All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky

21

In the morning we brushed ourselves off as best we could and walked up to the road and looked around carefully. We didn’t see Bad Tiger, Timmy, or the Ford.

I couldn’t imagine them hanging around. They didn’t want us so bad they’d chance being found by the law, or so I thought. Still, we stayed cautious.

We posted a lookout at the edge of the road behind a tree, and the idea was to switch from time to time, until we saw a car or truck coming that we thought might give us a ride.

I hadn’t been on duty more than a few minutes, when I looked up the road and saw a truck with panel boards on the back moving toward us.

I whistled up Jane and Tony. They came running. I went to the side of the road and put a thumb out. Jane and Tony were soon standing beside me, doing the same.

The truck stopped. It was a man who might have been younger than he looked, ’cause his teeth were missing and his clothes were worn and he hadn’t shaved in a few days, and his skin had burned the color of dried blood.

He stuck his head out the window, said, “You’re going my way, you can ride. But there’s hogs in the back. The girl can sit up here if she likes.”

“I like,” Jane said, then went around in front of the truck and got in on the passenger’s side.

Me and Tony went around back and climbed over the boards and eased ourselves inside the truck bed with a half dozen small black and white hogs and a piglet. There was hog mess on the floor and it stunk.

We clung to the wood slats and the man drove us out of there. It was better when we got to moving, because the wind blew some of the stink away, and it felt good because it was starting to turn off hot.

I could see through the back window that Jane was chatting the driver up, maybe telling him how we were a talented bunch of singers on our way to make our fortune with our family in East Texas. Or maybe it was some other lie. Anyway, she was talking a lot, and he was nodding and grinning.

We rode into a little town where everything seemed to be either gray or orange. Once, the buildings had been brightly painted, but the sandstorms had sanded them down and made them bleaker. The orange was the color that was left after all the paint had been worked over by sand. Before the sand, it could have been red or yellow.

We were let off in front of the general store. We had lost our bags of goods, but Jane still had the money she had saved stuffed in her pocket, and I still had my pocketknife, so we weren’t without something.

In the store we looked around for a box of crackers and had the counterman cut us off a chunk of rat cheese and some bologna and we bought some bread by the slice. We got a half dozen Coca-Colas and a few penny candies.

The counterman wrapped up the bread and meat and cheese in separate pieces of wax paper, and then he wrapped it all up in brown paper. Jane paid for it. He put it all in a grocery bag, except the Coca-Colas, and he put those in a double bag so where they were damp from the cooler they wouldn’t wet through the sack.

A nice-looking woman standing behind us in line, said, “What have you children been doing? You smell like hogs.”

“We’re pretty near out of money,” Jane said. “In fact, what we just spent is about it. Those two got that stench from cleaning out a man’s hogpens with shovels. I did the wash for him too. He paid us mostly in food and a night’s sleep, but a bath is something we haven’t had. And truthfully, if anyone ever needed it, it’s those two.”

“You don’t even have a shirt?” the woman said to me.

“I started not to let him in the store dressed like that,” said the counterman, “wearing that dirty undershirt, but I figured it wasn’t by choice.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Jane said. “We been hitchhiking for a week on account of our parents just dropped us off on the side of the road. Us and our old yellow dog. They told us we was going to stop and pick flowers, ’cause our grandparents were buried up this way. But that was a lie. They drove off and left us when we was out picking.”

“I ain’t seen a flower around here in a month of Sundays,” the counterman said. “The storms have knocked them all down.”

“There were just three or four, actually,” Jane said. “You don’t expect your folks to do a thing like that. Lie to you about your grandparents’ graves, and there being flowers, and then them just driving off and leaving us. It wasn’t something we expected.”

“What happened to the dog?” the lady asked.

“Hit by a truck,” Jane said. “Happened pretty quick. Merciful, really, otherwise he would have starved to death, and we might even have had to eat him. Our parents never named him for just that reason. They said you shouldn’t name something you might have to eat. They used to joke that they wasn’t sure they was going to name us.”

“That’s awful,” said the lady.

“Isn’t it?” Jane said.

“Beside the road?” the woman said. “Well, my goodness. And your dog run over too.”

“It was pretty sad,” Jane said, “but I’ve tried to keep us together and not let these two get in any trouble. We had to rent Jack here out to a man we come across, for … well, who knows what.”

“You poor child,” the woman said, and put her hand on my head. She pulled it back pretty quick, though. My hair was full of grasshopper guts, grit, and pig stink.

“You rented your brother out?” the counterman said. “You rented him?”

“Hunger is not a great bearer of judgment,” Jane said.

“That sounds like a cock-and-bull story to me,” said the counterman.

“Oh, don’t say that,” said the lady. “You kids come with me. I’ll see you get a real meal. We’ll put those things of yours in the icebox. You can get a bath, and tomorrow I’ll talk to my church friends, and maybe we can find you a home. We’ve done a lot for orphans.”

“Thank you,” said Jane. “It’s good to know that Christian charity still exists in this world. I, for one, had come to doubt it.”

The woman said, “Come on,” and started leading us out the door.

I hadn’t taken a step, though, when the counterman reached across the counter and got me by the elbow.

“Hey, now. Mrs. Carson is a good widow lady. Don’t you kids go and take advantage of her.”

I looked up and saw Jane and Tony and the lady were near the door.

“We’ve had a hard time of it,” I said.

“I don’t believe a word of it,” he said.

“You think that’s something,” I said, “you ought to hear the truth.”

I pulled loose of him and followed them outside.