The Wayward Bus Read online

  “Morning, folks,” he said. “I just wondered where you all slept. And I’ll bet you sat up all night.”

  “Well, we did,” Alice said sourly.

  “It’s all right,” said Juan. “We’ll get to bed early tonight.”

  “Get the bus fixed? Think we’ll make it in this rain?”

  “Oh, sure,” said Juan.

  The man limped around the end of the counter and sat painfully down at one of the little tables. Norma brought a glass of water and a handful of silver wrapped in a paper napkin.

  “Eggs?”

  “Fried, with their eyes open, crisp bacon, and buttered toast. Buttered—get it? Hardest thing in the world is to get buttered toast. Now you butter that toast, plenty of butter, and let it melt in so there’s no yellow lumps showing and you’ll get yourself a nice tip.” He lifted his foot shod in a perforated and decorated brown oxford and looked at it and grunted with pain.

  “Sprain your ankle?” Juan asked.

  The door at the end of the counter opened and a medium-sized man came out. He looked like Truman1 and like the vice-presidents of companies and like certified public accountants. His glasses were squared off at the corners. His suit was gray and correct, and there was a little gray in his face too. He was a businessman, dressed like one, looked like one. In his lapel buttonhole there was a lodge pin so tiny that from four feet away you couldn’t see what it was at all. His vest was unbuttoned one notch at the bottom. Indeed, this bottom button was not intended to be buttoned. A fine gold watch and key chain crossed this vest and ducked in and out of a buttonhole on the way.

  He said, “Mrs. Pritchard will have scrambled eggs, moist if they’re fresh, toast and marmalade. And Miss Pritchard only wants orange juice and coffee. I’ll have Grape-Nuts and cream, eggs turned over and well done—don’t let the yolk be running—dry toast and Boston coffee—that’s half milk. You can bring it all in on a tray.”

  Alice looked up with fury. “You better come out here,” she said. “We haven’t got tray service.”

  Mr. Pritchard looked at her coldly. “We got held up here,” he said. “I’ve already lost one day of my vacation. It isn’t my fault that the bus broke down. Now the least you can do is to bring that breakfast in. My wife isn’t feeling so good. I’m not used to sitting on a stool and Mrs. Pritchard isn’t either.”

  Alice lowered her head like an angry milk-cow. “Look, I want to go to the toilet and wash my face and you’re holding up my bathroom.”

  Mr. Pritchard touched his glasses nervously. “Oh, I see.” He turned his head toward Juan and the light reflected from his glasses so that there were two mirrors with no eyes behind them. His hand whipped his watch chain out of his vest pocket. He opened a little gold nail file and ran the point quickly under each nail. He looked about and a little shudder of uncertainty came over him. Mr. Pritchard was a businessman, president of a medium-sized corporation. He was never alone. His business was conducted by groups of men who worked alike, thought alike, and even looked alike. His lunches were with men like himself who joined together in clubs so that no foreign element or idea could enter. His religious life was again his lodge and his church, both of which were screened and protected. One night a week he played poker with men so exactly like himself that the game was fairly even, and from this fact his group was convinced that they were very fine poker players. Wherever he went he was not one man but a unit in a corporation, a unit in a club, in a lodge, in a church, in a political party. His thoughts and ideas were never subjected to criticism since he willingly associated only with people like himself. He read a newspaper written by and for his group. The books that came into his house were chosen by a committee which deleted material that might irritate him. He hated foreign countries and foreigners because it was difficult to find his counterpart in them. He did not want to stand out from his group. He would like to have risen to the top of it and be admired by it; but it would not occur to him to leave it. At occasional stags where naked girls danced on the tables and sat in great glasses of wine, Mr. Pritchard howled with laughter and drank the wine, but five hundred Mr. Pritchards were there with him.

  And now, at the end of Alice’s ugly statement about a toilet, he looked about the lunchroom and found that he was alone. There were no other Mr. Pritchards here. For a moment his glance rested on the little man in the business suit, but there was something queer about him. True, there was some kind of a pin in his buttonhole, a little blue enamel bar with white stars on it,2 but it was no club Mr. Pritchard recognized. He found himself hating these people and hating even his vacation. He wanted to go back to the bedroom and close the door, but here was this stout woman who wanted to go to the toilet. Mr. Pritchard cleaned his nails very rapidly with the gold nail file on his watch chain.

  At bottom, and originally, Mr. Pritchard was not like this. He had once voted for Eugene Debs,3 but that had been a long time ago. It was just that the people in his group watched one another. Any variation from a code of conduct was first noted, then discussed. A man who varied was not a sound man, and if he persisted no one would do business with him. Protective coloring was truly protective. But there was no double life in Mr. Pritchard. He had given up his freedom and then had forgotten what it was like. He thought of it now as youthful folly. He put his vote for Eugene Debs alongside his visit to a parlor house when he was twenty. Both were things to be expected of growing boys. He even occasionally mentioned at a club luncheon his vote for Debs, to prove that he had been a spirited young man and that such things were, like a kid’s acne, a part of the process of adolescence. But although he excused and even enjoyed his prank in voting for Debs, he was definitely worried about the activities of his daughter Mildred.

  She was playing around with dangerous companions in her college, professors and certain people considered Red. Before the war she had picketed a scrap-iron ship bound for Japan, and she had gathered money for medical supplies for what Mr. Pritchard called the Reds in the Spanish war.4 He did not discuss these things with Mildred. She didn’t want to talk it out with him. And he had a strong feeling that if everyone was quiet and controlled she would get over it. A husband and a baby would resolve Mildred’s political uneasiness. She would then, he said, find her true values.

  Mr. Pritchard’s visit to the parlor house he did not remember very well. He had been twenty and drunk, and afterward he had had a withering sense of desecration and sorrow. He did remember the subsequent two weeks when he had waited in terror for symptoms to develop. He had even planned to kill himself if they did; to kill himself and make it look like an accident.

  Now he was nervous. He was on a vacation he didn’t really want to take. He was going to Mexico which, in spite of the posters, he considered a country not only dirty but dangerously radical. They had expropriated the oil; in other words, stolen private property.5 And how was that different from Russia? Russia, to Mr. Pritchard, took the place of the medieval devil as the source of all cunning and evil and terror. He was nervous this morning because he hadn’t slept either. He liked his own bed. It took him a week to get used to a bed, and here he was in for three weeks of a different bed practically every night, and God knew how some of them would be populated. He was tired and his skin felt grainy. The water was hard here so that when he shaved he knew he would have a ring of ingrown hairs around his neck within three days.

  He took a handkerchief from his breast pocket, removed his glasses and polished them. “I’ll tell my wife and daughter,” he said. “We didn’t know we were discommoding you so.”

  Norma liked that word and she said it over under her breath. “Discommode—I wouldn’t want to discommode you, Mr. Gable, but I think you should know . . .”

  Mr. Pritchard had gone back into the bedroom. His voice was audible, explaining the situation, and women’s voices were questioning.

  The man with the mustache got up from his chair and limped painfully to the counter, groaning under his breath. He brought the sugar bowl back with him and
sank, with grimaces, back into his chair.

  “I would have got that for you,” Norma said with concern.

  He smiled at her. “I wouldn’t want to trouble you,” he explained bravely.

  “It wouldn’t discommode me none,” said Norma.

  Juan put down his coffee cup.

  Pimples said, “I’d like to have a piece of that coconut cake.”

  Alice absently cut him a piece and slid the saucer down the counter and made a note on a pad.

  “I guess there ain’t never one on the house,” said Pimples.

  “I figure there’s plenty on the house the house don’t know about,” Alice replied.

  “Looks like a bad sprain you’ve got there,” Juan observed to the little man.

  “Crushed,” he said, “toes crushed. Here, I’ll show you.”

  Mr. Pritchard came out of the bedroom and took a seat at the remaining table.

  The little man unlaced his oxford and took it off. He slipped his sock off and laid it carefully in the oxford. His foot was bandaged from the instep to the ends of the toes, and the bandage was spotted and soaked with bright red blood.

  “You don’t need to show us,” Alice said quickly. Blood made her faint.

  “I ought to change the bandage anyway,” said the little man, and he unwound the gauze and exposed the foot. The big toe and the two next to it were horribly crushed, the nails blackened and the ends of the toes tattered and bloody and raw.

  Juan had arisen. Pimples came close. Even Norma could not stay away.

  “My God, that’s an awful smash,” Juan said. “Let me get some water and wash it. You ought to have some kind of salve. You’ll get an infection. You might lose that foot.”

  Pimples whistled shrilly between his teeth to indicate interest and a kind of enthusiasm for the quality of the hurt. The little man was looking into Juan’s face, his eyes shining with pleasure and anticipation.

  “You think it’s bad?” he demanded.

  “You’re damn right, it’s bad,” said Juan.

  “You think I should get a doctor?”

  “Well, I would if it was me.”

  The little man chuckled with delight. “That’s all I wanted to hear,” he said. He ran his thumbnail down his instep, and the top of his foot lifted off—the skin, the blood, the mashed toes —and underneath there was his foot whole and unhurt and his toes untouched. He put back his head and laughed with glee.

  “Good, isn’t it? Plastic. New product.”

  Mr. Pritchard had come close, a look of disgust on his face.

  “It’s the ‘Little Wonder Artificial Sore Foot,’ ” the man said. He pulled a flat box from his side pocket and handed it to Juan. “You’ve been so nice to me, I want you to have one. Compliments of Ernest Horton representing the Little Wonder Company.” His voice raced with his enthusiasm. “It comes in three sizes—one, two, or three crushed toes. This one I’m giving you is the three-toe number, just like the one you just saw. It’s got bandage and a bottle of artificial blood to keep the bandage looking terrible. Instructions inside. You’ve got to soften it in warm water the first time you put it on. Then it fits like skin and nobody can tell. You can have a barrel of fun with it.”

  Mr. Pritchard leaned forward. Way in the back of his mind he could see himself taking off his sock at a board meeting. He could do it right after he got back from Mexico, tell some story about bandits first.

  “What do you get for them?” he asked.

  “Dollar and a half, but I hardly ever sell for retail,” Ernest Horton said. “The trade snaps them up as fast as I can get them. I sold forty gross to the trade in two weeks.”

  “No?” said Mr. Pritchard. His eyes were wide with appreciation.

  “Show you my order book if you don’t believe it. It’s the fastest selling novelty I’ve ever handled. Little Wonder is cleaning up with it.”

  “What is the mark-up?” Mr. Pritchard demanded.

  “Well, I wouldn’t like to say unless you’re in the trade. Business ethics, you know.”

  Mr. Pritchard nodded. “Well, I’d like to try one at the retail price,” he said.

  “Get you one right after I eat. You got that buttered toast?” he asked Norma.

  “Coming up,” said Norma, and she went guiltily behind the counter and switched on the toaster.

  “You see, it’s the psychology that sells it,” Ernest said exultantly. “We’ve stocked artificial cut fingers for years and they moved slow, but this—it’s the psychology of taking off your shoe and sock. Nobody ever thinks you’d go to the trouble of doing that. The fellow that figured that out got himself a very nice fee.”

  “I guess you’re making a little something out of it yourself,” said Mr. Pritchard with admiration. He was feeling much better now.

  “I do all right,” said Ernest. “I got one or two other little things that might interest you in my sample case. Not for sale except to the trade, but I’ll demonstrate them. It might give you a laugh.”

  “I’d like to take half a dozen of the sore feet,” said Mr. Pritchard.

  “All the three toes?”

  Mr. Pritchard considered. He wanted them for gifts, but he didn’t want competition. Charlie Johnson could sell the tricks better than Mr. Pritchard could. Charlie was a natural comic.

  “Suppose you let me have one three-toe and three two-toe and two one-toe,” he said. “That’d be about right for me, I guess.”

  The quality of the rain was changing. It came with great, gusty, drenching downpours and with short, drippy intervals between. Juan sat with his coffee by the window. Half a brown doughnut lay in the saucer.

  “I think she’s going to let up a little,” said Juan. “I’d like to turn over that rear end some more before we start.”

  “I’d like to have a piece of that coconut cake,” said Pimples.

  “No you don’t,” Alice said. “I’ve got to keep a little cake for customers.”

  “Well, I’m a customer, ain’t I?”

  “I don’t know if we’ll get deliveries from San Ysidro today,” said Alice. “I got to keep a little cake on hand.”

  At the very end of the counter there was a candy tray arranged like steps, with wrapped and packaged candy bars in it. Pimples got up from his stool and stood in front of the display. He considered the bright little packages a long time before he made his selections. Finally he picked out three bars and put them in his pocket. “One Baby Ruth,6 one Love Nest, and one Coconut Sweetheart,” he said.

  “Coconut Sweethearts are a dime. They got nuts,” said Alice.

  “I know,” said Pimples.

  Alice picked up her pad from behind the counter. “You’re one jump ahead of your pay now,” she said.

  CHAPTER 4

  The moment the Pritchards came out of the bedroom Norma said quickly, “I got to brush my hair and clean up a little bit.” And she bolted for the door. Alice was right behind her.

  “After me in the bathroom,” Alice said coldly. Norma went across the bedroom of Mr. and Mrs. Chicoy and into her own bedroom. She closed the door behind her and, as there was no key, she snapped the little catch beside the lock to secure her privacy. Her narrow iron Army cot was unmade, and Ernest Horton’s big sample case stood against the wall.

  It was a very narrow room. A dresser with a bowl and pitcher stood against one wall, a silken pillow top, fringed and shiny, was tacked up over the dresser. It was pink and had a picture of crossed cannons in front of a bunch of red roses. And printed on the pillow top was a poem called “A Soldier’s Prayer to His Mother.”

  Midst shot and shell I think of you, Mother dear

  I hope your prayers will keep me clear

  And when the war is o’er and won,

  I will come back to you, my Number One.

  Norma looked quickly at the window, murky with rainy light, and then she reached inside the neck of her dress and turned back the material. On a safety pin, fastened to the turned edge, was a small key. Norma unpinned it.
She pulled her suitcase from under the dresser, unlocked and opened it. A shiny picture of Clark Gable in a silver frame lay on top, and it was signed “With Best Regards—Clark Gable.” She had bought the picture and frame and signature in a gift shop in San Ysidro.

  She ran her hand quickly to the bottom of the suitcase. Her fingers came on a little square ring box. She pulled it out and jerked it open, saw that the rings were there, and shoved the box back to the bottom of the suitcase. She closed and locked the case, pushed it under the dresser, and pinned the key back inside her dress. She opened the dresser drawer, lifted out a brush and comb, and went to the window. On the wall beside the red-and-green-flowered cretonne drapes there was a framed mirror. Norma stood in front of it and looked at herself.

  A lead-colored light came through the window and fell on her face. She widened her eyes with intensity and then she smiled, showing all her teeth, smiled vivaciously. She stood on her toes a little and waved to an immense crowd and smiled again. She ran the comb through her thin hair and tugged as the teeth caught in the marceled ends. She got a pencil from the dresser and worked the dull point through her pale eyebrows, accentuating the curve in the middle so that her face took on a surprised look. Then she began to brush her hair, ten strokes on one side and ten on the other. And while she brushed, she raised and flexed the muscles of one leg and then the other to develop the calves. It was a routine recommended by a picture star who had never willingly taken any exercise of any kind but who had beautiful legs.

  Norma glanced quickly at the window as the light grew still dimmer. She would have hated to be observed in the grotesque dance. Norma was even more submerged than an iceberg. Only the tiniest part of Norma showed above the surface. For the greatest and best and most beautiful part of Norma lay behind her eyes, sealed and protected.