The White Widow: A Novel (20 page)

Here comes a bus.

Pharmacy and Mr. Glisan could be coming about something else.

Don’t be stupid, Jack. What else could it be?

Woodsboro. The Woodsboro agent could have reported him for not stopping. Yes, that is it!

Oh, come on, Jack. Would the head of operators and the division superintendent drive all the way from Houston to Corpus to chew out a driver who missed a stop in a storm, almost an Indianola?

I guess not.

He told Loretta he had to go to the depot to finish some paperwork from the Friday storm. A tree limb on the road near El Campo had punctured a tire, he said. There were some questions about it, he said.

It was clear to Jack that Loretta did not believe him. It was clear she thought he was going out to meet his girlfriend, whoever and wherever she was. For reasons he could not understand, she was very peaceful about it at first. Maybe thinking he had died in the storm had changed her. Whatever,
she was peaceful about his leaving the house this Saturday night, something he had seldom done except to drive a run.

Her peacefulness ended at the front door. “What’s her name, Jack?” she said in a voice full of war.

“Ava Gardner,” he replied.

“That’s not funny, Jack.” Loretta was not a violent person but he knew that if she had been, he would have been hit over the head with a lamp or a skillet or a hatchet or some other heavy or sharp object.

He drove the Dodge first to the Tarpon Inn. He didn’t want a beer or some peanuts or anything in particular. His only thought was about College. Maybe he would be there; maybe he really was smarter than every other bus driver. Maybe they would have something to say to each other that would matter. Something that would help. Maybe he could be his Kenny of Kingsville.

College was there, all right. So was Senator, the local drivers’ union president, and Jack walked into the middle of a discussion at the bar about politics, the single most boring subject there was to Jack. Put Senator with Willow and a few drunk bus drivers and shrimpers and words flew. It took a few minutes for Jack to catch up to the fact that somebody, probably Willow, had started naming names of people at the Corpus Christi city hall, the state capitol in Austin, as well as with President Eisenhower and the Congress in Washington, who were Reds. Senator was hot.

“You are slandering good people, that is what you are doing,” he was saying when Jack took his place on a stool next to College, who seemed, as usual, to be listening but not participating, because all of these people were beneath him in some other world.

“They’re out to take over the schools and the water,” said a guy at the bar Jack did not recognize.

“That is absolute grease-monkey shit!” screamed Senator.

“That’s not what I heard on the radio!” Willow screamed back.

“The people on the radio wouldn’t know grease-monkey shit if they stepped in a barrel of it,” said Senator.

“They know a lot more than some damned stupid bus driver!”

Jack motioned at College to join him somewhere else. Jack took his Lone Star and went over to a table in a corner as far away from the bar as he could get. And in a minute or two, College, his beer in hand, sat down across from him.

“I’m not even sure I know what a Red is,” Jack said to College.

“That makes you even with every one of those people yelling about them over there,” said College. He made no effort to hide his disgust.

“What are they?”

“What?”

“Reds … Communists.”

College, for the second time in Jack’s presence, smiled. “They are people who think people like you should run things.”

“Bus drivers?”

“Yep. And carpenters and plumbers and salesclerks and ditchdiggers and steelworkers and roughnecks.”

“I can barely run a bus.”

“I thought you were one of our elite.”

“Our what?”

“Our best.” And College smiled again, but this time Jack realized there was no difference between his smile and his frown. They both expressed disgust.

“You ever been in serious trouble before, College?” Jack asked.

“None of your business, Jack.”

“I’m not prying.”

“You’re prying.”

“I think I’m in trouble and I want to talk about it.”

“Not to me, Jack. Not to me.” College grabbed his bottle of beer and stood up. “I can’t help you.”

“You’re smarter than me.”

College leaned down right into Jack’s face. “If I was smarter than you, then I wouldn’t be driving a bus with you and Sunshine and all the rest.”

He straightened up and headed back to the bar.

Clearly Jack had not found his Kenny of Kingsville.

“Sunshine?” Jacked yelled after College. “What about him?”

“I hear he’s in trouble, too.”

Jack arrived at the bus depot just after seven. Mr. Glisan and Pharmacy were already there, sitting in the district passenger agent’s empty office upstairs. They were waiting for him.

“You-all made good time,” Jack said when he walked in.

“Pharmacy did the driving,” Mr. Glisan said. “As they say, he never met a floorboard he didn’t like.”

Mr. Glisan was behind the small desk in the room. Pharmacy pulled up two wooden chairs for him and Jack. The chairs were brown and looked like they had come from a drugstore. A Rexall pharmacy? The Corpus DPA was named Bill Tillman. His job was to keep the commissioned agents happy and serviced with tickets, express waybills, posters, tariffs and small porcelain bus depot signs to hang outside. There were stacks and boxes and envelopes of all of these
kinds of things all over the office. It was a messy place. Tillman had started as a Dallas–San Angelo driver many years ago.

What if I became a DPA, Ava dear? Would you tell me your name and love me then?

We’ll just have to see, Jack dear.

It was clear from the second he walked in what Mr. Glisan and Pharmacy had come to talk about.

“There’s a problem, Jack,” Mr. Glisan said. “We’ve come to talk to you about a problem.”

“Have you got an idea of what it might be?” Pharmacy asked. “Any idea at all?”

“No,” Jack said. “Not at all. None.”

“We lost two checkers last night outside Refugio,” Glisan said.

“Checkers?”

“They were contract employees of Schoellkopf-Greene, a detective agency out of Fort Worth. We hired them.”

The faces of those two people came again to Jack. That woman and that girl were checkers? He thought he might not be able to breathe.

“What’s wrong there, fella?” Pharmacy asked. “You look kind of strange. Or are you sick?”

“I’m fine,” Jack said. What had he done or shown on his face to make Pharmacy say that? “What do you mean you lost ’em?”

“They’re dead, Jack. That’s really losing ’em, wouldn’t you agree?”

Jack said he would so agree.

Mr. Glisan said: “It happened during that storm yesterday afternoon. They were put out there to hop your schedule to Corpus and then come back on the five-thirty. They were found dead along the side of the highway last night. The
highway patrol said there were tire marks all over one of them.”

“Heavy tire marks,” Pharmacy said. “From a truck or maybe even a bus. The rain washed most of it away, so they can’t tell for sure.”

“Did the highway patrol call you, Jack?” asked Mr. Glisan. “They said they were going to.”

“Yes, sir. They called me.”

“What in the hell did you tell them?” Pharmacy said.

Mr. Glisan and Rex Al Barney were famous in the company for their one-two. Pop, goes Glisan, pow, goes Pharmacy. Take that, Operator Smith. Take that, Operator Jones.

“I told them I didn’t see a thing. I could barely see the highway, if the truth was known.”

“The truth is what this is all about, Jack.”

Take that, Master Operator Jack T. Oliver.

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you see them out there on the highway, Jack?” Mr. Glisan asked. He said it quietly, as if he were asking directions to the First State Bank of Wharton.

“No, sir,” Jack said, just as quietly.

“Dead or alive,” Pharmacy said. “Never mind what you might have told the highway patrol, did you see them, dead or alive?”

“No, I did not.”

“They would have been trying to wave you down,” Glisan said.

“There was nobody out on the highway in the kind of weather we had out there yesterday. It was about as close to being an Indianola as it gets without being one, you know.”

“I know, I know. It must have been hard to see,” said Pharmacy.

“It was.”

Glisan said, “Looking at your trip report, Jack, it would seem as if you came by where these two people died at about five-ten or so. You were running late into and out of Victoria but you lost a lot more time after that.”

“Fridays. You’d already been having a problem with Fridays,” Pharmacy said.

“Nobody could have driven a schedule on time in that yesterday,” Jack said.

Glisan again: “They must have died just about the time you drove by. The highway patrol figures it happened between five and five-thirty. Are you sure you didn’t see anybody out there trying to flag you down?”

“I am sure.”

Now Pharmacy with the pow: “This is the time, the exact moment, to tell the truth, Jack.”

“Why would I lie about something like this? If I saw two people trying to flag me down, I would have stopped and picked them up. If they were already dead when I came by, then I probably wouldn’t have been able to see them lying alongside the road because of the storm.”

“Dead people don’t flag down buses, you are sure enough right about that.” Pharmacy scooted his chair right up to Jack’s. He leaned his big body and face over at Jack just like College had done at the Tarpon Inn. “Did you run down those two people, Jack?”

“No.”

“Did you kill those two people, Jack?”

“No.”

“What’s gone wrong with your Fridays, Jack?”

“Nothing. A string of bad luck or something. I am not in charge of storms. Somebody else like God or Jesus is in charge of storms.”

“You are in charge of your bus, Jack. We pinned a gold
badge on you the other night that said to everybody you were the best we have in charge of our buses. The best we have do not run over and kill people and then lie about it.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Run over people or lie about it?”

“Both.”

“You run over people maybe by accident, you lie about it because you don’t want to lose your job, your ass and go to jail.”

Jack T. Oliver, Master Operator, felt nausea in his throat. But he also felt good about himself. He had, until this point at least, done very well for himself. He had stood his ground against Pop and Pow, Pow and Pop. He had not given in. He had not split or cracked or broken.

They were checkers! That woman and the girl were checkers!

Mr. Glisan, looking down in front of him at a folder on the desk, said: “Let me tell you about the two people who died, Jack. Anna Phyllis Fontes, age forty-two, a former probation officer in Fort Worth. Her husband, José Felix Fontes, is a sergeant in the Fort Worth Police Department. They have five children. One of them, Marguerite Susannah Fontes, age fourteen, was the other victim yesterday. She was a student at Birdville High School outside Fort Worth. She wanted to be a police officer like her father.”