The Glass Castle_ A Memoir - Jeannette Walls [22]
After a while, it got cold and uncomfortable in the back of the dark U-Haul. The engine made the floor vibrate, and we’d all go tumbling whenever we hit a bump. Several hours passed. By then we were all dying to pee and wondering if Dad was going to pull over for a rest stop. Suddenly, with a bang, we hit a huge pothole and the back doors on the U-Haul flew open. The wind shrieked through the compartment. We were afraid we were going to get sucked out, and we all shrank back against the Prospector. The moon was out. We could see the glow from the U-Haul’s taillights and the road we’d come down, stretching back through the silvery desert. The unlocked doors swung back and forth with loud clangs.
Since the furniture was stored between us and the cabin, we couldn’t knock on the wall to get Mom’s and Dad’s attention. We banged on the sides of the U-Haul and hollered as loud as we could, but the engine was too noisy and they didn’t hear us.
Brian crawled to the back of the van. When one of the doors swung in, he grabbed at it, but it flew open again, jerking him forward. I thought the door was going to drag Brian out, but he jumped back just in time and scrambled along the wooden floor toward Lori and me.
Brian and Lori held tight to the Prospector, which Dad had tied securely with ropes. I was holding Maureen, who for some strange reason had stopped crying. I wedged myself into a corner. It seemed like we’d have to ride it out.
Then a pair of headlights appeared way in the distance behind us. We watched as the car slowly caught up with the U-Haul. After a few minutes, it pulled up right behind us, and its headlights caught us there in the back of the cab. The car started honking and flashing its brights. Then it pulled up and passed us. The driver must have signaled Mom and Dad, because the U-Haul slowed to a stop and Dad came running back with a flashlight.
“What the hell is going on?” he asked. He was furious. We tried to explain that it wasn’t our fault the doors blew open, but he was still angry. I knew that he was scared, too. Maybe even more scared than angry.
“Was that a cop?” Brian asked.
“No,” Dad said. “And you’re sure as hell lucky it wasn’t, or he’d be hauling your asses off to jail.”
After we peed, we climbed back into the truck and watched as Dad closed the doors. The darkness enveloped us again. We could hear Dad locking the doors and double-checking them. The engine restarted, and we continued on our way.
B ATTLE M OUNTAIN HAD started out as a mining post, settled a hundred years earlier by people hoping to strike it rich, but if anyone ever had struck it rich in Battle Mountain, they must have moved somewhere else to spend their fortune. Nothing about the town was grand except the big empty sky and, off in the distance, the stony purple Tuscarora Mountains running down to the table-flat desert.
The main street was wide—with sun-bleached cars and pickups parked at an angle to the curb—but only a few blocks long, flanked on both sides with low, flat-roofed buildings made of adobe or brick. A single streetlight flashed red day and night. Along Main Street was a grocery store, a drugstore, a Ford dealership, a Greyhound bus station, and two big casinos, the Owl Club and the Nevada Hotel. The buildings, which seemed puny under the huge sky, had neon signs that didn’t look like they were on during the day because the sun was so bright.
We moved into a wooden building on the edge of town that had once been a railroad depot. It was two stories tall and painted an industrial green, and was so close to the railroad tracks that you could wave to the engineer from the front window. Our new home was one of the oldest buildings in town, Mom proudly told us, with a real frontier quality to it.
Mom and Dad’s bedroom was on the second floor, where the station