“Last thing when I was at her bedside, your grandmother wished me to tell you yourself”—echo of
last wish
in that; I clung harder to the receiver—“she has come through the operation as well as can be expected.”

I breathed again, some.

“Of course, there are complications with that kind of surgery,” the Sister of Charity spoke more softly now, “so her recuperation will take some time.” Complications. Those sounded bad, and right away I was scared again. “But we have her here in the pavilion,” the voice on the line barely came through to me, “where she is receiving the best of care. You mustn't worry.” As if I could just make up my mind not to.

Aunt Kate hovered by the bay window pinching dead leaves off the potted plants while I strained to believe what was being recited by the holy sister in Great Falls. “She says to tell you,” the nun could be heard gamely testing out Gram's words, “you are not to be red in the head about things, the summer will be over before you know it.”

“Can I—” My throat tight, I had trouble getting the sentence out, but was desperate to. “Can I please talk to her?”

“I'm sorry, but she's resting now.” That sounded so protective I didn't know whether it was good or bad. “Is there something you would like for me to tell her?”

I swear, Aunt Kate was putting together everything said, just from hearing my side of the conversation, as snoopy as if she were the third party on the line. Why couldn't she go back in the kitchen, or better yet, off to the bathroom, so I could freely report something like
I'm stuck in an attic, and Aunt Kitty who isn't Kate Smith and Herman who isn't Uncle Dutch turn out to be the kind of people who fight over the complexion of a piece of toast.

“I guess not,” I quavered, squeezing the phone. Then erased that in the next breath. “No, wait, there is, too. Tell her”—I could feel the look from across the room—“the dog bus worked out okay.” Mentally adding,
But Manito Woc or however you say it is even a tougher proposition than either you or I ever imagined, Gram. So please get well really, really fast.

•   •   •

A
S SOON AS
I clunked the phone into its cradle, Aunt Kate squared around to me from patrolling the potted plants and trilled as if warming up her voice, “Wasn't that good news. Mostly.”

“I guess.”

That word
complications
rang in my ears, and no doubt hers, as we faced each other's company for an unknown length of time ahead.

“Well, now, we must keep you entertained, mustn't we. I know you like to be busy, so I set up the card table and got out a jigsaw puzzle. Those are always fun, aren't they.”

Maybe I was not the absolute shrewdest judge of character, but I had a pretty good hunch that habit of agreeing with herself covered up her desperation at not knowing what to do with a kid. This household didn't have so much as a dog or cat, not even a goldfish. By all evidence so far, Aunt Kate was only used to taking care of herself and the constant war with Herman, as it gave every appearance of being.

Right now she was at her most smiling and dimpled as she led me over to the card table, stuck as far out of the way as possible in the corner of the living room, and the puzzle box front and center on it.
MOUNT RUSHMORE
—
KNOW YOUR PRESIDENTS
, and in smaller type,
1,000 Pieces.
Worse yet, it was one I had already done in my jigsaw period, when Gram was trying to keep me occupied. “Yeah, swell,” I managed to remark.

Ready to leave me to the mountain of puzzle pieces and my cold toast, Aunt Kate headed for the basement to see if the laundry was finished yet. “Oh, just so you know,” she sang out as she started down the cellar stairs, “I put your snap-button shirt in with our washing, but the other was torn so badly I threw it away. It wasn't worth mending.”

“Doesn't surprise me,” I called back. Catching up to the fact I hadn't bothered to remove my stash from the ruined shirt the night before, what with everything else going on, I inquired for the sake of keeping current, “Where did you put my money?”

The footsteps on the stairs halting, her voice came muffled. “What money is that?”

“It was safety-pinned to the back of the good pocket, Gram did that so a pickpocket couldn't steal it and—”

For someone of her heft, she came up out of those cellar stairs in a terrific burst of speed, turned the hall corner at full tilt, and barreled through the kitchen and out to the garbage can at the top of the driveway, flannel robe billowing behind her, me at her heels. Her backside was too broad for me to see past as she flung open the lid of the can and looked in, and I was afraid to anyway.

“Too late,” she moaned, “it's been picked up.”

“C-can't we get it back?” Frantically I ran down the driveway, followed by Aunt Kate at a heavy gallop. Pulling up short at the curb, I shot a look one way along the street and she the other, then our heads swung in the opposite directions, staring past each other. No garbage truck. We listened hard. Nothing to be heard except her puffing and blowing.

“Maybe we could go to the dump,” I stammered, “and head it off.”

“Impossible,” she said in a way that could have meant either the dump or me. With that, we trudged back up the driveway, the slap-slap of her fuzzy slippers matching the thuds of my heart.

Outside the kitchen door, she rounded on me furiously. “Why didn't you tell me it was pinned there?”

“I—I didn't know you were going to do the wash so soon,” I blurted, which was not the real answer to the real question.

That was coming now, as she drilled her gaze into me and started in. “More than that, why didn't you—”

But before she could rightfully jump all over me for forgetting to rescue the money myself before dropping the shirt in the laundry chute, she stopped and pinched between her eyes in that way that signaled she needed an aspirin. After a moment, eyes still tight shut, she asked as if she could not face any more of this, “How much was it?”

“Th-thirty dollars, all I had,” I said, as if it were an absolute fortune, which to me it was. As I've said, no small sum in those days, to someone like her either, according to the excruciating groan she let out.

“See,” I tried to explain, “I was supposed to buy my school clothes with it, and whatever comic books I wanted, and go to a show once in a while if you said it was okay, and—” I looked at her angry, flushed face, twice the size of my merely red one, and abjectly tailed off—“wasn't supposed to be a nuisance to you about money.”

“That didn't quite work out, did it,” she fried my hide some more as she stomped back into the kitchen, still mad as could be. I shrank behind her, keeping a cautious distance. “Now this,” she declaimed, “on top of everything else,” which seemed to mean me generally. “And I have all these things to do,” she further declared, just as if she had not been sitting around drinking coffee and reading the newspaper half the morning.

I babbled another apology to try to make amends, although I wasn't getting anything of the sort from her for failing to go through my pocket before junking my shirt and costing me every cent I possessed, was I?