“Nothing, really.”
“Nellie,” he called through the doorway again, “the case has grown more serious. Bring me another five.”
Adding that fiver, he handed me what amounted to a junior fortune, compared with my situation a minute before. Thanking him six ways to Sunday, I pocketed the money in a hurry and held out the autograph book. “Write down your address, please, huh? We’re gonna pay you back, honest.”
“Are you. When Uncle Wiggily gets over being nervous in the service, hmm?” Skeptical as he may have been, he wrote his name and address in, topping it with what he said was a prescription for a conditon like mine.
I met a boy with hair so red
it lit up whatever he said.
He does not need a lucky star,
his gift of gab will carry him far.
Passing the album back, Dr. Schneider gave me a last curious look as if still searching for a diagnosis. “You haven’t told me, buddy, where that bus fare is supposed to take you.”
When I did so, he half laughed again, ending up with what I hoped was just a snatch of philosophy or something. “Good luck and Godspeed. Normally it takes most of a lifetime to reach there.”
21.
HERMAN HARDLY LET our newfound wealth rest in his hand before buyng bus tickets out of the natural wonderland of Yellowstone, but then tucked away the remainder of the money, this time in a shirt pocket that buttoned tightly, with the firm pronouncement “Belly timber must wait, up the road. No candy bars even, until we git where we go.”
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SO IT WAS that we arrived worse for wear, inside as well as out, several hours and a couple of bus changes and long stretches of highway later and not done yet, at the Greyhound terminal in Butte, of all places, with Herman unshaven and me in a rodeo shirt showing every sign that I had been living in it day and night. Grooming was not foremost on our minds, however. Hunger was making me so cranky Herman had to relent on the candy bars, and he wolfed into the first of his as readily as I did mine while we hustled from the newsstand on into the waiting room. For once, we did not have to run eyes and fingers over the almighty map lettered COAST TO COAST—THE FLEET WAY for our connection and destination. Up on the Departures board along with bus times to Denver and Seattle and Portland and Spokane and other metropolises of the West was all we needed to know.
3:10 TO WISDOM.
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“DONNY, NO TIME to smart ourselves up like Einsteins,” Herman had scolded me in our slambang argument outside the Old Faithful Inn when I blurted that what we needed was Wisdom. “They throw me in the stony lonesome, like you say,” he grumbled with another furtive look over his shoulder. “I will have plenty time to git wise.”
“No, no, not that kind,” I held rock-solid to my inspiration, surer than sure. “Wisdom is a real place we can go to, honest! See, it’s a town called that.” My finger had punched the map dot beside the name as if it were the doorbell button to the Promised Land. “Wisdom must amount to something, it has a bus depot and everything, way down there in the Big Hole.”
Leaning in and skeptically adjusting his glasses, Herman tried to fathom all this. “Something been digged deep, and the town fell in?”
“Huh-uh, the Big Hole is a sort of a—oh, what do they call it—a nice long valley out away from everything. It’s famous in Montana, honest.”
“Famous, what for?”
“Hay.”
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THAT HAD SET him off again. “Cow food? Donny, are you lost in your mind? What good is hay to us? We cannot be cow farmers.”
He continued to balk like that until I managed to spell out to him jobs on a ranch in the best hay country under the sun. “That’s the really great thing about the Big Hole,” I pressed my argument. “There’s hay up the yanger there, they’ll be putting it up the whole rest of the summer. Time enough for—”
“Killer Boy Dillinger to go away from public eyes,” he thought out the rest for himself, nodding his head. “I take back that you left your mind, Donny,” he apologized with a sort of laugh dry as dust. “Let’s go to Wisdom place. Maybe some rub off, hah?”
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