“I may be leaving bed and board,” he says, “but I’m not leaving a good thing.”
“Bed and board are a good thing!” I get up, unsteady in the sway of the train. “Don’t you get that? A place to sleep and a guaranteed meal are all those million ‘migrant workers’ ask for. That and the satisfaction of a job well done — and the respect hard work deserves.”
Lloyd looks up at me from where he sits against the wall, forearms resting on his knees. His eyes look black in the darkness.
“What if that respect and satisfaction are withheld?” he asks. “Are bed and board still worth it? Are times so hard we have to give up our dreams of making a better life?”
I thought I had. I thought the Depression had stolen the dreams I never knew existed because I had always taken them for granted — a warm bed, good food, friends, trust. Something to run toward instead of always running away.
A gust blows into the boxcar, thick with fog and a rich, humid, salty perfume. I walk shakily to the door and look out. Far in the distance, the earth flattens onto the horizon, the moon’s glow doubled.
The ocean.
The end of the line.
That hope is still stuck tight in my chest, like a gasp of air swallowed hard.
I glance behind me, and Lloyd stands too. A hard rock of the boxcar throws him sideways, but he catches himself. Keeps his gaze on me.
He moves to stand beside me. Not touching.
“What are you looking for, Rosie?”
He says my name — my real name — and it cracks my chest open. For the first time in what seems like a lifetime, I feel like the girl I once was. Rose Marie Weaver. Book-smart and world-scared. Soft, maybe, but also optimistic.
Back then I believed that hard work moves you forward. Now I know you also have to grab luck before it passes you by.
I muster a deep breath because it takes a lungful to ask a favor.
“Would you introduce me to your aunt?”
“Yes,” he says quickly, without even thinking. He ducks his chin to his chest. Embarrassed. “You trusted me, and I want . . . I’d like to know where to find you.”
My heart stills.
He lifts his head. “I’d like to see you again.”
“What about me?” Billy murmurs from the corner.
The quaver in my chest is like the flicker of a flame, and I laugh.
“Of course I’d want to see you, Billy,” Lloyd says, but he’s looking right at me. “If you think you can trust me too.”
I can’t speak. There are too many negatives. Too many questions. I’ve only just met this boy. I have to think of Billy. And Mama. And all the things these hard times have taken from me. All the things I’ve had to give up.
Except, perhaps, my dreams.
I was obsessed with movies and film history when I was young — spending hours in front of the television, watching classics like It Happened One Night, The Thin Man, and The Gay Divorcee. To me, it seemed the world of the thirties was populated by quick-witted detectives, rich heiresses, and honorable journalists. It was only after reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath that I pictured a completely different scenario.
Two years ago, I came across a documentary film and accompanying book titled Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression by Errol Lincoln Uys. I was captivated by the idea of the nearly quarter million teens who for many reasons left home and braved the dangers of the freight trains during the 1930s. The men and women who shared their stories decades later inspired me with their courage and resilience.
It seemed a natural progression to create a train-jumping teenager influenced by the very same movies I had watched and immerse her in a world of deprivation and danger. But I wanted to make sure it was a world still lit by hope, because that was something Hollywood offered during those dark times.
I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN FRANKIE WAS a liar from the day I met her. She turned up at the Douglas airplane factory with pearls in her ears and a mouth that wouldn’t quit running, even when she jammed up her rivet gun and cost me my lunch break having to redo the panel she’d messed up. “This is just a temporary assignment,” she told me, leaning against the B-17’s half-built hull and smoking a cigarette while I corrected her work. “I’m actually a spy for the OSS. They’re going to drop me into France soon to rescue my fella.”
She looked so tiny propped up against that beast, not at all like a weapon to be tossed out behind enemy lines. I wouldn’t have minded tossing her out of a plane myself after that first day. But I knew how it was. She sounded as confident as all the rest of us once sounded, fresh from the Los Angeles bus terminal, face not yet scalded by the endless sunshine, still clinging to a drawl and a by-golly or two. Most girls learned to file their words and nails and teeth to sharp points after a few rounds at central casting, to shed the confidence for cutthroat common sense. Frankie, though, still hadn’t lost the conviction that the world was going to bend her way.