THE SCATTER OF buildings the bus pulled into at our destination did not look like much of a town. Much of anything.
While the tired dog bus chugged along a wide spot in the highway that was the main street, I tallied a couple of gas stations, a mercantile, a farm equipment dealership, a post office, the Watering Hole saloon as mentioned by the Jersey Mosquito, a supper club that looked like it had started life as a hash house, and a sprinkle of houses around. I had to admit, I’d seen Palookavilles that amounted to more. Yet the community of Wisdom famously carried one of the best names ever, by way of Lewis and Clark, who were thinking big when they passed through on their expedition and grandly dubbed three nearby rivers the Philosophy, the Philanthropy, and the Wisdom. None of those graftings lasted through time and local reference—the Wisdom became simply the Big Hole River, which proved to be the roundabout torrent our road had hugged so closely, and still was flowing good and wide here at our destination—but the little town picked up the name and used its remote location to good advantage as the provision point for the great hay valley; the nearest municipality of any size, Dillon, was sixty-five miles away through a mountain range.
I mention this only because there was something about Wisdom, scanty as it looked from a bus window, that immediately appealed to me. Anticipation can cause that, but somehow I felt Herman and I had arrived at a place that did not make too much of itself nor too little, and that felt about right. So, I was alarmed when Hoppy the driver did not even slow down as we passed the black-and-white enameled GREYHOUND sign hung to one side of the mercantile’s display window.
“Hey, wait, he missed the depot!” I burst out, Herman jerking to attention beside me.
Overland Pete and the California Kid and some others hooted as if that were the funniest thing they’d ever heard, but Skeeter again rescued me from further embarrassment. “We ain’t there yet, Snag. The one thing special about this excursion is, Hoppy dumps us off right where we’re puttin’ up for the night.”
Soon enough, those words bore truth. The bus jounced off the highway onto a stub dirt road, heading straight for the brush along the river. “We want the beachfront accommodations down the road, Hoppy,” Highpockets ordered up. Which drew the peevish response, “I know, I know. How god-many times have I druv the passel of you there?”
Not far from town, near a hidden-away clearing in the thick diamond willows, we rolled to a stop. “Everybody off, far as the golden chariot goes,” the driver recited, as I’d have guessed he did every year.
As everyone piled into the aisle and out, Herman and I were the last off the bus, and the final ones to have our belongings hurled out of the baggage compartment by Hoppy, who wished us luck with a shake of his head. We turned to have our first good look at a hobo jungle.
Herman, who had witnessed the Depression, chewed the side of his mouth before saying, “Hooverville without shacks, even.”
The poorfarm without walls or a roof, was my own spooked reaction to the scene of rough-dressed men strewn around a campfire in the dusk as our own bunch from the bus joined them, pitching their bindles and bedrolls into whatever nooks in the brush they could find. I was horribly afraid Herman was going to remind me it was my eye-dea that brought us to this—he sure was entitled to—but he confined himself to “Find ourselfs a place for the night, we better.”
Since we were too broke to afford a room even if Wisdom had any, our only course of action was staring us in the face. “Okay, we’re gonna have to jungle up with the rest of them.” I shook myself out of my poorfarm stupor. “First thing is, we don’t look right.”
Pulling him behind a clump of brush where we were out of sight from the campfire, I rolled up our pants cuffs to the tops of our shoes and generally mussed our clothes up, pulling our shirttails out some to look baggy and so on.
Lifting my Stetson off, I punched my fist up into the crown to take out the neat crimp and make it more like what the hoboes wore. I held out my hand for Herman’s eight-gallon pride and joy.
“Do we got to?” he groaned.
“Damn betcha,” I said, reaching up for it so he wouldn’t have to commit the crime against it himself. “We don’t want to stand out like dudes at a testicle festival.”
I beat up his hat against the willows, then rubbed it in the dirt for good measure as he watched in agony.
“There you go.” I handed him the limp, abused Stetson and clapped my own on my head. “Ready?” I inclined my head to the campfire.
“One Eye is with you, Snag,” he said, as if swallowing hard.