To me that meant the one that flushes, and with Gram’s number-one instruction for riding the dog bus in comparative comfort urgently in mind—Every stop, you make sure you get in there and go before the bus does—I was the first one off and into the station, fantastic Letty first giving me a good-bye pat on the cheek and wishing me all the luck in the world.
I could have used some by the time I emerged from the men’s restroom and tried to navigate the waiting room crowded with families of Indians and workgangs of white guys in bib overalls and a mix of other people, the mass of humanity causing me to duck and dodge and peer in search of something to eat. My meal money, a five-dollar bill Gram had tucked into my jeans, was burning a hole in my pocket. Besides that, on the principle that you never want to be separated from your money while traveling among strangers, I had a stash under my shirt, three ten-dollar bills that she had folded snugly and pinned behind the breast pocket with a large safety pin, assuring me a pickpocket would need scissors for hands to reach it. These days, it is hardly conceivable that three perforated ten-spots and a fiver felt to me like all the cash in the world, but at the time a cup of coffee cost only a dime, as did that stimulant for the younger set like me, comic books, and a movie could be seen for a quarter, and a pair of blue jeans would set you back two bucks and a half at most.
Be that as it may, besides providing me with a little to spend during the Wisconsin stay—“mad money,” Gram’s words for it probably fitting my tendencies all too accurately—the shirt stash was meant to outfit me with school clothes back there to come home with as well. School clothes were a big deal then, no real family wanting to look stingy about it. So, scraping that much cash together to send me off with was no easy thing—it amounted to half of Gram’s last monthly paycheck from the tight fist of Sparrowhead—and that’s why I had firm instructions from her to stretch the pocket fiver through the trip by confining lunches to a sandwich. No milkshakes, no pieces of pie, no bottles of pop, in other words no getting rambunctious with the tantalizing five-spot.
Which sounded okay in theory, but less so in a thronged bus depot when I was hungry as a wolf. Wouldn’t you know that the lunch counter, offering greasy hamburgers if a person did not want runny egg salad sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, was jam-packed by the time I could get there and service was slow as ring-around-the-rosy. Havre really needed Letty.
Desperately looking around as my stomach growled, I spied the newsstand that sold magazines and cigarettes and other sundries. Gram had not thought to say anything about candy bars.
I hurried over, one eye on the clock. No one else was buying anything, but the gum-chewing woman clerk had to tend to freight parcels as well as the candy counter, and it took a very long couple of minutes to get her to wait on me. “A Mounds bar, please”—dark chocolate with coconut inside, you can’t beat that—I said as rapidly as I could. Then I remembered that suppertime would not be until North Dakota, as distant to me as the cheese side of the moon. “Make it three.”
? ? ?
THE GREYHOUND had its motor running when I dashed out of the terminal, peeling a Mounds as I ran. The door was open, but the driver was resting a hand on the handle that operated it. “Cutting it pretty close, sonny,” he said, giving me the stinkeye as I panted up the steps, the door sucking shut behind me.
To my amazement, the bus had filled up entirely, except where I had saved my window spot with my cord jacket. And if I could believe my eyes, there next to it sat a big-bellied Indian with black braids that came down over his shoulders.
Oh man, here was my chance! A seatmate I could talk to about all kinds of Indian things! The Fort Belknap Reservation was somewhere in this part of Montana, I knew, and he and the Indian families taking up about half the bus must be headed home there. My head buzzed with the sensation of double luck. Here delivered right to me was not only someone really great for the autograph book, but who could palaver—that’s what Indians did, didn’t they?—with me about the black arrowhead if I went about it right. What a break!
“Hi!” I chirped as I joined him.
“Howdy,” he said in a thrilling deep voice that reverberated up out of that royal belly—maybe he was a chief, too!—as he moved his legs enough for me to squeeze by to my window seat.