Last Bus to Wisdom by Ivan Doig Page B

pinning him there below the racing silver greyhound. “Suit from the warden and all. How’d you like the accommodations in the pen?”
    The penitentiary! Really? I goggled at the ex-convict, or maybe not-so-ex. Trying to display some shred of dignity, he maintained in a hurt voice, “Paid my debt to society. I’m a free man.”
    â€œSwell,” the driver retorted, “so you go right back to swiping things like a kid’s suitcase.”
    â€œJust a misunderstanding, is all,” the captured culprit whined. “I thought the youngster was getting off here, and I was going to help him with his luggage.”
    â€œSure you were.” The driver turned his head toward me as the Gardenia group clucked in the background. “What do you say, champ, you want to press charges? Attempted robbery?”
    How I wished for that half-pint sheriff in the big hat right then. This Lake Itasca place, not much more than a wide spot in the road, didn’t look like it had any such. I could tell that the driver was antsy about the delay it would take to deal with the criminal, and come right down to it, I did not want my trip, complicated enough as it was, to be hung up that way, either.
    â€œNaw, let him go,” I said, sick of it all. When the driver turned the thieving so-and-so loose—my swearing vocabulary wasn’t up to the description he deserved—he swaggered off in the direction of the cafe, adjusting his suit, careful not to look back. The garden club ladies fussed over me, but I only looked at the bus driver with a long sigh. “Can I get something out of my suitcase again?”

6.
    â€œP AINT IT RED ” was my father’s backhand way of saying “Forget it,” and I did my best to follow that advice after the close call with the jailbird. But it was the sort of thing you can’t blot out in your mind by saying so. Even after I hurriedly fixed the money matter by retrieving the stash from the shirt in the suitcase and pinning it under the pocket of the one I was wearing, there was no covering over the fact that I had nearly lost just about everything I owned—the precious autograph book excepted, thank goodness—by my bragging.
That’ll teach you, Red Chief,
I mentally kicked myself, and for the rest of that morning on the ride down to Minneapolis I kept to my seat and watched the other passengers out of the corner of my eye lest I be invaded by some other wrongdoer.
    Luckily that did not happen, the bus inhabitants minding their manners and leaving me alone—maybe I was painted red to them—and around noon my attention was taken up by the way the Greyhound little by little was navigating streets where the buildings grew taller and taller. We were now in the big half of the Twin Cities, according to the driver’s good-natured announcement, and whatever the other place was like, everything about Minneapolis was more than sizable as I perched on the edge of my seat peering out at it all. The first metropolis—it puffed itself up to that by stealing half the word, didn’t it—of my life.
    Wide as my eyes were at the sights and scenes, it was hard to take it all in. Even the department store windows showing off the latest fashions seemed to dwarf those in, say, Great Falls. Likewise, the sidewalks were filled with throngs that would not have fit on the streets back in Montana. People, people everywhere, as traffic increasingly swarmed around us, the tops of cars turtling along below the bus windows barely faster than the walking multitudes.
    As the Greyhound crept from stoplight to stoplight, I couldn’t help gawking at so many passersby in suits and snappy hats and good dresses on an ordinary day, each face another world of mystery to me. Where were they going, what drew them out dressed to the gills like promenaders in an Easter parade? Where did they live, in the concrete buildings that seemed to go halfway to the sky