The Four Winds

A brown windshield veiled the world and they couldn’t waste water for cleaning it. At every gas stop, the attendant wiped the road dust and dead bugs away with a rag.

When they pulled into the gas station, they saw a grocery store not far away. A crowd had gathered in front of it: more people than they’d seen in one place since Albuquerque.

These weren’t town folks, for the most part. You could tell by their ragged clothes and rucksacks. These were bindle stiffs—homeless men, the kind who jumped on and off trains in the middle of the night. Some were going somewhere; most were going nowhere. Elsa couldn’t help looking at each one, searching for her husband’s face. She knew Loreda did the same.

Elsa pulled up to the gas pump.

“Why are there so many people over there?” Loreda asked.

“It looks like a parade or sumpin’,” Ant said.

“They look angry,” Elsa said. She waited for an attendant to come out and pump her gas, but no one came.

“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 wa

s 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.