West With Giraffes(29)
My spirits rose even higher. Until we came upon the biggest sign of all.
In the middle of the road, at the intersection of Skyline Drive and the Lee Highway, sat a barricade with a DETOUR arrow as big as Dallas, pointing up that Skyline Drive.
“What the—” the Old Man muttered.
About fifty yards down the detour was what looked like a football-field-long tunnel clear through the mountainside. A sign announced the name, as if they were proud of it: MARY’S ROCK TUNNEL AHEAD—TURN ON LIGHTS.
I pulled us to a stop. The Old Man jumped out and marched past the sign to the bend in the road ahead. What he saw made him cuss and throw down his fedora. Scooping up the hat, he pulled it low over his brow and began pacing the length of the rig, the giraffes moving their heads along with him, until he stopped to stare back the way we came. He was thinking about turning us around. If we did, that would be the end of my rig driving.
He crawled in the cab. “Side railing’s gone as far as you can see,” he grumbled. “Something took it out, a rock slide or a car going over.” He fidgeted with his fedora, then turned to look straight at me. “You ever driven in mountains, boy? Don’t lie to me.”
I didn’t want to lie big so I lied little. “Not that much.”
As he stared down the Skyline Drive detour, the whole of him drooped. He took off his hat and slapped it on the truck’s seat the way I already knew meant he was tired of thinking. “Guess we should take them back to DC and wait, even though that means taking them outa the rig. Which means losing more days . . . and maybe worse.” He turned, stared me full in the face, and said, “Now’s the time to tell me if you got any thoughts on the subject.”
The Old Man hadn’t decided. He wanted bad to keep going. He just didn’t want us going off a cliff. All I had to do was say I could handle it. Instead, looking at the tunnel, what I heard myself say was:
“We have to go through that?”
He paused, and I thought that was it. “It’s tall enough,” he said. “I can talk you through. It’s the afterwards that matters.”
“The . . . afterwards?”
“Turnouts, switchbacks, and overlooks to grind every gear you got before we level out and ease down back to the Lee.”
“How far?”
“That’s not your worry right now,” he said.
I didn’t like the sound of that.
“There’ll be no turning around once we start and there’ll be no second chances,” he went on. “We can go back to DC—there’s no shame in it, and I’ll still buy you that ticket back to New York. I had my chance to wait for an experienced driver, but we were making good time and the darlings had taken to you. So I didn’t. It’ll be on me,” he said, adding under his breath, “’Course if we end up at the bottom of the mountain the hard way, it’ll be on me, too. But in that event we’ll all be past caring.”
That’s the way he posed it. Either he believed my driving-skill lies or he was not telling me something, which was more likely the case. At the time, though, all I could think was what my rowdy young self had been thinking since leaving the harbor dock—Californy.
I straightened my spine, and with the hubris of a selfish boy with nothing behind and everything ahead, I said, “I can do it.”
“Hope to God I don’t regret this,” he muttered, setting his jaw. “OK. Here’s what you’re going to do. You’ll move us real slow into the mouth, not jostling our passengers or whomping their heads one little bit. It’s a long tunnel, and your first thought is to hug the side of the mountain. But you can’t see the side of the tunnel, so instead what you do is follow the yellow line down the middle, keeping your tire right on it. If you don’t think you can do that, then we need to put their heads in right now. If we do, though, there’s no good place for us to let their heads back out for a while, and that might be a big problem if they get jumpy. Because on the other side it’s going to curve and curve and curve some more before we level out, and they’ll be doing it blind. So we got to decide right now which way to play it—with a couple of two-ton beasts blindly being bunged around inside their boxes or with their windows open, so they can see what’s coming and help us balance the rig.”
I stared a little stunned at him after all that, then looked back at the giraffes, who were already shuffling so much we could feel it up front.
“Open or closed?” he pressed.
I reached into my pocket to rub Cuz’s lucky rabbit’s foot. It wasn’t there . . . I’d left it back in the pocket of my old pants along with the Old Man’s dollar. I almost told the Old Man, but I clamped my mouth good and shut. I’d have sooner gone off that mountain than let him hear me hanging our future on a rabbit’s foot. Instead I said, “Open.”
“All right then,” he said. “You ready?”
So, without the help of Cuz’s lucky rabbit’s foot, I turned us onto Skyline Drive. At the tunnel’s lip, I took a deep breath, fearing it’d be the last good inhale I’d take for quite a while. I turned on the rig’s headlights and we entered the black hole, the pinpoint light at the other end of the tunnel all we could see. Edging slow and steady, we moved into the dark, hugging the center stripe, the giraffes riding fine, the darkness quieting them nicely. A car entered from the other end, popping on its own headlights. I felt the giraffes jolt. The headlights grew bigger and bigger . . . until the car passed with a swish, and I swear I heard us all sigh as one.