50
PARTISAN REVIEW
He blew a kiss toward where I was standing. He put his hands in the
pockets of his bathrobe and stepped back. I saw on his cheeks, at his
jaw line, a smudge, like charcoal, of a two-day's beard.
I I
r
IN THE MORNING TRAFFIC
it took us a little over two hours to reach San
Bernadino, and about three hours more to arrive in Barstow. Mary had
fallen asleep almost at once, her chin, with its rows of frown lines, rest–
ing on her breast. Barton and I played our usual game: looking for out–
of-state license plates and betting whether the numbers on them added
up to odd or even. Georgia was as exotic as we got. Then my brother
dozed off as well. What kept me awake were the signs for Route 66 that
I saw at the intersections. This was the road the Joads had taken, head–
ing westward, in
The Grapes of Wrath.
You couldn't see any Okies now,
though there were plenty of open-backed trucks taking Mexicans up to
the farms in the Central Valley.
We stopped to have a late lunch in Barstow, and to wait out the worst
of that day's heat. Mary, digging into her hamper, refused to get out of
the car. Arthur gave me five dollars; while Barton and I ate in the lunch–
room, he filled the gas tank and bought a water bag, which hung drip–
ping from the front bumper when we came back to the car. There was
also a round tube, like an oversized thermos, attached to the passenger–
side window.
"That machine going to condition the air," Arthur explained, while
he scraped away the exoskeletons of the insects that had expired on the
windshield. He let Bartie and me fish in a cooler filled with soda pop
bottles up to their chins in frigid water. I took a Nehi strawberry and a
Nehi orange, and my brother plucked up two Royal Crown Colas. Thus
equipped, we set off into the Mohave Desert.
Do you know how heat can make the air above a radiator visible? As
thick, somehow, as a syrup? That's what the road looked like, straight,
black, unending, with little dust devils springing up on either side and–
what to call them?-heat devils rising above the macadam. It was like
looking through a pane of flawed glass. Between the road's occasional
rises and dips a pool of water would shimmer and gleam. "It's just a
mirage," I told Bartie, who had long since gone through both bottles of
cola.
"It's not!
ot!" he insisted, licking his parched lips. "Hurry up,
Arthur! Go faster! It's an order!"
But that pond, and all the others, constantly receded, reforming
beyond the next rise, like the waters that tormented Tantalus, Zeus's son.
