The Highway Kind(55)

Terri had the map in her lap, and from time to time she’d look at it, say, “You’re doing all right.”

“Of course I am,” I said. “This is the only highway to Marvel Creek. When we need the map is when we get off the main road and onto them little routes back in there.”

“It’s good to make sure you don’t get veered,” Terri said.

“I ain’t getting veered,” I said.

“Way I figure it, it’s gonna take three days to get there, or most near a full three days, not two like Mama said.”

“You figured that, did you?”

“I reckoned in the miles and how fast the car is going, if that speedometer is right, and then I put some math to it, and I come up with three days. I got an A in math.”

“Since it’s the summer, I reckon you’ve done forgot what math you learned,” I said.

“I remember. Three days at this pace is right, and this is about as fast as you ought to go. Slowing wouldn’t hurt a little. As it is, we blowed a tire, they wouldn’t find nothing but our clothes in some bushes alongside the road, and they’d be full of shit.”


End of that day we come near the Oklahoma border. It was starting to get dark, so I pulled us over and down a little path, and we parked under a tree for the night. We had some egg sandwiches Mama had made, and we ate them. They had gotten kind of soggy, but it was that or wishful thinking, so we ate them and drank some water from the canteens.

We threw a blanket on the ground and laid down on that and looked up through the tree limbs at the stars.

“Ever wonder what’s out there?” Terri said.

“I read this book once, about this fella went to Mars. And there was some green creatures there with four arms.”

“No joke?”

“No joke.”

“Must have been a good book.”

“It was,” I said. “And there was four-armed white apes, and regular-looking people too, only they were red-skinned.”

“Did they have four arms too?”

“No. They were like us, except for the red skin.”

“That’s not as good,” Terri said. “I’d like to have had me four arms, if I was one of them, and otherwise looked regular.”

“You wouldn’t look regular with four arms,” I said.

“I could stand it,” Terri said. “I could pick up a lot of things at once.”


When we woke up the next morning, my back hurt considerable. I had stretched the blanket out on an acorn, and it had stuck me all night. I come awake a few times during the night and was going to pull back the blanket and move it, but I was too darn tired to move. In the morning, though, I wished I had. I felt like I had been shot with an arrow right above my belt line.

Terri, however, was as chipper as if she had good sense. She had some boiled eggs in the package Mama had ended up giving her after it was decided she was going, and we had one apiece for breakfast and some more canteen water.

After wrapping up the blanket, we climbed back in the car and started out again, drove on across the line and into Oklahoma, going over the Red River, which wasn’t really all that much of a river. At that time of the year, at least where we crossed, it wasn’t hardly no more than a muddy trickle, though as we went over the bridge, I could see down a distance to where it was wider and deeper-looking.

We come to a little town called Hootie Hoot, which seemed to me to be a bad name for most anything, and there was one gas pump outside a little store there, and by the door going into the store was a sign that said they was looking for a tire-and-rim man. We could see the gas in the big jug on top of the pump, so we knew there was plenty, and we pulled up to it. Couple other stations we had passed were out of gas.

After we had sat there awhile, an old man with bushy white hair wearing overalls so faded they was near white as his hair came out of the station. He had a big red nose and looked like he had just got out of bed. We stood outside the car while he filled the tank.

“They say the Depression has done turned around,” he said. “But if it did, it darn sure didn’t turn in this direction.”

“No, sir,” I said.

“Ain’t you a little young to be out driving the roads?” he said.

“Not that young,” I said.

He eyed me some. “I guess not. You children on an errand?”

“We are,” I said. “We’re going to pick up my uncle Smat.”

“Family outing?”

“You could say that.”

“So we will,” he said.

“We might want something from the store too,” I said.

“All right, then,” he said.

Me and Terri went inside, and he hung up the gas nozzle and trailed after us.

I didn’t have a lot of money, a few dollars Mama had given me for gas and such, but I didn’t want another soggy egg sandwich or a boiled egg. I bought some Vienna sausages, some sardines, and a box of crackers, and splurged on Coca-Colas for the two of us. I got some shelled and salted peanuts to pour into the Coca-Colas, bought four slices of bread, two cuts of bologna, and two fat cuts of rat cheese. The smell of that cheese made me seriously hungry; it was right smart in aroma, and my nose hairs tingled.

We paid up, and I pulled the car away from the pump and on around beside the store. We sat on the bumper and made us a sandwich from the bread, bologna, and cheese. It was a lot better than those soggy egg sandwiches Mama had made us, and though we had two more of them, they had reached a point where I considered them turned, and I planned on throwing them out on the road before we left.