“I suppose so. We haven’t discussed it.”
Off the highway, on the gravel road now, the Mustang trailed a mist of dust that rose and thinned to nothing in the sun glare. On both sides of the road the fields stretched flat and empty to distant trees.
“This has all been picked,” Ryan said. “They’re working down a ways toward Holden now and I sure hope Bob Junior’s with them.” He let the Mustang crawl along, the gravel rattling against the car’s underbody.
“Way over there”-Ryan pointed. “There’s some pickers.” He waited until they were a little farther up the road, coming even with the pickers. “See how you straddle the row? These people are the only ones who can work bent over like that all day.”
“You did it,” Nancy said.
“I like to broke my back. After the first day I thought I’d have to quit. I guess you have to be raised a picker to be any good. Billy Ruiz, little half-pint of a guy, he’ll outpick anybody.”
They moved along the ruts, Ryan squinting out at the field lying still in the August heat and at small groups of figures, far out, working slowly along the rows but appearing to be standing in one place.
“They got to get the crop in this week,” Ryan said. “A few more days and they’re too big for pickles and all you’ve got are cucumbers-”
“I love pickle facts,” Nancy said.
Ryan looked at her. “Have you ever thought about it?”
“All the time.”
“If the grower can’t get enough pickers, I mean, good pickers to get his crop in on time, he loses his shirt. That’s why he needs the migrants.”
“I love farm labor facts, too.”
The Mustang approached the barn and outbuildings and beyond them the row of one-story buildings that were weathered a clean gray and stood in the open like a deserted Army post left to rot. As they drew closer there were signs of life: the clothes hanging on the lines and the sound of children playing.
The children, in the worn, hard-packed field next to the barn, stood for a moment watching the Mustang, then came running after it, yelling in a mixture of English and Spanish. A woman in a T-shirt and blue jeans stood in the doorway of her home; another sat on a turned-over washtub wearing a man’s straw hat. There were women in the shade of the washhouse and a woman in the open sunlight, half turned, motionless, her arms raised to the clothesline of faded denim and khaki, her gaze following the Mustang and the children running in its dust.
Ryan could hear the children and could feel the gaze of the women. He said to Nancy, “See that, like a tool shed? That’s where I lived, three of us in there.”
“Nice.”
“I don’t know. It really wasn’t so bad,” Ryan said. “It’s true what you hear about migrant camps, the awful way the people live. But when you’re living here, I mean everybody in it together, you get used to it and laugh at different things and it really isn’t so bad. We’d play ball in the evening or a guy would get his guitar out and, you know, everybody would sing.”
“Sounds like fun,” Nancy said.
Ryan looked at her. “All right, it wasn’t
“Are you ready?” She was pouring Cold Ducks into a stem glass. She had brought the bottle in a bag of crushed ice and two glasses.
“Not right now,” Ryan said.
The road curved out of the camp area and made a little jog and seemed to narrow with the trees closing in on both sides. About a hundred yards up the road they came to Ray’s place. It was in a clearing with a circular drive leading in and out, a two-story farmhouse that had been faced with green-stained logs and converted into a hunting lodge.
Nancy said, “Have you been inside?”
“No, this is the closest I’ve been.”
“He has deer heads and Indian blankets on the walls.”
“Well, it’s a hunting lodge,” Ryan said.
He turned into the drive and followed it in low gear as he studied the place. The drive was empty and the place looked deserted; still, he kept going, following the curved drive out again to the road.
Nancy was watching him. “You didn’t give it much of a look.”
“I want to see if we can get up behind it,” Ryan said.
He saw the sign down the road before he was able to read it. The sign was on the right, a painted board pointing across the road into the woods. Ryan wasn’t looking for a sign and it didn’t mean anything to him until they were close enough to read it-ROGERS-and then he remembered Mr. Majestyk telling him about the place up in the woods that would be perfect for a hunting lodge, his plan to have a couple of big A-frames stuck together with a central heating unit; that was it.
As he turned left into the dirt road Nancy said, “Now where?” She must have seen the sign, but that was all she said.
“This ought to get us up there,” Ryan said.
It was a dirt road with deep ruts, narrow and winding, so narrow in places the brush and tree branches scraped the sides of the car. They moved slowly, the springs squeaking and the flat shape of the hood out in front of them rising and dipping through the chuckholes. The road began to climb, curving into switchbacks, the trees high overhead, quiet in here and dim, with patches of sunlight and glimpses of sky up through the branches. All the way up neither of them spoke, not until they were at the top and the road opened up, ending in a cleared area, and Nancy said, “Well, now that we’re here.”
God, it was quiet, a quiet you could feel. Ryan’s door slammed loud and he stood there after he got out. Then moving and hearing only the sound of his shoes in the leaves. It was a good-sized area; it had been cleared and people had been here. He noticed a few rusted beer cans and a brown whiskey bottle and bits of paper around. Some people knew where it was, but God, it was quiet and away from everything. The only woods he had ever been in were in Detroit, in Palmer Park and on Belle Isle, and in those woods you could always hear people outside of the woods having a picnic or playing baseball. He had never been in real north-country woods.
“Now what?” Nancy said.
He didn’t answer her. He walked around, over to one side of the clearing that looked down on a lake, a narrow curved lake that sat down there by itself with thick trees growing up from its banks. He walked along the edge of the clearing, looking down into dense woods that you would have to cut your way through, to the other side, and here through an opening he could see the hunting lodge and beyond it part of the cucumber fields and the migrant camp, way down there far away, the buildings neat and orderly in the sunlight and edged with clean shadow lines. He could see the junk-heap cars back of the buildings and a little square of yellow, Luis Camacho’s bus.
God, with about a hundred and twenty thousand miles on it.
“You can see the camp,” Ryan said.
Nancy was still in the car, about twenty feet away. She said, “Really?”
“Come here, you can see it good. There’s the bus we rode up in.”
“Some other time,” Nancy said.
“I don’t know how that bus ever made it. It was the craziest ride I ever took. I mean, it wasn’t like a bus ride, it was like living on a bus for four days.” Ryan looked toward her, then walked over. “I’ll have one now.”
She poured Cold Duck into a glass and handed it to him. Ryan held it up, looking at the dark red color, and smiled.
“It reminds me of Billy Ruiz; he always drank rock and rye. You ever taste it? It’s awful.”
“Pop?”
“Terrible. It’s got a reddish color.” Ryan smiled again, looking at the stemmed glass. “He was always holding it up to see how much he had left. He’d be eating a lunch stick or something, take a bite, take a swallow, and then hold the bottle up and look at it, trying to make them come out even. It reminded me of that.”
“Let’s go,” Nancy said.
Ryan had turned from the car. He was looking off into the trees, in the direction of the migrant camp.
“I don’t know,” he said. “The way they live and all, they always seem to get along. They don’t really bitch about anything, they kid about it. I mean, I think of them as being pretty happy. I don’t mean simple, fun-loving folk,
