The White Widow: A Novel (7 page)

“What’s the lesson?”

“If you’re going to do it, don’t do it with a Presbyterian preacher’s wife.”

“Why not?”

“Because, young Mr. Oliver, they don’t know all of the positions.”

Jack laughed. “How in the hell do you know that?”

“I’m a reader.”

“Where is that written down?”

Paul M. Madison raised the heavy white china cup of coffee to his mouth with both hands. He took a long sip and said, “Only Master Operators know where things like that are written down, young Mr. Oliver. You will soon be a Master Operator yourself and you can see for yourself. That’s progress, you see.”

Paul took a gulp of coffee and said, “Okay, Jack, what’s up? You got the hots for some lady on your bus?”

“Not exactly.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“Go to dirty movies instead, Jack.”

“She’s a real White Widow, Paul. I have never seen anything like her. Even in the movies.”

“Did you put her in the Angel Seat?”

“Not yet.”

“Angel Seat” was what the drivers called a pair of seats on the ACF-Brill directly across the aisle from the driver’s seat. Few other makes of buses had them, because their doors opened right up to the driver’s seat and all the passengers sat
behind him. Some ACF-Brill drivers devoted much energy and charm to steering pretty women into that special seat and to keeping all others—particularly old people who wanted to talk—out of them.

Jack decided right then to go no further with Progress. He could not talk to him about the woman, about his Ava, about how he had thought of little else in three days, about how it had already caused him to think differently about Loretta and his life with her.

He wondered if he could ever talk to anyone about her.

“The checkers got two other guys in the Amarillo Division for taking cash fares,” Paul said. “They took movies of it.”

“Dirty movies?”

“Nope. Real ones. Somebody stood off in the bushes and shot pictures of the people getting on the bus and somebody else waited at the town where they were going, Vernon, I think it was, and shot ’em coming off. That way there was no question what happened, that the driver stole their money. That’s progress, you see.”

Sunshine Ashley joined them, bringing no sunshine and a cup of coffee that was almost white because it was more than half milk and sugar. He was a tall, thin, droopy man. “What are you talking about?” he said. “Something awful, I’ll bet.”

“That’s right,” said Progress. “White Widows and checkers.”

Sunshine’s face got even paler and sadder. “What checkers?”

“They’re everywhere,” Paul said.

“Even down here?” Sunshine said.

“I’m sure they are,” said Paul. “We’re due for another go.”

Sunshine closed his eyes. Jack thought for a second he might have been praying but then figured he had probably never prayed in his life.

It had been at least two years since the checkers came in a
big way to the South Texas Division. Five drivers were fired then for stealing, letting friends and women ride for nothing and other rules infractions.

“They’ll get us all before they’re through,” said Sunshine. It was a typical Sunshine thing to say.

They heard the arrival of the connecting bus from Laredo.

“See you next time, On Time.”

“You bet, Progress.”

“You probably won’t be seeing me,” Sunshine said. “They’re going to get me.”

Sunshine got up and left. “If I ever get like that, have somebody shoot me,” Paul said to Jack.

“Will do,” Jack said.

Paul said, “Women have ruined more of us than all of the cash fare stealing, bourbon and Cokes and slick highways put together, young Mr. Oliver. Don’t do it, Jack. Whatever it is you are thinking about, don’t. I am telling you, there is no such thing as a White Widow that’s worth losing your job and your life for.”

“I hear you, sir.”

They toasted each other with their coffee cups and stood up. Jack walked quickly ahead into the depot to get his last call to Houston.

Mr. Abernathy was there at the ticket counter with his suitcase.

“Where you headed today, Mr. Abernathy?” Jack asked.

“I’m going on your bus, sir,” said Mr. Abernathy.

“Terrific. Where to?”

“Vera Cruz, Mexico.”

“I’m headed the other way, to Houston today, Mr. Abernathy.”

“Oh, my, well, that is too bad. Then I will go to Mount Rushmore.”

“That’s the other way, too.”

“Well, well, then maybe another day.”

“Why do you want to go to Mount Rushmore, Mr. Abernathy?” It was a question Jack had asked Mr. Abernathy many times before.

“To see Mr. Jefferson.” It was an answer Mr. Abernathy had given many times before.

Jack had seen pictures in magazines of the four presidents’ heads that had been carved into the side of a mountain somewhere out West. He couldn’t remember if it was in Wyoming or Montana or Idaho. Or South Dakota? Thomas Jefferson was one of the four presidents, all right, and he thought George Washington, for sure, was one of the others. And Abraham Lincoln had to be there. But who was the fourth?

He thought about asking Mr. Abernathy that very question right now. But before it could be done, Mr. Abernathy, suitcase in hand, had disappeared through the depot door and headed back to wherever it was he lived between his trips to the bus depot to go nowhere.

Jack wondered again about who this man really was. Johnny Merriweather, among others, thought he might be the Humble Millionaire they were all waiting for. The other favorite fantasy of bus drivers, besides the White Widow, was the Humble Millionaire. In this dream there is a regular passenger, the quiet little old man in the brown workclothes or something who rides to El Campo every other Thursday or something. Upon his death, lo and behold and presto and shazam!, he leaves his favorite Great Western driver or ticket agent or porter a Cadillac, a rice farm, and maybe several million dollars, five oil wells and a dozen beautiful movie starlets.

Jack believed there was no way Mr. Abernathy could be a real Humble Millionaire. Because if he was, he’d be spending his time not getting on airplanes or Pullman cars to Mount Rushmore and other places, not not getting on buses.

Everybody said Mr. Abernathy did not have it all upstairs, and that was probably true. But Jack did not think he was really crazy. He had no trouble understanding why Mr. Abernathy could not get on the bus. Jack didn’t think that was crazy. He himself had never been anyplace besides Beeville before he came to Corpus, which was only eighty-four miles away. And he hadn’t left Corpus except to go to places close by, like Padre Island, until he went with Great Western. And even then—now—it was mostly just back and forth to Houston.

Going to new places was not easy for anybody.

Jack hadn’t even really wanted to leave Beeville. He figured he would live there all of his life and die there and be buried there in Mt. Hope Cemetery on the west side of town. He left only because he could not stand to be around his father’s disappointment anymore.

His father was Beeville’s leading eye doctor, and the first words Jack remembered hearing from him were: “My only ambition is for my son to join me in the practice.” Those were pretty much his only words, too. Robert Isaac Oliver, M.D., known around town as Dr. EyeBob, pushed and shoved and kicked Jack into taking math and biology and science classes in school. On Saturdays and in the summer he made him spend mornings at the doctor’s office or walking around the Bee County Hospital. From his third birthday and Christmas on, the gifts Jack received were mostly doctor kits and white coats, play stethoscopes and microscopes. Dr. EyeBob never passed up an opportunity to tell anyone about his plans for his son’s future, and it became a given. Everyone who knew the Olivers knew that Jack would someday be a doctor and would practice with his father. The father even
had a specific eye-doctor job, a “special mission,” for his son. As he told Jack: “They’re already working on something called a contact lens. There’ll be little tiny lenses that will go right on the eyes, replacing eyeglasses. Your special mission will be to learn everything there is to know about them and then to bring that know-how to the people of Beeville.”

It could not be. Jack did not want to be a doctor. He had neither the mind nor the desire to learn math or science or to perform the other intellectual tasks required. “I’m not smart enough,” he told his mother. He disliked the idea of dealing with people’s hurts and ailments, and the thought of fooling with the human eye specifically repulsed him. “It would make me sick every day,” he told his mother. Spending his life bringing the know-how about tiny lenses to Beeville was a special turn-off rather than a special mission. “I can’t think of anything worse than worrying about those little things,” he told his mother. “Anyhow, my fingers are so big, I’m sure I would lose them all the time.”

He told his mother but not his father because his mother always said for him not to say anything like that to his father. “I’ll talk to him, son,” she said each time and every time. Jack was never sure whether she did.

The father and son traveled a torturous, tumultuous road toward a relationship where there was only indifference and silence on both sides. The last leg began when Jack came home with a C-minus average on his report cards in junior high school. Dr. EyeBob got angry at the teachers and the school for not doing their jobs, but he also forced Jack to study for two hours every weeknight and for four hours each Saturday and Sunday. When the bad grades continued in high school, the doctor turned his wrath and frustration completely on Jack, accusing him of not caring, of not working hard enough, of being headed toward failure. It was a wrath
that did not turn away until, toward the end of Jack’s junior year, it became clear that he was not going to college. From then on the son no longer held any interest for the father.

Jack hung around Beeville after high school, living at a rooming house ten blocks from his parents’ big house on Harrison Street, working as a gas jockey at a truck stop on U.S. 81 and eating himself fat. For the next three and a half years he saw his mother and father on holidays and a few other times by accident on the street or in a store. It might have gone on like that forever if his mother had not called him one day at the truck stop and said she had great news and wanted to tell him about it immediately. She came within a few minutes to the truck stop and Jack took her to a back booth in the café for coffee.

His mother, Janet Alexander Oliver, was nineteen years old when she married Bob Oliver. He was a first-year medical student at the University of Texas Medical School in Galveston, and she had been his high school sweetheart in Beeville. She had attended a junior college in San Antonio for two years and then taken a job as a teller in a downtown bank in Beeville. As she told Jack and everyone else, her only real ambition in life had been to be “Mrs. Doctor Bob Oliver.” Jack was never quite sure if that was the truth, but it was something he had never talked to his mother about and never would.

“He loves you again, Jack, just like he did when you were little,” she said even before the coffee arrived. “He realizes that he treated you unfairly and he wants to apologize and make it better. He knows now that we all have to be what we are, and he can accept you for what you are. He is sure now that he can live with the disappointment because, as he says, that is all a part of life.”

She asked Jack to come over for dinner that night for a celebration and to bring his things and move back into his
old bedroom. “I’ll have Daisy Lee make your favorite meat loaf with the syrup and everything else the way you like it,” she said.

They agreed on six o’clock as the time for dinner. But when six o’clock came, Jack was forty miles south of Beeville, sitting in the fourth-row left-side window seat of a Gulf Coast Coaches Aerocoach on the way to Corpus Christi.

At around six-thirty the bus pulled into Sinton. He was now fifty miles away from Beeville. Jack decided that his mother and father had by now figured out that he was not coming to dinner. He closed his eyes and saw his mother go into the kitchen and take the meat loaf out of the oven. He saw his father light a cigarette—he smoked Chesterfields—and slam the stick match hard into an ashtray. He saw the two of them arguing about what might have happened to Jack and what she might have said to him to make him not want to come. He saw her go to the phone and try to find him—first at the truck stop and then at the rooming house. He saw her put the phone down finally and shake her head as she told his father that everybody everywhere said Jack had gone—from his job, from his rented room, from Beeville. He saw him go into the dining room and sit down at his regular place at the dining-room table. He saw her join him a few minutes later. He saw the two of them eat the meat loaf, served with baked potatoes, green beans in butter sauce and cole slaw.