The houses were vacant, and a vacant house falls quickly apart.
Splits started up the sheathing from the rusted nails.
A dust settled on the floors, and only mouse and weasel and cat tracks disturbed it.
On a night the wind loosened a shingle and flipped it to the ground.
The next wind pried into the hole where the shingle had been, lifted off three, and the next, a dozen.
The midday sun burned through the hole and threw a glaring spot on the floor.
The wild cats crept in from the fields at night, but they did not mew at the doorstep any more.
They moved like shadows of a cloud across the moon, into the rooms to hunt the mice.
And on windy nights the doors banged, and the ragged curtains fluttered in the broken windows.
Chapter 12
Highway 66 is the main migrant road.
66—the long concrete path across the country, waving gently up and down on the map, from the Mississippi to Bakersfield—over the red lands and the gray lands, twisting up into the mountains, crossing the Divide and down into the bright and terrible desert, and across the desert to the mountains again, and into the rich California valleys.
66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there.
From all of these the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads.
66 is the mother road, the road of flight.
Clarksville and Ozark and Van Buren and Fort Smith on 64, and there’s an end of Arkansas.
And all the roads into Oklahoma City, 66 down from Tulsa, 270 up from McAlester.
81 from Wichita Falls south, from Enid north.
Edmond, McLoud, Purcell.
66 out of Oklahoma City; El Reno and Clinton, going west on 66.
Hydro, Elk City, and Texola; and there’s an end to Oklahoma.
66 across the Panhandle of Texas.
Shamrock and McLean, Conway and Amarillo, the yellow. Wildorado and Vega and Boise, and there’s an end of Texas.
Tucumcari and Santa Rosa and into the New Mexican mountains to Albuquerque, where the road comes down from Santa Fe.
Then down the gorged Rio Grande to Los Lunas and west again on 66 to Gallup, and there’s the border of New Mexico.
And now the high mountains.
Holbrook and Winslow and Flagstaff in the high mountains of Arizona.
Then the great plateau rolling like a ground swell.
Ashfork and Kingman and stone mountains again, where water must be hauled and sold.
Then out of the broken sun-rotted mountains of Arizona to the Colorado, with green reeds on its banks, and that’s the end of Arizona.
There’s California just over the river, and a pretty town to start it.
Needles, on the river.
But the river is a stranger in this place.
Up from Needles and over a burned range, and there’s the desert.
And 66 goes on over the terrible desert, where the distance shimmers and the black center mountains hang unbearably in the distance.
At last there’s Barstow, and more desert until at last the mountains rise up again, the good mountains, and 66 winds through them.
Then suddenly a pass, and below the beautiful valley, below orchards and vineyards and little houses, and in the distance a city.
And, oh, my God, it’s over.
The people in flight streamed out on 66, sometimes a single car, sometimes a little caravan.
All day they rolled slowly along the road, and at night they stopped near water.
In the day ancient leaky radiators sent up columns of steam, loose connecting rods hammered and pounded.
And the men driving the trucks and the overloaded cars listened apprehensively.
How far between towns?
It is a terror between towns.
If something breaks—well, if something breaks we camp right here while Jim walks to town and gets a part and walks back and—how much food we got?
Listen to the motor.
Listen to the wheels.
Listen with your ears and with your hands on the steering wheel; listen with the palm of your hand on the gear-shift lever; listen with your feet on the floor boards.
Listen to the pounding old jalopy with all your senses; for a change of tone, a variation of rhythm may mean—a week here?
That rattle—that’s tappets.