instead of a plot next to his house. I wrote as best I could how my parents was buried in the barn, and how the property was pretty near being the bank’s anyway, and how they could have it.
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 cafe. 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.
