West With Giraffes(70)

Now I’d done it. He thought I was hiding something. Because I was.

A car pulled to a stop behind us. It was the green Packard. Nothing would have surprised me right then, swear to God. Yet I recall wishing that, just once, Augusta Red would take a wrong damn turn. The Old Man saw her in his sideview and hit the roof, which at least got his mind off me.

“That bad penny keeps showing up!” he grumbled. “I’m getting pure tired of worrying about her. If she wants to follow all the way to San Diego, I should let her. She’s in for a rude awakening.”

I glanced at her in my mirror, sitting there in the idling Packard, no doubt trying to figure it all out—why we were stopped and how she was going to talk her way back into our good graces—without a clue what was waiting for her in San Diego.

Two more cars whizzed by, one of them honking loud and long. With a glance back at the giraffes, whose necks had begun to sway, the Old Man gestured toward the farm road. “Listen, boy, we need to get the darlings off the highway for a bit. This is going to have to do.”

I didn’t move. Instead I turned toward the Old Man and said the only thing I had left to say. “It’s too much for my gut.”

A truck passed so loud it made the giraffes bolt, rocking the whole rig. The Old Man jerked his head around to check on them, and when he turned back, something in his face had changed. He looked like a whole other person, who was now looking at me like I was a whole other person. I’d found the limit of his forbearance—the giraffes.

“Let’s go,” he ordered.

“But you said . . .”

“We go up the road or I let you out right here and I’ll find that tree myself. You can catch a ride with your bad-penny girlfriend. Me and the giraffes have had enough of sitting here.”

My gut now doing backflips, I backed us up and turned down the old road I thought I’d never travel again. I glanced in the mirror. The Packard turned in, too, and I recall thinking how Red was tailing me right back into my nightmare.

As we kept dodging tumbleweeds, I noticed the abandoned road’s asphalt was turning crumbly and pointed it out to the Old Man, hoping I could still change his mind.

The Old Man studied the road, then studied me. “That’s the tree straight ahead, right? We’ll be fine that far.” Then the Old Man spotted the dry gulch that had begun to wind alongside the road. “Hold on, is that a wash?”

I glanced at it. In the Panhandle, with the land being flatter than a pancake, people called any bump a hill and the slightest dip a ditch. That’s what he was staring at—a dip I’d been looking at my whole life stretching away from the asphalt and back again. “That’s only a ditch,” I mumbled.

“You ever see water in it?”

I shook my head.

But he wanted a real answer. “Never?”

“Never.”

“Pull over,” he ordered.

We lurched to a stop. The Old Man got out, squinted, kicked at the dirt, and got back in the truck. “Oh, for sweet chrisesakes, what am I worrying about? It’s not even much of a ditch. This dirt’s so packed it’s hardpan. I’ll be damned if a flood’s coming into that today.”

So we moved on, the giraffes sniffing the air as if they could smell the rain up north. Soon we came to the asphalt’s dead end. On the right was the abandoned cotton gin. On the left, this side of the ditch, was a tumbledown church surrounded by wooden homemade crosses, the graveyard full before its time. In front of it all, shading a place that needed no shade, was the leafy tree, a rangy but hardy bur oak, the only thing alive in miles of tumbleweeds and dead dirt, nourished by the pine-box-buried dead below its roots.

The Old Man was almost smiling at the green tree in the middle of so much brown. But I was looking straight ahead. At the top of the asphalt road’s dead end was the weathered ARCADIA signpost. A dozen dirt paths splayed out in all directions from it toward deserted barns and shacks dotting the land as far as you could see. Still tacked to every inch of the post were name-carved chunks of dangling board pointing every which way, even down to the ground, telling the sorry tale of the whole place in one glance. And, there, on the bottom was our sign—NICKEL—still directing the way down the dirt path beyond the graveyard, like nothing had changed, as if you could find my ma waving you in to join us for supper.

The giraffes lurched the rig. Looking back, I caught the Old Man staring where I’d been staring—my pa’s sign. He started to say something, but the rig lurched again. We poked our heads out to see what was going on. From where we were parked on the edge of the asphalt, the giraffes were already stretching to reach the tree. Just like in the mountains, it was making us lean.

“Inch over closer,” the Old Man said, getting out. “The hardpan will take the rig.”

I rolled the rig half-off the asphalt, its left side parked on the hard-packed dirt directly under the tree. As I crawled up to pop the top, the giraffes began making happy snorting sounds at the sight of the day’s first leafy lunch. Feeling woozy, I had to look away, my eyes landing on my family’s unmarked graves, which made me woozier still. I closed my eyes a second, then opened them to see Red snapping photos from the Packard’s window where she’d stopped a ways back, and I had to look away from her, too.

Because I knew what was about to happen.

I edged my way to the ground and waited for it.