West With Giraffes(69)

“What’s wrong?” the Old Man said, watching me squirm. “Did a scorpion crawl up your pant leg?”

We wasted a couple of minutes scorpion-searching. I even jumped out and dropped my pants. When we didn’t find anything, the Old Man said, “All right, let’s go.”

Breaking out in a cold sweat, I pulled up my pants and got back behind the wheel.

The thing about destiny and fate and God-sized coincidences is that they fly in the face of being the master of your own life. When things are falling your way, it’s an easy idea to give up. But when they’re not . . . well, I’d already grappled with those feelings back in Tennessee and didn’t much care to again. Besides, no eighteen-year-old is going to believe he’s got no choice in what he does. So I told myself that whatever the thundering crap was going on, I still had choices—not yet knowing that having a choice can be worse than having none at all.

So we went. In a few miles, we passed the abandoned asphalt road I knew all too well, and I made sure not to even give it a glance. When I spied the gas station up ahead, though, I thought I might come right out of my skin. “Why don’t we go down a little farther,” I tried again. “I don’t like the looks of this place.”

“Looks fine to me,” he said. “Pull in.”

I stopped the rig by the station’s gas pumps.

“I’ll stay out here,” I said a little too quick.

Eyeing me, he headed inside as the gas pumper came out, the same toothless goober in overalls who had been there since the world began.

I ducked my head.

“Mister, you got giraffes in there!” he crowed as he started pumping. “You truck for a circus? I love a good circus, but last I heard of one in the Panhandle was up in Amarillo back in the ’20s. Now that’s been a while!” He finished filling the tank and was wiping the windshield when he leaned around, ready to jaw on about giraffes and circuses. Then he squinted. At me.

“Hey . . .”

I ducked lower.

“Heyheyhey—ain’t you Ned Nickel’s boy? From out at Arcadia?”

The passenger door creaked open and the Old Man got in, clutching a bag of supplies. He barely had his butt in his seat when I pulled us out of there. As we passed the same deserted asphalt road I’d done such a good job of ignoring before, I couldn’t help myself. This time, I cut an eye at the old sign:

ARCADIA →

“How far is it?” the Old Man asked.

“What?” I mumbled.

“Your pa wasn’t a sharecropper—he was a homesteader, a nester, wasn’t he? You had a place down that road.” When I didn’t answer, he cocked his head. “Pull over a second.”

As I veered the rig onto the shoulder and stopped, I could tell the Old Man was waiting for me to explain, gazing at me as confused as I’d ever seen him. All he knew up to that point was that my ma and pa died and the dust took our farm. Now he’d just found out that we’d passed close by it twice without a word from me. My options, though, were paltry. I could swear he heard wrong and try to stick to it. God knows I could lie with the best of ’em. Considering how the day was already going, though, I knew that wouldn’t last long. He’d soon be having me swear on my ma’s grave or the like. And who could blame him? I’d shot a man for him and the giraffes, but I’d also been caught pocketing the fat cat’s cash, and that very morning I’d tried to punch him again. If mercy there’d already been from the Old Man for whatever reasons, I kept poking it good. He’d forgiven me twice already. But like my ma used to say, only God can keep on forgiving. Maybe making good time for the giraffes’ sake would be a good enough reason to keep me on, I told myself, no matter what he found out about me. Or maybe, like most such things, how he’d respond would be a mixture so personal that you’d have to know his whole Old Man story to even venture a guess. So I kept sitting there like a bump on a log. Or worse, a deer in the headlights.

“Look at me,” he ordered, having enough of my stalling. “That true?”

I didn’t know what else to do. Giving up, I nodded.

“How far?”

“Two miles,” I mumbled, gazing down the old farm road. “Off the pavement.” The land was so flat you could see the cotton gin at the end of the asphalt from where we sat.

More turned-around cars were passing by, honking and whistling and making an unholy racket at the sight of us. Riled by all the noise, the giraffes had stopped chewing their cud.

“Aw, dammit,” the Old Man muttered, leaning out his window to look back at them. “We need to get off the highway, but hell if we’re going back to that packed rattrap yet. Is there a decent tree anywhere up this road for the darlings?”

“Not hardly,” was my half-ass reply.

The Old Man frowned. “Not hardly, meaning there is one?”

I nodded slow. “If it’s still even there.” I glanced at the blue sky. “The trooper also said it might start up raining . . .”

The Old Man paused long enough to make me look around at him. “If it’s too much for your gut, say so.” That’s the way he put it—like any eighteen-year-old would admit he didn’t have the stomach to visit his own homeplace. I stalled again, this time too long.

“Is there something you’re not telling me?” he said, those bushy eyebrows as low as I’d ever seen them.