Ghosts of Tom Joad (26 page)

I watched Angie climb on to the bus.

“Hey Earl.”

I'd been holding it in a long time, rain building up in the clouds like a summer storm.

“Angel. I missed you. I screwed up leaving you. You were worth every breath, everything. I'm so sorry—”

“Easy Earl, easy, friend. Nothing to be sorry about.”

“Angie, you knew, didn't you, about Reeve, about the factory, our life?”

“Naw, I didn't know much except that Reeve was an old story and I wanted a new one. Things went okay enough for me, but I'm just one person. Around me, too many people on my bus still weren't okay, and it pulled at me the same as at you. Our folks were better people than they became.”

“I should have gone with you that day.”

“Maybe—it would've been fun to have you along for the ride, Earl. But you're asking the wrong question.”

“What?”

“It ain't so much why you didn't come with me that one day, it's more why you didn't leave Reeve every day after that.”

“You were gone, Angie, I didn't know where to find you, and—”

“Earl, that road was always there.”

What Angie was for me, hell, she was so many things. But as she sat there it was like someone finally turned up the volume on the radio so I could hear it. I knew then that what she really was there for was to tell me I had to choose between the old story, my dad's life in Reeve, and the possibility of more than that. To me, then, I hadn't even seen the choice, only the false comfort of the familiar, the jobs will come back, manufacturing will be
reborn under the new president, or with green initiatives or hightech or fairy dust sprinkles. I didn't have the guts to not follow in my father's footsteps, even as I hated him, and I hated me, for doing it, and I ended up following the same bad spiral that took the country down. Like many people in American towns such as Reeve, I existed in a world that only got smaller. I couldn't think beyond it.

The idea that somehow at the end I could change pain into beauty, it wasn't any more true than the movies, at least it wasn't for me. No whores with hearts of gold, no self-taught janitors with noble ambitions, no meek inheriting anything. Just a helluva lot of damaged people, some still trying out of habit—our inherent stubbornness—and some done. Me, I was done.

T
HERE WAS A
long pause. The Driver stopped. It was quiet on the bus.

“Hey Earl, you remember once in the park, on the swings? What was it you kept saying while you pushed me?”

“I said, back and a-wwway, Angie, back and a-wwwway.”

“That was what your mama said to you, wasn't it, when you were little?”

“Yeah, my dad too, sometimes, I guess.”

“Earl, you gotta know now, I gotta tell you, a few months after I left Reeve with you, you know, when you turned back, I had a baby. I must've been pregnant when I left that day.”

“Me?”

“Maybe, probably … of course, yeah, he
is
you Earl. Looks like you, talks like you, sometimes sad, sometimes kinda funny,
summer birthday and brown eyes, a good kid like you. I didn't tell you, well, you never called me, and I even sent you that one postcard. It was hard, me being just a kid too, but we got by.”

“Angie—”

“You left something here Earl, world knows you were here. That boy's now—”

“A boy?”

“He's a man now, Earl, but you have a son out there that's just getting started on his bus ride. Gonna do something with himself, wants to help people.”

“Angie, if he wants to help people, you tell him about the hash I made of my life. Tell him he can have a society where the majority of people flounder just above poverty, the water risen right up to their literal New Orleans lips. Or, he can choose a society where people have more hope. His group—and there are 99 of him to every one of them—have to stop buying the old story. Most people understand the boss takes more, they just want enough. Farmers pray for rain, not a different system of weather. Rain works. Tell him he don't need socialism or wealth redistribution or handouts or a hand up or bailouts or welfare or food stamps or safety nets, just work where he can find his self-worth, create a reality that he can—I could have—well, lived with. You tell him that.”

“Okay now, it's almost done. Shhh, no more talking Earl.”

“Can I hold you?

“'Course. But time is short.”

“I never knew my arms could be a bad place for you to be. I wish there was more, Angie.”

“Me too. You know, Earl, it doesn't really end when you do. I can see you in his face, the way he sits, what he says, his smile. When people look in his eyes, you'll be there. You're on our bus, same as we were on yours.”

Angie smiled at me, and asked, as if we had always been together, when was the last time I'd had really good spaghetti, and if I still liked apples, like we hadn't not talked for all those years. She slid her hand down my arm, past the wrist, to 1977. I looked at her, seeing her sixteen, then back to myself, tanned almost chocolate to the shirt sleeves, strong again. Sixteen-year-old girls are wasted on seventeen-year-old boys. I never understood that it wasn't what we did or what we said, it was all about what we were when we were with each other. Some say it's about the bus ride—life—but at some point it just ends. The journey's all we have until we get there.

Angie took my finger in her mouth, I felt her tongue, warm and a little coarse, and she whispered to me that she wanted to curl around it until it's all inside of her. It became my last memory.

It was effortless.

The bullet I had just launched passed through my brain. What seemed like a lifetime had been just a fraction of a second, all that I remembered passing through my soul in a single moment. Things turned red, then white, then gray, as my eyes filled with night. My body was so heavy, then so light, until I was made more of air than of me, rising. At about this point the bullet completed what I had sent it to do.

I kissed Angel goodbye. It was time to get off the bus.

Y
OU MAY WRITE
alone, but you don't think alone. Thanks to the many people who read alongside me and helped make this all better: Mari Nakamura, Lisa Ehrle, Teri Schooley, Dan White, Randy “Charlie Sherpa” Brown, Bruce Levine, Connie Lockwood, Steve, Matthew Hoh, Alex Kingsbury, David Rubenstein, Alyssa Frohberg and Tom DeLong.

Special thanks to friends Jesselyn Radack, John Kiriakou, Tom Drake, and Teresa Hartnett, to Dr. Morris Berman for the inspiration, and to Laurie Russo, a help (again) as an early editor. And thanks to Tracy Richardson, Chris Katsaropoulos, and the team at Luminis for producing a beautiful book.

P
ETER
V
AN
B
UREN,
a 24-year veteran of the State Department, spent a year in Iraq. Following his first book,
We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People,
the Department of State began proceedings against him as a whistleblower. Through the efforts of the Government Accountability Project and the ACLU, Van Buren instead retired from the State Department with his full benefits of service.

Prior to Iraq, Van Buren was assigned to Taiwan, Osaka, London, Seoul, Tokyo and other locations in East Asia. He attended The Ohio State University, graduating with a B.A. in photography and an M.A. in education. He also attended Osaka University of Foreign Studies and Hyogo University of Teacher Education for post-graduate study. His commentary has appeared in
The New York Times, Salon, Mother Jones, Huffington Post, NPR,
and on the BBC. Having grown up in Ohio, Van Buren now lives in New York City.

Learn more at
www.ghostsoftomjoad.com