West With Giraffes(30)

Finally, we were out the other side, but we didn’t have more than a second to enjoy it. Just like the Old Man warned, the road went straight into a curve. Worse, we were in the outside lane with only stacked-log guardrails between us and the valley below. Pulling hard at that wheel, I wanted to fess up I was a big, fat, whopping liar and he was a fool to have trusted me one whit. But it was too late. We were into it. Deadly quick, I learned what a switchback was—we were swerving back and forth and back again, all around that lumpy mountain. I hugged the middle stripe, trying to ignore the little crosses decorating the shoulder of the road, knowing each one was a body that didn’t make it, and I’d have wagered not a one of them had a load of jittery giraffes. With each curve I was feeling us sway. Because what do you do with that much weight going around a bend? You lean. Especially if you happen to be a giraffe. The more they leaned and the more I struggled through gear after gear, the more I pictured us taking flight off the back of one of those switches, with the Old Man’s screaming regrets the last thing I ever heard. I slowed down. The speed limit signs quoted fifteen miles per hour as the government’s best bet for safe curve-taking speed. We weren’t even going ten, with me trying out gear after gear, feeling for the one to right us—then I found it—I did. It was working—we took the next switchback fine and the next one even finer. I was already imagining the praise the Old Man would be heaping on me the moment we were down, when I heard the sound of a sputtering motor coming up behind.

Before I could do a thing about it, a car appeared in my side mirror . . . a green Packard.

It couldn’t have been doing fifteen.

But that was faster than ten.

And . . .

BAMMM.

The Packard popped the back of the rig, throwing us forward and jostling both giraffes to the wrong side of the rig—the valley side. Out the Old Man’s side mirror, I could see their heads peering clean over the drop-off. The whole groaning rig was leaning about as far as it could without toppling clean over.

“STOP-STOP!” he screamed.

I threw on the brakes. It made the giraffes right themselves slightly, but not enough. They were panicking. The rig started teetering, hanging over the drop-off, with nothing between them and thin air but a railing built for cars.

Behind us, Red threw open the Packard’s door and started to jump out.

“You want to get us all KILLED? Stay in the car!” the Old Man hollered back at her, pushing me out the door. “Climb up the side and call the giraffes toward you while I get us moving!” he ordered, jumping behind the wheel.

“But shouldn’t you . . . ?”

“Hurry! You know she’s not happy with me! Just lean toward the mountain and talk ’em your way! There’s a turnout around the bend—we’re almost there, but you got to right them or we won’t even make it that far!”

It was the first time I’d seen the Old Man scared, so I moved quick. Climbing up, I leaned as far back as I could on the mountain side of the teetering rig and started calling to the giraffes without a single onion to help. Waving my free arm back my way, I used all the animal calls I knew, which were little more than chicken tsk-tsking and horse clucking, while the Old Man gunned the gas. But the rig kept teetering and the giraffes kept panicking—their big eyes wide with terror, their big bodies telling them to stampede, to run. I tried the Old Man’s giraffe-speak, but my voice was brittle. The rig lurched worse. As the Old Man gunned it harder, I lost my grip and had to grab it back, the terror in the giraffes’ brown-apple eyes now my terror. Then I was no longer giraffe-speaking, I was begging, wailing, pleading—please, please, trust me, oh please-please-please-please—COME TO ME—please.

“COME!”

And they did.

Their tonnage shifted, jerking the rig back straight, away from the free-falling death of us all.

If I could’ve let go of the rig, I’d have hugged both their titanic heads. But all I could do was hold on as the Old Man lurched us forward again, clearing the switchback and heading around the bend.

At the scenic overlook, barely wide enough for the rig itself, the Old Man jolted us to a stop, tumbling out of the driver’s seat to catch his breath. I tumbled to the ground, too, but rushed to the overlook, my bladder having all the excitement it could hold. The second I got the job done and was struggling with my new, stiff denim buttons, the Packard inched by.

I stared at Red staring back at me until she was out of sight.

“Let’s go!” The Old Man was already back in the passenger seat. “I got to check that splint, but not here.”

Hustling behind the wheel, I eased the rig back on the road. It wasn’t over. Not only were we still climbing, it had begun to drizzle.

The Old Man was talking fast. “There’s a clearing between the peaks with a comfort station and a big lot. Two maybe three switchbacks and we’re there . . .”

Running through the gears as smooth and slow as I could on the slickening road, I took the first switchback, and then the second, catching a glimpse of the clearing.

As we made the next turn, though, lining both sides of the road’s narrow shoulders was an army of shovelers. At the sight, the Old Man popped the dashboard with his hand loud enough to make me jump. He was smiling. “God A’mighty—it’s the CCC! The WPA practically built the zoo!”

The shovelers were a Civilian Conservation Corps crew, he said, part of FDR’s Hard Times program, like the Works Progress Administration that put out-of-work men to building things all across the country. The road crew, not much older than me, were putting down stones and logs, smoothing the edges of the entrance into the station, where another group was clearing trees and putting down dirt, their shovels flashing in the handful of sunbeams streaming into the clearing through the clouds. Traffic was being stopped the other way to let them work, but the signaler wasn’t doing much signaling, as he was too busy gaping at the giraffes. Soon, so was the entire road crew. When they caught sight of our cargo, the shovels stopped in a sort of wave as, one by one, the boys elbowed their neighbors, gasps rippling down the line.