West With Giraffes(16)

Busting with a new idea, I made a beeline for the rig. With Wild Boy and Girl watching, I hopped on the running board and stuck my head in the cab’s window to study the rig’s gearbox, hard and long. Too long. When I jumped back to the ground, the Old Man and his raised shotgun were waiting.

I threw up my hands. “DON’T SHOOT!” I yelped, which even scared me since it was the first thing I’d said out loud since cussing and kicking Cuz. “I’m not with those yahoos! It’s me. Remember—from quarantine?”

Lowering the shotgun, he squinted at the sight I surely was, standing there in my raggedy clothes caked with dried quarantine mud.

“What the . . . ,” the Old Man managed. “Are you following us?” He moved that shotgun to his other hand, and I saw why he couldn’t drive. The gnarly hand I’d noticed back at the dock was his right hand. His gear hand. So I blurted out my new and mighty idea that was still forming even as it was coming out of my mouth. “I can do it,” I blurted. “You can’t go all the way by yourself with Wild Boy and Girl.”

“Who?”

“The giraffes—I can drive you to Californy.”

At that, he raised one of his bushy eyebrows so high I thought it’d take flight. “Who the hell asked you? And what the hell makes you think I’d want you?”

I nodded toward the road. “Because your driver just left you in a lurch, that’s why. Mister, I can flat drive circles around any man alive, hand to God. I don’t much sleep, I’m not a yahoo, and I sure don’t booze. You can trust me.”

“Trust you? I don’t even know you!” The Old Man looked my raggedy self up and down, pausing at my rope-tied hand-me-down britches barely covering the tops of my boots. “How old are you?”

“Eighteen,” I lied. “I can drive anything that moves, and I’m a genius with engines, I am.”

“I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re a genius with giraffes, too?” the Old Man said.

I stuck out my chin. “Better than your driver.”

“What makes you think that?”

I eased my hand into my pocket. “For starters, I know not to poke my nose near an animal’s hooves,” I lied again, having done exactly that fetching Cuz’s rabbit’s foot, which at that moment I was rubbing bald.

The Old Man looked past me. “How did you get here?”

“Motorcycle.” I nodded to the cycle in the shadows.

He squinted. “Is that yours? I cannot abide a thief or a liar.”

“I got it, don’t I?” I answered, proving myself both.

A patrol car pulled up under the office’s light pole, and I stepped back into the shadows.

The Old Man noticed.

“Enough,” he growled. Stuffing the gun under his arm again, he marched to my thieved cycle, reached in, and ripped out a handful of wires, then marched back to the rig. “If I see you again I got a lawman in every town I can hand you over to. I’m guessing you don’t want that. And, Jesus-Joseph-Mary, were you raised in a barn? Take a bath! There’s a river right there. The smell coming off you is stinging my eyes.” Climbing behind the wheel, he stashed the gun back on the rack. Then, pulling that beat-up fedora low over his brow, he ground every last gear until he found one that worked, bouncing and jerking the rig and the giraffes onto the road.

Slipping to the ground, I stared at the dangling wires on my out-of-gas cycle, clean out of gas myself. Because there wasn’t going to be any fixing that motorcycle. Least not by me. I didn’t know a thing about engines beyond kick-starting the occasional thieveable cycle. I would have told the Old Man I could raise the dead if I thought it would’ve kept me on the road with them. And my big idea about driving the rig? I believed, in the way only a young fool can, that the part about driving anything with wheels was bona fide. Never mind the fact that I hadn’t driven anything bigger than my pa’s worn-out Model T truck. And never mind that the farthest I’d ever driven it was the twenty miles into town on a Panhandle highway so straight a nearsighted granny could do it. I wasn’t through with my California dreaming, though, and while I didn’t know it at the time, neither were the giraffes through with me.

Salvation of any stripe is a matter of degrees.

So there I sat on my backside by that useless cycle, listening to the Old Man grinding those gears in the distance. When one of those grinds lasted a full minute, I got light-headed from wincing—and I found myself off my ass and back to doing-or-dying. Where the liar in me had failed, the thief in me hadn’t, but it didn’t have a chance if I didn’t keep moving. Once again I was on a dead run in cowboy boots, stomping hard to catch up to a couple of giraffes, and to my pure surprise, I was gaining on them. It was still country dark, the deep kind right before dawn. I could see the town cop’s lights flashing on the other side of the low water bridge. But the rig’s lights were still on this side. The Old Man was hesitating. In the rig’s headlights, I could see the water running over the bridge, which wasn’t much more than a big chunk of reinforced concrete dropped into the stream. The giraffes, heads out, were rocking the rig, surely skittish over the sound of the water—until they got the new whiff of me. Both those necks swung around to watch as I clomped toward them as fast as my boots would go. I was only a few steps away when the Old Man put it in gear. I eyed the water and eyed the back of the rig, desperate. And when you’re desperate, you’ll try even your most desperate plan.