The White Widow: A Novel

by Jim Lehrer

  Then there was the sound of high heels hitting the bricks. He turned in the direction from whence it came. And there she was. A blond woman in a dark cloth coat. She looked scared and sad. They extended their arms to each other and embraced. They spoke, but Jack could not understand what they were saying. It was in French.

  “Dearest,” the subtitle said at the bottom of the screen.

  “My darling,” it said right afterward.

  Both gave startled looks. There was the sound of boot heels on the bricks.

  “Someone’s coming!” said the subtitle.

  The man and the woman put up the collars on their coats and walked away together. After a few seconds they started running. The sound of the boot heels on the bricks remained, getting louder and then fainter. Finally the sound stopped as the pair stopped running at the entrance to a large park. They hugged and went into the park. In a few seconds they were surrounded by bushes.

  He removed his coat and placed it on the ground. He assisted her to the ground with a touch to the elbow not unlike the one Jack used to help Ava and other passengers on and off his bus.

  He joined her on his coat.

  “This must be the last time,” she said in the subtitle.

  “I know,” he said. “But I would rather die.”

  “We will both die if we continue.”

  “It is then only a matter of how and when I die, my dearest.”

  “For me as well.”

  They kissed. He removed her dark cloth coat. He ran his right hand through her hair and over her shoulders. He put his head down on her chest.

  “Why must our nations be at war, Jacques?” she said.

  “It is a matter for history, not for people who love one another, Maria.”

  “We Italians should not have done what we did.”

  “We French had no choice but to do what we did.”

  “I know, my dear Jacques, I know. But I am first and always an Italian. I must serve my country.”

  “But it is Fascist.”

  “I know, but it is my country.”

  “But you are stealing secrets. You are a spy.”

  “So are you.”

  “But for a just cause, to defeat fascism.”

  He unbuttoned her blouse.

  “I must,” he said.

  “I know,” she said.

  Her breasts were exposed. He kissed each one fervently.

  “Oh, why must we be enemies?” she asked.

  “It is in our blood,” he said after coming up for air.

  “So is our love.”

  “It is our blood that will be spilled.”

  He removed his suit coat, tie and shirt.

  And so it went for over an hour. Full intercourse was never quite shown but most everything else was. Jack had heard of movies like this but this was the first time he had ever seen one.

  He had felt dirty and stupid when he first came into the lobby. He did not look at either the woman who sold the tickets or the young man who took them at the door. It was pitch-black inside the theater itself and that was just fine with Jack. It took a few seconds to get used to the dark in order to find a seat but he didn’t mind.

  “I like to sit right down front,” Horns said.

  “Not me,” said Jack. “I’m a back-of-the-theater man.”

  “All right,” said Horns. “I’ll see you when it’s over.”

  And when it was over he went out into the lobby and waited for Horns.

  Both of the spies, Maria as well as Jacques, did not survive. She was arrested and then tortured in a hotel room by a Gestapo officer in plainclothes. He wanted to know everything she had told her French lover. She repeatedly claimed she told him nothing, but the Nazi did not believe her. He had two hoods take her to a cliff overlooking an ocean and throw her several hundred feet to her death.

  Jacques died in a gun battle with the Gestapo hoods after he arrived at the cliff seconds too late to save the woman he loved.

  “Our love was not to be,” he said as he lay bleeding to death.

  Jack left the theater wondering if, and hoping that, the turn-on he had received from watching Jacques and Maria would last until he came home to Loretta the next day.

  But it was gone by the time he got back to the hotel and into his room.

  He went to sleep thinking about Ava and vowing to try again in the morning on the way back to Corpus to see if he could bring back Maria and Jacques.

  CHAPTER 8

  The custom and practice among Great Western Trailways drivers was to flash their bus headlights at each other when approaching from opposite directions. One flick meant simply Hi and all is well. Two flicks meant Hi and look out for a speed trap, an accident or some other hazard up ahead. Three flicks meant Stop, I need to talk to you.

  The next morning between Ganado and Edna, Jack flicked three times at the oncoming bus from Victoria, Corpus and the Valley. College was driving it. There had been a lot of swapping of runs and bringing in of extra-board people to accommodate the needs of drivers like Jack to be at the Master Operator dinner in Houston. College was the guy who had ended up driving Jack’s run south the previous day.

  “I need a couple of cash fare receipts,” Jack said to College. Jack had stopped his bus on the westbound shoulder of the highway and dashed across to College, whose bus was on the other shoulder.

  “I cannot believe the new Master Operator went off without something like that,” said College. He stepped up into his bus and returned in a minute with a whole book of cash fare receipts.

  “Congratulations, by the way, Jack,” he said. “Let me look at it.”

  College was an inch or so taller than Jack. He stepped up to look right at the gold badge on Jack’s hat. “A thing of beauty,” he said. “If things don’t work out you can melt it down and sell it for gold. Well, got to be on our way.”

  Jack had the sad thought—the sad certain thought—that College Tony Mullett would never get a gold badge. Nobody who never smiled could ever become a Master Operator.

  “How did it go on my run yesterday?” Jack asked quickly, trying his best to appear casual, normal, nonchalant.

  “Same as always.”

  “Did you happen to pick up a passenger in Victoria who looked sick?”

  “Sick? No, not that I remember. There were only five or six. A couple of Mexicans and a few others. Everybody looked well. Look, we both need to get a move on.”

  “Nobody asked about me there in Victoria?”

  “Progress Paul. He talked about how wonderful it was that you got your gold badge and all. Said it was progress, you see.”

  “I mean the passengers.”

  “Jack, come on. Like I said, there were two Mexicans. The only other passenger I remember was some looker of a woman, a White Widow type. She sure as hell didn’t ask about you. I kept wishing she would ask about me. I couldn’t keep my eyes off of her. But that was it. Did you hear about Texas Red Rocket?”

  “What about it?”

  “One of the dispatchers found their section torn out of Mr. Glisan’s copy of the Red Guide.” The Red Guide was the two-inch-thick book with a red cover that contained all the schedules of all the intercity bus companies in the United States and Canada. Its real name was Russell’s Official National Motor Coach Guide.

  “So what?”

  “Well, they’re saying it may mean we’re buying ’em out. I heard at the Tarpon yesterday that now they think Truman was a Commie, too. Nixon said it to somebody.”

  “Why would he say something like that?”

  “I was surprised Ike kept him on the ticket. Should have dumped him. Bye for now, Jack.”

  Dump Nixon? Truman too? “Right. Thanks.” Preacher Williams’s prayer line about rumors was right on target. They traveled up and down the lines of Great Western Trailways like electricity through the air.

  College jumped back into his bus and in a few seconds they were gone.

  And a couple of seconds after that Jack and his
bus were going the other way.

  He could not imagine why Ava had not asked about him. He might have been hurt, sick or even dead. And she did not ask.

  It could be that she was simply too shy, too embarrassed to ask.

  The sex thing was really not working. Horns Livingston’s device for maintaining himself sexually ready for his wife back in Shreveport was not having the same effect on Jack. Try as he did to keep the spies Jacques and Maria in his mind, he could not. Not enough, at least. And when he did it was Ava who was Maria, not Loretta.

  The new gold badge on his cap got in the way also. All along the route the agents had nice things to say to him about his being made a Master Operator. Those in Louise, Wharton and El Campo insisted on having somebody take their pictures with Jack in front of his bus.

  He had also had to cope with Lem Odum, a retired Rosenberg High School civics and English teacher who traveled regularly from Rosenberg to Victoria to get his back adjusted by the only woman chiropractor in South Texas. “Men don’t know how to do it,” he had explained to Jack many trips ago. “They’re too rough, too impatient, too stupid.”

  As always, Lem, who was probably seventy-five years old and who always wore white pants and white leather shoes, insisted on sitting in Jack’s Angel Seat and talking a mile a minute.

  “You know how all these towns got their names, don’t you, Mr. Oliver? Yes, I am sure you do. This highway follows the route of the old New York, Texas and Mexico Railways, which was owned by an Italian count named Telfener and his American father-in-law, named Hungerford. They called it the Macaroni Line and it only got built for ninety miles from Rosenberg to Victoria. But it left its mark. They named two towns after themselves, Telfener and Hungerford, plus a couple for Telfener’s daughters, Inez and Edna, and two more after a partner, John Mackay, and his daughter, Louise. You already knew all of that, didn’t you, Mr. Oliver. Very interesting history along this highway. You should tell the passengers about it as you drive along. They would love knowing where they are going and who went before them …”

  He was delighted when he finally got to Victoria, where the schedule called for a full twenty-five-minute noon-meal rest stop. He arrived to some real commotion. Progress Paul, Johnny Merriweather and the porter, Willie Church, were standing there in the depot driveway. Each was holding a handmade sign. MASTER OLIVER IS OUR MAN was the message on Paul’s.

  “Lunch is on me,” said Paul to Jack, “if you don’t have more than a hamburger.”

  A hamburger all the way with fries was exactly what Jack ate.

  “I hold my glass up in your honor,” said Paul, holding up a cup of coffee, which, as far as Jack ever saw, was the only thing Paul Madison ever drank.

  Jack clinked his iced-tea glass against Paul’s cup and against cups or glasses held by two other drivers at the table. One was an extra-board man waiting to double a schedule back to Houston at three o’clock. The other drove the Austin–Victoria turnaround for Texas Red Rocket Motorcoaches. He, like Paul, was on a layover.

  Jack entertained them for a few minutes with a little bit of what he could remember of Pharmacy’s spiel about what it took to be a bus driver. And he told them about Sunshine, sitting up there about to get his gold badge but worried that the same company that was giving it to him also was looking for ways to fire him.

  “Well, the checkers are out, he is sure right about that,” Paul said.

  “How do you know that?” Jack asked.

  “I hauled one of them this morning.”

  “Now, come on, Paul, how did you know it was a checker.”

  “A guy in dirty overalls about thirty flagged me down just down the road from Sample, between Smiley and Westhoff. He said he was going to Cuero and gave me a twenty-dollar bill. He was a checker.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I know everybody by sight and by name who lives anywhere near Sample and he wasn’t one of them who does. He was a setup. Nobody in there would have a twenty-dollar bill in their pocket either.”

  “Well, you don’t have anything to worry about.”

  “Nope.”

  Neither do I, thought Jack. I am no Sunshine. I know for sure Great Western Trailways needs me and Paul and our kind to stay in business. Like Pharmacy said about the backbone and the tailbone. What good were buses without drivers?

  A few minutes later when he loaded up for Corpus he did pay particularly close attention to each and every one of the eleven passengers who got onboard. Maybe, just maybe, one of them was a checker. But then he thought, So what? I have nothing to fear from any checker.

  He also could not help but look in the line of passengers for her, for Ava. Of course it was Saturday morning instead of Friday afternoon, and of course she had already gone to Corpus the day before with College. She was clearly “the looker” he was talking about.

  But he still could not help but look and hope.

  Would he spend the rest of his life looking and hoping for another sight of her?

  “What’s suddenly wrong with me, Jack?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t say ‘nothing’ like that,” Loretta said.

  “I don’t know any other way to say it.”

  “You said it like it was a secret.”

  “ ‘Nothing’ is not a secret.”

  “You’re fooling around with somebody,” Loretta said. “That’s the secret. It turns out you’re just like every other bus driver in the world, that’s the secret. You can’t keep your hands off of women, you can’t keep your thing in your pants. You’re nothing but a bus driver after all. Nothing but a bus driver who thinks promises to your wife don’t count, only hers to you do. Nothing but a little boy bus driver. That’s what you are, Jack. You lose a few pounds, get that uniform so it fits and you decide you are ready to go out there and have yourself some women, to hell with me, to hell with what you swore to do in front of that Methodist preacher and your mommy and daddy and my mommy and daddy and before Jesus and God and everyone else in that church. You no-good rotten bastard. You may have a gold badge from Great Western Trailways but you do not have a gold badge from life, I can tell you that. You are a lowlife, Jack. You are not a Master Operator person. You are not a gold badge person. You are not. You are not. You think you are skinny and that makes you a lover. You think you are skinny and that makes you a ladykiller. You think you are skinny and that makes you irresistible. You think you are skinny and that makes you something you are not. You are not any of that, Jack. You are still the same Jack. Nothing has changed just because you can wear pants with a thirty-four waist instead of a forty-two. Nothing has changed because you can wear a shirt with a sixteen collar instead of a seventeen and a half. Nothing has changed, Jack, except the core of your soul. And that smells. I can smell it. It is rotten. It is really rotten.”

  They were sitting at the kitchen table, the only place they sat and talked about important things. This was the most important thing they had ever talked about or probably ever would talk about.

  The amazing thing to Jack was that Loretta was not screaming it out. Her words were screams but her voice was quiet. He waited for her to stop, and when she did, he looked off at the refrigerator for a while.

  “Say something, Jack,” Loretta said. “Say anything, Jack.”

  “I’m not fooling around,” Jack said. “I am not fooling around.”

  “Why did you say it twice like that? Mr. Harte at the paper always says if somebody says something twice they are lying. The second time is to convince themselves they aren’t. It’s like they are quoting themselves and that makes it all true because the quoting is true. I did not kill the butcher. I did not kill the butcher. The first time was a lie. The second time wasn’t because it was just repeating, quoting the first time. And it is true I said it once, so that makes quoting it true.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “It makes more than you do, coming in here now saying again—again saying—you don’t think you
are up to making love to your wife, me, the woman you say you love.”

  “I strained my back throwing some express off the bus at Wharton. I told you I strained my back throwing some express off the bus at …”

  “There you go, lying again.”

  Jack really was lying. He was lying in a way that he had never done before to Loretta. His back was fine, of course. The only express he had to put off at Wharton was a small box of auto parts for the Chevrolet dealer.

  “Let me tell you about the dinner at the Milam,” he said.

  “Go ahead, tell me. I really want to hear about how the great Master Operator got his great gold badge. Was she there?”

  “Who?”

  “Her.”

  “Her?”

  “You know who I mean.”

  Yes, he knew who she meant, but she didn’t know. Nobody knew what was going on in his mind. Nobody knew that. Only he knew that. That was the only private place there was in a person’s life. The mind. He knew who she meant and only he knew. Loretta did not know.

  He described the Milam Hotel meeting room and what Mr. Glisan and Pharmacy said. Loretta did not crack a smile, even when he repeated a little bit of Preacher Williams’s stupid prayer.

  “Was she there, Jack, is still my question.”

  “My question is still Who?”

  “Your girlfriend.”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend.”

  “I don’t hear you, Jack.”

  “Then you’re not listening.”

  “I offer to reward my new Master Operator with anything and as much as he wants and what does he say? He says no thanks, because he strained his back putting off some express at Wharton. He says it twice the first time and then he says it twice again. That to me means only one thing and that one thing is that he has a girlfriend. I hear you. Let’s go to the movies, then.”

  “Great. Let’s do.”

  She stood up. “See what I mean?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You didn’t say that twice. You said ‘Great’ and ‘Let’s do’ only once. That means you were not lying. You really think it’s greater to go to a movie with me than to make love with me.”