Chapter Thirteen
I knew Bertha would be laying for me at the hotel. So I never went back. What money I had saved up was in the form of traveler’s checks, and I bought an ancient jalopy, picked up a heavy woolen shirt, some overalls, and a leather coat at one of the stores, purchased some bedding, a gasoline stove, cooking-pots, threw in a few canned goods, and was ready to leave by three-thirty that afternoon.
We looked like a typical bunch of dust-bowl refugees as we went rattling out of town. No one tried to stop us. We passed a carload of cops who looked us over and let us go on by.
We rattled out on the Beatty road, the car turning out a consistent thirty-seven miles an hour.
Along in the late afternoon, I pulled off on a crossroad which ran out into the desert, a pair of twisting ruts cut into the sand. After we were a couple of hundred yards from the main highway, I pulled out, picked my way through clumps of sagebrush, and stopped on a bare stretch of wind-blown desert.
“How about it?” I asked Louie Hazen.
“It’s a swell place, buddy.”
Helen Framley got out without a word, started lifting things out of the car.
“You got enough blankets,” she said to me.
“We’ll need them.”