I kept looking around for Skunk, but I figured by the time I saw him come up, it would be too late. Besides, we was all so tired we could hardly move. I went over and sat down by Mama while Jinx went off in the woods to take care of nature’s business.
“Sorry you came now?” I said.
“I don’t think I am,” Mama said. “It would have been nice had things worked out a bit smoother, but I’m not sorry. I’m sorry for the reverend, and even Gene and Constable Sy, I guess.”
“Constable Sy got it pretty bad,” I said. “Skunk did some things to him for fun.”
Mama nodded. “I’m still glad I came.”
“Even if you dream scary dreams of horses?”
“Even if I do.”
About that time Jinx came out of the woods, hurrying along so fast I was afraid she might have come up on Skunk.
“There’s lights on the other side of them trees,” she said.
“Skunk?”
“I don’t know it ain’t Skunk,” she said. “But I figure he’s a whole lot sneakier than to go out there and light a fire, and him trying to creep up on us.”
“You stay here with Terry,” I said to Mama, and me and Jinx hustled into the woods. This wasn’t the smartest thing in the world, to leave them by themselves, but it seemed at this point less smart to have them approach a fire with us. It could be Skunk, and he might not even care to put a sneak on. For that matter, whoever it was might not be friendly. It was better two young girls who could run like deer went to see what was what, instead of a tired woman and a boy we’d have to drag around by the arm.
We hadn’t gone far when I could see the same light Jinx had seen. It was definitely firelight, and we could faintly hear someone talking. Easing closer, we could make out the fire was in a big clearing, and beyond the clearing was some trees. We squatted down and looked out at the fire and listened as best we could to the voices, but there wasn’t much that could be made out. There was some laughing, and I could tell one of the voices was a man, and the others was a woman and child, and there was some other voices, too, that might have been older children. It was hard to tell.
Jinx and I didn’t even discuss it; we just got up and walked out of the woods where we was hiding and started toward the fire. I called out, “Hallo, the fire.”
The voices stopped, and I seen then that there was two men, because they both stood up and looked in our direction. We kept walking.
One of the men said, “Who’s out there?”
“Some near-drowned people,” I said.
There was some hesitation, but one of the men called out, “Come on up,” and that’s what we did.
When we got closer we could feel the heat of the fire. Though it was a warm night, we were still a bit damp, and it felt good. I sniffed something cooking, and the smell made my stomach hurt like it was going through a washer wringer. Where the smell came from was a big lard can setting on some logs in the fire. It was full of something and that something was bubbling.
I looked around at the others. The fire flickered over their faces. There was three young people, one maybe six, and the other two was a boy and a girl in their early teens. The woman was about Mama’s age, and she looked like she would have been pretty in daylight with a good dress on and her hair done right. Both men had on worn-out clothes and hats. I figured the one that was about the woman’s age was her husband, and the other man, though older, looked enough like the younger man I reckoned it was his father. They both had on old suit coats, which wasn’t the best thing for the weather, but I reasoned out they thought they might need them when the weather changed, and wearing them was the best way to keep up with their goods. They wore ragged hats and had some bundles bound up and lying near the fire. It didn’t take much thinking to know they was on the scout, trying to survive with what they had, same as us.
“We had an accident on the river,” I said. “Our raft got torn apart in the rainstorm, and we near drowned. We got an injured boy back there with part of his finger chopped off and his hand all swole up.”
“Chopped off?” the woman said.
“Yes, ma’am, he got it caught up in something when the raft broke up, and it come off. We been walking, trying to find our way out.”
It was a lie, but I figured I might not want to point out we had been chased by a crazy man with a hatchet, since he was most likely still out there.
“We come here by train,” said the older man. “Not to this spot, but back there”-he pointed-“where there’s a higher grade. The train slowed down and we could jump. We was tired of riding in the boxcar. You ride long enough, and you jump off, you feel like you’re still riding. I just now got over it. Thing is, though, I ain’t so sure jumping off was the smart idea. We’re just out here in the woods now. I was fed up plenty with that train then, but now I’m wishing we was back on it.”
“We’ve walked awhile,” said the woman.
“We’re thinking we ought to catch the next train coming through,” said the older man, “though this ain’t a good spot for it.”
I looked out beyond them, knew then that the rail line run right past us, not more than a hundred feet away.
“When’s that next train come through?” I said.
“We ain’t got no schedule,” said the younger man. “We’re new to this hoboing. We wasn’t born to it. We never had so much to begin with, but then it got so there wasn’t any work, and what work there was had fifty men after the job.”
“Jud,” the wife said. “She’s just asking a question, not our life stories.”
“No problem, ma’am,” I said.
“We was in the Dust Bowl up in Oklahoma,” the older man said. “Day that first dust storm come in. We hadn’t never seen nothing like it.”
“I don’t know there’s ever been anything like it,” Jud said.
“Naw,” said the old man. “Nothing like it.”
“These girls don’t want to hear all that,” said the woman, but that didn’t slow the old man down.
“At first,” he said, “out there on the horizon, it looked like a rain cloud, but the color was wrong, and it was too low to the ground. It got closer, and I thought, twister. But it wasn’t that. It was like big balls of dirty cotton being pushed along by the wind, balls higher than a house and wider than a town. It was sand. The birds was flying in front of it fast as they could go. And then it come. It hit the house and knocked out the windows, throwed glass and dirt every which way. It ripped the curtains to shreds. Everything turned dark, so goddamn dark we couldn’t see each other in it. It come and it come. We lay on the floor coughing. Then, when it was gone, we went out and looked at the fields. There wasn’t even a sprig of grass out there. It was like the storm had pulled everything up from the ground, including the ground. All the good planting soil was gone, taken off to God knows where. But them storms wasn’t done. They just kept coming. One after another. We fixed windows and we put wet rags around the cracks. We even sealed some with flour paste. But them storms, they didn’t make no never mind. I thought it was like in the Bible for a time. I thought it was the end times. And later, I sort of wished it had been, cause there wasn’t nothing left for nobody to eat that was worth eating. Oh, there was the rabbits at first. They was starving just like we was, and they was everywhere. Them rabbits was so poor, you had to eat three to get a meal for one person. And even cleaned and cooked they tasted like grit. Then if that wasn’t enough of a rock to tote up the mountain, along come a tornado and blowed our house all over Oklahoma. We got what was left and piled it in our truck, which by the grace of God didn’t get blowed away with the house. It got turned over two or three times and righted, but we was lucky there. It ran, even if it did have an engine full of sand.
“We went out to California to pick oranges, and that wasn’t no good. Everyone in the whole damn world seemed to be there. You could work all day and not make enough to buy a sack of flour. We come back this direction for no good reason at all. It’s greener than Oklahoma, but there ain’t nothing here for nobody to do. We’re on our way somewhere else.”