The Tilted World Read Online Free Page A

pulling into Greenville soon, and I can’t have you disembarking when I do, in front of the newspapermen with their flashbulbs. They’d blow your cover.”
    “How will we get to the town, then?” asked Ham.
    Hoover shrugged. “You’re enterprising gentlemen. I expect you can rustle up some horses.”
    Neither acknowledged this.
    “Well?”
    “Mighty wet for horses,” Ham said.
    Hoover reached for a golden cord scalloping the wall over the window and pulled. A buzzer went off and the porter opened the door.
    “Oliver, these gentlemen will be departing.”
    “Here?” Ham asked, incredulous. They were nowhere near a town.
    The porter pivoted and was gone. In a moment the train’s brakes squealed, like something punctured.
    Hoover slid open his desk drawer and lifted two cream envelopes onto the leather blotter. Neither man reached so Hoover picked up the envelopes and walked around the desk and placed one in Ingersoll’s hand and thumped him on the back and then did the same for Ham.
    “You served in France,” he told them, which caused both men to look up. “At the end of the day, this is just another war. A war against men who think they are above the law. And a war against Mother Nature.”
    The door opened again. Hoover picked up his spectacles and an envelope from the stack on his desk and turned it over to examine the return address. “They’re ready.”
    “Luggage, sir?” asked the porter.
    “None to speak of.” He slid a brass opener into the envelope. “This war,” he said, levering the opener, “is the one I’ll ride all the way to the White House.” He looked at Ham over his spectacles. “And I’ll bring my friends with me.”
    Ham nodded and stood and Ingersoll followed, looking back at Hoover unfolding his correspondence. The porter held the door and they stepped onto the metal grating between the cars, both clasping their hats against the sidewindering wind. Beneath their feet the clacking had slowed and the blurry fields grew definition, shriveled brown claws where cotton should have been. First Ham, with a grunt, and then Ingersoll jumped out into the scrolling world of mud.
    At the first farm they passed, they asked where they could buy two horses, and the farmer said, “I’ll sell you two horses and throw in a farm to pasture them on, too.” Ham said no, just the horses, and they barely had to lighten their Hoover envelopes for the two ribby roans.
    N ow on the gallery Ham surveyed the three bodies, the clerk faceup and the looters facedown, and shook his head. “Goddamn it. They were looting for boots.” A lidless box beside the bigger body held nothing but cardboard boot lasts. Blood had soaked the bottom of the box and had climbed halfway up the sides.
    Ingersoll knelt and turned over the other figure. A woman. The baby’s mother. She wore trousers, dark hair pulled back behind a man’s hat. Her mouth hung open and she was missing a few teeth. Her stomach was open, too, where it had been shot. Beside her in the blood lay a paper sack, a rip revealing a box of puffed wheat.
    “Probably drunk,” said Ham, but without conviction. The flood had made regular folks desperate, and desperate folks downright reckless. Reckless, jobless, hopeless. You can’t be hired as a corn sheller when the corn’s been drowned.
    “We’ll send the police back when we get to Hobnob,” Ham said, patting the man’s pants, and then the woman’s. He stood. “No papers, no wallet. Don’t imagine they’re from around here. Gypsies, I guess.”
    Ingersoll heard the baby again, wailing. It was a terrible sound. He stood.
    As if to head off any crazy thoughts, Ham said, “Let’s go, Ing. We’ve delayed too long already.”
    “Ham.”
    “Let’s go. Now. They got telephones in Hobnob.”
    “Ham, we can’t leave it.”
    “Well, we sure as hell can’t take it. You heard Hoover. One week to find the still.”
    “But leave the baby?”
    “What? We should nursemaid the infant while the