The White Widow: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

Double-pumping the clutch while moving the gearshift stick from first, to second, to third and on to fourth was a vital part of being the master of that big machine. Jack couldn’t imagine anything more boring than just putting his foot on the accelerator and having the gears shift automatically without his doing a thing, like he wasn’t even there.
    N.T.C. ran small Ford transits when Jack was working for them, and he hated them. They sounded like rubber bands twirling around in a tin can and they overheated in hot weather, which there was a lot of in Corpus.
    “Hey, Jack,” said the N.T.C. driver. “You’re running late.”
    “Hey, Floyd,” said Jack as he stepped aboard. “Late connection in Houston.”
    Jack knew all of the Nueces Transportation boys. Usually he caught the 6:30 for the twenty-minute ride out to where he lived. This time it was the 6:40. None of the drivers ever made him pay the fifteen-cent fare. They treated him like he was a postman or a policeman, who, if in uniform, could ride the transit buses of Corpus Christi free of charge. The N.T.C. drivers saw Jack as a distinguished alumnus, one of theirown who had gone on to better things as a driver of an intercity bus.
    “Get any in Houston?” Floyd asked.
    “Oh, the two usual blondes and a brunette,” Jack said.
    Floyd Cutlersen, a man in his late thirties with no apparent aspirations to go on to intercity driving, believed all he was told about the life of the over-the-road bus driver. Jack tried never to disappoint him with the truth. Like most every bus driver and most every other man he had ever known, Jack never minded other men thinking he was something with women he was not.
    “Which was the best?” Floyd asked.
    “The brunette.”
    “What did she look like?”
    “Like Ava Gardner.”
    “Are you serious? What did she do?”
    “She didn’t do a thing but just sit there,” Jack said.
    “Oh, come on, Jack. Tell me every detail.”
    Every detail, every detail, every detail was running through Jack’s mind, again and again, over and over.
    The bus came to another downtown stop. Several more passengers got on.
    Jack moved to the seat next to the window so somebody could sit down next to him. It was already dark, so there were mostly only lights in store windows to see. But he didn’t even see them.
    He saw only the White Widow in the fifth-row left-side window seat. He felt the smoothness of her skin on her elbow, smelled the soap on her body, admired the blue of her eyes.
    He saw that bite on her right leg. He regretted not getting a second look at it when she left the bus. But there was no opportunity.
    He saw her in a white porcelain bathtub that was large and stood up off the floor on four fancy short legs. She was splashing hot foamy water up on her body. He felt warmth in his face and some movement and some sensation lower in his body.
    The thought of not seeing her ever again in his life made him hurt. He actually felt a sharp pain right behind each of his eyes.

CHAPTER 3

    H e smelled the syrup in the meat loaf the second he opened the door. It was one of those things that connected his present life in Corpus and on the road to all of the early part back in Beeville. Daisy Lee, the Blue maid, made meat loaf that way when he was growing up, and his wife made it that way now that he was grown.
    “It’s me!” he yelled once inside.
    “You’re late!” she yelled from somewhere in the back of the house, he assumed the kitchen.
    “Had a lot of package express to write up!”
    And there she was. Her short dark brown hair was combed and her cotton dress, a green one with tiny white flowers on it, was clean and starched and pressed. It covered everything but her thick bare arms.
    Loretta had weighed 147 pounds when Jack went from Nueces Transportation to Great Western. She still weighed about that. He had gone from 225 to 167 in that same fifteenyears because he had to to keep his job after the war, when the veterans came