The White Widow: A Novel

by Jim Lehrer

  “I don’t blame you,” Pharmacy said. “It is sickening. I mean sickening. To watch those two helpless people go to their deaths, their bodies crushed, that blood flowing out of them and all over that highway …”

  “Forget it, Rex,” Mr. Glisan said. Mr. Glisan was one of the few people in the world of Great Western Trailways who ever called Pharmacy by his right first name. Jack wondered what Pharmacy’s wife and kids called him. He knew he had a wife and three children because the April issue of the company’s employee magazine, The Thruliner, had a story about them. The thing Jack remembered most was that Pharmacy’s oldest son was an Aggie, a mechanical engineering student at Texas A&M in College Station. Whenever Jack had thought about going to a four-year college, which had not been very often, he saw himself as an Aggie. They had an ROTC cadet corps that required every student to wear an army uniform with leather boots that went up the leg to the knee, and according to the teachers at Beeville High, tuition and other expenses at Texas A&M were cheaper than at any other bigtime college in Texas.

  Mr. Glisan, the Mr. Calm, was clearly in charge of this meeting. Pharmacy was clearly hot-red angry at Jack for what he had done. Mr. Peck showed nothing.

  “Do you have anything to say for yourself, Jack, before we go any further?” Mr. Glisan asked.

  “About what?”

  Pharmacy answered, “About why you violated every rule of the road and this company by backing down an open highway in a rain storm! How you left the scene of an accident in violation of every human and legal law of this state, this land and this company! You left those people dead, lying there along the road. Don’t you dare say, ‘About what?’ ”

  Jack had spent some time on the sand trying to work out what to say at this moment, this moment that he knew was sure to come. Nothing he thought about saying seemed right, now that it had come time to say it. So he said, “Okay.”

  “What happened, Jack?” Mr. Glisan said, lowering his voice and the temperature. Mr. Nice Guy.

  “If you saw the movie you know what happened,” Jack said. He said it quietly and politely, the way he had always said most things to most people.

  “I mean in your mind. What happened that caused you to violate your training? You were one of our best. What happened to you to cause you to do what you did?”

  “I don’t have anything to say about my mind.”

  “You have money troubles?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No outstanding debts on your mind?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Personal problems at home?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Your marriage all right?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “You don’t have children, do you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Is that the problem?”

  “No, sir.”

  Pharmacy took over.

  “Look, Jack, good men don’t suddenly go wrong. Not just like that, not the way you did. With Sunshine, it was different. He couldn’t keep his pants on, a common problem among men and bus drivers. But you? There has to be a reason, and we want to know what it is.”

  Jack looked right at Pharmacy and said, “Why?”

  “So, well, you know, so we’ll know what to look for in hiring people.”

  “So you’ll never end up with another me?”

  “Something like that.”

  Jack jerked his head back toward Mr. Glisan and said nothing. There would not have been any point in saying what he wanted to say, what was running coherently and precisely through his mind almost to his mouth and lips. Something along the lines of: Only Paul Madison is better than me and that is only because he’s been there longer. It is impossible to drive a bus better than I can. One mistake does not change that simple fact. What did Sunshine do? Where did he take off his pants?

  “Does it have anything to do with Fridays?” Pharmacy asked.

  Jack had decided he would not tell Mr. Glisan, Pharmacy, the police or anyone else about Ava. He might have told College if he had turned out to be his Kenny of Kingsville. He might have told him that this White Widow in his Angel Seat was the reason he lost his concentration and his head that night in the storm. But she was no excuse. Nothing like that could ever be an excuse for a Master Operator, the best bus driver in the system except for Paul Madison.

  “Nothing at all,” Jack said to Pharmacy. “As I told you in Houston, I had some bad luck a few Fridays in a row.”

  “That made late the man who is never late.”

  Jack decided to get this thing over with. “Pharmacy, listen. I know what’s coming to me so let’s get on with it.”

  “What do you think is coming to you?” Mr. Glisan asked.

  “I’m going to be fired, I am going to be charged and tried and probably sent to jail.”

  “Why are you so goddamn calm about it?” Pharmacy shouted.

  “Because I have already run it all through my mind. I lay out on the sand at Padre all afternoon thinking about it. I saw myself trying to get a job back at Nueces Transportation or selling bait over at Ingleside. I saw myself standing before a judge with a mustache and a long nose who was sending me to Huntsville for ninety-nine years. I saw myself wearing a prison uniform and eating in a big prison cafeteria and walking around a big exercise yard, like in the movies. I know what’s coming. I have seen it all already. So please, let’s get on with it.”

  “Nobody can imagine everything that happens before it happens,” Pharmacy said.

  “Nobody but me, I guess.”

  Both Pharmacy and Mr. Glisan turned toward Mr. Peck, who up to this moment had not said anything except hello.

  “Are you willing to sign a statement, confessing to what you did?” he asked.

  That was something Jack had not thought about on the beach at Padre. So he said, “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. What’s the point? You have the movie.”

  “What if we didn’t have the movie?”

  Peck was a smooth talker. It reminded Jack of the eleventh grade in Beeville when everyone was required to choose a magazine article and make a speech to the class about it. He did his on a reformed embezzler who had come out of prison and helped invent Scotch tape someplace up north, like Minnesota. When Jack opened his mouth to speak, his voice cracked into many pieces and went higher than most girls’. And this caused his legs to shake, like his left one had the first afternoon Ava came aboard his bus. Think of a flannel shirt, the teacher had said. Think about talking like a flannel shirt feels—soft and smooth and soothing. Mr. Peck talked like he was thinking of a flannel shirt.

  “You do, so why ask?”

  Mr. Peck looked again at Pharmacy and Mr. Glisan, and Jack saw something pass among them that made him think they might not have the movie after all. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said.

  “About what?” Pharmacy said.

  “I want to see the movie.”

  Mr. Peck did not look again at the other two men in the room. Instead, he reached inside a large white envelope and pulled out a black-and-white photograph. He handed it to Jack.

  “Do you know this woman?”

  Jack took the photo of Ava, his White Widow in the Angel Seat, in both hands. It was a photograph of her from the chest up. She had on a blouse that was light-colored and short-sleeved. Her eyes were open and she was smiling. He wanted to pull her to him and hold her tight against his chest. Nausea raced through him, and he started to sweat. He tried to think about flannel. If he had been standing, there was no telling what would have been happening to his legs and his every other part.

  “So you know her all right,” said Mr. Peck, who could not have helped but notice what was happening to Jack.

  “I don’t know her name,” Jack mumbled. “I don’t even know her name.”

  “The highway patrol found her,” said Mr. Peck. “She told them she was on your bus Friday afternoon during the storm. She was in the Angel Seat. She told them what happene
d.”

  Jack, still staring at the photograph, did not respond.

  “She has given them a full statement,” Mr. Peck said.

  Jack heard that and he thought about that. And he said, “What did she say happened?”

  “You know, the whole story,” Mr. Peck said.

  “What did she say the full story was?”

  “Nobody knows that better than you do, Jack, goddamn it,” Pharmacy said.

  Mr. Peck and the other two, Jack concluded, had absolutely nothing. No movie, no eyewitness account. The White Widow in the Angel Seat had nothing to tell anybody except that he stopped the bus, got out and came back a few minutes later and drove away. She could not have seen the dead woman and her daughter or anything behind the bus. Nobody on that bus could have, but she in particular could not have, from the Angel Seat up front.

  “What did she say she saw?” Jack asked, looking right at Mr. Peck.

  “I can’t tell you that. It would be in violation of investigative procedures.”

  “What is her name?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Who is she besides her name?” Mr. Peck asked.

  “I don’t know. Just a bus passenger.”

  Just a bus passenger.

  Jack felt fine again. He said to Mr. Peck, “Is showing me the movie also a violation of your investigative procedures?”

  Mr. Peck’s facial expression, which was all business, did not change. He was obviously used to getting people to confess to things.

  Jack was beginning to decide that he, Jack T. Oliver, was not as stupid as Mr. Peck and a lot of other people, including College, thought he was—and even he himself had thought he was.

  He decided then and there that he would not say another word. Not one word. If anything else was said in that room at the Hotel Surf about what had happened involving bus #4107 1.3 miles east of Refugio in the middle of that Friday storm, which was almost an Indianola, it was not going to be said by Jack T. Oliver.

  So that left the talking to the other three men. They had a lot to say about why they would love to make a deal with Jack. A deal that gave them what they wanted, which was silence and no trouble, in exchange for what they figured Jack wanted, which was to walk out of the Hotel Surf free and clear.

  Free and clear to do what? To be what? To go where?

  Progress Paul Madison was sitting in the center of the center section of the theater, about halfway between the rear and the screen. The usher said that was where he always sat. He was one of only three or four people in there. At least that was all Jack could see in the dark.

  It was the next Friday at one-thirty in the afternoon. Jack had just arrived in Victoria. He got Johnny Merriweather, the no-voice ticket agent, to look after his suitcase and the Santa Claus he had wrapped in two old paper bags. Johnny told him Paul was probably at one of the theaters around the corner over on the square. That meant he was at either the Orpheum or the Palace. The Orpheum, on the south side, was showing High Noon. The Palace, across on the north side, had as its main feature Hans Christian Andersen, starring Danny Kaye in the title role.

  The box office people and the ushers at both theaters knew Paul the Bus Driver and smiled happily in saying so. Jack did not know one person who did not smile when they talked about Paul. The woman at the Orpheum said it was his day for the Palace, and the usher there pointed Jack toward Paul with pleasure and without even asking for a ticket.

  “What are you doing here, Mr. Master Operator Oliver?” Paul whispered to Jack when he finally recognized the man who had sat down next to him.

  “I came to see you,” Jack said. “How much time left in this movie?”

  “Fifty-three minutes and twenty-two seconds,” Paul said.

  Jack looked up at the screen. Danny Kaye as Hans was singing a song about an inchworm to a bunch of kids.

  “But no worry,” said Paul. “I’ve already seen it seven times. That’s progress, you see.”

  They walked outside to the park of tall trees and crisscrossing sidewalks and white wooden benches in the middle of the square.

  “I almost didn’t know you without your uniform,” Paul said as they walked. “This may be the first time in history I have seen you like that, all naked like that in ordinary-man clothes.”

  Jack was wearing jeans and a light-blue and white striped short-sleeve shirt and black cowboy boots. Jack felt worse than naked here now with Paul in the clothes of a man who was no longer a bus driver. An ordinary man.

  Without discussing it, they sat down on a bench by a white frame bandstand. Jack had heard about concerts and politicians’ speeches there but he had never been to one. He had never been anywhere in Victoria except the bus station. Lem Odum, the retired Rosenberg teacher who wouldn’t ever shut up, told Jack once that Sam Houston actually made a campaign speech there in the square when he was running for governor or senator or something in the late 1800s. Jack didn’t know whether to believe him or not, although he knew for a fact that Allan Shivers, the present governor, had done that. Johnny Merriweather and a couple of others from the station had walked over and heard him. Johnny said Shivers talked mostly about why he, a Democrat, supported Eisenhower over Stevenson for president in 1952 and planned to do it again forever.

  Jack tried to imagine Sam Houston standing up there on the bandstand in front of a crowd making a speech, but he couldn’t. He had never seen a good picture of Houston and had no idea what he looked like.

  Jack wanted to make a speech to Paul. He wanted to start shouting and never stop. He wanted to point and punch and cry about what had happened. About those two people he had run over with #4107 during the Indianola. About the deal he had made at the Hotel Surf. To go away.

  Mr. Madison and all of you people of Victoria and of Texas and of the world! Listen to me! I, Jack T. Oliver, have come before you here today on this bandstand to tell you that I am a killer of a little girl and her mother. And now I am going away and away and away.…

  He had never made a real speech before. At least not since the one about the inventor of Scotch tape in high school, unless you counted those he made to the passengers at the beginning and end of each run and at major rest stops like Victoria. Nobody would count those.

  So he just started talking the regular way he always did to Progress Paul Madison.

  “Sorry about the movie,” Jack said.

  “Like I said, this was number eight.” Paul pointed to the south toward the Orpheum. “I’m up to nine on High Noon. They both change on Monday and I’ll start again.”

  Jack shrugged or frowned or indicated somehow to Paul that all of that sounded terrible.

  “Don’t wail for me, Jack,” Paul said. “The life on a daily turnaround puts me in my own bed every night. That’s what’s important.”

  “I could not see any movie eight or nine times. Isn’t there anything else to do around here on the layover?”

  “Not much else that I like to do. Look, they let me into these movies for free, for one thing. You didn’t come up here in civilian clothes on a day when you should be driving a bus to talk to me about watching movies on my layovers, for another. What in the hell is going on with you, Jack? You haven’t been on your runs, I figured you for sick or something. Nobody seemed to know anything. The rumor machine hasn’t gotten turned way up yet on you like it did on Sunshine.”

  What did Sunshine do? Later Jack would ask about Sunshine. Jack had come to Victoria to tell Paul Madison what in the hell was going on with him, Jack T. Oliver. And it wasn’t that he was sick or something.

  “Those two people who were killed during the storm down by Refugio?” he said.

  “Sure. About a week ago.”

  “Pharmacy and Mr. Glisan think I killed them. They think I backed over them and then drove off like a hit-and-run driver.”

  Paul said, “That was sure some bad storm. Almost an Indianola, if the truth were known. I barely made it back to San Antone that night.” Progress Paul Madison closed
his eyes and shook his head. “Judas priest, Jack.”

  “They were checkers.”

  That got Paul’s eyes back open. “Who were checkers?”

  “The dead woman and the girl.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Both.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Jack told of his first meeting at the Corpus bus depot with Mr. Glisan and Rex Al Barney.

  Paul again closed his eyes, shook his head and said, “Judas priest, Jack.”

  Then he said, “Tell me again what they looked like, how old they were and everything.”

  Jack didn’t want to but he quickly described what little he could remember about the two people he saw lying on the highway shoulder.

  Paul said, “They sound like a pair I picked up between Cuero and Thomaston last week. I hauled them here to Victoria. The woman had a twenty-dollar bill. They didn’t look like checkers to me. They must be the ones who got Sunshine, too. That’s progress, you see. But go on.”

  Jack had only one more place to go. And that was to describe a deal he was offered by Mr. Glisan, Pharmacy and Mr. Peck from the detective agency. He told Paul about the meeting at the Hotel Surf and the movie projector and the photograph.

  “The detective guy said they might lose their license if it got out they were using kids under sixteen as checkers. The law says they must be over sixteen. He said they didn’t know until after she died that this kid was only fourteen. Glisan said Great Western Trailways was also not keen on the whole world knowing that one of its buses had run over a couple of people and killed them. So if I would go quietly, they would stay quiet.”

  “In other words, they can’t prove anything against you?”

  “In other words, yes.”

  “Judas priest.”

  “I took the deal. I have gone quietly.”

  “To where?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Jack looked at his watch. “I want to go over and watch my old schedule come in from Houston,” he said, standing up.

  Paul got on his feet too. “Did they work on you to confess?”

  “Yes. But I didn’t.”

  “What about the woman passenger, the witness they found?”