I threatened.
“The hell you will,” George said.
“Give me back my harmonica, and I’ll give you the money.”
“Do like he says, Manny.”
As soon as I had the harmonica in hand, I threw the bills on the fire, where they fluttered like dry leaves onto the eager flames. The two men stumbled over themselves trying to save the burning cash, and in that confusion, I sprang up and sprinted away from the culvert, carrying the boot and my harmonica. I ran for the maze of tracks and the idled cars and, when I finally risked a glance over my shoulder, saw that I was alone. But still I ran, until I came to an open car and swung myself up and inside and lay panting.
It took a while for the full effect of the encounter to hit me. Then I began to cry, trying to keep my sobs quiet. I’d thought I was alone before, but now I understood how truly abandoned I was. An emptiness opened inside me that could have swallowed the whole universe.
“Albert,” I whispered. “Albert.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
I PULLED INTO Saint Louis two days later. The city had been my goal for so long I’d anticipated feeling something momentous when I arrived. Instead, I stood in yet another alien place, amid a spiderweb of tracks spun in the shadows of a jagged line of tall buildings, all of it laid out under a sky as gray as an old nickel.
I had no idea where to go, how to begin my search for Aunt Julia. I hadn’t been in Saint Louis since we’d visited following my mother’s death, which was half my lifetime ago. What was familiar to me by now was the Mississippi, so I made my way to the river. I found a city of shacks, a Hooverville beyond my imagination with a populace a hundred times greater than I’d seen in Hopersville. Shanties covered the flats for a full mile downriver, hovels built between hillocks of debris, all of it looking so tenuous I thought that if the gray sky cracked open and rain poured out, everything before me would simply wash into the river and be swept away.
I walked along makeshift pathways, amid an overpowering smell and sense of decay. In my imagining across the whole of my journey, Saint Louis had been a distant, golden promise. All that way, I thought with sinking hope, and everything I’d gone through, and for what?
“Hey, kid!”
I looked up. The darkness of my thoughts must have shown on my face, because a man with a beard like Spanish moss on his cheeks eyed me from beneath the brim of a worn fedora the same dismal color as the sky.
“On the bum, kid? Hungry?” He pointed downriver. “Free kitchen under the bridge. The Welcome Inn.”
“Thanks.”
“You get used to it,” he said.
“What?”
“If you don’t know now, you soon will.” He stepped inside a shack no bigger than a piano crate and covered in tar paper.
I found the Welcome Inn, with a long line of forlorn people looking for whatever might be handed out to them, women and kids among them. Although I was plenty hungry, I couldn’t bring myself to join that queue yet, and I wandered down to the edge of the river.
The surface of the water was oily and iridescent, and a foul, unnatural odor came off it. On the far side, industrial chimneys sent up columns of smoke that fed the dirty gray of the sky, and God only knew what those enterprises were pouring into the Mississippi. Up in Saint Paul, the water had been abysmal, and it had flowed past a hundred other towns and cities since then. With that beggared gathering of humanity at my back and the Mississippi looking so sick in front of me, it seemed that the place I’d come to was its own kind of hell.
“I should have gone with Maybeth,” I said aloud. At the sound of her name my heart nearly broke. But I brightened as I recalled our promise to each other to write as soon as we could. The letter I’d written hadn’t been mailed; maybe Maybeth’s luck had been better.
I asked three people in that Hooverville before anyone was able to direct me, and a short while later I found myself in the downtown post office, which was not nearly so grand as the one in Saint Paul but just as busy. I waited in line, and when I got to the window, asked about general delivery.
The