The Wayward Bus

by John Steinbeck

  The warmth and pinkness of the dawn sneaked in about them so that the electric light seemed to lose some of its brilliance.

  “I wonder how many will come in on the Greyhound,” Pimples asked idly. And then a strong thought came to him out of the good feeling for Mr. Chicoy. It was a thought so sharp that it almost hurt him. “Mr. Chicoy,” he began uncertainly, and his tone was fawning, craven, begging.

  Juan stopped turning the nut and waited for the request for a day off, for a raise, for something. There was going to be a request. That was inherent in the tone, and to Juan it was trouble. Trouble always started this way.

  Pimples was silent. He couldn’t get the words.

  “What do you want?” Juan asked guardedly.

  “Mr. Chicoy, could we fix it—I mean—could you fix it so you don’t call me Pimples any more?”

  Juan took his wrench from the nut and turned his head sideways. The two were lying on their backs, their faces toward each other. Juan saw the craters of old scars and the coming eruptions and one prime, tight, yellow-headed pustule about to burst on the cheek. As he looked, Juan’s eyes softened. He knew. It came on him suddenly, and he wondered why he had not known before.

  “What’s your name?” he asked roughly.

  “Ed,” said Pimples. “Ed Carson, distant relative of Kit Carson.6 Before I got these in grammar school, why, they used to call me Kit.” His voice was studied and calm, but his chest rose and fell heavily and the air whistled in his nostrils.

  Juan looked away from him and back at the bulbous lump of the rear-end housing. “O.K.,” he said, “let’s get the jacks underneath.” He rolled out from under the bus. “Get the oil in there now.”

  Pimples went quickly into the garage and brought out the pressure gun, trailing the air hose behind him. He turned the pet cock and the compressed air hissed into the gun behind the oil. The gun clicked as he filled the housing with the oil until a little ran thickly out. He screwed in the plug.

  Juan said, “Kit, wipe your hands and see if Alice has got any coffee ready, will you?”

  Pimples went toward the lunchroom. Near the door where one of the great oaks stood there was a patch of near darkness. He stood there for a moment, holding his breath. He was shaking all over in a kind of a chill.

  CHAPTER 3

  When the rim of the sun cleared the mountains to the east, Juan Chicoy stood up from the ground and brushed the dirt from the legs and seat of his overalls. The sun flashed on the windows of the lunchroom and lay warm on the green grass that edged the garage. It blazed on the poppies in the flat fields and on the great islands of blue lupines.

  Juan Chicoy went to the entrance door of the bus. He reached in, turned the ignition key, and pushed down the starter with the heel of his hand. For a while the starter whined rustily, and then the engine caught and roared for a moment until Juan throttled it down. He pushed down the clutch with his hand, put the gear in compound low, and let up the clutch. The rear wheels turned slowly in the air and Juan went around to the rear to listen to the action of the gears, to try to hear any uneven matching of the assembly.

  Pimples was washing his hands in a flat pan of gasoline in the garage. The sun warmed a brown leaf left by the past year and blown into a corner of the garage doorframe. After a while a little night-laden fly crawled heavily out from under the leaf and stood in the clear sun. Its wings were muddily iridescent and it was sluggish with night cold. The fly rubbed its wings with its legs and then it rubbed its legs together and then it rubbed its face with its forelegs while the sun, slanting under the great puffed clouds, warmed its juices. Suddenly the fly took off, circled twice, fluttered under the oaks and crashed against the screen door of the lunch room, fell on its back and buzzed against the ground, upside down for a second. Then it righted itself and flew up and took its position on the frame beside the lunchroom door.

  Alice Chicoy, haggard from the night of sitting up, came to the door and looked out toward the bus. The screen door opened only a few inches, but the fly flung himself through the opening. Alice saw him come through and whacked at him with the dish towel she carried in her hand. The fly buzzed crazily for a moment and then settled under the edge of the counter. Alice watched the rear wheels of the bus idly turning in the air and then she went in back of the counter and turned off the steam valve of the coffee urn.

  The brown fluid in the glass pipe on the side of the urn looked thin and pale. She ran her towel over the counter and in doing so noticed that the big white coconut cake in its transparent plastic cover was ragged on one edge with a “V” cut out of it. She took a knife from the silver tray, lifted the cover, trimmed the cake’s edge, and put the crumbs in her mouth. And just before the cover went back into place the fly lunged under the edge and flung himself on the coconut filling. He clung under a slight overhang so that he was not visible from above, and he dug and struggled hungrily into the sweet filling. He had a high, huge mountain of cake and he was very happy.

  Pimples came in, smelling of gasoline and grease, and he took his place on one of the round stools. “Well, we got that done,” he said.

  “You and who else?” Alice asked satirically.

  “Well, of course, Mr. Chicoy done the expert work. I’d like to have a cup of coffee and a piece of cake.”

  “You been in that cake already, before I got up.” She brushed her hair out of her eyes with one hand. “You can’t cover up,” she said.

  “Well, charge it to me,” said Pimples. “I’m paying for my feed, ain’t I?”

  “What do you want to eat all that sweet stuff for?” Alice said. “You’re at the candy tray all day long. You don’t get hardly any pay. All goes for sweet stuff. I bet that’s what makes all them pimples. Why don’t you lay off for a while?”

  Pimples looked shyly down at his hands. The nails were rimmed with black where the gasoline had not reached. “It’s rich in food energy,” he said. “Fellow’s going to work, he needs food energy. Take about three o’clock in the afternoon when you get a let-down. Why, you need something rich in food energy.”

  “It’s rich in lead in the pants,” Alice observed. “You need food energy about as much as I need a—” and she left it in the air. Alice was a very profane woman but she never said the words, she only led up to them. She drew a cup of coffee from the spout—a thick, flat-bottom cup with no saucer—spurted in some milk and slipped the cup across the counter.

  Pimples, looking hazily at the Coca-Cola girl who swung provocatively over the juke box, put in four spoonfuls of sugar and stirred the coffee around and around with the spoon straight up.

  “I like to have a piece of cake,” he repeated patiently.

  “Well, it’s your funeral. You’re going to have a can on you like a balloon.”

  Pimples looked at Alice’s well-formed behind and then quickly away. Alice took the knife from behind the counter and cut a wedge of coconut cake. The cliff of cake toppled on the fly and pressed him down. Alice shoveled the cake onto a saucer and slid it along the counter. Pimples went at it with his coffee spoon.

  “Those folks didn’t get up yet?” he asked.

  “No, but I heard them stirring around. One of them must have used up all the hot water. I haven’t got a bit in the lunchroom.”

  “That must be Mildred,” said Pimples.

  “Huh?”

  “The girl. Maybe she took a bath.”

  Alice looked at him levelly. “You get to your food energy and keep your mind where it belongs,” she said sharply.

  “I never said nothing. Hey, there’s a fly in this cake!”

  Alice stiffened. “You had a fly in your soup yesterday. I think you carry flies in your pocket.”

  “No, look here. He’s still kicking.”

  Alice came near. “Kill him,” she cried. “Squash him! You want him to get loose?” She picked up a fork from behind the counter and mashed the fly and cake crumbs together and scraped the whole thing into the garbage can.

  “How about
my cake?” Pimples asked.

  “You’ll get another piece of cake. I don’t know why you always get flies. Nobody else does.”

  “Just lucky, I guess,” Pimples said softly.

  “Huh?”

  “I said I was—”

  “I heard what you said.” She was unrested and nervous. “You watch your mouth or you’ll go out of here so fast you’ll think you’re on fire. I don’t care if you are a mechanic. To me you’re just a punk. A pimple-faced punk.” Pimples had withered. His chin had settled lower and lower against his chest as her anger rose. And he didn’t know that she was making him the depos itary of a number of things.

  “I didn’t say nothing,” he said. “Can’t a guy even make a joke?”

  Alice had reached a point where she had either to go on into a crazy, hysterical rage that tore the living daylights out of herself and everyone else around her, or she had to begin to taper off quickly, for she could feel the uncontrollable pressure rising in her chest and throat. In a second she appraised the situation. Things were tight. The bus had to get out. Juan had not rested either. The people who were using the beds would hear her rage and come out and Juan might hit her. He had once. Not hard, but accurately, and timed so perfectly that she imagined he had nearly killed her. And then the black fear that was always on the edge of her mind—Juan might leave her. He had left other women. How many she didn’t know because he’d never spoken of it, but a man of his attractiveness must have left other women. All of this happened in a split second. Alice decided on no rage. She forced the pressure down in her chest. Woodenly she raised the plastic cake cover and cut an oversized wedge and put it on a saucer and she carried this down the counter and set it in front of Pimples.

  “Everybody’s nervous,” she said.

  Pimples looked up from his fingernails. He saw how the little lines of age were sneaking down her neck, and he noticed the thickness of her upper eyelids. He saw that her hands had lost the tightness of skin of young girls. He was very sorry for her. Unblessed with beauty as he was, he thought that youth was the only thing in the world worth having and that one who had lost youth was already dead. He had won a great victory this morning, and now when he saw the weakness and indecision in Alice he pressed for a second victory.

  “Mr. Chicoy says he ain’t going to call me Pimples no more,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, I asked him not. My name’s Edward. They used to call me Kit in school on account my last name’s Carson.”

  “Is Juan calling you Kit?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Alice didn’t really understand what it was about, and behind her in the bedroom there was movement, footsteps between the rugs and a little low talking. Now that she was aware of the strangers, Pimples became closer to her because he was not quite a stranger. “I’ll see how it goes,” she said.

  The sun had been shining in through the front windows and the door, making five bright splashes on the wall, illuminating the Grape-Nuts packages and the pyramids of oranges behind the counter. And now the bright squares dimmed and went out. There was a roll of thunder, and without warning the rain began. It whisked down on the roof.

  Pimples went to the door and looked out. The rain sheeted down, obscuring the country, splashing high on the cement road. There was a steely look to the wet light. Pimples saw Juan Chicoy inside the bus for shelter. The back wheels were still turning around slowly. As he watched, Juan leaped to the ground and made a run for the lunchroom. Pimples held the door open for him and he bolted through, but even in the little run his overalls were dark with water and his shoes squidged sloppily on the floor.

  “God Almighty,” he said, “that’s a real cloudburst.”

  The gray wall of water obscured the hills and there was a dark, metallic light with it. The heads of the lupines bent down, heavy with water. The petals of the poppies were beaten off and lay on the ground like gold coins. The already wet ground could absorb no more water, and little rivulets started immediately for the low places. The cloudburst roared on the roof of the lunchroom at Rebel Corners.

  Juan Chicoy had taken one of the tables by the lunchroom window and he drank well-creamed coffee and chewed a doughnut and looked out at the downpour. Norma came in and began to wash the few dishes on the stainless steel sink behind the counter.

  “Bring me another cup of coffee, will you?” Juan asked.

  She came listlessly around the end of the counter. The cup was too full. A little stream of coffee dripped off the bottom of it. Juan pulled out a paper napkin and folded it as a blotter for the wet cup.

  “Didn’t get much rest, did you?” he asked.

  Norma was drawn, and her dress was wrinkled. You could see now that she would be an old-looking woman long before she was old. Her skin was muddy and her thin hands were splotched. Many, many things gave Norma the hives.

  “Didn’t get any sleep at all,” she said. “I tried the floor but I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Well, we’ll see it doesn’t happen again,” said Juan. “I should have got a car to take them into San Ysidro.”

  “Giving them our beds!” Alice said derisively. “Now, where did you get that idea? Where else do you suppose they could have got the owners’ beds? They don’t have to work today. They could just as well of sat up.”

  “Slipped up on me, I guess,” said Juan.

  “You don’t care if your wife sleeps in a chair,” Alice said. “You’d give away her bed any time.” Again Alice could feel rage rising in her and it frightened her. She didn’t want it to rise. She knew it would spoil things, and she was afraid of it, but there it was, rising and boiling in her.

  A sheet of rain whisked over the roof like a heavy broom and left silence as it moved on, and almost immediately another flat of rain took its place. The drip and gurgle of water from the roof eaves and from the drains was loud again. Juan had been looking reflectively at the floor, a small smile tightening his mouth against the white band of the scar on his lip. And this was another thing Alice was frightened of. He had set her out to observe her. She knew that. All relations and all situations to Alice were person-to-person things in which she and the other were huge and all others were removed from the world. There was no shading. When she talked to Juan, there were only the two of them. When she picked at Norma, the whole world disappeared, leaving only Norma and her in a gray universe of cloud.

  But Juan, now, he could shut everything out and look at each thing in relation to the other. Things of various sizes and importance. He could see and judge and consider and enjoy. Juan could enjoy people. Alice could only love, like, dislike, and hate. She saw and felt no shading whatever.

  Now she tucked her loosening hair back. Once a month she used a rinse on her hair which was guaranteed to give it the mysterious and glamorous glints that capture and keep men in slavery. Juan’s eyes were distant and amused. This was a matter of horror to Alice. She knew he was seeing her, not as an angry woman who darkened the world, but as one of thousands of angry women to be studied, inspected, and, yes, even enjoyed. This was the cold, lonely horror to her. Juan blotted out the universe to her and she sensed that she blotted out nothing to him. He could see not only around her but through her to something else. The remembered terror of the one time he had hit her lay not in the blow—she had been hit before, and far from hating it had taken excitement and exuberance from it—but Juan had hit her as he would a bug. He hadn’t cared about it much. He hadn’t even been very angry, just irritated. And he had hit a noisy thing to shut it up. Alice had only been trying to attract his attention in one of the few ways she knew. She was trying to do the same thing now, and she knew from the changed focus in his eye that he had slipped away from her.

  “I try to make a nice little home for us; nice, and with a carpet and a velveteen suite, and you got to give it away to strangers.” Her voice was losing its certainty. “And you let your own wife sit up in a chair all night.”

  Juan looked up slowly. “Norma,
” he said, “bring me another cup of coffee, will you? Plenty of cream.”

  Alice braced herself for the rage she knew was coming, and then Juan looked slowly toward her. His dark eyes were amused and warm, the focus changed again, and he was looking at her and she knew that he saw her.

  “It didn’t hurt you any,” he said. “Make you appreciate the bed tonight.”

  Her breath caught. A hot wave flooded over her. Rage was transmuted to hot desire. She smiled at him vacantly and licked her lips. “You bastard,” she said very softly. And she took a huge, shuddering sigh of air. “Want some eggs?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Two in the water, about four minutes.”

  “I know how you like them,” she said. “Bacon on the side?”

  “No. A piece of toast and a couple of doughnuts.”

  Alice went behind the counter. “I wish they’d come out of there,” she said. “I’d like to use my own bathroom.”

  “They’re stirring around,” said Juan. “They’ll be out in a little.”

  And they were stirring. There were footsteps in the bedroom. A door inside opened and a woman’s voice said sharply, “Well, I think you could knock!” And a man replied, “I’m sorry, ma’am. The only other way was to go out the window.”

  Another man’s voice with a brittle singsong of authority said, “Always a good idea to knock, my friend. Hurt your foot?”

  “Yes.”

  The door at the end of the counter opened and a small man came out into the lunchroom. He was dressed in a double-breasted suit; his shirt was of that light brown color worn by traveling men and known as a thousand-miler because it does not show dirt. His suit was a neutral pepper-and-salt for the same reason, and he wore a knitted dark green tie. His face was sharp, like a puppy’s face, and his eyes were bright and questioning, like a puppy’s eyes. A small, carefully trimmed mustache rode his upper lip like a caterpillar, and when he talked it seemed to hump its back. His teeth were white and even except for the two front uppers, and these were glittering gold. He had a brushed look about him, as though he had cleaned the lint from his suit with his hairbrush; and his shirt had the strained appearance that comes from washing the collar in the hand basin and patting it flat on the dresser top to dry. There was a kind of shy confidence in his manner and a wincing quality in his face, as though he protected himself from insult with studied techniques.