Text from HITCH, copyright © 2005 by Jeanette Ingold, used by permission of
Harcourt, Inc.
HITCH
Chapter
1
I woke up shivering in the boxcar
where I'd spent the night. Late October might be the tail end of summer in
Texas, but it wasn't up here, wherever here was.
I coughed and
ran my tongue over the grit clinging to my teeth. My body jangled with the
vibration coming up from the train wheels.
Sharp lines of
sunlight edged the wide, almost closed doors of the car and lay in stripes
across the forms of men sprawled around me. We must have passed out of
the dust storm, I thought, remembering the day before, when the train
rushing north across farmland had entered a blackness of blowing dirt unlike
anything I had ever seen.
First I'd
wondered if the huge cloud moving toward us, too dark brown for rain, might be
smoke. Then somebody called it for what it was, just before we got
swallowed up in a violent torrent of sandpapering earth.
I'd fallen
asleep to the how of it.
Leaning into
the boxcar door, I pushed it open. A wedge had kept it from shutting all
the way--a safety, against the bar-latch on the outside coming down and locking
us in. Dazzlingly bright light flooded the car, and someone demanded,
"You trying to blind us?" . . .
