The Longest Road (53 page)

“Charge at least a buck a night,” urged Jim. “I pay that for a cubbyhole in a rundown old house where the plumbing never works and the sheets don't get changed till they're filthy.”

Marilys and Laurie exchanged glances. Six oil-field workers would keep the bathroom tied up and dirty. Way read their minds. “It wouldn't be hard to turn part of the garage into an extra bathroom,” he said. “Insulate the walls, lay some linoleum, maybe put in a shower so the fellas could wash off the worst dirt and oil before they got in the tub. Put in two sinks so a couple of them could shave or wash up at the same time.”

“I'll help,” said Jim. “And I can find you good renters who won't come in roaring drunk or mean.”

Way whistled. “Boy howdy! Say we get seven dollars a week from six men, that's forty-two dollars!” He calculated in his head and whistled again. “That's a hundred and sixty-eight dollars for four weeks, say about a hundred and eighty-five dollars a month! That'll pay the mortgage and leave a nice chunk for Johnny's drilling and keeping the salvage yard going.”

“Yes, but we need to put in the new bathroom and we're going to need a good wash machine to handle all those extra sheets and towels.” Marilys puckered her forehead and then laughed as she clapped her hands. “Maybe what we need's a bigger mortgage.”

Everyone stared at her. “We haven't missed a payment and we've whittled some off the principal, which brings our interest down,” she explained. “I think the bank'd be happy to lend us enough to finance at least a couple more holes and give us a cushion for the salvage business. After all, they get this house if we don't pay.”

Lose their home? Go back to a tent or trailer? The idea twisted Laurie's insides but she didn't hesitate. “If you and Way are willing, Marilys, I'm all for it. Buddy?”

“Sure.” He slanted her a sarcastic look. “Maybe you won't kick so hard when I quit school next year if I go to work for what's sort of our own outfit till I'm old enough to get in the war.”

“You better hope the war's over a long time before you can go,” Laurie scolded. “And don't you start in on someone's signing for you when you're seventeen!”

He gave her a rebellious glare. She was used to his being taller than she, he had been for a year, but when she stopped to really look at him, she was amazed at how broad in the shoulders he was growing, how big and scarred his hands were. His brown hair waved like Daddy's and he had the same mouth, though his eyes were Mama's. When had he grown up? Laurie thought with a pang. Would they ever be close again the way they used to be out on the road? When he wasn't working, sleeping, or at school, he was usually with his friends.

Way said amiably, rising and stretching, “Marilys, we'll go to the bank tomorrow. And it already is tomorrow, so let's get to bed for what's left of the night!”

28

By the end of the week, the bathroom was ready and a washing machine with an electric wringer instead of a hand-turned one was positioned on the other side of the garage with lines strung inside for rainy days. Laurie and Buddy occupied opposite ends of the attic and had so much room in between them that it was more adventure than annoyance to share the huge expanse. Winks and Runcible followed Laurie and got their nocturnal exercise from chasing mice. Six sunburned young men roomed below but came and went by their own side entrance and were seldom in evidence except when they paid the rent. Jed and Bill Harris were brothers from Louisiana, lanky redheads with big grins. Lithe, quiet Quinn Sanders of Virginia was a driller, with dark eyes and curly hair. Towheaded Mark Steele and sandy-haired Jack Morris were roughnecks, even younger than Jim, away from their Kansas homes for the first time.

Dub's supply yard hogged customers but there were some Dub had cheated that would never buy from him. What with them and farmers, Way kept the yard going. Hauling supplies as far as he often did might cut his profit to nothing, but so long as he could pay bills and keep going, they all felt grateful.

“Dub'll get tired of losing money after a while,” Way reasoned. “If he don't break us inside of six months, I bet he'll raise his prices to where I can come pretty close to matchin' them.”

Marilys frowned. “I hope you're right, darling, but Dub can afford to lose a hundred times over what'd bankrupt us. Has Dub been around his new business?”

“Haven't seen him,” shrugged Way.

“He'll come,” predicted Marilys with a shiver. “When he finds out we're bucking him and that Johnny's outfit's drilling, he'll itch to know what went wrong with his nifty ideas to ruin us.”

“Now, sugar—”

“I wish I could believe he'd leave us alone,” said Marilys vehemently, “but I don't think he's done with us yet.”

“Then we're not done with him, either,” said Way, and hugged her, chuckling. Marilys smiled reluctantly but it was clear she was uneasy.

Meanwhile, of course, the war went on. The fate of the American Japanese still weighed on Laurie but not as much as fear for Johnny and grief for what was happening to vastly outnumbered American soldiers on Corregidor and Bataan who were running out of both food and ammunition. They surrendered on April 9 to an enemy that not only scorned them for not fighting to the death but lacked food for so many prisoners, men already weak from hunger, tainted water, and fighting in pestilential jungle.

Colonel James Doolittle raided Tokyo on April 18 with a squadron of B-52 bombers. These were launched from carriers but couldn't land on them so the returning squadron flew to a Chinese airfield. Tokyo wasn't much damaged but the raid lifted Allied spirits—which fell again as Corregidor surrendered on May 6 and survivors followed the captives of Bataan on the Death March to POW camps. Out of 76,000 prisoners, thousands were bayoneted, shot, or beheaded. Thousands more died of exhaustion, hunger, or dysentery. Oh God, if that happened to Johnny—

Laurie was glad to line up at the school May 14 to get her ration book. Getting by on a pound of sugar every two weeks wasn't much of a sacrifice but it made her feel she was helping a little. Since Way hauled supplies for the oil field, he was allotted enough gas for that vital work but apart from that, the family walked. The big Victory garden in back already had lettuce, radishes, and green onions with peas, green beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, corn, summer squash, yams, and collards coming on. They'd be able to can a cellar-full for winter besides supplying several neighbors who were too decrepit to garden.

Nylon, and of course, silk stockings were a thing of the past as were new trucks and cars. Laurie and Marilys turned in then nylons to hold gunpowder or be recycled into parachutes. Laurie went bare-legged that summer but Marilys used leg paint and grew expert at using eyebrow pencil to make a straight dark seam down the back.

“I detested cotton stockings when I was the only girl in school who wore them,” Laurie told Marilys with a rueful chuckle. “This winter, though, they'll be in fashion for everybody.”

To save fabric, skirts were shorter and narrower, and dresses had no ruffles or big collars. Men's trousers were cuffless and suits had no vests. High school kids, who were starting to be called teenagers, developed uniforms; outsized men's shirts dangled over girls' blue jeans rolled to the knee with football socks; boys wore shirttails out, jeans, and combat boots. With the manpower shortage, most of them had part-time jobs and spent their money on records, at soda fountains, or skating rinks. Though she was still nineteen, Laurie felt a generation removed from them.

The whole family put their galoshes in a nationwide rubber drive that began in June. Since rubber mostly came from countries occupied by the Japanese, there was a critical shortage of this essential material and no good substitute had been found. Kitchen fat was saved and turned in to make explosives. Boy Scouts collected saved newspapers. For a metal-scrap drive, the family contributed the handsome old wrought-iron fence that surrounded the yard, the gazebo with its benches, and the handrails of the steps, as well as all the tin they could scavenge.

Meanwhile, in early June, the radio and papers reported that an awesome Japanese fleet—8 carriers, 11 battleships, 22 cruisers, 65 destroyers, and 21 submarines—was approaching Midway Island where the Americans had only 3 carriers with 233 planes. All American battleships in the Pacific had been destroyed at Pearl Harbor or severely disabled. As Japanese bombers attacked the island, the Americans struck at the fleet. They lost the first assault. Thirty-five of forty-one torpedo bombers were shot down. But minutes later, thirty-seven dive bombers swooped down and sank three carriers within the hour.

Before the armada retreated it lost 1 cruiser, 4 carriers, and 330 aircraft. The Americans pursued, though they had lost 1 carrier and 150 airplanes. Lack of fuel forced them to give up the chase and the chance to deal a smashing blow.

“Glory be!” whooped Way as the news came in. “Maybe this means the Japs won't have it all their way in the Pacific anymore!”

Johnny was out there somewhere. Laurie hadn't heard from him in weeks but she sent a letter by V-mail nearly every day. Her sugar ration went to make candy and baked treats that could endure shipping and Pacific humidity. In these boxes, she sent cartoons, clippings, and little gifts she hoped would be useful or funny.

I suppose you've read in the
Stars and Stripes
that General Dwight D. Eisenhower's taken command of our forces in Europe. What do you think about the WAACS and WAVES? Isn't it something that after the way Japanese-Americans have been sent to camps, 10,000 Hawaiian Nisei volunteered for the all-Nisei combat unit that's being formed on the mainland? Maybe now the government will let up on trying to get the governor of Hawaii to deport Japanese citizens. I wish the president would close those awful camps but I guess people on both coasts are scared of someone's showing a light to guide in enemy aircraft. They have air raid warnings, shelters, blackouts, and all that kind of thing. Even here, the school kids have air raid drills. Buddy came home from school yesterday and said the principal's telling them to put big books like encyclopedias on their heads to protect them from falling debris and to put erasers in their mouths to lessen an explosion. I hope you have a lot of erasers, Johnny!

Her first real letter from Johnny smelled of mildew and cigarette smoke. “I'm writing this in the tent while the other guys shoot craps,” ran the penciled scrawl. “I got five letters from you all at once—it was sure like Christmas, especially when I opened up those boxes of brownies and pralines. Don't use up all your rations on me, though, honey chile. We get candy bars and gum and I've sure eaten a lot worse chow than C rations. Our corporal, Tom Shelton, a cowboy from Texas, has a harmonica, too, and we get plenty of applause on account of we're the only show in camp.” Some lines were marked out by the censor, sharply reminding Laurie that Johnny couldn't tell her where he was or anything about what was really going on. At least she knew that he'd had some of her letters and packages, that he was alive and well on the fifth day of June.

She sat down to begin her answer before she went to work. She never had told him about Crystal, or Dub, either. He'd have to know sometime, of course, but she couldn't find the words to tell him that his wife had deserted him and his partner-father-friend had robbed him and tried to put him out of business completely.

When Jim wasn't on a job for Soup MacNeal, he worked with Vance and Peavine Mitchell, the old roughneck who was helping on Johnny's land. Jim said the bailings were showing a little oil.

“They've got their hopes up,” Laurie told Marilys. “But if they don't get a well this time, they're moving to another old farm of Johnny's.”

“Well, I guess we can always mortgage the mortgage,” Marilys joked, but it wasn't really funny. Drilling was costly. The last thing in the world Johnny would want would be for them to lose their home in the effort to have some producing wells going for him when he came home.

Laurie refused to even think about
if
he came, though she suspected he was in the Solomon Islands in the fierce fighting centering on Guadalcanal. Late in August of 1942, the papers and radio hailed a decisive naval victory over the Japanese, but the land battle raged on over a volcanic tropical island that neither side wanted but couldn't allow the other to hold.

The news trumpeted names most Americans had never heard of before. German troops met ferocious resistance at Stalingrad on the Volga River and General Rommel's famed Afrika Corps invaded Egypt.

On her twentieth birthday, Laurie
ooh
-ed and
aah
-ed over the cake that she knew must have taken all of the family's sugar ration for the week, but she hadn't heard from Johnny in weeks and had little heart for celebration. Everett had shipped out the first of October. That added to everybody's anxiety and Buddy's grumblings about staying in school while there was a war on.

Vance Morrow abandoned another dry hole, the one that had looked so promising. When the family promised to back him, he moved the spudder to Johnny's other farm and started making hole.

After the long stretch without hearing from Johnny, several letters came at once, all full of worry. His letters to Crystal were being returned, stamped with
MOVED, NO FORWARDING ADDRESS
.

I hate to think it but she must have left me. And you'd hate to say so, wouldn't you, kid? Tell me the truth, I can stand it better than not knowing. I can't blame her much if she did take off. I wasn't the kind of husband Crystal needed. She liked fun and excitement, dancing and parties. Looking back, I can't imagine why she married me. When I volunteered, I guess she figured I'd really let her down—and I must have, for this to happen. Dub never writes. Do you know if he's sick or something? Probably he's just out wheeling and dealing.