West With Giraffes(23)
The giraffes were craning their necks toward the loud train and the Old Man was all nerves. Throwing open the truck door and tumbling out, he said, “Help me get the giraffes’ heads in! We don’t want any trouble.”
I didn’t much like the sound of that, especially since it was way too late to get their heads in. The train was already passing.
And at that very moment, so was the Packard.
A blur of green shot past us as I climbed up the rig’s side. Jolting to a stop behind the other cars at the crossing, Red bailed out in all her curly-headed glory, camera in hand. She snapped the train and cars, then turned to snap us. When she saw me, she was so surprised she lowered the camera to look at me looking at her. And I was surely looking at her.
“Hurry, boy!” the Old Man hollered my way.
From the old Chevy, a man rushed toward us. “I’ll be darned if those aren’t giraffes—you with that circus?”
I was too busy trying to get Girl to let me close the window to answer. After a couple of tries pushing that huge head where it didn’t want to go, I threw up my hands, looking back for the Old Man so he could go ahead and chew me out. But the train had finished passing the crossing and he was squinting hard enough after it to pop a blood vessel.
The family from the Oldsmobile then joined the party. “I know who you are!” the mother crowed, scooting toward us with her little ones. “I read about you in the papers. Look here, children! They’re going to California! Those are the hurricane giraffes! They’re going to live with Belle Benchley in the San Diego Zoo! We’ve seen her in the newsreels, haven’t we, children?” she went on. The Old Man wasn’t listening. His attention was glued to the circus train’s little red caboose with its banner hanging off the back: DC TONIGHT! Because as it disappeared around the bend, a big, potbellied, mustached man strode through the caboose’s back door in time to stare at us. Hard.
The Old Man cussed under his breath.
When the railroad crossing arms lifted, nobody in line wanted to leave as long as we were there, so we had to pull around them. With the giraffes bobbing their necks back toward the crowd, we crossed the tracks and disappeared around the same bend. I watched Red in my sideview mirror until she was no longer in sight, wondering if the Old Man noticed her. But his mind seemed stuck on that circus train.
As soon as the road veered away from the tracks, the Old Man announced, “We’ll stop for the night now and go into DC tomorrow.” Since we still had an hour of sun, that seemed like another mighty strange thing to do. I wasn’t going to say so, though, considering he was still planning to ditch me in DC and I needed more time to figure out how to change his mind.
In about a mile, we pulled into a little place called Round’s Roadside Auto Rest. It wasn’t much, four rickety-looking huts and some cane-back chairs set in a circle around a courtyard campfire. A plump gray-bunned lady and her two grown daughters came out with the Old Man to see the giraffes, all three wiping their hands on their aprons. The place was a family thing, you could tell, their clapboard house by the road serving as an office and a little café, too, if you can call a table with six chairs a café. The ma pointed to the corner hut nearest a nice live oak grove, the one she thought best for our rig parking. Soon we were set. As we finished tending to the giraffes, complete with Old Man kick, onion bribes, and tree munching, the three women brought us meat pies, potatoes, and coconut cake. I was amazed by the Old Man’s manners. I sized him for someone raised by wolves, roughshod and proud of it. But you should have heard the sweet talk he gave those ladies. “Why, Mrs. Round, you shouldn’t have” and “Thank you kindly, ma’am.” A real charmer.
When they left, he caught me looking at him funny and waved me toward the hut. “You can take the bed the first shift.”
“Can’t yet,” I said, not wanting to admit I don’t sleep.
“All right, I’ll relieve you in a few.” Then I stood there with my hands in my new pockets, trying to figure out what to do. He pointed toward the campfire. “Go sit in one of those cane-back chairs. You can see the giraffes from over there.”
So I went over and sat myself down.
It was dark by that time. There was only one other car at the Auto Rest that night. I couldn’t quite see what it was, the only light being from the little courtyard’s campfire. I squinted at the car and sat straight up at what I saw.
It was a Packard. The more I squinted, the greener it got.
I positioned the chair so I could see both the rig and the Packard, and waited. I straightened my new duds, situating my scrawny self like a relaxing rig-driving man, and watched the stars come out one by one. By the time the Big Dipper was above me, I saw the door open from the little hut and out she came.
“Stretch, it is you!” Red called as she came close. “May I join you?” she said, and sat down. The light of the fire made her hair look so red I thought it might burst into flames. Up close, I saw she had freckles everywhere, the mighty, all-over redheaded Irish kind that women hid under pancake makeup shoveled on with a trowel. Not her. Plus, I could see she truly wasn’t all that much older than me no matter how fancy her clothes or car. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty, the way a girl can look too old for her own good—and, at that moment, mine.
“I can’t believe you’re driving the giraffes!” she said. “The other man’s gone?”