The White Widow: A Novel (5 page)

He very much wanted to make love. He was used to having that feeling when he returned from an overnight run. It went with being a bus driver. It went with captaining a speeding motor coach full of precious human cargo down the highways and through the cities and towns of America. That was the line a lot of the drivers used, at least. One of them, a guy who drove Houston–Dallas, said it was a scientific thing. His wife, who was an operating-room nurse, said rodeo riders,
jockeys, bicycle racers, tractor operators and other men who had their private parts rubbing up against something for long periods of time all had the same sensation and need when their day’s work was done.

The terrible part of Jack’s feeling tonight was that he could not imagine having sex with Loretta, the only woman he had had it with, not only since they married but in his whole life. She was the first and the only, except in his mind, where he had been very active since junior high school. The only real activity besides Loretta had been some necking with secretaries from the traffic or operating departments a few times after company safety parties in Houston. It had always made Jack feel bad and guilty and ashamed when he remembered what he had done, and he always vowed that it would never ever happen again.

But that made him very, very unlike so many of the men he drove with. “What would you think about your wife doing what you’re doing?” he once asked Ray “Smooth” Jefferson, a Houston–San Antonio driver who was notorious for poking any woman who would let him. “I’d kill her,” said Smooth.

There was that additional truth about Jack’s not fooling around. Before he put on the uniform of a Great Western driver and began to trim down his weight, there were few opportunities, few women who made themselves available to him. None, to be even more exact about it. He had grown up pudgy in Beeville, a small town north of Corpus on the San Antonio highway, U.S. 181. And he had stayed pudgy through high school, his year of junior college at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi and into a career driving buses. He had also had a serious pimple problem from the fifth grade on, and it all combined to prevent him from ever having a real date with a girl until he was twenty-two, when he met Loretta’s cousin Alice Armstrong, who everybody called the All-American Girl!, after the radio show about Jack Armstrong,
the All-American Boy. Alice was a revenue clerk at Nueces Transportation Company. One afternoon a week before Christmas, as he was turning in his report and the change from his fare box, she asked Jack if he was “booked” for that coming Saturday night. He sure wasn’t, he said. She said a bunch of the girls there in the office were going to have a casual drop-in Christmas-cheer party and were inviting some of the single drivers and mechanics to come.

“You are single, aren’t you Jack?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied.

“With some of these guys you can’t tell for sure,” she said. “But I figured you to be for sure.”

For sure. Those words hit home, but he went to the party. He had always been a big fan of Christmas. Loretta, who was already at the
Caller
, was there. She, too, was pudgy—overweight—and a big fan of Christmas. For unspoken but obvious reasons the two of them were drawn together almost immediately. They started talking about their mutual love for Christmas lights and other decorations and then moved on to their respective lives dealing with people who ride city buses and call in classified ads to sell cars and houses. Before long they were giggling, mostly about how much fun it would be to fill a front yard with electric reindeer and Santa Clauses, and Jack called her the next day and asked her to go to the movies the following Friday night. She accepted, and within a few weeks he had taken her to see all of the best-decorated houses and stores and, finally, on a warm January Sunday afternoon, to his favorite spots on the beach at Padre Island. They moved on from talking about Christmas decorations and their jobs to talking about love. And a few weeks after that Jack gave her an engagement ring, which he had bought at Martin’s Jewelers for thirty-seven dollars. They set May 2, less than five months away, as their wedding date.

They sat now at their small kitchen table, which was also
their dining table, and ate meat loaf and a baked potato, which she covered with sour cream and butter and he ate with only salt and pepper on it. He drank a Falstaff beer, called Flags by everyone at the Tarpon Inn, a tavern he sometimes went to on days off. It was on the bay on the east side of the ship channel.

“Where was all of the express going?” Loretta asked him.

“The what?”

“The express, the stuff that made you late.”

“Oh, that. That. It was mostly auto parts to Victoria. Some to El Campo. And some flowers to Woodsboro.”

He chewed and swallowed and sipped slowly and silently. And he knew it was only a matter of time before she asked him the question she always asked him at times like this.

“Are you all right, Jack?”

Somebody had told them both that it was part of a joke routine on the stage in England, or somewhere overseas.

“I’m swell, Loretta,” he replied, as he always did.

“You seem like something’s on your mind besides that meat loaf and me.”

“I’m swell, Loretta.”

“I hear you, Jack.”

“I hear you” was another of their favorite expressions. He brought it home one day from a ticket agent in Houston and she picked it up and now used it too.

She shrugged and told him what she had been doing while he was away driving his Silversides Air-Conditioned Thruliner to Houston and back.

“Kress’s had a special on the little blinking red lights so I picked up two dozen,” she said. “I figured they’d fit down the sides of the front door if we want them there.”

“Good idea. I have thought for a while we needed something there.”

Decorating the outside of their house for Christmas was the major project in their lives together. They discussed all year the putting up of lots of lights and stars and Santas and angels and mangers in their small front yard and across the front of their small house. Doing all of that was what first drew them together and it was now important in keeping them together. Jack’s interest in decorating for Christmas had begun back in Beeville, where, because of his plumpness, he was asked a lot in high school and around town to dress up as Santa Claus for Christmas parties. He also did it twice for the N.T.C. folks.

“I really am tired of Oscar,” she said. “He’s worn out and he looks it.”

“I love him,” he said. “He was our first, you know.” Oscar was the name they gave to their four-foot-tall plastic Santa.

“I know.”

“I’m still worried about those old green lights we put up over the garage,” he said. “That cord is cracking and exposed and it’s going to cause a short if we’re not careful.”

“We’re careful, Jack, don’t worry.”

“But it’s dangerous. They could start a fire.”

Loretta was now the supervisor of all classified advertising telephone girls. There were twelve of them on a full-time basis, up to twenty at special holiday times, when the calls really poured in.

“Somebody, a man who talked like a Mexican, wanted to advertise for a Social Security card,” she said, turning to a report on her work. “He wanted to buy a Social Security card.”

“Why?”

“Come on, Jack. You know why. So he could get into the hospital and welfare and everything like that.”

“Sure, I get it.”

“Well, I’m glad. It looks like they’re going to promote Mr.
Starr to San Antonio. I am really going to hate that. He’s the only one on the second floor who understands what it’s like for our girls to hang on that phone all day with people trying to cheat on the number of words and things like that.”

She had complained before about the cheats. People who called in an ad and then didn’t want to pay the same perword price for an “a” or an “and” as they did for something in three or four syllables.

“Little Martha McMullen is going to have a baby. That will be the end of her for us. I really do hate that. Nobody knows boats and marine gear like she does. She grew up over at Aransas around boats and things. Her daddy’s a shrimper, so’s her brother. I’m hoping to have her train somebody up to full speed before she actually has to go. We’ve got some time because the baby’s not due for seven months. I can hide her in the back for a while, but once she shows she’s got to go. The paper doesn’t like having pregnant women sitting around where people can see them. Guess they think it’ll give people ideas. At any rate, I’m thinking about putting Ann Marie in there. I think she’s ready. Her voice is about as sweet over the phone as anybody’s we’ve ever had. She could sell a classified ad to Baby Jesus.”

“Baby Jesus?”

“You know, the one in the Bible and the one we put in the front yard.”

“Oh,
that
one.”

“Did I get your attention finally?”

“Why would Baby Jesus want a classified in the
Corpus Christi Caller
?”

“Anybody and everybody, if they live long enough, will have a need for a classified in the
Caller.
That is our motto.” Jack was not the kind of man who thought along funny or witty lines. But the idea of opening up the newspaper some morning and seeing a classified ad in there from Jesus trying
to sell off an old Whirlpool refrigerator or Chevy coupe set him off laughing.

“You are something, Loretta Oliver,” he said.

“Thank you, Jack T. Oliver. Is that a proposal for something besides apple pie for dessert tonight?”

“You hear me right,” Jack said.

He went on back to the bedroom while Loretta cleaned up after supper. That was how they always did it. He came into the house, they went right into the kitchen and ate dinner and then he went upstairs and took off his uniform. Loretta liked to sit across the table from him in the gray and black of Great Western Trailways. Jack noticed that her admiration of him in his uniform had increased as he slimmed down.

He had always been a uniform man himself. Beeville, his hometown, was also the home of Chase Naval Air Station, which was a sister base to the larger one at Corpus Christi. Most Navy and Marine pilots went to one or the other, or both, for advanced fighter training after graduating from flight school at Pensacola, Florida. Jack went to the base on special days with his dad and saw a lot of sailors and Marines on the streets in Beeville. “Chase Sets the Pace” was the base slogan. His first boyish dreams were all about flying Navy fighter planes, but that was never really in the cards. First, it was the simple fact that he was really not that interested in going to college, and, second, it was the more complicated fact of his weight. He was driving for Nueces Transportation when the war started and he thought again about the Navy. Then he got his draft notice and eventually was classified 4-F, so that ended that, too.

It was the 4-F that really changed his life. He remembered Ward Bond in
It Happened One Night
and he went to see Great Western, which he had heard was desperate for drivers
because so many were going into the service. He went on to lose fifty pounds, as required, and now here he was, about to become a Master Operator. And that, as his driver friend “Progress” Paul Madison would say, was progress, you see.

Jack had learned how to care for a uniform. He hadn’t paid that much attention to his gray poplin uniform shirts when he was with N.T.C. Now he had the laundry give them precisely measured military creases down from the shoulder through both pockets. He put wire collar stays in his shirt collars. His gray gabardine trousers and coat were always well pressed and clean. He tied his black tie in a precise military knot and he kept his black shoes shined like they were glass.

The thinner he got, the harder he worked at his appearance. But at the same time it was so much easier to look good in a uniform when you weren’t fat. Just being able for the first time in life to wear his pants right across the center of his now flat stomach rather than just below or above the balloon that had been there for so long made a huge difference. He hadn’t taken a really good look at himself in a mirror until he was twenty-seven years old.

Their frame house on Cunningham Street was small. They had bought it for $9,075, 80 percent of that handled by a mortgage from the Nueces Savings and Loan Association. The house had two bedrooms and a living room, plus a bathroom and the kitchen. The walls were thin. As he carefully removed his shoes and socks and his tie and his shirt and his trousers, he could hear Loretta rinse and dry and put away every dish, every glass, every knife, fork and spoon they had used at dinner.

Soon she would be finished. Soon she would be in the bedroom.

Now he was, as usual on evenings when they made love, down to his undershorts. He was also down to figuring out how he was going to work himself up to wanting to do it.

And there, like Refugio, she was.