The Wayward Bus Read Free Page B

“He is the free man, the man who cannot be held in bonds of any sort, the man who will at any moment leave a woman.” Though half of the ring finger on his left hand has been amputated, he wears a gold wedding band on it for “decoration.” He is not flawless—he has struck Alice in the past, and he is tempted to abandon his passengers before the end of their journey and flee to Mexico. But Steinbeck’s admiration for him is palpable. As the novelist wrote Elizabeth Otis in 1954, “I feel related to Spanish people more than to Anglo-Saxons. Unusual with my blood line—whatever it is. But they have kept something we have lost.”
    The gadget salesman Ernest Horton is at first glance a ludicrous character, a first cousin of Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman. But he takes his surname from the Latin root for “talk” or “ex hort” and the German root for “listen”; he is, as his entire name suggests, an “earnest speaker and listener.” In fact an admirable figure, he has been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for military valor. When Camille recognizes the medal in his lapel, he allows that it was pinned on him by “the big boss” or the president of the United States, though he modestly adds that “It don’t buy any groceries.” (In contrast, Elliott Pritchard twice fails to recognize the medal because he never served in the military. He thinks it a lodge pin much like the one he wears. And whereas Bernice expects fresh eggs and room service, Ernest makes his bed “neatly, as though he had done it many times before.”) Ernest has been taught to trust in the efficacy of thrift and honesty, moreover; he twice invokes the standards of honest business in conversation with Elliott. He befriends Norma and defends her from the baseless allegations of Alice. In another age and place he would be a noble and heroic type, but in this time and place he is merely a traveling salesman struggling to make a living by selling trinkets, gadgets, and novelties like the “Little Wonder Artificial Sore Foot” and a whiskey dispenser that resembles a toilet.
    Significantly, too, Camille Oaks constructs her identity and assumes a stage name for the occasion. As a professional stripper at stags or smokers, she takes her first name from an advertisement for Camel cigarettes on the wall of the lunchroom. In effect, the name acknowledges that as a sex object she is a mere commodity. In classical myth, however, Camille is a virgin queen, servant to Diana. The name echoes “camomile,” the herb whose flowers may be used as a tonic. And it is also an abbreviated form of “chameleon.” Neither a natural blonde nor the stereotyped dumb blonde, Camille is worldly wise. She has learned to blend into her environment, a strategy that enables her to survive. As she tells Norma, “everybody’s a tramp some time or other. Everybody. And the worst tramps of all are the ones that call it something else.” Significantly, she bonds with Norma (= Normal) and takes her under wing. She helps Norma with her make-up, the protective coloring that will “give her some confidence” and enable her to survive in Los Angeles. In the end, all Camille really wanted, Steinbeck adds, “was a nice house in a nice town, two children, and a stairway to stand on.” She is sufficiently self-reliant that a husband ranks low on her wish list and realistic enough to know she will never realize her dream.
    Pimples, Juan’s seventeen-year-old apprentice, suffers from the worst case of pustulate acne recorded in American literature.
    His face is “rivuleted and rotted and eroded” and his “mind and emotions were like his face.” Only a few paragraphs of the novel are told from his point of view because, “loaded with the concupiscent juices of adolescence,” he is the least sentient of all the characters. He mostly