The Wayward Bus

by John Steinbeck

into the Milky Way a generation later. As for the title: The first synopsis of the story, Steinbeck remembered, “was written in Spanish” and “was called El Camión Vacilador. The word vacilador, or the verb vacilar, is not translatable unfortunately, and it’s a word we really need in English because to be ‘vacilando’ means that you’re aiming at some place, but you don’t care much whether you get there. We don’t have such a word in English. Wayward has an overtone of illic itness or illegality, based of course on medieval lore where wayward men were vagabonds. But vacilador is not a vagabond at all. Wayward was the nearest English word that I could find.”

Steinbeck wrote much of the novel at his kitchen table in New York “amid jampots and pieces of cold toast and stale coffee,” and he destroyed “about 20,000 words” in January 1946 because he was dissatisfied with them.

She often sneered at Sonny Tufts. She liked older men with interesting faces. Sometimes, wiping the damp cloth back and forth on the counter, her dream-widened eyes centered on the screen door, her pale eyes flexed and then closed for a moment. Then you could know that in that secret garden in her head, Gable had just entered the restaurant, had gasped when he saw her, and had stood there, his lips slightly parted and in his eyes the recognition that this was his woman. And around him the flies came in and out with impunity. It never went beyond that. Norma was too shy. And, besides, she didn’t know how such things were done. The actual love-making in her life had been a series of wrestling matches, the aim of which was to keep her clothes on in the back seat of a car. So far she had won by simple concentration. She felt that Mr. Gable not only would not do things like that, but wouldn’t like them if he heard about them.

“There’s lots nobody knows about metal and about engines too. Take Ford.5 He’ll make a hundred cars and two or three of them will be no damn good. It’s not just one thing that’s bad, the whole car’s bad. The springs and the motor and the water pump and the fan and the carburetor. It just breaks down little by little and there don’t nobody know what makes them. And you’ll take another car right off the line, you’d say it was just exactly the same as the others, but it’s not. It’s got something the others haven’t got. It’s got more power. It’s almost like a guy with a lot of guts. It won’t bust down no matter what you do.”

Light was creeping up the sky and over the mountains. The colorless dawn of grays and blacks moved in so that white and blue things were silver and red and dark green things were black. The new leaves on the big oaks were black and white, and the mountain rims were sharp. Lumpish, heavy clouds that rolled in the sky like dumplings were beginning to take on a faint rose-pink color on their eastern edges.

Pimples looked up from his fingernails. He saw how the little lines of age were sneaking down her neck, and he noticed the thickness of her upper eyelids. He saw that her hands had lost the tightness of skin of young girls. He was very sorry for her. Unblessed with beauty as he was, he thought that youth was the only thing in the world worth having and that one who had lost youth was already dead. He had won a great victory this morning, and now when he saw the weakness and indecision in Alice he pressed for a second victory.

Her married life was fairly pleasant and she was fond of her husband. She thought she knew his weaknesses and his devices and his desires. She herself was handicapped by what is known as a nun’s hood, which prevented her experiencing any sexual elation from her marriage; and she suffered from an acid condition which kept her from conceiving children without first artificially neutralizing her body acids. Both of these conditions she considered normal, and any variation of them abnormal and in bad taste. Women of lusty appetites she spoke of as “that kind of woman,” and she was a little sorry for them as she was for dope fiends and alcoholics. Her husband’s beginning libido she had accepted and then gradually by faint but constant reluctance had first molded and then controlled and gradually strangled, so that his impulses for her became fewer and fewer and until he himself believed that he was reaching an age when such things did not matter. In her way she was a very powerful woman. She ran an efficient, clean, and comfortable house and served meals which were nourishing without being tasty. She did not believe in the use of spices, for she had been told long ago that they had an aphrodisiac effect on men. The three—Mr. Pritchard, Mildred, and herself—did not take on any weight, probably because of the dullness of the food. It did not stimulate any great appetite.

Her body and her mind were sluggish and lazy, and deep down she fought a tired envy of the people who, so she thought, experienced good things while she went through life a gray cloud in a gray room. Having few actual perceptions, she lived by rules. Education is good. Self-control is necessary. Everything in its time and place. Travel is broadening. And it was this last axiom which had forced her finally on the vacation to Mexico.

Of his emotional life she knew nothing whatever, just as he knew nothing of hers. Indeed, she thought that a man in middle age had no emotional life. Mildred, who was twenty-one, felt that the saps and juices were all dried up at fifty, and rightfully so, since neither men nor women were attractive at that age. A man or a woman in love at fifty would have been an obscene spectacle to her.

Gee, thanks...

She was ahead of him. She knew what he was going to say. It had happened so many times before. He was going to try to find out where she lived. He wanted her telephone number. It was simple. She didn’t live anywhere. She had a trunk stored with Loraine with some books in it—Captain Hornblower,6 and a Life of Beethoven,7 and some paper books of the short stories of Saroyan,8 and some old evening dresses to be made over. She knew Louie was having trouble. She knew that blush that rose out of a man’s collar and the thickness of labored speech. She saw Louie glance apprehensively in the mirror at the rear of the bus.

Mr. Pritchard said, “I have an impression I have met you. Could that be?” In her head Mildred paraphrased it, “Ain’t I seen you some-wheres?”

“Well, start feeling good, then, and don’t run it into the ground. Nobody likes sick people very long. Nobody. Get that straight.” His eyes were not looking at her but around her and through her, and panic came over Alice.

Juan was not a man who fooled himself very much.

She’d be drunker than a skunk when he got back, but maybe that would blow out her tubes and she’d feel better.

Juan was about to say “I had a brother who was kicked to death by a horse,” but he thought, “Aw, nuts, the guy’s a push-over. I wonder what he’s scared of.”

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.

Juan’s character is level headed and realistic. His descriptions of him show him as insightful, thoughtful and sensitive to the people and situations around him.

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.

didn’t even consider him a foreigner. “I don’t either,” said Juan. “Well, there’s one other way to stay out of trouble with the passengers.” “What’s that?” “Let them decide. This is a democracy, isn’t it?” “They’ll just get to fighting.” “Well, what’s wrong with that if they fight each other?” said Juan. “You’ve got something there,” Breed said. “But I’ll tell you one thing. Whatever side everybody else is on, Van Brunt is gonna be on the other side. There’s a fellow wouldn’t vote for the second coming of Christ if it was a popular measure.” “He’s all right,” said Juan. “You just gotta know how to handle him. I had a horse once that was so ornery that if you reined left he’d turn right. I fooled him. I did everything opposite and he thought he was getting his own way. You could get Van Brunt to do almost anything by disagreeing with him.”

“Little girls keep their noses out of big man’s business,” said Mr. Pritchard.

the farmers began to remove from their fields the weeds, the field turnip, the yellow mustard, the poppies and thistles and milkweeds, and these refugees found a haven in the ditches beside the road. The mustard stood seven feet high in the late spring, and red-winged blackbirds built their nests under the yellow flowers. And in the damp ditches the water cress grew. The ditches beside the road under the high growth of weeds became the home of weasels and bright-colored water snakes, and the drinking places for birds in the evening. The meadow larks sat all morning on the old fences in the spring and whistled their yodeling song. And the wild doves sat on the barbed wire in the evening in the fall, shoulder to shoulder for miles, and their call rang down the miles in a sustained note. At evening the night hawks coursed along the ditches, looking for meat, and in the dark the barn owls searched for rabbits. And when a cow was sick the great ugly turkey buzzards sat on the old fence waiting for death.

Steinbeck really paints a picture.

Juan was not a deeply religious man. He believed in the Virgin’s power as little children believe in the power of their uncles. She was a doll and a goddess and a good-luck piece and a relative. His mother—that Irish woman—had married into the Virgin’s family and had accepted her as she had accepted her husband’s mother and grandmother. The Guadalupana became her family and her goddess.

Van Brunt saw that he meant it. He looked down at his hands, pinched up the loose skin on his knuckles, and rubbed his left hand with his right.

This is exactly the unconscious actions that old men do.

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.2 He was afraid of his friends and his friends were afraid of him. A rat race, she thought.

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?”