Read Online The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck, Gary Scharnhorst - Free Book Online Page A

give away her bed any time.” Again Alice could feel rage rising in her and it frightened her. She didn’t want it to rise. She knew it would spoil things, and she was afraid of it, but there it was, rising and boiling in her.
    A sheet of rain whisked over the roof like a heavy broom and left silence as it moved on, and almost immediately another flat of rain took its place. The drip and gurgle of water from the roof eaves and from the drains was loud again. Juan had been looking reflectively at the floor, a small smile tightening his mouth against the white band of the scar on his lip. And this was another thing Alice was frightened of. He had set her out to observe her. She knew that. All relations and all situations to Alice were person-to-person things in which she and the other were huge and all others were removed from the world. There was no shading. When she talked to Juan, there were only the two of them. When she picked at Norma, the whole world disappeared, leaving only Norma and her in a gray universe of cloud.
    But Juan, now, he could shut everything out and look at each thing in relation to the other. Things of various sizes and importance. He could see and judge and consider and enjoy. Juan could enjoy people. Alice could only love, like, dislike, and hate. She saw and felt no shading whatever.
    Now she tucked her loosening hair back. Once a month she used a rinse on her hair which was guaranteed to give it the mysterious and glamorous glints that capture and keep men in slavery. Juan’s eyes were distant and amused. This was a matter of horror to Alice. She knew he was seeing her, not as an angry woman who darkened the world, but as one of thousands of angry women to be studied, inspected, and, yes, even enjoyed. This was the cold, lonely horror to her. Juan blotted out the universe to her and she sensed that she blotted out nothing to him. He could see not only around her but through her to something else. The remembered terror of the one time he had hit her lay not in the blow—she had been hit before, and far from hating it had taken excitement and exuberance from it—but Juan had hit her as he would a bug. He hadn’t cared about it much. He hadn’t even been very angry, just irritated. And he had hit a noisy thing to shut it up. Alice had only been trying to attract his attention in one of the few ways she knew. She was trying to do the same thing now, and she knew from the changed focus in his eye that he had slipped away from her.
    â€œI try to make a nice little home for us; nice, and with a carpet and a velveteen suite, and you got to give it away to strangers.” Her voice was losing its certainty. “And you let your own wife sit up in a chair all night.”
    Juan looked up slowly. “Norma,” he said, “bring me another cup of coffee, will you? Plenty of cream.”
    Alice braced herself for the rage she knew was coming, and then Juan looked slowly toward her. His dark eyes were amused and warm, the focus changed again, and he was looking at her and she knew that he saw her.
    â€œIt didn’t hurt you any,” he said. “Make you appreciate the bed tonight.”
    Her breath caught. A hot wave flooded over her. Rage was transmuted to hot desire. She smiled at him vacantly and licked her lips. “You bastard,” she said very softly. And she took a huge, shuddering sigh of air. “Want some eggs?” she asked.
    â€œYeah. Two in the water, about four minutes.”
    â€œI know how you like them,” she said. “Bacon on the side?”
    â€œNo. A piece of toast and a couple of doughnuts.”
    Alice went behind the counter. “I wish they’d come out of there,” she said. “I’d like to use my own bathroom.”
    â€œThey’re stirring around,” said Juan. “They’ll be out in a little.”
    And they were stirring. There were footsteps in the bedroom. A door inside opened and a