The Wayward Bus

by John Steinbeck

  Milton said, “Well, all right. You’ll have to sign the poison book, of course. But look out for that stuff, Van. Look out for it. Don’t leave it around.”

  They’d been friends for many years. They’d gone in the Blue Lodge together and had been through the Chairs, and in succeeding years they had been Worshipful Master of the San Ysidro Lodge, and then Milton went into the Royal Arch and the Scottish Rite and Van Brunt never went beyond the third degree. 1 But they had remained friends.

  “How much of the stuff do you want?”

  “About an ounce, I guess.”

  “That’s an awful lot, Van.”

  “I’ll bring back what I don’t use.”

  Milton was worried. “Don’t touch it at all with your hands, will you?”

  “I know how to handle it,” Van Brunt said.

  Then he went into his office in the basement of his house, and with a sharp pocketknife he pricked the back of his hand. When there was a little blood coming out, he opened the glass tube of crystals. And then he stopped. He couldn’t do it. He just couldn’t tip the crystals into the cut.

  After an hour he took the tube to the bank and put it in his safety-deposit box along with his will and his insurance policies. He thought of buying a little ampule to wear around his neck. Then, if the big one came, he could maybe get it to his mouth the way those people in Europe did.2 But he couldn’t take it now. Maybe it wouldn’t happen.

  There was a weight of disappointment on him, and there was anger in him too. All the people around him who weren’t going to die angered him. And there was another thing that bothered him. The stroke had knocked the cap off one set of his inhibitions. He had suddenly reachieved powerful desires. He was pantingly drawn toward young women, even little girls. He couldn’t keep his eyes and his thought from them, and in the midst of his sick desires he would burst into tears. He was afraid, as a child is afraid of a strange house.

  He was too old to accommodate the personality change of his stroke and the new nature it gave him. He had never been a reader, but now that he could not read he was famished for reading. And his temper grew sharper and more violent all the time until people he had known for years began to avoid him.

  He listened to time passing in his veins and he wanted death to come and he was afraid of it. Through half-shut eyes he saw the golden light of the sunset come into the bus. His lips moved a little and he said, “Evening, evening, evening.” The word was very beautiful, and he could hear the whistling in his heart. A fullness of feeling came on him, swelled in his chest, swelled in his throat, pulsed in his head. He thought he was going to cry again. He tried to clench his right hand, but it was asleep and it wouldn’t clench.

  And then he became rigid with tension. His body seemed distended, like a blown-up rubber glove. The evening light blazed in. In back of his eyes a terrible flickering flash came. He felt himself tumbling and tumbling toward grayness and toward darkness and into black, black. . . .

  The sun touched the western hills and flattened itself, and its light was yellow and clear. The saturated valley glittered under the level light. The clean, washed air was crisp. In the fields the flattened grain and the thick, torpid stems of the wild oats tightened themselves, and the sheathed petals of the golden poppies loosened a little. The yellow river boiled and swirled and cut viciously at the banks. In the back seat of the bus Van Brunt snored hoarsely against his palate. His forehead was wet. His mouth was open and so were his eyes.

  CHAPTER 20

  Pimples moved into the seat beside Norma and she gathered her skirts daintily against her and slid a little toward the window.

  “What do you suppose that old guy wants with that girl?” he asked suspiciously.

  “I don’t know,” said Norma. “But I tell you one thing. She can handle him. She’s a wonderful girl.”

  Pimples said, “Oh, I don’t know. There’s other wonderful girls.”

  Norma flared up. “Like who?” she said, derisively.

  “Like you,” said Pimples.

  “Oh!” She hadn’t expected this. She put her head down and stared at her laced fingers, trying to regain her balance.

  “What did you have to go and quit for?” Pimples said.

  “Well, Mrs. Chicoy wasn’t nice to me.”

  “I know. She isn’t nice to anybody. But I wish you didn’t quit. We could have got together, maybe.”

  Norma didn’t answer. Pimples said, “If you say the word I’ll get out one of the raisin pies. They’re pretty nice.”

  “No. No, thanks. I couldn’t eat anything.”

  “You sick?”

  “No.”

  “Well, if you’d only come back to work at the Corners we could maybe go into San Ysidro Saturday nights and dance and stuff like that.”

  “You didn’t think of that before,” she said.

  “I didn’t think you liked me.”

  She became a little arch now. This was a delightful game. “What makes you think I like you now?” she said.

  “Well, you’re different now. You kinda changed. I like the way you done your hair.”

  “Oh, that,” she said. “Well, there wasn’t any reason to kinda fix myself up back at the lunchroom. Who’d see me?”

  “I would,” Pimples said gallantly. “Come on back. They’ll give you your job again. I guarantee that.”

  She shook her head. “No, when I quit, I quit. I don’t go crawling back. Besides, there’s a future. We’ve got plans.”

  “What kind of plans?”

  Norma wondered whether she ought to tell. In some ways it was bad luck, but she found she couldn’t help herself. “We’re going to get a little apartment with a nice davenport and a radio. And we’re going to have a stove and an icebox and I’m going to study to be a dental nurse.” Her eyes were shining.

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Me and Miss Camille Oaks, that’s who. When I’m a dental nurse I can dress good and we’ll go to shows and maybe give little dinners.”

  “Nuts,” he said. “You won’t never do that.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You just won’t. Now, why don’t you come back to the Corners? I’m studying radar and we’ll go out together sometimes and you can’t tell—we might get together. You take a girl—she’s gonna want to get married. I’m a young guy. It’s—er—it’s good for a young guy to have a wife. It gives him kind of —ambition.”

  Norma looked into his face, a level, questioning look, to see whether he was making fun of her. And there was something so direct in her look that Pimples misinterpreted it and glanced away in embarrassment.

  “I know,” he said bitterly. “You think you couldn’t go with a guy that’s got these things. I done everything. I spent over a hundred dollars going to doctors and for stuff at the drugstore. But it don’t do no good. There was one doctor says they won’t last. He says they’ll go away in a couple more years. But I don’t know if that’s the truth. Go ahead,” he said fiercely. “Get your damn apartment. Maybe I got ways of having fun you never heard of. I don’t have to take no guff from nobody.” His voice was completely miserable and he stared down into his lap.

  Norma looked at him in amazement. She had never known this kind of abject pain in anyone but herself. No one ever needed Norma for sympathy or reassurance. A bubble of warmth burst in her and a kind of gratefulness.

  She said, “Don’t you think like that. You don’t have to, because if a girl cared for you she wouldn’t think like that. The doctor knew what he was talking about. I knew three other young fellows, and them things went away after a while.”

  Pimples kept his head down. There was still misery in him but an imp was stirring too. He felt the advantage coming to his side and he began to use it, and it was a new thing to him, a new discovery. Always he had blustered with girls and bragged, and this was so easy. A sly imp began to operate.

  “Well, it just gets so you can’t stand it,” he said. “Sometimes I think I’ll just kill
myself.” He forced a half sob.

  “Now don’t you say like that,” said Norma. This was a new function for her too, but one she fitted into probably better than any other.

  “Nobody likes me,” Pimples said. “Nobody won’t have nothing to do with me.”

  “Don’t you say like that,” Norma repeated. “It’s not true. I always liked you.”

  “No, you never.”

  “I did too.” She laid her hand on his arm in reassurance.

  Blindly he reached up and held her hand against his arm. And then his hand clasped hers and he squeezed her fingers and automatically she squeezed back. He turned in his seat and flung his arms about her and pushed his face into hers.

  “Don’t!” she cried. “Stop that!”

  He gripped her more tightly.

  “Stop it,” she said. “Stop it. That old man back there.”

  Pimples whispered, “Listen to the old bastard snore. He’s pounding his ear. Come on, come on.”

  She wedged her elbows against his chest to hold him away. His hands began plucking at her skirt. “Stop,” she whispered. “You just stop.” She knew now that she had been tricked. “Stop it! Let me get out of here!”

  “Come on,” he said frantically. “Please come on.” Pimples’ eyes were glazed and he was fighting with her skirt.

  “Stop it, please stop. Suppose—suppose Camille came in? Suppose she saw what you’re—”

  Pimples’ eyes cleared for a moment. He looked at her evilly. “Suppose she did. What do you care what that god-damned tramp sees?”

  Norma’s mouth fell open and her muscles relaxed. She looked at him in unbelief. She looked at him as though she hadn’t heard what he said. Then her rage was cold and murderous. Her work-hardened muscles set rigidly. She tore her hand free and hit him in the mouth. She leaped to her feet and swung at him with both her fists, and he was so startled that he covered his face with his hands to protect himself.

  She was spitting at him like a cat. “You skunk!” she said. “Oh, you dirty little skunk.” And she kicked and shoved and pushed him out into the aisle, and she ran up the aisle and out of the bus. His feet were tangled in the stanchions of the seats and he tried to roll over.

  A sickness and a weakness came over Norma. Her lips were quivering and her eyes were streaming. “Oh, the dirty skunk,” she cried. “The filthy, dirty skunk.”

  She crossed the ditch and flung herself down in the grass and put her head down on her arms. Pimples got to his feet and peeked out the window. He didn’t know what in the world to do.

  Camille, walking slowly back along the road, saw Norma lying face down in the grass. She stepped across the ditch and leaned over her. “What’s the matter? Did you fall down? What’s the matter with you?”

  Norma raised her tearful face. “I’m all right,” she said.

  “Get up,” said Camille shortly. “Get up out of that wet grass.” She reached down and jerked Norma to her feet and led her under the cliff and sat her down on the folded newspapers. “Now, what in the hell is the matter with you?”

  Norma wiped her wet face with her sleeve and destroyed the last of her lipstick. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Well, that’s your business,” said Camille.

  “That Pimples. He grabbed me.”

  “Well, can’t you take care of yourself? Do you have to pull a nosedive?”

  “That wasn’t why.”

  “Well, what was why?” Camille wasn’t really interested. She had her own troubles.

  Norma rubbed her red eyes with her fingers. “I hit him,” she said. “I hit him because he said you was a tramp.”

  Camille looked quickly away. She stared across the valley where the last of the sun was disappearing behind the mountains and she rubbed her cheek with her hand. Her eyes were dull. And then she forced them to take on life and she forced them to smile and she gave the smile to Norma.

  “Look, kid,” she said. “You’ll just have to believe this until you find it out for yourself—everybody’s a tramp some time or other. Everybody. And the worst tramps of all are the ones that call it something else.”

  “But you aren’t.”

  “Let it lay,” said Camille. “Just let it lay. Come on, let’s try to do something with your face. New lipstick isn’t as good as a bath but it’s better than nothing.”

  Camille opened her purse and dug into it and got out a comb.

  CHAPTER 21

  Juan quickened his footsteps so that Mildred had trouble keeping up with him.

  “Do we have to run?” she asked.

  “It’ll be a lot easier digging the bus out while it’s still light than floundering around in the dark.”

  She trotted along beside him. “Do you think you can get it out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, why didn’t you do that in the first place instead of walking away?”

  He slowed his footsteps for a moment. “I told you,” he said. “I told you twice.”

  “Oh, yes. You really meant that, then.”

  “I really mean everything,” said Juan.

  They came to the bus after the sun had slipped below the range. But the high clouds were lighted with rose and they threw a rose transparency over the land and the hills.

  Pimples skulked out from behind the bus when Juan approached. There was a hostile cringing about him. “When are they coming out?” he asked.

  “I can’t get anyone,” Juan said shortly. “We’ll have to do it ourselves. We’re going to need help. Where the hell is everybody?”

  “Scattered around,” said Pimples.

  “Well, get out the tarpaulin.”

  “That lady’s got it laying down up there.”

  “Well, get her up. I want rocks if you can find any and I want planks or some posts. We may have to tear down some fence. But leave the barbed wire up so the stock won’t get out. And, Pimples—”

  Pimples’ mouth dropped open and his shoulders sagged. “You said—”

  “Get all the men. I’m going to need help. I’ll get the big jack out from under the back seat.”

  Juan climbed into the bus. It was a little dark in the bus now. He saw Van Brunt lying on the seat. “You’ll have to move so I can get the jack,” he said.

  Suddenly Juan leaned close. The eyes of the old man were open and rolled up, and a harsh, labored snoring came from his mouth, and there was spittle around the corners of his mouth. Juan turned him over on his back and his tongue fell into his throat and his in-breathing was plugged. Juan reached into the open mouth with his fingers and pushed the tongue down and forward. He shouted, “Pimples! Pimples!” and with his free hand he knocked on the window with his gold wedding ring.

  Pimples climbed into the bus.

  “This man’s sick, goddammit. Call some help. Blow the horn.”

  It was Mr. Pritchard who took over Van Brunt. He hated it and yet he had to do it. Juan cut a little piece of stick and showed him how to hold down the tongue and wedge the stick against the roof of the mouth so that the old man could breathe. Mr. Pritchard was revolted by the look of the man, and the sour odor that came from the laboring chest sickened him. But he had to do it. He didn’t want to think about anything. His mind wanted to stop. A series of chilling agonies ran through him. His wife came into the bus and saw him and took the first seat inside the door, as far from him as possible. And even in the dusky light he could see the scratches and the blood on her collar. She didn’t speak to him.

  He said in his mind, “I must have been crazy. I don’t know how I could have done it. Dear, can’t you just think I was sick, out of my head?” He said it in his head. He would give her the little orchid house, and not such a little one. He’d build her the finest orchid house money could buy. But he couldn’t even mention it for a long time. And the Mexican trip—they would have to go through with it. It would be horrible, but they would have to go through with it. How long would it be before the look would go out of her eyes, the reproach, the h
urt, the accusation? She wouldn’t speak for several days, he knew, or when she did it would be with perfect politeness; short replies and a sweet voice, and her eyes would not meet his. “Oh, God,” he thought, “how do I get into these things? Why can’t it be me here, dying, instead of this old man? He’s never going to have to go through anything again.”

  He felt the men working under him on the bus. He heard the shovel bite and the suck of mud and he heard the stone thrown under the wheels. His wife sat stiffly and her lips were set in a tolerant smile. He didn’t know yet how she was going to handle the situation, but it would come to her.

  She was sad and she said to herself, “I must think no evil. Just because Elliott went down under a brutishness is no reason for me to lose beauty and toleration.” There was a flicker of triumph in her. “I have conquered anger,” she whispered, “and I have conquered disgust. I can forgive him, I know I can. But for his own sake it must not be too soon—for his own good. I’ll have to wait.” Her face was full of dignity and hurt.

  Outside, Pimples was performing miracles of muscle and fortitude. His two-toned oxfords were destroyed with mud. Almost purposely he destroyed them. There was a layer of mud on his chocolate trousers. He violated his fine clothes. He drove his shovel into the earth and dug down behind the wheels and underneath the sides and he threw the mud out. He got down on his knees in the mud to use his hands. His wolf eyes glittered with effort and the sweat stood out on his forehead. Out of the corner of his eye he watched Juan. Juan had forgotten, and just at a time when Pimples needed him most. Pimples drove his shovel into the ground with gusty bursts of strength.

  Ernest Horton took a pickax and crossed the ditch. He picked away the turf and roots and topsoil until he found what he wanted. The broken stone from the ancient crash of the hill. He lifted the stones out and piled them on the grass beside his hole.

  Camille came over to him. “I’ll help you carry some of these down.”

  “You’ll get all dirty,” said Ernest.

  “You think I can get any dirtier than I am?” she asked.

  He rested the pick head on the ground. “You wouldn’t like to give me your phone number? I’d take you out.”