Free Last Bus to Wisdom by Ivan Doig Page B

vowed calmly, and jailbreaker notwithstanding, I found myself pulling for that to be true.
    The sheriff sighed in exasperation. “You’re being a fool for love, worst kind. Honest to God, Harv, if brains was talcum powder, you couldn’t work up a sneeze.”
    Aware that my fascination with all this showed no sign of letting up, the sheriff tipped his hat back a fraction with his finger as if to have a clearer look at me. I had already noticed in life that shrimpy guys didn’t like the idea of being shrimpy guys, and so they acted big. The sheriff still wasn’t much bigger than I was when he fluffed himself up to ask suspiciously, “What about you, punkin, what’s a little shaver like you doing on here by yourself? Where’s your folks?”
    â€œMe? I’m, uhm, I’m going to visit our relatives,” which I hoped was just enough truth to close the topic.
    His eye level the same as mine, this tough kernel of a man simply stared across the aisle at me. “Traveling on the cushions, huh? Pretty good for a kid your age. Where you from?”
    â€œGros Ventre,” I said distinctly, as people from over east, which was most of the rest of Montana, sometimes didn’t know it was pronounced
Grove On
.
    â€œThat’s some ways from here. I didn’t hear you say how come your folks turn you loose to—” The bus suddenly humming in a different gear, it dropped down in a dip and showed no sign of coming out, the road following the Missouri River now. The broad river flowing in long lazy curves with thickets of diamond willows and cottonwood trees lining the banks impressed me, but the sight seemed to turn the sheriff’s stomach. Beside him, though, his handcuffed seat partner smiled like a crack in stone.
    â€œThere ’tis, Carl. What’s left of the river, hmm?”
    â€œShut up, Harv, I don’t need to hear about it.” Sounding fit to be tied, the sheriff shot a look over to where I still was taking in everything wide-eyed, and growled, “We’re just past Fort Peck Dam, the outlaw is talking about.” His mouth twisted. “Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn’t think the Missouri River worked good enough by itself, so he stuck in a king hell bastard of a dam,” a new piece of cussing for me to tuck away.
    â€œBiggest dirt dam in Creation.” The sheriff was becoming really worked up now. “Biggest gyp of the American taxpayer there ever was, if you ask me.” He scrunched up worse yet, squinting at the river as if the grievance still rubbing him raw was the water’s fault. “Every knothead looking for a nickel came and signed on for a job, and next thing I knew, I’m the law enforcement having to deal with a dozen Fort Peck shantytowns with bars and whorehouses that didn’t shut down day or night.”
    â€œI know.” I nodded sagely. “I’m from there.”
    That was a mistake. His apple-doll face turning sour, the sheriff spoke as if he had caught me red-handed. “You wouldn’t be pulling my leg, would you?”
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    S O MUCH FOR the value of the unvarnished truth.
    For it was absolute fact that I was born in one of those damsite shantytowns the sheriff despised. By then, 1939, the Fort Peck Dam work was winding down but there still was employment for skilled heavy equipment operators like my father, Bud Cameron, catskinner. Young and full of beans, he was one of those ambitious farmboys raring to switch from horses to horsepower, and he must have been something to see sitting up tall on the back of a bumblebee-yellow Caterpillar bulldozer, manipulating the scraper blade down to the last chosen inch of earth, on some raw slope of the immense dam.
    I may as well tell the rest of the Cameron family story, what there is of it. My mother, teenage girl with soft eyes and fashionably bobbed dark hair according to the Brownie box camera photos