The man lit a cigarette, exhaled a stream of blue-gray smoke through his open window. “Same as you, I imagine.”
“What do you mean?”
He turned. For the first time she saw his entire face, the tanned roughness of it, the sharp nose and black eyes. “You’re running away from something. Or someone.”
“And you are, too?”
“Kid, if you aren’t running away these days, you aren’t paying attention. But no, I’m not running.” He smiled in a way that made him almost handsome. “I don’t want to get caught out here, either.”
“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?