*thunk* The coach hit a slight bump on the Interstate.

“Aii-yi-yi-yi-yi”  What the hell? An honest-to-god native war cry had emitted from somewhere behind my right ear.

Then silence.

*thunk* We hit another slight bump in the pavement.

“Aii-yi-yi-yi-yi” 

I patted my hair back down on my head. Aww crap! Now what am I going to do with this guy?

He’d snuck on my full-size coach, apparently drunk. It was shortly after midnight and we had just departed Billings, MT and gotten onto I-90 for our 380-mile run to Rapid City, SD. I had the authority to toss drunks off my coach, but you’d can’t screen them all properly with the quantity of passengers to load, especially if they happen to be good ‘actors’ and don’t say anything so you can’t smell it. It being the midnight-special run didn’t help much either when most of them were bleary-eyed not from being drunk, but from being tired. Many of them were bedraggled transfers from the incoming Missoula run and had been (unfortunately!) on a bus for days.

I took the tickets personally, looking at each passenger as they boarded. With a tight timeline, no help and a lot of passengers, we operators did the best we could. Sometimes some of the the passengers would get pretty offended if I asked if they’d been drinking, but on a desolate freeway full of nothing for miles and a questionable bus depot conveniently located next to a saloon, err…bar for the bored passengers, it was a necessary question.

We were outfitted to enhance the appearance of ‘sheriff’ more-so than fancy chauffeur.

Leaving the hotel for the return run to Billings, MT.

We did what we could. There was little for security measures, no metal detectors, no scanners. Just us – the modern day stagecoach operators. I was the security, taking care of passengers for hundreds of miles and one of 3 operators who had this particular run.

The passengers relied on me to get them wherever they were going safely and to keep them safe should something go wrong en route. I didn’t want to have to bench-press a goon off my coach but I was prepared if necessary. This coach line didn’t have driver-cages so I was fair game should someone flip out on me. (That’s unfortunately happened to other operators on other bus lines.) I always kept the seats immediately behind me clear to keep anyone from being able to easily reach me while seated.

Billings, MT where I was based was the ‘wild west’, more so the real deal than the sanitized tourist versions of other towns. You could sometimes find people passed out on the sidewalk on the way to the bus depot. It didn’t take much effort to overlay a sepia-tinted vision of the late 1800s onto whatever you were looking at. Instead of 6 horses and a carriage, my horses were diesel – but little else was different with some passengers staggering over from the saloon, swinging their saddlebags over their shoulders wanting a ride to the next station in their lives. Some would branch off towards Denver, catching a connecting bus in Buffalo, WY and  some would stay on and head towards Rapid City and Sioux Falls, SD.

*thunk*

“Aii-yi-yi-yi-yi”

Damn! How did he get by me? I checked my passenger mirror. He was mostly passed out. But when the bus would hit a slight bump, he’d rouse and let fly.

*thunk*

“Aii-yi-yi-yi-yi”

“Shut the f*** up, you f****** idiot!”

I sighed and glanced into my passenger mirror again. His irate seatmate across the aisle was quite vocally letting him have it. I had visions of other passengers joining in, perhaps a drunken brawl breaking out at 70 mph on a desolate stretch of interstate. It was another 45 min or so to Hardin, MT where I could toss him out if he didn’t settle down. None of us wanted to listen to 380 miles of war-cries.

In moments like these I fleetingly missed my freight. I never had trouble with drunken french fries or cursing building materials. A fight would never break out between rival boxes of frozen turkey and I would never receive tap-on-the-shoulder complaints that that a load of power-sports parts had dropped the last full roll of toilet paper down the hole.

The interstate pavement changed slightly. With the coach up to speed and gently swaying back and forth, the war-cries (thankfully!) became increasingly more infrequent.

Gentle snores eventually filled the air, replacing the yowling and I breathed a sigh of relief. The warrior had apparently passed out for the long-term, along with his irritatedly cursing seatmate – an added bonus! Quiet would reign from them throughout the rest of the trip. We had several hours before the next stop and he would hopefully sleep off most of his disruptiveness. As long as he wasn’t a danger or bothering any of my other passengers I would let him stay on. Just another day in the wild west!