by Jim Lehrer
The woman passenger at San Juan was white, large, almost middle-aged and sweating in the early July sun, along with everyone else. Jack no longer called white people Dollars and blacks Blues and Mexicans Tamales. That kind of thing didn’t go over well here in New Mexico. He figured it was because there were so many Indians around and the regular people—the white people—were afraid to make up nicknames for the Indians so they didn’t for anybody else either.
“Sorry,” he said to the woman. “Had a mechanical problem, couldn’t be helped.”
“Am I going to miss my connection to Albuquerque?”
“Probably.”
“There aren’t any wars going on now. There’s no excuse for this anymore.”
The woman was right. But this was a routine normal happening, a routine normal day in Jack T. Oliver’s new slow-moving, awful life driving a bus for Cannonball Coaches. The breakdown this morning was caused by a leak in the airbrake hose line in this awful worn-out bus, a twenty-one-passenger Pony Cruiser. He had fixed the leak with black tape many times but it never held for long. Randy Wilkinson, the owner of Cannonball as well as a one-man real estate business in Santa Fe, would have been more than willing to buy a new hose if anybody in New Mexico or anywhere else in the world had such a thing. Pony Cruisers weren’t much better new than old. They were up-front-engine hard-riders that clanked and whammed and roared and rattled and whined like an old machine shop no matter how many years or miles they had on them. Jack had always seen the Pony Cruiser as not much of a bus. Small, inexpensive to buy, cheap on gas and oil. They had done fairly well during the war because buses were scarce, and for some reason Pony Cruiser, which was headquartered in a Michigan town named Kalamazoo, was able to keep its manufacturing lines up and working. But once the war was over and GMC, ACF-Brill, Beck Flxible and Aerocoach got back into full civilian production, Pony Cruiser lost much of its business and before long was forced to close down. What they left behind was a couple hundred of these miserable little buses being operated by small bus lines around the country who had no place to turn for air-brake hose lines and other spare parts when something went wrong.
“Will you try to step on it and at least try to make my connection at Santa Fe?” the woman asked Jack as she walked past him. Jack had not gotten out of his seat and helped her on the bus. That kind of thing was not required on Cannonball. All the driver did was open the door. It was up to the passenger to get on with baggage or whatever. Cannonball also did not issue tickets. It was all cash fares. The woman handed him exact change—two one-dollar bills and a fifty-cent piece—for the one-way passage to Santa Fe.
“Yes, ma’am,” he told her but he didn’t mean it. He spoke to her in a listless tone that matched the way he felt and the way he slumped behind the wheel of the Pony Cruiser. “No promises, though. Trailways won’t wait for the likes of us.”
No promises about anything, lady. Not even that we’ll make it out of this gas station before something else on this bus breaks or cracks or boils over.
He closed the bus door, revved the motor and eased the bus back out onto the gravel road, which was dusty and rutted. The engine was there under a hatch right next to him, which meant the noise and the heat were worse than they would have been had the motor been somewhere else. Great Western’s ACF-Brills’ motors, of course, were pancaked underneath the center of the bus, while GMC, Aerocoach, Flxible and most of the others now were pushers, with the motors in back. Beck was the only one left besides Pony Cruiser that put the motor under a hatch right up alongside the driver.
When Jack left Corpus Christi he had no intention of doing anything like what he was doing, driving a bus for Cannonball Coaches. He had no intentions at all. He had simply gone inside the Greyhound depot on Upper Broadway just like a Mr. Abernathy or any regular passenger, walked up to the ticket counter and bought a ticket to Amarillo, in the Texas panhandle. Why Amarillo? No particular reason. It just came to him when the Greyhound agent asked him where he would like to go. He had no ideas about settling in Amarillo; it just seemed like a place to go, to stop and take a breath and get his bearings. He put some of the insurance adjuster’s forty-five dollars on the counter and said, “Oneway to Amarillo.” Jack had never been out there, but he had heard from other Great Western drivers about Amarillo and the flat, dry land around it. The only other thing he knew about Amarillo was that U.S. Highway 66, what drivers from there called the Real Highway, went through there on the way to California.
He also knew there were no oceans or lakes or rivers anywhere in sight that would draw him to lie down by them and imagine. He was determined not to imagine again. His mother had been right about that. His imagination would get him in trouble. It ended up killing three people, the third being the only woman who ever loved him.
Now Jack had only vague memories of how he got where he was, which was in New Mexico, not Amarillo. He could remember few specifics of the bus trip from Corpus to San Antonio and then up through San Angelo on Kerrville Bus Company, a Greyhound affiliate, to Amarillo. He thought he remembered being on a Beck Steeliner from San Antonio at least as far as Big Spring, but maybe not. Maybe it was a TNM&O Coaches GMC PD4103 thru bus—called a pool car in the business. Kerrville’s buses were blue and white; TNM&O’s were black and white. The rides were also very different. Becks tended to sway from side to side. GMC’s had a thrust feel to them, as if somebody in an army tank was ramming them down the road from behind.
At Amarillo, he jumped off the bus and started walking. He was immediately struck by the wide streets and the dry, blowing air, and he noticed that most of the men had light-brown dust or mud on their shoes or boots, and that there were a lot of churches on street corners. And there in front of him, after a while, was the Trailways bus depot. It was newer and fancier than the Greyhound station. The whole side of the building where the buses came in and parked was glass, and the loading docks—there were ten—were cut in like a long blade of saw teeth. Two ACF-Brills were parked at docks. One of them had LOS ANGELES on its front destination sign, the other said MEMPHIS. It was all right to go in. Nobody would know him here.
“How do you go from here to Mount Rushmore?” he asked a young ticket agent inside. He was not even tempted to tell the young man that he, Jack T. Oliver, had until five days ago been a Master Operator for Great Western Trailways, the Route of the Silversides Thruliners, which were Cheaper by Far Than Driving Your Car and were Always Going Your Way to the Next Town or Across America.
Jack watched the agent pull out the Red Guide, Russell’s Official Motor Coach Guide, and look up the route and schedule.
“It says here that Mount Rushmore is up by Rapid City, South Dakota,” said the kid agent. “Nobody’s ever asked me about going there before. You could go from here up to Denver and then to Cheyenne and on to Rapid City. Our next Denver bus is in two hours.”
Jack didn’t want to wait around for two hours. But he had a question. “Does it say in the guide who is the fourth president at Mount Rushmore besides Washington, Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson?”
The kid agent looked back at the book. “Theodore Roosevelt, it looks like to me from this small picture. Teddy Roosevelt. The guy with the funny glasses.”
“Thanks,” Jack said. Teddy Roosevelt. Right. Jack remembered his being mentioned in school but he could not remember for what.
He smiled at the agent and stepped away. The Los Angeles bus was into its last-call loading. He watched the driver tear the tickets and handle the baggage and put aboard three or four final passengers. The driver had a silver Panhandle Trailways badge on his cap. Jack fingered the gold Master Operators badge in his right pants pocket. He had put it there when Progress Paul Madison gave it to him and he had not gone anywhere without it since.
Jack walked through the glass door to the Los Angeles bus. He flashed his badge to the driver, who invited Jack to come along with him “as far as you want to go.” It was a technical violation of the rules, because an off-duty driver also was sup
posed to show his annual pass and do some paperwork in order to ride a Trailways bus. Jack had turned in his pass with his own badge when he was suspended.
Jack climbed aboard and took the Angel Seat, and it wasn’t long before they were headed west out on the straight flat concrete of U.S. Highway 66 toward Tucumcari, Albuquerque and points west. The U.S. Highway 66. Jack had heard drivers talk about Highway 66 and he had thought and wondered about it, but he had never “taken bottoms over it,” as one of the Houston–Beaumont drivers used to refer to driving a bus of passengers on a particular road or highway.
This Amarillo driver was a quiet, soft-spoken man—he said they called him Chatter because he didn’t talk much—who told Jack he had been with Panhandle Trailways for eleven years, driving mostly Amarillo–Albuquerque and Amarillo–Oklahoma City overnights since he graduated off the Amarillo extra board. He asked Jack where he was headed and why he was in Amarillo. Jack made it up as he went along, saying he was not headed for anyplace in particular and had just taken some time off to see a little of the country. One day this man would probably find out that the guy he gave a free ride to because he thought he was a Master Operator was really none other than that awful Jack T. Oliver man down in Great Western’s South Texas Division who killed all those people—including his own wife.
As the bus hummed down the open road, Jack suddenly wanted to jump out and off. It was too much. The memories were too ferocious, too terrible, but also, the hummier it got out there on the open road, they were also too wonderful. He simply could not bear sitting there in the Angel Seat, watching this other man drive this Trailways ACF-Brill. He wanted off this bus, out of this world.
That was why he got off in a place called Clines Corners, New Mexico, a good thirty miles short of Albuquerque. The other major reason was that an orange and yellow Flxible Clipper, like the one Paul Madison drove on his Victoria–San Antonio turnaround, was waiting there at the small café where the buses stopped. Chatter said the Flxible had come from Roswell to the south and was now on its way north to Santa Fe. Sometimes we have connecting passengers for it, he told Jack.
How about me being the connecting passenger this time? I have to get off this bus!
And within minutes Jack was in the Flxible on his way to Santa Fe. The bus line that owned and operated the bus was called Land of Enchantment Stages, and the driver said they were mostly a feeder line from the smaller cities and towns of New Mexico to both Trailways’ and Greyhound’s competing main east–west and north–south lines. Jack decided then and there that he wanted to go to work for Land of Enchantment Stages, but the driver said he would have to go the other way, to company headquarters in Roswell, to apply for a job. He also said they weren’t hiring right then because business had really been falling off lately, like it was for everybody in the bus business.
Fate and Randy Wilkinson, owner of Cannonball Coaches, intervened. Wilkinson was at the Santa Fe bus depot with his terrible little Pony Cruiser and a terrible problem. His only driver had just walked off the job. Jack showed him his gold Master Operator badge, and after thirty minutes of talk over coffee in the depot café, Jack T. Oliver became a driver for Cannonball Coaches.
That was nine months and five days ago. Now here he was trying to get that awful little Pony Cruiser the 103 miles between Pica Chama and Santa Fe one more time. It was a route that Land of Enchantment Stages had run for years but because of dwindling business had given to Randy Wilkinson to operate. Jack made two round-trips a day, six days a week—Wilkinson’s brother, a Santa Fe police officer, drove it on Mondays—leaving Santa Fe in the morning at 7:05 going north and ending up back there at 8:15 at night. That was if the Pony Cruiser did not have a problem, which, like today, it usually did.
Jack lived in a rented room in an old two-story house three blocks from downtown and the bus depot. One reason Jack chose the place was that the two elderly women who owned the house said it was all right for him to park the Cannonball bus on the street in front at night. Jack had to share the bathroom with four other men who had rooms on the second floor, and he hated that. But that was life.
So was seldom being able to close his eyes and fall asleep in his narrow bed in his hot room before one or two in the morning.
So was seeing the faces of Loretta and/or those two Tamale checkers when he did close his eyes.
So was not wearing a tie or a long-sleeved uniform shirt or a driver’s cap or a badge or a ticket punch or shined shoes or anything else he had once considered as important to being a bus driver as the bus itself.
So was not having anybody in his life with whom he could go to the movies or have a cup of coffee or a steak.
So was not having anybody even to tell last Thursday that it was his thirty-seventh birthday.
So was the thought that this was going to be the rest of his life.
The next town, Perryville, was even smaller than San Juan. All it had was a grocery store with a single Gulf gas pump and a field behind it full of wrecked and junked cars and trucks. Jack pulled up front and thought, as he did every time, that it was in that field, that graveyard back there, that this lousy bus was someday going to meet its maker.
There were no people waiting for his bus. He honked his air horn and looked around to see if anybody came running toward the bus. Nobody did.
“Can we just go on?” said the woman who wanted to make the connection to Albuquerque.
She was one of only three passengers. The other two were Indians, both men, who got on at Pica Chama. Three passengers. In all of his years with Great Western he never drove a regular scheduled run with only three passengers.
In all of his years with Great Western he never looked like this either. He had already put thirty of his old pounds back on and he knew more were coming. He had gotten a late start this morning and didn’t take the time to shave. Wilkinson didn’t care and neither did anyone else. His pants were soiled khakis that he had bought at a Woolworth’s in Santa Fe. His light-blue short-sleeved shirt had come from there, too. It was the second day in a row he had worn it. It had been more than a month since he’d had a haircut and his hair was down over the collar in back. Nobody cared.
He glanced up into his rearview mirror. The woman passenger was two rows back on the left side. She was over forty, at least, and she had no style or class. She was definitely no White Widow. She was definitely no Ava, no Grace. He immediately despised himself for even thinking such a thing. But it didn’t really matter that much anymore. Since he had put on the weight and gotten sloppy in his dress and appearance, all thought of Ava and White Widows meant nothing. No woman in her right mind would take a second look at him now. He knew it, and knowing it kept him from imagining otherwise. There would be no more Avas in his mind and in his life to cause him to run over people and cause his wife to kill herself. It was a great relief, a great release. It was the only relief and release he had experienced but it was something, it was a beginning.
“Why won’t you even try to make it?” the woman passenger barked at him. She had met his eyes in the mirror. She knew he was looking at her. “You’re just poking along like we’ve got all day,” she said.
Jack wasn’t looking at her anymore.
“There ought to be a law that only lets real bus drivers drive these things,” said the woman, apparently not only to Jack but to the whole world.
Jack wanted to stop and run back there and show the woman his gold badge.
Look at this, lady! I was a Master Operator. I was On Time Jack Oliver. Look at this! I was the best bus driver in the world! Almost, at least, except for Paul Madison. Look at this! I was a Master Operator!
Was?
He now had a straight shot into Santa Fe. Only two more stops, and most of the road was paved. The southbound Mesa Verde Trailways left Santa Fe for Albuquerque at 12:05. Jack glanced down at his wristwatch. That was exactly thirty-two minutes from now.
In the old days I could have made it. It would be tough and take some doing and som
e luck—some Master Operator luck—but I could do it.
Was?
With his right foot on the accelerator, he increased the speed a bit. He took a deep breath and let it out and moved his shoulders around as if to loosen them and him. He sat straight up in the seat and gripped the steering wheel firmly.
Then he reached down into his right pants pocket and pulled out the Master Operator badge. He felt it and peeked at it and placed it up on the dashboard in front of him.
Was?
There was a line of slow-moving traffic in front of him. He counted two cars and a pickup truck, none of them in a hurry to get anywhere.
Was?
He saw a break in the oncoming traffic in the left lane; he eased the bus into it, hit the air horn and floorboarded the accelerator. The little Pony Cruiser, rising to the occasion, took off like a jackrabbit with buckshot in its butt.
Jack, timing it perfectly, swung the bus back into the right lane several smooth seconds before an oncoming green pickup would have been a problem.
His mind and his attention and his reflexes and his muscles and his soul were all in sync now, all concentrating on moving that little bus down New Mexico State Highway 6 with a precision and grace that only the very best bus drivers in the world are capable of.
Here he was again, out on the road at full speed. On the open road at full speed.
In a few minutes Jack and his Pony Cruiser were at Cubano, another wide place in the road, where he could be flagged by people at an intersection in front of the Catholic church. He slowed the bus down and hit the air horn and watched for people. There were no trees or signs or anything else to obstruct his view. Nobody was there to catch his bus.
He gunned the bus without ever pulling off the road. At Great Western that would have been a mark-down offense, but this was not Great Western. And, besides, he had a connection to make.
And, besides, I have a connection to make.
A medium-sized truck, old and slow, pulled out in front of him five miles farther down the road. There was an incline and a curve ahead, which made passing on the left dangerous or impossible. But there was a wide gravel shoulder on the right. Jack maintained his speed and zipped that bus right up and around and in front of that truck. The driver, who looked to Jack like a Mexican, had a surprised and scared expression on his face. But it all happened so fast he didn’t have time to react in a way—like suddenly pulling to the right himself—that would have endangered anybody.
