SO HERE we were, only a pair of dog bus tickets short of the half-hidden town that was the gateway to hay heaven. I couldn’t wait to get there, brimming as I was with visions of driving the stacker team on some well-run ranch with no Wendell Williamson to say Nuhhuh, horsepower over horses, the birdbrain, while Herman was hired on as—well, that would have to be determined. Now that we had made it as far as Butte and one last change of buses, the ride of what appeared from the route map to be only a couple of hours at most should be a snap of the fingers for seasoned travelers like us.
On the other hand, the distance to the ticket office on the far side of the jam-packed waiting room gave us both cause to pause. From the moment we stepped in through the ARRIVALS swinging doors, the Butte bus depot looked like a tough proposition. Throughout the waiting room, hard-eyed men with bent shoulders and faces with an awful lot of mileage on them, the best description was, were slouched on benches that would never be mistaken for church pews, and the women perched next to them in their none-too-good Sunday best for traveling did not look much better. Even more unsettling to me were scruffy boys my age roving through the crowd, shrilly hawking newspapers at the top of their voices. Orphans! was my immediate thought, captives of the state orphanage right here in the infamous mining city. Around the corner with its door wide open and just waiting . . .
Looking back I realize that citizens of a famously tough copper company town with neighborhoods called Muckerville and Dublin Gulch, where miners with names like Maneater Duffy and Monkey Wrench Mike and Luigi the Blaster and hundreds of others worked in mines such as the Destroying Angel and the Look Out, were not likely to be a greeting committee of fashion plates. But we were not mistaken in there was a prickly feeling that we had better watch our step—that was Butte for you, if you were an outsider—as we cautiously moved off from the Departures board toward the ticket office.
And then we both saw it at once. The bulletin board alongside the ticket window with all manner of things posted as usual, but standing out like a billboard to us the bold black lettering NEW THIS WEEK FROM YOUR FBI and that lineup of posters with Herman’s mug prominent on the very end.
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STOPPING DEAD in his tracks, he stared at himself across the distance of the long waiting room. “Are they after me everywheres?” a whisper of despair escaped him.
Did it ever seem so, at our each and every turn, but since then I have caught up with the lore that the dictatorial boss of the Federal Bureau of Investigation at the time, J. Edgar Hoover, used Butte as a Siberia for agents who had fallen out of his favor. Having too little else to do, this band of exiles was notorious for plastering the city and the country around with the latest MOST WANTED posters, apparently in the hope of netting criminals in the backwaters of Montana. It was simply our rotten luck of the moment that, with his face here, there, and anywhere, their most likely catch was Herman the German.
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“HERE.” I tried to disguise him by handing him what little was left of my candy bar. “Hold this in front of your face and pretend to eat it while we go across there. We’re running out of time to get tickets.” Queerly, the schedule board did not show any Wisdom bus beyond the one, even the next day. If I had learned anything from experience, it was to catch the bus first and deal later with whatever came along.
Herman may have agreed in principle, but as we set out to edge through the waiting room without attracting notice, all at once he faded like a shadow into the men’s restroom, leaving me abandoned with “Donny, wait here. I be right back.”
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OH, GREAT. The worst possible time for a call of nature. Now I was stranded there trying to seem inconspicuous while minding the duffel bag and wicker suitcase, both of which looked suspiciously ratty even alongside the Butte mode of dusty old luggage. Right away I caught Herman’s case of jumpiness. My imagination could feel the entire depot population looking at me, especially those sharp-eyed newsboys roaming the waiting room like coyotes on the hunt.
“Hey, looka the greeny,” one of them jeered as they circled past me.
“Yah, fresh off the boat,” laughed another. “Probably got that willow yannigan from his granny in the old country.”
Determinedly looking casual, I tried to kill time by gazing around and around the terminal with surpassing interest except at the incriminating bulletin board. No Herman, no Herman, as minutes ticked away. What the hell was he doing in there all this time? Had he been rolled by some thug?
At last, thanks be, Herman emerged, still in one piece. Although not quite. I had to look twice to be sure of what I was seeing. Surprise enough, he did not have his eyeglasses on, which he all but slept with. But the shocker was that he had taken out his glass eye.
Face squinched out of shape to stretch the eyelid down and cheek skin up to cover the empty eye socket, he looked different from his WANTED picture, for sure. More like a sideshow freak winking gruesomely.