“I’m Jack Valen,” the man said. “Loreda Martinelli.”
He put the truck in gear and they drove north. The suspension on the truck was shot. The leather seat burped up and down at every bump.
Loreda stared out the window. In the brief flash of their headlights or in the glare of billboards lit up by streetlights, she saw people camped on the side of the road, and hobos walking with packs slung over their backs.
They passed the school and the hospital and the squatter’s camp, which lay shrouded in darkness.
And then they were past the places Loreda knew, past the town of Welty.
Out here, there was nothing but road.
“Hey, what do you have to do this late at night?” she said. It occurred to her suddenly that she could have put herself in danger.
The man lit a cigarette, exhaled a stream of blue-gray smoke through his open window. “Same as you, I imagine.”
“What do you mean?”
He turned. For the first time she saw his entire face, the tanned roughness of it, the sharp nose and black eyes. “You’re running away from something. Or someone.”
“And you are, too?”
“Kid, if you aren’t running away these days, you aren’t paying attention. But no, I’m not running.” He smiled in a way that made him almost handsome. “I don’t want to get caught out here, either.”
“My dad did that.” “Did what?”
“Ran out in the middle of the night. Never came back.”
“Well … that’s a hell of a thing,” he said at last. “What about your mom?”
“What about her?”
He turned onto a long dirt road. Darkness.
Loreda didn’t see lights anywhere, just blackness. No houses, no streetlights, no other cars on the road.
“W-where are we going?”
“I told you I had a stop to make before I dropped you at the bus station.” “Out here? In the middle of nowhere?”
He let the truck roll to a stop. “I need your word, kid. You won’t talk about this place. Or me. Or anything you see here.”
They were in a huge grassy field. A barn stood alongside a dilapidated ranch house, both bathed in moonlight. A dozen or so cars and trucks were parked in the grass, their headlights off. Thin yellow lines in between the boards of the barn indicated that there was something going on inside. “No one listens to people like me,” Loreda said. She couldn’t bring herself to say the word she meant: Okies.
“If you don’t give me your word, I’ll turn around right now and drop you off on the main road.”
Loreda looked at him. He was impatient with her, she could tell. A tic pulled at the corner of his eyes, but otherwise he appeared calm. He was waiting for her to decide, but he wouldn’t wait long.
She should tell him to turn around right now, take her back to the road. Whatever was going on in that barn this late at night couldn’t be good. And grown-ups didn’t demand this kind of promise from kids.
“Is it bad, what’s going on in there?”
“No,” he said. “It’s good. But these are dangerous times.”
Loreda looked into the man’s dark eyes. He was … intense. A little frightening, perhaps, but alive in a way she hadn’t seen before. Here was a man who wouldn’t live in a dirty tent and eat scraps and be grateful for it. He wasn’t broken like the rest of them. His vitality called out to her,
reminded her of better times, of the man she’d thought her father to be. “I promise.”
He drove forward, threading his way through the parked cars. Near the doors, he parked the truck and turned off the engine.
“You stay in the truck,” he said, opening his door. “How long will you be?”
“As long as I need to be.”
Loreda watched him walk toward the barn and open the door. She saw a flash of light, and what looked like shadow people gathered within. Then he closed the door behind him.
Loreda stared at the dark barn, the streaks of light bleeding through the cracks. What were they doing in there?
An automobile chugged up alongside the truck, parked. Its headlights snapped off.
Loreda saw a couple get out of the car. They were well dressed, all in black, both smoking cigarettes. Definitely not migrants or farmers.
Loreda made a snap decision: she got out of the truck and followed the couple to the barn.
The barn door opened.
Loreda slipped in behind the couple and immediately pressed herself back against the rough boards of the barn.
She couldn’t have said what she was expecting to see—grown-ups drinking hooch and dancing the Lindy Hop maybe—but whatever she’d expected, it wasn’t this. Men dressed in suits mingled with women, some of whom were wearing pants. Pants. They seemed to be all talking at once, gesturing with their hands as if arguing. The place felt alive, hive-like with activity. Cigarette smoke created a haze that blurred everyone and stung Loreda’s eyes.
There were about ten tables set up in the barn’s dusty, shadowed interior, with lanterns set on each one, creating pockets of light shot through with dust and smoke. Typewriters and mimeograph machines were positioned on the tables. Women sat in chairs and smoked and typed. There was a strange aroma in the air, mixed in with the smell of smoke. Stacks of papers lined the tabletops. Every once in a while Loreda heard the briiiiing of a carriage return.
When Jack strode forward, people stopped what they were doing and turned toward him. He pulled a newspaper off a table in front of him and climbed up several loft steps, then faced the crowd. He lifted the newspaper up. The headline read: “Los Angeles Declares War on Migrants.”
“Police Chief James ‘Two Guns’ Davis, with the support of the big growers, the railroads, the state relief agencies, and the rest of the state fat cats, just closed the California border to migrants.” Jack threw the paper to the straw-covered floor. “Think of it. Desperate people, good people, Americans, are being stopped at the border at gunpoint and turned away. To go where? Many of them are starving back home or dying of dust pneumonia. If they won’t turn back, the coppers are jailing them for vagrancy and judges are sentencing them to hard labor.”
Loreda was hardly surprised. She knew what it was like to come here looking for better and be treated as worse.
“Bastards,” someone yelled.
“All across the state of California, the big growers are taking advantage of the people who work for them. The migrants coming into the state are so desperate to feed their families, they’ll take any wage. There are more than seventy thousand homeless people between here and Bakersfield. Children are dying in the squatters’ camps at a rate of two a day, from malnutrition or disease. It’s not right. Not in America. I don’t care if there is a Depression. Enough is enough. It’s up to us to help them. We have to get them to join the Workers Alliance and stand up for their rights.”
There was a roar of approval from the crowd.
Loreda nodded. His words struck a nerve with her, made her think for the first time, We don’t have to take this.
“Now is the time, comrades. The government won’t help these people. It is up to us. We have to convince the workers to stand up. Rise up. Use any means at our disposal to stop big business from crushing the workers and taking advantage of them. We must stand together and fight this capitalist injustice. We will fight for the migrant workers here and in the Central Valley, help them organize into unions and battle for better wages. The time … is now!”
“Yes!” Loreda shouted. “Yes!”
Jack jumped down from the riser on the loft ladder, but just before he did, Loreda saw him look directly at her.
He strode toward her, making his way easily through the crowd.
Loreda felt the intensity of his gaze; she felt like a mouse paralyzed by the gaze of a hunting hawk.
“I thought I told you to stay in the truck.” “I want to join your group. I could help.”
“Oh, really?” He towered over her, was even taller than her mom. She drew in a tight, ragged breath. “Go home, kid. You’re too young for this.”
“I am a migrant worker.”
He lit a cigarette, studied her.
“We live in the ditch-bank camp off Sutter Road. I picked cotton this fall when I should have been in school. If I hadn’t, we would have starved. We live in a tent. We wanted the jobs in the fields so badly that sometimes we slept in ditches at the side of the road to be first in line. The boss—that fat pig, Welty—he doesn’t care if we make enough to eat.”
“Welty, huh? We’ve been trying to unionize the migrant camps. We’ve met with resistance. The Okies are stubborn and proud.”
“Don’t call us that,” she said. “We’re people who just want jobs. My grandparents and my mom … they don’t believe in government handouts. They want to make it on their own, but…”
“But what?”
“It’s not going to work, is it? Us coming here for a better life and actually getting it?”
“Not without a fight.”
“I want to fight,” Loreda said, realizing as she said it that she’d been itching for this fight for a long time. This was what she’d run away to find, not her lily-livered father. This was the passion she’d lost. She felt the heat of it.
“How old are you, really?” “Thirteen.”
“And your old man ran out on the family when he lost his job in … St.
Louis.”
“Texas,” Loreda said.
“Kid, men like that aren’t worth shit. And you’re too young to be walking around on your own. How’d you get to California?”
“My mom brought us.”
“All by herself? She must be tough.”
“I called her a coward tonight.”
He gave her a knowing look. “Is she going to be worried?”
Loreda nodded. “Unless they went looking for me. What if they’re gone?” At that, homesickness gripped her; not the kind for a place, but for people. Her people. Mom and Ant. Grandma and Grandpa. The people who loved her.
“Kid, the people who love you stay. You’ve already learned that. Go find your mom and tell her you’ve been as dumb as a box of marbles. And let her hold you tight.”
Loreda felt the sting of tears. A police siren wailed outside.
“Shit,” Jack said, taking her by the arm, dragging her across the barn, through the panicking crowd.
He shoved her up the ladder in front of him and pushed her into the loft. “There’s fire in you, kid. Don’t let the bastards put it out. Stay here till morning or you might end up in the hoosegow.”
He dropped down the loft ladder to the barn floor.
The door cracked open. Cops appeared in the opening, holding guns and billy clubs. Behind them, red lights flashed. Cops streamed into the barn, scooped up the papers and the typewriters and the mimeograph machines.
Loreda saw a cop hit Jack in the head with his club. Jack staggered but didn’t fall. Weaving a little, he grinned at the copper. “That’s all you got?”
The cop’s face tightened. “You’re a dead man, Valen. Sooner or later.” He hit Jack again, harder.
“Round ’em up, fellas,” the policeman said, as blood splattered his uniform. “We don’t want Reds in our town.”
Reds.
Communists.
 |
ELSA WALKED BENEATH AN anemic moon into the town of Welty. At this hour, the streets were deserted.
There it was: the police station, tucked on a side street, not far from the library.
She didn’t believe that anyone in authority would actually help her, or even listen to her, but her daughter was missing. This was all she could think of to do.
The parking lot was empty but for a few cruisers and an old-fashioned truck. In the light cast downward from a streetlamp, she saw a bindle stiff standing beside the truck smoking a cigarette. She didn’t make eye contact but felt him watching her.
Elsa straightened to her full height, unaware that she’d become hunched on her walk here.
She moved past the vagrant and entered the station. Inside, the lobby was austere; one row of chairs against a wall, each one empty. Light shone down from the ceiling onto a man in uniform, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, at a desk with a black phone.
She tried to look confident. Clutching her fraying handbag strap, she crossed the tile floor, made her way to the officer at the desk.
He was tall and thin, with slicked-back hair and a thin mustache. He wrinkled his nose at her disheveled appearance.
She cleared her throat. “Uh. Sir. I’m here to report a missing girl.” She tensed, waited for it: We don’t care about your kind.
“Uh-huh?”
“My daughter. She’s thirteen. Do you have children?” He was silent so long she almost turned away.
“I do. A twelve-year-old, in fact. She’s the reason I’m losing my hair.” Elsa would have smiled any other time. “We had a fight. I said …
Anyway, she ran away.”
“Do you have any idea where she’d go? What direction?”
Elsa shook her head. “Her … father left us a while ago. She misses him, blames me, but we have no idea where he is.”
“Folks are doing that these days. Last week we had a fella kill his whole family before he killed himself. Hard times.”
Elsa waited for more. The man stared at her.
“You won’t find her,” Elsa said dully. “How could you?” “I’ll keep my eye out. Mostly, they come back.”
Elsa tried to compose herself, but his kindness unraveled her more than cruelty could. “She has black hair and blue eyes. Well, almost violet, really,
but she says only I see that. Her name is Loreda Martinelli.” “Beautiful name.” He wrote it down.
Elsa nodded, stood there a moment longer.
“My recommendation is to go home, ma’am. Wait. I bet she’ll come back. It’s obvious you love her. Sometimes our kids don’t see what’s right in front of them.”
Elsa backed away, unable to even thank him for his kindness.
Outside, she stared across the empty parking lot and thought: Where is she?
Elsa’s legs started to give out on her. She stumbled, nearly fell. Someone steadied her. “You okay?”
She wrenched sideways, pulled away.
He backed off, lifted his hands in the air. “Hey, I’m not going to hurt you.”
“I—I’m fine,” she said.
“I’d say you’re further from fine than anyone I’ve ever met.”
It was the bindle stiff she’d seen by the truck on her way into the station. An ugly bruise discolored one of his cheekbones. Dried blood flecked his collar. His black hair was too long, raggedly cut, threaded with gray at the temples.
“I’m fine.”
“You look exhausted. Let me drive you home.” “You must think I’m stupid.”
“I’m not dangerous.”
“Says the bloodied-up man at the police station at one in the morning.” He smiled. “A good beating makes them feel better.”
“What did you do?”
“Do? You think you need to commit a crime to get beaten up by the coppers? I’m just unpopular these days. Radical ideas,” he said, still smiling. “Let me drive you home. You will be safe with me.” He put a hand to his chest. “Jailbird’s honor.”
“No, thanks.”
Elsa didn’t like the way he was staring at her. He reminded her of the hungry men who lurked in shadows to steal what they wanted. Deep-set black eyes peered out from his craggy face; he had a jutting nose and pushed-out chin. And he needed a shave. “What are you looking at?”
“You remind me of someone, that’s all. A warrior.” “Yeah. I’m a warrior, all right.”
Elsa walked away. Out on the main road, she turned left, toward the camp. It was the only thing she could think of to do. Go home. Ant was there.
Wait and hope.
