Cadillacs, La Salles, Buicks, Plymouths, Packards, Chevvies, Fords, Pontiacs. Row on row, headlights glinting in the afternoon sun. Good Used Cars.
Soften ’em up, Joe. Jesus, I wisht I had a thousand jalopies! Get ’em ready to deal, an’ I’ll close ’em.
Goin’ to California? Here’s jus’ what you need. Looks shot, but they’s thousan’s of miles in her.
Lined up side by side. Good Used Cars. Bargains. Clean, runs good.
Chapter 8
The sky grayed among the stars, and the pale, late quarter-moon was insubstantial and thin. Tom Joad and the preacher walked quickly along a road that was only wheel tracks and beaten caterpillar tracks through a cotton field. Only the unbalanced sky showed the approach of dawn, no horizon to the west, and a line to the east. The two men walked in silence and smelled the dust their feet kicked into the air.
“I hope you’re dead sure of the way,” Jim Casy said. “I’d hate to have the dawn come and us be way to hell an’ gone somewhere.” The cotton field scurried with waking life, the quick flutter of morning birds feeding on the ground, the scamper over the clods of disturbed rabbits. The quiet thudding of the men’s feet in the dust, the squeak of crushed clods under their shoes, sounded against the secret noises of the dawn.
Tom said, “I could shut my eyes an’ walk right there. On’y way I can go wrong is think about her. Jus’ forget about her, an’ I’ll go right there. Hell, man, I was born right aroun’ in here. I run aroun’ here when I was a kid. They’s a tree over there—look, you can jus’ make it out. Well, once my old man hung up a dead coyote in that tree. Hung there till it was all sort of melted, an’ then dropped off. Dried up, like. Jesus, I hope Ma’s cookin’ somepin. My belly’s caved.”
“Me too,” said Casy. “Like a little eatin’ tobacca? Keeps ya from gettin’ too hungry. Been better if we didn’ start so damn early. Better if it was light.” He paused to gnaw off a piece of plug. “I was sleepin’ nice.”
“That crazy Muley done it,” said Tom. “He got me clear jumpy. Wakes me up an’ says, ‘’By, Tom. I’m goin’ on. I got places to go.’ An’ he says, ‘Better get goin’ too, so’s you’ll be offa this lan’ when the light comes.’ He’s gettin’ screwy as a gopher, livin’ like he does. You’d think Injuns was after him. Think he’s nuts?”
“Well, I dunno. You seen that car come las’ night when we had a little fire. You seen how the house was smashed. They’s somepin purty mean goin’ on. ’Course Muley’s crazy, all right. Creepin’ aroun’ like a coyote; that’s boun’ to make him crazy. He’ll kill somebody purty soon an’ they’ll run him down with dogs. I can see it like a prophecy. He’ll get worse an’ worse. Wouldn’ come along with us, you say?”
“No,” said Joad. “I think he’s scared to see people now. Wonder he come up to us. We’ll be at Uncle John’s place by sunrise.” They walked along in silence for a time, and the late owls flew over toward the barns, the hollow trees, the tank houses, where they hid from daylight. The eastern sky grew fairer and it was possible to see the cotton plants and the graying earth. “Damn’ if I know how they’re all sleepin’ at Uncle John’s. He on’y got one room an’ a cookin’ leanto, an’ a little bit of a barn. Must be a mob there now.”
The preacher said, “I don’t recollect that John had a fambly. Just a lone man, ain’t he? I don’t recollect much about him.”
“Lonest goddamn man in the world,” said Joad. “Crazy kind of son-of-a-bitch, too—somepin like Muley, on’y worse in some ways. Might see ’im anywheres—at Shawnee, drunk, or visitin’ a widow twenty miles away, or workin’ his place with a lantern. Crazy. Ever’body thought he wouldn’t live long. A lone man like that don’t live long. But Uncle John’s older’n Pa. Jus’ gets stringier an’ meaner ever’ year. Meaner’n Grampa.”
“Look a the light comin’,” said the preacher. “Silvery-like. Didn’ John never have no fambly?”
“Well, yes, he did, an’ that’ll show you the kind a fella he is—set in his ways. Pa tells about it. Uncle John, he had a young wife. Married four months. She was in a family way, too, an’ one night she gets a pain in her stomick, an’ she says, ‘You better go for a doctor.’ Well, John, he’s settin’ there, an’ he says, ‘You just got a stomickache. You et too much. Take a dose a pain killer. You crowd up ya stomick an’ ya get a stomickache,’ he says. Nex’ noon she’s outa her head, an’ she dies at about four in the afternoon.”