by Jim Lehrer
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?
CHAPTER 2
There was Refugio.
The Great Western Trailways commission agent in Refugio was Adele Lyman, an unhappy woman whose real business was supposedly selling real estate and Verdigris Valley Life and Casualty insurance. It was a business she had taken over from her husband, who had died in the line of duty as a volunteer fireman. He was at a house fire when a beam fell on him, knocked him down and crushed his back so he couldn’t move and escape the smoke that filled his lungs and killed him.
Jack pulled up #4101 in the marked-off parking area in front of Adele Lyman’s place at 4:20.
Four-twenty. Three minutes late! Jack opened the door to the ACF-Brill and climbed down and out. The door was operated by air, just like the brakes. There was a lever on the right-hand-bottom side of the dashboard that triggered the air, a swisssh sound and the opening of the door.
He had left Victoria right on the money. There had been no passengers to discharge or pick up at Inairi or Vidauri. What had happened to make him late? He kept his Gruen wristwatch precisely correct. Every morning before he left his home in Corpus or his hotel room in Houston he called the time-check number.
But he hadn’t looked at it since he left Victoria. That was unusual, too. He always routinely checked his watch every few minutes. Like clockwork he checked his watch.
“What have you got for me today?” Jack said to Adele inside the rundown office that doubled as the bus depot.
“Two Tamales and four Dollars, swee
tie, and some roses for Billie’s Flowers in Woodsboro,” she said. Jack could not imagine any citizen of Refugio buying either real estate or insurance from Adele Lyman. He couldn’t tell if she was stupid or was drunk all of the time, but the result of whatever bothered her was that her hair, which was light brown, was never combed, and her dresses, which did not fit, were stained with food. She was probably in her late fifties but she looked, sounded and smelled seventy. One of the other drivers said her only problem was that she could not get over the loss of her husband in that house fire. Jack thought that was probably right. Why else would a woman not comb her hair or wash her clothes?
Jack and the other drivers figured it was only a matter of time before a Great Western district passenger agent, a DPA, came through and took the bus depot away from her. The 10 percent commission she got on all bus tickets and package express, like the shipment of roses to Woodsboro, was probably her only income. Too bad, but she was definitely not good for the bus business in Refugio.
When she said “two Tamales” she meant two Mexicans. Two people, two passengers. She called all Mexicans Tamales. She called all Negroes Blues, all bus drivers sweetie, and all other people, including well-dressed Anglo passengers, Dollars. So her report meant there were six passengers and a box of flowers for the 4:17 to Corpus and points south.
Jack grabbed the brown cardboard box of flowers, which was long, like a small casket, and light, and yelled, “All aboard for Corpus and the Valley!”
Six people got up from a group of half-broken black-vinyl-and-chrome chairs off in one corner and followed him outside. Those chairs were the only things in the place except for a cluttered desk and a matching swivel chair and a wire rack full of Great Western timetables, most of them long out of date.
He helped the people to board, stuck the flowers in the rear outside baggage compartment and hustled back to the door of his bus.
“They’re going to fire your butt, Jack,” said Adele Lyman. She had followed him outside. “Three whole minutes late. You were three whole frigging minutes late. Naughty, naughty Jack. Naughty, naughty. What has come over On Time Jack Oliver? The checkers will get you if you don’t watch out.”
Jack waved her words away, got back up and behind the wheel, gunned #4101 and eased her out onto the highway.
It was only after he had her in fourth gear, cruising gear, back on the road and moving at a good solid speed, that he finally took a look at his beautiful lady Ava, his White Widow.
Her head was back on the headrest. Her eyes were closed. Definitely. Her eyes were definitely closed. And she was no longer alone. A Refugio passenger, one of Adele Lyman’s Dollars, was now sitting next to her. The Dollar was a middle-aged woman who looked like she was somebody’s teacher. The beautiful lady was perfectly safe.
How old is she? Older than thirty? Jack had not gotten that good a look at her close up, but, yes, more than thirty. There was something in that marvelous face and skin that showed that much age. Maybe a little more. She was a woman of some substance, some living. Was she a telephone operator? Or a nurse? No, no. A teacher? Or maybe she was nothing?
Jack saw her handling a long-distance call from him to his grandmother in San Angelo. Then applying a tourniquet to his bleeding right leg. Then putting an algebra problem on a blackboard and calling on him, at age fifteen, to explain to the class what it was all about.
Then he saw her doing nothing but sitting on a stool at a Walgreen’s lunch counter, sipping a cup of coffee with cream and sugar, eating ever so gently a piece of lemon meringue pie.
He quickly spun his eyes toward the outside mirror on the left and then slowly to the one on the right. A blue Ford had come up behind him while he was watching the lady. The Ford was impatient to get around him. Jack watched him swing out to the left to check the oncoming traffic and then slide back.
Hey, calm down there, buddy.
A semi was coming from the other direction. There had been talk of widening 77 to four lanes from Victoria all the way to Corpus. But it did not make sense to Jack. The traffic was seldom that heavy, except on holidays and some weekends. But this guy in the Ford, whoever he was and wherever he was going, would probably not agree.
The truck passed, the oncoming lane cleared, and the Ford zipped on around. Jack estimated the guy’s speed at seventy-two or seventy-three miles per hour.
Hey, Slick, where are you when we need you? Slick Carlton was the Texas highway patrolman who usually worked this road. They called him Slick because he wore his hair like some movie stars did, combed straight back and sopped with hair tonic. He was stationed in Sinton and lived there, but he was originally from Port Arthur, sixty miles east of Houston, right on the coast south of Beaumont. The joke out on the road was that Slick’s mother had been a madam at one of the many whorehouses Port Arthur provided to serve the merchant sailors who came to port in search of fun and favors. Slick always denied it, but halfheartedly and with a laugh.
Jack goosed #4101 up to fifty-nine miles per hour. Fifty-five was the legal limit, fifty-seven was the company limit. But he needed to make up some of that time he had lost, he did not know where. He could not get all three minutes back between now and Woodsboro, just thirty-five miles away, but he could get a minute. Close to it, at least. Then maybe another between Woodsboro and Sinton, before opening it up even more on the four-lane from Odem on into Corpus.
Jack loved the fact that some of the drivers, his admiring friends, talked about a special sense he had of the connection between his speed and his schedule. One guy said it was a lot like the sense Indians have about animals.
He wondered if the beautiful lady snored when she slept. Loretta did when she slept on her back. Loretta was his wife.
He saw the woman, Ava, asleep on her back on a big four-poster bed. Her beautiful blue eyes were closed, her beautiful dark hair fell like a queen’s crown around her head. She was not snoring.
Hey, Ava, open your eyes and let me take a good look at you!
He glanced down at the speedometer. Fifty-three, it said. He had let it slip back down.
The depot in Woodsboro was at the El Hacienda Motor Court right on the highway. The only way anybody would know it was the bus depot was the small red, cream and blue porcelain sign that hung on a bracket out front. It was oval, about two feet long, with the words GREAT WESTERN across the top, the picture of an ACF-Brill IC-41 in the center and BUS DEPOT across the bottom. The lettering was in standard Trailways style—called macaroni because the letters resembled pieces of fat macaroni.
Jack stopped the bus with the sound of the air brakes, exactly four minutes late.
Not only had he not made up a minute, he had lost one.
It was that White Widow back there. He simply could not think about her and imagine about her and watch her and drive this bus at the same time.
Okay, Jack T. Oliver, straighten up. Square yourself and your mind away, Jack T. Oliver, On Time Jack Oliver. You have a schedule to keep. You are about to become a Master Operator.
Turn off that big imagination of yours and do your job, On Time Jack Oliver. Your reputation and your whole life depend on it.
He lost two more minutes after Woodsboro, pulling his bus into the Union Bus Terminal at Peoples and Schatzel on Lower Broadway in Corpus Christi at 5:56 P.M., exactly six minutes late. He had been late before, because of bad weather, a mechanical failure or a late connection at Houston from Dallas or New Orleans, but not since he was a rookie had he actually lost six minutes on a schedule for no real good reason.
For no real good reason like having a genuine White Widow sitting in the fifth-row left-side window seat. He had had beautiful women on his buses before. Many of them. Hundreds of them. Some of the drivers, he was convinced, drove buses solely to meet women. They were like ship captains in the movies; they kept girlfriends all along the route from Houston to Corpus, Corpus to McAllen, Houston to Dallas or wherever they drove. But Jack was not one of those. He had never made a pass at a woman passenger, o
r even a veiled suggestion of such a thing. He saw them and enjoyed the view but that was always as far as it went. Even in his mind.
That is what made this so different, so incredible, so shaking.
And it wasn’t because she was that beautiful even. He had had a young woman on his bus one time who went on to become Miss Wharton and third runner-up for Miss Texas. Billy Hobby, the agent in Wharton, still talks about her coming in there in tight silver pants and white boots with her mother and buying a one-way to Fort Worth.
No, there was more to this woman in a fifth-row left-side window seat than just being gorgeous, than just looks. But what?
Maybe it was a spiritual thing. Some kind of spirit in her had wrapped itself around one in him. There was nothing that could be done to stop it, or even to slow it down. Like the waves coming in on the beach on Padre.
Maybe “love” was the word for it. Love? Oh, come on, Jack. How can you be in love with a person when you do not even know her name and the only words you have exchanged are:
“All the way to Corpus.”/“That’s right.”
“Have a nice trip.”/“Thank you.”
What was love anyhow? He told Loretta he loved her and he meant it when he said it. He really did. He meant that he was glad the two of them had met and decided to make a life, have sex and decorate their house at Christmas together.
He and Loretta were famous in their neighborhood and in their entire part of Corpus Christi for the Christmas displays on their house and on the lawn. One year they’d even had a picture of Oscar in the Corpus Christi Caller, where Loretta worked as a supervisor in the classified advertising department. Oscar was Loretta and Jack’s half-life-size Santa Claus.
He took one last look at the White Widow in the rearview mirror as he set the emergency brake.
Do you decorate your house at Christmas, Ava? Where is your house anyhow?
She was talking to the woman sitting next to her. About what? What exactly did her voice sound like? He had heard her speak so little, it simply was not enough to get a fix. If he heard her speak on the radio or on the telephone or even over a PA system he would not be able to recognize her.
