name?”
Yet in the midst of all the excitement, Ish felt himself sliding sidelong looks at the greasy beard and spotted vest, and gradually resenting Charlie more than ever.
“Watch your step,” he thought to himself. “You’re just being the provincial, resenting the intrusion of anyone else who may have different manners and ideas. You keep saying that the community needs the stimulation of new thoughts, and yet when someone else comes in, you start resenting him, and rationalizing to yourself, because you say, ‘He’s dirty on the outside, and so must have something dirty about him on the inside.’ Relax—this is a great day!” Nevertheless, all thought of its being a great day went sour inside him.
“No,” Bob was saying, “we never got to New York. We got to that other big city—Chicago. But past there the roads kept getting worse and worse—trees grown up, trees fallen around everywhere, lots of washouts, bridges gone. So we had to shift one way or the other, looking for…”
Someone cut in with another question before Bob could even finish his answer. There were half a dozen questions, each one canceling out the one before. In the hubbub, Ish caught Ezra’s eye. In that glance he seemed momentarily to sense danger, and he knew that Ezra too was watching Charlie.
Ish felt himself both reassured and justified. Ezra knew people, Ezra liked people. If Ezra was so quickly perturbed at Charlie, there must be something about which to be wary. Ish trusted Ezra in such a case much better than he trusted himself.
“Come on,” he thought again. “You don’t really know at all what Ezra’s thinking. Maybe he’s disturbed because he senses what you’re thinking. And what’s that? Maybe I’m only thrown off because I’m like any small tribesman, and fear the horrible stranger with his new ideas and his new gods to fight against mine.”
He brought himself back to what was being said. “…wear funny clothes,” he heard Dick’s voice saying. “Long white gowns, sort of, I don’t know what you call them, and they have long white sleeves in them. The men and the women both wear them. They threw stones at us. They yelled, ’Unclean, unclean!’ They kept crying, ’We are the people of God!’ They made us keep away.”
Then Em spoke. The rich roll of her voice, deep but feminine, seemed to cut in beneath the high-pitched almost yelping noises of the excited little crowd. Any of the others would have had to pound on the table and shout for attention. For her, the room grew quickly quiet, even though she did not raise her voice and the words were common-place:
“It’s late,” she was saying. “Time for dinner. The boys are hungry….”
Half-witted Evie gave one last little senseless giggle, and then she too was quiet.
Em was saying that everyone should go home now, and come back later. Ish watched Charlie, and saw that Ezra was still watching him too. Charlie’s eyes looked at Em, perhaps a moment too long. His glance shifted to Evie’s blond hair, and took on, it might have been, an appraising look. Then everyone was getting up, starting to go. Dick took Charlie off to dinner at Ezra’s.
After dinner had been got on the table and they were seated, there were a great many questions to ask. Ish let Em do most of the talking with Bob. She had all the mother’s worries to settle. Had they been sick? Found plenty to eat? Slept warm? Discussion of the trip itself was being reserved until the others returned after dinner, and Ish felt also that he should not pump Bob about Charlie. Yet he could not resist the temptation entirely, and Bob showed no reticence.
“Oh,” he said. “Charlie? Sure, we just picked him up about ten days ago, down near Los Angeles. There are quite a few people, I guess, living around Los Angeles. There are some all together, like us, and a few just scattered. Charlie was by himself.”
“Did you ask him to come along, or did he just come with you?”
Ish watched, carefully. He saw that Bob was surprised by the question, but apparently not disturbed.
“Oh, I don’t just remember. I don’t know that I asked him. Maybe Dick did.”
Ish dived into his thoughts again. Perhaps Charlie had reasons for wanting to get from Los Angeles to some other place. No, that was merely slandering a man out of prejudice without trial, and then he heard Bob going on.
“He tells lots of funny stories, Charlie does. He’s a very good guy.” Funny stories, yes, and one could imagine what kind. They were frank enough in all their language, these days; the concept of obscenity, you might say, had disappeared, largely because there was only one word for things in their vocabulary, at least among the younger ones. Obscenity seemed to have died a natural death, possibly as a counterpart to the death of romantic love. But Charlie—he might still be able to tell a dirty story. Although Ish had never been a prude about stories, still he felt his original resentment shifting to a kind of righteous indignation, in spite of his continually telling himself that he really knew nothing about Charlie, except the boys’ opinions that he was a very fine person. Ish felt himself wishing that the water had never gone off, and shocked them into doing something about the future, and thus bringing an outsider in among them.
After dinner, they all built up a big bonfire on the hillside, and gathered about it. There was much singing and skylarking of the youngsters. It was a time of celebration.
There was much excitement, but the boys gradually got their story told…. They had encountered only a few minor washouts and landslides on the highway to Los Angeles, nothing that the jeep could not negotiate in four- wheel drive. The group of religious fanatics, wearing white nightgowns and calling themselves the People of God, lived in Los Angeles. They had focused upon religion, Ish assumed, under the influence of some strong leader who had happened to survive, just as in The Tribe for lack of such a leader, they had developed almost no interest in such things.
Out of Los Angeles, the boys had taken 66 eastward, just as Ish remembered so vividly he had done in the days following the Great Disaster, when he had not been much older than the boys were now. The highway across the desert was easy and open, except for an occasional stretch where sand had blown across. They had gone along with no more trouble than blowouts here and there. The Colorado River bridge they had found shaky, but still passable.
The next community was apparently at one of the old Indian pueblos near Albuquerque. From what he could make out from the boys’ description, Ish concluded that most of the few dozen people at this little community were not very dark in complexion, but that the dominant spirit must be Indian, because their pattern of life was based on growing corn and beans as the Pueblo Indians had done for many hundreds of years. Only some of the older people talked English. This community also had drawn inward upon itself, and looked with suspicion upon the strangers. The people there had horses. They did not drive automobiles, and they rarely went into any town.
From there, the boys had swung north to Denver, and then out eastward across the plains.
“We followed a road,” said Bob. “It’s like 66, only just part of it.” He paused, hesitant. Ish thought for a minute, and then realized that the boy was trying to describe Highway 6. Some of the markers would still be standing along it, and Bob had sensed that they were the same shape as the numerals on 66, although there was only one of them. Ish was embarrassed that his own son was not sure of the numerals.
Highway 6 had led them on through the comer of Colorado, and across the plains of Nebraska.
“Lots of cattle everywhere!” Here Dick was taking up the story. “Cattle everywhere, you always see cattle.”
“Did you ever see the big brown ones with humps on their shoulders?” asked Ish.
“Yes, once we saw a few of them,” said Dick.
“How about the grass? Does any of it grow straight and stiff looking, with a head on the end, and little grains forming. When you went through they should have been still soft and milky, perhaps. When you came back, you might have seen it somewhere standing all golden with the grain hard. We called it wheat.”
“No. We saw nothing like that.”
“And how about corn? You know what that is. They were growing it there by the Rio Grande.”
“No, there is no corn growing wild anywhere.”
Onward still they had gone, finding the roads now blocked more often, since they had come to the wetter country with ranker and faster growth and heavier rains, combined with hard frosts in winter. The highways were splitting up into great chunks and blocks as the frost worked under them, wherever the surface was cracked, grass and weeds, and even bushes and young trees were springing up to block the way. Yet they had crossed what was once Iowa.
“We came to the big river,” said Bob. “it is the biggest of all, but the bridge was good.”
They had come to Chicago, but it was a mere desert of empty streets. It would be an inhospitable place,
