West With Giraffes(61)
Less than an hour over the Oklahoma state line, the wind began gusting enough to sway the rig. We pulled under a sturdy tree grove to check Girl’s splint and let the giraffes nibble and rest, since it was the last such grove I knew we’d see for a good long time, the trees sparser with each mile. Before we hit the road again, we tried to get the giraffes’ heads in and latch the windows, but they were having none of it and we were too late to try any tricks.
“You got any idea how long this’ll last?” the Old Man said, holding on to his fedora.
I didn’t and, more than ever in my miserable farmboy life, I wish I did.
For a couple of hours, as the wind got worse and the land turned flatter and flatter, we drove slower than usual. A few miles this side of Comanche, we made a stop at Loco, a crossroads with only two buildings on opposite sides of the main highway. One was a two-pump gas station, all red and black and shiny as the new Texaco sign above it. The other was a ramshackle general store and post office that looked like it might topple if you gave it a good push. The store had more metal signs on it than wood, outsized signs for Coca-Cola and Brylcreem and Carter’s Little Liver Pills tacked everywhere you looked. While it seemed odd to the Old Man, it looked normal to me. Metal signs stopped the dust and wind that could even beat tar to seep through a shack’s cracks.
I pulled the rig into the tiny Texaco station and a gap-toothed, bow-tied gas attendant greeted us, the giraffes leaning down to greet him on their own.
“Don’t that beat all!” he kept saying.
On the far side of the pumps a carload was pulling onto the farm road north, whooping back in Spanish at the sight of the giraffes.
“Migrant workers,” said the gas pumper, holding his cap on against the wind. “That time of year. Been a stream of ’em all week passing through on their way up to Michigan for cherry-picking season. If this dust gets bad again, I swear, I’m heading that way myself.”
The Old Man watered the giraffes himself so he could give the Girl’s splint another quick check, sending me to the store across the highway for food and a new sack of onions.
Behind the store counter, a rawboned man sporting a neck goiter the size of a corn ear shoved the last of a biscuit into his mouth. “Whatcha got over there?” he said, wiping his lips with his sleeve and squinting through the screen door.
“Giraffes.”
“Don’t say! The things I see going by. Passing through quick, I imagine.”
I nodded, grabbing up the supplies and plunking them down on the counter.
The man harrumphed. “Better you do, what with the wind getting up. Critters with throats like that won’t like it if the sky turns brown. Woke up to the dang dust. Hadn’t seen it in months. Whole state’s still recovering from ’35, ya know.”
“I know,” I said.
“Which made the dusters of ’34 and ’37 look like church picnics, ya know.”
“I know,” I said.
“But rain’s coming,” he added. “You can feel it.”
Hearing that turned me cold—it was a phrase as familiar to my ears as the wind itself, like an anthem of all Dust Bowl hangers-on, the ones too stubborn to leave. My own pa used to say it, right before things usually got worse, and that made me turn around to get one more thing—a jar of Vaseline. Then leaving it all up front for the Old Man to pay for, I went to use the indoor privy at the back of the store.
Passing by a big barrel of apples, my old pilfering reflex almost had me easing one into my pocket. As I came out of the privy door, though, who do I see standing by the apples but Mrs. Augusta Red. The sight of her twisted me up like a pretzel, especially since I thought back in Little Rock that I’d never see her again. Despite all her sweet talk at the zoo, I wasn’t through with my pique at her, and I was in no mood to hear more. I inched back behind the door to wait her out, and I almost missed what she did next. Glancing toward the clerk still staring out at the giraffes, she stifled a cough. Then, slick as you please, slicker than I’d ever done it, she picked up one of the apples herself, slipped it in her trouser pocket, and strolled out the back entrance to where the Packard was parked.
For a second I stood there flummoxed, not sure that I saw what I saw and not sure what it meant if I did.
As I hustled across the road to the rig, craning my neck back for Red, I almost ran right into a pole by the gas pumps, looking around only at the last second.
“Whoa!” exclaimed the bow-tied gas attendant. “That was close.”
“Better watch where you’re going, boy. Fast as you were moving, that pole would’ve knocked you on your can,” the Old Man said, closing the trapdoors. “Looks like that store’s got a Western Union shingle, so I might as well check for a telegram from the Boss Lady. Did you get the supplies ready for me to pay for?”
I nodded, still watching for Red. There she came, leaning into the wind, camera up, scooting across the highway toward us.
The Old Man fumed at the sight of her. “She keeps turning up. Like a bad penny,” he muttered, then headed around the far end of the rig to avoid her.
I was sure the Old Man was going to call the law on her, like he said he would, and I had a sudden urge to warn her. But I didn’t. I could only stand there watching her snap pictures of the bow-tied gas pumper and the giraffes. Then she looked up and grinned my way, and I thought I heard singing. I started to pop myself upside the head until I saw a tent out beyond the station surrounded by trucks, tin lizzies, and farm wagons. The sound of singing voices was wafting on the wind from it. I figured it must be a church “revival” like the ones I got dragged to every year of my life, complete with a pulpit-pounding evangelist and soul-saving altar calls, so I wasn’t about to bring it up.