The little boys raised their eyes to her face and they stopped breathing; their mouths were partly opened, their half-naked bodies were rigid.
“Oh- them. Well, no- them’s two for a penny.”
“Well, gimme two then, ma’am.” He placed the copper cent carefully on the counter. The boys expelled their held breath softly. Mae held the big sticks out.
“Take ’em,” said the man.
They reached timidly, each took a stick, and they held them down at their sides and did not look at them. But they looked at each other, and their mouth corners smiled rigidly with embarrassment.
“Thank you, ma’am.” The man picked up the bread and went out the door, and the little boys marched stiffly behind him, the red-striped sticks held tightly against their legs. They leaped like chipmunks over the front seat and onto the top of the load, and they burrowed back out of sight like chipmunks.
The man got in and started his car, and with a roaring motor and a cloud of blue oily smoke the ancient Nash climbed up on the highway and went on its way to the west.
From inside the restaurant the truck drivers and Mae and Al stared after them.
Big Bill wheeled back. “Them wasn’t two-for-a-cent candy,” he said.
“What’s that to you?” Mae said fiercely.
“Them was nickel apiece candy,” said Bill.
“We got to get goin’,” said the other man. “We’re droppin’ time.” They reached in their pockets. Bill put a coin on the counter and the other man looked at it and reached again and put down a coin. They swung around and walked to the door.
“So long,” said Bill.
Mae called, “Hey! Wait a minute. You got change.”
“You go to hell,” said Bill, and the screen door slammed.
Mae watched them get into the great truck, watched it lumber off in low gear, and heard the shift up the whining gears to cruising ratio. “Al-” she said softly.
He looked up from the hamburger he was patting thin and stacking between waxed papers. “What ya want?”
“Look there.” She pointed at the coins beside the cups- two half-dollars. Al walked near and looked, and then he went back to work.
“Truck drivers,” Mae said reverently, “an’ after them shitheels.”
Flies struck the screen with little bumps and droned away. The compressor chugged for a time and then stopped. On 66 the traffic whizzed by, trucks and fine streamlined cars and jalopies; and they went by with a vicious whiz. Mae took down the plates and scraped the pie crusts into a bucket. She found her damp cloth and wiped the counter with circular sweeps. And her eyes were on the highway, where life whizzed by.
Al wiped his hands on his apron. He looked at a paper pinned to the wall over the griddle. Three lines of marks in columns on the paper. Al counted the longest line. He walked along the counter to the cash register, rang “No Sale,” and took out a handful of nickels.
“What ya doin’?” Mae asked.
“Number three’s ready to pay off,” said Al. He went on the third slot machine and played his nickels in, and on the fifth spin of the wheels the three bars came up and the jackpot dumped out into the cup. Al gathered up the big handful of coins and went back of the counter. He dropped them in the drawer and slammed the cash register. Then he went back to his place and crossed out the line of dots. “Number three gets more play’n the others,” he said. “Maybe I ought to shift ’em around.” He lifted a lid and stirred the slowly simmering stew.
“I wonder what they’ll do in California?” said Mae.
“Who?”
“Them folks that was just in.”
“Christ knows,” said Al.
“S’pose they’ll get work?”
“How the hell would I know?” said Al.
She stared eastward along the highway. “Here comes a transport, double. Wonder if they stop? Hope they do.” And as the huge truck came heavily down from the highway and parked, Mae seized her cloth and wiped the whole length of the counter. And she took a few swipes at the gleaming coffee urn too, and turned up the bottle-gas under the urn. Al brought out a handful of little turnips and started to peel them. Mae’s face was gay when the door opened and the two uniformed truck drivers entered.
“Hi, sister!”
“I won’t be a sister to no man,” said Mae. They laughed and Mae laughed. “What’ll it be, boys?”
“Oh, a cup a Java. What kinda pie ya got?”
“Pineapple cream an’ banana cream an’ chocolate cream an’ apple.”
“Give me apple. No, wait- what’s that big thick one?”
Mae picked up the pie and smelled it. “Pineapple cream,” she said.
“Well, chop out a hunk a that.”
The cars whizzed viciously by on 66.
CHAPTER 16
JOADS AND WILSONS crawled westward as a unit: El Reno and Bridgeport, Clinton, Elk City, Sayre, and Texola. There’s the border, and Oklahoma was behind. And this day the cars crawled on and on, through the Panhandle of Texas. Shamrock and Alanreed, Groom and Yarnell. They went through Amarillo in the evening, drove too long, and camped when it was dusk. They were tired and dusty and hot. Granma had convulsions from the heat, and she was weak when they stopped.
That night Al stole a fence rail and made a ridge pole on the truck, braced at both ends. That night they ate nothing but pan biscuits, cold and hard, held over from breakfast. They flopped down on the mattresses and slept in their clothes. The Wilsons didn’t even put up their tent.
Joads and Wilsons were in flight across the Panhandle, the rolling gray country, lined and cut with old flood scars. They were in flight out of Oklahoma and across Texas. The land turtles crawled through the dust and the sun whipped the earth, and in the evening the heat went out of the sky and the earth sent up a wave of heat from itself.
Two days the families were in flight, but on the third the land was too huge for them and they settled into a new technique of living; the highway became their home and movement their medium of expression. Little by little they settled into the new life. Ruthie and Winfield first, then Al, then Connie and Rose of Sharon, and, last, the older ones. The land rolled like great stationary ground swells. Wildorado and Vega and Boise and Glenrio. That’s the end of Texas. New Mexico and the mountains. In the far distance, waved up against the sky, the mountains stood. And the wheels of the cars creaked around, and the engines were hot, and the steam spurted around the radiator caps. They crawled to the Pecos river, and crossed at Santa Rosa. And they went on for twenty miles.
AL JOAD drove the touring car, and his mother sat beside him, and Rose of Sharon beside her. Ahead the truck crawled. The hot air folded in waves over the land, and the mountains shivered in the heat. Al drove listlessly, hunched back in the seat, his hand hooked easily over the cross-bar of the steering wheel; his gray hat, peaked and pulled to an incredibly cocky shape, was low over one eye; and as he drove, he turned and spat out the side now and then.
Ma, beside him, had folded her hands in her lap, had retired into a resistance against weariness. She sat loosely, letting the movement of the car sway her body and her head. She squinted her eyes ahead at the mountains. Rose of Sharon was braced against the movement of the car, her feet pushed tight against the floor, and her right elbow hooked over the door. And her plump face was tight against the movement, and her head jiggled sharply because her neck muscles were tight. She tried to arch her whole body as a rigid container to preserve her fetus from shock. She turned her head toward her mother.
“Ma,” she said. Ma’s eyes lighted up and she drew her attention toward Rose of Sharon. Her eyes went over the tight, tired, plump face, and she smiled. “Ma,” the girl said, “when we get there, all you gonna pick fruit an’ kinda live in the country, ain’t you?”
Ma smiled a little satirically. “We ain’t there yet,” she said. “We don’t know what it’s like. We got to see.”
“Me an’ Connie don’t want to live in the country no more,” the girl said. “We got it all planned up what we gonna do.”
For a moment a little worry came on Ma’s face. “Ain’t you gonna stay with us- with the family?” she asked.
“Well, we talked all about it, me an’ Connie. Ma, we wanna live in a town.” She went on excitedly. “Connie gonna get a job in a store or maybe a fact’ry. An’ he’s gonna study at home, maybe radio, so he can git to be a expert an’ maybe later have his own store. An’ we’ll go to pitchers whenever. An’ Connie says I’m gonna have a doctor when the baby’s born; an’ he says we’ll see how times is, an’ maybe I’ll go to a hospiddle. An’ we’ll have a car, little car. An’ after he studies at night, why- it’ll be nice, an’ he tore a page outa Western Love Stories, an’ he’s gonna send off for a course, ’cause it don’t cost nothin’ to send off. Says right on that clipping. I seen it. An’ why- they even get you a job when you take that course- radios, it is- nice clean work, and a future. An’ we’ll live in town an’ go to pitchers whenever an’- well, I’m gonna have a ‘lectric iron, an’ the baby’ll have all new stuff. Connie says all new stuff- white an’- Well, you seen in the catalogue all the stuff they got for a baby. Maybe right at first while Connie’s studyin’ at home it won’t be easy, but- well, when the baby comes, maybe he’ll be all done studyin’ an’ we’ll have a place, little bit of a place. We don’t want nothin’ fancy, but we want it nice for the baby-” Her face glowed with excitement. “An’ I thought- well, I thought maybe we could all go in town, an’ when Connie gets his store- maybe Al could work for him.”