Mercifully the highway soon curved and we passed Freezout Lake with its islands of snowy pelicans, within sight of the one-room Tetonia school where I went part of one year, marked mainly by the Christmas play in which I was the Third Wise Man, costumed in my mother’s pinned-up bathrobe. A little farther on, where the bus route turned its back on the Rockies to cross the Greenfield Canal of the huge irrigation project, I was transported once more to a summer of jigging for trout at canal headgates.
What a haze of thoughts came over me like that as memory went back and forth, dipping and accelerating like a speedometer keeping up with a hilly road. Passing by familiar sights with everything known ahead, maybe too much of a youngster to put the right words to the sensation but old enough to feel it in every part, I can only say I was meeting myself coming and going, my shifting life until then intersecting with the onrushing days ahead.
That near-stranger who was me, with his heart in his throat, I look back on with wonder now that I am as gray-haired as my talky companion on the Chevy bus was. The boy I see is a stocky grade-schooler, freckled as a spotted hyena, big for his age but with a lot of room to grow in other ways. Knowing him to be singled out by fate to live a tale he will never forget, I wish that things could have been different enough then to let him set off as if on a grand adventure, turned loose in the world at an age when most kids couldn’t unknot themselves from the apron strings of home. He has never been out of Montana, barely even out of the Two Medicine country, and now the nation stretches ahead of him, as unknown and open to the imagination as Pleasantville. And he knows from Condensed Books that unexpected things, good about as often as bad, happen to people all the time, which ought to be at least interesting, right? On top of it all, if worse comes to worst, tucked in those new blue jeans is a round-trip ticket home.
But that was the catch. Home to what, from what?
? ? ?
I MUST HAVE BEEN better than I thought at hiding my double-edged fear, because the chatterbox at my side seemed not to notice anything troubling me until I shifted restlessly in my seat because the object in my pants pocket had slipped down to where I was half sitting on it and was jabbing me something fierce. “Aren’t you comfortable? Heavens to Betsy, why didn’t you say so? Here, I’ll make room.” With a grunt she wallowed away from me a couple of inches.
“Huh-uh, it’s not that,” I had to confess as she watched my contortions with concern, because I still needed to squirm around and reach deep into my pants to do something about the matter. Knowing I dare not show it to her, I palmed the thing and managed to slip it into my jacket pocket sight unseen while I alibied, “My, ah, good luck charm sort of got caught crosswise. A rabbit’s foot on a key chain,” I thought up, hoping that would ward her off.
“Oh, those,” she made a face. “They sell the awful things so many places these days I’m surprised the bunnies have any tootsies left.” With that, to my relief, she went back to dishing out topic after topic in her chirpy voice.
“Donal,” she eventually got around to pondering my name as if it were one of the mysteries of the ages. “Without the d on the end? That’s a new one on me.”
“It’s Scotch, is why,” I came to life and informed her quick as a flash. “My daddy said—says—the Camerons, see, that’s us, were wearing kilts when the English still were running around buck-naked.”
From the way her eyebrows went up, that seemed to impress her. Emboldened, I confided: “You know what else, though? I have an Indian name, too.”
Her eyebrows stayed lofted as, for once, I leaned in her direction, and half whispered, as if it were just our secret: “Red Chief.”
She tittered. “Now you’re spoofing.”
People can be one surprise after another. Here she hadn’t let out a peep of doubt about anything I’d reeled off so far, but now when I told her something absolutely truthful, she clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth the funny way that means That’s a good one.
“No, huh-uh, honest!” I protested. “It’s because of my hair, see?” My floppy pompadour, almost always in need of a haircut, was about as red as anything from the Crayola box. And if that didn’t earn me a tribal alias, I didn’t know what did. Maybe, as Gram would tell me when I got carried away with something, this was redheaded thinking. It seemed only logical to me, though. If Donal was tagged on me when I came into the world bald as a baby can be, didn’t it make sense to have a spare that described how I turned out? Indians did it all the time, I was convinced. In the case of our family, it would only have complicated things for my listener to explain to her that my alternate name had come from my father’s habit of ruffling my hair, from the time I was little, and saying, “You’ve got quite a head on you, Red Chief.”