I didn’t like the idea of the bank owning my kin’s bodies, but I had always been taught it wasn’t the body that mattered, it was the life inside it. That life was long gone now.
While I was finishing the note, Jane come up, Tony lagging along behind her.
“We really shouldn’t wait around,” Jane said. “We should start trying to make some real ground before another storm settles in. We’re fed and we got a car and we’re ready to go, and I say we should go.”
“Dang right,” Tony said.
I wasn’t all that certain it was the right thing to do, but I was pretty certain it was the only thing to do.
Back at the car, we put our bags of goods on the back floorboard. Jane got in on the front passenger side, and Tony rode in the backseat. There was plenty of room for him and the goods, and even some room left over for another two boys just Tony’s size. That was some big Ford.
I backed us out of the barn and bumped along over the sand. It was slow going, but it was going.
And I won’t lie—theft or not, it felt pretty good to know I had a V8 Ford and my foot on the gas, and that I was driving away from all that death and all that sand, pushing on forward with some kind of hope. I didn’t know right then where I was going. But I knew one thing for sure.
Wherever I was going in that stolen Ford, I was darn sure going to try to get there fast.
6
It was a long time before we found any kind of ruts we could ride in, but when we did, we started moving faster, and I got a little braver about my driving. Course, I had to hope I didn’t grind the gears so much I burned up the clutch or tore up the engine in some way, or ran off into a ditch and killed us all.
Jane kept saying stuff like “I thought you said you could drive.”
“I said I could drive, but I didn’t say I was any good at it. I ain’t Henry Ford his ownself. I’m just me.”
“I see that,” Jane said.
“I think he does all right,” Tony said. In that moment, I liked him a lot.
“It’s all right if you look where you’re going,” she said. “Nobody is going to give you points for guesswork.”
We rode along like that for a while, and I started taking in the sights, such as they were. It was mostly dust, and every field looked just like the others. There were some fences standing, but most of them were pushed down by the sand and the wind, and a few were leaning and about to go. There were a number of dead rattlesnakes hanging off the barbwire fences. There were a lot of folks around them parts had Cherokee blood in them, my family being one of them. Cherokee believed if you killed a rattlesnake and put it so it could be seen, the gods would give rain. So far, them that believed that had been wrong, and the only thing that had come of it was a lot of dead snakes.
After we had driven for a while, I said, “Maybe if we’re going to run off somewhere, we ought to know where it is we’re going.”
“Away from here,” Tony said. “That’s good enough.”
“I’m for deciding which way to go,” I said as the car bumped along. “Any kind of idea might be good, since so far, nobody has one.”
“I don’t know about that,” Jane said. “Seems to me I’m the only decisive one in the bunch. Wasn’t for me, you’d still be at home alone, and Tony here would have stayed under a collapsed house till what food there was run out and he dried up and blew away.”
“That’s probably true,” Tony said.
Actually, she had a point, but she still didn’t have a direction. I decided to take the bull by the horns.
“California?” I said. “How about we go there? They got work, and we’re all able-bodied enough to work.”
“I’m kind of a runt,” Tony said.
“They don’t make no difference in age or size in the fields,” I said. “You can stand on a stool to pick an orange, or get down on your knees to dig a tater.”
“I was hoping for a brain-using job,” Tony said.
“I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one,” I said.
“Not long ago, Pa was in town talking to a fella who had come back from California,” Jane said. “Took his whole family. Was gone two months. He said it wasn’t the paradise you’d think. They called everybody that come out there Okies, even if they wasn’t from here. People got beat and robbed and taken advantage of, and with so many folks scrambling for jobs, there weren’t many to be had. He come back to Oklahoma, though he said it was like it was when he left. He wanted to go somewhere else, but his truck broke down and they couldn’t go nowhere else unless they walked. He said the oranges in California was fresh, though, and it was real green.”
“We need more than oranges, and greenery is nice to look at, but the main green we need is dollar green,” I said.
“In my bag,” Jane said, “I got fifteen dollars saved. It’ll be a start.”
“I got a dollar,” Tony said. “What you got, Jack?”
“Pocket lint.”
“So,” Jane said, “we got sixteen dollars and some pocket lint.”
“But we got high hopes,” I said. “We’re all ready to conquer the world, except we don’t know where we’re going.”
“I always heard we had kin in East Texas, around Tyler,” Jane said, looking out the side window. “I don’t know them none, but I think they’re an aunt and an uncle. If we could find them, they might give us some kind of help.”
“I ain’t never heard of them,” Tony said.
“That’s because it never came up when you were around.”
“All right, then,” I said. “Which way do you figure is East Texas from here?”
“I’d go south first, and then when we get to Texas, veer east.”
“Point taken,” I said.
7
We eventually found a pretty good road. Driving along, we passed a couple of old trucks packed down with all manner of goods, heading out of Oklahoma. As we did, I seen the drivers was men wearing old hats and a touch of beard. They was missing teeth and had expressions so sad it made my heart hurt just looking at them. They looked like those husks of insects you find after spiders have sucked the juice out of them. In those faces was dead children and blowed-away farms and buried dreams, and like us, I figured they didn’t have no true direction. Just an urge to get away and hope there was something beyond their view from the windshield.
We come upon a little town. I hadn’t never been there before. I had been to Hootie Hoot, which was the closest town to us, but this one, which was called Ferguson, was new to me. Thing was, I hadn’t never been any farther in this direction than the back of our forty acres. The Catchers weren’t by nature much on traveling, especially since traveling costs money. But here I was, a regular family renegade, on the road and rolling forward.
While we was riding into town, Jane said, “I think we ought to stop here and use some money to eat at a café. That will be our treat. Then we can buy a few goods at the store to take with us, and from then on we can eat on the way, stopping beside the road to picnic.”
“We brought goods,” I said.
“Those are our emergency goods,” she said. “And we should get some gas.”
“We got plenty of gas,” I said.
“An emergency thinker stays ready and prepared. If we fill it now, we won’t have to worry for a long while. We don’t know what’s up the road, Jack. Let’s top it off.”
For some reason, I was starting to do whatever she wanted. It annoyed me, but I couldn’t keep from doing it.
I saw a gas station, so I pulled over by the pump and got out and looked around until I found the tank on the car. I had never put gas in a car. Daddy had always done the job, so I didn’t even know for sure where it went in.
An old man with no teeth came out and grinned some gums at me. He said, “How much gas you wanting?”
I hadn’t considered, but Jane was out and coming around the back end of the car. She said, “Give us two dollars, if it’ll hold it, and can you check the oil and water and get the wind
shield? Might check the air in the tires too.”
“Yes, ma’am, I can do that,” he said, glancing into the car at Tony. “You kids running away from home or something? Are you a family and that’s your little boy?”
“Really,” Jane said. “Do we look old enough to be parents of a boy that size?”
“No, but it’s a conversation starter,” the old man said.
“We ain’t got no parents,” I said. “We’re off to East Texas. We think.”
“You think?”
“We’re a little fuzzy on directions,” I said. “I know you got to go south before you go east, but that’s about it. And I know that because she told me.”
“You ain’t running from the law, are you?” the old man said.
“Heavens no,” Jane said. “We’re brothers and sister. And this car is the family car. Our kin is all dead. The dirty pneumonia got them all. You want to know something else that stinks? Dang dog died the same day the cows stopped giving milk and the chickens quit laying. Ain’t that something? Only thing missing was dropping our last dollar down a rat hole.”
I had suspicions all along, but now they were confirmed. Jane was a born liar. And though she was a natural at it, good as anyone I’d ever heard, she was also one that didn’t like to quit if she had a good audience. She kept right on painting the barn, so to speak, when there wasn’t no need for paint, or for that matter when the paint bucket was empty. She wasn’t just a liar and a thief, she had turned me into both, and it was my fault because I’d let her.
“We’ve got a few dollars and some goods, but not much,” she said, “and we’re going to East Texas to find relatives, if they’ll have us. We’re all talented singers, and think we might form a family group with us and the relatives, like the Carter Family. Only we got a real high tenor in the boy there, and that will make us unique.”
She nodded at Tony. He smiled and waved.
“Well now,” said the old man, eyeing Tony through the window, as if he might want to burn the image of him on to his brain so he could tell folks he had seen a high tenor up close, “that’s quite the business. You know, this car looks familiar to me. Do you know a fellow named Otto Turpin?”
Jane pursed her lips and looked up a bit, like she was giving it some serious thought, shook her head slowly, said, “Nope. Can’t say I do. You, Eugene?”
It took me a second to realize that she had christened me with that name.
“No,” I said. “It don’t ring a bell.”
The old man nodded. “Yeah, well, tell you what, wait right here while I get my tire gauge, and then I’ll get your gas.”
When the old man was back inside the station, I said, “What’d you have to tell him all that for? And call me Eugene?”
Jane wasn’t listening to me. “He recognized the car. He knows we’re thieves.”
She went quickly to the door of the station, looked in, and came back.
“He went out the back door,” she said. “I bet he’s going to get some kind of law, though what it would be in this little hole is beyond me.”
She went around and got in on her side of the car, and by then I figured out that we was leaving, and in a hurry.
I cranked up the Ford and we got back on the road, and as soon as we was to the city limits sign, which took about two minutes, I jammed my foot down on the gas. The road was a main road, and the county had worked at scraping it clear of dust mounds, and for the first time I began to open up and feel the throb of the engine through the steering wheel, the power of that big machine.
8
“They’re going to go check on Turpin,” I said, “and when they find him dead, they’re going to think we murdered him.”
“Murdered him?” Jane said. “And how did we do that? Piled sand on top of him while he sat there rocking, smoking his pipe? No. Even the locals around here won’t be that dumb.”
“You’re one of the locals,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, “but I can read.”
“So can I.”
“What? Tractor Digest?”
“You ain’t been to school any more than me. And there ain’t no school no more. We ain’t had school in more than a year. Ain’t no school to go to. Storms shut it down.”
“The teacher teaches in her own home,” Tony said. “I went there to stay away from Pa. He had a hankering to whip my butt now and then for entertainment. So school’s better.”
“That’s right,” Jane said. “And I went to school because I value an education.”
“It’s certainly doing you a lot of good right now,” I said. “You’ve left two men dead, stolen a car, and now we’re running from the law.”
Jane turned and looked through the back windshield.
“By the time that old man tells the law, we’re out of his town. And by the time he can get word to the county, we’ll be long gone.”
She turned front again. “It’s like in them movies where the cowboy crosses the Rio Grande and is free.”
“We’re going to Mexico?” I said.
“No,” she said, “course not. We’re going to East Texas. I was speaking in a metaphorical way.”
“You were?” I said.
“You wouldn’t understand. Teacher taught that after you stopped coming.”
9
We drove all day.
I thought about Old Man Turpin as we drove. I wondered how he afforded such a nice car. It wasn’t but a couple years old and didn’t look to have been driven all that much. I wondered what he thought about when he was alone in his house with his new Ford in the barn and no place to go and his supper on the table with no one to share it with.
He wasn’t a friendly man—he wouldn’t even wave at you if he passed you on the street in town. If he did speak to you, it was usually to complain. He once stopped me on the street to tell me I ought not to eat a peppermint stick while I was walking ’cause I might fall down and it might punch through the top of my mouth and stick me in the brain.
I thought that a little unlikely. I also thought he probably didn’t care if I was brain-stabbed or not. It was just something to complain about. Like Mama used to say about mean folks, they’ve always got some kind of pain of their own, and they don’t mind sharing it.
It must have been that way for him to finally give up and sit on his porch in his rocking chair and let blowing sand that cut like buckshot cover him up while he tried to smoke his pipe. Something like that wasn’t any kind of accident. You had to be dedicated to it.
But all that said, he traveled some. At least as far as that filling station behind us. The old man had recognized the car. Heck, for all I knew, Turpin was a big man around town there. I don’t guess you really know nothing about nobody unless you walk around in their shoes some.
I found a station in a town some fifty miles out of Ferguson, and we got gas there, but we didn’t stop at a café to eat because we was on the run and couldn’t afford time or money for such foolishness now. Jane bought us some pickled eggs from a big jar in the station and some Cokes, and we ate and drank while I drove.
No one had recognized the car at the station, as far as we could tell, so I figured that Ferguson was about as far south as Old Man Turpin went. Or at least, I hoped so. He didn’t strike me as a world traveler, any more than we was.
As we rode, I looked alongside the roads and saw the sand piled there, and beyond the edge of the roads was more sand. It reminded me of pictures I had seen in schoolbooks of the Arabian Desert, and it occurred to me that I had near forgot how things had looked before the great winds had come and picked up all the good earth and thrown it to the sky. Thrown it up there and whirled it around, sorted out what good topsoil remained—and that wasn’t much—and then chucked it all over Oklahoma and beyond. It was hard to remember how things had looked when the woods were thick and the fields were high with green corn and rows of shiny green beans and peanuts and potato tops thick and standing up tall, letting you know if you dug down under them, you’d
find some fat potatoes for cleaning, cutting, and frying. Peanuts to parch and crack and eat raw. Plenty of peas to pick and boil up with a chunk of pork rind. All gone now.
It was hard to remember the last time I was truly clean. When there wasn’t any dust under my collar, behind or in my ears, or in my hair. It was hard to remember being able to walk to school, or darn near anywhere except a field, and not have to stop to pour dust out of your shoes.
It was hard to remember when all the earth hadn’t been thrown to the sky.
I thought on all these things as I drove, and I have to admit, it was both bitter and sweet, but it was nice to have my head free of Jane’s words for a while. After the pickled egg and the Coca-Cola, she had grown silent—a condition that I figured was unnatural to her, and on some level didn’t suit her, but right then I was grateful for it.
The sand didn’t come during the day, and by the time we took an old road off the main highway and parked alongside a creek that actually had water in it, under an oak that actually had leaves, it was near nightfall.
The trail wound down off the road and under the tree in such a way we were well out of eyeshot from the highway, but not so deep down we couldn’t be back up there in fifteen minutes.
We had a number of goods we’d brought, and one of those was a small pot. We put that aside, gathered sticks, and made a stack of little ones for tinder and bigger ones for real fuel, and we did all this under the oak tree. We put matches to the sticks and started a fire. Next we opened a can of beans and heated them up in the pot. We dipped the beans out of the pot with a cup, put them in the wooden bowls we had. We each had our own spoon, and had even been smart enough to bring some pepper and salt. The beans wasn’t like Mama used to make them, as they was canned beans we’d had to fight open with a can opener, but they tasted pretty good just the same.