Amerika by Brauna E. Pouns, Donald Wrye Page B

and he just nodded. That was their last night together.
    Several things happened then, in quick succession. First, she told Peter that she’d “seen Devin” a few times. Bronzed and hardened by his months in the oil fields, Peter cursed and leaped into his car, roaring off in the direction of the Milford farm. She never knew what happened there; neither man ever talked about it. Within a week Devin made good on his plan to join up with the marines. At the end of the summer, Peter did the same thing.
    Amanda was devastated. She imagined them both being killed. But they both came back safely and everything was as it had been before. Devin and Peter were friends again. Amanda resumed her relationship with Peter and her episode with Devin faded into unreality.
    They didn’t see much of Devin, except at Christmas, and when he came back to be best man in their wedding. After that, Amanda was busy raising a family and she hardly thought of Devin at all.
    But now, after the fight with Peter, the memories of Devin, and the news of his return, were almost more than Amanda could bear.
    By midmorning Amanda had the house to herself; the kids off to school, Peter to work. She sat in her kitchen, a cup of untouched coffee before her, staring out of the frost-tinted kitchen window. The walls were closing in on her, the silence of the house suffocating. She grabbed her winter coat and walked out the door, a blast of winter chill hitting her immediately. She got into the station wagon and started to drive, with no particular destination in mind. She passed the Milford farm and, at a small rise, pulled to the side of the road, got out, and walked to the front of her car.
    She looked down upon a sight that defied all memory and logic.
    The exile camp had sprouted along a muddy creek, sprawling up the hillside. It resembled a shantytown, the likes of which had not been seen in America since the depths of the Great Depression—Hoovervilles, they called them then, but now there was no one so handy as a president to blame. Some two hundred men, women, and children lived in fifty-odd shacks, tents, lean-tos, and rusted-out vans and hatchbacks. The dwellings were crudely constructed from scraps of lumber, tarpaper, tin, canvas, even from huge cardboard boxes that still said Frigidaire or Kelvinator. Fires blazed in barrels, and the soggy ground was littered with old tires, rusty bedsprings, discarded furniture, and farm implements. Every imaginable variety of junk lay scattered about.
    A m anda got back into her car and drove a quarter of a mile to a soggy, rutted road that led into the camp. She got out and looked around, not quite knowing how to proceed.
    Children in ill-fitting, cast-off garments passed by as they played some sort of game, barely acknowledging the woman in clean, pretty clothes. From the adults, however, she received suspicious looks as she made her way toward a modem farmhouse, the only permanent structure amid the makeshift dwellings.
    She made her way to the front door of the house, where she was met by a large, crude-featured woman. “It’s a little early for the tourist season.”
    “Hello. I’m Amanda Bradford.”
    “I know who you are. Can I help you?”
    “I don’t know, really. I just—”
    The Woman interrupted. “Never been out here and thought you’d like to see the way the scum—no, what is it you call us? . . . squatters—live.”
    Amanda felt herself flush.
    “What happened? Junior League run out of projects?” the woman snapped.
    “To be perfectly honest, I don’t know why I’m here. Maybe I should have come sooner, but I didn’t, and I’m here now, so maybe you should take advantage of that instead of trying to make me feel miserable—which, incidentally, you are doing one helluva job at.”
    The woman stared at her a moment, then smiled tightly. “Fair enough. I’m Esther. Welcome to America’s Russian-inspired real-life a nim al park.” She turned aside and, with a sweeping gesture,