The Four Winds(90)

“My dad did that.”

“Did what?”

“Ran out in the middle of the night. Never came back.”

“Well . . . that’s a hell of a thing,” he said at last. “What about your mom?”

“What about her?”

He turned onto a long dirt road.

Darkness.

Loreda didn’t see lights anywhere, just blackness. No houses, no streetlights, no other cars on the road.

“W-where are we going?”

“I told you I had a stop to make before I dropped you at the bus station.”

“Out here? In the middle of nowhere?”

He let the truck roll to a stop. “I need your word, kid. You won’t talk about this place. Or me. Or anything you see here.”

They were in a huge grassy field. A barn stood alongside a dilapidated ranch house, both bathed in moonlight. A dozen or so cars and trucks were parked in the grass, their headlights off. Thin yellow lines in between the boards of the barn indicated that there was something going on inside. “No one listens to people like me,” Loreda said. She couldn’t bring herself to say the word she meant: Okies.

“If you don’t give me your word, I’ll turn around right now and drop you off on the main road.”

Loreda looked at him. He was impatient with her, she could tell. A tic pulled at the corner of his eyes, but otherwise he appeared calm. He was waiting for her to decide, but he wouldn’t wait long.

She should tell him to turn around right now, take her back to the road. Whatever was going on in that barn this late at night couldn’t be good. And grown-ups didn’t demand this kind of promise from kids.

“Is it bad, what’s going on in there?”

“No,” he said. “It’s good. But these are dangerous times.”

Loreda looked into the man’s dark eyes. He was . . . intense. A little frightening, perhaps, but alive in a way she hadn’t seen before. Here was a man who wouldn’t live in a dirty tent and eat scraps and be grateful for it. He wasn’t broken like the rest of them. His vitality called out to her, reminded her of better times, of the man she’d thought her father to be. “I promise.”

He drove forward, threading his way through the parked cars. Near the doors, he parked the truck and turned off the engine.

“You stay in the truck,” he said, opening his door.

“How long will you be?”

“As long as I need to be.”

Loreda watched him walk toward the barn and open the door. She saw a flash of light, and what looked like shadow people gathered within. Then he closed the door behind him.

Loreda stared at the dark barn, the streaks of light bleeding through the cracks. What were they doing in there?

An automobile chugged up alongside the truck, parked. Its headlights snapped off.

Loreda saw a couple get out of the car. They were well dressed, all in black, both smoking cigarettes. Definitely not migrants or farmers.

Loreda made a snap decision: she got out of the truck and followed the couple to the barn.

The barn door opened.

Loreda slipped in behind the couple and immediately pressed herself back against the rough boards of the barn.

She couldn’t have said what she was expecting to see—grown-ups drinking hooch and dancing the Lindy Hop maybe—but whatever she’d expected, it wasn’t this. Men dressed in suits mingled with women, some of whom were wearing pants. Pants. They seemed to be all talking at once, gesturing with their hands as if arguing. The place felt alive, hive-like with activity. Cigarette smoke created a haze that blurred everyone and stung Loreda’s eyes.

There were about ten tables set up in the barn’s dusty, shadowed interior, with lanterns set on each one, creating pockets of light shot through with dust and smoke. Typewriters and mimeograph machines were positioned on the tables. Women sat in chairs and smoked and typed. There was a strange aroma in the air, mixed in with the smell of smoke. Stacks of papers lined the tabletops. Every once in a while Loreda heard the briiiiing of a carriage return.

When Jack strode forward, people stopped what they were doing and turned toward him. He pulled a newspaper off a table in front of him and climbed up several loft steps, then faced the crowd. He lifted the newspaper up. The headline read: “Los Angeles Declares War on Migrants.”

“Police Chief James ‘Two Guns’ Davis, with the support of the big growers, the railroads, the state relief agencies, and the rest of the state fat cats, just closed the California border to migrants.” Jack threw the paper to the straw-covered floor. “Think of it. Desperate people, good people, Americans, are being stopped at the border at gunpoint and turned away. To go where? Many of them are starving back home or dying of dust pneumonia. If they won’t turn back, the coppers are jailing them for vagrancy and judges are sentencing them to hard labor.”

Loreda was hardly surprised. She knew what it was like to come here looking for better and be treated as worse.

“Bastards,” someone yelled.

“All across the state of California, the big growers are taking advantage of the people who work for them. The migrants coming into the state are so desperate to feed their families, they’ll take any wage. There are more than seventy thousand homeless people between here and Bakersfield. Children are dying in the squatters’ camps at a rate of two a day, from malnutrition or disease. It’s not right. Not in America. I don’t care if there is a Depression. Enough is enough. It’s up to us to help them. We have to get them to join the Workers Alliance and stand up for their rights.”