The White Widow: A Novel (11 page)

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.

“Did you really go to college for four years?” Jack asked.

“Maybe.”

“Thanks for answering me, finally.”

“You’re welcome.”

“What did you study?”

“Anthropology.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s all about where we came from.”

“We?”

“You, me, all people everywhere.”

“No wonder you took up bus driving.”

College looked around and right at Jack and smiled a good one. Jack could hardly wait to tell Progress that he had finally seen a real smile on College’s face.

Jack got another Lone Star and a small sack of Tom’s Salted Peanuts from Willow.

“Are you hiding from something?” Jack asked College.

“Probably.”

Jack decided to move on to the things they usually talked about, which was mostly comparing the steering and other mechanical characteristics of the various buses they drove. College also drove Houston–Corpus overnights, so they both knew the same buses. College shared Jack’s amazement over the fact that two buses could come off the assembly line in Chicago or Philadelphia or Muskegon or some place in Ohio but sound and shake and drive as different as if they had come from two different worlds. It was also amazing to both of them that the same bus could drive and react differently to different drivers. For one it acted up and was slow to start, say, but for another it clicked right off.

And after a while Jack told College and Willow and the others that it was time for him to get on a Nueces Transportation bus for home.

“How about a movie tonight then?” Loretta had said when he called and said no to lunch.

“Sure,” he said.

“Any choice?”

“You say.”

She was home by four-thirty and they were at the theater by five. Loretta had picked
Show Boat
to see. She said it
was a big musical in Technicolor with lots of good songs and things like that. It had already been out for a couple of years and had come back for a second replay at the Bayside Theater.

Jack was inside the theater, sitting with a sack of popcorn in his lap and watching the opening credits of the movie, before he realized what had happened. Ava was in this movie. Not his Ava but the other one, the movie one, the real one. Ava Gardner.

She was not the main girl star. That was Kathryn Grayson. Ava played a half-Blue singer with a drinking problem who was down on her luck. Jack went furnace-hot inside when she sang a song called “Bill.”

He almost cried when, near the end, with black bags under her eyes, she sang “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man of Mine.”

Loretta did not suggest or even hint about making love when they got home. It was Wednesday. That was what they did on Friday.

Jack had never been happier about that particular habit than he was right then. He had the strange feeling, a really strange feeling, that it would have been disloyal to Ava, his Ava, to make love to Loretta this particular night.

Most of the feelings he was having about everything were strange.

Then, going to Houston the next day, he had another animal problem. A woman passenger tried to take a black cocker spaniel on the bus with her at Woodsboro. She said the dog
would stay right in her lap all of the way to Ganado, where she was going.

“It’s against our rules,” he told her.

“He is better behaved than most humans,” said the lady, who was a Dollar in her forties.

“I don’t make the rules, ma’am.”

“He doesn’t bite.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He’s completely trained. He will not mess up your bus.”

“I’m really sorry.”

The woman burst into tears. “I have to go to Ganado!” she screamed. “My mother is dying!”

“I don’t make the rules,” he said again, wondering this time if she was a checker. Now wouldn’t that be something? A checker trying to see if he would give in and let this woman take a dog on a Great Western Trailways bus.

The woman, checker or not and still crying, ran away with her dog under her arm.

“I hate you!” she screamed at him.

And Jack got back up in his bus and drove off toward Houston. He decided there was no way that woman was a checker and he felt bad about her, her cocker spaniel and her mother.

The final episode in his six days and fourteen and a half hours of misery came the next day when he went to the Houston garage to pick up the bus he would drive south to Victoria and Corpus, to Ava, his Ava.

He got in to start it and the engine would not turn over. There was not even a whirl. A mechanic fooled with it for fifteen minutes and pronounced it fixed. But the delay caused him to hurry through all of his prerun preparations at the depot.

The one thing he did not want to be was late into Victoria. He wanted every moment he could possibly have with her.

It was between El Campo and Wharton, with still about ninety minutes to go before Victoria, that he was overcome with panic at the possibility of her not being there.

It was something he had not even considered until then. What if two trips on the 3:15 was it? What if she was not going to be there this Friday?

What if he would never see her again?

Thinking about it caused him to forget to throw off the bundles of the
Houston Press
that were delivered every afternoon by bus to El Campo and Edna.

He also forgot about a passenger who wanted to get off just the other side of Hungerford, a no-depot flag stop. The passenger, a middle-aged woman in a red dress, had to run up the bus aisle and yell at him to stop.

He was embarrassed and apologetic and it started him worrying about himself, but after a while he was back worrying only about whether he would ever see his White Widow again.

There, again like Refugio, she was again.

She was the fourth in line and there were another five or six passengers behind her, so there was no way Jack could say anything to her other than “Good to see you again.”

“Thank you,” she replied.

Good to see you again.

Thank you.

She wore a short-sleeved pink dress. So he felt the bare skin of her elbow for the second time. The touch triggered little shots of something through his fingers up into his arms and down and around and throughout his body. Or maybe he imagined it.

But what did it matter if they were imagined if he really did feel them? And he really did feel something.

It was at Sinton that he knew he had to do something. He could not bear to watch her like this—she was in the sixth-row aisle seat on the left—and think of her slipping away into the Corpus Christi evening before he had asked her a few questions.

Where do you go when you leave the bus depot?

Why do you ride this schedule every Friday?

Will you be back next Friday?

What is your name?

Who are you?

What do you think of me?

Could you love a bus driver?

What about a bus driver who was a Master Operator?

Would you sit in my Angel Seat?

The bus depot at Sinton was on the right side of the highway at a Gulf station. Two passengers got off and three got on. He also put off a box of heavy oil-field equipment that had been shipped package express from Haliburton in Houston, and he thumped all four of the rear tires. Company rules required thumping them every two hours or so to see if they were flat. Because they were dual—two on each side of the axle—it was impossible to tell just by looking if one was flat. So the driver thumped them with something heavy and listened to the sound. If the sound was dead, that meant the tire was dead. Jack used his ticket punch for thumping.