The White Widow: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

sixties, a Dollar, was on her way down the step to the ground.
    “Yes, ma’am,” he said, turning back to take her elbow.
    By the time she was down and he could look back at the terminal door, the White Widow was out of sight.
    She had left him without saying even a word of good-bye or regret. Would he ever see her again?
    He wished there was a way to capture a smell in his nose and hold it for a while. That soap smell was there now but he knew it would soon be gone. He could imagine the bathtub and her in it, though. Yes, yes. He knew he could do that. He knew he could hold that for the rest of his life.

    The other drivers gave him a hard time for being late.
    “We were about to call the highway patrol, the Coast Guard, the Kiwanis and the Camp Fire Girls,” said Jumping Jimmy Dale Hayes, the driver who was waiting to take the schedule on to Brownsville. His nickname came from the fact that he couldn’t sit still for long, except when he was driving a bus. “Where, oh where, had our little Jack gone?”
    “Calling all cars, calling all cars,” said Okie Owens, whose first bus job had been with Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma Coaches out of Pawhuska, Oklahoma. He spoke through his hands cupped in front of his mouth. He was driving the 6:30 connection straight west out of Corpus to Alice, Freer and Laredo. “Be on a lookout for On Time Oliver and his big ACF. Calling all cars, calling all cars.”
    There were three other drivers, two from the extra board, in the drivers’ room behind the ticket counter. Working offthe extra board was how and where everybody began at Great Western. Extra-board drivers spent their days and nights always on standby at depots or by their phones at home, waiting to pull a double or a charter, to drive a scheduled run for a sick or vacationing regular. They got rich over the holidays and in summer and other heavy-traffic periods, but since they were paid only minimum “protection” wages when not actually driving, they could come close to starving the rest of the year, particularly in the travel-business dog days of January, February and March.
    Everybody got into the act kidding Jack.
    “Six minutes. Six minutes late. A record.”
    “They ought to never give him that gold badge now.”
    “What kind of example does that set for the young drivers coming along?”
    “If On Time Oliver is late, then what’s next?”
    “The Japs will win next time.”
    Jack laughed with them and took it. But he said nothing about what had happened, offered no explanation at all for the lost six minutes. He didn’t even make up a good lie about a crazy passenger in Wharton or an overturned tractor trailer outside Louise.
    He signed all of the reports and the logs, said good-bye to everyone, took his small black leather suitcase and headed out for home. Loretta would have dinner for him. It was Friday, which usually meant meat loaf, one of his most favorite foods. Loretta had finally learned from his mother how to make it the right way, with chopped green peppers and a little maple syrup in there with the egg, the ketchup, the mustard and the dry Wheaties cereal.
    He walked two blocks to the bus stop at Lancaster and Chaparral. There were three Tamales, a Blue and two Dollars waiting for a bus. In less than three minutes there itcame. The Alameda–Staples, one of three main lines through Corpus. Jack had driven that run himself many times when he worked for Nueces Transportation Company, the Corpus Christi transit line. That was where he started his career as a bus driver when he was twenty-two years old.
    The bus hissed to a stop. It was a GMC TDH-3612 in its blue-and-white Nueces Transportation livery. The
T
was for “transit,” the
D
for “diesel” and the
H
meant it had hydraulic automatic drive rather than manual drive. Some of the Great Western drivers longed like whiny babies for the day when automatic drives would come to ACF-Brills and other intercity buses, but Jack did not agree.