West With Giraffes(50)

“You’re . . . not calling the law?”

“Haven’t you been listening? We need to get to Memphis,” was his answer. “Right now.”

I’d like to say that was the last we saw of Percival Bowles, but it was not. Back on the highway, we watched the railroad track in the distance edge slowly closer. By the time we got to Muscle Shoals, the highway once again took us right by the train station with no place for us to hide—and there was the circus pulling up stakes.

About ten miles on the other side of town, the tracks hugging the road again, we saw a roadside store with old-timers rocking on the porch. We hadn’t had a thing to eat since Yeller’s leftovers the night before, and we were getting dangerously low on gas. We could go without food, but we couldn’t go without fuel. We had to stop.

I pulled the rig up to the pumps. As the old-timers on the front porch stools geehawed and made their way over to get a better look-see at the giraffes, the Old Man put on his fedora and pulled it low over his gash. “I know you got questions,” he said my way, “but first we need to get you and the darlings to Memphis.” With a tense glance back down the road, he got out and marched into the store, the giraffes watching him go.

As the attendant, staring at the giraffes, pumped the gas about as slow as I ever saw, a panel truck pulled up on the other side of the pumps—a yellow-and-red panel truck. And out from the passenger side crawled Bowles. No longer in hat, boots, and ringmaster outfit, his mustache bushy and unwaxed, he was as pure ugly as a devil should be.

He’s going to spill the beans on me, I thought, looking back for the Old Man. Giving the giraffes a soulful look, I eyed the railroad tracks for a place to hop a freight if it came to it, and then, squeezing the gold piece in my pocket, I stepped toward Bowles and his driver. I was going to say something, anything, to stop what I thought was going to happen next, even arguing with myself over handing back the gold piece if that would end it.

But Mr. Percival Bowles had no interest in a measly double-eagle coin. As he and his driver moved my way, he pulled a wad of money from his breast pocket. It was a roll of hundred-dollar bills held together with a single rubber band, and it was big as his fat fist.

If the gold coin looked like John D. Rockefeller to my orphan eyes, then that roll of bills looked like Fort Knox. This wasn’t a double eagle to bribe a fool of a boy . . . this was a full-grown man’s bribe, the kind of fortune a fella could put in his pocket and go. Never mind the giraffes were worth thousands more than whatever he had, and never mind that his lackeys had tried to abscond with the giraffes that very morning, Bowles thought he could buy the Old Man off, mistaking Mr. Riley Jones for another Hard Times chump like me.

Here and now—with the decades fading from living memory the outright chicanery of that “time of opportunity,” as Bowles called it—you might be thinking it folly for anybody to believe they could bribe for, much less steal, two giraffes and get clean away with it. A giraffe is a mighty hard thing to hide, as we already well knew. There was good reason the Old Man called outfits like his “fly-by-night,” though. It was still a time of medicine shows, Bible salesmen con artists, and all manner of flimflammers leaving town under the cover of darkness, and that included one-night-stand traveling circuses. To live before the War was to believe you could be or do whatever you wanted by just moving on down the road, especially with the Hard Times turning even good people bad. Fat cats like Bowles relied on it, as much as the greed or hunger of every soul he met, and he was relying on both right then.

“Hello again, young man,” he said, flashing the cash roll my way as the beefy driver came around the front of the truck to stand beside him. “I have a proposition for your Mr. Johnson. But I want you to listen very closely, because if he’s not wise enough to take it himself, it can be yours. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, as a smart lad like you knows, and you are, after all, in the driver’s seat.” Then he held out that roll of bills close enough for me to touch. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

In the glow of that small fortune, I lost any good sense I’d redeemed that morning. My eyes stuck on Fort Knox, I heard myself mumble, “Jones.”

“Hmm?”

“Not Johnson—Jones,” I mumbled. “Riley Jones.”

He jerked a step back, taking the cash roll with him. “What did you say his name was?”

“Riley Jones,” I said again.

His face dropped like he’d seen a spook. What he said next made me forget all about bills and beans and bribes.

“Young man,” he muttered, “you’re traveling with a murderer.”

There were few words that could have gotten my eyes off that cash wad, and that was surely one of them.

His gaze darted past me. “You best watch yourself driving such delicate creatures in this ridiculous rig. You’d be better off with me. At least I know the value of a man’s life over an animal’s.”

From behind me, I heard the slap of the store’s screen door. Next thing I knew Bowles had shoved the cash roll into my chest and let go, making me grab it to keep it from dropping in the dirt. Just that quick, I was touching more money than I’d ever again hold in my hands. Men have died for less. At that moment, I knew why.

I’d like to write that I never wavered, full of moral fiber to burn. That, chin high, remembering the giraffe larceny and my shot-firing part in stopping it, I flung the cash roll back at him. And don’t think I wasn’t tempted to tell the story that way, being forced to make full use of the eraser end of this pencil. But you know that’s not what happened. I surely understood that Mr. Percival Bowles expected a certain obligation from any poor soul taking his money, be it thrust on them or not. Dealing with any attached fat-cat strings, though, had to wait. Because once my hands touched that roll of cash, it wasn’t about the fat cat. It wasn’t about the Old Man or the giraffes. It wasn’t even about right or wrong. It was only about a Dust Bowl orphan and a big roll of cash. I did what you’d expect such a boy to do. I pushed that pocket fortune deep into my right front pocket on top of the gold coin, my fingers clutching both good and tight.