The White Widow: A Novel Read online

  But he was late. Seven minutes by the time he got to Woodsboro.

  And the bus was hot inside. September was mostly as hot as August in South Texas. Jack saw sweat on Ava’s face. Sweat on her beautiful face. He so much wanted to help her.

  Here now, let me wipe that awfulness from you.

  Oh, please, Jack. That would be wonderful, Jack. Thank you oh so much, Jack.

  He was sure her sweat did not smell like everyone else’s did. He could not imagine anything about her that would smell bad. Nothing, literally nothing at all. Nothing at all.

  Your hand feels so good there, Ava said.

  It feels so good being there, my dear, Jack said.

  Johnny Ray was singing “Little White Cloud That Cried” in the background. They were in bed, the lights were out, their clothes were off.

  He kissed her gently on the mouth and then around her mouth and on her neck and chest and below.

  Oh, my God, Jack, your lips feel so good on me, Ava said.

  They feel so good being on you, dearest, Jack said.

  He took his time, lingering for full pleasure over each move, each caress, each kiss.

  And when it was over, when both had screamed their pleasure to the heavens, they fell back from each other.

  “What are they feeding you bus drivers out on the road these days?” Loretta said.

  “The same old roast beef, ranch fries and brown gravy,” Jack said.

  “I think maybe they’re spiking it with something,” Loretta said. “I have never seen anything like you. Are you ready now for dinner?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’ll go get it on the table. I hope the meat loaf hasn’t burned.”

  “I’ll be right behind you.”

  She leaned over and kissed him on his naked stomach, turned on the lamp on the table by the side of the bed and got up.

  “You called out something besides me just now, Jack,” she said. “When you were coming.”

  “Like what?” he said.

  “I couldn’t make it out. Ada, Alma, Ava. Something like that. Something with an A, or maybe an R.”

  He did not look at her. He kept his eyes on the ceiling. “Sex is making you hear things.”

  “Well, whatever. It was some fun. See you in a minute.”

  “In a minute.”

  He heard her go into the bathroom and he heard her cleaning herself.

  Well, whatever. He had walked into the house and instead of going into the kitchen to eat meat loaf, as they did every Friday night, he had said, “Could we go to bed first?”

  Loretta said no because the food was ready, but after he took her in his arms and kissed her, she decided a few extra minutes in the oven would not hurt the meat loaf.

  There had been no way he could control the order in which passengers got off the bus. He had hoped that maybe Ava would be among the last, so he could say something to her and perhaps prompt her to say something back to him.

  Well, well, I trust you had another good ride on my bus, he would say. It’s an ACF-Brill IC-41.

  I did indeed. I am so fond of the ACF IC-41. What does the IC stand for?

  “Inter-city,” meaning between cities. “Intra-city” means within the city. Transit buses, in other words.

  How wonderfully interesting and fascinating.

  I love my work as a bus driver.

  I love men who love their work.

  Then I don’t have to become something else, dear?

  I didn’t say that, Jack dearest.

  There were other imagined conversations he had with her, particularly during the last ten miles on Highway 9 from Odem on into Corpus.

  So sorry about the air conditioning, Ava dear.

  It’s not your fault, Jack dearest, and I barely noticed.

  I promise the bus I will be driving next Friday on this run will have an air-conditioning system that works.

  Oh, please don’t go to any extra trouble just for me.

  It is the least I can do for a regular customer.

  But this is only my second trip.

  Won’t there be others?

  Oh my, yes. Many others forever more.

  And:

  I am sorry we arrived eight minutes late, Ava dear.

  I was so entertained and pleased by my ride I barely noticed.

  I am delighted to hear that. The comfort and enjoyment of my passengers is of great importance to me.

  I can tell. You truly enjoy driving this bus, don’t you?

  More than I can ever express, when you are on it.

  I find that admirable. People should enjoy their work or change their work to something they do enjoy.

  I am glad to hear you say that. Life’s too short is what I say.

  That is what I say, too, Jack dearest.

  What actually happened was that she seemed to be in a hurry, maybe because the schedule was eight minutes late. At any rate, Jack took her naked left hand to help her down the last step.

  “Thank you for riding with us again,” Jack said.

  “You’re welcome,” she said and hurried off.

  Thank you for riding with us again.

  You’re welcome.

  He kept an eye on her as long as he could. But she disappeared at the end of the bus depot building, turning up Schatzel Street just as she had last Friday night.

  He wondered how in the world he could wait another whole week before seeing her again, assuming she came again to his bus the next Friday.

  By the time he got home to Loretta his imagination had his body and mind in such a state of agony and excitement that he could not help but make love to Ava with Loretta.

  CHAPTER 6

  The next seven days—six days and fourteen and a half hours to be precise—were miserable ones for Jack T. Oliver.

  He had a right front tire blow on him as he rounded a corner a block from the depot in Wharton. Fortunately he was moving less than twenty miles an hour. The big bus, #4207, jerked savagely to the left and for a few seconds was literally out of his control, but he got it stopped before anything was hit, any harm to persons or property was done.

  An angry man, who looked half Dollar, half Blue, took a swing at him behind the bus at Edna. He had been on the bus all the way from Houston, but Jack had not paid that much attention to him until the guy discovered his suitcase was not on the bus with him. He said he had checked it through to Edna from Saranac Lake, New York, four days earlier.

  “They said it would get here when I did,” he said to Jack, who had the baggage compartment door up to prove to the guy there was no bag in there with an Adirondack Trailways baggage-check number that matched the one he had in his hand.

  “Well, it isn’t here, I’m sorry,” Jack said, reaching up to close the compartment door.

  “That’s not good enough, you Texas sunavabitch,” the man said in an accent that sounded pure Yankee. He was taller but thinner than Jack. He had not shaved for several days, so he looked very tough.

  “Watch your language, buster,” Jack said.

  “Buster, my ass.”

  The man swung a fist toward Jack’s face. Jack saw it coming in time to throw his left hand up to protect himself. In that hand was the foot-long steel key that opened the baggage compartment door. The man’s fist crashed against it at full force, causing the guy to scream with pain and grab his hand. Jack declined the agent’s offer to call a cop. Just call Houston, Dallas or somewhere and help him find his bag, Jack said. Jack tried to avoid getting passengers arrested, not just because the company didn’t think it was too hot for business but also because if there were hearings and trials later, it meant taking days off and other disruptions.

  A baby calf, all black except for large white spots around the eyes, ran out in front of his bus between Inairi and Vidauri. Jack saw it, but there was no way to miss it without either swinging out left into oncoming traffic or heading off the road to the shoulder on the right. Neither was an option, and the poor calf was knocked throu
gh the air and landed in a bloody, lifeless heap. Jack and a passenger, a high school boy with a crew cut and a Future Farmers of America blue corduroy jacket, pulled the cow’s body into the ditch. The high school kid seemed sad and wouldn’t look at or say anything to Jack. He obviously thought Jack could have avoided hitting the animal.

  “There was no way to miss him without causing an accident,” Jack said as they carried the cow. He had the front legs, the kid had the rear ones. “It was him or us.”

  “Maybe,” said the sad boy, who had boarded at Victoria; Jack knew, from his ticket and his FFA jacket, that he was from Freer, a town between Alice and Laredo.

  Nuts to you, kid, Jack thought but did not say.

  Animals were serious hazards to buses. A Mack’s Motor Coaches Fitzjohn had gone out of control north of Woodville, Texas, recently after hitting a mongrel dog. Two passengers were seriously hurt. A Kerrville Bus Company driver had lost a new Beck bus and his own right eye and leg when he plowed into a bull outside Fort Stockton last year. Jack had also heard of a Blue Ridge Lines driver who died after broadsiding a deer somewhere west of Baltimore, Maryland.

  So nuts to you, kid. People are more important than animals.

  On Wednesday, his day off, he woke up to rain. He looked outside and saw immediately that it was one of those heavy, steady downpours that would last all day. Among the things it would wash away was the day he had planned in the sand at Padre.

  He had been very much looking forward to gazing up at that sky the color of Ava’s eyes and thinking about her, and about them together.

  “What are you going to do today?” Loretta asked before she left for work. Jack was up but still in the light-blue boxer shorts he often slept in when it was hot.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get the lambs out and see if they work.”

  “You’ve got three months to do that.”

  The lambs. There were two of them, painted wood, life-size. He had picked them up at a junkyard near Ingleside two weeks before on his day off. He thought they might work with their Christmas manger set.

  “Want to go downtown and meet me for lunch?” Loretta asked.

  “I doubt it. I’ll call if I do.”

  “You going to hit the Tarpon then.”

  “Maybe.”

  She left and Jack got back into bed, hoping he might be able to go back to sleep.

  Maybe he could imagine he was lying in the sand at Padre and do all of the same imagining he would have done out there.

  He closed his eyes. He couldn’t see anything at first, and then he saw that damned dead cow between Inairi and Vidauri, and all he could hear was the rain on the windows and the roof. He reached over to the bed table and turned on the radio. He hated what was on the radio in the daytime—only dumb story programs for women. Didn’t the people who ran radio stations realize that there were a lot of bus drivers and other men out there listening to the radio in the daytime too?

  The lambs. He got up, dressed in some jeans and an old uniform shirt and went out to the garage to see about the lambs.

  He had to step around Oscar, the Santa Claus, to get to them. The Santa, which was old and made of a thin glass-like material, went on one side of the front yard, the manger on the other. Jack had a special affection for Oscar because he was the first big item they had bought together for their front yard.

  The lambs came almost to his waist. Their features were lifelike. One had its head down, as if it were eating grass; the other looked straight ahead, as if posing for a photograph. Both needed to be painted. They would be fine.

  Decorating their house and yard for Christmas was his only hobby. Some of the other drivers fished and hunted and collected things like old Coke and RC bottles. Some of the others remodeled their own houses or did handyman work for other people on their days off. There was a driver in Amarillo who did people’s income tax returns, and there were others who actually ran real businesses on the side, like liquor stores or appliance fix-it places.

  Jack didn’t have anything like that to do. Besides playing with the Christmas decorating the only other thing was going to Padre Island to rest.

  And occasionally he did go to the Tarpon Inn for a few beers, when it was too wet to go to Padre or he just felt like it.

  That Wednesday it was too wet and he felt like it.

  But even that didn’t turn out well. Nobody he cared about or cared to talk to or even to see was there when he arrived. A Rio Grande Coaches driver named Mitchell Johnson was drunk at the bar when he came in. They called him Wax because of his name, Johnson, and because he was greasy, like table wax. He started telling Jack about growing up in St. Charles, Missouri, outside St. Louis and how his father was a brakeman on the Katy Railroad. Jack didn’t care a thing about St. Charles, Missouri, or Wax’s dad.

  The Tarpon Inn’s owner was a painted redheaded woman in her sixties. Everybody called her Willow because she was skinny and seemed to always be bitching—weeping—about something: the high cost of electricity, the stupid city, the dumb beer salesmen, the Fritos route man, the awful weather, the idiot sheriff’s deputies.

  It was the shrimpers she was hating this day.

  “They come in here all stinking like their shrimp, acting like they’re tough and God. All of them have those wads of money in their pockets but they all ask for credit and then I have to scream and pull every dime out of them. I have had it with them, Jack. Had it. And besides that Eisenhower’s a Communist.”

  Besides that Eisenhower’s a Communist? It was the second time Jack had heard that in the last several days. What’s going on with Eisenhower?

  “He is not!” Wax Johnson yelled from down the bar.

  It didn’t make sense to Jack either. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ike, General Eisenhower, was the president of the United States, and before that he had been a five-star general who led America to victory against the Nazis in Europe. It didn’t make sense that a five-star general and now the president of the United States would be a Communist, but if Willow said so, then fine.

  “Yeah, he is, and I can prove it,” Willow said.

  Wax dismissed her with a wave and turned back to his conversation with a guy Jack had never seen before. Somebody said he was a new road man for Schlumberger, the big oil field supply outfit out of Houston.

  Jack didn’t much care if Dwight D. Eisenhower really was a Communist. He had never paid much attention to things like that. He had enough to do with his own life. He left that kind of stuff to Senator, the local drivers’ union president, who talked and talked about politics, about Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, Allan Shivers and Price Daniel. The nickname Senator didn’t really fit because he looked more like a justice of the peace than a senator and talked with the bad grammar and bad words of a deputy sheriff. Not that Jack or anybody else around knew or cared much about what senators looked or talked like.

  College was the only one who ever talked to Senator about anything other than union business, and College did it that smart-alecky way he talked to most everyone.

  But Jack liked to listen to College, and there, like Refugio, he was, sitting down next to Jack at the bar.

  “I hate this place,” College said to Jack as he sat down.

  “Want to go somewhere else?”

  “There is no somewhere else.”

  Progress said College was the only human being he had ever known who never smiled. Jack said he had seen him do it once when he won a flip for beers at the Tarpon Inn. But Progress didn’t believe him. Progress came up with the “College” nickname, and it was not for friendly reasons. He was certain College, whose real name was Anthony Richard Mullett, had never attended one college class, not even in junior college. Progress gave him the name because he acted like he was smarter than everybody, not because he really was.

  “Why don’t you ever smile?” Jack asked College suddenly, with no thought or warning.

  College was a dark-skinned, black-haired man who seemed to Jack to be in his forties,
maybe five or so years older than he was himself. But he had been with Great Western for less than ten years.

  College did not answer Jack. He spoke to Willow. “A Lone Star and a glass.”

  “Coming up,” she replied.

  Jack was also drinking a Lone Star but right out of the bottle, the way most people did at the Tarpon Inn. He had less than half of his left.

  “I smile when I’m happy,” College said softly to Jack, but still not looking at him. Clearly, he was seldom happy, including right now talking to Jack.

  Jack wondered why he liked College at all and why College seemed to take to him in return. Jack knew no more about Anthony Richard Mullett than anyone else did. There had been rumors around that he was the heir to a large dairy company in Kansas City but had been cheated out of his inheritance by somebody connected to the gangsters of the Pendergast machine, who had always been behind the success of Harry Truman. Another story had him being a disrobed Catholic priest who now hated God, Jesus and everyone else. The one that most of the drivers believed was that Anthony Richard Mullett was a rich man’s son who couldn’t make it in the big world and decided to hide forever behind the steering wheel of a bus. Jack didn’t know what to think.

  “What did you do before you started driving a bus?” Jack asked. Why not just be direct?

  “Nothing.”

  Jack said, “Everybody did something before they started driving a bus. Everybody did.”

  “Not me.”

  “Paul Madison thinks you hate being a bus driver,” Jack said to College. “I told him there was no way a man could do a job that he hated.”

  College took a long sip from his Lone Star but said nothing.

  “You didn’t come here to talk today, I see,” Jack said.

  “Not about me or bus driving, that is certainly correct.”

  Jack had never paid that much attention to the way College actually spoke. Now he did. Now he understood why “College” stuck as a nickname. The way he said “certainly correct” was the way people with smarts and style said it. The l and t sounds were more distinct than most other people’s.