“You needn’t be quite so tickled about it. I’m not exactly public enemy number one.”
“Oh, hurting your feelings, am I. Ain’t that just too damn bad.” The sheriff glanced up at the composed figure nearly a head taller than him and complained, “I’ve got a whole hell of a lot of better things to do than pack you back to Wolf Point, you know. Do you have to be such a pain in the britches? First you get in a fight with some fool bartender because you think you’ve been shortchanged and tear up the bar.” So much for my imagining this was an escaped murderer, being delivered to the cold scales of justice. “Then you keep breaking out of that half-assed excuse for a jail they have over there and showing up back here in my jurisdiction.” With his face squinched like one of those apple dolls that have dried up, the sheriff groused, “Can’t you for christ sakes light out in some other direction for a change? Go get yourself a haying job somewhere? Stacking hay is about your speed, Harv.”
“I explained that, Carl,” the prisoner said patiently. “My girlfriend Letty waits tables in Great Falls. How else am I supposed to get to see her?”
“I KNOW HER! Leticia, I mean, it was right there in pink!”
My bray startled both men, their heads whipping around to scrutinize me. “She was here on the bus, see,” I gave out the news as fast as I could talk, “so I met her and we talked for a long way and she was really nice to me, boy, she’s a piece of work.” I reported further to the surprised prisoner, “She told me all about you, sort of. The trucker part.”
“Oh, swell,” the sheriff said sardonically. “Now she’s running around the countryside, too. What is it about you two, claustrophobia?”
The prisoner ignored the sarcasm, leaning forward to see around the sheriff. “Why was she on the bus, my friend? Start at the beginning.”
It seemed a good time to keep the beginning close to the end. “She got sick and tired of uppity customers at the Buster hotel, so she’s gonna try Havre.”
“Havre.” The men looked at each other as if that were the bottom of the barrel.
Harv recovered enough to maintain, “Letty’d have her reasons.”
“Eh, her,” the sheriff scoffed. “The cause of all this. Isn’t that so, loverboy?”
“Only because you arrested me when I was on my way to go see her in Great Falls, before Havre came up,” the prisoner said, patient as paint. “I was hitchhiking just fine until I had to stop for a bite to eat.”
“For crying out loud,” his captor groused. “I leave the office for lunch at the Highliner Cafe like usual, and there you come waltzing up the street, big as life. What was I supposed to do?”
“You could have looked down the street.”
“Oh, sure, wink and let a jailbreaker run around loose, even if it’s you.” The sheriff shook his head in disgust. A mean little smile crept in after that expression. “Anyway, this Letty sounds like she isn’t waiting for you, Harv old kid.”
“We’ll fetch up together, sooner or later,” the big quiet man in cuffs vowed calmly, and jailbreaker notwithstanding, I found myself pulling for that to be true.
The sheriff sighed in exasperation. “You’re being a fool for love, worst kind. Honest to God, Harv, if brains was talcum powder, you couldn’t work up a sneeze.”
Aware that my fascination with all this showed no sign of letting up, the sheriff tipped his hat back a fraction with his finger as if to have a clearer look at me. I had already noticed in life that shrimpy guys didn’t like the idea of being shrimpy guys, and so they acted big. The sheriff still wasn’t much bigger than I was when he fluffed himself up to ask suspiciously, “What about you, punkin, what’s a little shaver like you doing on here by yourself? Where’s your folks?”
“Me? I’m, uhm, I’m going to visit our relatives,” which I hoped was just enough truth to close the topic.
His eye level the same as mine, this tough kernel of a man simply stared across the aisle at me. “Traveling on the cushions, huh? Pretty good for a kid your age. Where you from?”
“Gros Ventre,” I said distinctly, as people from over east, which was most of the rest of Montana, sometimes didn’t know it was pronounced Grove On.
“That’s some ways from here. I didn’t hear you say how come your folks turn you loose to—” The bus suddenly humming in a different gear, it dropped down in a dip and showed no sign of coming out, the road following the Missouri River now. The broad river flowing in long lazy curves with thickets of diamond willows and cottonwood trees lining the banks impressed me, but the sight seemed to turn the sheriff’s stomach. Beside him, though, his handcuffed seat partner smiled like a crack in stone.