West With Giraffes(54)

I started to reach in my pocket for the comfort of the double-eagle gold piece. Glancing at the Old Man, though, I thought better of it and put the rig into gear.

For the next few hours, the Old Man was lost in his thoughts, with me worrying what those thoughts were. It was October but the air was so thick with heat and moisture, you’d have thought it was hot-damn August. The giraffes, though, seemed to like it fine, having not pulled their heads in once since the Memphis bridge.

By the time the sun began to set, we were getting close to Little Rock, piney woods framing the winding highway. All seemed normal enough as we approached a tiny town that looked like every other tiny town we’d been through . . . until we saw the big homemade sign:

NIGGER, DON’T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON YOU HERE

Riding the rails, I’d heard of “sundown towns” with signs warning “colored” travelers not to be caught there after dark. Now I was seeing one. I was staring so hard at the thing, I almost ran the rig up on a wreck not twenty yards past it.

There, spun around sideways to the highway, was a rusted-out Model A truck with PECANS FOR SALE painted slapdash on the side. The entire head of a very dead big-antlered buck was stuck in the front grill, and the radiator was gushing pink water. I veered in time to miss the truck but not the buck’s back end. Blood, deer parts, and pecans sprayed across the highway—and as we passed, parts squishing and pecans crunching, a Black man in a straw hat scrambled for the tree line.

Both the Old Man and I looked back. I was staring at the deer parts we’d flattened. The Old Man, though, was staring at that tree line.

“Pull over,” he ordered.

I thought he wanted to check the rig’s front bumper. Instead he climbed out, walked to the tree line, and called out something I couldn’t quite hear. He must have gotten no response, because he started up again, this time pointing toward Little Rock, then back at the sign, then up at the setting sun. With that, the pecan man eased out from the trees, straw hat in hand. They talked a second, then the pecan man followed the Old Man to the rig, eyes darting between the road and the two giraffe heads swiveling to get a good look at him. When the Old Man opened the cab door and pointed to the bench seat’s space between him and me, the pecan man shook his head.

“Nossuh,” he said.

The Old Man tried reasoning with him, but the pecan man kept glancing down the road and shaking his head.

“Nossuh. No-SUH.”

Not until we heard a car coming did the situation change—the pecan man sprinted back to the trees.

As the car passed, the Old Man fumed, picked up one of the water cans between the rig and cab, and shoved it into his floorboard. Then he called toward the pecan man, pointing to the now-empty water-can space behind the cab.

The pecan man peeked out. Shoving his straw hat back on his head, he rushed to his wrecked truck and grabbed up as many lumpy gunnysacks from the wrecked truck as he could handle. Hustling back to the rig, he squeezed himself into the water can’s empty space behind the cab, pecan sacks cradled in his arms.

After the Old Man did his own squeezing into his seat, legs straddling the big metal water can, I put the rig in gear and steered us onto the road, eyeing what I could see of the pecan man in my rearview. Stretching out her front window, Girl’s long tongue was nibbling at his straw hat, making the pecan man weave and bob until another car whizzed by and the pecan man pulled his straw hat as low as it would go.

As we entered the one-horse town, I recall feeling the sweat pop out on my forehead. I’d already felt scared lots of times in my young life, but this was a different kind of scared. It wasn’t like we were going to roll through unseen with a couple of giraffes, and if somebody, anybody in this damn town, noticed the pecan man, there might be forewarned hell to pay. The sun wasn’t down yet, but it wasn’t far from it. I didn’t feel a bit better when the Old Man moved the shotgun from the rack back to his lap.

The burg’s downtown was only four blocks long, barely more than a wide place in the highway. As we rolled slow through it, a handful of people, all unsurprisingly White, came out of the storefronts to stare. I glanced back for the pecan man.

He wasn’t there.

“STOP!” the Old Man yelled, and I stomped on the brakes.

A red-faced yokel in a shabby tan uniform with an old sidearm on his hip had stepped right in front of the moving rig and put up a hand. Eyeing our bloody front bumper, he walked over to look in at us from the Old Man’s window. On his uniform was written in what looked like leaky blue fountain pen ink: “Sundown Peace Officer.” It didn’t take much imagination to see him in another kind of uniform, the kind with a hood . . . and I found myself wishing for Big Papa’s clan complete with those sharp, nasty-looking scythes.

“You’re creating a hazard, mister,” the yokel grumbled. “What the heck are you toting there?”

“Giraffes.”

“Uh-huh. You with a carnival? We don’t much cotton to carnivals around here. Too much riffraff among other undesirables. We like a peaceful town after sundown,” he said, tapping his uniform’s inky title. “And it’s almost sundown.”

“We’re only passing through, if you’ll let us on by,” the Old Man said. “Trying to make the Little Rock Zoo before dark.”

“Uh-huh.” He eyed the Old Man’s head gash and nodded toward the rig’s front. “There’s blood on your bumper.”