The White Widow: A Novel Read online

  Also Houston was too big, and it was growing even bigger, and too fast. Some people said they expected it to be as big as New York someday. That would be the day Jack would have enough seniority to bid a San Antonio or Laredo turnaround and never have to fight his bus’s way into Houston anymore. He hoped. They didn’t even have any zoning regulations there, like they did in Corpus and everywhere else in the world, so that meant there could be a Conoco station or a Pig Stand drive-in in the middle of somebody’s block in Houston. It also had the worst weather of any place in Texas. It was not only hot, which it was everywhere, including Corpus, but it was wet-hot. The humidity was usually up there with the temperature, and just for good measure it liked to rain for a few minutes most afternoons. One of the Dallas drivers who had grown up in northern Iowa said being outside in Houston in the afternoon was like taking a hot shower with your clothes on. Jack agreed.

  He always figured the best thing about Houston was its name. Jack, like every other kid in Texas, had had to take a course in Texas history in high school. Not much of it touched him or stuck, except the story of Sam Houston. Sam had come to Texas from Tennessee, whipped the Mexicans at San Jacinto, became the president of the Republic of Texas and then, when Texas went into the union, represented it in Washington as U.S. senator and finally ran it as governor. He was, according to Jack’s teacher and books, a rough, smart man who could fight or talk just about anybody out of just about anything. After Loretta and Jack agreed to get married Jack told her if they had a son he wanted to name him Sam Houston.

  “But I don’t want him called Sam or Sammy, Houston or Houstie, or anything like that,” he had said. “I want him called Sam Houston, like it was one name, Samhouston. Samhouston Oliver.” Loretta said that would be fine with her. They never discussed it again because they never had a son, or a daughter, and the doctor had said it was unlikely Loretta ever would. Something was not quite right about her reproductive things, he said. She and Jack had talked about someday adopting a child, a boy they could name Samhouston, but it had not happened.

  In all fairness to the city named after Sam, Jack had not seen or experienced very much of it firsthand. He had been driving buses in and out of there two or three times a week for twelve years, but what he did when he was there wasn’t much and it was almost always the same. He drove into the city from the southwest on Highway 59, which became Main Boulevard. There was a fifteen-block go up the west side of downtown and then across east on Preston to the bus depot, which covered two thirds of a block bounded on the east by Congress, the west by Travis.

  He did every arrival day what he did this day. After unloading his passengers and doing his paperwork he drove the bus to the garage seven blocks south on Nagle Street in the middle of a neighborhood of small houses where the Blues lived. Only in Houston could you put a bus garage in somebody’s backyard. From there he caught a ride on a bus back to the depot and then walked three blocks to the Ben Milam Hotel. Great Western kept a block of a dozen rooms at the Milam for drivers on layovers. The rooms were small and they weren’t fancy but they were clean and just fine with Jack.

  A Dixie driver named Livingston fell in with him for the walk over to the hotel. Dixie was a division of Great Western that went all through East Texas. It had been called Dixie-Sunshine Trailways before being taken over by Great Western. Livingston drove Shreveport–Houston down through Henderson, Nacogdoches and Lufkin. Jack had known him and seen him around for years but they were not good friends. Livingston’s first name was Harold but everybody called him by his nickname, which was Horns. Horns Livingston.

  “You-all going to stop in with me?” Horns said to Jack as they got to a tavern called the Mirabeau Lamar Bar.

  “You know the rules on drinking,” said Jack. The layovers were only twelve hours usually, and twelve hours was also the limit on drinking—no driver could have even a sip of alcohol less than twelve hours before pulling a run. The smell of a beer on the breath of a driver reporting for duty was grounds for immediate suspension and eventual dismissal.

  “Nah, nah,” said Horns, who was from Louisiana and spoke in an accent that Jack thought made his own South Texas one sound like he was from Alaska or somewhere else up north. “The picture show in the next block.”

  “No, thank you,” Jack said.

  The picture show in the next block was a theater that showed only girlie movies. Jack had walked by it many times but had never been inside.

  “It’s not the real thing but it’ll do until you can get the real thing,” said Horns Livingston.

  “Not interested right now, but thanks.”

  “You-all not interested in women? Is that what you-all not interested in? Are you interested in something else besides women? Is that what you-all are saying?”

  “No, that is not what I’m saying.”

  “You-all a married man, I’m a married man. I don’t run around on my old lady, you-all don’t run around on your old lady. So what does that leave a man to do? A man who needs to keep himself at a fever pitch at all times, ready to go the second he’s back home? What does that leave a man to do, Jack? You-all tell me.”

  Jack had never met Horns’s wife but he had seen lots of photos of her. Horns carried them around with him as religiously as he did his ticket punch and log book. And he seemed to have a new set every couple of weeks. Her name was Janet Lee and she was clearly a well-endowed, well-stacked woman with a lot of blond hair twisted and waved and arranged on the top of her head. The photos showed her behind the wheel of a car, lounging outside on a hammock, smoking a cigarette in a kitchen, picking flowers and doing all kinds of others things.

  “I have nothing to say to you about that,” Jack said.

  “I give Janet Lee everything I have to give, and that means whenever I get home from a run. I mean the second I come through the door, there she stands without a speck of clothes on her body. So I have got to be ready three times a week. Going to these movies helps me stay ready.”

  It was his talking like this that caused him to get the nickname Horns.

  The theater was called the Lone Star Majestic. It may at one time have shown real movies with real movie stars like Ava Gardner and Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable but it hadn’t since Jack had been coming to Houston and staying at the Milam just down the street.

  Horns gave Jack a wave and headed for the box office. Jack kept walking. He did look at the posters advertising the movie that was showing, Lovesick Spies Blues. There were some black-and-white photographs of some of the women who appeared in the movie.

  None of them looked a bit like Ava Gardner or even Claudette Colbert.

  CHAPTER 5

  Then five days later it was Friday again. And there, like Refugio, she was.

  She looked exactly the way he had remembered her, exactly the way he had seen her in his mind ever since the previous Friday at this same precise time. The only difference was in the way she was dressed. She had on a purple blouse that had sleeves all the way to her wrists.

  It meant he would not be able to feel the touch of her skin again.

  “Well, good afternoon,” he said as she handed him her ticket.

  “Good afternoon,” she replied.

  Well, good afternoon.

  Good afternoon.

  He tried to capture the sound of her voice within his head, like on a phonograph record, so he could play it back again. And again.

  “One-way to Corpus again,” he said, as he read the ticket, punched it and tore it into two parts—one for her, one for him and the Great Western Trailways auditors.

  Again, she smiled but said nothing. She took back her portion of the ticket and, with his gentle assistance, stepped up into the bus.

  His bus.

  He forgot to smell her! He had been so intent on the sound of her voice that he had not smelled her. Had she bathed again in a white porcelain bathtub with legs before catching his bus?

  He was actually shaking when he closed the bus door behind her and the
eight other passengers who boarded at Victoria. He had trouble getting his ticket punch back into the holster on his right hip. He felt some twitching in his left leg, as if it was about to rattle out of control again, as it had last Friday.

  Progress Paul Madison, who had also just had his last call for San Antonio, was there at the counter sorting through his tickets. “Twenty-two peoples, not bad,” he said to Jack. “That’s progress, you see.”

  Jack knew Paul would see something in him. Paul never missed a thing.

  “You okay, young Mr. Oliver?” said Paul.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine.” Jack put his tickets in little stacks by towns. “Let’s see, three to Corpus, two for Woodsboro, one to Odem …”

  “Hey, you’re shaking,” said Paul. “You have a problem with a passenger?”

  “No problem. No problem at all.”

  Jack knew that Paul Madison knew better but he did not press it. “Hasta la vista, boys and girls, one and all,” Paul said to Jack and to Johnny Merriweather behind the counter. And he was gone.

  In a few seconds Jack heard the smooth revving of the Buick engine in Paul’s Flxible Clipper, then the release of its air brakes.

  “I have a question, Johnny,” Jack said. He could not help himself.

  “Sure, Jack.”

  “There’s a woman I just put on. She rode last Friday, too. She looks familiar. Should she? Did she used to work around here or something?”

  “You mean the looker?”

  Jack felt some warmth in his face. “Yeah, that’s the one.”

  “I wish I was familiar with her. But I ain’t. She looks to me like she’s got money or something, though. She looks like a White Widow to me.”

  Money or something. Now Jack hadn’t even gotten that far in thinking about her. Money or something.

  “Give me a last call,” he said to Johnny and turned to go back out to his bus and to her.

  Right behind him at the counter stood Mr. Abernathy with his suitcase.

  “I’m ready and this time I am really going,” he said. Jack had never seen him so direct and happy.

  “Get yourself a ticket and let’s hightail it,” Jack said. “Hey, hey, Mr. Abernathy.”

  “No, no, I’m not going with you,” said Mr. Abernathy, still smiling. “I’m on my way to Mount Rushmore through San Antonio with Mr. Paul Madison and then on west and up.”

  “Paul just pulled out. That was him leaving as you were coming into the waiting room.”

  “Oh, my,” said Mr. Abernathy. “I will just have to come back.”

  And again he walked away with his suitcase.

  “I feel sorry for him,” said Johnny Merriweather. “He’s crazy as a red hornet.”

  “Right,” Jack said, never really having heard of red hornets, crazy or otherwise. “Only a crazy person would miss the bus to Mount Rushmore, wherever that is.”

  “What are you saying, Jack?”

  “I don’t know what I’m saying,” he said. And he really didn’t know. “Like I said, give me a last call.”

  She took a different seat. She was on the aisle, on the right, four rows back. He had found her quickly when he made his announcement to the passengers, which he did without losing his lunch or control over his left leg. As Paul would have said, that’s progress, you see.

  Now he could see her clearly in his rearview mirror. There was a young boy in a clean white T-shirt with SAN ANTONIO YMCA CAMP emblazoned in dark blue on it sitting by her in the window seat. He was a Dollar. Probably in high school. They were talking.

  She was a looker all right. Oh my, yes, she was a looker.

  She’s got money or something. Johnny was probably right about that, too. And she had gone to college. No question she had gone to college. Probably to U.T. at Austin, or that women’s college up at Denton. Jack had always rooted for Texas A&M, the Aggies, over U.T., the Longhorns, but if Ava was a U.T. grad he would change his loyalty for her. He would change anything for her. Anything at all.

  Jack, as he turned his bus onto Moody Street, suddenly wished for the first time that he could go back and change his life so he had gone on and finished college, even just junior college. For Ava. He wished he had done so for Ava.

  But, but, but. If he had done that, then he would probably have gone on to be something fancier than a bus driver. That would be terrible! He could not even imagine himself as something else. Not since he gave up seeing himself flying fighter planes or scoring touchdowns. He could not imagine a life now anywhere except behind the wheel of an ACF-Brill on the open road.

  On the open road at full speed. Again, again, after each stop in each town, it happened to him day after day, run after run.

  There were two passengers, an elderly Tamale couple, to let off at Vidauri. There was no bus station there, only a flag stop at a Flying Red Horse Mobil station. He pulled the bus to a stop and helped the couple off.

  He smelled something. Something was running hot. It wasn’t the radiator. He went around to the side where the air conditioning motor was. Some smoke was coming out of it.

  Back inside, back in his seat, he switched off the air conditioning and then stood to address the passengers.

  Here I am again, Ava! Look up here at me, please.

  “Our air conditioning is not working properly,” he said, trying his best to avoid speaking only to her, to Ava. “I have switched it off. This means opening the windows. There are releases and handles there on each. Feel free to open them. If there is a problem, please let me know. It’s only about a hundred and ninety-seven degrees outside so it should not be too bad.”

  There were some laughs. She smiled. Ava smiled. His White Widow smiled at him.

  And he was back in his seat, in gear and on down the highway and into his thoughts.

  Jack and Ava were in a booth in a nice restaurant, a seafood restaurant along Padre Island Drive that served baked potatoes with sour cream and tiny green chives as well as butter. She was in her light-colored blouse, he was in full uniform.

  I cannot go away with you if you stay a bus driver, she said.

  I am a bus driver now and forever more, he said, leaning across the table and taking her right elbow in both of his hands. What else could I be?

  Start your own shoe store or be a radio announcer? she asked.

  I cannot do either, he replied. I have to be out there on the open road, again and again, day after day, where I belong.

  Then this must be good-bye, dear Jack.

  I cannot live without you, Ava dearest.

  You have no choice, Jack dear.

  Why can you not love a bus driver?

  Because I was brought up to love better than that.

  Then it is true you have money or something like that?

  It is true.

  Adele Lyman and four passengers were not the only ones waiting for Jack and his bus in Refugio. So was Slick Carlton, the regular Texas highway patrolman for the area.

  “Two wetbacks shook loose from some immigration cops up at Goliad,” Slick said to Jack once the bus was stopped. He had his tan uniform Stetson on his head, but Jack could still smell the tonic underneath. Jack also got a whiff of leather from his wide brown belt and holster, from which protruded a very large .38 magnum pistol. “Any candidates aboard your bus?”

  Jack was embarrassed to have to say “I don’t think so, Slick. But be my guest.”

  He stepped back up inside his bus with Slick, who had played linebacker for Lamar College in Beaumont and looked it.

  Jack, through good habit and practice, normally looked over every passenger he had on his bus. A question like “Any candidates aboard your bus?” would draw an informed answer. But since she, Ava, got on in Victoria, he had been distracted.

  Jack watched from the front of the bus as Slick walked down the aisle, silently peering into the faces of the twenty-seven people who were sitting silently watching him do it.

  Jack’s eyes were on Ava. Hers finally found his.

  All in an ex
citing day’s work for a bus driver, he tried to say with his look. It’s responsible, difficult, respectable work for a man. Sometimes they turn up wetbacks but sometimes in the process they flush out bank robbers and murderers and rapists.

  Rapists?

  There was no criminal of any kind on board.

  “Somebody told me you were about to get the big gold badge,” Slick said.

  “You got it right.”

  “You got it right, you mean. I’m ready for something like that.”

  “When are you due to make corporal?”

  “In about a year if one of those damned Indianolas doesn’t get me first.”

  “Indianola” was what a lot of people along this part of the Gulf called hurricanes and most really bad storms. The name came from the town of Indianola, which was right on the water due south of Victoria and Port Lavaca and had been on its way to rivaling Galveston as a major port and railroad center in the late 1800s. But then it was wiped almost off the face of the earth by two killer hurricanes that hit in two Septembers eleven years apart. Hundreds of people were killed and the few big houses that survived were dismantled and moved away to Cuero and other towns farther inland. Cuero, which also called itself the turkey capital of the world, was Progress Paul’s hometown. He grew up with the descendants of some of the Indianola survivors.

  “Well, I don’t have to tell you, we’re right into the Indianola season,” Jack said to Slick.

  “I know, I know, and I can hardly wait to start pulling people out of floating shacks and stranded pickups,” Slick said.

  They shook hands and in a few minutes Jack was back on his way to Corpus Christi. A good thing about Slick’s check was that Jack did not have to say more than a quick “Hi” and “Bye” to Adele.