West With Giraffes(46)
I paused. “Heads.”
He raised the hand covering the coin. Tails. Then, grinning so big and oily I could’ve slipped on it, he turned the coin over . . . It was tails on the other side, too.
I jerked back. “What are you trying to pull!”
“Good trick, don’t you agree? Works every time. You ever heard anybody say ‘tails up’?” He held out the coin. “It’s yours. Smart young lad like yourself can make good use of it.”
“Don’t want it,” I muttered. “Don’t like tricks.”
“Ah, an honest man, too.” He flicked his wrist and there were two gold pieces in his palm. He flicked again and there was only one. “Young man, I promise no tricks. Only a proper offering of services. Here’s a real double-eagle twenty-dollar gold piece. Go ahead. Check it.”
I turned it over in his palm. It had the appropriate amount of sides—one heads, one tails.
“All you have to do is give me a peek at the hurricane giraffes,” he said, nodding toward the rig.
“How do you know that?”
“Why, you’re famous, young man. You’ve been in all the papers as you travel. I was figuring you’d come along the Lee Highway, and I was right. So what do you say? A peek and the coin is yours.” When I didn’t snatch it right up, he pinched it between his thick thumb and forefinger and held it out, the thing all but glittering in the lantern’s glow.
With real gold hovering so near, I forgot all about the trick coin, the Old Man’s circus outbursts at the railway, and pretty much everything else. In a time when you could buy a hot dog and a soda pop for a nickel, a twenty-dollar gold piece was John D. Rockefeller. I didn’t just want it, I needed it. There was no bigger devil-deal to offer a hard-knock boy in a Hard Times world. I’d lived on tumbleweed soup and been tempted with raccoon parts cooked over crazy-hungry bums’ fire barrels. Not until years into my army days did I trust that tomorrow would hold food without fear. I’m back on my own at Memphis, aren’t I? I told myself, staring at that gold. Even with a ticket to Californy, I could be broke and hungry again soon, couldn’t I? Right then, my fool young self started angling how to get the gold piece with no harm done to the giraffes or the Old Man. I was cocksure I could do it, having yet to learn that nobody gets devil-dealing both ways, there being either heaven or hell to pay for everything in this world and nothing in between.
I reached for the double eagle.
He palmed it. “First, a look.”
So I stepped up on the fender to open the giraffes’ windows. At the sound of me so near, both Boy and Girl pushed their heads out on their own.
“Ohhhhhhh,” the ringmaster moaned with smarmy pleasure, eyes glistening. “They’re sublime! And so young! Perfect, perfect.”
The giraffes, however, took one look at him and pulled their heads back in.
He groaned. “No, no, no, make them come out!”
Since I already knew you couldn’t make a giraffe do anything, which he didn’t seem to know, I thought it was over. “You saw them. A deal’s a deal,” I said, eyes on his clenched palm.
“But I must see more.” He opened his golden palm. “More and it’s yours. You have my word.”
I glanced back and forth between the coin and the rig, pondering the least I could do to get the gold piece. Considering he’d seen their heads, I opened the trapdoors to reveal both giraffes’ lower halves, hoping that’d be enough.
It was not.
“Come now, you can do better.”
All I could think to do next was open the top for a look down on them. Climbing up the side ladder, I headed up, expecting the roly-poly ringmaster to follow.
“Young man,” he called up, rubbing his belly, “there’s got to be another way.” When I didn’t hop right to it, he waved the gold piece at me once again. I couldn’t think what else to do. He was now bouncing it in his open palm, just so it would gleam in the lamplight. There was the double eagle, all golden and glittering. Waiting. For me. “It’s yours, son! Don’t you want it?”
Tearing my eyes off the coin, I glanced around me, my eyes landing on a big clamp near my hand, one of the four heavy “ramp” clamps holding the entire side upright. Maybe I can lower the side—only a bit, I thought. Never mind I’d hadn’t touched the clamps before and never mind I had no idea how heavy the side was. Halfway down—that’s as far as I’ll go, I told myself, temptation as bad in inches as in miles.
I opened the top first, then started working on the side clamps. The Old Man had battened the things down to last for the entire ride, and I had to work them loose. You’d think that would’ve given me time to think about what I was doing. But that gold piece had me still believing I could outsmart a tricky fat cat making me deaf, dumb, and blind to all but it. When the last clamp opened, I grabbed hold of the middle and stepped a boot down on the fender—as far as I was going to go—and lowered the traveling crate’s side for the first time since the giraffes had been put in. I might as well have drawn a diagram on how to do it, Mr. Percival T. Bowles watching my every move. It was worse than a knucklehead stunt, it was a selfish and deadly one that I was to regret the moment I’d done it. Because no sooner had I stepped down, I lost my footing on the fog-damp fender and I fell, landing on my back in the dirt with the rig’s entire side flopped down on top of me, chest-high.