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IN MY EXPERIENCE, there is no other thrill quite like disappearing, the way Herman and I were about to, aboard the dog bus. Who would not be excited at the prospect of walking away—no, better, riding away at high speed almost as if the racing hound beneath our side window was carrying us on its back in some storybook—from what we faced in that household where you couldn’t even eat toast in peace? This is hindsight, always 20/20, but given my nearly dozen years of living more or less like an underage vagabond in construction camps and cookhouse, I had been through enough to grasp that with every mile flying past we would be borne away from Palookaville existences—Manitowoc ruled by the Kate in his case, foster home and orphanage limbo in mine—to life of our own making in the wide-open map of the West. An idea as freeing as a million-dollar dream and a whole hell of a lot more appealing than waiting on your knees for your soul to be snatched to heaven, right? So I still have to hand it to Herman, vanishing as we did was an inspiration right up there with the Manitou walkers going about their business in ghostly invisibility.
Not that erasing ourselves from where we were supposed to be was as easy as a snap of the fingers and the two of us gone in a cloud of tailpipe exhaust. Right away there in the Milwaukee bus terminal, Herman had me keep out of sight while he did the buying of the tickets to the map dot called Crow Agency—as he said, so any busybody would not remember us traveling together. “No tracks behind do we leave,” he told me as if we were as stealthy as the Apaches themselves.
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WHICH HELD TRUE only if Apaches greeted anyone sitting across from them on a Greyhound bus with “Hallo, you are going where?”
Something I had not counted on was that my newly conceived comrade in travel would be an adventure himself on the long trip west. This came through to me almost the minute our fannies hit the bus seats, when Herman struck up a conversation with whoever happened to be seated opposite us, or for that matter, in front or behind. Evidently he had stored up bushels of talk those hours in the greenhouse all by his lonesome, and did he ever let the surplus out now, much of it given to bragging up the two of us as adventurers of the highway.
“My nephew, some traveler he is,” time after time he presented me, grinning back skittishly through my freckles, to whatever listener happened to be captive at the moment. “Seeing the land, we are.”
Now, I had palavered plenty with total strangers on my trip to Manitowoc, for sure, but I was not trying to cover my tracks at the time. So while I was constantly jumpy about us somehow being tracked down—fairly or not, in my imagination the busybody who might do so had the plentiful face of Aunt Kate—Herman without a qualm gabbed away along a tricky line of conversation to maintain, keeping things approximate enough to be believed yet skipping the troublesome truth that we amounted to voluntary fugitives.
Runaways, when you came right down to it, as the mean little Glasgow sheriff had wrongly accused me before I was even out of Montana on my first cross-country journey. It does make a person think: Had the runty lawman with his sour squint spied something in me that I didn’t recognize in myself? Being seen through is never welcome, and thank heaven or Manitou or whatever weird power seemed to guide Herman, because despite my nerve flutters, whenever someone expressed curiosity about where we were going, he always derailed the question with a goofy grin and the observation “Somewheres south of the moon and north of Hell, if we are lucky.”
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AND SO, state by state, as the bus rolled up the miles then and beyond, if we were remembered at all by the young honeymooners giggling their way to Wisconsin Dells or the retired Mayo Clinic doctor and his pleasant wife who reminded me of the kindly Schneiders or the Dakotan couple off the hog farm to shop in town, any of the Greyhound riders across the aisle would have recalled the pair of us only as a pared-down family of tourists out to see things.