The Cat's Pajamas

I woke some nights ago around three in the morning and found that I had been crying and I didn’t know why. I sat up in bed and realized I’d been dreaming about those bodies found all along the road, from Kansas City to the Oklahoma border.

It was then that I got up and rifled through some old books left to me by my parents and found pictures of the Okies: people who had gone west and who had been memorialized in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. The more I looked at the pictures, the more I felt the need to weep. I had to put the books away and go back to bed, but I lay there for a long time with tears streaming down my face and only slept when the sun rose in the morning.

I’ve taken the long way to tell you about this because it has been so hurtful to my soul.

I found the body of the older man in an empty cornfield, strewn in a ditch, his clothes burnt by the sun and parched as in a dry harvest. I called in the county coroner and continued searching; I had an uneasy sense that there were more bodies to be found. Why I should think this still remains an immense mystery to me.

I found the woman thirty miles farther on, under a culvert, and she, in turn, bore no marks of violence but seemed dead as if from an invisible bolt of lightning having struck her in the night.

Fifty miles still farther on lay the bodies of the children and the young man.

When they were all assembled, like a jigsaw puzzle, in the county coroner’s office, we surveyed them with a terrible sense of loss, though we did not know these people. Somehow we felt we had seen them before and known them well, and we mourned their deaths.

This entire case might have remained a terrible mystery forever. Many weeks later, as I waited for a haircut in a barbershop one afternoon, I leafed through a pile of magazines. Opening an issue of an old magazine, I came to a page of photographs that caused me to jump up, throw the magazine against the wall, then pick it up again, shouting to nobody, “Damn! Oh, Jesus! Damn!”

I clenched the magazine in my hand and stormed out.

Because, my God, the pictures of the Okies in the magazine were the same people I’d found along the road!

But, looking closer, I read that these pictures were taken weeks ago in New York, of folks dressed up to look like Okies.

The clothes they wore were new but made to look dusty and worn, and if you wanted to have them you could go to a department store and buy these old clothes at new prices and think yourself back sixty years.

I don’t know what happened next. I kind of went redhot bloodshot blind. I heard someone yelling, and it was me. “Damn! Oh God!”

Crushing the magazine, I stared at my motorcycle.

The night was cold, and somehow I knew I had to ride my cycle somewhere. I rode off in the autumn weather for a long while and stopped every once in a while. I didn’t know where I was, and I didn’t care.

Now I’ll tell you another thing that you won’t believe, but when I’m done, maybe you will.

Have you ever been in a really big windstorm? The kind of storm that came through Kansas and blew over Oklahoma all those years of the Dust Bowl. When you see the photos and hear the name there is hardly any way for you to imagine how it was when the people inside the great wind couldn’t see the horizon, didn’t even know what time it was. The wind blew so hard it flattened farms, tore off roofs, knocked over windmills. It ruined a lot of poor roads, which were already nothing more than red mud.

Anyway, you get lost in the middle of a storm like that, when the dust burns your eyes and fills your ears, and you forget what day it is or what year and you wonder if something awful is going to happen and then maybe it’s not awful, but it does happen and it’s there.

This big wind roared up and I was on the road on my motorbike when it hit. I had to stop my bike I was so blind. I stood there with the sun going down beyond the storm and the wind howling and I was afraid for the first time. I didn’t know what I was afraid of, but I waited with my motorbike and after a long while the wind sort of died, and coming along Route 66 from the eastern horizon, going real slow, was an old jalopy; an open car with bundles in the back and a water bag on the side, and steam coming out of the radiator and dirt crusted over the windshield so whoever was driving had to half stand to look over to see the road.

The car puttered up close to me and then sort of ran out of gas. The man behind the wheel looked at me and I looked at him. He was tall, even sitting in his seat, and his face was bony and his hands were bony on the wheel. There was a crumpled hat on his head, and he had a three-day beard. His eyes looked like he’d been in a night storm forever.

He waited for me to speak.

I walked over and all I could say was “You lost?”

He looked at me with his steady gray eyes. His head didn’t move, but his lips did. “No, not now. Is this the Dust Bowl

?”

I sort of pulled back and then I said, “I haven’t heard those words since I was a kid. Yeah, this is it.”

“And this is Route 66?”

I nodded.

“That’s how I figured,” he said. “Well, if I go straight on, will I get where I want to go?”

“Where’s that?”

He looked at my uniform and his shoulders sort of sagged. “I was looking for, I think, a police station.”