“You sitting down?”
“Why?”
He coughed slightly. “That kid named Moon Child?”
“What about her?” I said, my heart seizing.
“The nurse found her dead an hour ago. A pillow was on the floor.”
* * *
JO ANNE CAME through the door clutching a bag of groceries and a jug of Clorox. She was smiling. I took the bag and jug out of her hands and told her what had happened. Or at least most of it.
“She’s dead?” she said. “Moon Child died in the hospital?”
I told her about the pillow. She sat down at the counter. Her face was as colorless as cardboard, her hair hanging in her eyes. “She was murdered in the hospital? How can that happen? Where were the cops?”
“It’s not their fault, Jo Anne.”
“Nobody cared enough to find out her real name.”
“She never told you what it was?”
“No, she said Marvin picked her up when she jumped out of a semi on the Pass. The driver tried to make her sodomize him.”
“Marvin Fogel picked her up in Ratón Pass?”
“Wandering in the middle of the highway. She said he fed her and gave her clean clothes and money. She said Marvin was the only man who was ever kind to her.”
“Did she ever say where she was from?”
“California, I think. She said something about Buck Owens and Bakersfield. She said she was going to be in the movies.”
“In California?”
“No, Trinidad. A science fiction picture or something. She was going to play a goddess.”
“She told you this when she was loaded?”
“All of them are loaded. If I grew up like them, I’d stay loaded, too.”
“I need to find Stoney.”
“The bus goes wherever there’s free food.” She stared at the floor, her defense system obviously used up.
The rain had stopped, but I could hear it dripping from the eaves and smell the coldness of the fog and the clean dampness of the earth coming through the broken windows. The sun was a whitish yellow, with the pale, thin fragility of a Communion wafer buried inside a cloud. I felt strange about Moon Child. She was the angriest of the kids I’d met on the bus, yet perhaps the one who had the most courage. How could she have been led on by a Hollywood con man claiming he could cast her in a movie?
I put my hand on Jo Anne’s shoulder. “I’m going to call a carpenter friend of mine and hang some blankets over the windows, then take you out to eat. Is that okay?”
“Sure.”
“Then we’ll take a ride down to the Sally. They’re good people.”
“The what?” she said.
* * *
BACK THEN, WHEN you were on the drift, you learned quickly that the Other America was a complex culture held together by the poetry of Walt Whitman, the songs of Woody Guthrie, and the prose of Jack Kerouac. I knew former Wobblies and CCC boys who were still riding the rods, bumming their way from Ammon Hennacy’s Joe Hill House in Salt Lake City down to the date-palm harvest on the California-Mexico border, their faces as lined as an old leather glove, most of them toothless, vibrating on the floor of a flat-wheeler, filled with joy from their first drink in the morning until they slept under the stars that night.