All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky

14

We rode in the car in the way Bad Tiger said for us to ride, and we rode that way all through the day and into the night, except for when they stopped to switch drivers, or we took turns going off in the woods one at a time to do our business.

When Timmy drove, Bad Tiger moved me up front with Timmy, and he moved Jane to the backseat and sat between her and Tony. I don’t think he did it because he cared all that much for Jane’s welfare, I think it was because he admired Jane for standing up to them and kicking Timmy. I think he liked that, but it was nothing you could confuse for friendship.

At one point Timmy said, “The gas is almost gone.”

“How much you got?” Bad Tiger said.

“Less than a quarter.”

“All right, then. Let’s stop for the night somewhere, and tomorrow we’ll get some gas. We ought to be over the Texas line tomorrow. There’s a couple little towns the way we’re going. We’ll stop in one of them.”

Timmy had a new toothpick in his mouth, and I could see it in the glow from the lights on the instrument panel. He moved it from one side of his mouth to the other like the pendulum of a clock.

After a little bit, Timmy found a dirt road that wound up into some trees. He drove off the road and over what had once been a cow trail, but now there was no grass for cows. The trees weren’t like the trees before, when we had found the green spot down by the big creek. They were like the ones closer to home, and I figured it was because here the soil had been farmed out, and the wind had come and blown it off the earth and shot it through the trees like bullets. The sand had torn off what leaves were left that hadn’t been eaten by starving bugs and animals. Even the bark on the trees was beat off by the sand in spots, like the trees had been in terrible knife fights with one another.

We parked and they had us get out. The wind was cool. The shadows wound and fell and twisted through the barren trees.

Bad Tiger stretched and looked around. “We’ll be in Texas pretty soon,” he said. “It don’t look much better than Oklahoma.”

“There’s East Texas,” Timmy said.

“Yeah, well, East Texas is all right. I like all those trees, creeks, and rivers.”

“They got alligators down there, just like in Louisiana,” Timmy said.

“Yeah,” Bad Tiger said, “thanks for the nature tip. I know that. I got relatives from there. Or did once. They all died, and I shot my daddy, so I don’t have any relatives anymore.”

“You killed him?” Tony said.

“Last time I looked at him,” Bad Tiger said, “he was still dead.”

“You shot and killed your own pa?” Tony said.

“Me and him didn’t get along,” Bad Tiger said.

“An understatement, I’m sure,” Jane said. “I didn’t like my pa neither, but I didn’t shoot him. Course, we left him under a tractor and some dirt.”

Bad Tiger laughed. “You’re all right, girlie. I bet if someone dipped you in hot water you’d come out pink and cute. Fixed your hair, put a nice dress on you, you’d look all right.”

“You don’t worry none about my looks,” Jane said.

Bad Tiger laughed. He said, “You kids go over and sit down by that tree there, and don’t get any ideas. I’ll get mad if you do, and if you make me run after you, you can’t imagine how mad I’ll be.”

Actually, I could imagine.

We went over and put our backs against the tree. I couldn’t tell what kind of tree it was in the dark, but it felt good to be sitting there with my back against it, away from Bad Tiger and Timmy.

I looked around for anything that might be a place to hide if we did make a break for it, but that little clutch of trees we were in was it. There was a rise of land that hid us from the main road, and that was some distance off anyway. The moon was high and partial, but bright. It wasn’t a great night for trying to make a run for it.

“I think they circled back up to the Dust Bowl,” Jane said. She said it so only we could hear. “The scenery changed for the better for a while, and now it’s like it was when we left. I think they’re running the roads in a way they think they can avoid the law.”

“They took a lot of back roads, all right,” I said. “Some main ones, like the one we just come off of, but a lot of back roads.”

“They’re zigzagging to Texas,” Jane said. “If they’re even going to Texas. I think all that talk might have been for our benefit so if we got away, we wouldn’t know what they had in mind.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think we’re still high up in Oklahoma. They’ve turned us around and confused us so we wouldn’t know it.”

“I know it,” Jane said.

“Yes, of course—how could you not, being all-knowing? I just wish you’d been all-knowing before that tire blew so we could have pulled off and changed it before our friends came up.”

“Oh, give it a rest.”

I did. We sat in silence for a long time until Tony said, “Did you see the way Timmy shot Buddy?”

“I don’t think it meant a thing to him,” Jane said. “Maybe he saw it like putting an animal out of its misery, but I don’t think so. I think he wanted to do it just so he could kill something. I know people like that. Boys, I’ll have to add. They kill birds that don’t hurt nothing and that they don’t eat. They kill them and pick them up and look at them and toss them, then they kill another. They don’t do it for no other reason than the pleasure of the kill. That’s the kind of men these are.”

“I’m so scared,” Tony said.

He sounded like he was about to break out bawling.

“Don’t cry,” Jane said. “Don’t give them that. Don’t you cry, you hear?”

“Yeah,” he said, choking back a sob. “I hear you.”

“We’ll just have to wait for our moment,” I said.

“That’s right,” Jane said. “Our moment. And it’ll come.”

“Way I figure, a moment don’t always come,” Tony said.

“Sure it will,” Jane said. “We’ll get our moment. It’ll come when we least expect it, and we got to be ready to take advantage of it. It’ll come.”

“If they don’t kill us first,” Tony said.

“Don’t talk like that,” Jane said. “You can’t think like that. It’s defeatist. Think of John Carter of Mars. You remember those books? I read them to you, remember.”

Tony nodded. “I remember.”

“What was John Carter of Mars’s slogan?”

“I still live.”

“That’s right. We’ll be fine. We got to watch for our moment is all. We got to play it smart. We still live.”