West With Giraffes(36)
“What do I do?” I said.
The Old Man fumed. “Take the road.”
We went about a hundred yards fine enough, but as we took a curve, I had to stand on the brakes. In front of us was a railroad underpass, the old narrow kind where the road dips down to go under the track instead of the other way around. It looked low.
And when I say low, I mean real low.
Both of us could tell by eyeing the underpass that the clearance was going to be close, plus it was barely wide enough for us to pass through.
I’d have pulled the rig off the road if there’d been a shoulder, but it was already sloping inward to pass under the railroad trestle. So I had to stop in the middle of the road, and the moment we came to a stop, I felt eyes on me. I thought it was the giraffes until I saw a whitewashed shotgun shack right by the tracks. Sitting in a small window in the roof’s eaves was a little Black girl, not more than four or five. We were so close, I could see her eyes grow wide with giraffes.
The Old Man was talking. “Go measure the thing quick before some new fool rear-ends us.” Reaching under the seat for a big metal tape measure, he thrust it at me. I got out with it and ran, taking the tape high as soon as I was below the underpass.
“Twelve feet eight!” I called.
The rig was twelve foot eight—maybe higher, since tires inflate on the road.
By the time I returned to the rig, the Old Man was standing near the front fender, staring down at the rig’s tire. “I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this,” he muttered as he took the cap off the tire’s air valve stem. The rig had single tires up front and double tires in back under the giraffes to help hold the weight and to keep the rig going if one went flat. Within seconds, he’d let a little air out of all of them, each one making a tiny, soft phhhhhht sound, that is, until he got to the last right-side double tire that had picked up a nail. The Old Man had no choice. He had to let air out of it, too—and when he did, the tire went full-out flat. After giving it a good cussing, he took a deep breath. We still had the other double tire to get us to our night stop and some gas station help—if we could only get through the underpass.
I measured again. Still too close. He had to let out a bit more on every tire.
As he was all but finished, his fingers pinching the valve stem of the tire by the flat, a two-seat roadster zoomed around the curve, swerved to miss us, and barreled on through the underpass. Having already been hit once by a swerving rubbernecker, I jumped like a spooked bullfrog, stumbling into the Old Man so hard that his fingers, still squeezing the tire’s stem, wrenched the nozzle sideways . . . and the phhhhhht sound was replaced by another sound . . . the tiniest unsettling ssssssshhhhhhh.
And it wasn’t stopping. Both of the right-side double tires were about to be flat.
For a second, we looked at each other, then the Old Man yelled, “We got to get through to even get off the road! Put their heads in!”
I wasted a full minute trying, but the usually obliging Boy wasn’t having it, much less Girl.
“Forget it!” called the Old Man as he ran to the curve, and seeing the Old Man run was a scary sight in itself. “Coast’s clear!” he yelled. “Go!”
I hopped behind the wheel, still hearing that tiny ssssssshhhhhhh.
“Down the middle—slow but quick—they need time to get their heads in,” the Old Man hollered, “but that tire’s about to go!”
With the giraffes snorting and stomping at the ruckus, I put the rig into gear and inched forward, trusting the giraffes to pull their heads out of harm’s way on their own . . . and, God love them, they did. Slow, slow, slow, we moved under the rusted old railroad bridge, the top of the rig making screech-scraw wood-scraping sounds to set your teeth on fire.
The rig was almost through—only inches left to clear—when the remaining back right tire went flat with one quick, sad phhwwmphh. We dropped to a dead stop, plugging up that underpass good.
I jumped to the ground and wiggled between the rig and the underpass wall to join the Old Man gaping at the woeful sight. Both back right tires were flat, all right. In a flash, we saw what had happened. It was the giraffes. As soon as most of the rig had cleared and it was safe to pop their heads out again, they’d done just that. At the same time. On the same side. The extra weight was too much for the single, half-deflated tire on top of what was causing that ssssssshhhhhhh sound—which, of course, now had also stopped.
At that, the Old Man whopped that poor fedora of his to the ground and stomped it flat, produced a rolling cuss I would have admired any other time, creative as sin and the length of a long spiral spit into the wind. Which is probably how it felt, too, his big plan coming right back in his face, because I knew what he was thinking. I was wanting to kick myself. When the giraffes wouldn’t let me close one side’s windows, I should have tried tricking them by closing off opposite side ones—Girl one way, Boy the other—to keep the rig balanced for the few seconds we needed it to work. Too little, too late, I latched all the windows giraffe-tight to get us balanced again, at least long enough for the Old Man to stop cussing and start figuring out what to do. In the meantime, we were stuck now in almost as much mortal peril as in the mountains. So I headed in a sprint back to the curve, since one of us had to keep cars from ramming us into a world of hurt.
The Old Man hollered me to a halt. “Get back here!”