The White Widow: A Novel (23 page)

Progress Paul Madison was sitting in the center of the center section of the theater, about halfway between the rear and the screen. The usher said that was where he always sat. He was one of only three or four people in there. At least that was all Jack could see in the dark.

It was the next Friday at one-thirty in the afternoon. Jack had just arrived in Victoria. He got Johnny Merriweather, the no-voice ticket agent, to look after his suitcase and the Santa Claus he had wrapped in two old paper bags. Johnny told him Paul was probably at one of the theaters around the corner over on the square. That meant he was at either the Orpheum or the Palace. The Orpheum, on the south side, was showing
High Noon.
The Palace, across on the north side, had as its main feature
Hans Christian Andersen
, starring Danny Kaye in the title role.

The box office people and the ushers at both theaters knew Paul the Bus Driver and smiled happily in saying so. Jack did not know one person who did not smile when they talked about Paul. The woman at the Orpheum said it was his day for the Palace, and the usher there pointed Jack toward Paul with pleasure and without even asking for a ticket.

“What are you doing here, Mr. Master Operator Oliver?” Paul whispered to Jack when he finally recognized the man who had sat down next to him.

“I came to see you,” Jack said. “How much time left in this movie?”

“Fifty-three minutes and twenty-two seconds,” Paul said.

Jack looked up at the screen. Danny Kaye as Hans was singing a song about an inchworm to a bunch of kids.

“But no worry,” said Paul. “I’ve already seen it seven times. That’s progress, you see.”

They walked outside to the park of tall trees and crisscrossing sidewalks and white wooden benches in the middle of the square.

“I almost didn’t know you without your uniform,” Paul said as they walked. “This may be the first time in history I have seen you like that, all naked like that in ordinary-man clothes.”

Jack was wearing jeans and a light-blue and white striped short-sleeve shirt and black cowboy boots. Jack felt worse than naked here now with Paul in the clothes of a man who was no longer a bus driver. An ordinary man.

Without discussing it, they sat down on a bench by a white frame bandstand. Jack had heard about concerts and politicians’ speeches there but he had never been to one. He had never been anywhere in Victoria except the bus station. Lem Odum, the retired Rosenberg teacher who wouldn’t ever shut up, told Jack once that Sam Houston actually made a campaign speech there in the square when he was running for governor or senator or something in the late 1800s. Jack didn’t know whether to believe him or not, although he knew for a fact that Allan Shivers, the present governor, had done that. Johnny Merriweather and a couple of others from the station had walked over and heard him. Johnny said Shivers talked mostly about why he, a Democrat, supported Eisenhower over Stevenson for president in 1952 and planned to do it again forever.

Jack tried to imagine Sam Houston standing up there on the bandstand in front of a crowd making a speech, but he couldn’t. He had never seen a good picture of Houston and had no idea what he looked like.

Jack wanted to make a speech to Paul. He wanted to start shouting and never stop. He wanted to point and punch and cry about what had happened. About those two people he had run over with #4107 during the Indianola. About the deal he had made at the Hotel Surf. To go away.

Mr. Madison and all of you people of Victoria and of Texas and of the world! Listen to me! I, Jack T. Oliver, have come before you here today on this bandstand to tell you that I am a killer of a little girl and her mother. And now I am going away and away and away
.…

He had never made a real speech before. At least not since the one about the inventor of Scotch tape in high school, unless you counted those he made to the passengers at the beginning and end of each run and at major rest stops like Victoria. Nobody would count those.

So he just started talking the regular way he always did to Progress Paul Madison.

“Sorry about the movie,” Jack said.

“Like I said, this was number eight.” Paul pointed to the south toward the Orpheum. “I’m up to nine on
High Noon.
They both change on Monday and I’ll start again.”

Jack shrugged or frowned or indicated somehow to Paul that all of that sounded terrible.

“Don’t wail for me, Jack,” Paul said. “The life on a daily turnaround puts me in my own bed every night. That’s what’s important.”

“I could not see any movie eight or nine times. Isn’t there anything else to do around here on the layover?”

“Not much else that I like to do. Look, they let me into
these movies for free, for one thing. You didn’t come up here in civilian clothes on a day when you should be driving a bus to talk to me about watching movies on my layovers, for another. What in the hell is going on with you, Jack? You haven’t been on your runs, I figured you for sick or something. Nobody seemed to know anything. The rumor machine hasn’t gotten turned way up yet on you like it did on Sunshine.”

What did Sunshine do? Later Jack would ask about Sunshine. Jack had come to Victoria to tell Paul Madison what in the hell was going on with him, Jack T. Oliver. And it wasn’t that he was sick or something.

“Those two people who were killed during the storm down by Refugio?” he said.

“Sure. About a week ago.”

“Pharmacy and Mr. Glisan think I killed them. They think I backed over them and then drove off like a hit-and-run driver.”

Paul said, “That was sure some bad storm. Almost an Indianola, if the truth were known. I barely made it back to San Antone that night.” Progress Paul Madison closed his eyes and shook his head. “Judas priest, Jack.”

“They were checkers.”

That got Paul’s eyes back open. “Who were checkers?”

“The dead woman and the girl.”

“Both of them?”

“Both.”

“How do you know that?”

Jack told of his first meeting at the Corpus bus depot with Mr. Glisan and Rex Al Barney.

Paul again closed his eyes, shook his head and said, “Judas priest, Jack.”

Then he said, “Tell me again what they looked like, how old they were and everything.”

Jack didn’t want to but he quickly described what little he could remember about the two people he saw lying on the highway shoulder.

Paul said, “They sound like a pair I picked up between Cuero and Thomaston last week. I hauled them here to Victoria. The woman had a twenty-dollar bill. They didn’t look like checkers to me. They must be the ones who got Sunshine, too. That’s progress, you see. But go on.”

Jack had only one more place to go. And that was to describe a deal he was offered by Mr. Glisan, Pharmacy and Mr. Peck from the detective agency. He told Paul about the meeting at the Hotel Surf and the movie projector and the photograph.

“The detective guy said they might lose their license if it got out they were using kids under sixteen as checkers. The law says they must be over sixteen. He said they didn’t know until after she died that this kid was only fourteen. Glisan said Great Western Trailways was also not keen on the whole world knowing that one of its buses had run over a couple of people and killed them. So if I would go quietly, they would stay quiet.”

“In other words, they can’t prove anything against you?”

“In other words, yes.”

“Judas priest.”

“I took the deal. I have gone quietly.”

“To where?”

“I’m not sure.”

Jack looked at his watch. “I want to go over and watch my old schedule come in from Houston,” he said, standing up.

Paul got on his feet too. “Did they work on you to confess?”

“Yes. But I didn’t.”

“What about the woman passenger, the witness they found?”

“She didn’t see anything, I guess.”

“The movie?”

“It must not have come out or they didn’t have one in the first place. They wouldn’t show it to me, so that must mean they were bluffing about something having to do with it.”

“I hear they had real good movies of Sunshine,” Paul said.

They started walking toward the bus depot.

“How come you came up here to tell me all of this?” Paul asked.

“I had to tell somebody, and you’re the closest thing to a Kenny in Kingsville I have.”

“Well, well. I don’t know what that means and I don’t think I get it and I am not sure I am so glad you told me but that is that and here we are and that is progress, you see.”

Paul pointed toward the bandstand, which was several yards off to the right of where they were walking. “You ever play a musical instrument, Mr. On Time Master Operator Oliver?”

“Nope. You?”

“The piano. I played the piano when I was in the seventh grade. I played it a whole year and loved it and then quit.”

“Why?”

“I kept getting my fingers stuck down in between the keys.”

Jack laughed. “I’m going to miss you, Progress.”

“Nobody misses bus drivers except other bus drivers.”

“Are you a Communist?”

Paul reached over and slammed his right fist against Jack’s right shoulder. “Those are fighting words, Jack.”

“College told me Communists want bus drivers and other people like us to run everything in Austin and Washington and the world.”

“College is a stupid man who doesn’t know it. They’re the worst kind.”

“He knows it. He told me himself he was stupid or he wouldn’t be driving a bus like Sunshine and me.”

“See what I mean?”

Jack didn’t but it didn’t matter. They were almost to the door to the bus depot.

“Was the woman in the photograph the one you had the hotsie-totsies for?” Paul said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Didn’t I warn you about them White Widows? Sunshine thought he had himself one, too.”

Jack didn’t even have to ask about Sunshine.

Paul just told the story. “You know on that Port Lavaca–Victoria turnaround he’d make four round trips a day from here to there and back. Every once in a while, it turns out, he would pay his kid brother, who worked at a gas station, to dress up in one of his extra driver’s uniforms. At Bloomington, the first town out of Victoria, Sunshine would disembark and the kid brother would take over and drive the schedule on to Port Lavaca, do the layover, and then drive it back to Bloomington. Sunshine would then get back on and take the bus on into Victoria like nothing had happened. What
had
happened, of course, was that Sunshine had a couple of hours in the layover sack with the White Widow wife of the junior high school football coach. Let that be another lesson to you, too, young Mr. Oliver.”

“Don’t fool with wives of football coaches?”

“You’re right, because they want to call all the plays and that’s progress, you see.”

Jack grabbed Paul’s right hand and shook it hard. If Paul had been a woman he would have hugged him.

“Did they let you keep your gold badge?” Paul asked.

“Nope. I turned it in this morning to Sweet Jennings. They said it was company property, not mine.”

Paul reached up to his own uniform cap and pulled it off of his head. “Here, I’ll give you mine.”

“No, Paul. No! You can’t do that.”

Paul undid the little screws that held the badge on the front of the cap. “I’ll tell them some dirty rotten thief stole mine. They’ll give me another one.”

The badge came off in his right hand and he thrust it at Jack. “You earned this,” Paul said.

Jack took it, admired it and put it in a trouser pocket. “If I was a girl I’d cry,” he said, as Paul turned around and headed back toward the Palace Theater.

There was no guarantee, of course, that she would be there, that she would ever go again on a Friday afternoon on the bus from Victoria to Corpus Christi.

If she did come, if she was there, he would not try to talk to her inside the depot. He had already decided that. He would wait until her bus got the first call, until she came outside into the loading-docking area and got in line.

That was where he waited, with his head down. He was not interested in talking to the extra-board man who would be driving his old schedule, or to Willie Church, the porter, or to anyone else. Johnny Merriweather knew he was around but he would be busy inside the depot, handling things for the schedule.

Out of uniform, Jack was some guy waiting for a bus. Everyone else had the same problem Paul did in recognizing him as Jack T. Oliver, Master Operator.

The ACF-Brill IC-41 on Schedule 726, his schedule, pulled into the driveway nine minutes late. Jack was delighted to see that this rookie guy off the extra board, Billy McDougal, couldn’t drop in from nowhere and pull his old schedule on time.

You’ll never do it like I did, Billy! he wanted to shout.

Jack was also happy to see the bus was #4101, one of his favorites. She had tight brakes, soft-shifting gears and great pickup from a dead start. He felt good about seeing her now, probably for the last time.

Just under ten minutes later the awful voice of Johnny Merriweather came screeching through the PA loudspeaker. “May I have your attention, please! This is your first call for Great Western Trailways Silversides Air-Conditioned Thruliner to Corpus Christi and the Rio Grande Valley, now leaving from lane one for Inairi, Vidauri, Refugio, Woodsboro …”