West With Giraffes(72)
“What do you want me to do!”
“Get the rig started and move it full back on the asphalt! It’s not even two feet over!”
“The engine’s flooded,” I moaned. “What else can we do!”
He threw up his arms. “I don’t know! I never drove giraffes into a sun-drenched flood before!”
“Close the top and windows?” I tried.
“What good would that do? You think this is an ark?”
“Get ’em out?”
“They won’t come out—not in time!”
“Open the top and sides to the ground?”
“They’d be thrown out and injured trying to get to their feet, and that’d be the end of her.”
“What else . . . what else?” I babbled. “There’s got to be something!”
“The pavement’s right there!” Throwing his entire weight against the rig like frustration alone could move it, the Old Man slammed his fist down on the hood. “Just get it started!”
Knowing it was too much too quick, I got in and tried anyway while the Old Man grabbed some onions and climbed up to coo his giraffe-speak, hoping to keep the giraffes from tipping the rig over themselves.
“C’mon-c’mon-c’mon,” I begged, grinding the ignition, stopping again this side of draining the battery dead. Throwing my door wide, I dropped to the ground, fingers digging at the left tires’ dirt. The hardpan was still rock-hard and bone-dry. I told myself it would be enough to keep the giraffes upright, because it had to . . . because I had nothing else to tell myself . . . because the water in the wash was spilling over.
The flash flood had arrived.
I blinked and it jumped the ditch’s edge, rushing across the graveyard.
I blinked again and it was sweeping away the crosses, spreading across the dirt like it was searching for us until it was pouring over my boots.
That quick, all the ways in the world to describe moving water were happening where I stood. And because water finds what it wants, it was also filling the crumbly asphalt behind us, flowing toward the paved road’s bend away from the ditch where Red was supposed to be—but where, of course, she was not. She had stopped only halfway back and was snapping pictures. Now the water had found her, too.
The giraffes began kicking the rig, the water’s roar drowning out the Old Man’s coos. I got back behind the wheel, grinding the starter again until I heard the battery dying—and it was all I could do not to grind it dead for fear there’d be no reason not to if it didn’t start now.
Instead I crawled up with the Old Man and the giraffes, telling myself over and over, The water will stop . . . the water has to stop . . .
But it wasn’t stopping.
In fact, we could now see what the giraffes had already seen. The worst—the surge—was still coming. Debris-filled water, crap from one hundred miles away, was on us. Limbs and rocks and mud pinged the rig as the water rushed past. Then, like it fell from the sky, an entire uprooted tree appeared, bouncing off one side of the wash and back to the other, until the surge raised it up and slammed its trunk into the church, collapsing the whole rickety thing. Before we could do a thing but holler, the trunk and half the church swirled around the graveyard oak and slammed into the left side of the rig, making the Old Man lose his fedora and almost take a header into the water before I grabbed him back.
With the water forced to flow around the tree trunk jammed now against the rig, no longer was the worry how deep or how fast, but how heavy. Just like the Old Man feared, we felt the hardpan under the rig’s left tires begin to go soft.
The rig began to lean.
Scrambling to the other side, we started calling Boy and Girl to come our way. But the giraffes, caught again at the mercy of roiling water, were panicking. As the rig leaned nearer and nearer to the point of no return, from the bottom of their long throats came the bellowing, blood-boiling, giraffe-terror caterwaul.
Down the wet asphalt road, Red stood on the Packard’s hood watching. I gazed at her, longing for the next moment never to come, wishing I could stop time.
But time doesn’t stop.
The next moment came . . . and, with it, came the sound of a revving engine.
Driving straight for us was the Packard.
Speeding faster and faster, the Packard began to hydroplane along the wet pavement, water spewing up on both sides until it was right on us, seconds from crashing into the rig. Then Red jerked the wheel left, plunging the Packard between the surge and the rig, and as the water grabbed it, she jerked the wheel right, slamming that big Packard broadside against the leaning rig, wedging us tight against the surge.
By the time I’d grasped what had happened, Red had wiggled out her window and climbed up to us, as the worst of the flash flood hit. For the eternal seconds that followed, we couldn’t do a thing but watch and wonder if the rig would stay tall, if the Packard’s heft would hold, if the giraffes would stay on their feet—trying not to think about how dirt is dirt and mud is mud and rivers create mountains by rushing and roaring.
Then, quick as it came, the water was gone.
As the debris settled and the flood sounds disappeared, we sat there. The silence was crushing. Yet still we sat. We stared at the bright sunny day. We stared at the giraffes as Girl sniffed and Boy sneezed. We stared at the bent graveyard oak and the crosses strewn helter-skelter as far as we could see. The feeling was like the hurricane shock in my memory, coming down off the moment, waiting for my mind to catch up with my body. When mine did, I saw I had grabbed hold of Red, and the Old Man had grabbed us both. We untangled, easing a few inches apart, all staring down at the wedged Packard, watching water leaking from every door.