Finally the prisoner thrust his manacled hands across to give me the finished product, only to have it intercepted, the sheriff growling, “Not so fast. Let me see that.”
Reading it with a pinched look, the sheriff at first couldn’t seem to believe his eyes, saying to himself, “Huh. Huh.” Finishing, he burst out: “Harv, you’re hopeless! That’s schoolhouse mush if I ever saw any.”
Unperturbed, Harv stated, “Letty is worth every word of it.”
Sourly the sheriff passed the opened album for me to take in the painstakingly shaped words.
Holy wow, I thought to myself, that pretty well described Letty, except for the pink stitching.
The sheriff was still expressing disgust with his prisoner. “Where’d you pick up that list of schoolkid stuff, loverboy?”
“Belowdecks on a troop carrier headed for the Guam invasion,” Harv countered, with a level gaze at his captor.
Somewhere amid their back-and-forth and my thrilled admiration of his construction on the page, I finally fully took in the signature beneath.
Harvey Kinnick, serving time in this life.
I blurted, “Y-you’ve got the same last name?”
“We’re brothers,” the prisoner specified. “Aren’t we, Carl.”
The sheriff folded his arms on his chest in practically a pout. “Step-brothers.”
5.
THE PAIR of them got off at Wolf Point, a town so scrimpy it was no surprise that it could not hold Harv the jailbreaker. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, button,” the sheriff left me with. I thought to myself, as I have ever since, that left a large margin for error, given the behavior of certain adults.
Wolf Point seemed to be the cutoff between what is generally thought of as Montana and the notion of North Dakota, farms sprinkled across a big square of land. By now passengers had dwindled drastically—there wasn’t much of anywhere to pick someone up until the supper stop at Williston, a couple of hours away—and I managed to gather only the autographs and inscriptions of a Rural Electrification troubleshooter and two elderly Dakota couples retired from wheat farming and moved to town, so much alike right down to the crow’s-feet wrinkles of their prairie squints that they could have been twins married to twins. Maybe inspiration flattens out along with the countryside, because they all tended to come up with sentiments along the lines of Remember me early, remember me late, remember me at the Golden Gate. But every page filled went toward my goal of a world-famous collection.
At the Williston depot, for once the driver beat me in getting off, handing over the paperwork to the next driver at the bottom of the bus steps. As I scooted for the restroom, I overheard him say to the new man, “Carrying a stray,” and the response, “I’ll keep an eye on him.”
That exchange made my guts tighten. Was that what I was, a stray? Like a motherless calf? That was not the kind of fame I wanted, and unfair besides. I had Gram yet, and like it or not, the unknown great-aunt and -uncle ahead in Wisconsin. It was only between here and there that I was unclaimed, I tried telling myself.
But I was further unsettled when the lunchroom’s supper offerings did not include chicken-fried steak or anything remotely like it, only stuff such as macaroni and cheese or meatloaf that wasn’t any kind of a treat, anytime. In direct violation of Gram’s orders, feeling guilty but fed, I had a chocolate milkshake and a piece of cherry pie, à la mode. Maybe Minnesota, on tomorrow’s stretch of the trip, would feed better.
The bus added a dozen or so passengers in Williston, but I was too played out by the full day to go up and down the aisle with the autograph book. Instead, I settled in for the night, which took a long time coming in horizontal North Dakota. First thing, making sure no one was watching, I took out my wallet and put it down the front of my pants, another of Gram’s strict orders. It felt funny there in my shorts, but nobody was going to get it while I slept. Then I remembered the Green Stamps, of inestimable or at least unknown worth, and stuck those down there to safety, too.
Bundling my jacket for a pillow, I made myself as close to comfortable as I could and thought back on the day while waiting for sleep to come. Oh man, was Gram ever right that the dog bus gets all kinds. The soldiers going to meet their fate in Korea. The nun and the sheepherder, both of whom I had miraculously escaped. That hibernating Indian. Heavenly Letty. The cantankerous little sheriff and his gallant prisoner. And that didn’t even count the digestive woman back at the start of the trip. They all filled in the dizzying span of my thoughts like a private version of Believe It or Not! And wherever life took them from here on, most of them had left a bit of their existence in my memory book. A condensed chapter of themselves, maybe, to put it in Pleasantville terms. I had much to digest, in more ways than one, as I lay back in the seat.