The Four Winds(62)

“There may not be gas again for a long time,” Loreda said.

Elsa understood. She and her daughter now shared an awareness of a different kind of danger on the road. If they didn’t get gas here, they wouldn’t make it across the desert.

Elsa honked her horn.

A uniformed attendant hurried toward the truck. “Don’t get out, lady. Lock your doors.”

“What’s going on?” Elsa said, rolling down her window.

“Folks have had enough,” he said, pumping gas into the tank. “That’s the mayor’s grocery store.”

Elsa heard someone in the crowd yell, “We’re hungry. Give us food.”

“Help us!”

The crowd surged toward the store’s entrance.

“Open the door,” a man shouted.

Someone threw a rock. A window shattered.

“We want bread!”

The mob broke down the door and surged into the store, shouting and yelling. They swarmed the interior, breaking things. Glass shattered.

Hunger riots. In America.

The attendant finished filling the tank, then untied the jug from the front of the truck hood and filled it with water and retied it. All the while, he was watching the riot going on in the store.

Elsa rolled down her window just enough to pay for her gas. “Be safe,” she said to the attendant, who said, “What’s that these days?”

Elsa drove away. In the rearview mirror, she saw more people surge into the store, bats and fists raised.



AT FOUR O’CLOCK, ELSA pulled off to the side of the road, parked in the only shade she could find, and took a nap in the back of the truck. Her sleep was restless, uncomfortable, plagued by nightmares of parched earth and impossible heat. When she woke, hours later, still feeling groggy, her limbs aching, she sat up and pushed the damp hair out of her face. She saw her children, sitting in the dirt nearby, around a campfire. Loreda was reading to Ant.

Elsa got out of the truck and walked toward her children.

An overburdened jalopy rumbled past, headlights bright enough in the falling darkness to reveal a stoop-shouldered family of four walking along the shoulder of the road, going west, the mother pushing a carriage; beside her was a white sign posted for travelers: FROM HERE ON, CARRY WATER WITH YOU.

A year ago, Elsa would have thought it insane that any woman would think to walk from Oklahoma or Texas or Alabama to California, especially pushing a baby carriage. Now she knew better. When your children were dying, you did anything to save them, even walk over mountains and across deserts.

Loreda came up beside her. They watched the woman with the baby carriage. “We’ll make it,” Loreda said into the quiet.

Elsa didn’t know how to repond. “We made it through the Dust Bowl,” Loreda said, using the recently coined term to describe the land they’d left behind. They’d read a newspaper a few days ago, learned that April 14 had been dubbed Black Sunday. Apparently three hundred thousand tons of Great Plains topsoil had flown into the air that day. More soil than had been dug up to build the Panama Canal. The dirt had fallen to the ground as far away as Washington, D.C., which was probably why it made the news at all. “What’s a few miles of desert to explorers like us?”

“Not a speck,” Elsa said. “Let’s go.”

They walked back to the truck. Elsa paused, placed her hand on the warm, dusty metal of the hood. An amorphous fear—of so many bad outcomes—coalesced into a single word. Please. She trusted God to watch out for them.

After a late supper of beans and hot dogs and almost no conversation, Elsa herded her children into the back of the truck to sleep on the unfurled camp mattress they’d brought from home.

“You sure you’re okay driving alone at night?” Loreda asked for at least the fifth time.

“It’s cooler now. That will help. I’ll drive as far as I can tonight and then pull over to sleep. Don’t worry.” She reached past her sagging collar for the small velvet pouch she wore around her throat. She removed the copper coin, looked down at Abraham Lincoln’s craggy profile.

“The penny,” Loreda said.

“It’s ours now.”

Ant touched the coin for luck. Loreda just stared at it.

Elsa put the penny back in its hiding place, kissed them good night, and then returned to the driver’s seat. She started the engine and turned on her headlights; twin golden spears cut into the darkness as she put the truck in gear and drove away.

On the road, night erased everything except the path the headlights revealed. No cars were traveling east.

The road was as flat and black and rough as a cast-iron frying pan.

As the miles accumulated, so did her fear. It spoke to her in her father’s voice: You’ll never make it. You shouldn’t have tried. You and your children will die out here.

Every now and then, she passed an abandoned vehicle, ghostly evidence of families who’d failed.

Suddenly the engine coughed; the truck did a little jerk. The rosary looped around the rearview mirror swung side to side, beads clattering together. A cloud of steam erupted from beneath the hood.

No no no no.

She pulled to the side of the road. After a quick check on the sleeping kids—they were fine—she went to the front of the truck.

The hood was so hot it took her several tries to unlatch it, open it. Steam or smoke tumbled out in the dark. She couldn’t tell which it was.