West With Giraffes(18)

“I don’t want to go back. I can get you to Californy. I swear on my ma’s grave, I can.”

The look he shot me could’ve stopped a rhinoceros. “You’ll be OK with DC, boy, or you can stay here on the side of the road waiting for the kindness of strangers. What’ll it be?”

So I nodded. He swung the door wide, moved over, and I pulled myself up quick before he changed his mind.

Jangling all our molars, I found my way through the first few gears. As each mile got smoother, though, I started feeling something new—I wasn’t quite sure, seeing as I’d never felt it before, but I think I was feeling lucky.

That’s when I noticed a car behind us growing bigger in my sideview mirror with each passing second, until it slowed and began to follow from way on back.

It was a Packard. A green one.

Feeling my first fit of pure happiness, I’d have bet the farm that inside it was a flame-haired, camera-toting woman in pants.





. . . “Hon, I got your breakfast!”

Pushing the door open with her hip, it’s Big Orderly Red again. Just as I’m putting the period on the end of my sentence.

“Don’t want it,” I call over my shoulder.

“I warmed it back up for you,” she says, setting the tray of powdered eggs and godawful coffee on the bed nearest the window. Girl takes one sniff and shakes her big head.

“You’ve got to keep your strength up for your writing, don’t you?” Rosie tries.

I keep scribbling.

“Why don’t you take a break? We can play a game of dominoes—a game and a story—like old times,” she says, looking over my shoulder. “It looks like it’s getting good, too!”

I keep scribbling.

“So, who did you say you’re writing to?” she tries next.

I keep scribbling.

She sighs. “OK, you’re onto me. I’ll go.” As she does, though, she gives my shoulder a squeeze and says, “But, hon, are you writing to Augusta Red? Because if you are, where’re you going to send it?”

My heart flutters at that. I glance back at Girl in the window, peacefully chewing her cud. Then I take out my pocketknife, sharpen my pencil, and get back to driving the hurricane giraffes.





4

Across Maryland

So. There I was—Woody Nickel—driving giraffes with a freckled redheaded beauty hot on my trail. Since every dog has its day, maybe it was just that my stray-dog-boy day had come. God knows I was due a little Light Shining on me from Above, whether I believed in such things or not. Like most people, denying it never got in the way of relying on it. Here and now, older than old, I’ve lived long enough to believe then not believe, then believe and not believe more times than I can count, life being the bumpy ride it is. But I can say this. Luck it may have been. Yet if ever I’ve known a destiny feeling, the kind that makes you feel bigger than you are, moving you to something better than you are, it was that moment driving those giraffes with the green Packard in my mirror. I didn’t know quite what to do with it, barely able to breathe for fear I’d scare the grand thing away. Every few seconds I checked my mirror, squinting hard back at the Packard until I was sure it was Red behind the wheel. Alone.

“Button up.” The Old Man was frowning at my shirt.

My snitched shirt was too small to button all the way, but I gave it a good try with my free hand. “Sorry I tried to punch you back at quarantine,” I mumbled, cutting my eye his way.

“If you’d done more than tried, you wouldn’t be sitting here,” he said, eyeing my last button, both of us knowing it wasn’t going to budge. “Fine. Drive.”

I drove us around a curve. We leaned into it, both glancing in our sideview mirrors at the giraffes. They leaned fine, too. We were up to thirty-five miles per hour.

“That’s good. Right there,” he ordered. I could feel the Old Man’s eyes still on the woebegone sight of me, and they stayed on me long enough to make me antsy.

“What happened to your people?” he finally said.

“All in the ground.”

“What happened to your farm?”

“Dust took it.” I glanced back at Red, and my flickering hope flared up sky-high again. “I can go the distance. I can. I want to go to Californy.”

He fumed. “You and every other Okie.”

“I’m not an Okie.”

“Sure you are. I hear your twang.”

“I’m from Texas. The Panhandle.”

“Same thing,” he said. Back home, those were fighting words. If you were on the road with your life on your back, though, it didn’t matter if you were from Kansas or Arkansas or Texas—you were an Okie. “Don’t be having that Californy dream. Things aren’t like you’re thinking.” He eyed me again. “When’s the last time you ate?”

“I’m not hungry,” I lied, thinking he was still looking for an excuse to boot me. “I don’t eat much.”

Next he was studying the bruises on my arms, the scrapes on my face, and the loose tooth I kept tonguing. “You in the hurricane?”

I nodded, tonguing the tooth.

“You want it to fall out, keep doing that.”

I stopped.

“You get that scab on your face from the hurricane, too?”