Timothy Proctor

Member of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

The number thirty-six bus leaves the Southside depot at ten to six in the morning, and for thirty-five years Timothy Proctor has been the man at the wheel of it, or of one very like it. He was born in 1973 at the Westside of San Antonio, Texas, and is living today in the Westside, where he works as a bus driver for the city transit authority. He is a man of the House of Proctor, the Yorkist line that keeps the White Ledger and descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, but he was never called, is not a vampire slayer and has no alias, archetype or craft. He is the elder son of the machinist and slayer Edwin Proctor, The Iron Otter, and of the telephone operator Vera Dawson, and the brother of the slayer Terrence Dawson Proctor. In 1995 he married the librarian Colleen Green, and they have two sons, Gary Proctor, born in 1996, and Michael Green Proctor, born in 1997, neither of whom was called. The family remembers him as the one who drives, who notices and who says very little about either. He was born in January, in a hospital on the Westside, in a cold snap that had frozen the pecan trees along Zarzamora Street, and he was taken home to a rented upstairs flat near the old shoe-repair shop that had belonged to his great-grandmother Ada Menger. His father was on the swing shift at the Kelly engine depot and his mother was on a headset, and between them they arranged to have the baby minded by a succession of neighbours, one of whom, a retired streetcar conductor, taught him at two to say the names of the stops. The family moved to the Southside when he was four, to a frame house with a garage that his father filled with a lathe, and he has said that the first thing he learned in his new street was the timetable of the bus that ran past it. He was a placid, round-shouldered, observant boy who disliked being rushed and who could sit for an hour at a window and report afterwards on every vehicle that went by. Edwin, who had been told what he was in a kitchen at fourteen and had waited a long time to find out which of his sons it would be, watched Timothy with a patient, level eye. There was no drama about it. At twelve the boy was shown the Ledger's pocket book, at a kitchen table, by his mother, who read the entries aloud as she had for Edwin, and he listened to the end, asked whether anyone was ever hurt, and was told the truth. He said that he did not think he would be good at it. At fourteen he said so again to himself, and at sixteen to his father, in the garage, in front of the lathe, in a quiet voice, and Edwin turned off the machine, wiped his hands and said that the Ledger had a great many uses for a man who preferred a quiet life and that the first of them was to be one. Vera, who was listening at the kitchen door, said afterwards that it was the best speech her husband had ever made, and that it had been seven sentences long. He took the job at the transit authority at eighteen, in the summer of 1991, a year after he finished at the vocational school, and trained at the depot on a Saturday morning with a retired driver named Mr Ybarra, who had a laminated card of the city's streets and a very low opinion of left turns. He liked the work from the first week. A bus driver, he said, is a person who gets other people where they are going, and who is permitted, by the nature of the job, to look at everyone. He drove the Southside routes, then the Westside, and then, at twenty, the number thirty-six, a long rattling early run from the Southside through the old barrios to the university, which he has kept, by choice, ever since. He knows its stops as a priest knows his congregation. He knows which porch light has been off for a month, which regular has stopped getting on and which doorway has the wrong kind of quiet, and he has a driver's habit of checking the long mirror above the windscreen every few seconds, which shows him the whole bus and, in the dark of a winter morning, a good deal of the pavement behind it. It was in the long mirror, on a February morning in 1994, that he first saw Colleen Green, a tall, freckled, bespectacled graduate student in a quilted coat who got on at ten to six at the stop by the university and sat in the second seat with a book, and for six months, as she tells it, they exchanged a single sentence. He said good morning and she said good morning. Then the heater failed, and the bus was half empty and cold, and he turned round at a red light, looked at the book she was holding, which was a history of the Texas Rangers, and asked whether it was any good. She said that it was dull. He said that he preferred a good timetable. She laughed so loudly that the one other passenger woke up. They were married in the spring of 1995, in the church at Bandera, and his father took her aside in the churchyard on the eve of the wedding and explained, with his hands behind his back, what the family did. She asked whether it was written down, and whether it was accessible. Timothy, who stood at a little distance, said afterwards that he had never been so proud of a woman for asking about a filing system. What he does for the Ledger he does with a bus. It is a modest service and a real one. A driver on a city route sees what the city does at the hours that most people are asleep, and Timothy, who has driven the same routes for years, has made it a habit to pass what he sees to his brother Terrence, in a brief telephone call at the end of a shift, without comment and without a name. A rider who does not show in the long mirror. A man at a stop in August in a heavy coat. A house on the Southside where the lights have burned all day and the curtains have never moved. He has twice, at his father's request, held the thirty-six at a stop for twelve minutes in the small hours while a cousin got off at the far end of the street, and he has never asked why. Edwin, who had spent his own career trying to make a trap out of a fixed route, said that his son had been a trap all along and had simply never needed to be told. Gary Proctor was born in the autumn of 1996 and Michael Green Proctor in the winter of 1997, in the stone house at Bandera that Colleen's library salary and his own wages bought, and Timothy spent the early years of both boys driving the forty miles home on Friday evenings, a habit that he has never given up. Gary grew up to love the outdoors, and Michael, who is thoughtful and quick with a joke, followed his father in preferring a timetable. In the week of the attacks of September 2001 he drove his route as usual, because the buses ran, and he spent the morning looking in the mirror at the faces of people who were hearing the news on their telephones, and said afterwards that it was the first time in ten years that he had seen the whole of a bus fall silent at once. His mother was killed on a wet night in the autumn of 2012, on the Loop, by a truck that had lost its brakes, and he was the first of the family to reach the scene, having heard the call on the depot radio. He drove his father home. He sat in the kitchen with him until daylight, with the cash book open on the table, and in the years that followed he took the old man to the market on Saturdays and, when Edwin was ill in the autumn of 2019, sat with him through the last weeks beside Terrence, who held his arm. When Edwin died, in November of that year, Timothy took a day's leave, which was the first he had taken in eleven years, and drove his father's old Chevrolet slowly across the city by the longest route he knew. In the pandemic years he drove an almost empty bus through the winter, because someone had to, and carried nurses and cleaners and warehouse hands who would otherwise have walked, and on Fridays he drove out to Bandera to help Colleen carry the paper bags of books to the porch of the library. He keeps a small rented place on the Westside, a few streets from the hospital where he was born and a short walk from the depot, and he spends his weekends in the stone house at Bandera. He is fifty-three, a tall, round-shouldered, patient man with a quiet voice and a clean-shaven jaw, who still turns the wheel as if it might break, and who takes, as his wife says, the long way home. Timothy Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the driver of the number thirty-six, the son of The Iron Otter who preferred the quiet and put it to work. In the Slayerverse he stands for the kin of the White Ledger who were never called, the drivers, carriers and watchers of the ordinary hours, who saw the city as it was at ten to six in the morning and who proved that a steady hand on a wheel and a good eye in a mirror can serve the hunt as faithfully as a pistol.