The White Widow: A Novel (28 page)

The next town, a place called Lambville, was larger, with a population of more than one thousand. Here Jack had to leave the highway, turn right for a block, take a left and drive down the main street for a block, and then head back to the left to the highway. The designated flag-stop place was Lambville Rexall at the second downtown intersection. There were usually passengers here, and he saw two people with two suitcases standing in front of the drugstore as he approached. The Cannonball Coaches way of picking up passengers wouldn’t be good or fast enough this time.

Jack stopped the bus, moved the gearshift into neutral, jerked back the emergency brake, opened the bus door and leaped out. He grabbed the two suitcases and came close to carrying the two passengers, an elderly Mexican couple, onto the bus himself. Less than a minute had gone by from the time he stopped the bus.

Back on the highway a few seconds later, he looked at the woman passenger in the second row on the left. She was smiling at him.

He would have smiled back but he didn’t have the time to waste.

According to his watch, it was 11:53. He now had only twelve minutes left. Normally the trip into Santa Fe from Lambville the leisurely Cannonball way took Jack twenty minutes or more. That would not be good enough this morning. He had a connection to make.

I have a connection to make!

He kept the speed as high as he dared, usually ten or fifteen miles above the limit, and he geared up and down and gunned and pedaled and honked. Joe “Rocket” Ridgley would have been proud of him. He came up to a car turning left, blocking traffic from behind. He squeezed the bus by on the right, with only a few inches to spare between the bus
and a drainage ditch. He crowded a yellow light at the intersection with the road from Taos. And as he entered the city limits of Santa Fe, he rolled through a stop sign without coming to a full stop.

Suddenly his imagining came back. As he turned down Smith Street in Santa Fe he saw instead Main Avenue in Houston. He felt the hum of an ACF-Brill IC-37 under him instead of the wham and whine of this Pony Cruiser. He felt he weighed 186 instead of 210. And he saw himself dressed again in starched and pressed gray, with that gold badge on his hat instead of on the dashboard. He was again, in his imagination, On Time Jack Oliver, Master Operator.

His real watch said 12:03. He was now at Water Street, only a block from the bus depot at 126 Water in the center of downtown Santa Fe, New Mexico.

You’re all right, little bus
, he said to the Pony Cruiser.

He whipped the little bus into the depot loading area and saw the sight he wanted to see. The 12:05 Mesa Verde Trailways southbound was sitting there. It was an ACF-Brill IC-41 Silversides Thruliner with its heavy motor running but with the door still open. Jack braked his bus to a dramatic stop right behind it, opened his bus door and yelled to the woman in the second row and his other four passengers: “Santa Fe!”

For the first time in a long time, he then got out of his seat and helped the passengers disembark.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said the woman as she hurried down and off and past him. “I mean it. I wasn’t sure if we were going to die or make it but it was going to be one or the other. You are a terrific bus driver. I’m sorry for what I said earlier.”

Jack smiled and saluted, as if he had a cap to put his right hand to.

The woman ran toward the Trailways bus, which resembled the buses Jack drove between Houston and Corpus. The Mesa Verde Trailways driver came out of the drivers’ ready room at that moment. Jack waved at him, but the Trailways man only nodded. None of the mainline drivers, Greyhound as well as Trailways, paid much attention to any of the feeder lines’ drivers.

I’m as good as you, buddy! Better even!

Jack stepped back up inside his little bus and sat down behind the steering wheel. He reached down to the dashboard and picked up his Master Operator’s badge. He held it tightly in his right hand and he closed his eyes,

For the first time in nine months and five days he did not see the faces of dead people.

He saw himself in full bus-driver livery, standing with Mr. Abernathy. They were looking at a mountain that had big faces of Theodore Roosevelt and three other presidents chiseled into it.

Jack looked with Mr. Abernathy back to a road where an ACF-Brill IC-37 was sitting with its motor idling. Jack knew this bus. It was #4208. She had a slight vibration at the low speeds and the steering was a bit stiff turning to the left but she was a magnificent piece of equipment.

“All aboard, Mr. Abernathy,” Jack said.

“Where are you going today?” Mr. Abernathy asked.

“To the Next Town or Across America—to Inairi, Vidauri, Refugio, Woodsboro, Sinton, Odem, Calallan, Corpus Christi and the Rio Grande Valley.”

“Oh my, that’s too bad. I’m packed for the other direction.”

“That
is
too bad. Well, then, I’ll see you next time.”

“Yes, that will be fine,” said Mr. Abernathy. “I’ll just wait here with Mr. Jefferson and the others until my bus comes.”

“I always have a seat for you, Mr. Abernathy,” Jack said, as he waved good-bye, climbed up into #4208 and slid into the driver’s seat.

He hit the lever to close the door and looked up into the rearview mirror.

There she was. My Ava. Sitting in the fifth-row left-side window seat. She was wearing the light cream-colored blouse, the same one she had on that afternoon they first met.

She was looking out at Mount Rushmore at Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Teddy Roosevelt, Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Washington.

Your face is as beautiful from the side as it is from the front, Ava dear.

Thank you, Jack dearest.

Could you live in New Mexico, my Ava?

I can live wherever you are, my Jack.

He doubled-clutched, gently pushed the gearshift lever into first and revved the motor slightly. Then he eased up gradually on the clutch, turned the steering wheel smoothly and forcefully to the left and moved on down the road.

There, like Refugio, he was again.

Jim Lehrer worked as a Trailways ticket agent in Victoria, Texas, while attending Victoria College in the 1950s.
White Widow
, his tenth novel, is based on that experience. Lehrer has also written two books of nonfiction and three plays. He is the anchor and executive editor of
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
on PBS and lives with his wife, Kate, in Washington, D.C. They have three daughters.