The Four Winds

Thank God.

Loreda drove up and parked. She opened the truck’s door and got out, banging the door shut behind her. “Mom!” she yelled. “The store wasn’t open.”

Elsa craned her neck to see Loreda. “Why not?”

“Probably because of the strike talk. They want to remind us how much we need them. Pigs.”

Jean’s body suddenly arched and stiffened. Her eyes rolled back in her head. Her body began to shake violently.

Elsa held her friend until she stilled.

“There’s no aspirin, Jean,” Elsa said.

Jean’s eyes fluttered open. “Don’t fret none, Elsa. Just let me—”

“No,” Elsa said sharply. “I’ll be right back. Don’t you dare go anywhere.”

Jean’s breathing slowed. “I might go dancin’.”

Elsa eased Jean’s head back and got out of the truck. “You stay here,” she said to Loreda. “Try to get Jean to drink more water. Keep a wet rag on her forehead. Don’t let her kick the covers away.” She turned to Jeb. “I’ll be right back.”

“Where yah going?” Jeb asked.

“I’m getting her aspirin.”

“Where? You got any money to buy some?”

“No,” Elsa said tightly. “They make sure we never have money. Stay here.”

She ran to the truck and started it up, drove out to the main road.

At the hospital, she walked across the parking lot and pushed through the doors, leaving dirty brown footprints across the clean floor as she walked to the front desk, where a woman sat alone, playing solitaire.

“I need help,” Elsa said. “Please. I know you won’t let us come to the hospital, but if you could just give me some asprin, it would be such a help. My friend has a fever. Really high. It could be typhoid. Help us. Please. Please.”

The woman straightened in her chair, craned her neck to look up and down the hall. “You know that’s contagious, right? There’s a nurse at the new government tent camp in Arvin. Ask her for help. She treats your kind.”

Your kind.

Enough is goddamned enough.

Elsa walked out of the hospital, went back to the truck, and grabbed Ant’s baseball bat from out of the bed. Carrying it, she walked across the parking lot, trying to stay calm.

This time she banged through the doors, took one look at the woman sneering up at her, and slammed the baseball bat down on the front desk hard enough to dent the wood.

The woman screamed.

“Ah, good. I have your attention. I need some aspirin,” Elsa said calmly.

The woman spun around, yanked open a cabinet. With shaking hands, she started pawing through medicine. “Darn Okies,” the woman muttered.

Elsa smashed a lamp. Then the phone.

The woman grasped a pair of bottles and thrust them at Elsa. “You people are animals.”

“So are you, ma’am. So are you.”

Elsa took the aspirin.