“Must have been a good book.”
“It was,” I said. “And there was four-armed white apes, and regular-looking people too, only they were red-skinned.”
“Did they have four arms too?”
“No. They were like us, except for the red skin.”
“That’s not as good,” Terri said. “I’d like to have had me four arms, if I was one of them, and otherwise looked regular.”
“You wouldn’t look regular with four arms,” I said.
“I could stand it,” Terri said. “I could pick up a lot of things at once.”
When we woke up the next morning, my back hurt considerable. I had stretched the blanket out on an acorn, and it had stuck me all night. I come awake a few times during the night and was going to pull back the blanket and move it, but I was too darn tired to move. In the morning, though, I wished I had. I felt like I had been shot with an arrow right above my belt line.
Terri, however, was as chipper as if she had good sense. She had some boiled eggs in the package Mama had ended up giving her after it was decided she was going, and we had one apiece for breakfast and some more canteen water.
After wrapping up the blanket, we climbed back in the car and started out again, drove on across the line and into Oklahoma, going over the Red River, which wasn’t really all that much of a river. At that time of the year, at least where we crossed, it wasn’t hardly no more than a muddy trickle, though as we went over the bridge, I could see down a distance to where it was wider and deeper-looking.
We come to a little town called Hootie Hoot, which seemed to me to be a bad name for most anything, and there was one gas pump outside a little store there, and by the door going into the store was a sign that said they was looking for a tire-and-rim man. We could see the gas in the big jug on top of the pump, so we knew there was plenty, and we pulled up to it. Couple other stations we had passed were out of gas.
After we had sat there awhile, an old man with bushy white hair wearing overalls so faded they was near white as his hair came out of the station. He had a big red nose and looked like he had just got out of bed. We stood outside the car while he filled the tank.
“They say the Depression has done turned around,” he said. “But if it did, it darn sure didn’t turn in this direction.”
“No, sir,” I said.
“Ain’t you a little young to be out driving the roads?” he said.
“Not that young,” I said.
He eyed me some. “I guess not. You children on an errand?”
“We are,” I said. “We’re going to pick up my uncle Smat.”
“Family outing?”
“You could say that.”
“So we will,” he said.
“We might want something from the store too,” I said.
“All right, then,” he said.
Me and Terri went inside, and he hung up the gas nozzle and trailed after us.
I didn’t have a lot of money, a few dollars Mama had given me for gas and such, but I didn’t want another soggy egg sandwich or a boiled egg. I bought some Vienna sausages, some sardines, and a box of crackers, and splurged on Coca-Colas for the two of us. I got some shelled and salted peanuts to pour into the Coca-Colas, bought four slices of bread, two cuts of bologna, and two fat cuts of rat cheese. The smell of that cheese made me seriously hungry; it was right smart in aroma, and my nose hairs tingled.
We paid up, and I pulled the car away from the pump and on around beside the store. We sat on the bumper and made us a sandwich from the bread, bologna, and cheese. It was a lot better than those soggy egg sandwiches Mama had made us, and though we had two more of them, they had reached a point where I considered them turned, and I planned on throwing them out on the road before we left.
That’s when a ragged-looking fellow come up the road to the store and stopped when he seen us. He beat the dust off the shoulders and sides of his blue suit coat. His gray hat looked as if a goat had bitten a hunk out of the front of it. The suit he was wearing had been nice at one time, but it was worn shiny in spots and hung on him like a circus tent. His shoe toes flapped when he walked like they were trying to talk. He said, “I hate to bother you children, but I ain’t ate in a couple days, nothing solid anyway, and was wondering you got something to spare?”
“We got some egg sandwiches,” Terri said. “You can have both of them.”
“That would be right nice,” said the ragged man.
He came over smiling. Up close, he looked as if he had been boiled in dirt, his skin was so dusty from walking along the road. One of his nose holes was smaller than the other. I hadn’t never seen nobody like that before. It wouldn’t have been all that noticeable, but he had a way of tilting his head back when he talked.