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 windshield? 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?
“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
