The Four Winds(66)

“The house didn’t look so nice up close. No room for a dog. That woman said we could find a place up the road about fourteen miles. Must be a campground or auto court for people coming west.”

“What’s an Okie?” Loreda asked.

“Someone they won’t rent to.”

“But—”

“No more questions,” Elsa said. “I need to think.”

Elsa drove past more cultivated fields. There were few farmhouses out here; mostly the landscape was a quilt of new green growth and brown, recently tilled fields. The first sign of civilization was a school, a pretty one, with an American flag flying out front. Not far beyond that was a well-tended-looking county hospital with a single gray ambulance parked by the entrance.

“This is about fourteen miles,” Elsa said, slowing down.

There was nothing here. No stop sign, no farm, no motor court.

“Is that a campground, Mommy?” Ant asked.

Elsa pulled off to the side of the road. Through the passenger window she saw a collection of tents and jalopies and shacks set back from the road in a weedy field. There had to be a hundred of them, clustered here and there in community-like pods, but without any real plan or design. They looked like a flotilla of gray sailboats and abandoned automobiles on a brown sea. There was no road to the campground, just ruts in the field, and no sign welcoming campers.

“This must be the place she was talking about,” Elsa said.

“Yay! A campground,” Ant said. “Maybe there’ll be other kids.”

Elsa turned onto the muddy ruts and followed them. An irrigation ditch full of brown water ran the length of the field to her left.

The first tent they came to had a peaked roof and sloping sides; a stovepipe stuck out from the front like a bent elbow. The area in front of the open flaps was cluttered with belongings: dented metal wash buckets, whiskey barrels, gas cans, a chopping block with an ax stuck in it, an old hubcap. Not far away sat a truck with no tires. Someone had built up slatted sides and draped plastic over it all to create a dry place to live.

“Ewwww,” Loreda said.

There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the placement of the tents and shacks and parked jalopies.

Rail-thin children dressed in rags ran through the tent town, followed by mangy, barking dogs. Women sat hunched on the banks of a ditch, washing clothes in brown water.

One pile of junk turned out to be a dwelling; inside, three children and two adults huddled around a makeshift stove. A family.

A man sat on a rock, wearing only his torn trousers, his feet bare and black soled, his drying shirt and socks spread out in the dirt in front of him. Somewhere, a baby cried.

Okies.

Your kind.

“I don’t like this place,” Ant whined. “It stinks.”

“Turn around, Mom,” Loreda said. “Get us out of here.”

Elsa couldn’t believe people lived this way in California. In America. These folks weren’t bindle stiffs or vagabonds or hobos. These tents and shacks and jalopies housed families. Children. Women. Babies. People who had come here to start over, people looking for work.

“We can’t drive around wasting gas,” Elsa said, feeling sick to her stomach. “We’ll stay here one night, find out what’s going on. Tomorrow I’ll find work and we’ll be on our way. At least there’s a river.”

“River? River?” Loreda said. “That is not a river and this is . . . I don’t know what this is, but we do not belong here.”

“No one belongs in a place like this, Loreda, but we only have twenty-seven dollars left. How long do you think that will last?”

“Mom, please.”

“We need a plan,” Elsa said. “Getting to California. That was all we thought about. Clearly it wasn’t enough. We need information. Someone here will be able to help us.”

“They don’t look like they can help themselves,” Loreda said.

“One night,” Elsa said. She forced a thin smile. “Come on, explorers. We can handle anything for one night.”

Ant whined again. “But it stinks.”

“One night,” Loreda said, staring at Elsa. “You promise?”

“I promise. One night.”

Elsa looked out at the sea of tents and saw a break in them, an empty space between a ragged tent and a shack made of scrap wood. She drove into the empty area and parked on a wide patch of dirt tufted with weeds and grass.

The nearest tent was about fifteen feet away. In front of it was a collection of junk—buckets and boxes, a spindly wooden chair, and a rusted wood-burning stove with a bent pipe.

Elsa parked the truck. They got to work, set up their large tent, staked it in place, and laid the camp mattress in one corner, right down on the dirt floor, and covered it with sheets and quilts.

They unloaded only the supplies they would need for the night. Their suitcases, the food (all of it would need to be guarded constantly in this place), and buckets both for carrying water and for sitting on. Elsa built a small campfire in front of the tent and placed overturned buckets nearby as chairs.

She couldn’t help thinking that they now looked no different from everyone else here. She dropped a blob of lard into the Dutch oven, and when it started to pop, she added a precious chunk of ham along with a few canned tomatoes, a clove of garlic, and a potato cut into cubes.