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Monday
morning Karl and Clifford went to the shelter, picked up Jack Raymond, then
went to the same Ford dealer where Karl leased the truck. He picked out a 2010
Explorer with four wheel drive. After the lease papers were signed, they went
back to the shelter and picked up the rest of the men. When they arrived in
Marked Tree, Karl rented four motel rooms for a month.
Karl
already had a sleeping bag. He sent Clifford and the other men to a store that
sells camping gear to get sleeping bags, and a camp stove. At the grocery store
they would buy about thirty gallons of water, and groceries for four days. Karl
went to a farm equipment dealer to lease a dump truck, a front end loader/backhoe,
and a bulldozer. The bulldozer was on a flat bed trailer which would be pulled
by the dump truck. He would have to come back another day to pick up the
loader/backhoe. Karl wondered how he could manage that when he needed the bull
dozer to pull the dump truck and empty trailer up and over the dune.
While
they were in town they all rented post office boxes. Clifford needed an address
for income tax and Social Security, and other state tax reports and also for
their insurance. They couldn’t use the shelter for an address; they had all
checked out of the shelter.
Karl
sent Clifford and two of the men over the dune in the Explorer. He had the
other men help him unload the dozer and then chain it to the dump truck. Then
he sent all but Smitty over the dune in the pickup truck. He operated the dozer
and Smitty steered the dump truck pulling the empty trailer. The dozer pulled
the dump truck and trailer up and over the dune. Then he and Smitty had to
unchain the dozer and load it back onto the trailer. The other two vehicles
were waiting for them. Karl, driving the dump truck, took the lead since he
knew the route.
He
had intended for them to take over the office building to use for their
quarters. However, when they walked into it, it stunk worse than any hog barn.
There was litter strewn all over the floors – half eaten MREs, empty water
bottles. Scattered everywhere were unused packages of MREs. Worse was that in
the various rooms upstairs there was human excrement on the floor in every
room. The rest rooms were a nightmare. The toilets wouldn’t flush after the
quake but they were all filled with waste. He didn’t think any of the men would
be willing to undertake cleaning it.
Karl
remembered that Dana spoke of the Mexican women and children using the
abandoned police/fire station across the road. He went over there. Opening the
door he could not believe his eyes. The building was spotless. Stacked neatly
in one corner were unused MREs and water bottles.
Clifford
said to Karl, “Would you show me where I lived in Victoria?”
Karl
drove him down to the rubble of a brick house nearest the equipment sheds.
Clifford got out and tried to get into the wrecked house, but he could not.
“Melodie
told me to look for our photo albums in the drawer of an end table in the
living room.”
“When
I have the dozer down here, maybe we can lift a wall, maybe not.”
It
did not take them long to settle in to the police/fire station. Slim said he
bet he was going to have an air mattress next week. They all went down to
survey the damage. They decided to pull all the sheet metal sides of all the
metal buildings and make a pile of them. The equipment was all ruined. They
would haul it to another location away from the pile of sheet metal. The water
tower looked like it had only minor damage. Maybe it could just be put upright.
That wasn’t anything they could do, so they would leave it undisturbed. The
tanks which contained fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, and butane had all
burst open. Because there might be toxic residue, they decided to push and
shove them in the opposite direction from where they would be working. When
they had finished all that, they would be scraping the rubble into piles,
loading it into the dump truck and dumping it onto a field.
Friday
morning they looked at what they had accomplished so far. They left the dump truck and trailer in
Victoria and left for Little Rock about noon in the pickup truck and the
Explorer.
Mr.
Stauer had been working on the Mexicans’ problems all week. He located three
men in a Tulsa, Oklahoma hospital. He rented a three bedroom apartment near the
hospital for the wives and their children to live in until the men recovered.
He called the Oklahoma Human Services and they promised to help the women. He
said if they had any needs that wouldn’t be covered to call him.
He had the widows and their children moved to
low rent apartments in a town in South Arkansas which has a large Hispanic
population. The company’s lawyers were working out the immigration problems for
each of the women.
Karl
and the others of the Baker’s Koffee Klatch finished their work in Victoria in
a little over three months. They were all eligible for unemployment until they
could find another job.
Karl
did not think he could afford an apartment like Clifford had leased in
Chenault. He decided to look for work first. He found a job as a diesel
mechanic at a large Ford dealership. The dealer was selling more and more
diesel trucks. Also there were now a few diesel automobiles and he believed
there would be many more. He was glad to hire a man with Karl’s rich experience
because diesel mechanics were being offered high wages by the contractors who
were rebuilding the highways ruined by the quake.
Karl
found a nice three bedroom house in a lower middle class neighborhood. There
were attractive loans for earthquake victims and he had saved quite a bit of
money from the job he had just finished. His first task was to build a wheel
chair ramp in the front and the back. The house was built on one floor so there
were no steps inside. He bought a used van from the Ford dealer and installed a
wheelchair carrier on the rear himself.
There
wasn’t a whole lot of money left for furniture, dishes, pots, and pans so he
bought as much as he could from second hand stores. Moving in here was going to
be a big change for Dana. She had been with Melodie and the children all summer
and had even started school in that exclusive community. He noticed that the
first thing she moved into the new house was her stuffed animals.
When
Mary came home, you would have thought that it was the Czar’s dacha. She was so
happy and thrilled. Karl was glad that they bought a three bedroom house. Mary
would need her own bedroom for quite some time. The doctor ordered a hospital
bed, a wheelchair, and a number of other medical supplies. When the company
delivered them they about filled up her room.
When
Mary was finally in the house, Dana came to her with tears.
“I
don’t know what we are going to do. I still don’t know how to cook.”
“Well,
just wheel me up near to the stove and I’ll tell you step by step what to do.”
Clifford,
Melodie, and the children came over the first night after Mary came from the
rehab center.
“We
wanted to bring you a housewarming gift and tell you how happy we are that you
are finally home.”
They
brought a good set of cookware.
“Dana,
we have two gifts for you. Since I never kept my promise to teach you to cook,
here is a Betty Crocker Cookbook. The second gift came to my parents’ house
addressed to you. They gave it to us to give to you.”
It
was a letter from Rosalita”
“Dear
Dana,
I
am glad that you got away from that camp shelter. It was awful. No one there
liked Mexicans.
Several
months ago a chartered bus came for all the Mexicans. There was a really nice
woman who spoke Spanish and explained everything. The wives and children of men
who are missing were taken to a small town in Arkansas. They had a house for
each family in a low rent housing project. That is where I am now. The bus was
going on to Tulsa, Oklahoma where the husbands of three of the wives are in a
hospital.
My
Mom has a job in a restaurant here. The other women all have some kind of job.
I like the school here. There are a lot of Mexican students and they work hard
to get good grades.
You are
still my best friend. Please write me. Here is my address….”
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