The war interrupted this pattern. In 1943 my father went in—enlisted or drafted, I have never known; it is one of the mysteries of him—and at Omaha Beach on D-Day he was badly shot up in the legs. He spent months in a hospital in England where surgeons put in rods and spliced portions of tendon from elsewhere in him into his knees and on down. Eventually he came home to my mother and me, at least to Fort Harrison hospital in Helena, where he advanced from casts to crutches to learning to walk again. Perhaps it says most about my father that he went right back to being a catskinner, even though you operate a bulldozer as much with your legs, working the brake pedals, as with your hands. Whatever it cost him in pain and endurance, Bud Cameron never veered from that chosen line of work, and in a way his stubborn climb from a cripple’s life summed up our family situation, because we were always getting on our feet. Money was tight when earthmoving jobs shut down for the winter, and Montana winters are long. Hopping to whatever water project was first to hire skinners when the ground thawed, with me attending whatever one-room school happened to be anywhere around, my folks had hopes of moving up from wages to contracting projects on their own. They had managed to take out a loan on a Caterpillar D-10 dozer and were on their way to the Cat dealer in Great Falls to sign the final papers, when the drunk driver veered across the centerline on the Two Medicine hill.
If the big-hatted lawman poking his nose into my life asked about any of that, I was ready to tell him.
? ? ?
THE SHERIFF SNIFFED as if smelling something he didn’t like after I protested that I really had been born at Fort Peck, honest.
“That’s as maybe,” he allowed, leaning toward me as if to get a better look. “Tell me something, laddie boy.” His tone turned into something I did not like to hear. “You don’t happen to be running away from home, do you?”
“No! The other way around! I mean, Gram and me got kicked out of the cookhouse and so we don’t have anywhere, and she’s sending me off to these people like I told you for someplace to go, honest!”
Characters in the funnies sometimes act out a situation to the fullest and whenever the Just Trampin’ hobo PeeWee and his buddies encountered a sheriff like this, they squawked, “Yeeps! It’s the constabulary!” and their hair stood on end. I can’t prove the top of my head was a red pompadour reaching for the sky, but it felt that way as I faced the scowling little lawman across the aisle. I was as dumbfounded as I was scared. Could a person be arrested for riding a Greyhound bus? And if so, would my suitcase be searched? How could I explain the obviously precious black arrowhead to a sheriff already full of suspicion? It’s really mine, see, because I found it, but my grandmother made me hand it over to Sparrowhead and so I got it back when he wouldn’t let me stay on the ranch and— That sounded fishy even to me, let alone a skeptical law enforcement officer. Then and there, with that star badge full in my face, the consequences of my impulsive grab at the Double W went through me like a fever spasm.
Afflicted as I was by something I’d done without thinking, now I had to strain my brain for how to head off the inquisitive sheriff. The prisoner sent me a knowing look of sympathy that didn’t help. Somehow I needed to dodge incrimination—the first step to getting back to Gros Ventre and turned over to the authorities, I was sure—by proving I actually was going to visit relatives like I’d said. “Here, see?” Frantically I dug out the autograph book from my jacket pocket and produced the slip of paper Gram had written the Wisconsin address on.
Still spooked to my eyeballs, I held my breath as the sheriff studied Gram’s spidery handwriting.
“Hell if I know what people are thinking anymore, the things they do these days,” he muttered as he kept squinting at the scrawl. Finally the evidence seemed to convince him, if reluctantly. Handing back the scrap of paper, he rasped, “It’s still bad business, I say, turning a kid young as you loose in the world.”
The prisoner Harv rumbled a laugh. “How old do you always say you were, when you set out on your own? Barely out of short pants, right?”
“Nobody asked you, Harvey,” the sheriff snapped. His attention diverted from me, he folded his arms on his chest and shook his head at the lovelorn suitor in his custody and the dammed river that had saddled him with wide-open boomtowns, the things a lawman had to put up with.
Although I was still shaky from the close call, my impulse was to get back to an even footing as a legitimate Greyhound passenger if I possibly could. Screwing up my courage, I took a gamble. “Uh, sir?” I tried to keep the squeak out of my voice. “I’ve never had anything to do with a sheriff before, so how about signing my autograph book for me, please, will you, huh?”
That seemed to amuse him to no end. “Kind of a feisty squirt, hnn?” he cackled. “I can believe you was hatched at Fort Peck.” In the next blink, though, habit or something set in and he made a face and pushed away the opened album I was trying to give him. “I don’t have time for foolishness.”
Harv came to my rescue. “Aw, come on, Carl. Don’t you remember at all what it was like to be a kid?”
The sheriff shot him a look, but for once didn’t snap “Shut up.” Shifting uncomfortably, he muttered, “Oh hell, give the thing here.” He took the album as if it might bite him, fumbled with the pen until I showed him how to click it, then bent his head and wrote.
Like they say at Fort Peck, keep your pecker dry
Carl Kinnick, Sheriff,
Hill County, Montana
“Gee, that’s a good one,” I managed to more or less thank him. “Can I get his, too?”
The sheriff laughed meanly. “What do you say to that, Harv? I bet you’re not used to writing your John Hancock except to bounce checks.” Entertained, he passed the autograph book to the handcuffed prisoner.
With great concentration, the arrested man went to work at writing. It took him a long time, even considering the contorted way he had to hold the pen and book. “What in hell-all are you writing, the Bible?” the sheriff derided.