by Jim Lehrer
“Did you really go to college for four years?” Jack asked.
“Maybe.”
“Thanks for answering me, finally.”
“You’re welcome.”
“What did you study?”
“Anthropology.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s all about where we came from.”
“We?”
“You, me, all people everywhere.”
“No wonder you took up bus driving.”
College looked around and right at Jack and smiled a good one. Jack could hardly wait to tell Progress that he had finally seen a real smile on College’s face.
Jack got another Lone Star and a small sack of Tom’s Salted Peanuts from Willow.
“Are you hiding from something?” Jack asked College.
“Probably.”
Jack decided to move on to the things they usually talked about, which was mostly comparing the steering and other mechanical characteristics of the various buses they drove. College also drove Houston–Corpus overnights, so they both knew the same buses. College shared Jack’s amazement over the fact that two buses could come off the assembly line in Chicago or Philadelphia or Muskegon or some place in Ohio but sound and shake and drive as different as if they had come from two different worlds. It was also amazing to both of them that the same bus could drive and react differently to different drivers. For one it acted up and was slow to start, say, but for another it clicked right off.
And after a while Jack told College and Willow and the others that it was time for him to get on a Nueces Transportation bus for home.
“How about a movie tonight then?” Loretta had said when he called and said no to lunch.
“Sure,” he said.
“Any choice?”
“You say.”
She was home by four-thirty and they were at the theater by five. Loretta had picked Show Boat to see. She said it was a big musical in Technicolor with lots of good songs and things like that. It had already been out for a couple of years and had come back for a second replay at the Bayside Theater.
Jack was inside the theater, sitting with a sack of popcorn in his lap and watching the opening credits of the movie, before he realized what had happened. Ava was in this movie. Not his Ava but the other one, the movie one, the real one. Ava Gardner.
She was not the main girl star. That was Kathryn Grayson. Ava played a half-Blue singer with a drinking problem who was down on her luck. Jack went furnace-hot inside when she sang a song called “Bill.”
He almost cried when, near the end, with black bags under her eyes, she sang “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man of Mine.”
Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly,
I gotta love one man till I die,
Can’t help lovin’ dat man of mine.
Loretta did not suggest or even hint about making love when they got home. It was Wednesday. That was what they did on Friday.
Jack had never been happier about that particular habit than he was right then. He had the strange feeling, a really strange feeling, that it would have been disloyal to Ava, his Ava, to make love to Loretta this particular night.
Most of the feelings he was having about everything were strange.
Then, going to Houston the next day, he had another animal problem. A woman passenger tried to take a black cocker spaniel on the bus with her at Woodsboro. She said the dog would stay right in her lap all of the way to Ganado, where she was going.
“It’s against our rules,” he told her.
“He is better behaved than most humans,” said the lady, who was a Dollar in her forties.
“I don’t make the rules, ma’am.”
“He doesn’t bite.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He’s completely trained. He will not mess up your bus.”
“I’m really sorry.”
The woman burst into tears. “I have to go to Ganado!” she screamed. “My mother is dying!”
“I don’t make the rules,” he said again, wondering this time if she was a checker. Now wouldn’t that be something? A checker trying to see if he would give in and let this woman take a dog on a Great Western Trailways bus.
The woman, checker or not and still crying, ran away with her dog under her arm.
“I hate you!” she screamed at him.
And Jack got back up in his bus and drove off toward Houston. He decided there was no way that woman was a checker and he felt bad about her, her cocker spaniel and her mother.
The final episode in his six days and fourteen and a half hours of misery came the next day when he went to the Houston garage to pick up the bus he would drive south to Victoria and Corpus, to Ava, his Ava.
He got in to start it and the engine would not turn over. There was not even a whirl. A mechanic fooled with it for fifteen minutes and pronounced it fixed. But the delay caused him to hurry through all of his prerun preparations at the depot.
The one thing he did not want to be was late into Victoria. He wanted every moment he could possibly have with her.
It was between El Campo and Wharton, with still about ninety minutes to go before Victoria, that he was overcome with panic at the possibility of her not being there.
It was something he had not even considered until then. What if two trips on the 3:15 was it? What if she was not going to be there this Friday?
What if he would never see her again?
Thinking about it caused him to forget to throw off the bundles of the Houston Press that were delivered every afternoon by bus to El Campo and Edna.
He also forgot about a passenger who wanted to get off just the other side of Hungerford, a no-depot flag stop. The passenger, a middle-aged woman in a red dress, had to run up the bus aisle and yell at him to stop.
He was embarrassed and apologetic and it started him worrying about himself, but after a while he was back worrying only about whether he would ever see his White Widow again.
There, again like Refugio, she was again.
She was the fourth in line and there were another five or six passengers behind her, so there was no way Jack could say anything to her other than “Good to see you again.”
“Thank you,” she replied.
Good to see you again.
Thank you.
She wore a short-sleeved pink dress. So he felt the bare skin of her elbow for the second time. The touch triggered little shots of something through his fingers up into his arms and down and around and throughout his body. Or maybe he imagined it.
But what did it matter if they were imagined if he really did feel them? And he really did feel something.
It was at Sinton that he knew he had to do something. He could not bear to watch her like this—she was in the sixth-row aisle seat on the left—and think of her slipping away into the Corpus Christi evening before he had asked her a few questions.
Where do you go when you leave the bus depot?
Why do you ride this schedule every Friday?
Will you be back next Friday?
What is your name?
Who are you?
What do you think of me?
Could you love a bus driver?
What about a bus driver who was a Master Operator?
Would you sit in my Angel Seat?
The bus depot at Sinton was on the right side of the highway at a Gulf station. Two passengers got off and three got on. He also put off a box of heavy oil-field equipment that had been shipped package express from Haliburton in Houston, and he thumped all four of the rear tires. Company rules required thumping them every two hours or so to see if they were flat. Because they were dual—two on each side of the axle—it was impossible to tell just by looking if one was flat. So the driver thumped them with something heavy and listened to the sound. If the sound was dead, that meant the tire was dead. Jack used his ticket punch for thumping.
He had thumped them in Victoria and did not need to thump them now at Sinton, but he wanted some time to
think. Some more time to think.
Ten minutes farther down Highway 77 toward Odem and the intersection with Highway 9 that would take him and his bus and her on into Corpus he made a decision.
He knew that stretch of Highway 9 like the back of his hand. Like the back of his hand. An uncle, his mother’s brother Leroy, who lived up in Floresville near San Antonio, used that expression all the time. After spending a weekend or a summer around that uncle, Jack would come back to Beeville saying it himself. Without thinking about it he saw most things and knew most things and felt most things as clear as if they were the back of his hand.
Just beyond Calallen there was a roadhouse called Smitty’s that, like the Tarpon Inn, was popular with some of the bus crowd. Smitty’s Seafood Heaven and Earth, it was called officially. One of the Corpus–Laredo drivers met his second wife there, and it was where a Corpus–Brownsville Missouri Pacific driver had been punched out by a drunk sailor who thought the driver had said something about swabbies he did not like. The place had been gutted by a terrible fire several months ago and it was now closed down. Some of the drivers thought the owner, Smitty Mathews, a retired rodeo rider, set the fire for the insurance.
Jack remembered, because he had passed it at least three times a week for the last ten years, that there was an outside telephone booth in the parking lot in front of the now deserted, blackened, forlorn place.
It was a perfect place to have a mechanical breakdown.
One and a half miles before Smitty’s he reached down to the dashboard and turned off the ignition. After a beat, he switched it back on. There was a silence and then a pop and then more silence. He kept his foot off the brake, moved the gearshift lever into neutral and let the bus coast.
He pressed the starter. It caught. He gunned it and then switched off the ignition again.
The charred remains of Smitty’s Seafood Heaven and Earth was now just ahead. He could see it. He had another hundred yards or so to go. The bus was now moving at about thirty miles an hour. Jack could see a line of four or five cars and trucks stacked up behind him. There was too much oncoming traffic for them to pass him.
He swung the bus into the driveway in front of Smitty’s. And he braked her to a full stop.
“Sorry, folks,” he said to Ava and the other passengers, “but we have developed some kind of mechanical problem. I am sure we will not be delayed long. Please, everyone, remain onboard the bus. Thank you.”
He opened the door and stepped off.
The motor hatch on an ACF-Brill was on the right side of the bus about halfway back. He opened it and reached inside to a piece of wire. He pulled it loose and twisted it.
Then he went back inside the bus, slipped back behind the wheel, turned on the ignition switch, pushed the starter button. He did not have to look into the rearview mirror to know that the ears of every passenger were listening for the sound of the starter and the motor and that the eyes of every passenger were on him.
There was no sound. The starter was not turning over.
He addressed her and the others.
“I see a telephone over there,” he said. “We are less than twenty minutes from Corpus. It shouldn’t be long before a mechanic or another bus comes to our rescue. Those of you going on to Brownsville or McAllen or Laredo or elsewhere in the Valley have nothing to worry about. All of those connections and things will wait. Please remain on the bus while I go and call. Thank you.”
Jennings answered the phone and accepted his collect charges. Jennings was the main daytime dispatcher. Jack told him exactly where he had broken down and described the problem as probably having something to do with the ignition system. Jennings said a bus and a mechanic would be on their way in a few minutes.
“What have you got going on through?” Jennings asked.
“Nine to Raymondville or below, three for Laredo, one of them for Alice,” Jack replied.
“We’ll hold everything,” Jennings said. “Fridays aren’t your day, are they, On Time Jack?”
Jack ignored that and said, “There was a problem at the garage in Houston. She wouldn’t turn over. A mechanic said he fixed it but you know what that means.”
There she was inside his bus. He had twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five, to do something, to make a move. But he couldn’t just go in and sit down beside her.
Hello, Ava, would you mind if I sit with you while we wait?
I would be delighted, Jack.
You remembered my name!
How could I ever forget?
I love you with all my heart.
I know.
He stepped back into the bus.
“Help is on its way,” he announced to her and the other passengers. She was looking right at him. “Please make yourselves comfortable. If you want to get off the bus, that’s okay if you’ll stay real close—and out of the traffic on the highway. I want to make sure I deliver all of you in one piece.”
Jack heard some laughter. Ava smiled. She obviously thought he, this bus driver, was one clever, funny, witty man.
Yes, but could she love him?
Several of the passengers stood up and started up the aisle toward Jack and the door. That meant he would have to move out of their way so they could get off.
That meant he might as well get off too.
But what if she didn’t? What if she stayed right there in her seat?
What if he had done something so irresponsible, stupid and insane as sabotaging his own bus for nothing? What if he had risked his gold badge, his job, his future, his life, for nothing?
Outside now, he lit a Camel.
Jack T. Oliver, you are a fool. You are a lovesick boy. You are not a Master Operator. You are not fit to wear the uniform and carry the ticket punch of a Great Western Trailways bus driver, much less wear the gold badge of a Master Operator.
There she was.
From a spot in the parking lot ten feet away he watched her put her left foot on the scarred concrete and then the other.
He was there by her in two quick steps, two quick seconds. He held out his pack of Camels.
“Would you like a cigarette?” he asked.
“No, thank you,” she replied.
“You don’t smoke?”
“Not really, no.”
A conversation. We are having a conversation!
“This is your third straight Friday with me,” he said.
“That’s right.” She was looking past him. “I assume that phone over there is operational?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Operational. What a terrific word to use. He decided he would use one himself.
“Do you have adequate change?” He loved the word adequate.
“Yes, thank you,” she replied.
She lowered her incredibly marvelous head, stepped to one side and moved toward the phone booth.
He watched her every step, her every movement. He watched her put a coin into the slot. He watched her wait while the phone rang at the other end and he watched her talk to someone.
Who was she talking to? A husband, a boyfriend? A mother, a sister? A preacher, a lawyer, a cop?
She hung up. She opened the glass door of the booth and walked toward him and the bus.
“I hope everything is all right,” Jack said when she arrived back in his presence.
“Thank you,” she said and she kept walking to the bus.
He helped her up.
He saw that the bump was gone from her leg. In the words of Paul Madison, That’s progress, you see.
At Corpus she disembarked and left him, his bus and the depot the same as before. He tried his best to delay her, but once again, with people lined up behind to get out, it was simply impossible.
“Thanks again” was all he said.
She only smiled.
It was almost twenty minutes later, when he was out of the N.T.C. bus and walking the last two blocks to his house, that he remembered something truly horrible. He had not told her he would not be there next
Friday because of the Master Operators dinner in Houston!
He should have stopped her to say: Ava dear, please do not be alarmed when you do not see me next week. I will be getting a gold badge. But I will return the following Friday.
Or something like that.
He opened the front door of his house. Loretta was standing just inside.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I had a breakdown on Nine at Calallen.”
She was not dressed as she always was. She did not have on a dress or a skirt and blouse or even a pair of slacks. She had on her nightgown. Only her nightgown.
“I put the meat loaf on a very low heat,” she said. “But something else is on high boil.”
Jack reached out for her. He grabbed her shoulders and kissed her on the lips quickly and without passion.
“Being late like that has really upset me,” he said. “I think I’m going to have to take a pass on it—on us, you know what I mean.”
“I hear you.” But it was obvious from the look on her face that she did not know what he meant.
He did not know either. Not for sure. Not everything. Not even very much.
CHAPTER 7
There had been a lot of stories in the Houston newspapers about the Ben Milam Hotel and its history as the center of Houston’s early gambling and whoring industries. Jack had never paid much attention to any of it because by the time it became a part of his own history, as the place he spent his resting layover time, it was just a hotel.
Now, tonight, it was also going to be the place in history where he was presented with his gold Master Operator badge.
It was in one of the big banquet rooms, one named for Stephen F. Austin, who, like Jack’s hero, Sam Houston, as well as Ben Milam, Davey Crockett and Mirabeau Lamar (as in the bar down the street), was a big deal in Texas’s fight for independence from Mexico. There was a portrait of Austin about the size of a large Great Western bus depot sign on the main wall, behind the head table.
Jack was at that table, along with six other drivers who were getting gold badges and four company executives, including two from the general offices in Dallas.
