toward failure. It was a wraththat did not turn away until, toward the end of Jack’s junior year, it became clear that he was not going to college. From then on the son no longer held any interest for the father.
Jack hung around Beeville after high school, living at a rooming house ten blocks from his parents’ big house on Harrison Street, working as a gas jockey at a truck stop on U.S. 81 and eating himself fat. For the next three and a half years he saw his mother and father on holidays and a few other times by accident on the street or in a store. It might have gone on like that forever if his mother had not called him one day at the truck stop and said she had great news and wanted to tell him about it immediately. She came within a few minutes to the truck stop and Jack took her to a back booth in the café for coffee.
His mother, Janet Alexander Oliver, was nineteen years old when she married Bob Oliver. He was a first-year medical student at the University of Texas Medical School in Galveston, and she had been his high school sweetheart in Beeville. She had attended a junior college in San Antonio for two years and then taken a job as a teller in a downtown bank in Beeville. As she told Jack and everyone else, her only real ambition in life had been to be “Mrs. Doctor Bob Oliver.” Jack was never quite sure if that was the truth, but it was something he had never talked to his mother about and never would.
“He loves you again, Jack, just like he did when you were little,” she said even before the coffee arrived. “He realizes that he treated you unfairly and he wants to apologize and make it better. He knows now that we all have to be what we are, and he can accept you for what you are. He is sure now that he can live with the disappointment because, as he says, that is all a part of life.”
She asked Jack to come over for dinner that night for a celebration and to bring his things and move back into hisold bedroom. “I’ll have Daisy Lee make your favorite meat loaf with the syrup and everything else the way you like it,” she said.
They agreed on six o’clock as the time for dinner. But when six o’clock came, Jack was forty miles south of Beeville, sitting in the fourth-row left-side window seat of a Gulf Coast Coaches Aerocoach on the way to Corpus Christi.
At around six-thirty the bus pulled into Sinton. He was now fifty miles away from Beeville. Jack decided that his mother and father had by now figured out that he was not coming to dinner. He closed his eyes and saw his mother go into the kitchen and take the meat loaf out of the oven. He saw his father light a cigarette—he smoked Chesterfields—and slam the stick match hard into an ashtray. He saw the two of them arguing about what might have happened to Jack and what she might have said to him to make him not want to come. He saw her go to the phone and try to find him—first at the truck stop and then at the rooming house. He saw her put the phone down finally and shake her head as she told his father that everybody everywhere said Jack had gone—from his job, from his rented room, from Beeville. He saw him go into the dining room and sit down at his regular place at the dining-room table. He saw her join him a few minutes later. He saw the two of them eat the meat loaf, served with baked potatoes, green beans in butter sauce and cole slaw.
All but two of #4203’s forty-one seats were taken when Jack pulled into Great Western’s Union Bus Depot in Houston at 1:37 P.M. He had made up all but twelve minutes, despite the load, despite the traffic, despite thinking about Ava. A Late Arrival form had to be filled out only for anything over fifteen minutes, so at least he did not have to do that.
Jack hated all of the paperwork. Everybody did. But it was as much a part of the job as air-braking that #4203 with its thirty-nine passengers onboard under the huge loading-dock canopy in Houston. Paul Madison liked to say the first
Jack hung around Beeville after high school, living at a rooming house ten blocks from his parents’ big house on Harrison Street, working as a gas jockey at a truck stop on U.S. 81 and eating himself fat. For the next three and a half years he saw his mother and father on holidays and a few other times by accident on the street or in a store. It might have gone on like that forever if his mother had not called him one day at the truck stop and said she had great news and wanted to tell him about it immediately. She came within a few minutes to the truck stop and Jack took her to a back booth in the café for coffee.
His mother, Janet Alexander Oliver, was nineteen years old when she married Bob Oliver. He was a first-year medical student at the University of Texas Medical School in Galveston, and she had been his high school sweetheart in Beeville. She had attended a junior college in San Antonio for two years and then taken a job as a teller in a downtown bank in Beeville. As she told Jack and everyone else, her only real ambition in life had been to be “Mrs. Doctor Bob Oliver.” Jack was never quite sure if that was the truth, but it was something he had never talked to his mother about and never would.
“He loves you again, Jack, just like he did when you were little,” she said even before the coffee arrived. “He realizes that he treated you unfairly and he wants to apologize and make it better. He knows now that we all have to be what we are, and he can accept you for what you are. He is sure now that he can live with the disappointment because, as he says, that is all a part of life.”
She asked Jack to come over for dinner that night for a celebration and to bring his things and move back into hisold bedroom. “I’ll have Daisy Lee make your favorite meat loaf with the syrup and everything else the way you like it,” she said.
They agreed on six o’clock as the time for dinner. But when six o’clock came, Jack was forty miles south of Beeville, sitting in the fourth-row left-side window seat of a Gulf Coast Coaches Aerocoach on the way to Corpus Christi.
At around six-thirty the bus pulled into Sinton. He was now fifty miles away from Beeville. Jack decided that his mother and father had by now figured out that he was not coming to dinner. He closed his eyes and saw his mother go into the kitchen and take the meat loaf out of the oven. He saw his father light a cigarette—he smoked Chesterfields—and slam the stick match hard into an ashtray. He saw the two of them arguing about what might have happened to Jack and what she might have said to him to make him not want to come. He saw her go to the phone and try to find him—first at the truck stop and then at the rooming house. He saw her put the phone down finally and shake her head as she told his father that everybody everywhere said Jack had gone—from his job, from his rented room, from Beeville. He saw him go into the dining room and sit down at his regular place at the dining-room table. He saw her join him a few minutes later. He saw the two of them eat the meat loaf, served with baked potatoes, green beans in butter sauce and cole slaw.
All but two of #4203’s forty-one seats were taken when Jack pulled into Great Western’s Union Bus Depot in Houston at 1:37 P.M. He had made up all but twelve minutes, despite the load, despite the traffic, despite thinking about Ava. A Late Arrival form had to be filled out only for anything over fifteen minutes, so at least he did not have to do that.
Jack hated all of the paperwork. Everybody did. But it was as much a part of the job as air-braking that #4203 with its thirty-nine passengers onboard under the huge loading-dock canopy in Houston. Paul Madison liked to say the first
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