The White Widow: A Novel (26 page)

“There’s been a fire at your house, Mr. Oliver,” said Captain Rhodes.

Jack took off toward his house. College and the police captain were right there on each side of him.

“Fire?” Jack said. “What kind of fire?”

“A bad one, Mr. Oliver,” said the police captain.

The burning smell was his house. They rounded the corner and there was his house. Some smoke was coming out of the roof. But the house was still there. There was no flame. There were several fire trucks and firemen in the street and in the front yard. A lot of other people were standing around, too.

Who are all of these people?

“Maybe we should stop right here for a minute, Jack,” College said. “Let the captain explain what’s happened …”

Yes, yes. Let’s stop right here for a minute. Let the captain explain what’s happened.

The captain explained: “Your wife, Mr. Oliver, was in the house. The firemen got here too late to do her any good. She’s dead, Mr. Oliver.”

She’s dead, Mr. Oliver?

“There are some signs that it might not have been an accident, Mr. Oliver.”

Not an accident?

“She was found with strings of Christmas lights wrapped around her. They began around her neck and went around
her chest and under her arms and around her stomach. We don’t know if she did it herself but it looks that way. It looks like she might have just wrapped those lights around herself and then walked over to an outlet, sat down on the floor and stuck the plug in the socket. She was burned pretty badly.”

She was burned pretty badly.

“The fire probably started from the lights. Looks like they shorted out or something. Maybe you can help us figure it out.”

I warned her about those old lights. I told her that might happen. I told her those lights were bad. I told her to throw them out.

“One of the firemen found this in a baking dish in the kitchen,” said the captain. He handed Jack a folded piece of paper.

“Was it brown?”

“What?”

“The baking dish.”

“Yes, I think so. Why?”

“It was what she always baked the meat loaf in.”

Jack unfolded the piece of paper and read: “It’s all right for you, Jack, but not for me, Jack.” The words were written in black ink in Loretta’s small, tight, perfect handwriting.

“She was holding another note in her right hand,” said Captain Rhodes. “Unfortunately that was where the short was and most of it burned up—she may have even planned it that way. It was a note from you, Mr. Oliver.”

Yes, a note from me, Mr. Oliver. A note that said that I was leaving her and Corpus and that she should go on without me.

Jack blinked his eyes and his mind. “Where is she?” he said.

“At Nueces County Hospital,” said the captain. “She was pretty much gone, but they took her there to see if something
could be done, but there wasn’t anything. We got the word back here awhile ago that she had expired. Do you have a minister?”

Nueces County Hospital. They took her to Nueces County Hospital to see if something could be done.

“We don’t have a minister,” Jack said.

“What about some family or some close friends? We could take you to them afterward.”

Jack looked at Oscar, who was still there under his left arm, and at College, who was still there on his right side.

There was nobody else to take him to.

“Afterward?” Jack said.

“We’re going to want you to identify her, if you don’t mind, Mr. Oliver,” the police captain said. “I regret very much putting you through this, but there is no other way to do it.

“Texas law requires an ID from somebody who is related to or knows the deceased very well.”

What does Texas law require from Master Operators who cause the deaths of wives they are related to and of checkers they don’t know at all?

Jack grabbed Oscar by his right leg and threw him as hard and as far as he could toward the house and walked away with College and Captain Rhodes.

He saw only Loretta’s neck and head; the rest of her body was covered by a white sheet. Most of her hair had been singed off and the skin on her face was coarse red and flaked. Her eyes were closed. There was a dark black ring burned deeply into and around her neck where the string of Christmas lights must have been. It was as if she had been branded by some crazy cowboy.

Jack knew he would spend the rest of his life seeing that
black branded ring and that red face and that sparse head of hair most every time he closed his eyes. If he ever closed them again, that is.

There was an insurance adjuster and an undertaker waiting for Jack when he stepped back out into the hospital hallway. The adjuster, a guy in a brown suit, about thirty-five, told him that most of the fire damage was in the kitchen, where “your missus did it.” He said there was mostly smoke damage elsewhere, and that it wouldn’t take somebody too much elbow grease to clean it up. He gave Jack forty-five dollars in cash to spend a few nights away at a hotel of his choice. Jack told the adjuster that he was through with the house forever, and the insurance company could do whatever it wanted to do with it. Someday he would call or write to tell them where to send whatever money there was from it all.

“I never had anybody just walk away from a house like that before,” said the adjuster. “I’ll have to check out what to do.”

Jack didn’t catch the name of the adjuster but he did the undertaker’s. Morton F. Harper, Jr., of Harper and Sons. He was younger than the adjuster but his suit was darker and he had less hair. Morton F. Harper, Jr., said he was in a position to take “possession of the departed” and to “formulate and facilitate the full and final arrangements for her departure both from here at this hospital and from here on earth.”

Jack told him that would be all right and he gave Morton F. Harper, Jr., the name of Loretta’s parents and their phone number over at Ingleside. He also told him about Alice Armstrong, the All-American Girl.

“I’ve got to go now,” Jack then said to the undertaker, the adjuster, Captain Rhodes and College, who had not said a word to Jack since they left the house for the hospital with Captain Rhodes.

Jack walked out the Buford Street side of the hospital and headed north and west, through downtown toward the bay, the water. He had nothing in his mind except the funeral Harper and Sons would “formulate and facilitate” for Loretta. Jack had already been to that funeral. He had gone there in his mind the afternoon he first thought about Loretta’s dying. He would not go again.

He would not go again.

He came to the corner of Buffalo and Upper Broadway. There above the street, in flashing blue and white neon, was a running greyhound dog. It was the Greyhound bus depot.

He would not go again.

T
here he was, nine months and five days later.

Jack left Pica Chama on time but after only twenty miles and two stops he was twenty-five minutes late.

“Has there ever been one of you to get here when you were supposed to?” asked the angry woman. She was the only passenger waiting for his schedule at San Juan, this tiny town with less than five hundred people, one school, two churches, a café-tavern and a Skelly Oil station where the bus stopped. It wasn’t a regular commission agency, like the ones Adele Lyman in Refugio and others ran for Great Western, because Cannonball Coaches didn’t have official bus depots. They had no places with small porcelain signs hanging out front that sold tickets and took in package express or gave out schedule and fare information. Passengers and express customers had to know when the bus was coming and wait at a certain place and flag it down. In San Juan that certain place was the Skelly station.

The woman passenger at San Juan was white, large, almost middle-aged and sweating in the early July sun, along with everyone else. Jack no longer called white people Dollars and blacks Blues and Mexicans Tamales. That kind of thing didn’t go over well here in New Mexico. He figured it was because there were so many Indians around and the regular people—the white people—were afraid to make up nicknames for the Indians so they didn’t for anybody else either.

“Sorry,” he said to the woman. “Had a mechanical problem, couldn’t be helped.”

“Am I going to miss my connection to Albuquerque?”

“Probably.”

“There aren’t any wars going on now. There’s no excuse for this anymore.”

The woman was right. But this was a routine normal happening, a routine normal day in Jack T. Oliver’s new slow-moving, awful life driving a bus for Cannonball Coaches. The breakdown this morning was caused by a leak in the airbrake hose line in this awful worn-out bus, a twenty-one-passenger Pony Cruiser. He had fixed the leak with black tape many times but it never held for long. Randy Wilkinson, the owner of Cannonball as well as a one-man real estate business in Santa Fe, would have been more than willing to buy a new hose if anybody in New Mexico or anywhere else in the world had such a thing. Pony Cruisers weren’t much better new than old. They were up-front-engine hard-riders that clanked and whammed and roared and rattled and whined like an old machine shop no matter how many years or miles they had on them. Jack had always seen the Pony Cruiser as not much of a bus. Small, inexpensive to buy, cheap on gas and oil. They had done fairly well during the war because buses were scarce, and for some reason Pony Cruiser, which was headquartered in a Michigan town
named Kalamazoo, was able to keep its manufacturing lines up and working. But once the war was over and GMC, ACF-Brill, Beck Flxible and Aerocoach got back into full civilian production, Pony Cruiser lost much of its business and before long was forced to close down. What they left behind was a couple hundred of these miserable little buses being operated by small bus lines around the country who had no place to turn for air-brake hose lines and other spare parts when something went wrong.

“Will you try to step on it and at least try to make my connection at Santa Fe?” the woman asked Jack as she walked past him. Jack had not gotten out of his seat and helped her on the bus. That kind of thing was not required on Cannonball. All the driver did was open the door. It was up to the passenger to get on with baggage or whatever. Cannonball also did not issue tickets. It was all cash fares. The woman handed him exact change—two one-dollar bills and a fifty-cent piece—for the one-way passage to Santa Fe.

“Yes, ma’am,” he told her but he didn’t mean it. He spoke to her in a listless tone that matched the way he felt and the way he slumped behind the wheel of the Pony Cruiser. “No promises, though. Trailways won’t wait for the likes of us.”

No promises about anything, lady. Not even that we’ll make it out of this gas station before something else on this bus breaks or cracks or boils over.

He closed the bus door, revved the motor and eased the bus back out onto the gravel road, which was dusty and rutted. The engine was there under a hatch right next to him, which meant the noise and the heat were worse than they would have been had the motor been somewhere else. Great Western’s ACF-Brills’ motors, of course, were pancaked underneath the center of the bus, while GMC, Aerocoach, Flxible and most of the others now were pushers, with the
motors in back. Beck was the only one left besides Pony Cruiser that put the motor under a hatch right up alongside the driver.

When Jack left Corpus Christi he had no intention of doing anything like what he was doing, driving a bus for Cannonball Coaches. He had no intentions at all. He had simply gone inside the Greyhound depot on Upper Broadway just like a Mr. Abernathy or any regular passenger, walked up to the ticket counter and bought a ticket to Amarillo, in the Texas panhandle. Why Amarillo? No particular reason. It just came to him when the Greyhound agent asked him where he would like to go. He had no ideas about settling in Amarillo; it just seemed like a place to go, to stop and take a breath and get his bearings. He put some of the insurance adjuster’s forty-five dollars on the counter and said, “Oneway to Amarillo.” Jack had never been out there, but he had heard from other Great Western drivers about Amarillo and the flat, dry land around it. The only other thing he knew about Amarillo was that U.S. Highway 66, what drivers from there called the Real Highway, went through there on the way to California.