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IF SHE HADN’T CRIED, I would have given in to tears. As it was, I sat there trying to hunch up and take it, one more time. Two days and a night ahead on the dog bus, doom of some kind waiting at the Great Falls depot. Convinced that everything that could go wrong was going wrong, I sent a despairing look up the aisle of the bus. All the situation needed now was something like that bunch of hyena campers to torment me. But no, my fellow passengers mainly were men dressed up for business, a Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter up in front of someone like a last mocking farewell reminder of Aunt Kate, and a few couples where the women were as broad-beamed as seemed to be ordinary in Wisconsin. Nothing to worry, I thought bitterly of Herman’s wording.
The bus was at the outskirts of Manitowoc, the radius of my summer failure, when I heard the oof of someone dropping down next to me. Oh, swell. Exactly what I did not need, a gabby seat changer. With so much else on my mind, I’d forgotten to place my jacket in that spot and now it was too late. Two full hours ahead to Milwaukee yet, and I was in for an overfriendly visit from some stranger with nothing better to do than talk my ears off. Goddamn-it-all-to-hell-anyway, couldn’t life give me any kind of a break, on this day when I was being kicked down the road like an unwanted pup? I didn’t even want to turn my head to acknowledge the intruder, but sooner or later I had to, so it might as well be now.
“Hallo.”
Out from behind the newspaper, Herman the German was giving me the biggest horsetooth smile.
I rammed upright in my seat. “What are you doing on here?”
“Keeping you company, hah?” he said, as if I had issued an invitation. “Long ride ahead, we watch out for each other.”
“Y-you’re going to Montana with me?”
His shoulders went way up, the most expressive French salute yet. “Maybe not to Big Falls. We must discuss.”
So flustered was I trying to catch up with things in no particular order, I craned my neck back toward Manitowoc as if Aunt Kate were on our trail. “Does she know you’re here?”
“Puh.” That translated different ways, as “Of course not” and “It doesn’t matter,” take my choice. “Left her a note saying I am gone back to Germany, we are you-know-what.” Kaput? I goggled at him. Just like that, he could walk out of a marriage and hop on a bus in some other direction from where he said he was going? Man oh man, in comparison I was a complete amateur at making stuff up.
“Today was last straw on camel’s back,” he said. I listened open-mouthed as Herman continued in a more satisfied tone. “The Kate will run around like the chicken with its head chopped off awhile, but nothing she can do. I am gone like the wind.” He looked at me with the greatest seriousness. “Donny, this is the time if I am ever to see the West and how it was the Promised Land for people. I must do so now, or I am going to be too soon old.” To try to lighten that heavy thought, he winked at me with his bad eye. “So, we are on the loose, ja?”
“I guess you are. But Hippo Butt—I mean the Kate—got it all set up that my grandmother has to stick me in a foster home ahead of the orphanage as soon as I get to Great Falls and—”
“No, she does not. Silly eye-dea. I kiboshed.”
He had to repeat that for it to make any sense to me. As best I could follow, what it came down to was that he had guessed what she was up to when he saw her writing a letter. “Unnotcheral behavior,” he sternly called it. The rest was pretty much what you would think, him sneaking around from the greenhouse after she put the letter to Gram out in the mailbox, swiping it and reading it and, he illustrated triumphantly to me by fluttering his hands as if sprinkling confetti, tearing the thing up. “Evidence gone to pieces, nobody the wiser, hah?”
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IT SANK IN on me. No one in the entire world knew that the two of us were free as the breeze. Herman wasn’t merely flapping his lips; we really were footloose, crazily like the comic strip characters in Just Trampin’ who were always going on the lam, hopping on freight trains or bumming rides from tough truck drivers to stay a jump ahead of the sheriff. Or at least bus-loose—the fleet of Greyhounds ran anywhere we wanted to go. It was a dizzying prospect. Good-bye, battle-ax wife, for him, and no Hello, orphanage, for me—it was as simple as sitting tight in a bus seat to somewhere known only to us, the Greyhound itself on the lam from all we were leaving behind.
I tell you, scratch a temptation like that between the ears and it begins to lick your hand in a hurry. “You mean, just keep going?” As excited as I’d ever been, the question squealed out of me. “Like for all summer?”
“Betcha boots, podner. Who is to know?”