“Why didn’t you come and see me?” Cletus asked. She was silent, looking at the receiver.

“Yeah,” said Cletus, as though she’d answered. “That’s how it goes. I’ll think of you, Annie.”

“I’ll think of you.”

The following morning at six, two suitcases in the back of the old car, and a full tank of gas, off the ration now, she drove out of Los Angeles. A few miles beyond the city limits, on the side of the road, a Negro soldier stood holding a sign that read HOUSTON. She stopped the car. The man ran to the door and opened it.

“Thanks,” he said, getting in. “How far are you going?”

“All the way east,” Annie said.

“My name’s Mason White,” he said.

“You live in Houston?”

“I do now. War’s all over. I’m going home.”

Chapter 18

They drove night and day, spelling each other. He slept, his head against the window, his overseas cap draped over one knee while Annie took them through the Mohave mountains, dropping ever southward, pushing the car to its highest rattling speed through night-shut villages until Mason White touched her arm and said, “Not too fast along in here. We don’t want to be stopped.” She had forgotten there were towns—she had been driving across a map, unpeopled, a matter of road signs, of dirt roads leading off from the main highway to no place at all.

“When I came to California,” she told Mason White, “I gave a ride to an old cook from a CCC camp. His wife was having a baby up in a mountain village in the Rockies. He took the wheel and drove like a fury.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Five years,” she said, and hearing her words, could not believe them, remembering the cook bent over the wheel like a large red bird with lidless eyes, forgetting for a moment all the faces in between that time and this.

“Nearly as long as I been in the army.”

“Do you have a wife and children in Houston?”

“Just my mother and sisters. But I think I will have a wife soon. They say things are going to be better now. The magazines, the newspapers say things going to be better for us. Better jobs. Better life.”

She felt the slight emphasis he had put on the word, us, as though he’d touched her arm; he hadn’t meant her.

“They can’t go back on it now,” Mason White went on. “People had good jobs in the war plants, they aren’t going back to mopping up grease.”

“You’ve always lived in Houston?”