The White Widow: A Novel (15 page)

“What about it?”

“One of the dispatchers found their section torn out of
Mr. Glisan’s copy of the Red Guide.” The Red Guide was the two-inch-thick book with a red cover that contained all the schedules of all the intercity bus companies in the United States and Canada. Its real name was
Russell’s Official National Motor Coach Guide.

“So what?”

“Well, they’re saying it may mean we’re buying ’em out. I heard at the Tarpon yesterday that now they think Truman was a Commie, too. Nixon said it to somebody.”

“Why would he say something like that?”

“I was surprised Ike kept him on the ticket. Should have dumped him. Bye for now, Jack.”

Dump Nixon? Truman too? “Right. Thanks.” Preacher Williams’s prayer line about rumors was right on target. They traveled up and down the lines of Great Western Trailways like electricity through the air.

College jumped back into his bus and in a few seconds they were gone.

And a couple of seconds after that Jack and his bus were going the other way.

He could not imagine why Ava had not asked about him. He might have been hurt, sick or even dead. And she did not ask.

It could be that she was simply too shy, too embarrassed to ask.

The sex thing was really not working. Horns Livingston’s device for maintaining himself sexually ready for his wife back in Shreveport was not having the same effect on Jack. Try as he did to keep the spies Jacques and Maria in his mind, he could not. Not enough, at least. And when he did it was Ava who was Maria, not Loretta.

The new gold badge on his cap got in the way also. All
along the route the agents had nice things to say to him about his being made a Master Operator. Those in Louise, Wharton and El Campo insisted on having somebody take their pictures with Jack in front of his bus.

He had also had to cope with Lem Odum, a retired Rosenberg High School civics and English teacher who traveled regularly from Rosenberg to Victoria to get his back adjusted by the only woman chiropractor in South Texas. “Men don’t know how to do it,” he had explained to Jack many trips ago. “They’re too rough, too impatient, too stupid.”

As always, Lem, who was probably seventy-five years old and who always wore white pants and white leather shoes, insisted on sitting in Jack’s Angel Seat and talking a mile a minute.

“You know how all these towns got their names, don’t you, Mr. Oliver? Yes, I am sure you do. This highway follows the route of the old New York, Texas and Mexico Railways, which was owned by an Italian count named Telfener and his American father-in-law, named Hungerford. They called it the Macaroni Line and it only got built for ninety miles from Rosenberg to Victoria. But it left its mark. They named two towns after themselves, Telfener and Hungerford, plus a couple for Telfener’s daughters, Inez and Edna, and two more after a partner, John Mackay, and his daughter, Louise. You already knew all of that, didn’t you, Mr. Oliver. Very interesting history along this highway. You should tell the passengers about it as you drive along. They would love knowing where they are going and who went before them …”

He was delighted when he finally got to Victoria, where the schedule called for a full twenty-five-minute noon-meal rest stop. He arrived to some real commotion. Progress Paul, Johnny Merriweather and the porter, Willie Church, were
standing there in the depot driveway. Each was holding a handmade sign.
MASTER
OLIVER
IS
OUR
MAN
was the message on Paul’s.

“Lunch is on me,” said Paul to Jack, “if you don’t have more than a hamburger.”

A hamburger all the way with fries was exactly what Jack ate.

“I hold my glass up in your honor,” said Paul, holding up a cup of coffee, which, as far as Jack ever saw, was the only thing Paul Madison ever drank.

Jack clinked his iced-tea glass against Paul’s cup and against cups or glasses held by two other drivers at the table. One was an extra-board man waiting to double a schedule back to Houston at three o’clock. The other drove the Austin–Victoria turnaround for Texas Red Rocket Motorcoaches. He, like Paul, was on a layover.

Jack entertained them for a few minutes with a little bit of what he could remember of Pharmacy’s spiel about what it took to be a bus driver. And he told them about Sunshine, sitting up there about to get his gold badge but worried that the same company that was giving it to him also was looking for ways to fire him.

“Well, the checkers are out, he is sure right about that,” Paul said.

“How do you know that?” Jack asked.

“I hauled one of them this morning.”

“Now, come on, Paul, how did you know it was a checker.”

“A guy in dirty overalls about thirty flagged me down just down the road from Sample, between Smiley and Westhoff. He said he was going to Cuero and gave me a twenty-dollar bill. He was a checker.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I know everybody by sight and by name who lives anywhere near Sample and he wasn’t one of them who does. He was a setup. Nobody in there would have a twenty-dollar bill in their pocket either.”

“Well, you don’t have anything to worry about.”

“Nope.”

Neither do I, thought Jack. I am no Sunshine. I know for sure Great Western Trailways needs me and Paul and our kind to stay in business. Like Pharmacy said about the backbone and the tailbone. What good were buses without drivers?

A few minutes later when he loaded up for Corpus he did pay particularly close attention to each and every one of the eleven passengers who got onboard. Maybe, just maybe, one of them was a checker. But then he thought, So what? I have nothing to fear from any checker.

He also could not help but look in the line of passengers for her, for Ava. Of course it was Saturday morning instead of Friday afternoon, and of course she had already gone to Corpus the day before with College. She was clearly “the looker” he was talking about.

But he still could not help but look and hope.

Would he spend the rest of his life looking and hoping for another sight of her?

“What’s suddenly wrong with me, Jack?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t say ‘nothing’ like that,” Loretta said.

“I don’t know any other way to say it.”

“You said it like it was a secret.”

“ ‘Nothing’ is not a secret.”

“You’re fooling around with somebody,” Loretta said.
“That’s the secret. It turns out you’re just like every other bus driver in the world, that’s the secret. You can’t keep your hands off of women, you can’t keep your thing in your pants. You’re nothing but a bus driver after all. Nothing but a bus driver who thinks promises to your wife don’t count, only hers to you do. Nothing but a little boy bus driver. That’s what you are, Jack. You lose a few pounds, get that uniform so it fits and you decide you are ready to go out there and have yourself some women, to hell with me, to hell with what you swore to do in front of that Methodist preacher and your mommy and daddy and my mommy and daddy and before Jesus and God and everyone else in that church. You no-good rotten bastard. You may have a gold badge from Great Western Trailways but you do not have a gold badge from life, I can tell you that. You are a lowlife, Jack. You are not a Master Operator person. You are not a gold badge person. You are not. You are not. You think you are skinny and that makes you a lover. You think you are skinny and that makes you a ladykiller. You think you are skinny and that makes you irresistible. You think you are skinny and that makes you something you are not. You are not any of that, Jack. You are still the same Jack. Nothing has changed just because you can wear pants with a thirty-four waist instead of a forty-two. Nothing has changed because you can wear a shirt with a sixteen collar instead of a seventeen and a half. Nothing has changed, Jack, except the core of your soul. And that smells. I can smell it. It is rotten. It is really rotten.”

They were sitting at the kitchen table, the only place they sat and talked about important things. This was the most important thing they had ever talked about or probably ever would talk about.

The amazing thing to Jack was that Loretta was not
screaming it out. Her words were screams but her voice was quiet. He waited for her to stop, and when she did, he looked off at the refrigerator for a while.

“Say something, Jack,” Loretta said. “Say anything, Jack.”

“I’m not fooling around,” Jack said. “I am not fooling around.”

“Why did you say it twice like that? Mr. Harte at the paper always says if somebody says something twice they are lying. The second time is to convince themselves they aren’t. It’s like they are quoting themselves and that makes it all true because the quoting is true. I did not kill the butcher. I did not kill the butcher. The first time was a lie. The second time wasn’t because it was just repeating, quoting the first time. And it is true I said it once, so that makes quoting it true.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“It makes more than you do, coming in here now saying again—again saying—you don’t think you are up to making love to your wife, me, the woman you say you love.”

“I strained my back throwing some express off the bus at Wharton. I told you I strained my back throwing some express off the bus at …”

“There you go, lying again.”

Jack really was lying. He was lying in a way that he had never done before to Loretta. His back was fine, of course. The only express he had to put off at Wharton was a small box of auto parts for the Chevrolet dealer.

“Let me tell you about the dinner at the Milam,” he said.

“Go ahead, tell me. I really want to hear about how the great Master Operator got his great gold badge. Was she there?”

“Who?”

“Her.”

“Her?”

“You know who I mean.”

Yes, he knew who she meant, but she didn’t know. Nobody knew what was going on in his mind. Nobody knew that. Only he knew that. That was the only private place there was in a person’s life. The mind. He knew who she meant and only he knew. Loretta did not know.

He described the Milam Hotel meeting room and what Mr. Glisan and Pharmacy said. Loretta did not crack a smile, even when he repeated a little bit of Preacher Williams’s stupid prayer.

“Was she there, Jack, is still my question.”

“My question is still Who?”

“Your girlfriend.”

“I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“I don’t hear you, Jack.”

“Then you’re not listening.”

“I offer to reward my new Master Operator with anything and as much as he wants and what does he say? He says no thanks, because he strained his back putting off some express at Wharton. He says it twice the first time and then he says it twice again. That to me means only one thing and that one thing is that he has a girlfriend. I hear you. Let’s go to the movies, then.”

“Great. Let’s do.”

She stood up. “See what I mean?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You didn’t say that twice. You said ‘Great’ and ‘Let’s do’ only once. That means you were not lying. You really think it’s greater to go to a movie with me than to make love with me.”

“I’m going to go change clothes.”

“You don’t want to wear your new gold badge to the movies?”

He did not answer her and walked on out of the kitchen toward their bedroom.

“Does she have a name, Jack? Does this girlfriend of yours have a name? Is she a ticket agent or what? A passenger or what? Have you got her swooning because of that uniform, Jack? Mr. Sexy Thin Jack T. Oliver, Master Operator.”

He wasn’t sure how much longer he could go on like this.

He vaguely remembered that as a line from the movie about the two spies. They didn’t know how much longer they could go on and they didn’t go on much longer because they died.

And for the first time since they met at that Nueces Transportation party, he thought about Loretta dying. He wondered what the preacher who married them would say about her before the pallbearers, all Great Western drivers in uniform, carried her out in a coffin to be buried at the Resthaven Cemetery on Highway 9 on the road to Odem.