MILWAUKEE. The last hazardous stop I had to get through appeared to me endlessly gray and runny, drizzle streaking the bus window, as though the church steeples every block or two poked leaks in the clouds. Either a very religious place or one in serious need of saving from its sins, this big city looked old and set in its ways, streets of stores alike from neighborhood to neighborhood even when the spelling on the windows was different kinds of foreign.
Humped up trying to see out to the blurred brick buildings set tight against one another, I was as bleary as the weather. Ever since Wisconsin Dells, I kept going over my all too adventurous day, the close calls with the badly dressed master criminal and the wild ride to catch up with the bus in St. Paul—luck on my side but only barely until the Schneiders came along to stick up for me when I most needed it—my imagination darting back and forth to what could have happened instead of what did. Life is a zigzag journey, Letty’s inscription predicted, and how astute that was turning out to be.
Yet, already those experiences, bad and good, seemed farther past than they were. In some way that I could not quite wrap my mind around, distance messed up time, the miles accumulating since I climbed on the dog bus in Great Falls putting me unfathomably farther away from my life up till then than simply the count of hours could show. I had to think for a bit to realize that by now it was Sunday, and that Gram had gone into the hospital for her do-or-die operation. That thought swelled my imagination almost to bursting, my head crowded with doctors and nurses and nuns clustered around one familiar frail form, talking their hospital talk in tones as hushed as any in the gloomy Milwaukee churches the Greyhound was nosing past.
Determined as I was not to cry, my eyes were as blurry as the watery bus window by the time the driver called out the announcement about the depot’s conveniences and so forth.
Jumpy at having to change buses at what was bound to be another overwhelmingly busy terminal, I scrambled out directly behind the driver and seized my suitcase as soon as he heaved it out of the baggage compartment. I headed straight down the long bank of swinging doors with arrivals and departures posted beside them, not veering an inch toward the waiting room newsstand and its lure of Mounds bars.
Way down at the end of the doorways, past ST. LOUIS and KANSAS CITY and even BEMIDJI, I finally spotted a sign like a string of letters in alphabet soup.
SHEBOYGAN MANITOWOC WAUSAU EAU CLAIRE
The bus was sitting there empty, no driver in sight. I checked the posted departure time and saw that I had plenty of leeway to go use the nearby convenience, so as a precaution in I went, hugging my suitcase to me. It was there, washing my hands afterward, that the red lettering on the machine on the wall registered on me.
MAXIMUM PROTECTION
That drew my interest. Keeping a death grip on my suitcase, I went over to see what was being dispensed that qualified as so surefire against jeopardy of whatever kind. In smaller print but still in blazing red letters above the coin slot was the explanation, more or less.
TUFFY PROPHYLACTICS
THE STRONGEST CONDOM COMING AND GOING
Well, that indicated to me, in an inexact schoolyard way, the vicinity of what these were for. But only that? The further wording touting how stout and reliable a Tuffy was included the word sheath. That in turn brought to mind one of the poems Miss Ciardi had made us memorize by the dozens in the sixth grade. Noble Cyrano sheathed his knife / And spared the foul assassin’s life. I had something sharp to sheath, too, did I ever.
After all, people carried good luck charms for a reason—because they brought luck—which I had not been able to do with the practically knife-edged arrowhead stashed in the suitcase. If I could just somehow have it in my pocket without getting jabbed like crazy every time I sat down, maybe it would work more like a lucky piece was supposed to. In short, protection was what I needed, and here it was, promised for twenty-five cents.
Risking one of my few remaining coins, I turned the knob on the machine. Into the trough at the bottom dropped a round packet disappointingly small.