The Wayward Bus (13 page)

Her father was saying in his slow and, to Mildred, maddening way, “I can understand how he would think it was fine if he had never seen a merry-go-round before, but you get used to anything. A man would get used to a palace in a few days and then he'd want something else.”

“It's just a story,” Mildred said with so much fierceness that her father turned surprised eyes on her.

Mildred could almost feel Juan's fingers on her thighs. Her body tingled with desire, aroused and unsatisfied. She itched with a pure sexual longing, and her anger arose against her father as though she had been interrupted in the midst of connection. She put on her glasses, looked quickly at Juan and then away, for his eyes were veiled although he looked at all of them. He was enjoying a kind of triumph. He was laughing at her and also at the thing her father and mother did not know was happening. And suddenly her desire hardened into a knot in her stomach and her stomach ached and she felt a revulsion. She thought she would be sick.

Ernest Horton said, “I always intended to get down Mexico way. Thought I might ask the head office about it some time. Might make some pretty valuable contacts down there. Like these fiestas they have. They sell novelties, don't they?”

“Sure,” said Juan. “They sell little rosaries and holy pictures and candles and things like that, candy and ice cream.”

“Well, if a guy went down and got a line on that stuff, why, we could probably turn it out a lot cheaper than they can. We could stamp out those rosaries—well, nice ones—out of pot metal. And skyrockets. My company supplies some of the biggest celebrations, all kinds of fireworks. It's an idea. I think I'll write a letter.”

Juan looked at the increasing pile of dirty dishes in the sink. He stared over his shoulder at the door to the bedroom and then he opened the door and looked in. The bed was empty. Alice had got up, but the bathroom door was shut. Juan came back and began to scrub the dirty dishes in the sink.

The sky was clearing fast now, and the clean yellow sun was shining on the washed land. The young leaves of the oaks were almost yellow in the new light. The green fields looked incredibly young.

Juan smiled shortly. He cut two slices of bread.

“I think I'll walk around a little bit,” said Mr. Pritchard. “Want to come, dear?” he asked his wife. She looked quickly at the bedroom door.

“Pretty soon,” she said, and he understood her.

“Well, I'll just go outside,” he said.

CHAPTER 6

After Juan left her Alice lay a long time on her back with her arms crossed over her face. Her sobbing stopped gradually, like a child's. She could hear the murmuring talk out in the lunchroom. The inside of her arm was warm and wet over her eyes. She was flooded with a kind of comfort, and the release from tension was as though a tight mesh had been loosened from her body. As she lay in relaxed comfort, her mind jumped back to what had happened. She didn't remember the woman who had screamed at Norma. The morning was beginning to be hazy to her. She had not yet found her own rationalization for her action. Now that she thought of it, she knew she had not really suspected Norma of misconduct, and if she had she really wouldn't have cared very much. She did not love Norma. She didn't care a thing for Norma. Poor little washed-out cat.

When Norma had come to work, Alice, of course, put her senses on the girl and on Juan like a stethoscope, and when she had found no reaction on Juan's part, no quickening, no little creeping and trailing with the eye, Alice had lost interest in Norma except as an organism for carrying coffee and washing dishes. Alice was not very aware of things or people if they did not in some way either augment or take away from her immediate life. And now, as she lay relaxed and warm and quiet, her mind began to work and terror came with her thoughts.

She went back over the scene. Her terror grew out of Juan's gentleness. He should have hit her. His failure to do so worried her. Maybe he didn't care about her any more. Casual kindness in a man she had found to be the preliminary to a brush-off. She tried to remember what the Pritchard women looked like, and she tried to remember whether Juan had looked with warmth on either of them. She knew Juan. His eyes heated up like a stove when his interest was aroused. Then, with a little shock, she remembered that he had given up their bed to the Pritchards. She could smell the lavender on the bedclothes right now. A hatred and a distaste for that odor came to her.

She listened to the murmur of voices through the door. Juan was feeding them. He wouldn't have done it if he hadn't been interested. Juan would say the hell with it and go on out to work on the bus. A restless fear arose in Alice. She had mistreated Norma. That was easy. With Norma's kind you showed weakness, and Norma would melt and run down over herself. Take a girl like that, why, she had so little love that even a stink of it on a wind would knock her ass over teacup. Alice was contemptuous of this starvation for love. She could not tie her own up with Norma's. Alice was big in herself and everyone else was very little, everyone, that is, except Juan. But, then, he was an extension of herself. She thought it might be just as well to put Norma on her feet before anything else. She needed Norma to run the lunchroom, because Alice intended to get drunk just as soon as Juan went away in the bus. She would tell him when he came back that she had a toothache that was killing her.

She didn't do it very often, but she looked forward to it now. And if she was going to do it, she'd better begin covering her tracks. Juan didn't like drunk women. She uncrossed her arms from over her face. Her eyes were sunken from the pressure and it took a moment to get them to track. She saw how the sun was flooding sweetly over the green plain behind the bedroom, and how it flowed over the rising hills far to the west. A sweet day.

She struggled her body upright and went to the bathroom. There she dampened one end of a bath towel in cold water and patted it against her face to take out the creases where her arms had pressed down against her plump cheeks. She rubbed the end of the towel around her face and over her nose and along the edge of her hairline. A brassière strap was broken. She slipped open her dress and found that the little safety pin that held it was still there, so she pinned the strap to the brassière again. It was a little tight but she'd sew it after Juan had gone. She wouldn't, of course. When enough of the strap was broken she'd buy a new brassière.

Alice brushed her hair and put on lipstick. Her eyes were still red. She put some eyedrops in the corners with a medicine dropper and rubbed the lids against her eyeballs with her fingers. For a moment she inspected herself in the medicine-chest mirror and then went out. She slipped off her wrinkled dress and put on a clean print.

Quickly she crossed the bedroom to Norma's door and knocked softly. There was no answer. She knocked again. From inside the room came a rustling of paper. Norma came to the door and opened it. Her eyes were glazed, and she seemed to have been just awakened. In her hand she held the stub pencil she had used for the eyebrows earlier.

When she saw Alice a look of alarm came upon her face. “I didn't do nothing wrong with that fellow,” she said quickly.

Alice stepped into the room. She knew how to handle the Normas when she had her wits. “I know you didn't, honey,” Alice said. She cast down her eyes as though she were ashamed. She knew how to handle girls.

“Well, you shouldn't of said it. Suppose somebody heard it and believed it? I'm not that kind. I'm just trying to make my living and no trouble.” Her eyes suddenly swam in tears of self-pity.

Alice said, “I shouldn't of done it but I just felt so bad. It's my time of the month. You know yourself how miserable you feel. Sometimes you go kind of crazy.”

Norma inspected her with interest. This was the first time she'd ever found softness in Alice. This was the first time that Alice had ever needed to enlist Norma. She didn't like women and girls. There was a streak of cruelty in Alice toward other women, and when she saw Norma's eyes brim with tears of sympathy she felt triumphant.

“You know how it is,” Alice said. “You just get a little crazy.”

“I know,” said Norma. Soft tentacles of warmth stretched out from her. She ached for love, for association, for some human being in the world to be friendly with. “I know,” she said again, and she felt older and stronger than Alice and a little protective too, which was what Alice wanted.

Alice had seen the pencil in her hand. “Maybe you had better come out now and help. Mr. Chicoy's doing it all alone.”

“I will in just a moment,” said Norma.

Alice closed the door and listened. There was a pause, a slipping sound, and then the sharp sound of the bureau drawer closing. Alice pushed back her hair with her hand and walked softly toward the door into the lunchroom. She felt fine. She had gathered a great deal of information about Norma. She knew how Norma felt about things. She knew where Norma had put the letter.

Alice had tried to get into Norma's suitcase before but it was always locked, and while she could have taken it apart with her fingers—it was only cardboard—the marks would have showed tampering. She would wait. Sooner or later, if she was careful, Norma would neglect to lock her suitcase. Alice was clever, but she didn't know that Norma was clever too. Norma had worked for Alices before. When Alice went through Norma's dresser drawers and looked at her things and read the letters from her sister, she didn't notice the paper match carelessly lying on the drawer's edge. Norma always put it there, and when it was displaced she knew someone had been going through her things. She knew it couldn't be Juan or Pimples, so it must be Alice.

Norma was not likely to leave her suitcase unlocked. For all her dreams Norma was not stupid. In a toothpaste box in her locked suitcase there was twenty-seven dollars. When she had fifty dollars Norma would go to Hollywood and get a job in a restaurant and wait her chance. The fifty dollars would rent her a room for two months. Food she would get where she worked. Her high, long-legged dreams were one thing, but she could take care of herself too. Norma was no fool. True, she didn't understand Alice's hatred of all women. She didn't know that this apology was a trick. But she would probably find it out in time to save herself. And while Norma believed that only the best and most noble thoughts and impulses resided in Clark Gable, she had a knowledge of and a lack of respect for the impulses of the people she met and came in contact with in everyday life.

When Pimples came scratching softly at her window at night she knew how to take care of that. She locked her window. He wouldn't dare make too much noise trying to get in for fear Juan in the next room would hear him. Norma was nobody's fool.

Now Alice stood in front of the door between the bedroom and the lunchroom. She ran her finger down either side of her nose and then she opened the door and went behind the counter as though nothing at all had happened.

CHAPTER 7

The big and beautiful Greyhound bus was pulled in under the loading shed at San Ysidro. Helpers put gasoline into the tank and checked the oil and the tires automatically. The whole system worked smoothly. A colored man cleaned between the seats, brushing the cushions and picking up gum wrappers and matches and cigarette butts from the floor. He ran his fingers behind the last seat, which stretched across the rear. Sometimes he found coins or pocketknives behind this seat. Loose money he kept, but most other articles he turned in to the office. People made an awful stink about things they left, but not about small change. Sometimes the swamper managed as much as a couple of dollars behind that seat. Today he had dug out two dimes, a fifty-cent piece, and a hip-pocket wallet with a draft card, driver's license, and a Lions Club
¹
membership card.

He glanced inside the bill section. Two fifty-dollar bills and a certified check for five-hundred dollars. He put the wallet in his shirt pocket and brushed the seat with his whisk broom. He breathed a little hard. The money was easy. He could take it out and leave the wallet behind the seat for some other swamper to find down the line. The check would be left too. There was too much danger in checks. But those two sweet fifties—those sweet, sweet fifties! His throat was tight and would be until he got those sweet fifties out and the wallet behind the seat.

But he couldn't get to them because the punk kid was washing the outside of the windows where they were splashed with dirty mist from the highway. The swamper had to wait. If they caught him they'd put him away.

There was a little rip in the cuff of his blue serge trousers. He figured he would slip those two sweet fifties in there, inside the cuff, before he got off the bus. Then he'd get sick before he went off the job. He'd be sick, all right. Like enough he wouldn't be back for a week. If he got sick on the job and still stayed out the day till quitting time, they wouldn't figure anything if he didn't show up for a few days and it would save his job. He heard a step on the bus and stiffened a little. Louie, the driver, looked in.

“Hi, George,” he said. “Say, did you find a wallet? Guy says he lost it.”

George mumbled.

“Well, I'll come back and look,” said Louie.

George swung around, still on his knees. “I found it,” he said. “I was going to turn it in as soon as I finished.”

“Yeah?” said Louie. He took the wallet from George's hand and opened it. The punk kid looked in through the window. Louie smiled sorrowfully at George and flicked his eyes toward the punk.

“Too bad, George,” Louie said. “I guess they've got 'em stacked against us. Two fifties the guy said and two fifties it is.” He pulled out the bills and the check so the punk looking through the window could see them. “Better luck next time, George,” Louie said.