The White Widow: A Novel (19 page)

The last time he would see her!

Please look at me. Please look at me.

She could not hear him and she did not look at him.

“I must see you again,” he said.

“What?”

“This cannot end this way.”

“What way? What are you talking about?”

He was blocking her exit from the bus. They were at the Corpus Christi bus depot. It was now or never.

She tried to step around him but he moved to prevent it. Other passengers coming down out of the bus had to squeeze around them both. They had to find their way to the ground by themselves, without the help of Jack’s hand on an elbow.

“What is your name?” he asked her. “I call you Ava.”

“My name? Why do you want to know my name? Did you say Ava? Please. People are waiting for me. I must go.”

“What people?”

“Please, Mr.…”

“Oliver. Jack T. Oliver. You have heard my name four times now. Jack T. Oliver. I am Jack T. Oliver. This is the fourth Friday I have driven you here to Corpus. I was off getting my gold badge last Friday or this would have been the fifth.”

“Mr. Oliver, please. I do not know what you are talking about. I must go. If you wouldn’t mind moving out of my way now.”

“I was thinking about you just before it happened.”

“What happened? Please, now. Move out of my way. I am already very late.”

“My wife just died. Her name was Loretta.”

“I am very sorry. Please, now. Let me by.”

He moved out of the way. And then watched her, as he had three previous times, walk down Schatzel Street and out of his life.

No. He could not give her up. Not now. Not yet.

Nobody had seen what happened at Highway 77 and Farm Road 682. Why should he throw away the badge, the job and the woman he loved all because of an accident? It was simply a terrible accident. Telling what happened would not bring those two poor people back to life.

“It must have been hell out there where you just came from,” said Sweet Jennings, the dispatcher. They called him Sweet because he wasn’t. If he had his way, buses would be still unairconditioned and unheated, drivers and ticket agents would work for nothing, loud children and preachers traveling on buses would be against the law.

“It was so bad around Refugio I could barely see,” Jack said.

“You do realize you came in here just now forty-two minutes late?”

“I didn’t realize it was that bad.”

“Call for anything over thirty minutes. You know the rules.”

“Sorry. I got distracted by the storm, I guess.”

“Bay City’s underwater.”

“Any other reports?”

“No. Except for Galveston. I heard a Texas Red Rocket Flxible got knocked loose from the High Island Ferry. Nobody hurt but a lot of people got wet.”

“Me, too.”

“You look it.”

“Thanks.”

The smell of meat loaf hit him the moment he stepped inside the house. At first he thought he must be imagining it. Then he heard a woman’s voice say, “Jack? Is that you?”

He did not answer.

“I was worried sick that you got lost in that Indianola.”

Loretta came through the kitchen door toward him. He had never been so happy and so sad at the same time in his life.

“You look a mess,” she said, grabbing him and hugging him to her. “Let’s get you out of that wet uniform and into a hot bath.”

Loretta was not dead. It was the woman and the girl who were dead back on the highway near Refugio.

“I thought God was punishing me for what I was thinking about you, Jack, and what I had said to you, Jack. I really did think that was it. God was punishing me by making you die and disappear in an Indianola.”

It had never occurred to Jack that God had anything to do with anything that had happened, was happening or ever would happen to him.

I
t was almost one o’clock in the morning but Jack was not asleep. He had faked sleep so Loretta would finally quit asking him what was wrong besides his having been in an awful storm, almost an Indianola. So he was sitting in the kitchen when the phone rang. He picked it up before the first ring finished.

“Jack, is that you?” It was Slick Carlton of the Texas highway patrol.

“Yeah, Slick,” Jack said.

“Sorry to call you at home and so late but you know about duty and work and all of that.”

Jack said he knew about that.

“We’ve got two hit-and-run victims up on Seventy-seven, one point three miles east of Refugio, Jack. We can’t tell much about them except that they were hit and run over by something, somebody. Adele Lyman, our friend the fool, said
you were through there about then. Did you see anything that might help us figure out what happened?”

“Not a thing, Slick. Not one thing.”

“We can’t tell much when it might have happened because of the storm. That was a doosey wasn’t it?”

“Sure was.”

“Several times I thought I was going to be blown right off the road. I told you an Indianola might get me someday.”

“But it didn’t.”

“Yeah, right. I was lucky this time. The victims were a mother and her daughter. According to what the mother had on her, they were from Fort Worth. She had a driver’s license and she had a wad of money. I can’t imagine what somebody from Fort Worth would be doing out in the middle of the storm like that with a wad of money.”

“Me neither.”

“Well, sorry again to call so late. Thought it was worth a try. You know the names of any of the passengers who were with you?”

“No.”

“Too bad. There’s always a chance one of them might have seen something you didn’t. Go back to sleep.”

“Will do, Slick.”

“I’m not feeling so slick right now, Jack, I can tell you that. I got rainwater up my nose and in my ears and between my toes and up and between every other single part of me. If somebody squeezed me like a sponge I could produce enough water to fill a goodly-sized lake.”

“Yeah.”

Then just after two o’clock that afternoon Sweet Jennings called from the dispatcher’s office. Loretta was at work
because one of her weekend ad takers quit and another was down with a bad cold. Jack was in the bathroom fooling with the bathtub faucets. Both were leaking and he was hoping all that was needed was new washers.

“Mr. Glisan called from Houston just now,” Sweet said to Jack. “He said he and Pharmacy were about to get in a car to drive to Corpus. They want to see you when they get here. Should be tonight about seven or eight.”

“Tonight? They want to see me tonight?”

“That’s what he said.”

“What about?”

“That’s what I asked. ‘What about?’ He wouldn’t say. He talked like you would know, though. Guess not, huh? That figures.”

Jack went back to the bathtub. The washer on the hot-water faucet had melted almost away. He started scraping off its remains.

Mr. Glisan and Pharmacy do not get into a car on a Saturday afternoon to drive to Corpus unless it is important and serious. Obviously it has to do with the two dead Tamales. He hated himself for thinking of them as Tamales. And colored people as Blues. He hated Adele Lyman for doing that to him, although it was probably better than calling them wetbacks and niggers like everybody else did.

What do Pharmacy and Mr. Glisan know? How could they know what happened? They don’t know what happened? If they didn’t know what happened why would they jump in a car on a Saturday afternoon and drive five hours or more to talk to him? Could there have been somebody off in the field watching the whole thing? Could the dead woman’s husband, the dead girl’s father, have been watching? No?
Not him, not anyone? They would have come running out to see about it all?

What were two people from Fort Worth doing out there on that highway in that storm? They must have been driving a car and it broke down. Or got washed out in the storm. Sure. That is what happened. Why didn’t Slick Carlton and his people think of that? Obviously, that is what happened. The Tamale woman and her daughter were driving from Fort Worth to Corpus and the storm got in the way and caused them to stop. So here comes a bus, let’s flag it down. Thank God, one of them probably said. Here comes a bus!