The Wayward Bus

by John Steinbeck

  It was no beauty you could ignore by being used to it. It caught you in the throat in the morning and made a pain of pleasure in the pit of your stomach when the sun went down over it. The sweet smell of the lupines and of the grass set you breathing nervously, set you panting almost sexually. And it was in this season of flowering and growth, though it was still before daylight, that Juan Chicoy came out to the bus carrying an electric lantern. Pimples Carson, his apprentice-mechanic, stumbled sleepily behind him.

  The lunchroom windows were still dark. Against the eastern hills not even a grayness had begun to form. It was so much night that the owls were still shrieking over the fields. Juan Chicoy came near to the bus which stood in front of the garage. It looked, in the light of the lantern, like a large, silver-windowed balloon. Pimples Carson, still not really awake, stood with his hands in his pockets, shivering, not because it was cold but because he was very sleepy.

  A little wind blew in over the fields and brought the smell of lupine and the smell of a quickening earth, frantic with production.

  CHAPTER 2

  The electric lantern, with a flat downward reflector, lighted sharply only legs and feet and tires and tree trunks near to the ground. It bobbed and swung, and the little incandescent bulb was blindingly blue-white. Juan Chicoy carried his lantern to the garage, took a bunch of keys from his overalls pocket, found the one that unlocked the padlock, and opened the wide doors. He switched on the overhead light and turned off his lantern.

  Juan picked a striped mechanic’s cap from his workbench. He wore Headlight overalls with big brass buttons on bib and side latches, and over this he wore a black horsehide jacket with black knitted wristlets and neck. His shoes were round-toed and hard, with soles so thick that they seemed swollen. An old scar on his cheek beside his large nose showed as a shadow in the overhead light. He ran fingers through his thick, black hair to get it all in the mechanic’s cap. His hands were short and wide and strong, with square fingers and nails flattened by work and grooved and twisted from having been hammered and hurt. The third finger of his left hand had lost the first joint, and the flesh was slightly mushroomed where the finger had been amputated. This little overhanging ball was shiny and of a different texture from the rest of the finger, as though the joint were trying to become a fingertip, and on this finger he wore a wide gold wedding ring, as though this finger was no good for work any more and might as well be used for ornament.

  A pencil and a ruler and a tire pressure gauge protruded from a slot in his overalls bib. Juan was clean-shaven, but not since yesterday, and along the corners of his chin and on his neck the coming whiskers were grizzled and white like those of an old Airedale. This was the more apparent because the rest of his beard was so intensely black. His black eyes were squinting and humorous, the way a man’s eyes squint when he is smoking and cannot take the cigarette from his mouth. And Juan’s mouth was full and good, a relaxed mouth, the underlip slightly protruding—not in petulance but in humor and self-confidence—the upper lip well formed except left of center where a deep scar was almost white against the pink tissue. The lip must have been cut clear through at one time, and now this thin taut band of white was a strain on the fullness of the lip and made it bunch in tiny tucks on either side. His ears were not very large, but they stood out sharply from his head like seashells, or in the position a man would hold them with his hands if he wanted to hear more clearly. Juan seemed to be listening intently all the time, while his squinting eyes seemed to laugh at what he heard, and half of his mouth disapproved. His movements were sure even when he was not doing anything that required sureness. He walked as though he were going to some exact spot. His hands moved with speed and precision and never fiddled with matches or with nails. His teeth were long and the edges were framed with gold, which gave his smile a little fierceness.

  At his workbench he picked tools from nails on the wall and laid them in a long, flat box—wrenches and pliers and several screwdrivers and a machine hammer and a punch. Beside him Pimples Carson, still heavy with sleep, rested his elbow on the oily wood of the bench. Pimples wore the tattered sweater of a motorcycle club and the crown of a felt hat cut in saw teeth around the edge. He was a lank and slender-waisted boy of seventeen, with narrow shoulders and a long foxy nose and eyes that were pale in the morning and became greenish-brown later in the day. A golden fuzz was on his cheeks, and his cheeks were rivuleted and rotted and eroded with acne. Among the old scars new pustules formed, purple and red, some rising and some waning. The skin was shiny with the medicines that were sold for this condition and which do no good whatever.

  Pimples’ blue jeans were tight, and so long that they were turned up ten inches on the bottoms. They were held to his narrow middle by a broad, beautifully tooled leather belt with a fat and engraved silver buckle in which four turquoises were set. Pimples kept his hands at his sides as much as he could, but in spite of himself his fingers would move to his pitted cheeks until he became conscious of what he was doing and put his hands down again. He wrote to every company that advertised an acne cure, and he had been to many doctors, who knew that they could not cure it but who also knew that it would probably go away in a few years. They nevertheless gave Pimples prescriptions for salves and lotions, and one had put him on a diet of green vegetables.

  His eyes were long and narrow and slanted like the eyes of a sleepy wolf, and now in the early morning they were almost sealed shut with mucus. Pimples was a prodigious sleeper. Left to his own devices, he could sleep nearly all the time. His whole system and his soul were a particularly violent battleground of adolescence. His concupiscence was constant, and when it was not directly and openly sexual it would take to channels of melancholy, of deep and tearful sentiment, or of a strong and musky religiosity. His mind and his emotions were like his face, constantly erupting, constantly raw and irritated. He had times of violent purity when he howled at his own depravity, and these were usually followed by a melancholy laziness that all but prostrated him, and he went from the depression into sleep. It was opiatic and left him drugged and dull for a long time.

  He wore pierced white and brown saddle oxfords on bare feet this morning, and his ankles, where they showed below the turned-up jeans, were streaked with dirt. In his periods of depression Pimples was so prostrated that he did not bathe nor even eat very much. The felt hat crown notched so evenly was not really for beauty but served to keep his long light brown hair out of his eyes and to keep the grease out of it when he worked under a car. Now he stood stupidly watching Juan Chicoy put the tools in his box while his mind rolled in great flannel clouds of sleepiness, almost nauseating in their power.

  Juan said, “Get the work light on the long cord connected. Come on, Pimples. Come on now, wake up!”

  Pimples seemed to shake himself like a dog. “Can’t seem to come out of it,” he explained.

  “Well, get the light out there and take my back board out. We’ve got to get going.”

  Pimples picked up the hand light, basketed for protection of the globe, and began unwinding the heavy rubber-guarded cable from around its handle. He plugged the cord into an outlet near the door and the hand light leaped into brilliance. Juan lifted his toolbox and stepped out of the door and looked at the darkened sky. A change had come in the air. A little wind was stirring the young leaves of the oaks and whisking among the geraniums and it was an uncertain, wet wind. Juan smelled it as he would smell a flower.

  “By God, if it rains,” he said, “that would be one too many.”

  To the east the tops of the mountains were just becoming visible in outline with the dawn. Pimples came out carrying the lighted hand lamp and unkinking the cable behind him on the ground. The light made the great trees stand out, and it was reflected on the yellow-green of the new little oak leaves. Pimples took his light to the bus and went back to the garage for the long board with casters on the bottom on which a man could lie and wheel himself about when he worked under a car. He flung the board down bes
ide the bus.

  “Well, it’s like to rain,” he said. “Take nearly every year in California it rains this season.”

  Juan said, “I’m not complaining about the season, but with this ring gear out and the passengers waiting, and the ground is pulpy with rain—”

  “Makes good feed,” said Pimples.

  Juan stopped and looked around at him. His eyes crinkled with amusement. “Sure,” he said, “it sure does.”

  Pimples looked shyly away.

  The bus was lighted by the hand lamp now and it looked strange and helpless, for where the rear wheels should have been were two heavy sawhorses, and instead of resting on axles the rear of the bus rested on a four-by-four which extended from one horse to the other.

  It was an old bus, a four-cylinder, low-compression engine with a special patented extra gear shift which gave it five speeds ahead instead of three, two below the average ratio, and two speeds in reverse. The ballooning sides of the bus, heavy and shining with aluminum paint, showed nevertheless the bumps and bends, the wracks and scratches, of a long and violent career. A home paint job on an old automobile somehow makes it look even more ancient and disreputable than it would if left in hon orable decay.

  Inside, the bus was rebuilt too. The seats which had once been woven of cane were now upholstered in red oilcloth, and while the job was neatly done, it was not professionally done. There was the slightly sour smell of oilcloth in the air and the frankly penetrating odor of oil and gasoline. It was an old, old bus, and it had seen many trips and many difficulties. Its oaken floorboards were scooped and polished by the feet of passengers. Its sides were bent and straightened. Its windows could not be opened, for the whole body was slightly wracked out of shape. In the summer Juan removed the windows and in the winter put them back again.

  The driver’s seat was worn through to the springs, but in the worn place was a flowered chintz pillow which served the double purpose of protecting the driver and holding down the uncovered springs. Hanging from the top of the windshield were the penates:1 a baby’s shoe—that’s for protection, for the stumbling feet of a baby require the constant caution and aid of God; and a tiny boxing glove—and that’s for power, the power of the fist on the driving forearm, the drive of the piston pushing its connecting rod, the power of person as responsible and proud individual. There hung also on the windshield a little plastic kewpie doll with a cerise and green ostrich-feather headdress and a provocative sarong. And this was for the pleasures of the flesh and of the eye, of the nose, of the ear. When the bus was in motion these hanging items spun and jerked and swayed in front of the driver’s eye.

  Where the windshield angled in the middle and the center of support went up, sitting on top of the dashboard was a small metal Virgin of Guadalupe2 painted in brilliant colors. Her rays were gold and her robe was blue and she stood on the new moon, which was supported by cherubs. This was Juan Chicoy’s connection with eternity. It had little to do with religion as connected with the church and dogma, and much to do with religion as memory and feeling. This dark Virgin was his mother and the dim house where she, speaking Spanish with a little brogue, had nursed him. For his mother had made the Virgin of Guadalupe her own personal goddess. Out had gone St. Patrick and St. Bridget3 and the ten thousand pale virgins of the North, and into her had entered this dark one who had blood in her veins and a close connection with people.

  His mother admired her Virgin, whose day is celebrated with exploding skyrockets, and, of course, Juan Chicoy’s Mexican father didn’t think of it one way or another. Skyrockets were by nature the way to celebrate Saints’ Days. Who could think otherwise? The rising, hissing tube was obviously the spirit rising to Heaven, and the big, flashing bang at the top was the dramatic entrance to the throne room of Heaven. Juan Chicoy, while not a believer in an orthodox sense, now he was fifty, would nevertheless have been uneasy driving the bus without the Guadalupana 4 to watch over him. His religion was practical.

  Below the Virgin was a kind of converted glove box, and in it were a Smith & Wesson 45-caliber revolver, a roll of bandage, a bottle of iodine, a vial of lavender smelling salts, and an unopened pint of whisky. With this equipment Juan felt fairly confident that he could meet most situations.

  The front bumpers of the bus had once borne the inscription, still barely readable, “el Gran Poder de Jesus,” “the great power of Jesus.” But that had been painted on by a former owner. Now the simple word “Sweetheart” was boldly lettered on front and rear bumpers. And the bus was known as “Sweetheart” to all who knew her. Now she was immobilized, her rear wheels off, her end sticking up in the air and resting on a four-by-four set between two sawhorses.

  Juan Chicoy had the new ring and pinion gears and he was rolling them carefully together. “Hold the light close,” he said to Pimples, and he turned the pinion in the ring all the way around. “I remember once I put a new ring on an old pinion and she went out right away.”

  “Busted tooth sure makes a noise,” said Pimples. “It sounds like it’s coming through the floor at you. What do you suppose knocked that tooth out?”

  Juan held the ring gear up sideways and in front of the light turned the pinion slowly, inspecting the fit of tooth against tooth as he went. “I don’t know,” he said. “There’s lots nobody knows about metal and about engines too. Take Ford.5 He’ll make a hundred cars and two or three of them will be no damn good. It’s not just one thing that’s bad, the whole car’s bad. The springs and the motor and the water pump and the fan and the carburetor. It just breaks down little by little and there don’t nobody know what makes them. And you’ll take another car right off the line, you’d say it was just exactly the same as the others, but it’s not. It’s got something the others haven’t got. It’s got more power. It’s almost like a guy with a lot of guts. It won’t bust down no matter what you do.”

  “I had one of them,” said Pimples. “Model A. I sold her. Bet she’s still running. Had her three years and never spent a dime on her.”

  Juan laid his ring gear and pinion on the step of the bus and picked up the old ring from the ground. With his finger he traced the raw place where the tooth had broken out. “Metal’s funny stuff,” he said. “Sometimes it seems to get tired. You know, down in Mexico where I came from they used to have two or three butcher knives. They’d use one and stick the others in the ground. ‘It rests the blade,’ they said. I don’t know if it’s true, but I know those knives would take a shaving edge. I guess nobody knows about metal, even the people that make it. Let’s get this pinion on the shaft. Here, hold the light back here.”

  Juan put his little platform behind the bus and he lay on it on his back and scooted himself under with his feet. “Hold the light a little more to the left. No, higher. There. Now shove me my toolbox, will you?”

  Juan’s hands worked busily and a little oil dropped down on his cheek. He rubbed it off with the back of his hand. “This is a mean job,” he said.

  Pimples peered underneath the bus at him. “Maybe I could hook the light over that nut,” he said.

  “Oh, you’d just have to move it in a minute,” said Juan.

  Pimples said, “I sure hope you get her going today. I’d like to sleep in my own bed tonight. You don’t get no rest in a chair.”

  Juan chuckled. “Did you ever see madder people in your life when we had to come back after that tooth broke out? You’d think I did it on purpose. They were so mad they gave Alice hell about the pie. I guess they thought she made it. When people are traveling they don’t like anything to interrupt them.”

  “Well, they got our beds,” Pimples observed. “I don’t see what they got to squawk about. You and me and Alice and Norma were the ones slept in chairs. And them Pritchards was the worst. I don’t mean Mildred, the girl, but her old man and old lady. They figure they’ve been getting gypped someway. He tells me a hundred times how he’s a president or something and he’s going to make somebody suffer for this. Outrage, he says it was. And him and his
wife had your bed. Where’d Mildred sleep?” Pimples’ eyes glowed a little.

  “On the davenport, I guess,” said Juan. “Or maybe with her father and mother. That fellow from the trick company got Norma’s room.”

  “I kinda liked that guy,” Pimples said. “He didn’t say nothing much. He said he’d just as soon set up. He didn’t say what line he was in. But them Pritchards made up for it, all except Mildred. You know where they’re going, Mr. Chicoy? They’re going on a trip down to Mexico. Mildred’s been studying Spanish in college. She’s going to interpret for them.”

  Juan drove a key pin into the shaft and pounded it gently into place. He pulled himself from under the bus. “Let’s get that rear-end assembly now.”

  Light was creeping up the sky and over the mountains. The colorless dawn of grays and blacks moved in so that white and blue things were silver and red and dark green things were black. The new leaves on the big oaks were black and white, and the mountain rims were sharp. Lumpish, heavy clouds that rolled in the sky like dumplings were beginning to take on a faint rose-pink color on their eastern edges.

  Suddenly the lights in the lunchroom sprang on and the geranium border around the building leaped into being. Juan glanced toward the lights. “Alice is up,” he said. “Won’t be long till the coffee’s ready. Come on, let’s move the rear end in now.”

  The two men worked together well. Each understood what was to be done. Each did his piece. Pimples lay on his back too, tightening the housing nuts, and in the teamwork a good feeling came to him.

  Juan strained a tight forearm against a nut and his wrench slipped and he took skin and flesh off his knuckle. The blood ran thick and black out of his greasy hand. He put the knuckle in his mouth and sucked it and made a line of grease around his mouth.

  “Hurt it bad?” Pimples asked.

  “No, it’s good luck, I guess. You can’t finish a job without blood. That’s what my old man used to say.” He sucked the blood again and already the flow was lessening.