Right Size
By M. L. Konett
8/13/01
The marbles were dirty, so I put them in my mouth to get the grit off. I’d eaten a lot of dirt in the last couple of months—I’d survived the bad dust sickness—and a little more wouldn’t hurt. But that bug-eyed kid standing in front of me looked at me funny.
“Where you from, anyway?” I asked him, my mouth full of glass balls. There were four of us playing. There was nothing else to do in the camps. We were too young to go out and work. A boy has to be at least twelve to go out on the trucks and do the picking. None of us kids were over nine.
“Far away,” he said. This kid, his name was Petey. He was a queer one. He drank juice all the time, piss-warm apple juice. His ma always chased him around with the juice. But it wasn’t the juice that made him queer, it was everything put together.
My dry tongue pushed the marbles out of my mouth one by one, until all three were in my palm. “Farther than Little Rock?” I asked.
“So far that you wouldn’t even know the name of it,” he said quietly.
I sucked up and spat, mostly to get rid of the dirt and stuff in my mouth. “How do you know what I know?” I got up real close to Petey. He was taller than I was, but most everyone was taller than me, even the girls. “We’re sick of hearing about how perfect it is where you’re from. If it was so good, how come your family’s Okies too?”
Petey flinched; his clear blue eyes squinted underneath his dark brow. Okies was what people from California called us. But most of us weren’t from Oklahoma. Like my family, we’re from Kansas, a ways out of Dodge City. But then the dust storms came, and the worst one, the Black Sunday storm, wrecked the land and killed the cattle. There wasn’t anything left to do after the banks foreclosed but leave.
“They’re back!” One of the other boys we were playing marbles with pointed, out over the ridge that led to the entrance of the camp. A black, coughing flatbed truck clanked along the trail. In the back was my pa. He’d been one of the lucky ones picked that day to go out and pick fruit—”lucky” because too many days had passed without him on the truck. But now Pa and the truck were back. They were going to be getting off right where we were playing.
I jiggled my marbles and shoved them into my overalls. Petey was already gone. With bare feet, I stomped out the playing circle I’d drawn in the dirt. Pa wouldn’t like knowing I was fooling around. As I turned to find Pa, I stumbled right into a giant man—almost smacked into his thigh. I stopped and looked up at him. I must have made a noise because he started laughing and in a big booming voice he said, “Hey there, boy!”
I could barely see up as high as his chin, but I could tell that he had black hair. I couldn’t see much more about his face. He ruffled my hair with a hand at least twice as big as Pa’s. I couldn’t help it: my mouth was hanging open. He wasn’t normal. He just wasn’t normal at all.
Then Pa and the giant shook hands. Even Pa didn’t come up to his chest. Though Pa was a small man, he had a big handshake. That was his way of making up for his size.
The big man’s voice boomed again. “That your boy?”
Pa looked down at me. I think it must have hurt his neck, starting looking up at the giant and ending down so low at me.
“Yup,” Pa said, putting his arm around my shoulder. “This here is my son, Johnnie.”
“Sir.” I offered my hand.
The giant laughed. His paw swallowed my arm clear up to my elbow. His voice sounded kind of like what I imagined God’s voice would sound like coming down from the heavens, deep and music-like. “Did you meet my boy? Peter, where are you?”
The giant dropped my hand and looked around. I think I must have groaned out loud. Petey? He was likely off somewhere sucking up his juice or on his hands and knees finding his special rocks.
* * * *
I followed Petey out.
I was bored and all the men were off working. It was a good time to be working. California was just like they said it was: Paradise. Not a dusty dirty place like Kansas.
Ma was busy cleaning our garage. I wasn’t supposed to call it a garage, but that’s what it was. She worked so hard to keep it nice. It was handout money, government money, that let us live there. We were some of the oldest people in the migration camp, which was why we had a garage. Petey and his family were still living in a tent. I didn’t know how his pa slept in there.
I didn’t like to be around much when Ma was cleaning, because I always ended up on the floor scrubbing. So I wandered around the camp some, until I found Petey. He was carrying around a Mason jar full of juice. Like I said before, Petey was all the time drinking juice. I followed him around a spell. I think he was trying to lose me.
“Where you going, Petey?”
“Nowhere.”
Petey mostly just made circles around the camp. He’d stop here and there and check out some rocks on the ground. After a while, he’d pick one up and put it in his pocket. I watched him and followed him to where the ground was really rocky. I tried stepping in the same spots as him. It was easy to see where he was stepping because he had shoes on and they made tracks. I hadn’t owned a pair of shoes since I was six years old. That was back in Kansas. A long time ago….
Petey was wearing long pants and a long shirt, too. It was queer since it was so hot. Most of the time I didn’t even wear a shirt. His face looked like he’d been spooked; he wore that face pretty much all the time. He needed a haircut. He almost looked like a girl, especially with those light eyes and curly lashes.
Petey stopped walking around when he reached the edge of the camp. I could look up and see the foothills. We weren’t supposed to go out any further, at least I wasn’t. I don’t know what kind of rules Petey had—his parents were so much stranger than mine, chasing him with juice and all.
Petey drank the rest of his juice and sat down. He wasn’t acting very social. I didn’t have anything better to do than bug him, so I stuck around.
I sat down on the ground next to Petey. There was an anthill and I grabbed a twig and poked at it some. The high noon sun beat down and made my hair and face hot. I looked over to Petey and he was sweating pretty hard.
“Petey, where you from?” I didn’t know what else to ask him. I wanted to ask him how come his pa was so big but that wasn’t really a polite way to start a conversation.
“I forgot the name. I’ve been away so long.” Petey sighed.
I didn’t say anything. He was thinking hard and I didn’t want to mess up his remembering. I poked at the ants coming out of their home.
“Sometimes,” Petey said, “I close my eyes real tight and then I’m flying. Except there’s no clouds, and no trees, and there surely isn’t any dust. There’s just free and open space. No one had to leave on trucks and everyone had a real place to sleep. That’s what it was like at home.” He looked down into his empty Mason jar. “We’re going back soon.”
“You mean you close your eyes and dream? I do that at nighttime,” I said. I looked down at the poor ants I had forced away from their home; I swallowed hard. I knew how they felt. I threw my twig back behind me.
“It’s different.”
“How?”
“Just is.” Petey got up and started walking away from camp.
“I’m not allowed to go any further,” I said. I got up.
“Me neither,” he said. He didn’t stop walking. He headed out toward the foothills and I followed him.
* * * *
Birds were chirping and the sun was climbing higher and higher up in the cloudless sky. We were pretty far from camp. The rough ground tore up my feet. There were a lot of sharp rocks littering the path we were climbing. The air thinned out and Petey was having a hard time of breathing. He was getting red in the face.