The Subprimes by Karl Taro Greenfeld

highways.
    Each of them had once been nominally the owner of a house or a condominium, and each had lost their job, their home, and had to set out on the road.
    â€œIt wasn’t working for us anymore,” Darren said, “any more than it was working for whoever had once lived here and then had to leave. You know those abandoned Hopi cities? Or the Indian towns along the Gila River? The folks who lived there just . . . they got out. Like we did. There’s no reason to stay anywhere anymore. We don’t own nothing but ourselves.”
    A few children had fallen asleep in the glow of the fire. Someone had laid a blanket over them.
    â€œIt’s hard on the children, not going to a real school, but their parents didn’t have a choice. You lose your home. You can wait around for the warrant, which you can’t pay, and then you end up in debtors’ prison—and how is that good for children? No, you have to run.”
    She drowsed until the fire was embers, and then roused herself, leaving Darren asleep on the blanket.
    SARGAM SLEPT IN A SLEEPING bag in her abandoned house. The next morning, she made instant coffee in a tin cup over a Sterno can, and then went out to see the settlement already abuzz with activity. There were two dozen folks working in the vegetable plots, a boy tossing feed corn to chickens from a sack slung over hisshoulder, a few men pouring water from clear plastic drums into black plastic tubing. Sargam could see an improvised, rudimentary irrigation system, water spouting from black tubing pricked with holes. There were funnel-shaped valves every twenty-five yards along the tube, and the men walked down the tube, pouring from the drums. It was hot, sticky work, and had to be done before ten a.m. or you could get heatstroke in the furnace of the midday sun. By midmorning most everyone was indoors or in shade, the harsh, probing heat putting a hush on the community so that if you were just passing by, you might not guess there were over a hundred people scratching out a living from the earth and odd jobs.
    Midafternoon, a black woman walked down Yucca, banging a pot with a wooden spoon, and slowly, and not without groans, a crew of children followed her to a stucco house at the end of the road, where they took seats on the floor or the back step. Using a whiteboard she had scavenged, she gave them some elementary lessons in mathematics and English, the children every bit as bored and resentful as if they were in the best of classrooms.
    Sargam, wearing desert boots, jeans, and a T-shirt, wandered through the community, lending a hand in the fields, bending down to pull up radishes and beets while the women asked her where she was from, if she had a man or children.
    Lest the women take her reluctance to answer these questions as standoffishness, Sargam explained as best she could. She didn’t know her parents. She had never learned her given name. She had run away from her foster parents as soon as she reached puberty. She’d done plenty she wasn’t proud of since then. She’d lied. She’d robbed. She’d stolen. She didn’t tell them but they could figure out for themselves that she had lain with men for money.
    It had been fifteen years since she left that foster home.
    â€œThat bike you rode in on,” one of them said. “Pretty bike. Where did you get it?”
    â€œStole it from a dude. A bad man. That was two thousand miles and three states ago.”
    The women laughed. Sara, a blonde with a ridged forehead and a broad nose, stood up, wiped her arm across her brow, and asked, “How old are you?”
    â€œI don’t know my birthday. Thirty?” Sargam said. “I’m such a mutt. I’ve never seen an older version of me. Nothing to compare me to.”
    The work was harder than any Sargam had done, and after an hour her upper back and shoulders were sore and she was grateful when the woman said that was enough for