Last Bus to Wisdom (37 page)

“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.

W
E 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 Carl would take it easy on me for slipping jail, when it's not even his,” he said, as if there was more than one kind of justice.

“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.

•   •   •

A
T 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.”

The atmosphere around the campfire changed like a gun had gone off. Certain hoboes evaporated into the willow thicket on the riverbank, others sat up rigid in a collective stare toward the road, where a black-and-white patrol car with a big star on the door luminescent in the moonlit night was pulling up. Harv stayed as he was, as though none of this turn of events applied to him, and Herman and I were caught up in his example, whether or not we should have taken to the brush.

Right away, Highpockets was on his feet and in charge. “Anybody been yaffled lately?”

“I done a jolt a little while back,” Buttermilk Jack, the oldest of the hoboes except for Skeeter in our bunch, owned up to. “Fifteen days, vag, in Miles City.”

“Good time, or did you scoot?” Highpockets pressed what must have been the most veteran vagrant to be found anywhere.

“Served my sentence honest and true,” the old hobo swore. “Then they run me out of town. If anybody's on the lam, it ain't me.”

No, it was the trio of us at the other end of the log from old Jack who fit that description up, down, and sideways. Fear gripped me so savagely I could scarcely breathe. Would my all too readable face, between Harv's imperturbable one and Herman's contorted one, give us away, first of all to Highpockets? He had no stake in us, and as the Big Ole, his responsibility was toward the bunch he traveled through the fields of the West with, the Johnson family compressed into that last bus. He could dust his hands of strays like us to any inquiring lawman, to everyone else's benefit but ours. I am sure my eyes were rabbity and my freckles gone pale as I watched Highpockets read faces in the firelight.

Just before he reached ours, Peerless Peterson spat a sizzle of tobacco juice into the fire. “Why can't the bastards let us alone? We got as much rights as anybody, but they treat us like dirt when we're not sweating our balls off doing the work for them.”

“Shut your flytrap,” Highpockets snapped at him, “until we see what this is about. You go poking Johnny Law like that and he's likely to poke back with a billy club, you ought to have learned that by now.”

The circle around the campfire went tensely silent as he checked from man to man. “Anybody else the bloodhounds might be after, for anything? No? Let's make sure or we're all in for it.” On one side of me, Harv looked on innocently, and on the other, Herman somehow was an equal picture of guiltlessness. For my part, I had to sit tight and try not to appear as guilty as I felt about landing the pair of us in this fix. Luckily, Herman's whisper put some backbone in me. “Remember, big medicine you have. Makes you brave.” Newly conscious of the arrowhead and whatever power it carried, there next to my heart, I managed to guilelessly meet Highpockets's eyes as his gaze swept over the three of us, lingered, then moved on.

“All right, we seem to be in the clear. We've lucked out, some,” he reported in a low voice as he recognized the advancing lawman in the moonlight. “It's Mallory, the deputy sheriff over here. He's not the worst as hick dicks go.” But he still was some kind of sheriff and Herman still was featured on a
MOST WANTED
poster, and I still was his accomplice or something, skating on thin ice over the bottomless depth of the orphanage. I gripped the arrowhead pouch through my shirt, my other hand clasped in Herman's to tie our fortune together, good or bad.

•   •   •

T
HE DEPUTY
and Highpockets acknowledged each other by name as the local lawman stepped into the circle of light cast by the campfire. They did not shake hands, which would not have set well with either of their constituencies. This officer of the law was half again bigger than Harv's banty-size Glasgow nemesis, somewhat beefy the way people get from sitting behind a desk too much, but without that air of throwing his weight around unnecessarily. He did not look overly threatening except for the pistol riding on his hip. That six-shooting symbol of authority, however, was more than enough to draw resentment, loathing, hatred in some cases, from men harried first by railroad bulls and then the lawmen of communities that wanted them gone the minute their labor was no longer needed. The shift of mood in the encampment was like a chilly wind through a door blown open.

“Only checking to make sure you boys are comfortable.” Mallory spoke directly to Highpockets but all of us were meant to hear.

“There ain't nothing like it, bedroom of stars and the moon for your blanket,” Skeeter contributed ever so casually, as Peerless spat into the fire again. “Care to kip with us for the thrill of it all?”

“I think I heard a feather bed call my name,” Mallory chose to joke in return with a hand cupped to his ear. No one laughed. Heaving a sigh, the deputy got down to business. “Speaking of relaxation, maybe it'd help everyone's mood to know I'm only coming back from a hearing at the county courthouse over in Dillon, not on the lookout for anyone in particular. But”—he paused significantly—“I figured I'd stop by Highpockets's old stomping grounds here just to keep myself up-to-date. Any new faces I ought to be acquainted with, on the odd chance they'd show up in town on Saturday night and I wouldn't recognize them as haymakers instead of plain old drunks?”

Several of the hoboes who were already at the kip when our bus bunch arrived grudgingly owned up to being first-timers in Big Hole haying. The deputy made a mental note of each, then raised his eyebrows as he came to Harv and Herman and me. Harv merely nodded civilly to him. I was tongue-tied, and Herman did not want to sound the least bit German. In these circumstances, muteness could be construed as guilt—we certainly had a nearly overflowing accumulation of that among the three of us—and just as the silence was building too deep, Highpockets stepped in.

“Snag and his gramps there, One Eye, have been with us since we were apple-knocking, over by the Columbia. The big fella, too. They're jake.”

“If you say so, Pockets.” The deputy apparently could not help wondering about me, though. “Say there, Moses in the bullrushes. You're sort of young to be hitting the road like this. What brings you to hay country?”

“My s-s-summer vacation. From school.”

“Some vacation.” Mallory was growing more curious, the audience around the campfire restless with his lingering presence. Highpockets was looking concerned. “These your folks here,” the deputy persisted, “this pair of specimens?”

Herman's hand firmed on mine, helping to take the quiver out of my voice. “You guessed it. My Gramps, here, and my, uh—”