West With Giraffes(44)
Freedom, pally!
As I watched, though, a tramp with a cooking pot on his back stumbled on the track and as he scrambled not to be hit, I saw his face. It was the face of all tramps . . . weathered, blotched, woebegone . . . like the tramp’s face I saw thrown off to die for his shoes.
Almost running the rig right off the road with that bottled-up memory, I whiplashed the giraffes and threw the Old Man into the dashboard worse than back in DC. You’d think that would have had him chewing me up and spitting me out, but he barely did more than yowl, still bad-bewitched by his circus thoughts.
Five miles passed before I was driving proper, and it’d be another five before I could rid myself of the tramp’s face. By then we were well past Chattanooga, farmland surrounding us again, the road lined with store billboards touting jams and jellies, sorghum and cider, RC Cola and Jax Beer.
On my side, the highway was running along the rail’s right-of-way with only a thin line of pine trees as a divide. Mile after mile, the Old Man kept eyeing that tree line and I wished I didn’t know full well why. We could hear a train coming, and within seconds, a fast-moving freight train was roaring past the opposite way. The clickety-clack was so loud, both giraffes thrust their heads out the train’s side so forceful the rig lifted off the road. I leaned the other way, like that could stop the top-heavy rig from lurching into the trees. When the Old Man did it, too, though, I saw he was trying to yell over the clamor, motioning me to pull over. So I braked hard, jerking us to a stop on the shoulder. As the freight roared on, the Old Man grabbed Big Papa’s gunnysack, crawled up the side away from the train, and began pitching those onions in the giraffes’ windows, one after the other. He was trying to get the giraffes to pull their heads in—which they did—and, even though we now knew latches meant nothing to giraffes, he latched the windows anyway. After the long train passed, the Old Man and I, ears still ringing, sat inside the truck cab without the will to move until the echoes died away.
“How long’s the track going to be right next to the road?” I mustered up the courage to ask.
“All day,” was the Old Man’s answer.
For the next hour, we rode along eyeing the tracks and our side mirrors, the giraffes riding quiet inside, the skies turning gray to match our mood. I kept looking back for Red. There were lots of cars on that nice highway but no green Packard. If she was back there, and I knew she was, she was hiding pretty good from both the law and us.
Finally, we heard another train, this one approaching from behind. Seeing flashes of yellow and red in our mirrors, we knew it was the circus. Railcars of elephants, horses, and lions draped with posters of clowns and a top-hatted ringmaster inched closer and closer until they were traveling right beside us.
This time there wasn’t enough shoulder to pull off. I had to keep going. Frantic, the Old Man searched the road ahead for a turnoff with no luck.
The train was now so close the lions might as well have been in the truck cab with us. The only thing we had going for us was that the giraffes were still riding quiet inside the rig, unseen.
“C’mon, darlings . . . stay put,” the Old Man kept saying under his breath, glancing every few seconds back at the latched windows. “Stay put now.”
But then one of the circus cats roared, and out popped the giraffes’ heads searching for the lions. With that, the giraffes were seen, all right. A bearded lady by a Pullman window noticed first. Then a potbellied man with a handlebar mustache raised his window to lean halfway out the window to look. It was the same guy on the caboose back in Maryland.
I thought the Old Man was going to explode into little pieces where he sat, hollering and pointing at a country road up ahead. Turning so quick, we all but did it on two wheels and we didn’t stop until we saw the red caboose pass with its new sign flapping: MUSCLE SHOALS TONIGHT!
By the time we found our long way back to the highway on the narrow winding roads, the train track had veered away and the circus had surely made it all the way to Muscle Shoals.
The next twenty miles down the Lee Highway were blessed quiet. We’d traveled a lot of silent miles by that time, but that silence was a loud one. As the sky grew darker and grayer, we drove into a low area with a small storm brewing complete with sudden, dense fog. The cars behind us might as well have vanished.
For ten long minutes, we weren’t moving faster than a crawl, hoping everybody else was doing the same.
From the fog, a sign zipped past.
YELLER’S MODERN TOURIST CAMP
100 YARDS AHEAD
“Pull in there,” ordered the Old Man. “We’ll figure out how to get by that train tomorrow and on to Memphis while they’re busy loading. If we time it right, we’ll get to their turnaround stop ahead of them and that’ll be that.”
“They’ll be turning around?”
“It’s a southern circuit outfit,” he said. “Unless things have changed. And things don’t change.”
A hundred yards ahead, the sign popped into view again.
YELLER’S MODERN TOURIST CAMP
YOU MADE IT
We could make out the tall pine trees framing the entrance, their trunks painted bright yellow. I turned in and rolled the rig toward the red neon OFFICE sign glowing like a fog light in the middle of the grove.
The place was an auto-trailer camp, not an auto court. Except for the owner’s trailer and what looked like some rental trailers, it seemed we had the place to ourselves, although we couldn’t be sure because of the fog. After a few meet-the-giraffes moments for Yeller himself, complete with food right off his own trailer’s table, which we devoured on the spot, he lit his lantern.