West With Giraffes(14)

Peeking out, I saw the Old Man wave Earl to the cabin, ease down on the truck’s running board, and pat himself a cigarette from a Lucky Strike pack. That he could afford store-bought smokes, instead of rolling his own, was an impressive sight for my farmboy eyes. As he flicked open his Zippo and lit up, I decided everybody in California must be as rich as a Rockefeller, which made me ache all the more to keep on following. I eyed that dairy truck, dreaming of milk if not honey, and I took another bite of my potato, picking sweet grapes from a Californy vine in my mind. Finding a mossy soft spot against the boulder, I settled in to watch as the Old Man smoked one Lucky after the other, lighting the new one from the butt of the old. As always, I wasn’t about to let myself fall asleep if I could help it, so I stayed up hour after hour with the Old Man, spending the time plotting how I could keep following them.

Since I wasn’t much good at planning ahead, my ideas stunk . . . I could use the gas pump out front, but I’d have to first find a dime or a dollar in somebody else’s pocket. I could snitch another vehicle, but the snitch-worthy ones were already gone. The only other vehicle at the camp was the dairy truck, which would fill my stomach but wasn’t exactly prime thieving material. The later it got, the more desperate and stupid my ideas got. When I was seriously considering jumping on the back of the rig like I’d jump a freight train, I gave up.

By and by, the Old Man woke Earl for his watch, ordered him to close the rig’s top, and then disappeared inside the cabin. Putting a chaw of tobacco in his jaw, Earl slicked back his hair with both hands. Then, forgetting all about closing the top, he did what I feared he’d do. With a last look back at the Old Man’s cabin, he pulled out the hidden flask and started tippling, swigging right past that tobacco juice, a combination only a souser could love. When he parked himself on the running board, both giraffes poked their heads out their windows, took one look down at Earl, and pulled their heads right back in. But not before Girl quivered her big nostrils one last time my way.

For the next hour, I watched Earl tipple and spit until he was leaning his lolling head against the rig’s door. The only thing keeping him upright was his tobacco juice making him hack and cough—which might have been his goober plan.

Finally, when he slumped over sideways, I thought I heard sniggering somewhere beyond the rig. That got me up on my boots. From the shadows, three yahoos appeared, one of them with enough meat on his bones to make two of me, another one in nothing but overalls, and the third one a pipsqueak with a pudding-bowl haircut. After nudging Earl’s slumped lump, which upped the yahoos’ sniggering, the jumbo one rapped a knuckle on the road Pullman. Both trap windows flew open and out came the giraffes’ heads. Taking one look at the yahoos, the giraffes had the good sense to pull their heads back in, like they’d done with Earl. So the pipsqueak decided to climb up the rig to look in the windows at them. With a leg up from the jumbo yahoo, there he went. The pipsqueak kept climbing while the other yahoos kept sniggering.

Then everything went bad.

Real bad.

The giraffes began stomping and snorting and shaking the rig so much the pipsqueak fell off and then got right back on.

That’s when I saw what the pipsqueak saw and what the giraffes already knew . . . the top was still open. The pipsqueak was headed straight for it.

Still hearing Pa’s voice in my head on top of survival lessons from the road, I stood there in the dark, clenching and unclenching my fists. I was a rowdy of the sneaky coyote variety. Even when my temper got the best of me, I never did more than punch and run, and never more than one guy at a time.

As the pipsqueak climbed, he whopped the rig again. With that, the giraffes shoved their heads out their windows to stare my way with eyes terrified and pleading.

Then the pipsqueak hit the top.

What happened next all but defeats my poor powers to relate. Having nowhere to go, nothing to kick, and no one to defend them, the giraffes must have thought all was lost. Because from them came a caterwaul so bone-chilling I still despair at its memory. People say giraffes don’t make sounds. But I’m here to tell you they do—and this one was a moaning, bellowing, wailing piece of giraffe-terror that surely had met the hurricane itself. It was a sound only the lion at their throats must hear. I put my hands over my ears, but it didn’t help—the sound was vibrating in my chest, making me feel the giraffes’ terror as if it were my own. I couldn’t take it a second more. Before I even knew I was doing it, I’d sprinted to the rig, dodged jumbo, punched overalls, and, with a flying leap, grabbed at the pipsqueak’s leg. The two on the ground then grabbed my legs and spread them like a wishbone. But as they were about to make a wish, the giraffes rocked the rig and the pipsqueak fell in.

Next thing I heard over the giraffe’s caterwaul was a lot of giraffe-kicking and pipsqueak-howling—followed by a sound I’d heard a thousand times before. The click-clack of a cranking shotgun.

There stood the Old Man in his skivvies, shotgun up.

The pipsqueak popped from the top like a bottle rocket, the yahoos scrambled for the cover of the trees, and I dove back behind my boulder just as the shotgun blast echoed through the woods, stunning everything silent, including, to my deep relief, the giraffe-terror caterwaul.

Hearing the Old Man reloading, I forced myself to look. The rig was still rocking, the giraffes snuffling and stomping, and the Old Man had the shotgun stuck halfway up Earl’s nose.