The Wayward Bus (19 page)

He didn't think he was going to do anything about the blonde. There wasn't any possible way to get at her. And Juan was old enough not to suffer from something that was out of possibility. Given the opportunity there wasn't any question about what he would do. He had felt a wrench in the pit of his stomach when he first saw the blonde.

Norma had been stiff with Camille so far. She was so frozen up it took her some time to thaw. But Camille needed Norma as a kind of a shield, and they had their destination in common.

“I've never been in L.A. or Hollywood,” Norma confided softly so that Ernest could not hear. “I won't know where to go or anything.”

“What are you going to do?” Camille asked.

“Get a job, I guess. Waitress or something. I'd like to get in pictures.”

Camille's mouth tightened in a smile. “You get a job wait ressing first,” she said. “Pictures are a very tough racket.”

“Are you an actress?” Norma asked. “You look like you might be an actress.”

“No,” said Camille. “I work for dentists. I'm a dental nurse.”

“Well, do you live in a hotel, or a room, or a house?”

“I don't have any place to live,” said Camille. “I used to have an apartment with a girl friend before I went to Chicago to work.”

Norma's eyes grew eager. “I've got a little money put away,” she said. “Maybe we could get an apartment together. Say, if I got a job in a restaurant it wouldn't cost hardly anything for food. I could bring stuff home.” A hunger was growing in Norma's eyes. “Why, maybe sharing the rent it wouldn't be much. I could make good tips, maybe.”

Camille felt a warmth for the girl. She looked at the red nose and the dull complexion, the small pale eyes. “We'll see how it goes,” she said.

Norma leaned close. “I know your hair's natural,” she said. “But maybe you could show me how to kind of touch mine up. My hair's mousy. Just mousy.”

Camille laughed. “You'd be surprised if you knew what color my hair is,” she said. “Hold still a minute.” She studied Norma's face, trying to visualize what cold cream and powder and mascara could do for her, and she thought of the hair shining and waved, and the eyes made a little larger with eyeshadow, and the mouth reshaped with lipstick. Camille hadn't any illusions about beauty. Loraine was a washed-out little rat without make-up but Loraine did all right. It would be fun and company to make this girl over and to give her some confidence. It might even be better than Loraine.

“Let's think about it,” she said. “This is pretty country. I'd like to live in the country some time.” A picture had projected itself on her mind, the pattern of what would happen. She would fix Norma up. She could be kind of pretty if she was careful. And then Norma would meet a boy and naturally she'd bring him home to show him off and the boy would make passes at Camille and Norma would hate her. That's the way it would happen. That's the way it had happened. But what the hell! It would be fun before it happened. And maybe she could anticipate it and never be in when Norma brought a boy home.

She felt warm and friendly. “Let's think about it,” she said.

On the highway ahead Juan saw a crushed jackrabbit. Lots of people liked to run over things like that, but Juan didn't. He moved his steering wheel so that the flattened carcass passed between the wheels and there was no crunching under the tires. He had the bus at forty-five. The big highway busses sometimes went sixty miles an hour, but Juan had plenty of time. The road was straight for another two miles before it began wandering into the soft foothills. Juan took one hand off the wheel and stretched.

Mildred Pritchard felt the telegraph poles whipping by as little blows on her eyes. She had her glasses on again. She watched Juan's face in the mirror. She could see little more than a profile from her angle. She noticed that he raised his head to look back at the blonde every minute or so, and she felt a bitter anger. She was confused about what had happened that morning. No one knew, of course, unless Juan Chicoy had guessed. She was still a little swollen and itchy from the thing. A sentence kept repeating itself in her mind. She's not a blonde and she's not a nurse and her name is not Camille Oaks. The sentence went on, over and over. And then she chuckled at herself inwardly. “I'm trying to destroy her,” she thought. “I'm doing a stupid thing. Why not admit I'm jealous? I'm jealous. All right. Does admitting it make me any less jealous? No, it does not. But she forced my father to make a fool of himself. All right. Do I care whether my father is a fool? No, I do not—if I'm not with him. I don't want people to think I'm his daughter, that's all. No, that's not true either. I don't want to go to Mexico with him. I can hear everything he'll say.” She was uncomfortable and the movement of the bus was not helping. “Basketball,” she thought, “that's the stuff.” She flexed the muscles of her thighs and thought about the engineering student with the crew-cut hair. She pictured her affair with him.

Mr. Pritchard was bored and tired. He could be very irritating when he was bored. He twitched. “This looks like rich country,” he said to his wife. “California raises most of the vegetables for the United States, you know.”

Mrs. Pritchard could hear herself talking after she got home. “Then we drove through miles and miles of green fields with poppies and lupines, just like a garden. There was a blond girl got on at a funny little place and the men made fools of themselves, even Elliott. I joshed him about it for a week afterward.” She'd write it in a letter. “And I'm pretty sure the poor little painted thing was just as nice and sweet as could be. She said she was a nurse, but I think she was probably an actress—little parts, you know. There are so many of them in Hollywood. Thirty-eight thousand listed. They've got a big casting agency. Thirty-eight thousand.” Her head nodded a little. Bernice was sleepy and hungry. “I wonder what adventures we'll have now,” she thought.

When his wife slipped into her daydream Mr. Pritchard knew it. He had been married to her long enough to know when she wasn't listening to him, and ordinarily he went right on talking. He often clarified his thinking about business or politics by telling his thoughts to Bernice when she wasn't listening. He had a trained memory for figures and for bits of information. He knew approximately how many tons of sugar beets were produced in the Salinas valley. He had read it and retained it in spite of the fact that he had no use whatever for the information. He felt that such information was good to know and he had never questioned its value or why it might be good to know. But now he had no inclination toward knowledge. A powerful influence was battering at him from the rear of the bus. He wanted to turn around and look at the blonde. He wanted to sit where he could watch her. Horton and Pimples were behind him. He couldn't just sit opposite and look at her.

Mrs. Pritchard asked, “How old do you think she is?” And the question shocked him because he had been wondering the same thing.

“How old who is?” he asked.

“The young woman. The blond young woman.”

“Oh, her. How should I know?” His answer was so rough that his wife looked a little bewildered and hurt. He saw it and tried to cover his mistake. “Little girls know more about little girls,” he said. “You could tell better than I could.”

“Why? I don't know. Well, with that make-up and the hair tint it's hard to tell. I just wondered. Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, I guess.”

“I wouldn't know about that,” said Mr. Pritchard. He looked out the window at the approaching foothills. His palms were a little damp and the magnet drew at him from the rear of the bus. He wanted to look around. “I don't know about that,” said Mr. Pritchard. “But I'm interested in that young Horton. He's young, and he's got lots of get-up, and he's got ideas. He really caught my fancy. You know, I might find a place for a man like that in the organization.” This was business.

Bernice too could draw a magic circle around herself, with motherhood, or say, menstruation, a subject like that, and no man could or would try to get in. Business was her husband's magic circle. She had no right to go near him when it was business. She had no knowledge nor interest in business. It was his privacy and she respected it.

“He seems a nice young man,” she said. “His grammar and his background—”

“My God, Bernice!” he cried irritably. “Business isn't background and grammar. It's what you can produce. Business is the most democratic thing in the world. It's what you can do that counts.”

He was trying to remember what the blonde's lips looked like. He believed that full-lipped women were voluptuous. “I'd like to have a little talk with Horton before he gets away,” Mr. Pritchard said.

Bernice knew that he was restless.

“Why don't you talk to him now?” she suggested.

“Oh, I don't know. He's sitting with that boy.”

“Well, I'm sure that boy will move if you ask him nicely.” She was convinced that anyone would do anything if nicely asked. And in her case she was right. She claimed and got the most outrageous favors from strangers simply by asking nicely. She would ask a bellboy to carry her bags four blocks to the station because it was too close, really, to get a cab, and then thank him nicely and give him a dime.

Now she knew she was helping her husband to do something he wanted to do. What it was she didn't quite know. She wanted to get back to writing the imaginary letter about their trip. “El liott is so interested in everything. He had long talks with everyone. I guess that's why he's so successful. He takes such an interest. And he's so thoughtful. There was a boy with big pimples and Elliott didn't want to disturb him, but I told him just to ask nicely. People do love nice manners.”

Mr. Pritchard was cleaning his nails again with the gold appliance he wore on his watch chain.

Pimples' eyes were on the back of Camille's head. But first when he had sat down he made sure that he couldn't see her legs under the seat, not even her ankles. Now and then she turned to look out of the window, and he could see her profile, the long, darkened eyelashes which curled upward, the straight, powdered nose, nostrils a little coated with tobacco smoke and the dust of traveling. Her upper lip curved upward to a sharp line before it pillowed out in its heavy red petal, and Pimples could see the downy hair on her upper lip. For some reason this aroused him agonizingly. When her head was turned straight ahead he could see one of her ears where the hair parted a little and exposed it. He could see the heavy lobe and the crease behind her ear where it fitted so close to her head. The edge of her ear was fluted. As he stared at the ear she almost seemed to be conscious of his look, for she raised her chin and shook her head from side to side so that the part in her hair fell together and concealed the ear. She got a comb from her purse because the backward shake had uncovered the deep forceps scars along her jaw. Now Pimples saw the ugly scars for the first time. He had to lean sideways to see them, and a stab of pain entered his chest. He felt a deep and unreasoning sorrow, but the sorrow was sexual too. He imagined himself holding her head in his arms and stroking the poor scars with his finger. He swallowed several times.

Camille was saying softly to Norma, “Then there's this Wee Kirk i' the Heather.
¹
I guess that's the prettiest cemetery in the world. You know, you have to get a ticket to get in. I like just to walk around in there. It's so beautiful and the organ plays nearly all the time and you find people buried there that you've seen in pictures. I always said I'd like to be buried there.”

“I don't like to talk about things like that,” said Norma. “It's bad luck.”

Pimples had been vaguely discussing the Army with Ernest Horton. “They say you can learn a trade and travel all over. I don't know. I'm taking a course in radar engineering.
²
It starts next week by mail. I guess radar is going to be pretty hot stuff. But you can get a real good course in radar in the Army.”

Ernest said, “I don't know how it would be in peacetime. You can have it when there's a war.”

“Did you get to do some real fighting?”

“I didn't ask for it but I got it.”

“Where were you?” Pimples asked.

“All over hell,” said Ernest.

“Maybe I could get a good line and get in selling, like you,” Pimples suggested.

“Oh, that's just plain starvation till you get your contacts,” Ernest said. “It took me five years to build up my contacts and then I got drafted. I'm just getting back on my feet now. You can't just step into it and you've got to work at it. It doesn't look like work but it is. If I was to start over again I'd learn a trade so I could have a home. Pretty nice to have a wife and a couple of kids.” Ernest always said this. When he was drunk he believed it. He didn't want a home. He loved moving around and seeing different people. He would run away from a home immediately. Once he had been married, and the second day he had walked out, leaving a thoroughly frightened and angry wife, and he never saw her again, nor wrote to her. But he saw her picture once. She was picked up for marrying five men and drawing Army allotments from each one. What a dame. A real hustler. Ernest almost admired her. There was hustling that paid dividends.

“Why don't you go back to school?” he asked Pimples.

“I don't want no fancy stuff,” said Pimples. “Them college boys are just a bunch of nances.
³
I want a man's life.”

Camille had leaned close to Norma and was whispering in her ear. The two girls were shaking with laughter. The bus surged around the bend and entered the hill country. The road cut between high banks, and the soil of the cuts was dark and dripping with water. Little goldy-backed ferns clung to the gravel and dripped with rain. Juan put his right hand on the wheel and let his elbows hang free. There would be fifteen minutes of twisting hill road now with no straight stretches at all. He glanced in his rear-view mirror at the blonde. Her eyes were puckered with laughter and she'd covered her mouth with spread fingers the way little girls do.