Last Bus to Wisdom Read Free

cabin-size room and a few sticks of furniture, yet it had providently housed the pair of us the past two years, and if we were being kicked out, temporarily or not, I couldn’t help clinging to whatever I could. “I can stay on the ranch, I mean. Be in the bunkhouse with the haying crew, why not. I bet nobody would care and I wouldn’t take up hardly any room and—”
    â€œFor one thing, Donny, you’re not old enough for that.” Trying not to be cross with me but awful close to it, she squinted my direction through the bifocals that made her look like her eyes hurt along with the rest of her. “For another, Wendell may be short on brains, but he’s still not about to let you gallivant around the ranch on your own. So don’t talk just to hear your head rattle, we need to get a move on or you’ll miss the mail bus.” After more or less dusting off the suitcase, which was the best that could be done with wicker, she flopped the thing open on my bed. I didn’t care that it came from the old country with my grandfather’s father or somebody, to me it was just outdated and rickety and I’d look like some ridiculous comic strip character—PeeWee, the dim-witted little hobo in
Just Trampin’
readily came to mind—carrying it around. Ignoring my fallen face, Gram directed, “Hurry up now. Go pick out your shirts. Three will have to do you, to start with.”
    I stalled. “I don’t know what to take. What’s the dumb weather like back there?”
    â€œAbout like anyplace else,” she said less than patiently. “Summer in the summer, winter in the winter. Get busy.”
    Grudgingly I went over to the curtained-off nook that substituted for our closet. “Fuck and phooey,” I said under my breath as I sorted through shirts. I was at that stage—part of growing up, as I saw it—where cusswords were an attraction, and I’d picked up this expression from one of the cowhands being sent out in the rain to ride herd on stray cattle all day. It applied equally well to a dumb bus trip to Wisconsin, as far as I was concened.
    â€œWhat was that?” Gram queried from across the room.
    â€œFine and dandy,” I mumbled, as if I’d been talking to the shirts, and grabbed a couple I usually wore to school and my dressy western one. “Put that on to wear on the bus,” Gram directed from where she was aggregating my underwear and socks out of the small dresser we shared, “and these,” surprising me with the new blue jeans still in store folds. “People will think you’re a bronc rider.”
    Oh sure, a regular Rags Rasmussen, champion of the world at straddling saddle broncs, that’d be me, riding the bus like a hobo with a broken-down suitcase. Knowing enough not to say that out loud, I stuck to: “I bet they haven’t even got rodeos in
Wiss
-con-sun.”
    â€œDon’t whine.” Cheering me up was a lost cause, but she made the effort. “Honest to goodness, you’ll look swayve and debonure when you get on the bus.” I took that as a joke in more ways than one, suave and debonair the furthest from how I could possibly feel, packaged up to be shipped like something out of a mail-order catalog. She gave me a wink, not natural to her, and that didn’t help, either.
    Folding things smartly like the veteran of many moves that she was, she had the suitcase nearly packed while I changed into the stiff pants and the purple shirt with sky-blue yoke trimming and pearl snap buttons, which ordinarily would have lifted my mood. Back and forth between gauging packing space and my long face, Gram hesitated. “You can take the moccasins if you want to.”
    â€œI guess so.” Truth told, I didn’t care what else went in the hideous suitcase as long as those did. The pair of decorated Blackfoot moccasins rested between our beds at night, so whichever one of us