Last Bus to Wisdom by Ivan Doig Page A

sentence before she said it. “So you’re him.”
    Him? What him? I looked at her in confusion.
    â€œDon’t take me wrong,” she said quickly. “All I meant, Dorie told me what was up when she had to quit the truck stop. To take on raising you, at that cow outfit.”
    Blank with surprise, I stared back at the waitress who suddenly was the expert on me.
    Letty nibbled her lip, disturbing the lipstick a bit, then uttered the rest. “When she left to be with you, she had me put flowers on the crosses every month.”
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    W HITE AS BONES , the roadside trio of short metal crosses stood in memoriam on the long slope up from the Two Medicine River. One for my father, one for my mother, and although I could not see why he deserved the same, one for the drunk driver whose pickup drifted across the centerline and hit theirs head-on. Only once had I seen the crosses, on a school trip to the Blackfoot museum in Browning not long after the funeral, and I had to swallow sobs the rest of the trip. I almost wished the American Legion post would quit marking highway deaths like that—for some of us, too much of a reminder—but my father had been a favorite at Legion halls, someone who came out of the D-Day landing badly wounded but untouched in his personality, ready with a laugh and a story anytime he and my mother blew in for a drink and a nice supper and some dancing. The flowers, which I remembered were yellow, must have been Gram’s own ongoing remembrance, by courtesy—a great deal more than that—of Letty Minetti.
    A jolt went through me like touching the hot wire of something electric. Connected by accident, she and I were no longer simply strangers on a bus. This woman with the generous mouth knew all about me, or at least enough, and I was catching up with her circumstances. Wherever she was headed with her name on her uniform, it was not to work the counter at the Browning truck stop, a hundred miles in the other direction. “You do that anymore?” I rushed out the words, then hedged. “The flowers, I mean?”
    Letty shook her head and lit the interrupted cigarette. “Couldn’t, sorry. Been in the Falls a year or so,” she expelled along with a stream of smoke, “busting my tail in the dining room at the Buster. You know it?”
    Surprisingly, I did. The Sodbuster Hotel was a fancy place where the Williamsons stayed during the Great Falls rodeo, so Wendell could oversee—or according to Gram, mess with—the handling of the Double W’s string of bucking horses. My new confidante let out her breath, nothing to do with smoking this time. “It didn’t work out. I’ll tell you something. The more dressed up people are, the harder they are to wait on,” laughing as she said it, but not the amused kind. “I missed the Browning gang. The rez boys tip good when they have a few drinks in them, you’d be surprised. And truckers leave their change on the counter. It adds up.”
    What wasn’t adding up was her presence on this bus with the rest of us nomads, so I outright asked. “What are you doing on here, in this direction?”
    She flicked me a look, but answered readily enough. “Taking a job in Havre. New town, fresh start. That’s the way it goes.”
    That didn’t sound good. People were always saying about Havre, off by itself and with not much going for it but the railroad that ran through,
You can have ’er
.
    Something of that reputation must have been on Letty’s mind, too. “Hey, you know any French?”
    â€œâ€˜Aw river,’ maybe.”
    â€œNah, more than that. See, the place where I’ll be working is called, capital
T
, The Le Havre Supper Club.” She nibbled her lip. “Something doesn’t seem quite right about that, don’t you think? Anyway, that’s why I’m wearing my work shirt,”