“I know that,” Jane said. “But it doesn’t hurt to warn him. I don’t like Bad Tiger and Timmy.”
“Of course you don’t. If you did, I’d be worried.”
“I didn’t like what I thought they were thinking when it come to me.”
“Ain’t no thinking about it,” I said. “That’s exactly what they’re thinking, only with a killing at the end of it all.”
“Yeah, well, I told Timmy I wouldn’t forget he hit me with that toilet paper.”
“So that’s what this is about,” I said. “You getting even. You think helping Strangler gets you even with Timmy over a roll of tossed toilet paper?”
“Some. But I don’t want some man’s death on my hands who was just trying to help a crippled child neither.”
“Strangler ain’t your father. He might be as bad as they are. He might kill you himself.”
“I don’t think so. Not with him doing for his daughter what he did. Robbing a bank to pay for her operation. That’s a fellow that’s got backbone. That’s love.… Besides, that’s not all that matters. Doing something to help someone else that’s between a rock and a hard place, it’s just the sort of thing that gives you a sense of worth.”
“Couldn’t you find something else other than trying to keep Strangler from getting killed to give you worth?” I said. “We could turn out worthy but dead.”
“I’m not asking you to do a thing,” she said.
“The heck you aren’t,” I said. “I’d say you’re asking me plenty.”
“Jack, you don’t have to do a thing you don’t want to do. It’s me I’m talking about. I want to do something that gives me adventure and does something noble for someone. Something that makes me want to get up and get going in the morning, not just lie there hoping the wind quits blowing. Life needs to be about something more than milking a cow or throwing corn at chickens. King Arthur and his knights weren’t about milking cows and feeding chickens. They had quests to keep them busy.”
“We’re not King Arthur or his knights, and they weren’t fooling with gangsters.”
“You, Jack Catcher, are easily satisfied. Pa never figured anything for me but what he had. Getting married, and maybe having a husband that didn’t run off, and me having babies between putting up canned goods and frying a chicken.”
“Lots of people do that,” I said. “They get along okay.”
Jane nodded. “It’s all right if they want it. But no one asked me what I wanted. Pa, everyone else, just expected me to do a certain thing because that’s what they thought life was. I don’t need some obligation to hold me down. What I need is a choice that isn’t already made for me. What I need is to go out and see if the world is flat, round, or some kind of triangle. I need to feel I’ve seen something and done something that isn’t the same thing everyone else has seen or done.”
We sat and listened to crickets for a while. I turned over in my head what she had been saying. It was more than I could get hold of.
I looked up, smiled at her. “Say, where is that toilet paper, anyway?”
“I left it in the pig truck,” she said. “I figured he ought to have something for his troubles.”
“It isn’t much,” I said, “but it was nice of you.”
“Actually, I just forgot it.”
We sat for a little while without talking. Finally I said, “Do you really want to try and find Strangler?”
“We need a mission,” Jane said. “A goal. Like Sir Galahad. He went searching for the Holy Grail. Strangler will be our grail. The quest will teach us who we are.”
“You have to teach someone that?” I asked.
“I think you do,” Jane said. “And through the process of the quest, we learn what we’re looking for. The quest is everything.”
“What are we looking for?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I reckon we’ll know it when we find it.”
“What’s a quest, by the way?”
“Same as a mission. Same as a goal.”
“Then why not say goal or mission?”
“Because it gives it weight to call it a quest,” she said. “It gives it true purpose and meaning. It just sounds better.”
“What about Tony? Maybe he don’t want a mission. Maybe he wants to be like everyone else.”
“I don’t know about Tony. He’s just a kid. I practically raised him. What with Mama running off with that Bible salesman—which, by the way, put me off church forever—and our pa not really caring if we was loved, just doing what he thought was responsible because it’s what was responsible, I’ve been pretty much all the mother and father Tony’s had.”
“Being responsible isn’t all bad,” I said.
“Not all bad. But it sure means a lot more when you do it because you love somebody, and not because you think you’re supposed to and the church wants you to, or your neighbors, or whoever. I just wanted to be loved like any daughter. And Tony ought to have been loved like any son. Not just loved by his big sister. You got some of that kind of feeling, Jack. I can tell. Your pa may have lost his place when your mama died, but he loved you. Mine didn’t. Me and Tony was the same as property. We might as well have been middlebusters and cultivators for all the love Pa gave us.”
“I don’t know I had it so good,” I said. “Daddy wrote me a suicide note.”
“What did it say?”
I told her.
“There you go. At least there was an apology involved.”
She leaned over close to me and said, “Look here.”
I turned and she leaned forward and kissed me. I liked it.
We did it again.
When I pulled back that time, I hardly had any breath.
I leaned forward for one more. Jane said, “No. That’s enough. Don’t make more of it than what it was. A kiss between friends.”
“It was mighty friendly,” I said. I moved toward her again, but she put a hand on my chest and gently pushed me back.
“Wouldn’t do us any good if Mrs. Carson saw me kissing my brother, now, would it?”
“I ain’t your brother,” I said.
“Yeah, but Mrs. Carson don’t know that. That story I told earlier, I figure they’ve already got us pegged as a pretty odd family, so we don’t want to put fuel on the fire, now, do we?”
23
Mrs. Carson’s house was big. She had a room for me and Tony to share, and she gave Jane her own. After we went to bed, Jane slipped into our room. We still had the electric light on, which, come to think of it, was the only kind of lights Mrs. Carson had. At home we had some electricity, but with the sandstorms blowing down wires, we mostly used kerosene and candles.
The bed was nice and there was no dust anywhere. The house had the best-sealed windows I had ever seen.
All I knew was it kept out the dust.
I thought that this wouldn’t be such a bad place to stay, and we really were orphans, and maybe those church people Mrs. Carson talked about could help us out.
Anyway, Jane came in and said, “Mrs. Carson wants to see us all.”
We went into the kitchen, where Mrs. Carson sat looking clean and nice under the electric light over the kitchen table. She had a trim face, and the bones stood up high in her cheeks and her eyes were bright, like she was always surprised about something. I guess she was older than Mama by some years, but she didn’t look worn out the way Mama had. Mrs. Carson was soft and smooth-looking, and when she moved, you couldn’t take your eyes off her. She had a manner about her that was like some kind of strange but beautiful bird. She fit perfectly in her beautiful house.
The light over the table didn’t have a pull cord, like I was used to. None of the lights in the house had that. They all had switches. The light over the table was a big chandelier with lots of bulbs, and it made quite a glow. It was almost like being out in the yard at high noon. The walls were bright with paint and the floors were shiny with polish, and there wasn’t any sand in the corners or up in the curtains. Right
then, at that moment, it was the perfect place to be.
Mrs. Carson smiled at us as we came in and asked us to sit at the table. When we were all seated, she said, “That story you told me earlier. I just want you to know I didn’t believe a word of it. Not literally, anyway. But I do believe you kids are in trouble, and anyone that would make up a whopper like that is either a con person or someone who needs help. I decided you were the latter, though, girl, you have a bit of the former in you.”
“Why, thank you,” Jane said, as if it was a compliment.
“I wasn’t always well off,” Mrs. Carson said. “My husband and I had some good fortune. Now he’s gone. I try to help others when I can.”
“I’m sorry I lied to you,” Jane said.
“That’s all right,” Mrs. Carson said, “but you must never do it again.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jane said.
“The part about the dog was especially precious, dear,” Mrs. Carson said. “But you must not butter up your stories so. It makes them too slippery to handle. And Jack here, I doubt that happened to him … what you said happened.”
“No, ma’am, and he isn’t my brother either.”
“I didn’t think so. You don’t look anything alike. But Tony here, he’s your brother, right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jane said.
“What I want to tell you is this. If you want to stay, you can stay. I’ll do what I can. I’m all alone, and I don’t have any family. I wouldn’t mind the company.”
“I don’t think we can,” I said. “Jane and I have someone we want to help.”
“Help?” Mrs. Carson said.
“It’s a long story,” I said, not wanting to tell her the truth, because it sounded almost as crazy as the story Jane had made up. “There isn’t much to it. We just want to do right by someone.”
“I hope that’s the truth,” Mrs. Carson said.
“It is, ma’am,” Jane said.
Mrs. Carson nodded. “What about you, Tony?”
Tony looked at us, and then he looked at Mrs. Carson. “I like it here. I like it here fine,” he said.
“Then you should stay,” Jane said. “We’ll come back. I will.”
“Me too,” I said.
“I’d like to stay, but I got to stick with my sister,” Tony said. “She might need me.”
Mrs. Carson nodded again. “I could get the law on you so you wouldn’t go out there and get yourself hurt, but I haven’t the heart for it. I wouldn’t do that. You are welcome to stay as long as you like. And if you go away, you are welcome back. But with truer stories.”
“When we come back,” I said, “we will have the whole story for you. We appreciate your kindness. We really are orphans. We really have had bad times.”
“Who hasn’t?” Mrs. Carson said. “It’s just the bad times aren’t always the same kind of bad times for everybody.”
24
We slept good that night knowing we weren’t liars anymore, but we still got up early. I found some paper and a pencil in the kitchen and wrote a thank-you note to Mrs. Carson, and then we left quietly.
It was still dark when we started down the road. Mrs. Carson had given us some supplies, and we had those in big nice canvas bags slung over our shoulders. The bags were a little heavy, but as we ate what was in them, they would grow lighter. Not everything in them was food. There was a flashlight with spare batteries, some matches, and a few other odds and ends.
By the time the sun was up good, we were well out of town, and Jane, now wearing something nice, easily walked out to the edge of the road and caught us a ride by looking charming.
It was something she felt bad about in a way, as it didn’t live up to her idea of women and equality. She had given me the lecture on it as we walked. I thought it made sense, though I wasn’t sure I understood everything there was to know about it, and I’m not sure she did either.
The ride was another truck. Jane sat up front again and Tony and me sat in the back. The driver was a young man this time, and the truck wasn’t filled with pigs. It had short sideboards.
Tony was silent for a long time; then he said, “I liked it back there.”
“You didn’t have to leave. You want, we’ll stop the driver and walk back with you.”
“I just said I liked it there. I didn’t say go back. Mrs. Carson was nice.”
“Very nice.”
“But I wouldn’t be with you two if I went back,” he said.
“We could come back,” I said.
“Sometimes people say they’ll do something and they don’t,” Tony said. “They mean it, but they don’t do it.”
“I suppose that’s true,” I said. “But I’ll make you a promise. I won’t never leave you unless you want to be left. Understand?”
“Yeah,” Tony said. “Yeah. I do.”
“Good.”
Tony didn’t say any more about it, and I watched through the rear window as Jane did her magic with the driver. I wondered what lie she was telling this time.
We rode with him almost to the Red River. Then we walked across a bridge, which in that spot wasn’t over much of a river at all. After we had been walking on the other side of the bridge for a while, it started to grow dark. There didn’t seem to be any good place to stop along the road, so we went off it, to where some trees grew along the river.
As we walked, I got out the flashlight and shone it on the ground in case of water moccasins, which don’t like being surprised and are fairly ill-tempered. We hadn’t gone far when we saw a campfire in the woods and we could hear people singing.
“What do you think?” Jane said.
“Hobo camp,” I said. “It could be a place to rest and maybe share some food, and it could be a place to get our heads stove in.”
“They sound cheerful,” Jane said.
“Maybe they sing cheerful songs in hell,” I said. “You can’t tell by that.”
Hoboes were all over these days. Thousands of them. Riding the rails and walking along them. Drifting in and out of towns like tumbleweeds blown by the wind. Men, and sometimes women and children. All of them without work, without homes, and without hope. Shuffling about, mostly in worn-out clothes and toeless shoes. Bumming meals from homes along the way, picking through trash and hunting rabbits, sometimes cats and dogs, with nothing more than a heavy stick. Looking for anything to eat. All they had to look forward to was whatever was around the next bend in the road. Mama fed a few from our back door before things got so bad we couldn’t feed ourselves. For a while there, they came in droves. When they knew Oklahoma was completely played out, and the people they was begging from was near as bad off as they was, they moved on.
I had always felt sorry for them. Right now, we was just like them. Homeless. No family. And hungry.
“I think we should check it out,” Jane said.
“And I’ll say what I said again. You don’t know who’s out there, or what kind of people they are.”
It was no use. Jane had already started toward the fire.
We went through a little group of trees and there was a clearing. In the clearing was a fire, and on the fire was a pot, and around the fire was a bunch of hoboes. That made me think there was probably a train track nearby where they could jump on and off.
As we walked up, the singing stopped. Standing close to the fire was a big man with a worn-out jacket and baggy pants and shoes with soles that weren’t fully attached. It wasn’t really a cold night, but there was something that drew us to them. I suppose that fire seemed cheerful, and we needed all the cheer we could get.
There were four others there. A woman in pants, like Jane—who had gotten a fresh pair from Mrs. Carson—and she had on a big baggy shirt. She was missing some teeth and her hair was cut short. Two of the others looked enough like each other to be brothers, and might have been. There was one other. He was dressed in a suit with a very nice fedora and brand-new two-tone shoes. He was full-faced but kind of handsome in a hangdog manner. I reckon he
was thirty or so.
“Hello the fire,” I said. I knew from hearing Daddy talk that this was the way you greeted a camp. You let them know you was out there, so as someone with a gun wouldn’t part your hair with a bullet or bend a log over your noggin.
“Hello yourself,” said the big man. “Come on in.”
There were logs and broken-down trees around the fire, and the folks there were either standing around or sitting on those. We sat down on one of the broken-down trees.
“Can you contribute?” said the big man.
“Beg pardon?” I said.
“Something to add to the pot,” he said. “It’s right skinny. We got some potatoes boiling in the water, some salt and pepper, and there’s even most of an apple in there.”
“We do have some things,” I said. “How about a can or two of beans, and one of canned hash?”
“Excellent,” said the big man. “I’m Jimbo, and the lady here we call Boxcar Bertha, and them two boys that look so much alike are brothers. I don’t remember their names.”
One of them said, “I’m Sam, he’s Joe.”
The big man turned to the well-dressed man, said, “This here fella, he brought us the potatoes. What’s your name, sir?”
“Floyd,” he said.
“He just come up.”
“Mighty nice suit you got on, mister,” Jane said.
“Thanks,” he said. “Maybe not the place for it, but it’s what I had on when I had to leave abruptly.”
“Leave where?” Jane said.
“A town. By train. I caught it and rode it and got off up the way. I’ll catch it out tomorrow.”
“Where’s it go?” I asked.
“Fort Worth, Texas. I’ll get off there because I have to see someone lives there.”
“You look to me to be a man that has another line of work besides catching trains,” Jane said.
“You might say that,” he said, but he didn’t offer what line of work it was. Everyone had gone quiet when Jane had spoken, so I figured it was a rule of the road not to pry unless someone offered you information. I couldn’t say that for a fact, not being an experienced hobo and all, but it struck me that way.