They rolled into town in a cloud of dust, belongings rattling in the back. At some point Ant’s baseball bat had come loose and was rolling and thumping around in the bed of the truck, banging into things.
A brown windshield veiled the world and they couldn’t waste water for cleaning it. At every gas stop, the attendant wiped the road dust and dead bugs away with a rag.
When they pulled into the gas station, they saw a grocery store not far away. A crowd had gathered in front of it: more people than they’d seen in one place since Albuquerque.
These weren’t town folks, for the most part. You could tell by their ragged clothes and rucksacks. These were bindle stiffs—homeless men, the kind who jumped on and off trains in the middle of the night. Some were going somewhere; most were going nowhere. Elsa couldn’t help looking at each one, searching for her husband’s face. She knew Loreda did the same.
Elsa pulled up to the gas pump.
“Why are there so many people over there?” Loreda asked. “It looks like a parade or sumpin’,” Ant said.
“They look angry,” Elsa said. She waited for an attendant to come out and pump her gas, but no one came.
“There may not be gas again for a long time,” Loreda said.
Elsa understood. She and her daughter now shared an awareness of a different kind of danger on the road. If they didn’t get gas here, they wouldn’t make it across the desert.
Elsa honked her horn.
A uniformed attendant hurried toward the truck. “Don’t get out, lady.
Lock your doors.”
“What’s going on?” Elsa said, rolling down her window.
“Folks have had enough,” he said, pumping gas into the tank. “That’s the mayor’s grocery store.”
Elsa heard someone in the crowd yell, “We’re hungry. Give us food.” “Help us!”
The crowd surged toward the store’s entrance. “Open the door,” a man shouted.
Someone threw a rock. A window shattered. “We want bread!”
The mob broke down the door and surged into the store, shouting and yelling. They swarmed the interior, breaking things. Glass shattered.
Hunger riots. In America.
The attendant finished filling the tank, then untied the jug from the front of the truck hood and filled it with water and retied it. All the while, he was watching the riot going on in the store.
Elsa rolled down her window just enough to pay for her gas. “Be safe,” she said to the attendant, who said, “What’s that these days?”
Elsa drove away. In the rearview mirror, she saw more people surge into the store, bats and fists raised.
 |
AT FOUR O’CLOCK, ELSA pulled off to the side of the road, parked in the only shade she could find, and took a nap in the back of the truck. Her sleep was restless, uncomfortable, plagued by nightmares of parched earth and impossible heat. When she woke, hours later, still feeling groggy, her limbs aching, she sat up and pushed the damp hair out of her face. She saw her children, sitting in the dirt nearby, around a campfire. Loreda was reading to Ant.
Elsa got out of the truck and walked toward her children.
An overburdened jalopy rumbled past, headlights bright enough in the falling darkness to reveal a stoop-shouldered family of four walking along the shoulder of the road, going west, the mother pushing a carriage; beside
her was a white sign posted for travelers: FROM HERE ON, CARRY WATER WITH YOU.
A year ago, Elsa would have thought it insane that any woman would
think to walk from Oklahoma or Texas or Alabama to California, especially pushing a baby carriage. Now she knew better. When your children were dying, you did anything to save them, even walk over mountains and across deserts.
Loreda came up beside her. They watched the woman with the baby carriage. “We’ll make it,” Loreda said into the quiet.
Elsa didn’t know how to repond. “We made it through the Dust Bowl,” Loreda said, using the recently coined term to describe the land they’d left behind. They’d read a newspaper a few days ago, learned that April 14 had been dubbed Black Sunday. Apparently three hundred thousand tons of Great Plains topsoil had flown into the air that day. More soil than had been dug up to build the Panama Canal. The dirt had fallen to the ground as far away as Washington, D.C., which was probably why it made the news at all. “What’s a few miles of desert to explorers like us?”
“Not a speck,” Elsa said. “Let’s go.”
They walked back to the truck. Elsa paused, placed her hand on the warm, dusty metal of the hood. An amorphous fear—of so many bad outcomes—coalesced into a single word. Please. She trusted God to watch out for them.
After a late supper of beans and hot dogs and almost no conversation, Elsa herded her children into the back of the truck to sleep on the unfurled camp mattress they’d brought from home.
“You sure you’re okay driving alone at night?” Loreda asked for at least the fifth time.
“It’s cooler now. That will help. I’ll drive as far as I can tonight and then pull over to sleep. Don’t worry.” She reached past her sagging collar for the small velvet pouch she wore around her throat. She removed the copper coin, looked down at Abraham Lincoln’s craggy profile.
“The penny,” Loreda said. “It’s ours now.”
Ant touched the coin for luck. Loreda just stared at it.
Elsa put the penny back in its hiding place, kissed them good night, and then returned to the driver’s seat. She started the engine and turned on her
headlights; twin golden spears cut into the darkness as she put the truck in gear and drove away.
On the road, night erased everything except the path the headlights revealed. No cars were traveling east.
The road was as flat and black and rough as a cast-iron frying pan.
As the miles accumulated, so did her fear. It spoke to her in her father’s voice: You’ll never make it. You shouldn’t have tried. You and your children will die out here.
Every now and then, she passed an abandoned vehicle, ghostly evidence of families who’d failed.
Suddenly the engine coughed; the truck did a little jerk. The rosary looped around the rearview mirror swung side to side, beads clattering together. A cloud of steam erupted from beneath the hood.
No no no no.
She pulled to the side of the road. After a quick check on the sleeping kids—they were fine—she went to the front of the truck.
The hood was so hot it took her several tries to unlatch it, open it. Steam or smoke tumbled out in the dark. She couldn’t tell which it was.
Hopefully steam.
She couldn’t add water until the engine cooled down. Tony had drilled that fact into her head as they’d prepared for the trip. She untied the jug of water from the hood, held it close.
All she could do was wait. And worry.
She looked up and down the road; no headlights for as far as she could see.
What would happen when the sun rose? Triple-digit heat.
How close was she to the end of the desert? They had maybe three gallons of water left in their canteens.
Don’t panic. They need you not to panic.
Elsa bowed her head in prayer. She felt small out here, beneath this immense, starlit sky. She imagined the desertscape around her was alive with animals who survived in the dark. Snakes. Bugs. Coyotes. Owls.
She prayed to the Virgin Mary. Begged, really.
Finally, protecting her face with her bandanna, she opened the radiator and poured in the water. Then she retied the empty jug onto the truck and went back to her seat.
“Please, God…” she said, and turned the key in the ignition. A click, then nothing.
Elsa tried it again and again, pumping the gas, her panic bumping up with each failed attempt.
“Steady, Elsa.” She took a deep breath and tried again. The engine coughed and sputtered to life.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Elsa drove back onto the road and kept going.
Sometime around four, the road began to rise, becoming a giant unfurling snake of a thing, turning and twisting.
The air coming in through the open window cooled. Elsa’s sweat dried in itchy patches.
She drove up the steep, winding road, following the beam of her headlights, trying not to look at the cliff that crumbled away beside her.
Finally, when she could barely keep her eyes open, she pulled off the road into a wide patch of dirt ringed by tall trees.
She climbed into bed with her sleeping children, exhausted, and closed her eyes.
|
“MOM.”
“Mom.”
Elsa opened her eyes. Sunlight blinded her.
Loreda was standing by the truck. “Come here.” “Can I sleep for just—”
“No. Come. Now.”
Elsa groaned. How long had she been asleep? Ten minutes? A glance at her watch told her that it was nine o’clock.
Numb with exhaustion, she climbed out of the truck. She and Loreda walked uphill, toward a break in the trees, where Ant was waiting impatiently, bobbing up and down on bare feet.
“I need coffee,” Elsa said. “Look.”
Elsa glanced behind her, looking for a good spot to make a campfire.
“Look, Mom,” Loreda said, shaking her. Elsa turned.
They were standing at the top of a mountain, on a wide patch of flat land. Far below lay a vast swath of farmland, fields of green. Great rectangles of brown, newly tilled earth.
“California,” Ant said.
Elsa had never seen land so beautiful. So fertile. So green. California.
The Golden State.
Elsa swept her children into her arms and twirled them around, laughing so deeply it seemed to be the voice of her soul. Light returning to the dark. Relief.
Hope.
|
Loreda screamed.
Mom downshifted. The truck bucked and lurched and slowed, taking the hairpin turn at a crawl.
The cars behind them honked. They were a caravan of jalopies now, a bumper-to-bumper snake of cars going down a mountain.
Loreda clung to the metal door handle until her fingers ached and the sunburned ridge of her knuckles turned white.
The mountain road twisted again and again, some turns so sharp and unexpected that she was flung sideways.
Mom took a turn too fast, yelped in fear, and crammed the gearshift down.
Loreda screamed again. They barely missed hitting the wreckage of a jalopy in the ditch, lying on its side.
“Quit bouncing, Ant.”
“I can’t. My pee’s startin’ to come out.”
Loreda slid to the side again. The door handle pinched her skin hard enough that she cried out.
And then, at last, a huge valley stretched out in front of them, an explosion of color unlike anything Loreda had ever seen.
Bright green grass, flowering bits of color, maybe weeds or wildflowers.
Orange and lemon trees. Olive trees grew in swaths of silvery gray-green.
Cultivated green fields lay on either side of the wide black roadway. Tractors tilled large swatches of land, turned up the soil for planting. Loreda thought of the facts she’d collected as they readied for this trip. This was the San Joaquin Valley, nestled between the Coast Mountains to the west and the Tehachapi Mountains to the east. Sixty miles north of Los Angeles.
Another mountain range dominated the northern horizon, rising up like something out of a fairy tale. These were the peaks John Muir thought should be named the Range of Light.
As Loreda stared out across the San Joaquin Valley, she felt a hunger open up inside her, one she’d never imagined. Seeing all of this unexpected beauty, such colors, such majesty, she wanted suddenly to see more. America the Beautiful—the wild blue Pacific, the snarling Atlantic, the Rockies. All the places she and Daddy had dreamed of seeing. She wondered what San Francisco looked like, the city built on hills, or Los Angeles, with its white-sand beaches and groves of orange trees.
Mom pulled over to the side of the road and sat there clutching the wheel.
“Mom?”
Mom didn’t seem to hear her. She got out of the truck and walked into a field strewn with bright wildflowers. On either side, acres and acres of freshly tilled brown soil, ready for planting. The air smelled of rich earth and new growth.
Mom drew in a deep breath, exhaled. When she turned back to the truck, Loreda saw how shiny her mom’s blue eyes were.
But why cry now? They’d made it.
Mom stood there, staring out. Loreda saw a trembling in her hands and realized for the first time that Mom had been afraid. “Okay,” Mom said at last. “First Explorers Club meeting in California. Which way do we go?”
Loreda had been waiting for the question. “We’re in the San Joaquin Valley, I think. South is Hollywood and Los Angeles. North is the Central Valley and San Francisco. I reckon the biggest town in these parts is Bakersfield.”
Mom went to the back of the truck and made sandwiches while Loreda rattled off every relevant fact she’d memorized. The three of them walked
out into a field full of wildflowers and tall grass and sat down to eat.
Mom chewed her sandwich, swallowed a bite. “The only thing I know is farming. I don’t want to go to a city. No jobs. So no to Los Angeles. No to San Francisco.”
“The ocean is west of us.”
“I surely would love to see that,” Mom said, “but not yet. What good will the sea do for us? We need work and a place to live.”
“Let’s stay here,” Ant said.
“What did you call it, Loreda? The San Joaquin Valley? It sure is pretty,” Mom said. “Looks like plenty of work here. They’re getting ready to plant something.”
Loreda looked out over the field of wildflowers and the distant mountains. “Y’all are right. There’s no need to waste gas. We just need to find a place to stay.”
After lunch, they climbed back into the truck and drove deeper into the valley on a road as straight as an arrow, toward the distant purple mountains. Green fields lay on either side of the road; in some of them, Loreda saw lines of stooped men and women working the land.
They passed fields of fattening cattle and a slaughterhouse that smelled to high heaven.
As they drove past a billboard for Wonder Bread, Loreda saw a bunch of dark heaps on the ground beneath the sign.
One of the heaps sat up; it was a painfully thin boy, dressed in rags, wearing a hat with no brim on one side.
“Mom—”
Mom slowed the truck. “I see them.”
There were probably twenty of them: kids, young men, most of them dressed in rags. Worn, tattered overalls, dirty hats, shirts with torn collars. The land around them was flat and brown, unirrigated, as dry as lost hope.
“Some folks don’t want to work,” Mom said quietly. “You think Daddy’s over there?” Ant said.
“No,” Mom said, wondering how long they all would be looking for Rafe. All their lives?
Probably.
They came to a four-way stop, where a grocery store and filling station faced each other across a strip of paved road. All around were cultivated
fields. A sign read, BAKERSFIELD: TWENTY-ONE MILES.
Mom said, “We need gas, and since it’s our first day in California, I say licorice whips for all!”
“Yay!” Ant yelled.
Mom pulled off the road and onto the gravel lot, easing to a stop at the pumps. A uniformed station attendant came running out to help.
“Fill it up, please,” Mom said, reaching for her purse.
“You pay over yonder, ma’am. Same man owns the grocery store and the gas station.”
“Thank you,” Mom said to the attendant.
The three of them got out of the truck and stared across a cultivated field. Men and women were stooped over above the tufts of green. People working the fields meant jobs.
“You ever seen anything so pretty, Loreda?” “Never.”
“Can we go look at the candy, Mom?” Ant said. “You bet.”
Loreda and Ant ran across the street, toward the store, laughing and pushing each other excitedly. Ant clung to Loreda’s hand. Mom hurried to keep up with them.
An old man sat on a bench out front, smoking a cigarette, wearing a battered cowboy hat drawn low.
Inside, the general store was murky and full of shadows. A fan turned lazily overhead, casting shadows and moving the air around, not creating any real coolness. The store smelled of wooden floors and sawdust and fresh strawberries. Of prosperity.
Loreda’s mouth watered at all of the foodstuffs for sale in here. Bologna, bottles of Coca-Cola, packages of hot dogs, boxes full of oranges, wrapped loaves of Wonder Bread. Ant ran straight to the array of penny candy on the counter. Big glass jars full of licorice whips and hard candies and peppermint sticks.
The cash register was situated on a wooden counter. The clerk was a broad-shouldered man wearing a white shirt and brown pants held in place by blue suspenders. A brown felt hat covered his cropped hair. He stood as stiff as a fence post, watching them.
Loreda realized suddenly what they looked like after more than a week on the road (and years on the dying farm). Wan, thin, with pinched faces. Dresses hung together with dirt and hope. Shoes full of holes, or, in Ant’s case, no shoes at all. Dirty faces, dirty hair.
Loreda self-consciously smoothed the hair back from her face, tucked a few flyaway strands back under her faded red kerchief.
“You’d best control those kids of yours,” the man behind the counter said to Mom. “They can’t touch things with their dirty hands.”
“I’m sorry for our appearance,” Mom said, stepping up to the counter as she unclasped her purse. “We’ve been traveling and—”
“Yeah. I know. Your kind pours into California every day.”
“I got gas,” Mom said, plucking one dollar and ninety cents in coins from her wallet.
“I hope it’s enough to get you out of town,” the man said. There was a quiet after that, a drawing in of air.
“What did you say?” Mom asked.
The man reached under the counter, pulled up a gun, clanked it on the counter between them. “You best go.”
“Children,” Mom said. “Go back to the truck. We’re leaving now.” She dropped the coins onto the floor and herded the kids out of the store.
The door banged shut behind them.
“Who does he think he is? Just ’cause he hasn’t hit hard times, the crumb thinks he has the right to look down on us?” Loreda said, infuriated and embarrassed. He had made her feel poor for the first time in her life.
Mom opened the truck door. “Get in,” she said in a voice so quiet it was almost frightening.
