“Not just yet, hah-uh,” he stopped me. He still looked stricken but in a different way. “Something is tickling my mind. Quick, your book. Let me see.”
Blankly I handed over the autograph album, and peered along with him in the barely lit parking lot as he flipped pages to Reverend Mac’s inscription. With some kind of swearing in German, he put his thumb next to the signature, Isaac M. Dezmosz.
“Should have seen. Dismas was thief crucified with Christ.” It took me a moment to put together the initials with that pronunciation and come up with it: I Am Dismas.
“Lying in his false teeth, he was,” Herman bleakly summed up the so-called Reverend Macintosh.
I blew my top. “The smart-ass little sonofabitch of a thief! Distributing Bibles, my butt! C’mon, we’ll show him troubled times.”
I tore across the parking lot to where the bus was idling, ready to go, Herman galloping after me. I banged on the door, and Herman joined in as if he would tear it open with his bare hands.
The driver opened and considerately asked, “Forget something, boys?”
Without answering, I lunged up the steps and into the aisle, Herman right behind, both of us furiously searching for a distinctive gray head and silvery mustache.
Neither of which was in evidence on any of the remaining passengers, from front of the bus to the back as I careened up the aisle in search, Herman blocking the way in back of me in case the little Bible-spouting weasel tried to make a break for it. “Where’d that goddamned preacher go?” I demanded at the top of my voice, glaring at the rows of startled faces, none of them the right one.
“Who, the nice little minister?” the driver called down the aisle to us, perplexed by our invasion. “He got off at Livingston, a ways back. Said he had a train to catch.”
“Sinked, we are,” Herman said huskily, putting a hand on my shoulder to steady me, or maybe himself.
Retreating to the front of the bus, we laid out our situation to the driver, who could only shake his head as if now he had heard everything and offer the commiseration, “Tough break, boys, better report it at park headquarters and they’ll get the sheriff in on it.”
20.
STILL AS MAD as could be, I piled off the bus to do that very thing, my view of law enforcement having come around full circle in the past few minutes, with Herman more slowly following.
“Hurry up,” I called over my shoulder, half frantic or maybe more, as he lagged on the way across the parking lot, “let’s get some kind of cops after the thieving bastard.”
“Donny, hold back. Over here, please.”
Disconcerted by the detour, I uncertainly trailed after as he veered off to the gigantic wooden deck at the geyser side of the Inn, where people could sit out to watch Old Faithful display itself, although at that time of night we were the only ones anywhere around.
He dropped his duffel bag in a corner away from where everyone else was sitting, so I set my suitcase there, too, until it would become clear what this was about. More and more unnerved, I whispered when I didn’t have to, “Why’re we wasting time here when he’s getting away with—”
“Shhh, notcheral wonder is coming,” he gently shut me up.
Unstrung as I was anyway by Herman behaving this way, now I was hearing what sounded like low thunder and heavy rain mixed together, although the night sky remained cloudless. I thought I felt the earth tremble, but it might have been only me. We turned together toward the source of the sound, a boiling hiss from the whitish mound, and, as we watched, in its center what looked like a giant fountain started up, the cascades of steaming water billowing and falling, but steadily and incredibly shooting higher and higher, until the ghostly white column stood taller than the tallest trees, almost touching the single bright star, it looked like.
Yet magnificent as the sight was, it did little to change my anxious mood. Old Faithful was an eyeful, for sure, but so what? It faithfully would be blowing off steam again in an hour or so, after we’d had time to spill our story to whatever passed for cops under these circumstances, but Herman was making no move whatsoever in that direction.
Instead, he motioned wordlessly for me to take a seat in the deck chair next to the one he claimed. Scratching a match on the arm of the chair, he lit a cigar and gazed fixedly at Old Faithful’s rising and falling curtains of water as he puffed. Had he gone loco? This I could not understand at all, the two of us planting ourselves there, sightseeing the geyser fading slowly back into the ground, while the thief who’d left us skunk-broke except for a cheap Bible was making a getaway free as the breeze.
Finally he extinguished his cigar and murmured, as if coming out of his deepest think yet, “Guess what, Donny. Not a good eye-dea, to go to police.”
“Not a—? Sure it is. We’ve got to, they’re the ones to chase down the sonofabitching phony religious—”
“Many questions, they will have.”
“So what?”