All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky

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 café. 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.

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.