Nervously I pasted on a grin at their name-calling contest. Whatever their parents had been thinking in saddling them with those wacky christenings, these brats would be a different kind of material for the autograph book, for sure. And I couldn’t help but wonder what Kurt the leading loudmouth was going to come up with when he committed ink to paper.
Meanwhile he still was toying his way through the pages, and to get things going, I was about to hand him the Kwik-Klik and explain how it worked, when he clapped the book shut and held it out to show Gus and Mannie. “Gotta better idea. We’ll take it to camp and everybody there can write in it for ya. The counselors, even.” All three of them snickered at that, you can bet. “Don’t blow your wig,” Kurt said, as if I shouldn’t have a care in the world, “we’ll send it back to you in Monta-a-a-na when it’s full.”
“Hey, no! I need to keep it, I just want you guys to write in it.”
“We’ll get around to it,” he breezed by that. “Letcha know how the frog huntin’ goes.”
Getting really worried, I made a grab for the book. With a laugh, he tossed it across the aisle to Gus, who whooped and shoveled it to Mannie as if this were a game of keep-away.
In desperation, I shoved the heel of my hand into Kurt’s surprised face and kicked my way past him—he didn’t amount to much of a barrier compared to the braided Indian or the man in the bad-fitting suit—and launched myself onto the giggling pair across the aisle, calling them dickheads and sonsofbitches and whatever other swearwords came to my tongue. It was two against one, but they were underneath and I was all over them with flailing limbs. In the scuffle, I elbowed Gus hard enough to take the giggle out of him. Mannie was chanting “Uh uh uh, don’t be grabby!” when I got on top of him enough to knee him in a bad place and snatch the album back.
By now the grown-ups who supposedly were in charge of this band of thieves had floundered onto the scene and were pulling me off a howling Mannie, while the bus driver bellowed, “Everybody siddown!”
Still cussing to the best of my ability, I was grappled by one of the adults into the seat across the aisle, Kurt having retreated to the window as far as he could get from me.
“We wasn’t gonna keep it, honest,” he whined, the liar, as I furiously checked things over. The autograph book miraculously had survived without damage, but my shirt was wrecked all to hell, a pocket dangling almost off—fortunately not the one with the money pinned to it—and a number of buttons were missing, and I could feel a draft from rips under the arms and long tears down the back as if I’d been fighting clawed animals, which I pretty nearly was.
About then I spat something out. A piece of tooth. My tongue found the chipped spot. One of the sharp teeth next to my bottom front ones. Sharper now. Baring my choppers at him, I gave Kurt another murderous look, and he whimpered, the fearless frog hunter.
While I was trying to take inventory, catch my breath, nurse my tooth, and pull my ruined shirt together enough for decency, the bus abruptly slowed and steered off to one side. I reared up, blinking, looking around for Manitowoc. But no, we were braking to a halt on a roadside pullover, the parking lot for a picnic area, and the driver had something else in mind. Climbing out from behind the steering wheel with grim determination, his mustache bristling, he stalked down the aisle to the four of us dead-still in various states of apprehension.
“You.” He pointed a finger at me and then jerked a thumb toward the front of the bus. “Up there, where I can keep an eye on you.”
My ears burning, I followed him to the seat nearest the steps, swapping with some unlucky camper about to have Kurt inflicted on him. I guess by the same token, the kid in the window seat next to my new spot shrank away from me like he’d been put in a cage with a wild beast.
? ? ?
ACTUALLY, I discovered much, much too late, I’d been banished to the best seat on the bus. Why didn’t I think of this at, say, Havre? Up there with nothing in front but the dashboard and the doorwell, I could see everything the driver could, every particle of road and scenery, clear as if the bus-wide windshield were a magnifying glass. Except for the chipped tooth my tongue kept running over, all of a sudden I felt like a new person. For the next some minutes I sat entranced as the world opened ahead of me, no longer sliding past a side window. And so it was that I had the best possible view of my destination from the outskirts on in.