III
WELCH
BACK IN BATTLE MOUNTAIN, we had stopped naming the Walls
family cars, because they were all such heaps that Dad said they didn't
deserve names. Mom said that when she was growing up on the ranch,
they never named the cattle, because they knew they would have to kill
them. If we didn't name the car, we didn't feel as sad when we had to
abandon it.
So the Piggy Bank Special was just the Oldsmobile, and we never said
the name with any fondness or even pity. That Oldsmobile was a clunker
from the moment we bought it. The first time it conked out, we were still
an hour shy of the New Mexico border. Dad stuck his head under the
hood, tinkered with the engine, and got it going, but it broke down again
a couple of hours later. Dad got it running. "More like limping," he said
—but it never went any faster than fifteen or twenty miles an hour. Also,
the hood kept popping up, so we had to tie it down with a rope.
We steered clear of tollbooths by taking two-lane back roads, where we
usually had a long line of drivers behind us, honking in exasperation.
When one of the Oldsmobile's windows stopped rolling up in Oklahoma,
we taped garbage bags over it. We slept in the car every night, and after
arriving late in Muskogee and parking on an empty downtown street, we
woke up to find a bunch of people surrounding the car, little kids