“So I have, you put it so well.” The fine-boned man, on second look maybe not as elderly as he first appeared, smiled under the cookie-duster mustache. “But that’s the story of life, isn’t it. Keeping on across the unknowable distances that at the end of it all add up to that mystical figure of three score and ten,” click-click.
I had heard Herman’s gabs with strangers across the aisle so many times I was only half listening to this exchange, more interested in devouring Mounds bars and catching my breath, mentally at least, after the narrow escape from Sparrowhead. But that sizable serving of heavy thought from the little gent drew my attention. By now Herman, too, was cocking a speculative look at him.
“Please forgive me,” this daintiest of passengers touched the area of the knot of his tie. “There I go again, with my preaching collar on. You see, I’m a minister. Answered the call all those years ago”—a smile peeped from under the mustache again—“those big miles ago, and even though I’m retired, the pulpit still beckons at odd moments.” He laughed at himself, ever so apologetically. “I suppose folks like you unlucky enough to listen to my ramblings are my congregation now. I didn’t mean to intrude, my heart was simply warmed by the sight of the pair of you traveling together.”
Back there at the word minister, I stiffened. Dearie dearie goddamn. Why this, why now, why why why? On one of the biggest days of my life, the question of my taking the arrowhead had attached itself to me like a telltale shirttail that hung out no matter how I tried to tuck it. I mean, I still believed I in no way amounted to a real thief, whatever grabby-guts Wendell Williamson thought, because discovering the arrowhead after it had lain there unclaimed since before Columbus amounted to my luck and his loss, didn’t it? And I deserved half of our canasta winnings just as much as Aunt Kate, didn’t I? Shouldn’t old Hippo Butt and Sparrowhead both know when they were beat, and fold their cards like canasta losers? Yet if the situation was that clearcut, why did it keep bugging me? Now whoosh, and right here on the dog bus the latest stranger proved to be a man of the cloth, as I knew from something I’d read such people were called, whose occupation it was to provide answers to things like that, in church and out, from the looks of it.
? ? ?
OLD-TIMER ON THE DOG bus that I was from sixteen hundred and one miles going back east to Wisconsin and now many hundreds more westward with Herman, I had the crawly feeling that this particular passenger across the aisle was too close for comfort. This was way worse than the nun at the start of my trip to Manitowoc or the attic plaque of the kid on his knees bargaining with death in the night, this was as if the big mystery called God was using the bus-hopping minister like siccing a sheepdog onto strays. “Go get ’em, Shep, herd them close. Nip ’em good. Here, take this new set of teeth.” Maybe a limited dose of religion never hurt anyone, but bumping into the small-fry minister this way bugged me. For some reason, the wispy figure an arm’s length away reminded me of the little sheriff who’d arrested Harv. Trouble came in small sizes as well as large, I was learning.
? ? ?
“NO, NO, IS OKAY,” Herman was busy assuring the kindly minister he wasn’t intruding on us, although he sure as hell was, pardon my French. I could tell Herman, too, was thrown by the religious wraith’s sudden appearance. For if my conscience had a few uncomfortable things on it, the one in the seat next to mine must have been considerably weighted down with the phony tale of going back to Germany and this entire disappearing act he had thought up for the two of us.
“May I ask how you two are related?” the minister pressed on. “I see such a striking resemblance.”
He did? Was I growing to be like Herman that much? Oh man, there was another weighty question—good or bad, to take on the homely yet compelling characteristics of somebody so one-eyed, horse-toothed, and, well, Hermanic?
“Great-uncle only, I am,” he postponed the matter as best he could, with a glassy glance at me. “Donny is best grandnephew ever made.”
“How fortunate you are, sir,” a click and a chuckle from across the aisle. “Great by dint of the fruit of the family tree.”
“No bad apples on our branch, hah, Donny?” Herman fended.
“By the way, my parishioners called me Reverend Mac” came next, with an extended hand of introduction. “It’s from my middle name, Macintosh,” which had quite a clack to it as he said it.