The White Widow: A Novel (2 page)

There she sat, looking out the window to her left. There he stood, up in the front of the bus, facing her and the other passengers. He was ready to make his welcome-aboard announcement.

A sour splash of his vegetable-soup-with-saltines lunch rushed into his mouth. His right leg started shaking uncontrollably and he felt sweat on his face and on the top of his head under his uniform cap.

It was the White Widow. She wasn’t even looking at him. But there she was.

Forget the announcement, Jack. Just go over and sit down behind the steering wheel and drive this thing away from here before you throw up or pass out or do something else really awful.

But what if there’s a company checker on here? Not giving a welcome-aboard announcement at a major terminal is a Master Operator mark-down. This was no time for something like that.

He was due to get his Master Operator badge in four weeks, and he had already imagined with Kodak clarity what it would look like on the front of his uniform cap, how passengers and other people would react when they saw it up there. He was great at imagining things before they happened. It was one of the reasons he was such a good bus driver, because it helped him anticipate traffic, weather and other hazards of the road in time to avoid tragedies and other problems.

“Good afternoon, folks,” he said. The words came out cleanly and that stopped the nausea. He had always liked his voice; he thought it had a nice deep Master Operator kind of tone to it. He hoped it sounded that way to her.

She was still looking out of the window, not at him.

His leg stopped shaking.

“Our travel time to Corpus Christi this afternoon will be two hours and five minutes. My name is Jack. Jack Oliver. Jack
T.
Oliver. If I can assist you in any way or do anything to make your trip more comfortable, please give me a holler. We are glad you have chosen to ride with us today on Great Western Trailways. We call ourselves The Easiest Travel on Earth and that’s what we are. Thanks. Now let’s hit the road for Corpus, the Valley and points south.”

He gave a smart salute to the bill of his uniform cap, performed a half-military about-face and lunged in two strides into the driver’s seat. He gunned the motor, released with his left hand the emergency brake lever that came up from the floor on the left side of his seat, double-clutched and with his right hand put the bus in first gear by gently shoving the round black knob of the from-the-floor stick shift forward and to the left.

Safety regulations required that he look into the inside rearview mirror to make sure all passengers were seated before leaving a terminal. Unless there were standees, which there were not today. Only twenty-six of the forty-one passenger seats were occupied.

She moved her head to the front, toward him. He caught her eyes. Was that a smile? Did she smile at me?

Yes, I think she did. She did. I swear she did.

He let out the clutch, eased the bus up to the sidewalk at the edge of the driveway, made sure no pedestrians or cars were coming and turned the steering wheel steadily and powerfully
to the left. The bus glided onto the street, Main Street. It was a maneuver he had made hundreds of times but this time he felt a special sense of power and accomplishment, as if his extraordinary skills were on display on a stage. That was because of her. He wondered if she was watching him now. Did she see how he handled this big machine?

He peeked up into the mirror. She was looking out the window again. But he had the feeling she did so just then, just a whiff of a second before he looked at her. She did not want him to know she was watching him.

He was sure of it.

He had to make another left turn in two blocks at Commercial Street to head back to the west to Moody Street, which was U.S. Highway 59-77 through town. This time he would try to keep a good eye on her.

Now that was really stupid, Jack. Why in the world would a beautiful, sophisticated woman like this, a White Widow, want to watch a simple, dumb bus driver make a simple, dumb turn to the left?

But maybe she does realize how hard it is to turn one of these wheels, particularly this one. Bus #4101 had always had a stiff steering mechanism. He had written it up on the Trip Report several times, but it was still there. The easiest turner was #4207, which he often drove the other way, coming northeast out of Corpus.

There was no way to account for the differences in buses. They could come out of the same factory one right after the other and be completely different to handle, not only in the way they steered but in their braking, pickup, steadiness on the road and several other things. On the steering, they were talking about putting power steering on the new buses, but that was probably still years away. For Great Western, at least. Greyhound already had a few of their new Supercoaches
with air-assisted power steering on them. Turning one of these Great Western ACF-Brills required perfect coordination between speed and power. He knew several guys who never made it out of probation onto the extra board because they simply could not get the hang of it. They had to give up on being an intercity bus driver.

She must know this. She must know she is in the hands of somebody special, somebody who is also trim and firm and sharp and polished in his uniform.

Oh, don’t be stupid, Jack T. Oliver. Even if you’re not fat anymore, you’re still only a bus driver. Nobody but their mothers and wives and little boys see bus drivers as anybody special.

But she had smiled. He was sure she had smiled.

It Happened One Night
came back to him like it was showing on a large screen with full sound right there in front of him. It was a movie he saw when he was a kid that made him realize for the first time that there was a lot more to buses than he thought. Claudette Colbert, an heiress on the outs with her rich father, ran away on a Greyhound bus. She met up with Clark Gable, a newspaper reporter who had just been fired, and love bloomed, despite their very different backgrounds and stations in life. That was all great, but what also caught Jack’s attention was the way the bus driver, played by Ward Bond, tells Gable to shape up or get a sock in the nose.

The light was green at the intersection at Main and Commercial and there was no oncoming traffic. But a black Ford had stopped and was now waiting at the red light to cross on Commercial from the west, to Jack’s left. This meant Jack had to judge the turning distance exactly right or he would either take off the front of the Ford or run the right front tires of the bus over the curb on the far right side.

Watch this, White Widow! What is your name? You know mine now. I told you, along with the others, just a minute ago. Were you listening? I am Jack T. Oliver. Who are
you
?

Claudette Colbert? Nope. You know who you look like? Ava Gardner. That’s what I’ll call you. Ava.

Hi, Ava. Are you watching me?

He waited a beat too long before whipping the steering wheel all the way to the left. The bus missed the car but the right front tire scraped against the curb. It was only a slight brushing. Only a small mark would be left on the tire. There was no danger, no problem. It would not even have to be reported.

Did Ava notice? Once he had come out of the turn and straightened out the bus he looked in the mirror back at her. She was gazing out the window.

He shot his eyes around to the other passengers sitting behind. Did any of them see or feel what happened?

Nobody seemed to. Nobody looked scared or worried or upset or annoyed. Everybody looked perfectly happy to be on #4101, Great Western Trailways’ 3:15
P.M.
bus from Victoria to Corpus Christi, a Silversides Thruliner, from Houston to Brownsville in the Rio Grande Valley.

But, my God, let this be a lesson, Jack T. Oliver. You would never have scraped that tire if you hadn’t been thinking about that beautiful woman, that Ava. Never. A good lesson. Master Operators do not allow anything to distract them, Jack T. Oliver. Particularly beautiful women.

But this was more than just a beautiful woman. Oh, so very, very much, much more. More. She really was a White Widow, the bus driver’s ultimate dream woman.

Are you watching me drive this bus, White Widow Ava?

He made another left turn onto Moody Street with no problem and then he was on the highway. Five blocks of
houses later he was across the Guadalupe River Bridge, past the Circle Bar 12 Paradise Motel, the Conoco station and Fred and Larry’s Automotive Service out on the open road.

In a few minutes and miles U.S. Highways 59 and 77 parted, 59 running straight west through Goliad, Beeville, Mathis and Alice to Laredo. Highway 77 turned south toward Corpus Christi.

Jack made the turn with 77. He whistled some air out of his mouth and shook his shoulders slightly. Here he was again, out on the road at full speed. On the open road at full speed. Again, again, after each stop in each town, it happened to him day after day, run after run. No other experiences in his life electrified him, aroused him, thrilled him the same way.

He eased the speed up to fifty and then to fifty-five. Greyhound had their GMC Supercoaches and all of the fancy rest, but nothing was as good as an ACF-Brill. The Hall-Scott engine pancaked in the middle of the bus gave it stability and heft in the center. The GMCs were pushers, with their motors in the back. It made them slower on hills and wobbly in crosswinds. No bus held the road like an ACF-Brill.

The bus felt good, sounded good. He could feel the soft, slight, solid vibration of the Hall-Scott engine in the steering wheel. Already more than six years out of the ACF-Brill factory in Philadelphia, #4101, according to the driver’s Trouble Log, showed only minor problems, in addition to its stiff steering. A windshield wiper had gone off the track, two inside lights had shorted out, the air conditioning had been slow to kick in twice, an inside dual tire on the left rear had been blown by a nail. Nothing serious. It was a fine piece of equipment and it made Jack feel good to be its driver, its captain.

The White Widow, his Ava, was still looking out the window. Or were her eyes closed? It was hard to tell for sure.

Look this way! Look at me!

Jack cut his eyes from the outside rearview mirror on the left to the one on the right. Back and forth, ever so slowly every five to six seconds. A surprised driver is a reckless and dangerous driver, they said in operator school. Any driver who does not know at all times if there is a car or a truck or a tractor or a dog or any other moving object behind him or alongside him is an unsafe driver, an amateur. It is impossible to react correctly to an emergency if you have to first see what’s going on around you. The second or two that can take can be enough to make it impossible to react to a blowout, to a car turning out unexpectedly in front of you, to a patch of ice.

All of that was automatic to Jack now. Even when he was driving his own Dodge to the corner to pick up something at the store he did it, he moved his eyes from one side to the other in a five-second rhythm.

Her magnificent head was still facing outward, to her left. There was nothing to see out there. Nothing of consequence. Just flat land of what they called the coastal bend, some patches of good black land but mostly scrub grass and sandy light-brown dirt and shallow gulleys and white gravel roads.

What are you looking at, Ava dear?

The route ran parallel to the coastline about thirty miles inland all of the way from Houston down to Corpus. It was a distance of 287 miles. The Great Western Trailways schedulers allowed five hours and fifteen minutes to make it. There were some drivers who could never make it on time. There was something in their makeup, something in their personality, in their very being, that simply made it impossible for them to move their buses and their passengers down the highway and in and out of the terminals and stops in the time the official timetable said they should be able to. Sometimes it was the package express that they had to unload in the
small towns. Sometimes it was a late connection in Houston or heavy traffic somewhere. Sometimes, somewhere. They always had a reason, an excuse for running late.

There were others who always ran “hot.” Early. Joe “Rocket” Ridgley was the worst. His weird personality made him cut everything as thin and quick and frantic as he could to shave time off the schedule. Everybody said that Rocket had better be careful. It wasn’t healthy to be that frantic about anything. It could kill him in more ways than one. It could kill him with high blood pressure or ulcers or something like that, or, some of the drivers said, it could also kill him right out there on the highway. It was well known that Rocket got impatient to pass and sometimes took chances in his driving. Everybody said it was a wonder no checker had caught him and canned him because of it.

Jack believed that a schedule was a schedule. You weren’t supposed to be hot or late. He was obsessive about it and that was the reason the other drivers and most everyone else called him On Time. Most of the drivers, like major league ballplayers, had nicknames. His was On Time. On Time Jack Oliver. He didn’t mind. It was important for him to know that if a bus was due in Refugio—which was pronounced “Reh-fur-ee-oh,” not “Reh-foo-gee-oh”—at 4:17
P.M.
, as this bus was, the people of Refugio, Texas, could look up from whatever they were doing at 4:17 and remark, “Well, well, there’s the four-seventeen Great Western to Corpus.”

What is she looking at now?