The Wayward Bus

by John Steinbeck

  Nobody moved. Juan looked carefully into each face.

  “It isn’t legal,” Van Brunt said. “It won’t hold in any court.”

  “What won’t hold?”

  “What you’re doing.”

  “It isn’t in any court.”

  “It may be,” said Van Brunt.

  “You can’t come even if you want to,” said Juan.

  “You just try to keep me off. I’ve got a ticket and I’ve got a right to go on the bus. You just try to keep me off and I’ll have you up so fast it’ll make your head spin.”

  Juan hunched his shoulders. “And you would too,” he said. “O.K., let’s get started.” He turned to Mr. Breed. “Could you lend me a few tools? I’ll bring them right back.”

  “What kind of tools?”

  “Oh, a pick and shovel.”

  “Oh, sure. You mean in case you get stuck?”

  “Yeah, and have you got a block and tackle?”

  “Not a very good one. The blocks are all right, but there’s just some old half-inch line on them. I don’t know how much strain it would take. That’s a pretty heavy bus.”

  “Well, it would be better than nothing,” Juan said. “Haven’t got any new line I could buy here, have you?”

  “I haven’t had a new piece of Manila line1 since the war started,” said Breed. “But you’re welcome to what I have got. Come along. Pick up what you want.”

  Juan said, “Come along, Kit, and give me a hand, will you?” The three went out of the store and around to the back.

  Ernest said to Camille, “I wouldn’t have missed this. I wouldn’t for anything.”

  “I just wish I wasn’t so tired,” she said. “I’ve been riding busses for five days. I want to get out of my clothes and get some real sleep for a couple of days.”

  “Why didn’t you take the train? Chicago, you said?”

  “Yes, Chicago.”

  “Well, you coulda got on the Super Chief 2 and slept all the way to L.A. That’s a nice train.”

  “Saving pennies,” said Camille. “I’ve got a little piece of change and I want to lay around for a few weeks before I got to work. And I’d rather do it in a double bed than a berth.”

  “Did I catch you right?” he asked.

  “You did not,” said Camille.

  “O.K., you’re the boss.”

  “Look, let’s not play,” Camille said. “I’m too damn tired to play guessing games with you.”

  “O.K., sister, O.K. I’ll play any way you want.”

  “Well, then, let’s just sit this one out. Do you mind?”

  “You know? I like you,” Ernest said. “I’d like to take you out when you get rested up.”

  “Well, we’ll see how it goes,” Camille said. She liked him. She could talk to him. He knew a few answers and that was a relief.

  Norma had been watching them, listening. She was full of admiration for Camille. She wanted to learn just how it was done. Suddenly she realized that her eyes were wide open as a rabbit’s and she drooped the upper lids.

  Mrs. Pritchard said, “I hope I’m not going to get a headache. Elliott, see if they have any aspirins, will you?”

  Mrs. Breed tore a cellophane bag off a big cardboard display. “You want one of them? That’s a nickel.”

  “We better have half a dozen,” Mr. Pritchard said.

  “That’ll be twenty-six cents with tax.”

  “You needn’t have got so many, Elliott,” Mrs. Pritchard said. “I have a bottle of five hundred in my bag.”

  “It’s best to be prepared,” he answered. He knew her headaches and they were dreadful. They twisted her face and reduced her to a panting, sweating, grinning, quivering blob of pain. They filled a room and a house. They got into everyone around her. Mr. Pritchard could feel one of her headaches through walls. He could feel it all over his body, and the doctor said there was nothing to do about it. They injected calcium and they gave her sedatives. The headaches usually came when she was nervous and when things, through no fault of her own, were not going well.

  Her husband would have liked to protect her. They seemed to be selfish, these headaches, and yet they were not. The pain was real. No one could simulate such agonizing pain. Mr. Pritchard dreaded them more than anything in the world. A good one could make the whole house vibrate with horror. And they were a little like conscience. Try as he would, Mr. Pritchard could never lose the feeling that they were in some way his fault. Not that Mrs. Pritchard ever said anything or indicated that this might be so. In fact she was very brave. She tried to muffle her screams with a pillow.

  Mr. Pritchard didn’t bother her much in bed—very seldom, in fact. But in a curious way he tied up his occasional lust and his loss of self-control with her headaches. It was planted deep in his mind that this was so, and he didn’t know how it had got planted. But he did have a conscience about it. His bestiality, his lust, his lack of self-control, were the cause. And he didn’t have any means of saving himself. Sometimes he found himself hating his wife very deeply because he was unhappy. He stayed in his office overtime when she had a headache, and sometimes he just sat at his desk for hours, staring at the brown paneling, his body throbbing with his wife’s pain.

  In the middle of one of her worst spells she would try to save him. “Go to a movie,” she would moan. “Go over to Charlie Johnson’s. Take some whisky. Get drunk. Don’t stay here. Go to a movie.” But it was impossible. He couldn’t.

  He put the six little transparent bags into his coat pocket. “Would you like to take a couple now, just in case?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I think I’m going to be all right.” She smiled her brave, sweet smile.

  Mildred, when she heard the first mention of aspirin, went to the grocery side and studied the OPA price-ceiling chart on the wall.3 Her mouth pinched tight and her throat was convulsed.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” she said softly under her breath. “Oh, Christ, is she going to start that already?” Mildred didn’t quite believe the headaches. She’d never had a bad headache herself, only mild periodic ones and a few hangover headaches at school. She called her mother’s psychosomatic and psychotic, and she dreaded them even more than her father did. As a little girl she had run from them and gone to earth in the cellar or in the space behind the cabinet in the sewing room. And usually she was pulled out and taken in to her mother because when mother had a headache she needed love and she needed to be petted. Mildred thought of the headaches as a curse. She hated them. And she hated her mother when she had them.

  For a time Mildred had thought them pure sham, and even now, when through reading she knew the pain was real, Mildred still considered the headaches a weapon her mother used with complete cunning, with complete brutality. The headaches were pain to her mother, truly, but they governed and punished the family too. They brought the family to heel. Certain things her mother didn’t like were never done because they brought on a headache. And when she was at home, Mildred knew that her fear about getting into the house not later than one in the morning was caused by the almost certainty that her mother would get a headache if she didn’t.

  Between headaches you forgot how devastating they were. Mildred thought that a psychiatrist was what her mother needed. And Bernice would have done anything. She wanted to do anything. It was Mr. Pritchard who put his foot down. He didn’t believe in psychiatrists, he said. But actually he did believe in them, so much that he was afraid of them. For Mr. Pritchard had gradually come to depend on the headaches. They were in a way a justification to him. They were a punishment on him and they gave him sins to be atoned for. Mr. Pritchard needed sins. There were none in his business life, for the cruelties there were defined and pigeonholed as necessity and responsibility to the stockholders. And Mr. Pritchard needed personal sins and personal atonement. He denounced the idea of a psychiatrist angrily.

  Mildred forced herself to turn around and go back to her mother. “Are you all right, dear?”

  “Yes,” Ber
nice said brightly.

  “No headache?”

  Bernice was apologetic. “I just had a twinge and it frightened me,” she said. “I could never forgive myself if I had one of those horrible things and ruined papa’s trip.”

  Mildred felt a little shiver of fear at this woman who was her mother—at her power and her ruthlessness. It must be unconscious. It had to be. Mildred had seen and heard the engineering of this trip to Mexico. Her father hadn’t wanted to go. He would have liked to take a vacation by just staying home from the office, which would mean that he would go to the office every day; but by going at odd hours and returning, not by the clock but by his feeling, he would have had a sense of vacation and rest.

  But the trip to Mexico had been planted. When and how? Mildred didn’t know and her father didn’t know. But gradually he became convinced not only that it was his idea, but that he was forcing his family with him. And this gave him a fine sense of being boss in his own home. He had walked through closing door after closing door in the maze. It was rather like a trap nest. A hen finds a hole, looks in, sees there is a bit of grain, steps through the door—the door closes. Well, here is a nest. It’s dark and quiet. Why not lay an egg? It’d be a good joke on whoever left that door open.

  Her father had almost forgotten that he didn’t want to go to Mexico. Both Mr. and Mrs. Pritchard were doing it for Mildred. That was really the safe thing. She was studying Spanish in college, a language she was incapable of understanding, just as her instructors were. Mexico would be just the place to practice up. Her mother said there was no way of learning a language like having to use it.

  Mildred, looking at her mother’s sweet, relaxed face, simply could not believe that this woman could engineer a thing and then destroy it. Why? And she would do it. She had planted the idea. Sure as hell she was going to have a headache. But she would wait until she was out of touch with doctors, until her headache would cause the greatest possible impression. It was hard to believe. Mildred didn’t think her mother really knew what she was doing. But there was a doughy lump in Mildred’s chest and it weighed down on her stomach. The headache was coming. She knew it.

  She envied Camille. Camille was a tramp, Mildred thought. And things were so much easier for a tramp. There was no conscience, no sense of loss, nothing but a wonderful, relaxed, stretching-cat selfishness. She could go to bed with anyone she wanted to and never see him again and have no feeling of loss or insecurity about it. That was the way Mildred thought it was with Camille. She wished she could be that way, and she knew she couldn’t. Couldn’t because of her mother. And the unbidden thought entered her mind—if her mother were only dead Mildred’s life would be so much simpler. She could have a secret little place to live somewhere. Almost fiercely, she brushed the thought away. “What a foul thing to think,” she said to herself ceremoniously. But it was a dream she often had.

  She looked out the front window. Pimples had helped to put the block and tackle into the bus, and the Manila line had grease on it and the grease had got on Pimples’ chocolate brown trousers. He was trying to rub out the spot with a handkerchief. “Poor kid,” Mildred thought, “that’s probably his only suit.” She was going to tell him not to touch it when she saw him go to the gasoline pump and put a little of the gas on his handkerchief and go to work expertly on the spot.

  And there was Juan calling, “Come on, you folks.”

  CHAPTER 14

  The back road around the San Ysidro River bend was a very old road, no one knew how old. It was true that the stage coaches had used it, and men on horseback. In the dry seasons the cattle had been driven over it to the river, where they could lie in the willows during the heat of the day and drink from holes dug in the river bed. The old road was simply a slice of country, uncultivated to start, marked only by wheel ruts and pounded by horses’ hoofs. In the summer a heavy cloud of dust arose from its surface when a wagon went by, and in winter, pastelike mud spurted from under horses’ feet. Gradually the road became scooped out so that it was lower than the fields through which it traveled, and this made it a long lake of standing water in the winter, sometimes very deep.

  Then it was that men with plows made ditches on either side, with the embankments toward the road. And then cultivation came in and the cattle became so valuable that the owners of the property along the road put up fences to keep their cattle in and other people’s cattle out.

  The fences were split redwood posts set in the ground with one-by-six planks nailed halfway up connecting them. And along the top of the posts was old-fashioned barbed wire, a strip of twisted metal with sharpened spikes. The fences weathered in the sun and rain, the redwood planks and the posts turned light gray and gray-green, and lichens grew on the wood and moss formed on the shady sides of the posts.

  Walking men burning with messages came by and painted their messages on the planks. “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand”1—“Sinner, come to God”—“It is late”—“Wherefore shall it profit a man . . .”2—“Come to Jesus.” And other men put other signs on the fence with stencils. “Jay’s Drugs”—“Cyrus Noble—The Doctors’ Whisky”—“San Ysidro Bicycle Shop.” These signs were all weathered and dimmed now.

  As the fields were used less for grazing and more for wheat and oats and barley, the farmers began to remove from their fields the weeds, the field turnip, the yellow mustard, the poppies and thistles and milkweeds, and these refugees found a haven in the ditches beside the road. The mustard stood seven feet high in the late spring, and red-winged blackbirds built their nests under the yellow flowers. And in the damp ditches the water cress grew.

  The ditches beside the road under the high growth of weeds became the home of weasels and bright-colored water snakes, and the drinking places for birds in the evening. The meadow larks sat all morning on the old fences in the spring and whistled their yodeling song. And the wild doves sat on the barbed wire in the evening in the fall, shoulder to shoulder for miles, and their call rang down the miles in a sustained note. At evening the night hawks coursed along the ditches, looking for meat, and in the dark the barn owls searched for rabbits. And when a cow was sick the great ugly turkey buzzards sat on the old fence waiting for death.

  The road was well-nigh abandoned. Only a few families who had farms that could not be reached in any other way ever used it any more. Once there had been many little holdings here, with a man living close to his acres and his farm behind him and his vegetable patch under the parlor window. But now the land stretched away, untenanted, and the little houses and the old barns stood windowless and gray and unpainted.

  As noon came on the clouds hurried in from the southwest and bunched together. It is the rule that the longer the clouds prepare, the longer the rain will continue. But it was not ready yet. There were still some patches of blue sky and now and then a blinding flash of sun struck the ground. Once a tall cloud cut sun streaks into long, straight ribbons.

  Juan had to drive back a little along the highway to reach the entrance to the old road. Before he turned into it he stopped the bus and got down and walked ahead. He felt the greaselike mud under his feet. And Juan knew a sense of joy. He had been trying to push his carload of cattle bodily about their business in which he had no interest. There was almost a feeling of malice in him now. They had elected this road, and it might be all right. He had a happy vacation-feeling. They wanted it, now let them take it. He would see what they would do if the bus stalled. He dug his toe into the mixed mud and gravel before he turned back. He wondered what Alice was doing. He knew damn well what Alice was doing. And if he wrecked the bus—well, he might just walk away from it, just walk away and never come back. It was a very happy vacation-feeling he had. His face was glowing with pleasure when he climbed into the bus.

  “I don’t know whether we’ll make it or not,” he said happily. And the passengers were a little nervous at his exuberance.

  The passengers were seated in a bunch, as far forward as they could get. Every one of
them felt that Juan was their only contact with the normal, and if they had known what was in his mind they would have been very much frightened. There was a high glee in Juan. He closed the door of the bus and he put his foot twice on the throttle to race his engine before he set the bus in low gear and turned it into the muddy country road.

  The clouds were almost prepared for the stroke now. He knew that. In the west he could see one cloud fraying down. There it was starting, and it would move over the valley in another spring downpour. The light had turned metallic again with a washed, telescopic quality that meant only violent rain.

  Van Brunt said brightly, “The rain’s coming.”

  “Looks like,” said Juan, and he turned his bus into the road. He had good tread on his tires, but as he left the blacktop he could feel the rubber slip a little on the greasy mud and the rear end swing in a small arc. But there was a bottom to it, and the bus lumbered over the road. Juan put it in second gear. He would keep it there probably for the whole distance.

  Mr. Pritchard called above the beat of the motor, “How long is this detour?”

  “I don’t know,” said Juan. “I’ve never been over it. They say thirteen or fifteen miles—something like that.” He hunched over the wheel and his eyes lifted from the road and glanced at the Virgin of Guadalupe in her little shrine on top of his instrument board.

  Juan was not a deeply religious man. He believed in the Virgin’s power as little children believe in the power of their uncles. She was a doll and a goddess and a good-luck piece and a relative. His mother—that Irish woman—had married into the Virgin’s family and had accepted her as she had accepted her husband’s mother and grandmother. The Guadalupana became her family and her goddess.

  Juan had grown up with this Lady of the wide skirts standing on the new moon. She had been everywhere when he was little—over his bed to supervise his dreams, in the kitchen to watch over the cooking, in the hall to check him in and out of the house, and on the zaguán door 3 to hear him playing in the street. She was in her own fine chapel in the church, in the classroom in school, and, as if that wasn’t ubiquitous enough, he wore her on a little gold medal on a golden chain about his neck. He could get away from the eyes of his mother or his father or his brothers, but the dark Virgin was always with him. While his other relatives could be fooled or misled and tricked and lied to, the Guadalupana knew everything anyway. He confessed things to her, but that was only a form because she knew them anyway. It was more a recounting of your motives in doing a certain thing than a breaking of the news that you had done it. And that was silly too, because she knew the motives. Then, too, there was an expression on her face, a half smile, as though she were about to break out into laughter. She not only understood, she was also a little amused. The awful crimes of childhood didn’t seem to merit hell, if her expression meant anything.