The Wayward Bus (35 page)

He looked at the hand with the amputated finger and started to move to the other side to give her his whole hand.

“No,” she said, “I like that one.” She took his hand and rubbed her finger over the smooth skin of the amputation.

“Don't do that,” he said. “It makes me nervous.”

She clutched his hand tightly. “I won't have to put on my glasses,” she said.

The ranges to the east of them were glowing and gold with the setting sun. Juan and Mildred turned to the right and started up the hill toward the bus.

“Will you tell me something as—well, as a payment for my whoring?”

Juan laughed. “What do you want?”

“Why did you come down here? Did you think I'd follow you?”

“You want the truth or do you want to play games?” he asked.

“Well, I'd like both. But no—er—I guess I want the truth first.”

“Well, I was running away,” said Juan. “I was going to beat my way back to Mexico and disappear and let the passengers take care of themselves.”

“Oh, and why don't you?”

“I don't know,” he said. “It went sour. The Virgin of Guadalupe let me down. I thought I fooled her. She doesn't like fooling. She cut the heart out of it.”

“You don't believe that,” she said seriously. “I don't believe it either. What was the real reason?”

“For what?”

“For you coming down to that old place?”

Juan walked along and his face broke into a wide smile and the scar on his lip made the smile off-center. He looked down at her and his black eyes were warm. “I came down here because I hoped you would go for a walk, and then I thought I might —I might even get you.”

She wrapped her arm around his arm and pulled her cheek hard against the sleeve of his jacket. “I wish it could go on a little more,” she said, “but I know it can't. Good-by, Juan.”

“Good-by,” he said. And they walked slowly back toward the bus.

CHAPTER 19

Van Brunt lay outstretched on the back seat of the bus. His eyes were closed but he was not sleeping. His head rested on his right arm and the weight of his head cut off the full flow of blood to his right hand.

When Camille and Mr. Pritchard left the bus Pimples and Norma were silent for a while.

Van Brunt listened to age creeping in his veins. He could almost feel the rustle of blood in his papery arteries, and he could hear his heart beat with a creaking whistle in it. His right hand was going to sleep, but it was his left hand that worried him. There wasn't much feeling in his left hand. The skin was insensitive, as though it were a thick rubber. He rubbed and massaged his hand when he was alone to bring the circulation back, and he really knew what was the matter although he hardly admitted it even to himself.

A few months ago he had fainted, just for a moment, and the doctor had read his blood pressure and told him to take it easy and he'd be all right. And two weeks ago another thing had happened. There had been an electric flash in his head behind his eyes, a feeling like a blinding blue-white glare for a second, and now he couldn't read any more. It wasn't that he couldn't see. He saw clearly enough, but the words on a page swam and ran together and squirmed like snakes, and he couldn't make out what they said.

He knew very well he had had two little strokes, but it was a secret he kept from his wife and she kept from him and the doctor kept from both. And he waited, waited for another one, the one that would flash in his mind, would flash through his body, and if it didn't kill him, it would numb out all feeling. Knowing it had made him angry, angry at everyone. Physical hatred of everyone around him crowded in his throat.

He tried on all possible glasses. He used magnifying glasses on the newspapers because he himself, with half of his mind, was trying to keep his condition secret from himself. His angers had a habit now of bursting from him without warning, but the real horror to him was that he cried, uncontrollably sometimes, and couldn't stop. Recently he had awakened early in the morning saying to himself, “Why should I wait for it?”

His father had died of the same thing, but before he died he had lain like a gray, helpless worm in a bed for eleven months, and all the money he had saved for his old age was spent on doctor bills. Van Brunt knew that if the same thing happened to him the eight thousand dollars he had in the bank would be gone, and his old wife would have nothing after she buried him.

As soon as the drugstores opened that day, he went in to see his friend Milton Boston of the Boston Drug Store.

“I've got to poison some squirrels, Milton,” he said. “Give me a little cyanide, will you?”

“That's damn dangerous stuff,” Milton said. “I kinda hate to sell it. Let me give you some strychnine. It'll do the job just as well.”

“No,” Van Brunt said, “I've got a government bulletin with a new formula and it calls for cyanide.”

Milton said, “Well, all right. You'll have to sign the poison book, of course. But look out for that stuff, Van. Look out for it. Don't leave it around.”

They'd been friends for many years. They'd gone in the Blue Lodge together and had been through the Chairs, and in succeeding years they had been Worshipful Master of the San Ysidro Lodge, and then Milton went into the Royal Arch and the Scottish Rite and Van Brunt never went beyond the third degree.
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But they had remained friends.

“How much of the stuff do you want?”

“About an ounce, I guess.”

“That's an awful lot, Van.”

“I'll bring back what I don't use.”

Milton was worried. “Don't touch it at all with your hands, will you?”

“I know how to handle it,” Van Brunt said.

Then he went into his office in the basement of his house, and with a sharp pocketknife he pricked the back of his hand. When there was a little blood coming out, he opened the glass tube of crystals. And then he stopped. He couldn't do it. He just couldn't tip the crystals into the cut.

After an hour he took the tube to the bank and put it in his safety-deposit box along with his will and his insurance policies. He thought of buying a little ampule to wear around his neck. Then, if the big one came, he could maybe get it to his mouth the way those people in Europe did.
²
But he couldn't take it now. Maybe it wouldn't happen.

There was a weight of disappointment on him, and there was anger in him too. All the people around him who weren't going to die angered him. And there was another thing that bothered him. The stroke had knocked the cap off one set of his inhibitions. He had suddenly reachieved powerful desires. He was pantingly drawn toward young women, even little girls. He couldn't keep his eyes and his thought from them, and in the midst of his sick desires he would burst into tears. He was afraid, as a child is afraid of a strange house.

He was too old to accommodate the personality change of his stroke and the new nature it gave him. He had never been a reader, but now that he could not read he was famished for reading. And his temper grew sharper and more violent all the time until people he had known for years began to avoid him.

He listened to time passing in his veins and he wanted death to come and he was afraid of it. Through half-shut eyes he saw the golden light of the sunset come into the bus. His lips moved a little and he said, “Evening, evening, evening.” The word was very beautiful, and he could hear the whistling in his heart. A fullness of feeling came on him, swelled in his chest, swelled in his throat, pulsed in his head. He thought he was going to cry again. He tried to clench his right hand, but it was asleep and it wouldn't clench.

And then he became rigid with tension. His body seemed distended, like a blown-up rubber glove. The evening light blazed in. In back of his eyes a terrible flickering flash came. He felt himself tumbling and tumbling toward grayness and toward darkness and into black, black. . . .

The sun touched the western hills and flattened itself, and its light was yellow and clear. The saturated valley glittered under the level light. The clean, washed air was crisp. In the fields the flattened grain and the thick, torpid stems of the wild oats tightened themselves, and the sheathed petals of the golden poppies loosened a little. The yellow river boiled and swirled and cut viciously at the banks. In the back seat of the bus Van Brunt snored hoarsely against his palate. His forehead was wet. His mouth was open and so were his eyes.

CHAPTER 20

Pimples moved into the seat beside Norma and she gathered her skirts daintily against her and slid a little toward the window.

“What do you suppose that old guy wants with that girl?” he asked suspiciously.

“I don't know,” said Norma. “But I tell you one thing. She can handle him. She's a wonderful girl.”

Pimples said, “Oh, I don't know. There's other wonderful girls.”

Norma flared up. “Like who?” she said, derisively.

“Like you,” said Pimples.

“Oh!” She hadn't expected this. She put her head down and stared at her laced fingers, trying to regain her balance.

“What did you have to go and quit for?” Pimples said.

“Well, Mrs. Chicoy wasn't nice to me.”

“I know. She isn't nice to anybody. But I wish you didn't quit. We could have got together, maybe.”

Norma didn't answer. Pimples said, “If you say the word I'll get out one of the raisin pies. They're pretty nice.”

“No. No, thanks. I couldn't eat anything.”

“You sick?”

“No.”

“Well, if you'd only come back to work at the Corners we could maybe go into San Ysidro Saturday nights and dance and stuff like that.”

“You didn't think of that before,” she said.

“I didn't think you liked me.”

She became a little arch now. This was a delightful game. “What makes you think I like you now?” she said.

“Well, you're different now. You kinda changed. I like the way you done your hair.”

“Oh, that,” she said. “Well, there wasn't any reason to kinda fix myself up back at the lunchroom. Who'd see me?”

“I would,” Pimples said gallantly. “Come on back. They'll give you your job again. I guarantee that.”

She shook her head. “No, when I quit, I quit. I don't go crawling back. Besides, there's a future. We've got plans.”

“What kind of plans?”

Norma wondered whether she ought to tell. In some ways it was bad luck, but she found she couldn't help herself. “We're going to get a little apartment with a nice davenport and a radio. And we're going to have a stove and an icebox and I'm going to study to be a dental nurse.” Her eyes were shining.

“Who's ‘we'?”

“Me and Miss Camille Oaks, that's who. When I'm a dental nurse I can dress good and we'll go to shows and maybe give little dinners.”

“Nuts,” he said. “You won't never do that.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You just won't. Now, why don't you come back to the Corners? I'm studying radar and we'll go out together sometimes and you can't tell—we might get together. You take a girl—she's gonna want to get married. I'm a young guy. It's—er—it's good for a young guy to have a wife. It gives him kind of —ambition.”

Norma looked into his face, a level, questioning look, to see whether he was making fun of her. And there was something so direct in her look that Pimples misinterpreted it and glanced away in embarrassment.

“I know,” he said bitterly. “You think you couldn't go with a guy that's got these things. I done everything. I spent over a hundred dollars going to doctors and for stuff at the drugstore. But it don't do no good. There was one doctor says they won't last. He says they'll go away in a couple more years. But I don't know if that's the truth. Go ahead,” he said fiercely. “Get your damn apartment. Maybe I got ways of having fun you never heard of. I don't have to take no guff from nobody.” His voice was completely miserable and he stared down into his lap.

Norma looked at him in amazement. She had never known this kind of abject pain in anyone but herself. No one ever needed Norma for sympathy or reassurance. A bubble of warmth burst in her and a kind of gratefulness.

She said, “Don't you think like that. You don't have to, because if a girl cared for you she wouldn't think like that. The doctor knew what he was talking about. I knew three other young fellows, and them things went away after a while.”

Pimples kept his head down. There was still misery in him but an imp was stirring too. He felt the advantage coming to his side and he began to use it, and it was a new thing to him, a new discovery. Always he had blustered with girls and bragged, and this was so easy. A sly imp began to operate.

“Well, it just gets so you can't stand it,” he said. “Sometimes I think I'll just kill myself.” He forced a half sob.

“Now don't you say like that,” said Norma. This was a new function for her too, but one she fitted into probably better than any other.

“Nobody likes me,” Pimples said. “Nobody won't have nothing to do with me.”

“Don't you say like that,” Norma repeated. “It's not true. I always liked you.”

“No, you never.”

“I did too.” She laid her hand on his arm in reassurance.

Blindly he reached up and held her hand against his arm. And then his hand clasped hers and he squeezed her fingers and automatically she squeezed back. He turned in his seat and flung his arms about her and pushed his face into hers.