The White Widow: A Novel Page 4

He chewed and swallowed and sipped slowly and silently. And he knew it was only a matter of time before she asked him the question she always asked him at times like this.

  “Are you all right, Jack?”

  Somebody had told them both that it was part of a joke routine on the stage in England, or somewhere overseas.

  “I’m swell, Loretta,” he replied, as he always did.

  “You seem like something’s on your mind besides that meat loaf and me.”

  “I’m swell, Loretta.”

  “I hear you, Jack.”

  “I hear you” was another of their favorite expressions. He brought it home one day from a ticket agent in Houston and she picked it up and now used it too.

  She shrugged and told him what she had been doing while he was away driving his Silversides Air-Conditioned Thruliner to Houston and back.

  “Kress’s had a special on the little blinking red lights so I picked up two dozen,” she said. “I figured they’d fit down the sides of the front door if we want them there.”

  “Good idea. I have thought for a while we needed something there.”

  Decorating the outside of their house for Christmas was the major project in their lives together. They discussed all year the putting up of lots of lights and stars and Santas and angels and mangers in their small front yard and across the front of their small house. Doing all of that was what first drew them together and it was now important in keeping them together. Jack’s interest in decorating for Christmas had begun back in Beeville, where, because of his plumpness, he was asked a lot in high school and around town to dress up as Santa Claus for Christmas parties. He also did it twice for the N.T.C. folks.

  “I really am tired of Oscar,” she said. “He’s worn out and he looks it.”

  “I love him,” he said. “He was our first, you know.” Oscar was the name they gave to their four-foot-tall plastic Santa.

  “I know.”

  “I’m still worried about those old green lights we put up over the garage,” he said. “That cord is cracking and exposed and it’s going to cause a short if we’re not careful.”

  “We’re careful, Jack, don’t worry.”

  “But it’s dangerous. They could start a fire.”

  Loretta was now the supervisor of all classified advertising telephone girls. There were twelve of them on a full-time basis, up to twenty at special holiday times, when the calls really poured in.

  “Somebody, a man who talked like a Mexican, wanted to advertise for a Social Security card,” she said, turning to a report on her work. “He wanted to buy a Social Security card.”

  “Why?”

  “Come on, Jack. You know why. So he could get into the hospital and welfare and everything like that.”

  “Sure, I get it.”

  “Well, I’m glad. It looks like they’re going to promote Mr. Starr to San Antonio. I am really going to hate that. He’s the only one on the second floor who understands what it’s like for our girls to hang on that phone all day with people trying to cheat on the number of words and things like that.”

  She had complained before about the cheats. People who called in an ad and then didn’t want to pay the same perword price for an “a” or an “and” as they did for something in three or four syllables.

  “Little Martha McMullen is going to have a baby. That will be the end of her for us. I really do hate that. Nobody knows boats and marine gear like she does. She grew up over at Aransas around boats and things. Her daddy’s a shrimper, so’s her brother. I’m hoping to have her train somebody up to full speed before she actually has to go. We’ve got some time because the baby’s not due for seven months. I can hide her in the back for a while, but once she shows she’s got to go. The paper doesn’t like having pregnant women sitting around where people can see them. Guess they think it’ll give people ideas. At any rate, I’m thinking about putting Ann Marie in there. I think she’s ready. Her voice is about as sweet over the phone as anybody’s we’ve ever had. She could sell a classified ad to Baby Jesus.”

  “Baby Jesus?”

  “You know, the one in the Bible and the one we put in the front yard.”

  “Oh, that one.”

  “Did I get your attention finally?”

  “Why would Baby Jesus want a classified in the Corpus Christi Caller?”

  “Anybody and everybody, if they live long enough, will have a need for a classified in the Caller. That is our motto.” Jack was not the kind of man who thought along funny or witty lines. But the idea of opening up the newspaper some morning and seeing a classified ad in there from Jesus trying to sell off an old Whirlpool refrigerator or Chevy coupe set him off laughing.

  “You are something, Loretta Oliver,” he said.

  “Thank you, Jack T. Oliver. Is that a proposal for something besides apple pie for dessert tonight?”

  “You hear me right,” Jack said.

  He went on back to the bedroom while Loretta cleaned up after supper. That was how they always did it. He came into the house, they went right into the kitchen and ate dinner and then he went upstairs and took off his uniform. Loretta liked to sit across the table from him in the gray and black of Great Western Trailways. Jack noticed that her admiration of him in his uniform had increased as he slimmed down.

  He had always been a uniform man himself. Beeville, his hometown, was also the home of Chase Naval Air Station, which was a sister base to the larger one at Corpus Christi. Most Navy and Marine pilots went to one or the other, or both, for advanced fighter training after graduating from flight school at Pensacola, Florida. Jack went to the base on special days with his dad and saw a lot of sailors and Marines on the streets in Beeville. “Chase Sets the Pace” was the base slogan. His first boyish dreams were all about flying Navy fighter planes, but that was never really in the cards. First, it was the simple fact that he was really not that interested in going to college, and, second, it was the more complicated fact of his weight. He was driving for Nueces Transportation when the war started and he thought again about the Navy. Then he got his draft notice and eventually was classified 4-F, so that ended that, too.

  It was the 4-F that really changed his life. He remembered Ward Bond in It Happened One Night and he went to see Great Western, which he had heard was desperate for drivers because so many were going into the service. He went on to lose fifty pounds, as required, and now here he was, about to become a Master Operator. And that, as his driver friend “Progress” Paul Madison would say, was progress, you see.

  Jack had learned how to care for a uniform. He hadn’t paid that much attention to his gray poplin uniform shirts when he was with N.T.C. Now he had the laundry give them precisely measured military creases down from the shoulder through both pockets. He put wire collar stays in his shirt collars. His gray gabardine trousers and coat were always well pressed and clean. He tied his black tie in a precise military knot and he kept his black shoes shined like they were glass.

  The thinner he got, the harder he worked at his appearance. But at the same time it was so much easier to look good in a uniform when you weren’t fat. Just being able for the first time in life to wear his pants right across the center of his now flat stomach rather than just below or above the balloon that had been there for so long made a huge difference. He hadn’t taken a really good look at himself in a mirror until he was twenty-seven years old.

  Their frame house on Cunningham Street was small. They had bought it for $9,075, 80 percent of that handled by a mortgage from the Nueces Savings and Loan Association. The house had two bedrooms and a living room, plus a bathroom and the kitchen. The walls were thin. As he carefully removed his shoes and socks and his tie and his shirt and his trousers, he could hear Loretta rinse and dry and put away every dish, every glass, every knife, fork and spoon they had used at dinner.

  Soon she would be finished. Soon she would be in the bedroom.

  Now he was, as usual on evenings when they made love, down to his undershorts. He was
also down to figuring out how he was going to work himself up to wanting to do it.

  And there, like Refugio, she was.

  The lights were out. Frank Sinatra was singing “Something’s Gotta Give” on the record player. There were five songs on each side of the 45.

  “Are you sure you’re up to this, Jack?” Loretta whispered. It was another one of their jokes.

  “I’m sure,” he said.

  They were in their bed, they were kissing hard and his hands were caressing her body. She smelled of a perfume with a French name she had bought for herself last year. Her lips were large and moist. How she felt to his touch was all he knew of how a woman’s body feels. It was the sensation of touching something soft and smooth and loose.

  Then in the darkness of that room and of his mind came the face of that White Widow in the fifth-row left-side window seat.

  The lips against his got smaller and tighter. The skin under his hands got silkier and tighter.

  His nostrils suddenly were filled with the fragrance of an expensive bath soap, as if she had just stepped out of a white porcelain bathtub with legs on all four corners …

  “You are definitely all right, Jack,” Loretta said when they were finished. “I don’t think you have ever been more all right, Jack, Jack.”

  He got out of bed to clean himself up. He went to the bathroom.

  He could not remember ever feeling better or worse. He was not sure he could ever do this again. He was not sure he could ever again make love to Ava with Loretta.

  It wasn’t fair to either of them.

  CHAPTER 4

  He got a cup of coffee in the depot café, kidded around with the waitress and the cashier, and then went back through the terminal to the drivers’ ready room. It was 7:45 A.M. Sunday. He had thirty minutes before his run to Houston, a continuation of a through bus from McAllen, would be getting a first call.

  She was not in the waiting room. It was ridiculous to think she would be there. She had had a one-way ticket. Even if she did go back to Victoria, it would have been a dream kind of coincidence if she had been there to take Jack’s next schedule back. Great Western Trailways ran six schedules a day, every day, from Corpus to Victoria. There had been eight chances for her to go back to Victoria since she came down with him on Friday. She might have returned on the very next one, even.

  Baggage. Did she have any baggage on Friday? No, she did not. So that meant for sure she was already back in Victoria. If that was where she was going. Of course, she could have stayed right there in Corpus. Maybe she was returning from a quick trip to Victoria. Yes, yes, that was probably it. She lived in Corpus.

  Where exactly? And how? And with whom? Would she recognize him if they accidentally ran into each other at the Piggly Wiggly or at the movies? Would she know him in civilian clothes?

  Uniforms really do change people. And in more ways than just how they look.

  He was pleasant and professional to each of the eighteen passengers who boarded his bus. But when he took each ticket, each elbow, when he smiled each smile, he had half an eye back toward the depot door, up the street and everywhere else, hoping that maybe, just maybe, she would come.

  He also had a drunk to contend with. He was a Dollar, a white man, in his thirties, unshaven, smelly and dirty. Jack had twice told him that he could not ride the bus to Woodsboro this morning.

  “Sleep it off,” he said to the man, “and catch the next schedule.” Great Western had a policy against “providing passage to intoxicated persons” but left the enforcement to the drivers. Ticket agents were instructed to sell tickets to anyone who could stand up at a counter with money in his hand. The individual driver would decide if that ticket was going to get the customer anywhere on a bus.

  Jack was strict about drunks. Not because of their nuisance and noise but because they might get sick and throw up or they might get filled up and urinate or defecate in their pants. The resulting smell and awfulness from that kind of thing on a closed-up bus full of passengers was devastating.

  “Let me on this bus or I’ll cut you a new one,” said the drunk in one last try. Jack had just been given his last call on the PA system and was now ready to go. The man was standing in front of the bus door.

  “Out of my way, buster,” said Jack.

  “I’ll slice you up like a tomato.”

  “Move.”

  “I’m going to Woodsboro.”

  “You ain’t going nowhere right now.”

  Jack stepped toward the man. He saw the man’s right hand go into his pants pocket. There was the flash of a knife blade. Jack grabbed the man’s wrist with his right hand, twisted it around his back and slammed the man face-first against the bus. The knife fell to the concrete and the man shouted, “Jesus!”

  Jack shouted at James Birney, the porter, who was at the rear of the bus loading in some last-minute express, “Call a cop.”

  The Corpus Christi police station was only three blocks away, over on Chaparral. In a couple of minutes a squad car with two officers was there.

  Two minutes after that Jack had his ACF-Brill IC-41, #4110, in gear and was easing her out of the depot onto Lower Broadway toward Victoria and Houston. He had a schedule to keep.

  At the first red light he glanced in the inside rearview mirror. The fifth-row, left-side window seat was empty. He hated it that Ava had not been there to see what he had done this morning, to see him at his best.

  Oh, how brave you are, Jack dearest, she would have said.

  All in a day’s work, my sweet, he would have replied.

  He felt that aching in his body again. He could hardly wait until he got out of the city traffic, again onto the highway, the open road, so he could think about her.

  Jack saw Paul M. Madison, known and loved by Jack and others by his nickname, Progress, as one of the many pleasures of going to work each day for Great Western Trailways. Progress Paul Madison. Paul was in the first group of drivers to make Master Operator officially, and he was one in every way that could be defined unofficially as well. He was number three on the seniority roster of all 367 Great Western Trailways drivers, having started in 1934 as a driver for South Texas Coaches, one of Great Western’s many early predecessors. His first run was San Antonio to Victoria, and it had been his ever since. Five days a week for more than twenty years he had driven that 234 miles down U.S. Highway 287 in the morning to Victoria and had driven back that evening to San Antonio. When he started, the buses were motor-out-front models and the roads were mostly gravel and mud. Now the bus he drove was a twenty-nine-passenger Flxible Clipper with a Buick pusher engine in the back, and the highway was a solid two lanes of concrete or blacktop. He was known by all kinds and ages of people in the little towns along the route—Nursey, Thomaston, Cuero, Westhoff, Smiley, Nixon, Pandora, Stockdale, Sutherland Springs and Lavernia. The standard story was that Paul M. Madison had looked at more snapshots of children and grandchildren, received more fruitcakes and chocolate chip cookies from little old ladies, more cigars from new fathers, and more proposals of marriage and love from young women than any other driver in the entire Great Western Trailways system. When the company started its “Courtesy Great of the Month” program several years ago, Paul was the first employee chosen. The story in the company magazine, The Thruliner, said Paul Madison “stands for treating our customers with the courtesy and respect they deserve and he lives it and demonstrates it every workday behind the wheel of a Great Western motor coach.”

  He was as important to Jack as he was to any passenger. Jack adored him for setting a terrific example for him and all the other drivers, but it was the delightful man’s company that he really treasured. Jack just loved being with Paul Madison.

  “Well, On Time Jack, how are you?” he said this morning. “Tell me a good dirty Late story.”

  Paul was the one who had given Jack his nickname, On Time. He was the one who gave most of the drivers their nicknames: Ice Cream Jackson because he ate little else but ice cream, Snake
Eyes Streetman because he had a pair, Haircut Taylor because he always needed one, College Tony Mullett because he acted and talked like he was smart and superior.

  Paul got his own nickname, Progress, because of an expression he used a lot. “That’s progress, you see” was what he said to sum up most everything that came from company officials in Dallas and most everything he read in the newspapers or heard somewhere, most of which made no sense.

  Jack had no good dirty Late stories except the one about the drunk back in Corpus and he did not want to tell that one. So he only smiled at Paul, who was short and squat. His gray uniform shirt and darker gray gabardine trousers were not quite as well pressed and sharp as Jack’s. They used to be, but Paul had let himself go a bit in recent years. “All that dude stuff is for you main-line dandies,” he had said. “That’s progress, you see.”

  They were at a table in the Victoria depot’s coffee shop, the one reserved for Operators Only, back off in a corner. Paul had driven his schedule in from San Antonio. Jack, who had not made up the time lost by the scrape with the drunk, arrived in Victoria six minutes late, but he was now on a Hold-for-Connection order from the Houston dispatcher. The connecting schedule from Beeville, Alice and Laredo had blown a tire the other side of Goliad. It was being changed, and Jack was told to hold for about fifteen minutes because there were six passengers going on to Houston.

  It meant he and Progress Paul would have some time to talk. Unfortunately, Sunshine Ashley, a strange man who drove the Port Lavaca turnaround, was also unloading his bus out on the loading dock. He would be joining them there at the table in a few minutes. Progress had given him the name Sunshine because there wasn’t any in his life. Or at least, from the forlorn grimace that was always on his face, there didn’t appear to be any.

  Jack wanted very much to tell Progress about the woman on his bus Friday. He wanted very much to tell somebody about her, about it, about what it was doing to him.