All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky

6

It was a long time before we found any kind of ruts we could ride in, but when we did, we started moving faster, and I got a little braver about my driving. Course, I had to hope I didn’t grind the gears so much I burned up the clutch or tore up the engine in some way, or ran off into a ditch and killed us all.

Jane kept saying stuff like “I thought you said you could drive.”

“I said I could drive, but I didn’t say I was any good at it. I ain’t Henry Ford his ownself. I’m just me.”

“I see that,” Jane said.

“I think he does all right,” Tony said. In that moment, I liked him a lot.

“It’s all right if you look where you’re going,” she said. “Nobody is going to give you points for guesswork.”

We rode along like that for a while, and I started taking in the sights, such as they were. It was mostly dust, and every field looked just like the others. There were some fences standing, but most of them were pushed down by the sand and the wind, and a few were leaning and about to go. There were a number of dead rattlesnakes hanging off the barbwire fences. There were a lot of folks around them parts had Cherokee blood in them, my family being one of them. Cherokee believed if you killed a rattlesnake and put it so it could be seen, the gods would give rain. So far, them that believed that had been wrong, and the only thing that had come of it was a lot of dead snakes.

After we had driven for a while, I said, “Maybe if we’re going to run off somewhere, we ought to know where it is we’re going.”

“Away from here,” Tony said. “That’s good enough.”

“I’m for deciding which way to go,” I said as the car bumped along. “Any kind of idea might be good, since so far, nobody has one.”

“I don’t know about that,” Jane said. “Seems to me I’m the only decisive one in the bunch. Wasn’t for me, you’d still be at home alone, and Tony here would have stayed under a collapsed house till what food there was run out and he dried up and blew away.”

“That’s probably true,” Tony said.

Actually, she had a point, but she still didn’t have a direction. I decided to take the bull by the horns.

“California?” I said. “How about we go there? They got work, and we’re all able-bodied enough to work.”

“I’m kind of a runt,” Tony said.

“They don’t make no difference in age or size in the fields,” I said. “You can stand on a stool to pick an orange, or get down on your knees to dig a tater.”

“I was hoping for a brain-using job,” Tony said.

“I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one,” I said.

“Not long ago, Pa was in town talking to a fella who had come back from California,” Jane said. “Took his whole family. Was gone two months. He said it wasn’t the paradise you’d think. They called everybody that come out there Okies, even if they wasn’t from here. People got beat and robbed and taken advantage of, and with so many folks scrambling for jobs, there weren’t many to be had. He come back to Oklahoma, though he said it was like it was when he left. He wanted to go somewhere else, but his truck broke down and they couldn’t go nowhere else unless they walked. He said the oranges in California was fresh, though, and it was real green.”

“We need more than oranges, and greenery is nice to look at, but the main green we need is dollar green,” I said.

“In my bag,” Jane said, “I got fifteen dollars saved. It’ll be a start.”

“I got a dollar,” Tony said. “What you got, Jack?”

“Pocket lint.”

“So,” Jane said, “we got sixteen dollars and some pocket lint.”

“But we got high hopes,” I said. “We’re all ready to conquer the world, except we don’t know where we’re going.”

“I always heard we had kin in East Texas, around Tyler,” Jane said, looking out the side window. “I don’t know them none, but I think they’re an aunt and an uncle. If we could find them, they might give us some kind of help.”

“I ain’t never heard of them,” Tony said.

“That’s because it never came up when you were around.”

“All right, then,” I said. “Which way do you figure is East Texas from here?”

“I’d go south first, and then when we get to Texas, veer east.”

“Point taken,” I said.