When warm weather hits, I always feel drawn toward the Steinbeck portion of my bookshelf.  There’s something about his writing that really lends itself to sitting on the patio and having bright sunshine on the pages.

So it was that I grabbed The Wayward Bus, one of my favorite Steinbeck books in a while.  Of course it was written long before I was born, but I’m just getting to it now.

One of the reasons I enjoyed it so much is the simplicity of the setup.  There is a gas station in California that sits along a Greyhound bus route.  There is another Greyhound route to the west, and the husband of the couple that owns the gas station runs his own bus that connects passengers from one to the other.

A few people are waiting to make the trip and get delayed by a broken part on the bus.  A family of three obviously knows one another, but everyone else is a stranger.  As time goes on, we learn that the father, Mr. Pritchard, has met another young woman, Camille, before, but while she knows exactly when and where, he can’t place it.

It’s like a more wholesome, less murdery version of the movie The Hateful Eight.  The relationships become more complex the further the story goes, with secrets and lies and also some pies involved.  And the entire thing takes place over the course of basically two days with one not so easy trip on a bus.

One recurring problem at the gas station and its small lunch room area is the constant presence of flies, which drives the wife of the couple that owns it mad.  It also brought about perhaps the paragraphs I enjoyed most, ones that I could picture Steinbeck working through in his head.

“After while a little night-laden fly crawled heavily out from under the leaf and stood in the clear sun.  Its wings were muddily iridescent and it was sluggish with night cold.  The fly rubbed its wings with its legs and then it rubbed its legs together and then it rubbed its face with its forelegs while the sun, slanting under the great puffed clouds, warmed its juices.  Suddenly the fly took off, circled twice, fluttered under the oaks and crashed against the screen door of the lunch room, fell on its back and buzzed against the ground, upside down for a second.  Then it righted itself and flew up and took its position on the frame beside the lunchroom door.”

Can’t you picture the author sitting at a lunch counter somewhere with a sandwich in front of him and a few flies buzzing around?  He thinks, well how did they get in here in the first place?  He glances at the screen door and a sunlit piece of dirt just outside.  The wheels begin to turn.

Another great thing about reading books written decades ago is that there are always phrases I’ve never heard.  At one point Mr. Pritchard is talking privately with Camille, trying to convince her to come and work for him.  She is sure that he just wants her to be a secretary mistress and calls him out, saying she won’t sign up for a job just to wait for him to eventually make his awful move on her.

“If you’d said, ‘Here’s the way it is.  So much for an apartment and so much for clothes,’ why, I could have thought it out and I could have come to a conclusion, and it might have worked.  But I’m not going to be nibbled to death by ducks.  Did you want to surprise me after two, three months of me sitting at a desk?  I’m getting too old to play.”

Nibbled to death by ducks is absolutely something I want to add to my daily vocabulary, even if it doesn’t apply.

“Sir, I’m sorry but we’re out of tacos right now.”

“I will not be nibbled to death by ducks!!!!!”

Very much recommend this book.