The White Widow: A Novel Read online

  “I have asked Preacher Williams to say grace over our dinner,” said one of the executives into the microphone to get things started. He was Hubert Glisan, the division superintendent in Houston, who always acted as master of ceremonies at these dinners.

  Preacher Williams wasn’t a preacher, he was a Houston–San Antonio driver who only acted like he was a preacher. College said the closest Preacher, whose real name was Bryan, ever came to Jesus was when he used his name in vain.

  “Jesus in heaven, here we are,” he prayed. “Here we are, your humble flawed servants, earning our chili and our popcorn of life behind the wheels of our beautiful motorized chariots called buses. Protect us, dear Father, from the sins of the flesh, the hazards of the road, the calamities from your heavens, the temptations of speeding, stealing and loving and of passing on bad rumors about the executives in Dallas. Give us first and last calls to a heavenly home where every run is always on time, help us punch the right tickets, put off the right baggage at the right towns, apply the brakes when we should, stay off the air horn except in emergencies, gear down our engines when we should and swerve to avoid head-ons when we should. In your name and that of Great Western Trailways, the route of the Silversides Thruliners, the Always Going Your Way company which is the Easiest Travel on Earth to the Next Town or Across America, we pray. Amen.”

  Jack figured it was good Preacher Williams decided on being a bus driver because he would never have made it as a real preacher. Although College said in his tight way that Preacher was actually more interesting than any real one he had ever heard. Jack agreed with that. At one dinner Jack went to, Preacher Williams handed out mimeographed copies of what he said was “The Operator’s Creed,” which he had everyone read out loud together. It had things in it about “Transporting People Is My Business,” “The Safety of My Passengers Is My First Concern,” and “Courtesy to Passengers Is My Practice. The people who ride with me provide my livelihood. I will treat them with great respect.”

  Mr. Glisan told everyone to go ahead and eat.

  Jack put some butter on a warm dinner roll, took a sip of iced tea and cut into the veal cutlet on the plate before him. It was the first Friday night in a while that he had not eaten Loretta’s meat loaf. It was the second Friday night in a row that he had not made love to Loretta.

  “I never thought I’d ever be up here,” said Sunshine Ashley, sitting on Jack’s right. Sunshine, the man so called because he was just the opposite of sunshine. “I figured I’d fry in a head-on, get blown away by an Indianola or get caught by a checker before this would happen.”

  “I always knew I’d get the gold badge someday,” Jack said.

  “Me, too,” said the guy on the other side of Jack. He was Dippy Doolittle, a Houston–Dallas driver who got the name Dippy because he was. Jack had been told a hundred times about the Saturday night Dippy was driving down U.S. 75 south from Corsicana in a rainstorm when he mistakenly turned right off on State Highway 14 and was in Mexia, which was twenty-two miles west of his route, before he realized what he had done. Sunshine, on the other hand, had a spotless driving record. But here they were, one thinking he would make it to Master Operator, the other not. Jack decided it was just another sign of how different people were, and putting a Great Western Trailways uniform on them did not change the differences all that much.

  What it took to qualify was twelve years without a chargeable accident, plus what was called “an exemplary record of attention to duty,” which meant whatever the company decided it meant. Guys who showed up too much in dirty or unpressed uniforms, who were caught smoking a lot while driving or not wearing their caps while loading or unloading passengers, or who habitually ran late did not make it. There were several drivers in the system, five or six Jack knew personally, who had more than twenty years of driving time but were still wearing silver badges and probably always would. They had never done anything bad enough to get fired but they would never be good enough to be Master Operators.

  There were a hundred and fifty or so people eating in groups of eight or ten at round tables out in the room. Most were drivers, dispatchers and people like that. Some were in civilian clothes, coats and ties, but most, like Jack and the other honorees, were in uniform.

  “Have you heard about the checkers?” Sunshine said to Jack.

  “I’ve always heard about the checkers,” Jack said.

  “They’re sending hundreds this time,” Sunshine said. “Hundreds. I told you they’re out to get us all. Well, they are. All of us. Every damned one of us.”

  “Think about that, Sunshine. Why would the company want to get all of its drivers. Who in the hell would drive their buses?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m asking.”

  “Well, the answer is nobody. They would have nobody to drive their buses if they got all of us.”

  “That’s what I say, and it makes me sick and afraid to think about it.”

  “Don’t think about it.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “You never do anything wrong anyhow, so no checker could catch you doing anything anyhow.”

  “It’ll make ’em work twice as hard and as long until they do catch me.”

  “You’re a crazy man, Sunshine.”

  “They might even plant something on me. You still doing that Christmas thing?”

  “Yep.”

  “There’s a big wooden Santa Claus out in a field this side of Bloomington,” Sunshine said. “You interested?”

  “How big?”

  “As you and me.”

  “Is it for sale?”

  “I don’t know. You want me to check it out?”

  “Yep.”

  “I hate even putting up a tree in my living room. They cause fires, you know. You ever had a fire with all of that stuff you have?”

  “Never.”

  “Be careful.”

  “I am.”

  Mr. Glisan called for everybody’s attention, saying it was all right to go ahead and finish the chocolate cake and have some coffee while they went on with the program.

  He then started the speaking off with some words of encouragement about the future.

  He said: “I don’t think I have to tell you-all that the people aren’t riding our buses like they used to. They’re not riding Greyhound and our other competitors’ buses like they used to either. I also don’t have to tell you why. It’s all those cars out there. You operators see them on the roads and highways and streets. They are our real competition. They are the enemy. We are meeting that enemy with advertising and publicity that stresses the safety of bus transportation, the avoidance of prohibitive parking charges in larger cities and the absence of driver-tension characteristics for bus passengers. It is not working that well so far. The people are still buying and driving and riding in cars. However, when the saturation point of private vehicular traffic on our highways and streets is reached, it will begin to bear fruit.

  “As times goes by I believe more and more people will use public transportation when they realize the menace that is abroad on our highways today in the form of overpowered autos driven by people who drive and act as though safety is the responsibility of the other fellow. I hope the waiting period will not be too long. But I assure you we of Great Western Trailways will still be here, providing the best transportation on our particular part of God’s green earth, when the people get out of their cars and come back to the buses, where they belong.”

  Everybody gave Mr. Glisan a round of hoots and applause.

  Then he said that the bad part of the waiting was that there would be no money to buy new buses for a while. “I know our ACFs are growing old and cranky but we’re all going to have to get used to having them around as the mainstay of our mainline runs for a while longer,” he said. Some of the drivers let out some groans. Not Jack. As far as he was concerned, it would not matter if they never replaced the ACF-Brills. That bus was, in his opinion, the best there was or would ever be.

  “
I also know that some of you will miss the great life of going after new equipment, but we all have to adjust to life as it is,” said Mr. Glisan. One of the privileges of being a Master Operator was going to big cities like Chicago and Philadelphia at company expense, taking delivery on a new bus at the factory and then driving back to Texas. Jack had heard the stories about thick steaks and french fries and apple cobbler and nice hotels at company expense.

  Mr. Glisan turned the microphone over to Rex Al Barney, Great Western’s chief operator and director of operator training. Pharmacy, as he was called because Rex and Al went together to form Rexall, was the most feared and most loved man in the system. Like Paul Madison, he had started at the beginning with the bus business. He was a driver for the old Wichita Falls–Fort Worth Coaches, a company that was known mostly for painting the fronts of its buses like they were jackrabbit faces with the headlights as the eyes, the front bumpers as mouths, the running lights as ears and so on.

  Pharmacy, who had the power to fire any driver for just about anything, resembled an old football player and was the best public speaker in the Great Western Trailways system. Jack had heard him talk at safety meetings and dinners several times.

  Jack, along with everyone else in the room, was grinning before Pharmacy even opened his mouth.

  Pharmacy thanked Mr. Glisan and assured him that the Great Western operators stood ready to do their part to help the company get over what he called “this stupid craziness about the car that has bit the minds and other parts of so many of our customers.”

  Then to the audience he said: “It’s always a pleasure to be in the company of so many of my fellow bus drivers. That’s what we all are, even if in the fancy language of the company now we are called operators. I thought an operator was some pretty little lady who gave you the phone number you were looking for. Or somebody in a white coat and a mustache who stuck a knife in my stomach and pulled out an appendix.”

  Jack and everybody laughed.

  “I am always asked what it takes to be a bus operator, a bus driver. You know, the qualifications for employment. Not the ones about being so tall and so smart and so unfat and so able to get a driver’s license and so physically fit and so able to see the road ahead. I mean the real qualifications. The personal qualifications. Well, I finally after all these years found them written down. They were in a magazine put out for the employees of Tri-State Trailways over in Louisiana and Mississippi. All it says is that a guy named Smokey wrote it. I don’t know who Smokey is.

  “But here’s what he said about the kind of man a bus driver must be.

  “He must be a man of vision and ambition, an after-dinner speaker, a before- and after-dinner entertainer, a night owl—work all day, drive all night and appear fresh the next day. He must be a man who can learn to sleep on the floor and eat two meals a day to economize on traveling expenses so he can entertain his friends in the next town.

  “He must be able to entertain passengers, wives, sweeties and pet waitresses without becoming too amorous. He must inhale dust, drive through snow twelve feet deep at ten below and work all summer without perspiring or acquiring B.O.

  “He must be a man’s man, a ladies’ man, a model husband, a fatherly father, a devoted son-in-law, a good provider, a plutocrat, Democrat, Republican, a New Dealer and fast dealer—a technician, electrician, politician, polytechnician, mechanist, mechanic, polygamist and ambidextrous.

  “He must attend labor union meetings, tournaments, funerals and births and visit all passengers in hospitals and jails once a month.

  “He must have a wide range of telephone numbers of all principal cities and villages when entertaining the traffic department.

  “He must be an expert driver, talker, liar, dancer, traveler, bridge player, poker hound, toreador, golf player, diplomat, financier, capitalist and philanthropist—and an authority on palmistry, chemistry, archaeology, psychology, physiology, meteorology, redheads and lingerie.

  “That’s what this guy Smokey had to say, and from my driver’s seat it seems to me he’s got it about right. What do you-all think?”

  Jack was laughing so hard he was crying. So was everyone else.

  “Now you know what we’re looking for when we interview prospects. And now you know what these seven hotshots up here at the head table did to get all of this special attention here tonight.”

  Pharmacy moved toward getting serious. He talked about how the operator, the driver, was the backbone as well as the tailbone of Great Western Trailways. He said it was the experience the passenger has with the operator that will ultimately decide whether that passenger gets off a Great Western bus a happy or an unhappy customer.

  “The Great Western name and future are in our hands now more than ever, along with the steering wheel of an ACF-Brill, Beck, Aerocoach or Flxible Clipper.”

  Jack and the others applauded. Jack knew everything Pharmacy was saying was absolutely true, but it was good to hear it from somebody like Pharmacy. Of course, he was one of them himself, even if he was a big executive now. Once a bus driver, always a bus driver, in the mind if nowhere else.

  He wondered if Ava would be more pleased with him if he became an executive, like Pharmacy.

  I would hate it, dearest Ava.

  Why, dear Jack?

  I love being a bus driver, I love being a backbone as well as a tailbone of Great Western. I don’t think I could give up the open road.

  Not even for me, dear Jack?

  Let me think about it, dearest Ava.

  “Now we come to the real reason we are all here tonight,” Pharmacy said. “There are seven reasons. I will call them to come forward here one at a time to receive their gold badges, signifying that they have met the highest standards we have, to achieve the highest rank we have here at Great Western Trailways—that of Master Operator.”

  It was done alphabetically. That put Jack next to last.

  “Jack T. Oliver of Corpus Christi!” said Pharmacy when the time came. “The man we all know and love as On Time.”

  For a split second he felt like a movie star getting an Academy Award. The closest thing to it in his life before was receiving his first letter in football for the Beeville High Trojans. He never started, but he got into every game as a guard from his junior year on. He still had the blue letter jackets with the big white Bs on them, and when he thought about those days he was able to see himself playing quarterback and throwing winning touchdowns in bi-district championship games.

  The badge-changing ceremony was simple. Jack and the other six had already removed their regular silver-and-red badges from their caps.

  “Here is your badge, Jack,” Pharmacy said at the microphone. “Congratulations.”

  Jack shook Pharmacy’s hand and then took the badge. There, as five of the others had already done, he undid the little screws on the back of the gold badge and then stuck it onto the front of his cap where it belonged.

  He looked hard at the badge as he did it. It was a beautiful thing, with the words “Great Western Trailways” encircling a map of the United States at the top of the shield, and the words “Master Operator” right below. He had seen it on Progress Paul and a few others for years. Now it would be on him. Where it belonged.

  He put on his cap. There was much applause.

  He would have given anything for Ava to be there to see him, to see this. It would have made her see what a substantial and important and meaningful thing driving a bus really was.

  Look at this badge, Ava. I am no longer just an ordinary bus driver, an ordinary man. I am a Master Operator. I am now worth loving.

  As the dinner was breaking up a few minutes later, Pharmacy came over to say a final good-bye and good night to each of the new Master Operators.

  “And how’s it going for you, Jack?” he asked when he got to Jack.

  “Just great, Pharmacy, just great.”

  “I see the weight’s still off.”

  That made Jack mad. It was a completely unnecessa
ry thing to say. He hadn’t had a weight problem in more than seven or eight years. All he said was “My looks speak for themselves, Pharmacy.”

  “That’s right. What’s happening to you on Fridays, Jack?”

  Jack felt his body quiver. “Fridays?”

  “I was looking at some log reports this afternoon with Hubert. You were out of Victoria on time but late into Corpus three Fridays in a row. That is something for our man On Time Jack.”

  “Last Friday I had a breakdown.”

  “Right. Something happened to the ignition wire.”

  “Yeah. I think it was bad when I left Houston. I had trouble getting it out of the garage.”

  “I read that. You missed throwing off some papers one Friday.”

  “Now I do not know what happened on that. I really do not …”

  “And an agent said you forgot a passenger?”

  Forgot a passenger? “I don’t know about that.”

  “She was going to Hungerford, if my memory serves.”

  “Oh, right. Her.”

  “Well, again, good luck and congratulations. You are one of our best.”

  Jack thanked him and Pharmacy moved on to talk to someone else.

  Jack ran into Horns Livingston in the hotel lobby. He was looking for somebody to go to the movies with him.

  “I guess you’re not interested in my kind of movie, are you Master Operator Oliver? Congratulations, by the way.”

  “Thanks and thanks,” Jack said. “I am interested.” And he smiled and nodded and walked out the front door of the Milam with Horns Livingston in the direction of the Lone Star Majestic Theater.

  The movie, Lovesick Spies Blues, was not even in color. It opened with a shot of a guy in a light-colored raincoat waiting under a lamppost on a brick-paved street. “Lisbon, 1944,” it said underneath. He smoked a cigarette and looked around and smoked another cigarette and looked around again. Somebody was supposed to meet him, obviously. They were late. He was worried.