Free The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck Page A

Three-eighty he got. How soon you gonna be back by?”
    He held the screen door a little open. “Week-ten days,” he said. “Got to make a run to Tulsa, an’ I never get back soon as I think.”
    She said crossly, “Don’t let the flies in. Either go out or come in.”
    “So long,” he said, and pushed his way out. The screen door banged behind him. He stood in the sun, peeling the wrapper from a piece of gum. He was a heavy man, broad in the shoulders, thick in the stomach. His face was red and his blue eyes long and slitted from having squinted always at sharp light. He wore army trousers and high laced boots. Holding the stick of gum in front of his lips he called through the screen, “Well, don’t do nothing you don’t want me to hear about.” The waitress was turned toward a mirror on the back wall. She grunted a reply. The truck driver gnawed down the stick of gum slowly, opening his jaws and lips wide with each bite. He shaped the gum in his mouth, rolled it under his tongue while he walked to the big red truck.
    The hitch-hiker stood up and looked across through the windows. “Could ya give me a lift, mister?”
    The driver looked quickly back at the restaurant for a second. “Didn’ you see the
No Riders
sticker on the win’ shield?”
    “Sure—I seen it. But sometimes a guy’ll be a good guy even if some rich bastard makes him carry a sticker.”
    The driver, getting slowly into the truck, considered the parts of this answer. If he refused now, not only was he not a good guy, but he was forced to carry a sticker, was not allowed to have company. If he took in the hitch-hiker he was automatically a good guy and also he was not one whom any rich bastard could kick around. He knew he was being trapped, but he couldn’t see a way out. And he wanted to be a good guy. He glanced again at the restaurant. “Scrunch down on the running board till we get around the bend,” he said.
    The hitch-hiker flopped down out of sight and clung to the doorhandle. The motor roared up for a moment, the gears clicked in, and the great truck moved away, first gear, second gear, third gear, and then a high whining pick-up and fourth gear. Under the clinging man the highway blurred dizzily by. It was a mile to the first turn in the road, then the truck slowed down. The hitch-hiker stood up, eased the door open, and slipped into the seat. The driver looked over at him, slitting his eyes, and he chewed as though thoughts and impressions were being sorted and arranged by his jaws before they were finally filed away in his brain. His eyes began at the new cap, moved down the new clothes to the new shoes. The hitch-hiker squirmed his back against the seat in comfort, took off his cap, and swabbed his sweating forehead and chin with it. “Thanks, buddy,” he said. “My dogs was pooped out.”
    “New shoes,” said the driver. His voice had the same quality of secrecy and insinuation his eyes had. “You oughtn’ to take no walk in new shoes—hot weather.”
    The hiker looked down at the dusty yellow shoes. “Didn’t have no other shoes,” he said. “Guy got to wear ’em if he got no others.”
    The driver squinted judiciously ahead and built up the speed of the truck a little. “Goin’ far?”
    “Uh-uh! I’d a walked her if my dogs wasn’t pooped out.”
    The questions of the driver had the tone of a subtle examination. He seemed to spread nets, to set traps with his questions. “Lookin’ for a job?” he asked.
    “No, my old man got a place, forty acres. He’s a cropper, but we been there a long time.”
    The driver looked significantly at the fields along the road where the corn was fallen sideways and the dust was piled on it. Little flints shoved through the dusty soil. The driver said, as though to himself, “A forty-acre cropper and he ain’t been dusted out and he ain’t been tractored out?”
    “’Course I ain’t heard lately,” said the hitch-hiker.
    “Long time,” said the driver. A bee