The Wayward Bus (32 page)

She straightened her head. Why hadn't she thought of the barn before? Mildred crept back to the front porch and looked closely at the boards. She could see the wet track of Juan's shoes. She followed the track to the living room and lost it. Then she went to the open back door and looked out. What a fool she had been, creeping about! There were the footprints going out, headed, in fact, for the barn.

She went down the broken steps and followed the trail across the lot and passed the old windmill. She entered the barn and stood listening. There was no sound. She thought of calling out and gave it up. Slowly she moved down the line of stalls and around the end stall. It had taken a little while for her eyes to adjust to the light. She stood in the entrance to the central part. All the little mice flicked out of sight. Then she saw Juan lying on his back, his hands cupped behind his head. His eyes were closed and he was breathing evenly.

“I can go away,” Mildred said. “Nobody's keeping me. It will be my fault. I just want to remember that. He's minding his own business. Oh, what's this nonsense?”

She took off her glasses and put them in her pocket. The outline of the man was fuzzy to her now, to her unfocused eyes, but she could still see him. She walked slowly, carefully, across the straw-covered floor and when she was beside him she crossed her ankles and let herself down and sat on her crossed feet. The scar on his lip was white and he breathed shallowly and evenly. “He was just tired,” she said to herself. “He lay down to rest a moment and he fell asleep. I shouldn't wake him up.”

She thought of the people back in the bus—suppose neither she nor Juan ever came back. What would they do? Her mother would collapse. Her father would wire the governor—two or three governors. He would call the FBI.
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There would be hell to pay. Yet what could they do? She was twenty-one. When they caught up with her she could say, “I'm twenty-one and doing what I want to do. Whose business is it?” And suppose she went to Mexico with Juan? That would be quite a different story, quite a different thing.

And now little irrelevancies invaded her mind. If he's an Indian or has Indian blood, how is it someone can creep up on him? She held her eye corners back to bring his face into focus. It was a scarred, leathery face, but it was a good face, she thought. The lips were full and humorous, but they were kind. He would be gentle while he was with a woman. He might not stay with her for very long, but he would be nice to her. But he had that wife, that horrid wife, and he stayed with her. God knows how long. She must have been pretty when he married her, but she was ugly now. What had happened there? How did that horrid woman hold him? Maybe he was just like everyone else, like her father. Maybe he was just held in line by fears and by habit. Mildred didn't see how it could happen to anyone, but she knew it did. When people got old they grew frightened of smaller and smaller things. Her father was frightened of a strange bed or a foreign language or a political party he didn't belong to. Her father truly believed that the Democratic party was a subversive organization whose design would destroy the United States and put it in the hands of bearded communists.
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He was afraid of his friends and his friends were afraid of him. A rat race, she thought.

She moved her eyes down over Juan's body, a tough, stringy body that would get tougher and stringier as he got older. His trousers were a little wet from the rain and they hugged close to his legs. There was a neatness about him—a neatness of a mechanic who has just washed up. She looked at his flat stomach and at his broad chest. She saw no change in his breathing, no muscular change, but his eyes were open and he was looking at her. And his eyes were not sleep-heavy, but bright.

Mildred started. Perhaps he hadn't been asleep at all. He might have watched her come into the barn. She found herself explaining, “I needed exercise. You know, I've been sitting a long time. I thought I'd walk to the county road and pick up the car there. And then I saw this old place. I like old places.”

Her feet were going to sleep. She leaned sideways and, supporting herself with one hand, moved her legs and feet to one side and covered her knee carefully with her skirt. Her feet buzzed and burned with returning blood.

Juan did not answer. His eyes were on her face. Slowly he rolled on his side and supported his head with a hand under his ear. A dark gleam came into his eyes, and his mouth curled up a little at the corners. His face was hard, she thought. No way of getting past the eyes into the head. It was either all on the surface or else it was too completely protected ever to get at.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

His lips parted a little. “What are you doing here?”

“I told you, I needed exercise. I told you.”

“Yes, you told me.”

“But what are you doing here?”

He didn't seem really awake. “Me? Oh, I sat down to rest. I went to sleep. No sleep last night.”

“Yes, I remember,” she said. She had to go on talking. She was wound up. “I wondered about you. You don't belong here. I mean, driving a bus. You belong someplace else.”

“Like where?” he asked playfully. His eyes dropped to where the lapels of her coat crossed.

“Well,” she said uneasily, “I had a funny kind of a thought while I was walking. I thought maybe you wouldn't come back. You might just keep going and maybe go back to Mexico. I could see how I might do that if I were you.”

His eyes squinted and he peered into her face. “Are you nuts? What made you think that?”

“Well, it was just something that came to me. Your life, driving the bus, I mean, must be pretty dull after—well, after Mexico.”

“You haven't been in Mexico?”

“No.”

“Then you don't know how dull it is there.”

“No.”

He raised his head and straightened his arm and put his head down on his arm. “What do you think would happen to those people back there?”

“Oh, they'd get back somehow,” she said. “It isn't far. They wouldn't starve.”

“And what do you think would happen to my wife?”

“Well—” She was confused. “I hadn't thought of that.”

“Yes, you did,” said Juan. “You don't like her. I'll tell you something. Nobody likes her except me. One of the reasons I like her is because nobody likes her.” He grinned. “What a liar,” he said to himself.

“It was just a crazy thought I had,” she said. “I even thought I might run away too. I thought I would disappear and live by myself and—well, never see anyone again that I knew.” She rose up on her knees and sat down again on the other side.

Juan looked at her knee. He put out his hand and pulled her skirt down over it. She flinched when his hand came toward her and then relaxed uneasily.

“I don't want you to think I followed you in here,” she said.

“You don't want me to think it, but you did,” said Juan.

“Well, what if I did?”

His hand came out again and rested on her covered knee and fire raced through her.

“It's not you,” she said. Her throat was dry. “I don't want you to think it's you. It's me. I know what I want. I don't even like you. You smell like a goat.” Her voice staggered along. “You don't know the kind of life I lead. I'm all alone. I can't tell anyone anything.”

His eyes were hot and shiny and they seemed to bathe her in heat.

“Maybe I'm not like anyone else,” she went on. “How do I know? But it's not you. I don't even like you.”

“You give yourself a hell of an argument, don't you?” said Juan.

“Look, what are you going to do about the bus?” she demanded. “Are you going to the road?”

The weight of his hand on her knee increased and then he took his hand away. “I'm going back and pull the bus out, pull those people through,” he said.

“Then why did you come here?”

“Something went haywire,” he said. “Something I figured out went haywire.”

“When are you going back?”

“Pretty soon.”

She looked at his hand, relaxed on the straw in front of her, its skin dark and shiny and a little wrinkled. “Aren't you going to make a pass at me?”

Juan smiled and it was a good, open smile. “Yes, I guess so. After you get through arguing with yourself. You're on both sides now. Maybe pretty soon you'll decide whether you're for or against and I'll have something to work on.”

“Don't you—don't you want me?”

“Sure,” said Juan. “Sure.”

“Is it that you know I'll fall into your lap anyway, so you won't have to take any trouble?”

“Don't get me into your argument,” said Juan. “I'm older than you are. I like this thing very much. I like it so much that I can wait. I can even go without for a while.”

“I could dislike you very much,” she said. “You don't give me any pride. You don't give me any violence to fall back on later.”

“I thought you'd have more pride to be left to make up your own mind.”

“Well, I don't.”

“I guess not,” he said. “The women in my country are like that too. They have to be begged or forced. Then they feel good about it.”

“Well, are you always this way?”

“No,” said Juan, “only with you. You came here for something. You said yourself it didn't have anything to do with me.”

She looked at her fingers. “It's funny,” she said. “I'm what you'd call an intellectual girl. I read things. I'm not a virgin. I know thousands of case histories, but I can't make the advances.” She smiled quickly and warmly. “Can't you force me a little?”

His arms stretched out and she fell into place beside him in the straw.

“You won't hurry me?”

“We've got all day,” he said.

“Will you despise me or laugh at me?”

“What do you care?”

“Well, I do, whether I want to or not.”

“You talk too much,” he said. “You just talk too much.”

“I know it and it goes on all the time. Will you take me away? Maybe to Mexico?”

“No,” said Juan. “Let's see if you can shut up for a little while.”

CHAPTER 17

Pimples took the keys from the ignition lock on the instrument board and went to the rear of the bus. He unlocked the padlock which defended the luggage and threw up the lid. The smell of pies came sweetly to his nose. Mr. Pritchard looked in over his shoulder. The luggage was stacked tightly in the compartment.

“I guess I'll have to take it all out to get those tarps,” said Pimples, and he began to pull at the wedged suitcases.

“Wait,” said Mr. Pritchard. “Let me lift and you pull and we can leave them all in.” He stood on the bumper and strained upward at the bottom suitcase while Pimples yanked at the heavy fold of canvas. Pimples worked it from side to side and gradually it came free from under the luggage.

“Maybe we'd better get a couple of pies while we got it open,” Pimples said. “There's raspberry and lemon cream and raisin and caramel custard cream. A piece of caramel custard cream would go pretty good now.”

“Later,” said Mr. Pritchard. “Let's get my wife settled first.” He took one side of the heavy cloth and Pimples the other and they proceeded toward the cliff with its caves.

It was a fairly common formation. The side of the little hill had dropped away in some old time, leaving a smooth surface of soft limestone. Gradually wind and rain cut under from below, while the top of the cliff was held in place by topsoil and grass roots. And over the ages several caves were formed under the overhanging cliff. Here a coyote littered her pups, and here, in the old days when there were such things, a grizzly bear came to sleep. And in the higher caves the owls sat during the day.

Three deep, dark caves developed at the bottom of the cliff and a few small ones higher up. All the cave entrances were now protected from the rain by the high overhang of the cliff itself. The caves were not entirely the inventions of nature, for bands of Indians hunting antelopes had rested here and lived here, and had even fought forgotten battles here. Later it became a stopping place for white men riding through the country, and the men had enlarged the caves and built their fires under the overhang.

The smoke stains on the sandstone were old and some fairly new, and the floors of the caves were comparatively dry, for this little hill, one side of which had dropped away, did not receive the drainage from other, higher hills. A few initials had been scratched on the sandstone cliff, but the surface was so soft that they soon became illegible. Only the large, weathering word “Repent” was still clear. The wandering preacher had let himself down with a rope to put up that great word in black paint, and he had gone away rejoicing at how he was spreading God's word in a sinful world.

Mr. Pritchard, carrying his end of the tarpaulin, looked up at the word “Repent.” “Somebody went to a lot of trouble,” he said, “a lot of trouble.” And he wondered who had financed such a venture. Some missionary, he thought.

He and Pimples dropped the tarpaulin under the cliff 's overhang while they went to inspect the caves. The shallow holes were nearly alike, about five feet high and eight or nine feet wide and ten or twelve feet deep. Mr. Pritchard chose the cave the farthest toward the right because it seemed to be drier and because it was a little darker inside. He thought the darkness would be good for his wife's coming headache. Pimples helped him spread the tarpaulin.

“I wish we could get some pine boughs or some straw to put underneath the canvas,” Mr. Pritchard said.