The Longest Road (51 page)

With a wave of desolation that took her by surprise, she asked, “Will you be moving to Enid?”

“Not for a while, anyhow. Soup wants to see how it works to have me over here. For jobs down this way, I can mix the nitro, load the truck, and get to the well, while all he has to do is jump in his truck and meet me.”

“It's real exciting, Jim.”

His laugh was rueful. “Scary, too, pulling this without Johnny's knowing about it. But with everything else he's got on his mind, I didn't want to give him an argument or act like I was ungrateful.”

“Good luck, Jim. Come by and see us.”

“You bet.” He hesitated. “Laurie. If you need anything—if I can help—you'll tell me, won't you?”

They were linked by the man who had drowned outside Eden six years ago. Knowing Jim, she understood that he believed he owed a debt to her and Buddy. “Yes,” she promised. “I'll tell you. Thanks for walking me to work. Thanks for being at the train.”

That night, for the first time in years, she dreamed that as she watched the night sky, the moon turned red as blood and began to fall toward earth, swelling to blot out the stars. Dread stopped her breath. She woke to a scream breaking in her throat, lay there, heart sledging, as she came out of the terror.

“Laurie!” Way called from outside her door. “You all right, honey?”

“Yes. I—I just had a nightmare.”

“Want Marilys to come stay with you a while?”

“Goodness, no.” Jumping out of bed, Laurie opened the door and gave him a hug. “I'm fine now,” she said with a sheepish laugh. “Sorry I woke you up.”

But another world had ended.

27

No one had much heart for the holidays. There seemed to be no stopping the Japanese, who were overrunning the Pacific Islands. On December 23, American marines on Wake Island surrendered after a bloody fifteen-day siege. The family agreed to take the money they'd have spent on a special big dinner and each other's presents and send it to a group that provided food and clothing to English war orphans; Laurie added the money she'd saved for her annual gift to her parents.

There was still a nice dinner, with Jim invited, in midafternoon after Marilys and Laurie got home from work. The restaurant served a gala holiday dinner but would be closed the rest of the day. When the last crumb of apple pie had vanished, the family and Jim gathered around the dancing blaze in the big old fireplace and sang carols, Marilys accompanying with the guitar, Laurie playing the harmonica. When they paused for spiced cider and nuts, Laurie put on the records that had been Johnny's early Christmas present, Woody Guthrie singing Dust Bowl songs, hard-luck songs, church-house blues, most of them tunes Johnny had taught her that she had played all the way from Oklahoma to California and then through Arizona, New Mexico and Texas—Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and back to Oklahoma.

A long, lonesome road, but she and Buddy had been lucky. They had Marilys and Way and a home, this wonderful old house. If only this war would be over, if Johnny came home safe—Yet how could you pray that it would be others who died instead of the one you loved? Be with them all, she prayed. With everybody everywhere who's afraid or sick or sad or dying.

A child's prayer, a fool's prayer. Right now, thousands of American soldiers based in the Philippines were trapped on the Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor, a little island in Manila Bay. That very day, the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong had fallen to the Japanese.

Laurie shoved back the somber thoughts and drew comfort from watching Marilys and Way sitting close together, cracking nuts and feeding the best ones to each other. Having his own business had given Way a new confidence, a prouder way of moving. It was hard to see in him the raddled hobo who had mooched food from Laurie and Buddy on the train.

As the business was to Way, the house was to Marilys. Only a few days before, as the women hung laundry on the line stretched where it got the most sun, Marilys warmed her chapped hands beneath her arms and gazed lovingly around the big yard. “I can't believe we really have a home, especially one this nice! Finding Way was all the luck I asked for, I wouldn't have the nerve to expect more. But isn't it wonderful to know this place is ours and we'll never have to move again?”

It was unlikely that Laurie would live out her days in the gracious old home, though knowing it was there would give her a sense of rootedness, of security.

“It
is
wonderful. After all those shacks and tents we've lived in, it's a pleasure to have furniture to dust and floors that look nice when you've finished mopping and waxing.”

Sitting in front of the fire, Marilys and Way looked so blissful that Laurie wondered with a stab of pain if she would ever in the world sit by Johnny like that? To live with the one you loved, that seemed happiness and good fortune beyond what any mortal could expect. If he just came home safe, she'd never ask for anything else, but she couldn't help imagining.

That night when the blood-red moon swelled to fill the sky and fell slowly toward Laurie, when she woke with a scream lodged in her pulsing throat, she told herself as always, only a dream. Only a dream. She thought as she had learned to do of Johnny, conjured up his smile and voice and hands, listened to him singing. When she drifted into sleep again, the bad dream didn't come.

The New Year of 1942 brought desperate times for the Allies from the totally destroyed Dutch-British-Australian-American forces in the Java Sea to Norway, where Vidkun Quisling had been installed as the Nazis' puppet. On February 22, 1942, a Japanese submarine shelled an oil refinery near Santa Barbara, California. The only damage was to a pumphouse roof, but that the mainland could be attacked at all sent a wave of panic through the whole country. While the seemingly invincible Japanese took Singapore and conquered Burma and the Netherlands East Indies, the U.S. government decided to move all Japanese—citizens of the United States, most of them born here—from the West Coast and Hawaii to relocation centers in the interior where they couldn't help hostile forces.

“Reckon the army's scared at the way Japanese soldiers don't surrender and them Zero pilots same as commit suicide to serve that emperor they think is some kind of sun-god.” Way rubbed his scarred cheek. “They're takin' folks with as little as one-sixteenth Japanese blood and adopted kids raised by Cau-Cau—”

“Caucasians?” asked Laurie.

“Yeah. Sounds too much like that Nazi idea of being Aryan, whatever in the hell that is. Crazy, too. 'Cause just the way a drop of Negro blood makes a person black to some people, what they're admittin' is that a little tiny bit of Japanese blood is stronger than other kinds and stronger than being raised American.”

Laurie wrote her congressmen, the War Department, and President Roosevelt. “You've done so much good for the country. Please don't let this awful thing happen. Except that we won't kill them, it's like Hitler's sending Jews to concentration camps.” She never got an answer.

Allowed to bring only what they could carry, 110,000 Japanese-Americans reported to converted livestock stalls and stadiums where families were crowded into rooms furnished only with cots, blankets, and mattresses, separated from families in the next “apartments” only by thin partitions. These camps were surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers. Anyone who tried to leave would be shot.

“Most of them had to sell everything they owned,” Marilys said with bitter shame. “Maybe there were a few spies out there and it was sure scary when that submarine shelled the refinery, but to do this to thousands of people—”

“There must be plenty of us who don't think it's right,” Laurie said. “But what can we do about it?”

“Nothin' except write the government—and I guess unless everybody in the country did that, it wouldn't help. After the way our boys were snuck up on at Pearl Harbor and the way they're starvin' now over on Bataan, there's plenty of Americans hate all Japanese even if they're American, too.”

“I suppose over in Germany right now,” said Laurie slowly, “good ordinary people are talking this way about what's happening to the Jews. They hate it but they don't know what they can do.”

“If they talk very loud, they'll wind up in a camp, too.” Way grunted. “At least here we can still say we think our government's wrong—not that it helps those folks penned up behind bobwire on account of their ancestors.”

Johnny had shipped out at the end of March. His APO was San Francisco, so it was sure his outfit was headed for the Pacific, where troops were so urgently needed. There was no way to get reinforcements to the besieged Americans on Bataan but he could go somewhere equally perilous. Laurie got a card that said: “Play that harmonica, honey. Take care, and write even when I don't.”

Knowing that he was on his way to battle, that he could be killed or terribly maimed, plunged Laurie into agony. She worked and did her share around the house, but it was like moving in a trance. Then Way came home from the salvage yard one night looking so stricken that it jarred her back to reality.

“Dub's putting in a salvage and supply company right across the street from ours.”

Laurie and Marilys stared. Way sank down in a chair as if his bones were broken. “Worked it slick. I never had the least notion.”

“Are—are you sure?” Marilys whispered.

“Sure, I'm sure. Yesterday there was just that old overgrown field across from our place. By the time I got to work this morning, trucks were unloading every kind of pipe you can imagine along with tanks and pumps and generators—enough stuff to supply a whole durned oil boom.”

“How do you know it's W.S.?” Laurie asked when her voice would work.

Way laughed mirthlessly. “On account of right on the side of the fancy new trailer that's plunked down close to the street, there's a great big sign.”

“Oh.” That was all Laurie could say.

Marilys poured Way some coffee and put in plenty of cream and sugar. “Sweetheart,” she admonished, “you've been honest and gone to a lot of trouble to find what contractors needed at a fair price. Many's the night you've driven through a storm to deliver some piece of equipment a driller needed. The men that know you won't go flocking over to Dub's.”

Way shook his head. “Sweetie, a contractor has to get the best price he can for his boss. If he don't and gets caught, it's his neck.”

“Yes, but you don't tack on much profit.” Marilys had often chided him about the need to charge more for his time. “No one can undersell you without losing money.”

“Dub can lose money till he puts me out of business.”

“But—”

Way raised a stilling hand. “It's there on his sign, sugar, folksy and bighearted as hell. ‘Tell Dub the best price you can find on what you need. He guarantees the same product at ten percent less. Tell Dub what you've been offered for your used supplies and he'll pay you at least ten percent more.'” Way's body sagged. He had shaved that morning and his clothes had been clean then but some effect of shadow and posture suddenly, pitilessly, made him look like the tramp who'd hopped that boxcar seven years ago. “Reckon I was a fool not to guess Dub would try to wipe me out someday.”

“He waited till Johnny shipped out,” Marilys said bitterly.

A new fear clutched Laurie. Dub had acted so benevolent, so understanding, when Johnny volunteered. Suppose Redwine had decided to get even for what Laurie had been sure he'd view as a betrayal? What if he somehow robbed Johnny of his part in the company—all legal and correct, of course, so Johnny would have no remedy?

“I've let you down,” Way groaned, clenching his fists. “Sunk all our money in it, Laurie's and Buddy's, too.”

“You were trying to get ahead, make us a better living,” Marilys comforted. “You were making a go of it, too. Who could suspect that Dub was just being patient all these years, waiting for his chance?”

“I should have seen through him,” Way gritted. “The way he framed me for stealing, dogged me all over the country—”

“It's my fault,” said Marilys.

Way stared. “That's crazy, sweetheart!”

“No. There's something I didn't tell you—thought it would just cause trouble. Dub tried to get me to take up with him again.”

Way sprang to his feet. “Why, that—”

Marilys caught his arm. “He threatened to tell you—all the things I already had, back before we married. When he found out his blackmail wouldn't work, he never spoke to me again except when he had to.”

“Can't blame him for wanting you back,” said Way, “but that was a dirty way to go about it.”

“He didn't want
me
,” Marilys said with a shake of her head. “He wanted to get at you. I was afraid if I told you, you'd get in a fight with him and he'd find some way to send you to jail. But his trying that proved that behind Johnny's back, he was the same old Dub.” Marilys's lips quivered. “I should have let you know.”

Way took Marilys in his arms and kissed her long and thoroughly. “I'd have done my best to flatten Dub's nose all the way to his cheekbones,” he said with a chuckle, “but I doubt if we'd have picked up and left town what with everything going so good for us.” He pondered for a moment. “No, honey, we none of us have enough poison in our systems to figure how a guy like Dub goes around just storing it up till he gets a chance to fang it into somebody.”

“I'll bet there are some contractors who won't buy from Redwine,” said Laurie, with sudden hope. “Matt Sherrod told me how W.S. cheated and double-crossed oil folks from one end of Texas to the other, and did the same in Oklahoma, till he partnered with Johnny. Johnny had so many friends that they let bygones be bygones, but I bet they remember.”

Way brightened, then said dismally, “There may be a few outfits that wouldn't buy water from Dub in hell, but I doubt if there's enough to keep me in business.”