coffee. “You wouldn’t happen to have a cigar, would you?”
No reply.
“You get dust storms?” he asked.
“That’s down south,” said an old man. “ Oklahoma and Texas.”
“You got the time?”
“Yes, sir,” said a young man.
“Don’t see any harm in you tellin’ me.”
“Better check.”
“You got to check with someone to tell a fella the time?”
“I don’t have to check with nobody.”
“Hush up,” said the old man.
The boy returned to the room alone, hours after sundown, Charlie hearing his feet on the slats, and told him it was close to midnight. The hours went like that, although Charlie rarely dozed. “Why don’t you get some sleep, Mr. Urschel.”
“I can’t.”
“You want a spot of ’shine?”
“I’d like to use the facilities before I sleep. Is that okay? Or should you ask?”
The young man unlocked him from the high chair and bound the chains tighter at the wrist, checking the manacles on his legs. The boy prodded Charlie on with what he took for the butt of a shotgun, and would tell him to turn here and there, and then grabbed his elbow as they came to the porch and some rickety steps, Charlie nearly tripping over a baying hound awoken from sleep.
The outhouse smelled like a thousand outhouses he’d known, hastily slapped together in the oil fields, but he never had grown used to the stench. He was able to unlatch his pants and sit, and, with his hands loose, play a bit with the tape over his eyes, loosening the cotton a bit and readjusting, moonlight flooding through the cutout in the door. Tattered catalog images of women in their brassieres and slips had been tacked to the leaning walls, and old corncobs were placed in a box at his feet. Flies buzzed from the carved wooden seat and echoed deep within the hole and in the stench of it all, and Charlie Urschel began to plan his escape.
When he finished, with the cotton loose from his eyes, he unlatched the outhouse door and stumbled before the boy. He could see him now through the slits. A short, squatty fella with grease-parted hair and wearing a pair of Union overalls. The 12-gauge looked to have rusted shut long ago.
The boy reached in the overalls’ flap and pulled out a cigar. He placed it into Charlie’s hands and asked if he’d like him to light her up. Charlie said, “Sure, why not?,” and so the boy struck a couple matches and waited until the cigar got going.
Charlie stretched his legs and took in the layout of the little shack, the small hogpen and chicken coop. He saw the old well with a bucket, and in the far distance, perhaps a mile, he saw the lights of another house.
“How does she smoke, Mr. Urschel?”
“Thank you just the same,” Charlie said. “But not my brand.”
The boy remained sullen all the way back into the shack, where he told Charlie to change into a pair of pajamas. Charlie got settled back against the wall where he could get chained up for the night.
“Just how much of a cut are you gettin’, son?”
THE TELEPHONE CALL WAS PLACED FROM A SINCLAIR OIL FILLING station just across the Canadian River bridge west of the city. Jones interviewed the proprietor of the station near midnight, and the man told him right quick that it had been a couple beggars from down in Hooverville who’d made the call, even bumming the nickel from a customer. The man gave him a fair description of the two, and Jones told Berenice Urschel to wait at the station or he could call an agent to pick her up.
“I want to go with you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“You bet I do,” she said. “I can pick him out.”
Jones looked away from the gas pumps toward the oil-drum fires burning among the lean-tos and clapboard shelters. You could smell the stink and shit and cook fires even through the cut of gasoline.
“I won’t have it.”
“Then I’ll go myself.”
Berenice Urschel was already halfway across the highway following a rutted road into the camp when Jones caught up with her. He didn’t say a word as they were swallowed into the wall-to-wall dwellings, women washing laundry in galvanized tubs, nursing babies, and cooking bottom-feeding fish across small fires. A latrine had been dug along the roadway that wound its way to the river where the chamber pots and rotten food had been dumped. The smell was something to behold, and Jones covered his face several times with a handkerchief he pulled from his shirt pocket.
Standing high on the hill, you could see the tin roofs-hundreds of them-gleaming silver in the full moon. The Canadian River moved slow and sluggish in the crook of the bend.
“They live like animals,” Berenice Urschel said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Jones said. “Every city’s got one.”
“I never read of this place.”
“Ain’t a good postcard for the Chamber.”
“Where do they come from?”
“The country,” he said. “Nowhere else to go, you head to the city, looking for work.”
“But women and children,” she said. “This just isn’t decent.”
“These days, it’s what we got.”
Jones followed Mrs. Urschel, who stumbled for a moment, holding on to some rusted sheet metal and making a big, clanging racket. A tall, skeletal figure appeared from the lean-to and thrust a sharpened stick at Jones. “Who is it?”
The boy’s eyes were the color of spoiled milk. Peach fuzz covered his upper lip.
“Looking for someone.”
“Who are you?”
“Just looking,” Jones said again.
The boy reached out and touched the soft cotton of Jones’s suit jacket and moved his fingers across the side where he kept the thumb buster. He stepped back, “You the law?”
“I’m the law.”
“You gonna burn us out again?”
“Just looking for a couple hustlers that took this woman’s money.”
“Wasn’t me.”
“Didn’t say it was.”
Berenice hadn’t said a word, fascinated by the young boy with the milky eyes. Almost in a trance, she glanced down to see her hand had been cut on the sheet metal, and she stared at it with awe as the drops ran down the length of her arm and twisted back to her elbow. Jones thrust the white handkerchief into her hand and clenched her fingers inward to make a fist.
“What happened?” she asked. “Where are your eyes?”
“These is my eyes,” the boy said. “Got caught in a duster. I seen it from forever. You just noticed a line of it, just a line of ink on paper, and then it got thicker and grew till you saw it as a flood. Daylight all ’round you. Birds started to get nervous, animals turning in circles.”
“You with your people?” Jones asked.
“Daddy’s gone to find work,” he said. “Mama’s dead.”
Jones nodded. “C’mon,” he said, Berenice standing still.
“I tried to make it back,” the boy said. “I thought we was in End-Times. I covered up my mouth with a rag, but my ears were plugged, and no matter how tight I shut my eyes that dang grit worked in there. Couldn’t hear nothin’. Couldn’t feel nothin’. I thought I was dead, laying there tasting the dirt, already buried and gone, and I wondered if this wadn’t what God had planned for us, that heaven wadn’t no reward but the taste of dirt and knowing it.”
