I saw Flower Cannon again at the end of April. The weather was warm. By noon of this particular day I was down to jeans and a T-shirt, carrying my sports coat over my shoulder. The people along the avenue seemed relaxed and alive. A combo of five students played jazz in a tiny garden park. There were children on the grass. Balloons were for sale. A snapshot would have caught mouths open in laughter and dogs floating in mid-air.
The two men who ran a shoeshine stand at the local bus station had moved their bench out onto the sidewalk. I climbed up onto one of the chairs there and presented my old walking boots. In airports and hotels the professionals generally refused to have a go at these clodhoppers, because I’d worked the leather full of waterproofing compound. But these two, a white-headed old black man and his partner, who might have been his son or even his grandson, always cordially wiped them down and slapped some drops of oil on them.
“I guess they won’t take a polish,” I said, as I’d said to them many times over the last four years.
“That’s all right,” the old man said. “We can clean them up just as good as anything with some saddle soap and mink oil today.”
The younger man took care of me while I sat in the elevated chair with my feet on the metal rests, watching the folks go by.
The old man, who’d been gone inside the station a while on some errand or other, returned and began sweeping down the area with a short broom, bent over in his navy pants and navy sweater. He seemed lost in a world of his own until he addressed his partner. “You tell him?”
“No.”
“I’ll go ahead and tell him then.”
The other said nothing.
“That stuff you buy,” he said to me, “it’s just as good if you get a big jar of Vaseline. That’s only what they use anyway. Vaseline petroleum jelly.”
“Oh,” I said, “you mean the waterproofing stuff.”
“Yes. It’s just Vaseline petroleum jelly. That’s all you need to get. Or anything like that.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“You might as well just get you a big jar,” the old man said, “the large economy size. Be done with it.”
“Be done with it,” the young man said.
“What I want to know,” the first said, “is how can he go every weekend over to the river, lose thirteen, fourteen hundred dollars, come on back like it was nothing.”
“Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know for sure,” the other said.
I looked from one to the other and gathered they weren’t talking about me.
“Go for a weekend, lose three thousand dollars like it wasn’t nothing at all.”
“He getting it somewhere.”
“Three thousand, four thousand,” the old man said. “He goes every weekend.”
“He getting it from the A-rab.”
“He don’t never win. He go to the river, he lose a lot of money.”
“Uh huh. Uh huh. Uh huh. I know,” the younger said with considerable assurance.
“There’s the river bus right now.”
“Is it Eddie?”
“Naw. Eddie don’t drive that river bus no more. Eddie’s got a sister…”
“He got a sister? Eddie?” The younger man was finished with my boots now. He tapped each twice with the heel of his brush and pulled my cuffs down.
“Yeah. He got a sister…Now: you get in some water,” the old man said to me. “Go ahead, stand up to your cuffs, your feet gonna be as dry as the desert. That’s that woman driver driving today,” he said to his partner. “See her?”
“Yeah. I see her.”
“She’s down in Chicago,” he said.
“She is?”
I gave him ten dollars.
“That’s why he driving down in Illinois now,” he said.
“Go ahead and keep the change,” I told him.
“Thank you very much,” he said to me. “Her,” he told the other. “Her, I’m saying. Eddie’s sister.”
I left them to feel their way through a forest of pronouns and approached the woman driver of the bus to Riverside. She sat hunched over her big flat steering wheel examining a notebook as I looked up at her through the open door.
I had a twenty in my fingers. “Can I just pay you and get on and ride?” I asked.
“That’s exactly how it works,” she said.
I got on board.
“I don’t need a ticket?”
“I got tickets. And they got tickets inside.” She made change. “And you can order tickets through the mail. The whole world wants to sell you a ticket on my bus.”
The bus was almost full of passengers, many of them probably going to the casino in Riverside. I sat next to a tiny old gentleman wearing sunglasses like the black bulging eyes of an insect. Across the aisle sat a small boulder of a man who revealed to me, as soon as the bus had swung onto the interstate highway out of town, that he played blackjack in Riverside several times a month; that his name was Vince; that until hard work had worn out his joints he’d made his living principally as a Sheetrocker, but now he survived on government disability checks supplemented by his natural good luck. Once he had my attention Vince kept talking, looking deeply into my face. Meanwhile where the tiny old man looked, from behind his black orbs, nobody knew. I understood that poker players often wore sunglasses to keep their emotions secret. I sensed he was being stoic about something enormous.
Getting aboard this bus had been a crazy impulse, but I’d actually been meaning to go to Riverside for some time now. A musician by the name of Smokey Henderson, a trumpeter who led a jazz trio and whom I’d met through Ted Mackey, had told me that as a regular thing his group played in a club attached to the Indian casino there. I’d enjoyed their music at Ted’s house once or twice, and it just seemed like the right kind of day to go looking for more of it.
Riverside lay forty-five miles out along the two-lane blacktop known around these parts as the Old Highway. I’d been told it was a quiet town, part of the reservation along the Sioux River.
I was expected later that afternoon at a small gathering of the History Department, a monthly coffee klatsch, but by getting on this bus I’d acknowledged that it didn’t matter anymore if I spent time among my colleagues or ended up dozens of miles away listening to jazz.
Our bus left the interstate and turned onto the Old Highway. My friend Vince across the aisle, who appeared to be in his early fifties, was telling me about a friend who’d been on his mind a lot recently. “He died two years ago. Three years ago, I think. He destroyed, just destroyed, his liver. He swelled up bigger than a fucking toad. That’s the third guy I’ve seen do that. He swelled up this big around,” and so on. I didn’t mind very much. Vince had a colorful past, had been married often, worked at hazardous jobs, fought in the Vietnam war, spent 210 days in jail the previous year for assaulting an alcoholism counselor right in the counselor’s office, and, like many people you sit beside on the bus, as I’d found out since I’d quit driving a car, he apparently ran through this history repeatedly in the privacy of his thoughts and felt proud to share it with any polite listener. Overhead, the sky continued clear. The fields had been plowed in straight rows, but nothing had sprouted yet, and from here to every horizon we saw only the fastidious organization of lifeless dirt. Come late August the horizon would no longer be visible. The Old Highway would drill like a tunnel through tall corn. The sound of insects in the fields would be deafening, and above it all would carry the call, the whir-and-twitter, of redwing blackbirds. Right now we drifted through a soft ocher haze of dust.