West With Giraffes(56)
“This here is Woodrow Wilson Nickel, my young driver,” the Old Man said. “We had a bit of miserableness this morning in Tennessee that made us wish for a secure night’s sleep this side of the river. So we thank you in advance for the short-notice hospitality.”
“Any friend of Mrs. Benchley is welcome here,” the bowler-hat man said, his eyes darting past me to the giraffes already nibbling the tree. “Where’s your home, Mr. Nickel?”
Home? I didn’t have a home, least not one I wanted to chat about.
The Old Man piped up. “We met young Mr. Nickel back East, and he’s been helping us out in a pinch.”
The bowler-hat man wasn’t really listening, though, his social nicety already forgotten under the spell of the giraffes. He sighed, staring up at them. “What we wouldn’t do for giraffes. Sure you don’t want to let them stay awhile?”
The Old Man didn’t even dignify that with an answer. I didn’t know what to think until both of them broke out laughing.
“Mrs. Benchley would have us both tarred and feathered!” hooted the bowler-hat man. “For what it’s worth, I called our vet to come look at the female’s leg. It’ll make his day. Don’t think he’s ever seen a giraffe. Ah, here he is.”
The zoo’s vet was as far from the white-coated Bronx Zoo vet as he could get, dressed in stained khakis, smelling of manure, with a pop-eyed look on his face to rival my own at my first sight of the giraffes. He forced himself to focus on Girl’s leg. “You say she’s been in the rig the whole time? That must’ve been some miserableness you had. Looks more like she’s been running and kicking to beat the band.”
When the Old Man didn’t answer, I made the mistake of looking at her leg myself, and I thought I might retch. It was way worse than back in the cornfield, blood and pus oozing from everywhere. Because of me, I thought. I had lowered the side. I had taken the twenty-dollar gold piece. I hadn’t warned the Old Man—and I’d hurt Girl. I couldn’t breathe, feeling a weight pushing against my lungs so bad that Mr. Percival T. Bowles might as well have been sitting his fat ass right on my chest.
“Get the onions,” the Old Man said.
Grabbing the sack, I crawled up the side and started feeding onions to the Girl as fast as she’d take them. While the vet doctored away, medicating and rewrapping, I kept feeding the Girl until the vet called it “done as done could be” for traveling. “Don’t suppose you can leave her here until that leg decides if it’s going to heal,” he said.
The Old Man shook his head.
“Well, then, it goes without saying that it’d be good if you can get her on solid ground as soon as you can,” the vet said. “I’ll come in early to check her in the morning before y’all leave and give you more sulfa and supplies for the road. It’d be an honor.”
At that, the bowler-hat man slapped the Old Man on the back, like we were all having a gay ol’ time, and said, “Let’s go send Mrs. Benchley a telegram.”
“I’ll catch up with you,” the Old Man told him. As the two zoo men left, he motioned me down. Pushing back his fedora, he settled his hands on his hips and waited until I was standing in front of him, then leveled his gaze at me and said, “I know what I promised you at Memphis, but I had to make a choice for the darlings’ sake. And now it looks like I need you to keep going. Otherwise, we’re stuck here for longer than her leg might stand. If we can dodge any more bad luck, we’re only about three days out and we’ll be to California, like you wanted.” He paused. “You OK with that, Woody?”
It was the first time the Old Man had called me Woody. He wasn’t turning me in to the cops . . . and I was still headed to California. I couldn’t find my tongue. All I could do was nod.
“All right then.” He gave me a couple of awkward hard pats on the shoulder, something he’d never done before, either, and said, “It’s safe in here. We should both get a good night’s sleep. What’s ahead is as different from what we’ve already gone through as the moon is from the sun. But you already know that,” he added, “since we’ll be passing through your old stomping grounds.”
That zapped me like a thunderbolt out of blue sky. “What?”
“The highway,” he said. “It crosses Okie-land and the Texas Panhandle to get West.”
“But we’re going the southern route,” I mumbled. “That’s what you said, the southern route . . .”
“This is the southern route.” He cocked his head. “We’re in Arkansas, boy. Did you think we were going by way of New Or-leens?”
Yes! I did! I wanted to shout. That’s a southern route! Cussing myself for being so lamebrained, I didn’t know what to do. I can’t go back through the Panhandle! I can’t even go near—I’d be chancing too much after what I did! I kept thinking, my mind screaming with it. Yet I couldn’t tell the Old Man. He’d want me to tell him why, which I wasn’t about to do. It even occurred to me that he might somehow know. Is that why he kept me on after finding the cash roll in my pocket—to take me back to the Panhandle county sheriff for a reckoning there?
But he can’t know . . .
The first time a poor soul gets a bit of grace in his wretched life, especially from a man who, by his own pronouncements, abides no chicanery, it’s a hard thing to recognize let alone accept, and even harder to trust. I knew what to do with judgment, having a young lifetime of experience with that. This level of kindness, though, if kindness it be, only made me prickly and even a bit fearful, since I hadn’t forgotten what Percival Bowles had warned at the mention of the Old Man’s name.