The White Widow: A Novel Page 3

  He stood and addressed his passengers for the last time on this run on this day:

  “This is Corpus Christi. Those of you going on to the Valley will have twenty-five minutes to eat and do as you like. I will be leaving you here. I certainly do hope all of you have had a nice ride with me this afternoon. By all means come back. We are always going your way, here at Great Western Trailways, to the next town or across America. Please watch your step as you disembark.” Jack always enjoyed saying “disembark.”

  But why did he say all of the rest of that? There was nothing in the company guidelines about saying anything other than warning them to watch their step and announcing the name of the town and the length of the rest stop. Always going your way. To the next town or across America. They were all Great Western company mottos, used even in some of their radio jingles. Some of the drivers complained about the money those radio ads cost, saying the money should go to employee salaries. Jack didn’t feel that way. They made him feel proud. He had heard a new one just the other day that was particularly catchy, he thought. It went:

  It’s cheaper by far than driving your car,

  To ride a Great Western Trailways bus.

  It’s cheaper by far than driving your car, dear lady Ava. We’re always going your way, Always. To the next town or across America. Always, dear lady Ava.

  Greyhound had had a whole song written about it for a World War II movie starring Van Johnson. “Love on a Greyhound Bus” had made it to Number Two on the Hit Parade on the radio for several weeks. Jack figured that nobody would ever write a song like that about Trailways. He loved the words in the Greyhound song.

  Bought a ticket the other night,

  The Union Station was lit up bright,

  The crowd was shovin’ with all its might,

  But we all settled down for a trip on a Greyhound Bus.

  There were words about heading west, stopping for hot dogs and soda pop, cuddling up close to you, asking the driver “How long till we make another stop?,” moving on through Columbus, Ohio, Indianapolis, Indiana, and being delayed by a bridge out, a Texas storm and a driver who “mistook Illinois for Iowa.” It ended with:

  But we’d be happy in any state,

  ’Cause we both fell in love on a trip on a Greyhound Bus,

  That’s us.

  In love on a Greyhound Bus.

  Was that what he, Jack T. Oliver, was now doing? Was he actually falling in love on #4101, his own Great Western Trailways bus? He was in love with Loretta, wasn’t he? How could he fall in love with somebody else?

  He was in love with Loretta, wasn’t he?

  One by one the passengers came to the step and let themselves down to the ground. Jack stood at the bottom and took each person by the elbow and assisted him or her. Great Western Trailways, the route of the Silversides Air-Conditioned Thruliners, was not keen on getting sued by people who fell or tripped getting off a bus. A Wichita Falls–Dallas driver was fired two years ago after such an incident. He turned to talk to a porter instead of paying attention to passengers disembarking at the Wichita Falls depot. An elderly man stumbled, fell facedown on the pavement and suffered a concussion.

  Jack could feel her coming. The White Widow was approaching.

  He tried to glance up to see her but she was still out of sight, still back down the aisle, waiting her turn.

  Now, there she was. Those blue eyes were right on him. Then they looked down to see where she was going, to watch her step.

  He reached for her elbow. Velvet smooth. Oh, still so ever velvet smooth. And there was a smell. How could he have missed it before? It was perfume. No, a soap. Good, expensive soap. She must have bathed right before catching the bus in Victoria? The idea of her coming directly from a bathtub to #4101, his bus, sent warmth to his face.

  “Watch that step now,” he said to her. Of course, that was what she was already doing.

  She smiled. But not enough to even show her teeth.

  He removed his fingers from the velvet. And she walked away toward the terminal door.

  “My turn?”

  A woman in her sixties, a Dollar, was on her way down the step to the ground.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, turning back to take her elbow.

  By the time she was down and he could look back at the terminal door, the White Widow was out of sight.

  She had left him without saying even a word of good-bye or regret. Would he ever see her again?

  He wished there was a way to capture a smell in his nose and hold it for a while. That soap smell was there now but he knew it would soon be gone. He could imagine the bathtub and her in it, though. Yes, yes. He knew he could do that. He knew he could hold that for the rest of his life.

  The other drivers gave him a hard time for being late.

  “We were about to call the highway patrol, the Coast Guard, the Kiwanis and the Camp Fire Girls,” said Jumping Jimmy Dale Hayes, the driver who was waiting to take the schedule on to Brownsville. His nickname came from the fact that he couldn’t sit still for long, except when he was driving a bus. “Where, oh where, had our little Jack gone?”

  “Calling all cars, calling all cars,” said Okie Owens, whose first bus job had been with Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma Coaches out of Pawhuska, Oklahoma. He spoke through his hands cupped in front of his mouth. He was driving the 6:30 connection straight west out of Corpus to Alice, Freer and Laredo. “Be on a lookout for On Time Oliver and his big ACF. Calling all cars, calling all cars.”

  There were three other drivers, two from the extra board, in the drivers’ room behind the ticket counter. Working off the extra board was how and where everybody began at Great Western. Extra-board drivers spent their days and nights always on standby at depots or by their phones at home, waiting to pull a double or a charter, to drive a scheduled run for a sick or vacationing regular. They got rich over the holidays and in summer and other heavy-traffic periods, but since they were paid only minimum “protection” wages when not actually driving, they could come close to starving the rest of the year, particularly in the travel-business dog days of January, February and March.

  Everybody got into the act kidding Jack.

  “Six minutes. Six minutes late. A record.”

  “They ought to never give him that gold badge now.”

  “What kind of example does that set for the young drivers coming along?”

  “If On Time Oliver is late, then what’s next?”

  “The Japs will win next time.”

  Jack laughed with them and took it. But he said nothing about what had happened, offered no explanation at all for the lost six minutes. He didn’t even make up a good lie about a crazy passenger in Wharton or an overturned tractor trailer outside Louise.

  He signed all of the reports and the logs, said good-bye to everyone, took his small black leather suitcase and headed out for home. Loretta would have dinner for him. It was Friday, which usually meant meat loaf, one of his most favorite foods. Loretta had finally learned from his mother how to make it the right way, with chopped green peppers and a little maple syrup in there with the egg, the ketchup, the mustard and the dry Wheaties cereal.

  He walked two blocks to the bus stop at Lancaster and Chaparral. There were three Tamales, a Blue and two Dollars waiting for a bus. In less than three minutes there it came. The Alameda–Staples, one of three main lines through Corpus. Jack had driven that run himself many times when he worked for Nueces Transportation Company, the Corpus Christi transit line. That was where he started his career as a bus driver when he was twenty-two years old.

  The bus hissed to a stop. It was a GMC TDH-3612 in its blue-and-white Nueces Transportation livery. The T was for “transit,” the D for “diesel” and the H meant it had hydraulic automatic drive rather than manual drive. Some of the Great Western drivers longed like whiny babies for the day when automatic drives would come to ACF-Brills and other intercity buses, but Jack did not agree. Double-pumping the clutch while moving the gearshift s
tick from first, to second, to third and on to fourth was a vital part of being the master of that big machine. Jack couldn’t imagine anything more boring than just putting his foot on the accelerator and having the gears shift automatically without his doing a thing, like he wasn’t even there.

  N.T.C. ran small Ford transits when Jack was working for them, and he hated them. They sounded like rubber bands twirling around in a tin can and they overheated in hot weather, which there was a lot of in Corpus.

  “Hey, Jack,” said the N.T.C. driver. “You’re running late.”

  “Hey, Floyd,” said Jack as he stepped aboard. “Late connection in Houston.”

  Jack knew all of the Nueces Transportation boys. Usually he caught the 6:30 for the twenty-minute ride out to where he lived. This time it was the 6:40. None of the drivers ever made him pay the fifteen-cent fare. They treated him like he was a postman or a policeman, who, if in uniform, could ride the transit buses of Corpus Christi free of charge. The N.T.C. drivers saw Jack as a distinguished alumnus, one of their own who had gone on to better things as a driver of an intercity bus.

  “Get any in Houston?” Floyd asked.

  “Oh, the two usual blondes and a brunette,” Jack said.

  Floyd Cutlersen, a man in his late thirties with no apparent aspirations to go on to intercity driving, believed all he was told about the life of the over-the-road bus driver. Jack tried never to disappoint him with the truth. Like most every bus driver and most every other man he had ever known, Jack never minded other men thinking he was something with women he was not.

  “Which was the best?” Floyd asked.

  “The brunette.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Like Ava Gardner.”

  “Are you serious? What did she do?”

  “She didn’t do a thing but just sit there,” Jack said.

  “Oh, come on, Jack. Tell me every detail.”

  Every detail, every detail, every detail was running through Jack’s mind, again and again, over and over.

  The bus came to another downtown stop. Several more passengers got on.

  Jack moved to the seat next to the window so somebody could sit down next to him. It was already dark, so there were mostly only lights in store windows to see. But he didn’t even see them.

  He saw only the White Widow in the fifth-row left-side window seat. He felt the smoothness of her skin on her elbow, smelled the soap on her body, admired the blue of her eyes.

  He saw that bite on her right leg. He regretted not getting a second look at it when she left the bus. But there was no opportunity.

  He saw her in a white porcelain bathtub that was large and stood up off the floor on four fancy short legs. She was splashing hot foamy water up on her body. He felt warmth in his face and some movement and some sensation lower in his body.

  The thought of not seeing her ever again in his life made him hurt. He actually felt a sharp pain right behind each of his eyes.

  CHAPTER 3

  He smelled the syrup in the meat loaf the second he opened the door. It was one of those things that connected his present life in Corpus and on the road to all of the early part back in Beeville. Daisy Lee, the Blue maid, made meat loaf that way when he was growing up, and his wife made it that way now that he was grown.

  “It’s me!” he yelled once inside.

  “You’re late!” she yelled from somewhere in the back of the house, he assumed the kitchen.

  “Had a lot of package express to write up!”

  And there she was. Her short dark brown hair was combed and her cotton dress, a green one with tiny white flowers on it, was clean and starched and pressed. It covered everything but her thick bare arms.

  Loretta had weighed 147 pounds when Jack went from Nueces Transportation to Great Western. She still weighed about that. He had gone from 225 to 167 in that same fifteen years because he had to to keep his job after the war, when the veterans came back to work. The company was willing to make exceptions to its weight rules to get drivers during the war but not afterward. Mr. Glisan, the district superintendent in Houston, told him straight: “Slim down or it’s back down to transit, Jack.” Nobody said anything like that to Loretta at the Corpus Christi Caller classified advertising department, so she did nothing serious about her weight problem. As she said more than once to Jack, “If God had wanted me to be tall and skinny, that’s what I’d be.” It was only a few times more than once that she said it because after Jack got way down they no longer talked about it, continuing to act like they were still the overweight lovers they had begun as.

  “On Time Jack Oliver returns again,” she said, reaching for him.

  “On Time Jack Oliver always returns again,” he said.

  It was one of their standard greetings, one of what they called their love jokes.

  They threw their arms around each other and kissed hard on the mouth. It was what they always did when he came in after a night away in Houston.

  Jack patted her on her rear end and they moved toward the kitchen together. His eye fell to her legs. There was no bump on either one of them.

  He very much wanted to make love. He was used to having that feeling when he returned from an overnight run. It went with being a bus driver. It went with captaining a speeding motor coach full of precious human cargo down the highways and through the cities and towns of America. That was the line a lot of the drivers used, at least. One of them, a guy who drove Houston–Dallas, said it was a scientific thing. His wife, who was an operating-room nurse, said rodeo riders, jockeys, bicycle racers, tractor operators and other men who had their private parts rubbing up against something for long periods of time all had the same sensation and need when their day’s work was done.

  The terrible part of Jack’s feeling tonight was that he could not imagine having sex with Loretta, the only woman he had had it with, not only since they married but in his whole life. She was the first and the only, except in his mind, where he had been very active since junior high school. The only real activity besides Loretta had been some necking with secretaries from the traffic or operating departments a few times after company safety parties in Houston. It had always made Jack feel bad and guilty and ashamed when he remembered what he had done, and he always vowed that it would never ever happen again.

  But that made him very, very unlike so many of the men he drove with. “What would you think about your wife doing what you’re doing?” he once asked Ray “Smooth” Jefferson, a Houston–San Antonio driver who was notorious for poking any woman who would let him. “I’d kill her,” said Smooth.

  There was that additional truth about Jack’s not fooling around. Before he put on the uniform of a Great Western driver and began to trim down his weight, there were few opportunities, few women who made themselves available to him. None, to be even more exact about it. He had grown up pudgy in Beeville, a small town north of Corpus on the San Antonio highway, U.S. 181. And he had stayed pudgy through high school, his year of junior college at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi and into a career driving buses. He had also had a serious pimple problem from the fifth grade on, and it all combined to prevent him from ever having a real date with a girl until he was twenty-two, when he met Loretta’s cousin Alice Armstrong, who everybody called the All-American Girl!, after the radio show about Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. Alice was a revenue clerk at Nueces Transportation Company. One afternoon a week before Christmas, as he was turning in his report and the change from his fare box, she asked Jack if he was “booked” for that coming Saturday night. He sure wasn’t, he said. She said a bunch of the girls there in the office were going to have a casual drop-in Christmas-cheer party and were inviting some of the single drivers and mechanics to come.

  “You are single, aren’t you Jack?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he replied.

  “With some of these guys you can’t tell for sure,” she said. “But I figured you to be for sure.”

  For su
re. Those words hit home, but he went to the party. He had always been a big fan of Christmas. Loretta, who was already at the Caller, was there. She, too, was pudgy—overweight—and a big fan of Christmas. For unspoken but obvious reasons the two of them were drawn together almost immediately. They started talking about their mutual love for Christmas lights and other decorations and then moved on to their respective lives dealing with people who ride city buses and call in classified ads to sell cars and houses. Before long they were giggling, mostly about how much fun it would be to fill a front yard with electric reindeer and Santa Clauses, and Jack called her the next day and asked her to go to the movies the following Friday night. She accepted, and within a few weeks he had taken her to see all of the best-decorated houses and stores and, finally, on a warm January Sunday afternoon, to his favorite spots on the beach at Padre Island. They moved on from talking about Christmas decorations and their jobs to talking about love. And a few weeks after that Jack gave her an engagement ring, which he had bought at Martin’s Jewelers for thirty-seven dollars. They set May 2, less than five months away, as their wedding date.

  They sat now at their small kitchen table, which was also their dining table, and ate meat loaf and a baked potato, which she covered with sour cream and butter and he ate with only salt and pepper on it. He drank a Falstaff beer, called Flags by everyone at the Tarpon Inn, a tavern he sometimes went to on days off. It was on the bay on the east side of the ship channel.

  “Where was all of the express going?” Loretta asked him.

  “The what?”

  “The express, the stuff that made you late.”

  “Oh, that. That. It was mostly auto parts to Victoria. Some to El Campo. And some flowers to Woodsboro.”