“Dang right. Must have been a star pupil in fool school, is all I can think,” her husband pitched in.
From the corner of my eye, I apprehensively studied the couple, way up there in years, clucking their tongues about me now. Both of them were short and sparely built, like a matched pair that had shrunk over time. Actually the woman reminded me of Gram, even to the skinny wire eyeglasses emerging from the cloud of gray hair bunched in no particular identifiable hairdo. She had on what looked like a churchgoing dress, the darkest blue there is with touches of white trim and what resembled a really valuable carved ivory rose brooch, which she wore with about the same authority as the Glasgow sheriff did his badge. Her husband also was dressed in Sunday best, a baggy brown suit and wide green tie with watermelon stripes. Bald and small-headed and with his skinny glasses perched on the knobby end that old noses sometimes form into, he didn’t look like much, a druggist or something. But when he leaned forward to scrutinize me further through the tops of his glasses, I glimpsed the hat line where his forehead turned from suntanned to pearly pale. Ranchers and farmers had that mark of lifelong weathering, and I didn’t know any others who did. This added another hayload to my mortification. People who ought to have recognized me for what I was, if I only had been wearing my rodeo shirt instead of slopping syrup on it, were against me. My best hope was that the tsk tsking pair of old busybodies was getting off at the next stop, and it couldn’t come too soon.
“I tell you, a soul can’t simply sit by after seeing that without saying something,” the woman was definitely saying, in that hen-yard voice. “It runs contrary to common decency.”
“You’re right as rain,” her husband vigorously bobbed endorsement to that. “Speak your piece, it’s entirely called for in this dang kind of a situation.”
With that, here she came across the aisle as if catapulted out of her seat, landing right next to me while I cringed back to the window.
“We want to let you know”—she leaned right in so close on me I could smell Sen-Sen on her breath—“we think it was downright awful of the fool up there in the driver’s seat to go off and leave you like that.”
I sat up like a gopher popping out of its hole. “Really? You do?”
“Bet your britches we do,” the man chipped in, sliding over into her seat on the aisle and sticking his head turtle-like across toward us. “It was uncalled for, that dang kind of behavior when it’s up to him to be on the lookout for his passengers, is what I say.”
I barely resisted contributing “Well, yeah, he’s a dickhead,” but condemnation of the guilty party humped over the steering wheel seemed to be going along just fine with dangs. All of a sudden, the dog bus was the top of my world again, given these unexpected backers. Fortunately, the three of us were far enough from the driver that he couldn’t make out what we were saying about him, although he was watching us plenty in the rearview mirror, looking sore that the commotion back and forth across the aisle plainly involved me one more time.
? ? ?
IN THE BURST of introductions, they made themselves known to me as Mae and Joe Schneider, and I recited by heart Donal without a d and how it dated back to Scotland and Cameron kilts and buck-naked Englishmen, which seemed to interest them to no end. They in turn lost no time filling me in on the Schneider clan, as they called it, three boys with children of their own, one son who ran what they referred to as “the ride” at the place they were going to, Wisconsin Dells, and another they had just visited who was a doctor in Yellowstone Park, treating people who fell into scalding pools or were mauled by bears. Wow, I thought, talk about being famous, he must be the talk of the park every time he patched up some dumb tourist like that. A third son, it turned out, ran the family farm in Illinois—somewhere called Downstate, which from my fuzzy geography I guessed had nothing to do with Chicago—while, as Mrs. Schneider said, she and Joe “trotted around having the time of our lives.”
Trotting around by dog bus for the fun of it was a new notion to me, and as I listened to one and then the other peppily telling of their travels, I longed for the cushion of family that was theirs, in contrast to Gram and me on our own with only the distant relatives—literally—that I was being packed off to like a fruitcake at Christmas.
Something of this must have shown through in me, because Mr. Schneider interrupted himself to ask, wrinkled with concern, “Now, where is it you’re going, Donal?”
“Manitowoc.”
The Schneiders glanced at each other as if their hearing had failed.
I repeated the tricky word. “My grandmother says it means ‘Where ghosts live’ in Indian.” That didn’t seem to help.
“Don’t know it at all. You, Mae?”