West With Giraffes(35)
Soon we rocked into a rhythm like the one on our first traveling day. But for me, it was as different as different could be. I wasn’t riding on a thieved cycle trying to keep up. I wasn’t working an angle or plotting my next move. I was just driving us along, blissful, the hours slipping by, the roadside stops as pretty as a picture, and the trees sheer chomping delights. We passed a horse farm, and the horses began running with us along the pasture’s long white fence, tails swishing, manes flying high. Somewhere during that stretch Wild Boy even lay down. At the next rest stop, I popped the top to find him spread across his traveling crate’s floor again, his long neck drooping over his back, defying the laws of necks.
This time, instead of telling the Old Man, I leaned in and whispered, “Hey—”
Unwinding his neck, Boy got to his feet, rising like a giraffe prince as if to say, What? Then he pushed by me to reach for the new trees with Girl . . . and a wave of something peculiar and bittersweet passed over me. Down the road, I glanced in my sideview mirror at the giraffes with their snouts to the wind . . . and the same feeling washed over me again. Forcing my eyes straight ahead, I pictured myself riding on that California-bound train until my flickering hope was once again aflame.
The rest of the morning’s drive was pure traveling peace, the high point being a batch of those old Burma-Shave ads staggered on little signs as we rolled by:
THE SAFEST RULE
NO IFS OR BUTS
JUST DRIVE LIKE EVERY ONE
ELSE IS NUTS
BURMA-SHAVE
HE LIT A MATCH
TO CHECK GAS TANK
THAT’S WHY
THEY CALL HIM
SKINLESS FRANK
BURMA-SHAVE
The last one I remember because it made the Old Man bust out laughing. In fact, by the afternoon’s first stop we were all in such a good mood that Girl didn’t even kick at the Old Man when he inspected her splint.
As we pulled back on the road, though, we heard the sound of a train in the distance and the Old Man tensed.
The sound grew louder and louder, coming from somewhere beyond the trees. The railroad track was moving toward us again. We strained for a glimpse through the woods, and when we saw flashes of yellow and red, the Old Man cussed under his breath.
“What kind of circus moves so much it keeps up with us?” I said.
“The cheap, fly-by-night kind,” he said back.
The trees thinned and I caught a glimpse of elephants in a passing cattle car, their ears sagging low. “They don’t look happy.”
“Nothing much happy going on over there,” muttered the Old Man. He took the next moment to spit out the window, which now in memory seems as much a comment as a sudden urge to rid himself of spittle. Because the next thing he said was, “Forget the skullduggery. You’d want to bring the wrath of God down on them just for how they treat their animals.”
For over a mile, the train paced us on the other side of the tree line until it began pulling ahead. Through the trees, we could make out the new sign on the red caboose that said CHATTANOOGA TONIGHT! as the train chugged out of sight.
Our good mood was dashed. As the land opened up to pasture, I kept checking the giraffes in the side mirror, their road Pullman looking far too much like a cattle car. I noticed the Old Man looking back more, too, but not at the giraffes. He was glancing at the road, and he kept it up for miles. The circus train had already passed, so I couldn’t quite figure why. I checked my own side mirror, worrying he’d spied the green Packard, but the road was empty.
Then he was pointing. “Turn off.”
I exited us onto a gravel road that ran through a tall stand of nearby trees.
“Pull into that grove,” he said, his voice gone odd. “And put the giraffes’ heads in.”
So I did, and they let me, which was also mighty odd.
We sat there for five minutes that turned into ten, watching. I started wishing for cars to whiz by to kill the boredom. I saw a glimpse of color . . . yellow . . . and red.
A panel truck whizzed by and out of sight—the same panel truck we’d seen back in Maryland.
I cut my eye at the Old Man, busting with questions, but his jaw was set so solid, I knew to let him be. Our nice traveling mood wasn’t only broken now, it was roadkill.
We opened the giraffes’ windows again, and for the next couple of hours, the highway wound us through town after little town, the roadside sprinkled with advertising billboards, ones like I’D WALK A MILE FOR A CAMEL and DRINK A BITE TO EAT 10-2-4 DR. PEPPER. Even town wags calling out “How’s the weather up there?” didn’t perk us up. By late afternoon, the air had turned a tad chilly, so we rolled up our windows, and even the giraffes pulled their heads in. The stop for the night was about two hours away, the Old Man said, so we’d be done before it got any chillier, the air or the mood.
That’s when we came to the overpass.
And when I say overpass, I mean what was left of the overpass.
Somebody hadn’t quite made it under. The middle section had been hit by something harder than a giraffe head. All that was left of it was dangling pieces of concrete and wire. Below it was another big DETOUR sign, plunked down in the middle of the highway.
The Old Man groaned. “NOW what!”
I slowed us to a crawl and the giraffes popped their heads out to see why. The detour arrow pointed to a side road that held the promise of looping back around to the highway soon enough. The side road itself looked iffy, though. It was paved, if cracked and weedy, but it didn’t have a name or a number. All it had to mark it was a homemade sign announcing COTTAGES FOR COLOREDS with an arrow pointing the way.