The White Widow: A Novel (6 page)

The lights were out. Frank Sinatra was singing “Something’s Gotta Give” on the record player. There were five songs on each side of the 45.

“Are you sure you’re up to this, Jack?” Loretta whispered. It was another one of their jokes.

“I’m sure,” he said.

They were in their bed, they were kissing hard and his hands were caressing her body. She smelled of a perfume with a French name she had bought for herself last year. Her lips were large and moist. How she felt to his touch was all he knew of how a woman’s body feels. It was the sensation of touching something soft and smooth and loose.

Then in the darkness of that room and of his mind came the face of that White Widow in the fifth-row left-side window seat.

The lips against his got smaller and tighter. The skin under his hands got silkier and tighter.

His nostrils suddenly were filled with the fragrance of an expensive bath soap, as if she had just stepped out of a white porcelain bathtub with legs on all four corners …

“You are definitely all right, Jack,” Loretta said when they were finished. “I don’t think you have ever been more all right, Jack, Jack.”

He got out of bed to clean himself up. He went to the bathroom.

He could not remember ever feeling better or worse. He was not sure he could ever do this again. He was not sure he could ever again make love to Ava with Loretta.

It wasn’t fair to either of them.

H
e got a cup of coffee in the depot café, kidded around with the waitress and the cashier, and then went back through the terminal to the drivers’ ready room. It was 7:45
A.M.
Sunday. He had thirty minutes before his run to Houston, a continuation of a through bus from McAllen, would be getting a first call.

She was not in the waiting room. It was ridiculous to think she would be there. She had had a one-way ticket. Even if she did go back to Victoria, it would have been a dream kind of coincidence if she had been there to take Jack’s next schedule back. Great Western Trailways ran six schedules a day, every day, from Corpus to Victoria. There had been eight chances for her to go back to Victoria since she came down with him on Friday. She might have returned on the very next one, even.

Baggage. Did she have any baggage on Friday? No, she did not. So that meant for sure she was already back in Victoria.
If that was where she was going. Of course, she could have stayed right there in Corpus. Maybe she was returning from a quick trip to Victoria. Yes, yes, that was probably it. She lived in Corpus.

Where exactly? And how? And with whom? Would she recognize him if they accidentally ran into each other at the Piggly Wiggly or at the movies? Would she know him in civilian clothes?

Uniforms really do change people. And in more ways than just how they look.

He was pleasant and professional to each of the eighteen passengers who boarded his bus. But when he took each ticket, each elbow, when he smiled each smile, he had half an eye back toward the depot door, up the street and everywhere else, hoping that maybe, just maybe, she would come.

He also had a drunk to contend with. He was a Dollar, a white man, in his thirties, unshaven, smelly and dirty. Jack had twice told him that he could not ride the bus to Woodsboro this morning.

“Sleep it off,” he said to the man, “and catch the next schedule.” Great Western had a policy against “providing passage to intoxicated persons” but left the enforcement to the drivers. Ticket agents were instructed to sell tickets to anyone who could stand up at a counter with money in his hand. The individual driver would decide if that ticket was going to get the customer anywhere on a bus.

Jack was strict about drunks. Not because of their nuisance and noise but because they might get sick and throw up or they might get filled up and urinate or defecate in their pants. The resulting smell and awfulness from that kind of thing on a closed-up bus full of passengers was devastating.

“Let me on this bus or I’ll cut you a new one,” said the drunk in one last try. Jack had just been given his last call on
the PA system and was now ready to go. The man was standing in front of the bus door.

“Out of my way, buster,” said Jack.

“I’ll slice you up like a tomato.”

“Move.”

“I’m going to Woodsboro.”

“You ain’t going nowhere right now.”

Jack stepped toward the man. He saw the man’s right hand go into his pants pocket. There was the flash of a knife blade. Jack grabbed the man’s wrist with his right hand, twisted it around his back and slammed the man face-first against the bus. The knife fell to the concrete and the man shouted, “Jesus!”

Jack shouted at James Birney, the porter, who was at the rear of the bus loading in some last-minute express, “Call a cop.”

The Corpus Christi police station was only three blocks away, over on Chaparral. In a couple of minutes a squad car with two officers was there.

Two minutes after that Jack had his ACF-Brill IC-41, #4110, in gear and was easing her out of the depot onto Lower Broadway toward Victoria and Houston. He had a schedule to keep.

At the first red light he glanced in the inside rearview mirror. The fifth-row, left-side window seat was empty. He hated it that Ava had not been there to see what he had done this morning, to see him at his best.

Oh, how brave you are, Jack dearest, she would have said.

All in a day’s work, my sweet, he would have replied.

He felt that aching in his body again. He could hardly wait until he got out of the city traffic, again onto the highway, the open road, so he could think about her.

Jack saw Paul M. Madison, known and loved by Jack and others by his nickname, Progress, as one of the many pleasures of going to work each day for Great Western Trailways. Progress Paul Madison. Paul was in the first group of drivers to make Master Operator officially, and he was one in every way that could be defined unofficially as well. He was number three on the seniority roster of all 367 Great Western Trailways drivers, having started in 1934 as a driver for South Texas Coaches, one of Great Western’s many early predecessors. His first run was San Antonio to Victoria, and it had been his ever since. Five days a week for more than twenty years he had driven that 234 miles down U.S. Highway 287 in the morning to Victoria and had driven back that evening to San Antonio. When he started, the buses were motor-out-front models and the roads were mostly gravel and mud. Now the bus he drove was a twenty-nine-passenger Flxible Clipper with a Buick pusher engine in the back, and the highway was a solid two lanes of concrete or blacktop. He was known by all kinds and ages of people in the little towns along the route—Nursey, Thomaston, Cuero, Westhoff, Smiley, Nixon, Pandora, Stockdale, Sutherland Springs and Lavernia. The standard story was that Paul M. Madison had looked at more snapshots of children and grandchildren, received more fruitcakes and chocolate chip cookies from little old ladies, more cigars from new fathers, and more proposals of marriage and love from young women than any other driver in the entire Great Western Trailways system. When the company started its “Courtesy Great of the Month” program several years ago, Paul was the first employee chosen. The story in the company magazine,
The Thruliner
, said Paul Madison “stands for treating our customers with the courtesy and respect they deserve and he lives it and demonstrates it every workday behind the wheel of a Great Western motor coach.”

He was as important to Jack as he was to any passenger. Jack adored him for setting a terrific example for him and all the other drivers, but it was the delightful man’s company that he really treasured. Jack just loved being with Paul Madison.

“Well, On Time Jack, how are you?” he said this morning. “Tell me a good dirty Late story.”

Paul was the one who had given Jack his nickname, On Time. He was the one who gave most of the drivers their nicknames: Ice Cream Jackson because he ate little else but ice cream, Snake Eyes Streetman because he had a pair, Haircut Taylor because he always needed one, College Tony Mullett because he acted and talked like he was smart and superior.

Paul got his own nickname, Progress, because of an expression he used a lot. “That’s progress, you see” was what he said to sum up most everything that came from company officials in Dallas and most everything he read in the newspapers or heard somewhere, most of which made no sense.

Jack had no good dirty Late stories except the one about the drunk back in Corpus and he did not want to tell that one. So he only smiled at Paul, who was short and squat. His gray uniform shirt and darker gray gabardine trousers were not quite as well pressed and sharp as Jack’s. They used to be, but Paul had let himself go a bit in recent years. “All that dude stuff is for you main-line dandies,” he had said. “That’s progress, you see.”

They were at a table in the Victoria depot’s coffee shop, the one reserved for Operators Only, back off in a corner. Paul had driven his schedule in from San Antonio. Jack, who had not made up the time lost by the scrape with the drunk, arrived in Victoria six minutes late, but he was now on a
Hold-for-Connection order from the Houston dispatcher. The connecting schedule from Beeville, Alice and Laredo had blown a tire the other side of Goliad. It was being changed, and Jack was told to hold for about fifteen minutes because there were six passengers going on to Houston.

It meant he and Progress Paul would have some time to talk. Unfortunately, Sunshine Ashley, a strange man who drove the Port Lavaca turnaround, was also unloading his bus out on the loading dock. He would be joining them there at the table in a few minutes. Progress had given him the name Sunshine because there wasn’t any in his life. Or at least, from the forlorn grimace that was always on his face, there didn’t appear to be any.

Jack wanted very much to tell Progress about the woman on his bus Friday. He wanted very much to tell somebody about her, about it, about what it was doing to him.

“Have you ever had a thing with a woman passenger?” Jack asked Paul within seconds after he sat down. He felt some warmth in his face as the words came out. He was sure Paul saw it. Paul did not miss a thing.

“It’s none of your business, it’s against the rules and the answer is no. Not since I got married, which was twenty-seven years ago. The real answer is, Don’t do it, Jack, even if she’s a White Widow.”

Jack wasn’t sure where the expression “White Widow” came from but he had heard it from his first day with Great Western. It meant any mysterious, beautiful, perfect woman passenger who was probably not available. A black widow only better.

“She’s a real White Widow,” Jack said. “She really is.”

“There is no such thing, Jack. It’s all up here,” Progress said, putting his right hand to his head. “And down here,” he said, putting his left hand down on his groin.

“The checkers got a guy on Amarillo–Wichita Falls last week. He had a White Widow, some Presbyterian preacher’s wife, who was meeting him during the rest stop at Childress. They were going off and getting more than a rest. Let that be a lesson to you.”