West With Giraffes(51)
“BOY!”
The Old Man was by the screen door, still in his bloodied shirt. Then he was marching at us double time, onion sack in one hand and a bag of supplies in the other. He dropped the supply bag into the cab’s open window and threw the passenger door wide, ignoring both the fat cat and the driver. “Get in the truck, boy.”
“Now hold on,” Bowles said, moving toward the Old Man. “All I want to do is talk.”
The Old Man turned his back on them both, still clutching the gunnysack. But then the driver went and clamped a paw on the Old Man’s shoulder—and with a one-two punch I’d never see the likes of again, the Old Man swung the onion sack, smacking the driver full in the face while he socked Bowles square in his double chin, knocking him on his butt.
“MOVE!” the Old Man yelled.
We jumped in the truck and screeched away as fast as a big rig could go, my sideview mirror full of scattered onions, old-timers, and the circus driver trying to pull the roly-poly ringmaster out of the dirt.
There was, of course, a big flaw in our getaway. A panel truck without two-ton giraffes can travel faster than a top-heavy rig with them. I was driving us faster than the Old Man had ordered me ever to go, bouncing the giraffes around, inside and out, their heads banging against their windows. Yet all too soon, the panel truck caught up. For a mile they dogged us, as the railroad tracks veered even closer to the highway, sometimes not ten yards away. The circus truck kept pulling into the wrong side of the road, until, on an empty stretch, it came up beside us like it was going to pass. But it didn’t. It rode right along with us, weaving back and forth inches from my door.
“What the hell’s he pulling?” yelled the Old Man.
Bowles was trying to get my attention. Clenching a new wad of money in his fist, his arm resting on his windowsill, he was signaling me with every look his way: Pull over, young man. That’s all you have to do . . . You have the money. And here’s more . . . if you pull over.
You might think it’d be easy to keep my eyes to myself, that one wad of cash was surely enough. For a stray-dog boy, though, enough is never enough. If one pocket fortune could save me from feeling the desperate gnaw of an empty stomach forever, another could make forever last longer still. Never did it cross my mind to wonder what they’d do to the Old Man, much less the giraffes, if I chose to add a new wad to the old one. There are far more salvations than the kind you find in church, and I was in need of one right then to save me from myself. Because here was where I would begin to grasp not only the first stink of my waffling young soul but also that destiny is a mobile thing—that every choice you make, along with every choice made around you, can cause it to spin this way and that, offering destinies galore. I had a choice to make. Yet as I kept glancing at the new cash roll, the future in which I had all this fat cat’s money came full and irresistible to me. It was a blinding, sparkly, full-table thing in the way only an orphan could see it. In my gut, here and now, I know that destiny would have been my choice and my, our, undoing.
And I was saved from it only by a bump in the road.
We hit a pothole so molar-rattling hard it bounced my glance off the new wad and onto Bowles’s other hand, which was gripping something on the seat beside him. It was the gun from his holster, an old pistol like the kind my pa brought home from World War I, and he was clutching it in a way that said he’d use it. Bowles had a backup plan. If I didn’t stop the rig, he was going to do some brandishing of it. Maybe aiming for our tires. Or back at the giraffes. Or at me, never mind his high words about valuing a man’s life.
That shook my mind free of the devil-deal just long enough to grasp all the other destinies spinning out from what I’d do next, what we’d all do next. Because, with one eye still on Percival Bowles’s pistol, I saw the Old Man ease the shotgun from its rack. As the seconds ticked off, with our vehicles filling both lanes of the empty highway, the future was waiting for me to choose a destiny. Choices are as bad as plans, though, and as you already know, I was very, very bad at plans. If I stopped, all hell would break loose. If I didn’t, all hell could still break loose.
I couldn’t decide.
As I kept not deciding, I kept on squirming. The more I squirmed, the more the cash roll in my pants pocket slipped higher, until the top bills were fluttering in the breeze—and the Old Man saw.
Reaching over, he grabbed the cash roll and pulled it out.
I jerked my head around to see him gazing at me with wounded eyes that said he knew exactly what it was and where it came from. I waited for him to aim the shotgun righteously my way. Instead, his gaze never leaving my face, he tossed the cash out the window, bills scattering to the wind. I didn’t have a second to yelp or to mourn. Because the next moment was to be a reckoning.
On my left was the devil packing a pistol and cash roll, on my right was the Old Man packing a shotgun and the judgment of the Almighty. The future was waiting for me to make that choice.
For the first and last time in my life, though, not being able to make a choice was the right choice.
Because the fat cat’s plan had its own flaw, and it was coming right at us. A logging truck appeared over the rise. The driver eased on the panel truck’s brakes to pull back behind the rig. What he couldn’t see was that there was now another car behind us. A sedan had pulled out from a farmhouse’s driveway, weaving in and out of my sideview mirror. It was a Packard and a woman was behind the wheel. I blinked at the sight, thinking it to be Red so much I wondered if I’d conjured her, but this Packard was brown and the driver was a granny in white crocheted gloves and hat. She’d pulled so close gaping at the giraffes, Girl’s head out one way, Boy’s the other, she didn’t seem to know what was happening, and worse, neither did the giraffes. Boy’s head was sticking much too far over the road.