FOR ANOTHER TWENTY smackers, Louie Slewfoot’s going rate for saving our skins, he drove us to Billings, a safe distance from Crow Fair and its cops in braids, and dropped us at the Greyhound station there.
“You fellows sort of make a full day,” he remarked as he handed down the now dusty suitcase and duffel bag from the back of the camper, with dusk giving way to dark. Life with Herman packed a lot into the hours, I was definitely finding out.
“Take good care of that arrowhead, chiefie, so it’ll take care of you,” Louie advised me with a sly wink as he took his leave of us with a slam of the camper door. But not before, big medicine or whatever doing its work, I coaxed him into an autograph and more.
Say, do you remember the time
I slipped on a banana peeling
and hit the ceiling
while wondering why
I had a stye in my eye
and how in hell
my nose runs while my feet smell?
Oh, I was in tough condition
because life’s a rough proposition—
but at least it makes a nice rhyme.
Louie Slewfootb
Off the rez and on the go—
“Not Longfellow, but not shabby,” Herman approved, reading over the inscription from a genuine Indian that I had finally proudly attained. “More to him than meets an eye. Too bad he is not Apache.”
Handing me back the autograph book, he switched his attention to the old standard, the red-webbed route map on the Greyhound depot wall. “Scenery everywheres, I betcha,” he observed about the many roads trending west. “So, Donny, what does your fingers say?”
This was almost too easy. On tiptoes, I jabbed a finger to the most famous spot west of Crow Fair.
“Yahlahstone,” Herman ratified thoughtfully, looking over my shoulder. “Old Faithful geezer is there?”
Fixing his pronunciation, I assured him that besides geysers there were bound to be natural wonders popping up all over the place in Yellowstone National Park.
“Not only that,” it must have been the big medicine still working in the pouch around my neck that had me thinking so expansively. “See there, then we can go on through the park”—my finger confidently traveled down the spine of the West, arriving in Arizona—“all the way to where the Apaches live, how about.”
“Now you are speaking,” he enthusiatically took up the prospect.
First thing was to get us on our way, and I drew Herman’s attention to the schedule board, showing that the bus we wanted was about to go. “C’mon, or we’re gonna miss it.”
“Donny, wait,” he held back, concerned. “We have not had bite to eat since breakfast.”
“Never mind,” I took care of that, seasoned bus hopper that I was, “we’ll grab candy bars.”
? ? ?
SCRAMBLING ONTO THE BUS at the last minute with a handful of Mounds bars apiece, scanning the rows of mostly filled seats in that game of chance of where to sit, we even so were not the last to board. Just as the driver had shut the door with the departing whoosh, there was a polite tapping on it, and here came a wisp of a man, hardly enough of him to withstand being blown away by the wind; gray-headed and with a silvery mustache sharp over his lip like a little awning; well-dressed in a mild way, his plain brown suit obviously far from new. He thanked the driver kindly for letting him board, and evidently to make no more fuss deposited himself in the first seat available, which happened to be across from us.
As the bus pulled out, for once someone got the jump on Herman, with the latecomer leaning across the aisle and inquiring in a cultivated voice, “Where are you gentlemen headed, may I ask?”
“Yahlahstone Park, next on list,” replied Herman, triggered into his usual spiel that he and I were out to see the West, but perhaps in deference to the man’s oh-so-polite demeanor, he left off the part about ending up somewhere south of the moon and north of Hell.
“Oh, good for you and the young man there.” His visitor approved our intentions with an odd click of his mouth. “Endless things to see in the park,” he went on in that same refined tone but clickety at the end of each string of words, “all the marvels of nature. I’m passing through there myself, on my way to visit my daughter in Salt Lake City.” By now I had caught on that his false teeth clacked.
“Ah-huh,” Herman stalled, like me thinking over the prospect of several hours of clickety-clack conversation like this from across the aisle. “You got some big miles to go.”