The White Widow: A Novel (8 page)

All but two of #4203’s forty-one seats were taken when Jack pulled into Great Western’s Union Bus Depot in Houston at 1:37
P.M.
He had made up all but twelve minutes, despite the load, despite the traffic, despite thinking about Ava. A Late Arrival form had to be filled out only for anything over fifteen minutes, so at least he did not have to do that.

Jack hated all of the paperwork. Everybody did. But it was as much a part of the job as air-braking that #4203 with its thirty-nine passengers onboard under the huge loading-dock canopy in Houston. Paul Madison liked to say the first qualification for driving a bus was not a driver’s license but the ability to write insignificant information in inaccessible spaces on incomprehensible forms.

Jack completed his trip report and his driver’s log and the bus’s mechanical log and all the rest after the passengers had disembarked and the porters had unloaded the baggage and express.

The Houston terminal was a joy to anybody who liked buses. There were always ten or twelve buses parked or moving in or out of the five lanes, having just arrived from somewhere or getting ready to go somewhere. There were always lots of people milling about, waiting, eating, drinking, laughing, crying, sleeping. Missouri Pacific Trailways, which ran up to Texarkana as well as to the Valley along the coast route, used the terminal. So did Texas Red Rocket Motorcoaches, which operated to Galveston and Beaumont, and several other small feeder lines. Greyhound had its own terminal six blocks away.

Jack said hello to a few of the drivers and the baggage agent and got permission finally from the dispatcher to take his bus on to the garage. His work on this day was almost over.

He felt a letdown. He always did when he finished a run. The tension built steadily in him from the time he arrived at the depot in Corpus, checked out the bus after it arrived from the Valley, put aboard his first passengers, moved them along the highway and through the towns until he finally reached Houston. As he approached Houston, the bus always got more loaded with people and express, and the highway became crowded with cars and trucks and other hazards. And then suddenly, like rolling off the edge of a table, it was
over.
Sssssssssss-ttt
went the brakes and off went the people, the express and all of that tension.

In the early years he looked forward to that final thrill of driving a busload of people into that Houston depot. “Thrill” was the right word, too. It was a little-boy thing, like scoring a touchdown in the Cotton Bowl in Dallas or marching in review as a Navy pilot after getting his wings, two things he had done only in his imagination. Sometimes he imagined there was background music playing, like in the John Wayne movie
The High and the Mighty
, as he made the last right turn off Travis into the terminal, caught the signal from the dispatcher as to lane and position and then eased his coach into place for that final stop, the last
ssssssssss-tt.

He had imagined driving the bus into the Houston depot, with and without music, before he actually did it for the first time, and in the beginning reality measured up to what he had imagined. But then after a while it did not.

Sex with Loretta had run along the same lines. He was certain that would not happen with Ava, his Ava. How could that ever be less than he could imagine?

Do other men have thoughts like this about women all of the time?

There was another part to the letdown of finishing his run in Houston that had nothing to do with all that. It was what always lay ahead for him at night there. Which was mostly boring and nothing much.

Jack could not get used to Houston and he had about decided he probably never could. Houston made no sense. It was where the crazy oil millionaires like Glenn McCarthy spent their money on big cars and new hotels and where the roughest of the seamen came to play while their oil tankers and freighters were loaded and unloaded. The only difference between the millionaires and the seamen was how much money they had. “Rough” was the word for Houston. A
man had to be careful going into bars, because Houston people didn’t think very long before they decided killing was all somebody was good for. Bang, bang, you are dead, Mr. Bus Driver. The cops were the same way, particularly when it came to Tamales and Blues. In Corpus, people talked before they fought. In Houston, it was just the opposite. At least that was what Jack was told.

Also Houston was too big, and it was growing even bigger, and too fast. Some people said they expected it to be as big as New York someday. That would be the day Jack would have enough seniority to bid a San Antonio or Laredo turnaround and never have to fight his bus’s way into Houston anymore. He hoped. They didn’t even have any zoning regulations there, like they did in Corpus and everywhere else in the world, so that meant there could be a Conoco station or a Pig Stand drive-in in the middle of somebody’s block in Houston. It also had the worst weather of any place in Texas. It was not only hot, which it was everywhere, including Corpus, but it was wet-hot. The humidity was usually up there with the temperature, and just for good measure it liked to rain for a few minutes most afternoons. One of the Dallas drivers who had grown up in northern Iowa said being outside in Houston in the afternoon was like taking a hot shower with your clothes on. Jack agreed.

He always figured the best thing about Houston was its name. Jack, like every other kid in Texas, had had to take a course in Texas history in high school. Not much of it touched him or stuck, except the story of Sam Houston. Sam had come to Texas from Tennessee, whipped the Mexicans at San Jacinto, became the president of the Republic of Texas and then, when Texas went into the union, represented it in Washington as U.S. senator and finally ran it as governor. He was, according to Jack’s teacher and books, a rough, smart man who could fight or talk just about anybody out of just about anything.
After Loretta and Jack agreed to get married Jack told her if they had a son he wanted to name him Sam Houston.

“But I don’t want him called Sam or Sammy, Houston or Houstie, or anything like that,” he had said. “I want him called Sam Houston, like it was one name, Samhouston. Samhouston Oliver.” Loretta said that would be fine with her. They never discussed it again because they never had a son, or a daughter, and the doctor had said it was unlikely Loretta ever would. Something was not quite right about her reproductive things, he said. She and Jack had talked about someday adopting a child, a boy they could name Samhouston, but it had not happened.

In all fairness to the city named after Sam, Jack had not seen or experienced very much of it firsthand. He had been driving buses in and out of there two or three times a week for twelve years, but what he did when he was there wasn’t much and it was almost always the same. He drove into the city from the southwest on Highway 59, which became Main Boulevard. There was a fifteen-block go up the west side of downtown and then across east on Preston to the bus depot, which covered two thirds of a block bounded on the east by Congress, the west by Travis.

He did every arrival day what he did this day. After unloading his passengers and doing his paperwork he drove the bus to the garage seven blocks south on Nagle Street in the middle of a neighborhood of small houses where the Blues lived. Only in Houston could you put a bus garage in somebody’s backyard. From there he caught a ride on a bus back to the depot and then walked three blocks to the Ben Milam Hotel. Great Western kept a block of a dozen rooms at the Milam for drivers on layovers. The rooms were small and they weren’t fancy but they were clean and just fine with Jack.

A Dixie driver named Livingston fell in with him for the
walk over to the hotel. Dixie was a division of Great Western that went all through East Texas. It had been called Dixie-Sunshine Trailways before being taken over by Great Western. Livingston drove Shreveport–Houston down through Henderson, Nacogdoches and Lufkin. Jack had known him and seen him around for years but they were not good friends. Livingston’s first name was Harold but everybody called him by his nickname, which was Horns. Horns Livingston.

“You-all going to stop in with me?” Horns said to Jack as they got to a tavern called the Mirabeau Lamar Bar.

“You know the rules on drinking,” said Jack. The layovers were only twelve hours usually, and twelve hours was also the limit on drinking—no driver could have even a sip of alcohol less than twelve hours before pulling a run. The smell of a beer on the breath of a driver reporting for duty was grounds for immediate suspension and eventual dismissal.

“Nah, nah,” said Horns, who was from Louisiana and spoke in an accent that Jack thought made his own South Texas one sound like he was from Alaska or somewhere else up north. “The picture show in the next block.”

“No, thank you,” Jack said.

The picture show in the next block was a theater that showed only girlie movies. Jack had walked by it many times but had never been inside.

“It’s not the real thing but it’ll do until you can get the real thing,” said Horns Livingston.

“Not interested right now, but thanks.”

“You-all not interested in women? Is that what you-all not interested in? Are you interested in something else besides women? Is that what you-all are saying?”

“No, that is not what I’m saying.”

“You-all a married man, I’m a married man. I don’t run around on my old lady, you-all don’t run around on your old
lady. So what does that leave a man to do? A man who needs to keep himself at a fever pitch at all times, ready to go the second he’s back home? What does that leave a man to do, Jack? You-all tell me.”

Jack had never met Horns’s wife but he had seen lots of photos of her. Horns carried them around with him as religiously as he did his ticket punch and log book. And he seemed to have a new set every couple of weeks. Her name was Janet Lee and she was clearly a well-endowed, well-stacked woman with a lot of blond hair twisted and waved and arranged on the top of her head. The photos showed her behind the wheel of a car, lounging outside on a hammock, smoking a cigarette in a kitchen, picking flowers and doing all kinds of others things.

“I have nothing to say to you about that,” Jack said.

“I give Janet Lee everything I have to give, and that means whenever I get home from a run. I mean the second I come through the door, there she stands without a speck of clothes on her body. So I have got to be ready three times a week. Going to these movies helps me stay ready.”

It was his talking like this that caused him to get the nickname Horns.

The theater was called the Lone Star Majestic. It may at one time have shown real movies with real movie stars like Ava Gardner and Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable but it hadn’t since Jack had been coming to Houston and staying at the Milam just down the street.

Horns gave Jack a wave and headed for the box office. Jack kept walking. He did look at the posters advertising the movie that was showing,
Lovesick Spies Blues.
There were some black-and-white photographs of some of the women who appeared in the movie.

None of them looked a bit like Ava Gardner or even Claudette Colbert.

T
hen five days later it was Friday again. And there, like Refugio, she was.

She looked exactly the way he had remembered her, exactly the way he had seen her in his mind ever since the previous Friday at this same precise time. The only difference was in the way she was dressed. She had on a purple blouse that had sleeves all the way to her wrists.

It meant he would not be able to feel the touch of her skin again.

“Well, good afternoon,” he said as she handed him her ticket.

“Good afternoon,” she replied.

Well, good afternoon.

Good afternoon.

He tried to capture the sound of her voice within his head, like on a phonograph record, so he could play it back again. And again.

“One-way to Corpus again,” he said, as he read the ticket, punched it and tore it into two parts—one for her, one for him and the Great Western Trailways auditors.

Again, she smiled but said nothing. She took back her portion of the ticket and, with his gentle assistance, stepped up into the bus.

His
bus.

He forgot to smell her! He had been so intent on the sound of her voice that he had not smelled her. Had she bathed again in a white porcelain bathtub with legs before catching his bus?

He was actually shaking when he closed the bus door behind her and the eight other passengers who boarded at Victoria. He had trouble getting his ticket punch back into the holster on his right hip. He felt some twitching in his left leg, as if it was about to rattle out of control again, as it had last Friday.

Progress Paul Madison, who had also just had his last call for San Antonio, was there at the counter sorting through his tickets. “Twenty-two peoples, not bad,” he said to Jack. “That’s progress, you see.”

Jack knew Paul would see something in him. Paul never missed a thing.

“You okay, young Mr. Oliver?” said Paul.