Out here, there were new dangers. Her children would learn that man could be dangerous, too. There was a darkness in the world of which they’d been innocent; already Loreda was losing that innocence. It would never return. “We’d best sleep in the back of the truck. I hadn’t figured on anyone trying to steal our gas,” Elsa said.

“I reckon there’s a lot we ain’t figured on,” Loreda said.

Elsa was too tired to correct her daughter’s grammar, and really, language seemed pretty small out here, in this vast expanse of nothing. She touched Loreda’s shoulder, let her hand lie there. “Thank you,” Elsa said softly. It felt, strangely, as if the world had just tilted somehow, slid sideways, taking them and everything they knew with it.

DAY AFTER DAY, THEY drove west. Nine hundred miles over thin, potholed roads, making slow progress, stopping only when they had to eat or get gas, and to sleep at night. Elsa had grown used to the thump and rattle of the truck and the clanging of the stove and boxes in the back. Even when she got out of the car, her body remembered the jarring up-and-down and left her feeling dizzy.

The long, hot days driving had ground them all down. There had been conversation in the first, exciting hours of travel, talk of exploring and adventures, but heat and hunger and a bumpy road had finally silenced them all, even Ant.

Now, they were camped on a wild stretch of land, close to the road, where coyotes howled and bindle stiffs walked alone, many of them desperate enough to steal the pillow from beneath your head or the gas from your tank. That scared Elsa most of all: the gas in their tank. Gas was life now.

She lay on the camp mattress with her sleeping children tucked in close. Although she had needed sleep desperately last night, it hadn’t come. She’d been plagued by nightmares of what lay ahead.

She heard a sound. A branch breaking.

She sat up fast and looked around.

Nothing moved.

Careful not to waken the children, she crawled out of bed and put her shoes on, then stepped onto the hard-packed dirt. Tiny pebbles and twigs poked at the thinning soles of her last pair of shoes. She was careful not to step on anything sharp.

Well away from the truck, she lifted her dress and squatted down to relieve herself.

As she returned to the truck, the sky turned a bright peony pink, broken here or there by the strange silhouette of a cactus. Some of them looked from a distance like thorny old men, raising their fists to an uncaring god. Elsa was stunned by the unexpected beauty of the morning. It reminded her of daybreak on the farm. She tilted her face skyward, felt the honest warmth of sunshine on her skin. “Watch over us, Lord.”

Back at camp, she made a fire and started breakfast. The smell of coffee and honey-drizzled polenta cakes baking in the Dutch oven over an open flame roused the children.

Ant put on his cowboy hat and stumbled close to the fire and started to unbutton his pants.

“Not so close to camp,” Elsa said, swatting his backside.

Ant giggled and walked out a ways to pee. Elsa saw him making patterns in the dry dirt with his urine stream.

“I know it takes nothing to entertain him,” Loreda said. “But his own pee is a new low.”

Elsa had too much on her mind to smile.

“Mom?” Loreda said. “What’s wrong?”

Elsa looked up. There was no point lying. “The worst section of desert is ahead. If we cross it at night, hopefully our engine won’t burn up. But if something goes wrong . . .”

Elsa shuddered at the thought of their truck rolling to a steaming, smoking halt in the middle of a desert that boasted triple-digit heat and no water. They’d heard horror stories about the Mojave Desert. Cars abandoned, people dying, birds picking at sun-bleached bones.

“We’ll go as far as we can today and then sleep until dark,” Elsa said.

“We’ll make it, Mom.”

Elsa stared out at the dry, unforgiving desert that stretched west, studded here and there with cactus. Along this thin ribbon of road that stretched east to west, there was civilization, but only now and then. In between towns there were great stretches of nothing. “We have to,” she said. God help her, it was as encouraging as she could be.

EIGHTEEN

They rolled into town in a cloud of dust, belongings rattling in the back. At some point Ant’s baseball bat had come loose and was rolling and thumping around in the bed of the truck, banging into things.

A brown windshield veiled the world and they couldn’t waste water for cleaning it. At every gas stop, the attendant wiped the road dust and dead bugs away with a rag.

When they pulled into the gas station, they saw a grocery store not far away. A crowd had gathered in front of it: more people than they’d seen in one place since Albuquerque.

These weren’t town folks, for the most part. You could tell by their ragged clothes and rucksacks. These were bindle stiffs—homeless men, the kind who jumped on and off trains in the middle of the night. Some were going somewhere; most were going nowhere. Elsa couldn’t help looking at each one, searching for her husband’s face. She knew Loreda did the same.

Elsa pulled up to the gas pump.

“Why are there so many people over there?” Loreda asked.

“It looks like a parade or sumpin’,” Ant said.

“They look angry,” Elsa said. She waited for an attendant to come out and pump her gas, but no one came.