The White Widow: A Novel (22 page)

Now that would soon be over too. He would no longer be a bus driver. What would he be? Jack T. Oliver, child and woman killer. Jack T. Oliver, hit-and-run driver. Jack T. Oliver, sex maniac.

Jack T. Oliver, ex-convict.

Jack T. Oliver, ex-son.

He dug his heels deeper into the sand. He stuck the fingers of both hands down into the sand. He banged his head against the sand several times. He moved his butt back and forth to burrow out a deeper hole. He did the same with his shoulders and legs.

Into the sand. He wanted to go deeper and deeper into the sand, his sand. He wanted to disappear. Where is the water? Where are the waves? Cover me up, water.

Cover me up.

He closed his eyes. He tried to imagine the movie the company had of his killing that woman and her daughter. Black and white. It had to be in black and white. Color was for Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel, Judy Garland and Fred Astaire, Donald O’Connor and Vera Ellen. Black and white was for a woman-obsessed bus driver backing his ACF-Brill IC-41, bus #4107, over helpless Tamale women and children.

He saw the bus hit the girl. She fell down and the right rear tires rolled on top of her, right in her middle. The woman, screaming, ran to her and was hit by the bus and knocked back. Her head hit the concrete. Everything was wet and then red.

He opened his eyes. What he saw was bright and white and blue. Here came a cloud from the right. It was a bright and white cloud that would do no harm to the sky or to any person or thing.

He tried again to dig himself deeper into the sand. But it was no use. He could go no farther.

T
hey told him to come to a room at the Hotel Surf rather than to the bus depot. The Surf was a clean second-level hotel on Corpus Christi beach on the other side of the port. The main hotels were on the west side, the downtown side.

There was a third man in the room with Mr. Glisan and Pharmacy. Jack caught the name as Peck. Mr. Peck of Schoellkopf-Greene Detective Agency Inc. He was short, trim and dressed in a dark brown suit like a cop.

The room was larger than a standard Hotel Milam room. It had two large double beds plus a sitting area with a couch and two or three chairs around a table. There was a movie projector on the table and a portable movie screen unrolled and ready against a far wall.

“Want to see our little movie, Jack?” Mr. Glisan asked after they all sat down.

It was a question Jack had not come prepared to answer.
He had assumed he had to watch the movie. He assumed he had no choice. He assumed it was part of the punishment, the sentence, the end.

“No,” he said. “Not if I don’t have to.”

“I don’t blame you,” Pharmacy said. “It is sickening. I mean sickening. To watch those two helpless people go to their deaths, their bodies crushed, that blood flowing out of them and all over that highway …”

“Forget it, Rex,” Mr. Glisan said. Mr. Glisan was one of the few people in the world of Great Western Trailways who ever called Pharmacy by his right first name. Jack wondered what Pharmacy’s wife and kids called him. He knew he had a wife and three children because the April issue of the company’s employee magazine,
The Thruliner
, had a story about them. The thing Jack remembered most was that Pharmacy’s oldest son was an Aggie, a mechanical engineering student at Texas A&M in College Station. Whenever Jack had thought about going to a four-year college, which had not been very often, he saw himself as an Aggie. They had an ROTC cadet corps that required every student to wear an army uniform with leather boots that went up the leg to the knee, and according to the teachers at Beeville High, tuition and other expenses at Texas A&M were cheaper than at any other bigtime college in Texas.

Mr. Glisan, the Mr. Calm, was clearly in charge of this meeting. Pharmacy was clearly hot-red angry at Jack for what he had done. Mr. Peck showed nothing.

“Do you have anything to say for yourself, Jack, before we go any further?” Mr. Glisan asked.

“About what?”

Pharmacy answered, “About why you violated every rule of the road and this company by backing down an open highway in a rain storm! How you left the scene of an accident
in violation of every human and legal law of this state, this land and this company! You left those people dead, lying there along the road. Don’t you dare say, ‘About what?’ ”

Jack had spent some time on the sand trying to work out what to say at this moment, this moment that he knew was sure to come. Nothing he thought about saying seemed right, now that it had come time to say it. So he said, “Okay.”

“What happened, Jack?” Mr. Glisan said, lowering his voice and the temperature. Mr. Nice Guy.

“If you saw the movie you know what happened,” Jack said. He said it quietly and politely, the way he had always said most things to most people.

“I mean in your mind. What happened that caused you to violate your training? You were one of our best. What happened to you to cause you to do what you did?”

“I don’t have anything to say about my mind.”

“You have money troubles?”

“No, sir.”

“No outstanding debts on your mind?”

“No, sir.”

“Personal problems at home?”

“No, sir.”

“Your marriage all right?”

“It’s fine.”

“You don’t have children, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“Is that the problem?”

“No, sir.”

Pharmacy took over.

“Look, Jack, good men don’t suddenly go wrong. Not just like that, not the way you did. With Sunshine, it was different. He couldn’t keep his pants on, a common problem among men and bus drivers. But you? There has to be a reason, and we want to know what it is.”

Jack looked right at Pharmacy and said, “Why?”

“So, well, you know, so we’ll know what to look for in hiring people.”

“So you’ll never end up with another me?”

“Something like that.”

Jack jerked his head back toward Mr. Glisan and said nothing. There would not have been any point in saying what he wanted to say, what was running coherently and precisely through his mind almost to his mouth and lips. Something along the lines of: Only Paul Madison is better than me and that is only because he’s been there longer. It is impossible to drive a bus better than I can. One mistake does not change that simple fact. What did Sunshine do? Where did he take off his pants?

“Does it have anything to do with Fridays?” Pharmacy asked.

Jack had decided he would not tell Mr. Glisan, Pharmacy, the police or anyone else about Ava. He might have told College if he had turned out to be his Kenny of Kingsville. He might have told him that this White Widow in his Angel Seat was the reason he lost his concentration and his head that night in the storm. But she was no excuse. Nothing like that could ever be an excuse for a Master Operator, the best bus driver in the system except for Paul Madison.

“Nothing at all,” Jack said to Pharmacy. “As I told you in Houston, I had some bad luck a few Fridays in a row.”

“That made late the man who is never late.”

Jack decided to get this thing over with. “Pharmacy, listen. I know what’s coming to me so let’s get on with it.”

“What do you think is coming to you?” Mr. Glisan asked.

“I’m going to be fired, I am going to be charged and tried and probably sent to jail.”

“Why are you so goddamn calm about it?” Pharmacy shouted.

“Because I have already run it all through my mind. I lay out on the sand at Padre all afternoon thinking about it. I saw myself trying to get a job back at Nueces Transportation or selling bait over at Ingleside. I saw myself standing before a judge with a mustache and a long nose who was sending me to Huntsville for ninety-nine years. I saw myself wearing a prison uniform and eating in a big prison cafeteria and walking around a big exercise yard, like in the movies. I know what’s coming. I have seen it all already. So please, let’s get on with it.”

“Nobody can imagine everything that happens before it happens,” Pharmacy said.

“Nobody but me, I guess.”

Both Pharmacy and Mr. Glisan turned toward Mr. Peck, who up to this moment had not said anything except hello.

“Are you willing to sign a statement, confessing to what you did?” he asked.

That was something Jack had not thought about on the beach at Padre. So he said, “No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. What’s the point? You have the movie.”

“What if we didn’t have the movie?”

Peck was a smooth talker. It reminded Jack of the eleventh grade in Beeville when everyone was required to choose a magazine article and make a speech to the class about it. He did his on a reformed embezzler who had come out of prison and helped invent Scotch tape someplace up north, like Minnesota. When Jack opened his mouth to speak, his voice cracked into many pieces and went higher than most girls’. And this caused his legs to shake, like his left one had the first afternoon Ava came aboard his bus. Think of a flannel shirt, the teacher had said. Think about talking like a flannel shirt feels—soft and smooth and soothing. Mr. Peck talked like he was thinking of a flannel shirt.

“You do, so why ask?”

Mr. Peck looked again at Pharmacy and Mr. Glisan, and Jack saw something pass among them that made him think they might not have the movie after all. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said.

“About what?” Pharmacy said.

“I want to see the movie.”

Mr. Peck did not look again at the other two men in the room. Instead, he reached inside a large white envelope and pulled out a black-and-white photograph. He handed it to Jack.

“Do you know this woman?”

Jack took the photo of Ava, his White Widow in the Angel Seat, in both hands. It was a photograph of her from the chest up. She had on a blouse that was light-colored and short-sleeved. Her eyes were open and she was smiling. He wanted to pull her to him and hold her tight against his chest. Nausea raced through him, and he started to sweat. He tried to think about flannel. If he had been standing, there was no telling what would have been happening to his legs and his every other part.

“So you know her all right,” said Mr. Peck, who could not have helped but notice what was happening to Jack.

“I don’t know her name,” Jack mumbled. “I don’t even know her name.”

“The highway patrol found her,” said Mr. Peck. “She told them she was on your bus Friday afternoon during the storm. She was in the Angel Seat. She told them what happened.”

Jack, still staring at the photograph, did not respond.

“She has given them a full statement,” Mr. Peck said.

Jack heard that and he thought about that. And he said, “What did she say happened?”

“You know, the whole story,” Mr. Peck said.

“What did she say the full story was?”

“Nobody knows that better than you do, Jack, goddamn it,” Pharmacy said.

Mr. Peck and the other two, Jack concluded, had absolutely nothing. No movie, no eyewitness account. The White Widow in the Angel Seat had nothing to tell anybody except that he stopped the bus, got out and came back a few minutes later and drove away. She could not have seen the dead woman and her daughter or anything behind the bus. Nobody on that bus could have, but she in particular could not have, from the Angel Seat up front.

“What did she say she saw?” Jack asked, looking right at Mr. Peck.

“I can’t tell you that. It would be in violation of investigative procedures.”

“What is her name?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Who is she besides her name?” Mr. Peck asked.

“I don’t know. Just a bus passenger.”

Just a bus passenger.

Jack felt fine again. He said to Mr. Peck, “Is showing me the movie also a violation of your investigative procedures?”

Mr. Peck’s facial expression, which was all business, did not change. He was obviously used to getting people to confess to things.

Jack was beginning to decide that he, Jack T. Oliver, was not as stupid as Mr. Peck and a lot of other people, including College, thought he was—and even he himself had thought he was.

He decided then and there that he would not say another word. Not one word. If anything else was said in that room at the Hotel Surf about what had happened involving bus #4107 1.3 miles east of Refugio in the middle of that Friday storm, which was almost an Indianola, it was not going to be said by Jack T. Oliver.

So that left the talking to the other three men. They had a lot to say about why they would love to make a deal with Jack. A deal that gave them what they wanted, which was silence and no trouble, in exchange for what they figured Jack wanted, which was to walk out of the Hotel Surf free and clear.

Free and clear to do what? To be what? To go where?