by Jim Lehrer
“I’m going to go change clothes.”
“You don’t want to wear your new gold badge to the movies?”
He did not answer her and walked on out of the kitchen toward their bedroom.
“Does she have a name, Jack? Does this girlfriend of yours have a name? Is she a ticket agent or what? A passenger or what? Have you got her swooning because of that uniform, Jack? Mr. Sexy Thin Jack T. Oliver, Master Operator.”
He wasn’t sure how much longer he could go on like this.
He vaguely remembered that as a line from the movie about the two spies. They didn’t know how much longer they could go on and they didn’t go on much longer because they died.
And for the first time since they met at that Nueces Transportation party, he thought about Loretta dying. He wondered what the preacher who married them would say about her before the pallbearers, all Great Western drivers in uniform, carried her out in a coffin to be buried at the Resthaven Cemetery on Highway 9 on the road to Odem.
He saw himself sitting there in the front row, his eyes closed, his head down, while somebody played on an organ “I Walk Through the Valley Alone,” Loretta’s favorite hymn. He didn’t look at Loretta’s parents there in the pew to his right. They came over from Ingleside, a small fishing town across the bay to the east from Corpus. That was where Loretta had grown up and where her father, Marsh Lindsey, still ran a small bait-and-tackle store in a marina. Loretta’s cousin, Alice Armstrong, the All-American Girl, was in the pew with the Lindseys, along with Mr. Harte and several of the girls from the Caller. Jack had asked his own mother and father not to come from Beeville to the funeral and they honored his request. He seldom thought of them as part of his life anymore. The Great Western drivers and dispatchers and ticket agents and porters were his family now. They were the ones who really mattered to him.
He saw himself with his head in Ava’s lap. He was in full uniform and he was crying. She was patting him on the top of his uniform cap.
“Now, now, Jack,” Ava said. “It wasn’t your fault. You must not punish yourself this way.”
“It was my fault,” he said between the sobs.
“Now, now, Jack,” Ava said, removing his cap and running her fingers through his hair. “How could you have known she didn’t know how to run out of a house on fire?”
He hoped and prayed Loretta didn’t want to see Show Boat again tonight.
Jack had done only a few things in his life that made him feel ashamed. Like everybody else in the world, he had told a few lies, particularly to his parents and to teachers when he was growing up, but none that did serious or permanent harm to anyone else. He had stolen a bamboo fishing rod out of the garage of a neighbor in Beeville, but he returned it out of guilt after he had used it only once. He had used a cheat sheet taped to the inside of his wrist to answer four of seventeen questions on a geometry exam when he was a senior in high school. As a grown-up in Corpus, when he was given change from a ten-dollar bill instead of a five by mistake at the post office, he had kept it. He had screamed cuss words at strangers and belched and expended gas in public places a few times. But overall, he had very few reasons to feel deep shame, the kind that lingered in the soul for more than a week or put people to bed or out of their heads. He hadn’t even done that much in his imagination to be ashamed of.
Now, suddenly, at the age of thirty-six in the year 1956, after just becoming a Master Operator, he was thinking about the death of Loretta, and thinking about it as a good thing.
The shame of it made him shudder and ache down inside below his stomach, as happened sometimes when he drove his car over the Highway 281 high bridge that went east from downtown over the ship channel to the Port of Corpus Christi.
And he spoke to himself:
It’s an unbelievable situation. I am acting like a high school boy in jeans and boots with a crew cut and a letter jacket. I have to stop this. I cannot continue to moon about this woman, this woman I call Ava. How silly that is. Here I am, talking about this stranger as if she was my girlfriend or mistress or something or other. Mistress. Listen to me use that word. What exactly is a mistress anyhow? I don’t even know her name! I call her Ava after a movie star. I remember guys in high school in Beeville did that. They’d come home from a movie with Hedy Lamarr or Lana Turner in it and then on Saturday night, on dates with real girls, they’d imagine they were actually kissing or feeling up Hedy or Lana. Grown-up Master Operators do not act that way. But here I am. I mean, here I am. My wife. What have I done to her? She asks if I am running around on her? No, I say. Which is the truth. The technical truth. But I am running way, way around on her in my head. And then some. But I cannot tell her that. I cannot say, Loretta dear, what I am doing, to tell the truth, is that I have fallen like heavy rain on dry sand for a woman on my Friday bus. We have exchanged maybe twenty words. Forty words, counting both the ones she has said and the ones I have said. Forty words! She looks at me like she does not even really see me. And that is probably because she really doesn’t. I am only the bus driver. I am like the seat. Oh my, there is the bus seat. Oh my, there is the bus driver. She didn’t even miss me last Friday. Or at least if she did, she didn’t say anything to College. “Where is that wonderful man Jack T. Oliver, the regular driver on this run? Is he down with the flu? Did he have to have an operation to remove something? Is he on vacation? Where did he go on vacation? Did he die? Did he get run over by another bus? Has he become president of Great Western Trailways? Has he become a movie star? Is he Ward Bond?” But not a word like any of that. Not one question. This cannot go on. I cannot continue to let this do this to me. Do what to me? Well, look what happened last Friday. I actually sabotaged a bus. I actually destroyed company property so I could simply be with her another twenty-five minutes or so. I sabotaged a bus! It was simply crazy. Am I simply crazy? I am not thinking about murder, heavens no, but I am thinking about Loretta dying. By natural causes, by all means. In a fire, of all things. I cannot believe it! I am thinking that if she died, then Ava would hold my head in her lap and comfort me. Ava would make it all better for me. If Loretta were dead then everything would be all right. Then what I am thinking about Ava would be fine, would be all right, would be honorable, would be clean. You are a terrible, rotten despicable person, Jack T. Oliver. I am ashamed to be you.
Jack said all of this to himself that night as he lay next to Loretta. They had seen High Noon with Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. Now Loretta was asleep. He had faked being asleep, but when he was sure she was, he opened his eyes and went to the kitchen for a glass of water.
He wanted to think. And he wanted to talk. He wanted to say what he had to say to somebody. But there was nobody to talk to. He had almost started with Progress Paul Madison but that was not going to work. What about College? Maybe he really was smart, maybe he really did go through four years of college. Maybe he would listen and understand and help. And help. Help. Help was what he needed, all right, and maybe all that help needed to be was for somebody to listen to him tell his story, recite his awfulness, admit his shame. But there was nobody. There was nobody. There was nobody he could tell about Ava on the bus and what she was doing to him.
Some things are too private. Some thoughts are too shameful to have, much less to talk to someone else about. How can a normal person go around talking about having a fantasy love affair in the head with a woman who didn’t even miss him when College drove the schedule? How could a normal person go around talking about wishing his wife was dead in a fire in his own house?
But there are some things that seem too important not to talk out loud about. It’s not enough to just think to yourself about them. They have to be spoken.
Jack wished he had a friend he could call.
“Hey, Kenny, this is Jack. I need to talk to you about something important right now, this very minute. I know it’s three A.M. and you live in Kingsville, thirty miles away, but I need you. Okay?”
“Okay, Jack. I’ll be right there.”
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But there was no Kenny in Kingsville in Jack’s life. Was there a Kenny in Kingsville in everybody else’s life? Do other people know people so well that they could call them in the middle of the night and get them to come over to hear about a crazy thing like his love affair with a woman named Ava on his bus? A woman named Ava whose name was really something else?
Does Loretta have somebody she can talk to? Somebody she can tell about what her husband, Jack, is acting like? Which is like he has a girlfriend. Is there someone she can tell about the fact that her husband has suddenly given up making love to her either before or after the meat loaf?
No, probably not. There are some things that we just cannot talk to anybody about. It’s the same for everybody. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s just for men.
Thoughts about wanting your parents to leave you or your Spanish teacher to come over and unzip your fly or being tempted to yell something terrible in the middle of the Sears store or wanting to walk into the grocery store that wouldn’t cash your check and blow up the manager with a twelve-gauge shotgun.
Nobody talks about those kinds of things with anybody.
So maybe Ava will have to stay unspoken about to anyone.
So that meant he was on his own, just as he always had been, and as far as he knew, just like everybody else was, too. But knowing that everybody else was did not help one bit. It even made it worse.
CHAPTER 9
The rain began between El Campo and Wharton. At first it was only a few drops on the windshield. But he could tell almost from the start that it was going to be a bad one, much worse than the simple straight-down rain that had come the week before on his day off, even worse than what they said in the forecast.
Jack turned on the ACF-Brill’s huge wipers and a few minutes later he turned on the headlights and the running lights. Some wind came up east of Ganado and it was blowing the rain sideways across the highway by the time he got to Edna. He put on a yellow slicker and used a large black umbrella to help passengers keep dry as they dashed off or onto the bus. The slicker and the umbrella were part of the equipment supplied by the company.
All of that took valuable time. Traffic was also slower than usual. It always was when it rained heavily. The dispatcher in Houston had told him to expect heavy rain and maybe even a thunderstorm or two. He said the forecast said it was part of a whipping tail of a tropical storm, a real Indianola, that had stalled somewhere out in the Gulf below Lake Charles, Louisiana. Tropical storms and hurricanes and the warnings and alerts and conversation that went with them were all part of life on the Texas Gulf Coast, particularly during the September Indianola season. They were another of the “all in a day’s work, ma’am” hazards faced by Jack and other bus drivers.
He thought of Dry Fred Bogard, a San Antonio–Corpus driver who had a terrible fear and hate of driving in bad weather. He would call in sick whenever he heard about heavy rain or thunderstorms in an official forecast or felt something coming in his left wrist, which he said was more accurate than most forecasts. The company put up with him until one afternoon he got caught in a surprise Indianola-like crusher of blowing sand and rain on his way north into Pleasanton. He pulled his bus into the driveway next to the café where the buses stopped, jumped out and ran inside, leaving the San Antonio–bound passengers to wonder what was happening. Despite pleas from the woman commission agent who ran the café and several of the passengers, he refused to come back outside and drive on as long as there was even a whiff of sand or a drop of moisture still in the air. He now sold tires and batteries for Kelfer Tire Company in San Antonio.
Jack was no Dry Bogard. His only real concern this afternoon was that it was Friday and the weather was making him late into Victoria. The later he was, the later it would be that he saw Ava.
It was just after he turned on the wipers that he made a decision about her. He was going to ask her her name this afternoon. No matter what else happened, he was going to know her real name by the time he pulled into Corpus Christi this evening.
That was his decision and it would be done. And if that worked, then maybe he would ask her to sit in the Angel Seat. Maybe. That decision was not a sure decision like the one about her name.
My name is Jack, what is yours?
Ava.
Would you care to ride in my Angel Seat, Ava?
I would love to, Jack.
But she wasn’t there. She wasn’t there!
He looked in the waiting room and then in the coffee shop. She wasn’t there. Did this mean she was not coming? Did this mean she was not coming ever again on a Friday afternoon?
Did this mean that it was over between them?
“Our love was not to be,” Jacques had said as he lay bleeding to death after being shot by the men who threw Maria off the cliff.
Jack told Johnny Merriweather to give him a first call. He had no choice. He had to go, no matter the weather. The wind was even stronger and the rain was even harder now than when he had pulled in ten minutes earlier. He heard some thunder off in the distance. A flash of lightning came through the waiting-room door.
But he had to go. He was no Dry Fred Bogard.
There was a small canopy under which the passengers could dash in order to keep from getting completely drenched.
Jack and Willie Church used umbrellas to make it even better but it was mostly a lost cause. Everyone, including Jack, got soaked through.
Back inside, counting his tickets, which were also mostly wet, Jack had to confront the tragedy that lay before him. She was gone. She had stormed into his life like that tail from the Indianola hurricane outside and then blown off out into the sea, never to sit on his bus again. She had wrung out his soul, caused him to forget to throw off papers, run late, pull out an ignition wire and even to think about Loretta dying. How could she do all of that and then sail out of his life? How could she do that to him?
And then, there she was. She came racing through the waiting-room door, her head covered with a newspaper, the rest of her wrapped in a light-pink raincoat.
“Oh, you’re still here,” she said when she saw Jack.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “There was no way I would leave without you.”
Oh, you’re still here.
Yes, ma’am. There was no way I would leave without you.
Jack watched her buy a ticket.
“A one-way to Corpus Christi,” she said to Johnny Merriweather. She put a five-dollar bill down on the counter.
“You bet,” said Johnny. He grabbed one of the card tickets out of the ticket dispenser, stamped the back hard with the validator, put it on the counter and said: “Two-twenty out of five.”
The water on her face made her even more gorgeous. Jack wished he had a big towel that he could wrap around her and dry her off with. Maybe remove that pink raincoat and what was underneath before doing so. Maybe hold her and then give her a hot bath in a white porcelain bathtub with legs and rub her so she would not catch double pneumonia. Double pneumonia was what his mother had warned him about the most. “Come in here right now, Jack T., before you catch double pneumonia,” she used to say. It could be raining or it could be dry, it could be cold or it could be hot, it could be almost anything and she would say it. Jack never understood, for instance, how a tornado warning could give him double pneumonia, but that was his mother’s way, so that was it.
Jack knew he was staring. But he could not help it and he did not care. She was just four feet away from him there at the ticket counter.
She took her ticket and her change from the counter and turned to face Jack. But she said nothing.
“Well, it’s all aboard for Corpus and the Valley,” Jack said. Willie Church was standing there with an umbrella. “Let me hold this over you, ma’am,” Willie said.
“Why, thank you so much,” she said.
“We don’t even know what to call you,” Jack said as he followed her and Willie to the door.
Why, thank you so much.
We
don’t even know what to call you.
She did not answer. She must not have heard him over all the noise and commotion from the rain and the wind.
At the door to the bus, Jack said to her, “Why don’t you just take that seat up there across from me?”
She glanced around at him, smiled and said, “That would be nice.”
That would be nice.
And there, in a few seconds, she was in his Angel Seat.
Ava was sitting in his Angel Seat!
The storm was worse. Maybe the dispatcher in Houston had heard it wrong. Maybe the forecast was for that Indianola to come right down the coast along Highways 59 and 77, right on Jack’s tail.
By his watch it was 3:45 in the afternoon but by his sight it was nighttime outside. It was that dark.
Lightning cracked off in the distance ahead. He was just going under the railroad underpass on the western outskirts of Victoria. There was no traffic. Everybody had sense enough to stay off the roads until this thing passed. And it would pass. That was the great and good thing about storms, even Indianolas, down here. They came fast, hit and then they were gone.
Ava’s view was the same as his out the front windshield. She was looking at the storm. So was everyone else on the bus. There were eighteen passengers in all, less than half a full load. The weather probably kept away others, people who just decided it was not worth going through all of this to get to Woodsboro or Corpus or Harlingen or wherever. They would put off their trips until tomorrow or another day.
She didn’t put off her trip. She came through the early darkness, the sweeping rain, the powerful wind, to ride with him to Corpus.
And now there she sits not more than five feet away from him in his Angel Seat.
He wanted to ask her again about what to call her. He wanted to look at her and to smell her. But there was some serious driving to do first.
