West with Giraffes: A Novel

by Lynda Rutledge

  It took us a while to get on the road after that. Still parked in the middle of the cornfield, the rig looked no worse for wear, which was more than I could say for the rest of us. I gazed back toward the trailer camp for Red. Once again, though, she’d vanished. So I stood there still dressed only in my skivvies and boots, watching the Old Man work through the trapdoor applying all the sulfa we had left to Girl’s wound, which was now not only bloody but also covered with pus. Infection had set in. She was so worn out, she leaned against the crate and let him. He rewrapped the splint the best he could. As we held our breath, she wobbled a second and stood straight again on all four legs.

  Closing the trapdoor, the Old Man sank onto the truck’s running board, only then raising a hand to check his own wound. The gash on his head had stopped bleeding but still looked as angry as the Old Man felt about it being there. Watching, I felt the full weight of Mr. Percival T. Bowles on my chest, the gold piece in my pocket burning like sin, because I hadn’t warned him. If I didn’t tell him now, I’d keep feeling like a Panhandle Judas. But what good will telling him do? He’ll leave me on the side of the road right here before Memphis, I reminded myself.

  I had to say something, so I said, “Can I help clean that up?”

  He didn’t answer. He looked at his gnarly hand’s fingers that didn’t quite bend and cussed them good, then fingering his gashed temple, he cussed it good, too. Whatever had happened, he wasn’t in the mood to share.

  Shifting from one boot to the other, I tried again. “Girl’s going to be OK, isn’t she?”

  That got him on his feet. “We’re lucky we don’t have a dead giraffe to be burying out in this gotdam cornfield. And we better hope our luck holds until we can get more sulfa, or we still might be doing it.”

  I braced for what was surely coming next, a calling of the law and all the questions that’d go with that. Instead the Old Man reloaded both guns, put them back on the rack, and said, “If anybody asks, boy, I shot that rifle. You could have killed a man, and I wouldn’t wish that on you.”

  I frowned, puzzled at what seemed like a questioning of my shooting skills. “I winged him,” I said. “If I’d aimed to kill him, he’d be dead.”

  The Old Man’s bushy eyebrows popped high, like he didn’t know quite what to make of what I’d said. For a moment he gave me his hollow-eyed stare again, but with a flicker behind it I couldn’t quite name. “Go put your shirt and pants on,” he finally said. “Fast as you can. We got to go.”

  “You’re . . . not calling the law?”

  “Haven’t you been listening? We need to get to Memphis,” was his answer. “Right now.”

  I’d like to say that was the last we saw of Percival Bowles, but it was not. Back on the highway, we watched the railroad track in the distance edge slowly closer. By the time we got to Muscle Shoals, the highway once again took us right by the train station with no place for us to hide—and there was the circus pulling up stakes.

  About ten miles on the other side of town, the tracks hugging the road again, we saw a roadside store with old-timers rocking on the porch. We hadn’t had a thing to eat since Yeller’s leftovers the night before, and we were getting dangerously low on gas. We could go without food, but we couldn’t go without fuel. We had to stop.

  I pulled the rig up to the pumps. As the old-timers on the front porch stools geehawed and made their way over to get a better look-see at the giraffes, the Old Man put on his fedora and pulled it low over his gash. “I know you got questions,” he said my way, “but first we need to get you and the darlings to Memphis.” With a tense glance back down the road, he got out and marched into the store, the giraffes watching him go.

  As the attendant, staring at the giraffes, pumped the gas about as slow as I ever saw, a panel truck pulled up on the other side of the pumps—a yellow-and-red panel truck. And out from the passenger side crawled Bowles. No longer in hat, boots, and ringmaster outfit, his mustache bushy and unwaxed, he was as pure ugly as a devil should be.

  He’s going to spill the beans on me, I thought, looking back for the Old Man. Giving the giraffes a soulful look, I eyed the railroad tracks for a place to hop a freight if it came to it, and then, squeezing the gold piece in my pocket, I stepped toward Bowles and his driver. I was going to say something, anything, to stop what I thought was going to happen next, even arguing with myself over handing back the gold piece if that would end it.

  But Mr. Percival Bowles had no interest in a measly double-eagle coin. As he and his driver moved my way, he pulled a wad of money from his breast pocket. It was a roll of hundred-dollar bills held together with a single rubber band, and it was big as his fat fist.

  If the gold coin looked like John D. Rockefeller to my orphan eyes, then that roll of bills looked like Fort Knox. This wasn’t a double eagle to bribe a fool of a boy . . . this was a full-grown man’s bribe, the kind of fortune a fella could put in his pocket and go. Never mind the giraffes were worth thousands more than whatever he had, and never mind that his lackeys had tried to abscond with the giraffes that very morning, Bowles thought he could buy the Old Man off, mistaking Mr. Riley Jones for another Hard Times chump like me.

  Here and now—with the decades fading from living memory the outright chicanery of that “time of opportunity,” as Bowles called it—you might be thinking it folly for anybody to believe they could bribe for, much less steal, two giraffes and get clean away with it. A giraffe is a mighty hard thing to hide, as we already well knew. There was good reason the Old Man called outfits like his “fly-by-night,” though. It was still a time of medicine shows, Bible salesmen con artists, and all manner of flimflammers leaving town under the cover of darkness, and that included one-night-stand traveling circuses. To live before the War was to believe you could be or do whatever you wanted by just moving on down the road, especially with the Hard Times turning even good people bad. Fat cats like Bowles relied on it, as much as the greed or hunger of every soul he met, and he was relying on both right then.

  “Hello again, young man,” he said, flashing the cash roll my way as the beefy driver came around the front of the truck to stand beside him. “I have a proposition for your Mr. Johnson. But I want you to listen very closely, because if he’s not wise enough to take it himself, it can be yours. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, as a smart lad like you knows, and you are, after all, in the driver’s seat.” Then he held out that roll of bills close enough for me to touch. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  In the glow of that small fortune, I lost any good sense I’d redeemed that morning. My eyes stuck on Fort Knox, I heard myself mumble, “Jones.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Not Johnson—Jones,” I mumbled. “Riley Jones.”

  He jerked a step back, taking the cash roll with him. “What did you say his name was?”

  “Riley Jones,” I said again.

  His face dropped like he’d seen a spook. What he said next made me forget all about bills and beans and bribes.

  “Young man,” he muttered, “you’re traveling with a murderer.”

  There were few words that could have gotten my eyes off that cash wad, and that was surely one of them.

  His gaze darted past me. “You best watch yourself driving such delicate creatures in this ridiculous rig. You’d be better off with me. At least I know the value of a man’s life over an animal’s.”

  From behind me, I heard the slap of the store’s screen door. Next thing I knew Bowles had shoved the cash roll into my chest and let go, making me grab it to keep it from dropping in the dirt. Just that quick, I was touching more money than I’d ever again hold in my hands. Men have died for less. At that moment, I knew why.

  I’d like to write that I never wavered, full of moral fiber to burn. That, chin high, remembering the giraffe larceny and my shot-firing part in stopping it, I flung the cash roll back at him. And don’t think I wasn’t tempted to tell the story that way, being forced to make full use of the eraser end of this p
encil. But you know that’s not what happened. I surely understood that Mr. Percival Bowles expected a certain obligation from any poor soul taking his money, be it thrust on them or not. Dealing with any attached fat-cat strings, though, had to wait. Because once my hands touched that roll of cash, it wasn’t about the fat cat. It wasn’t about the Old Man or the giraffes. It wasn’t even about right or wrong. It was only about a Dust Bowl orphan and a big roll of cash. I did what you’d expect such a boy to do. I pushed that pocket fortune deep into my right front pocket on top of the gold coin, my fingers clutching both good and tight.

  “BOY!”

  The Old Man was by the screen door, still in his bloodied shirt. Then he was marching at us double time, onion sack in one hand and a bag of supplies in the other. He dropped the supply bag into the cab’s open window and threw the passenger door wide, ignoring both the fat cat and the driver. “Get in the truck, boy.”

  “Now hold on,” Bowles said, moving toward the Old Man. “All I want to do is talk.”

  The Old Man turned his back on them both, still clutching the gunnysack. But then the driver went and clamped a paw on the Old Man’s shoulder—and with a one-two punch I’d never see the likes of again, the Old Man swung the onion sack, smacking the driver full in the face while he socked Bowles square in his double chin, knocking him on his butt.

  “MOVE!” the Old Man yelled.

  We jumped in the truck and screeched away as fast as a big rig could go, my sideview mirror full of scattered onions, old-timers, and the circus driver trying to pull the roly-poly ringmaster out of the dirt.

  There was, of course, a big flaw in our getaway. A panel truck without two-ton giraffes can travel faster than a top-heavy rig with them. I was driving us faster than the Old Man had ordered me ever to go, bouncing the giraffes around, inside and out, their heads banging against their windows. Yet all too soon, the panel truck caught up. For a mile they dogged us, as the railroad tracks veered even closer to the highway, sometimes not ten yards away. The circus truck kept pulling into the wrong side of the road, until, on an empty stretch, it came up beside us like it was going to pass. But it didn’t. It rode right along with us, weaving back and forth inches from my door.

  “What the hell’s he pulling?” yelled the Old Man.

  Bowles was trying to get my attention. Clenching a new wad of money in his fist, his arm resting on his windowsill, he was signaling me with every look his way: Pull over, young man. That’s all you have to do . . . You have the money. And here’s more . . . if you pull over.

  You might think it’d be easy to keep my eyes to myself, that one wad of cash was surely enough. For a stray-dog boy, though, enough is never enough. If one pocket fortune could save me from feeling the desperate gnaw of an empty stomach forever, another could make forever last longer still. Never did it cross my mind to wonder what they’d do to the Old Man, much less the giraffes, if I chose to add a new wad to the old one. There are far more salvations than the kind you find in church, and I was in need of one right then to save me from myself. Because here was where I would begin to grasp not only the first stink of my waffling young soul but also that destiny is a mobile thing—that every choice you make, along with every choice made around you, can cause it to spin this way and that, offering destinies galore. I had a choice to make. Yet as I kept glancing at the new cash roll, the future in which I had all this fat cat’s money came full and irresistible to me. It was a blinding, sparkly, full-table thing in the way only an orphan could see it. In my gut, here and now, I know that destiny would have been my choice and my, our, undoing.

  And I was saved from it only by a bump in the road.

  We hit a pothole so molar-rattling hard it bounced my glance off the new wad and onto Bowles’s other hand, which was gripping something on the seat beside him. It was the gun from his holster, an old pistol like the kind my pa brought home from World War I, and he was clutching it in a way that said he’d use it. Bowles had a backup plan. If I didn’t stop the rig, he was going to do some brandishing of it. Maybe aiming for our tires. Or back at the giraffes. Or at me, never mind his high words about valuing a man’s life.

  That shook my mind free of the devil-deal just long enough to grasp all the other destinies spinning out from what I’d do next, what we’d all do next. Because, with one eye still on Percival Bowles’s pistol, I saw the Old Man ease the shotgun from its rack. As the seconds ticked off, with our vehicles filling both lanes of the empty highway, the future was waiting for me to choose a destiny. Choices are as bad as plans, though, and as you already know, I was very, very bad at plans. If I stopped, all hell would break loose. If I didn’t, all hell could still break loose.

  I couldn’t decide.

  As I kept not deciding, I kept on squirming. The more I squirmed, the more the cash roll in my pants pocket slipped higher, until the top bills were fluttering in the breeze—and the Old Man saw.

  Reaching over, he grabbed the cash roll and pulled it out.

  I jerked my head around to see him gazing at me with wounded eyes that said he knew exactly what it was and where it came from. I waited for him to aim the shotgun righteously my way. Instead, his gaze never leaving my face, he tossed the cash out the window, bills scattering to the wind. I didn’t have a second to yelp or to mourn. Because the next moment was to be a reckoning.

  On my left was the devil packing a pistol and cash roll, on my right was the Old Man packing a shotgun and the judgment of the Almighty. The future was waiting for me to make that choice.

  For the first and last time in my life, though, not being able to make a choice was the right choice.

  Because the fat cat’s plan had its own flaw, and it was coming right at us. A logging truck appeared over the rise. The driver eased on the panel truck’s brakes to pull back behind the rig. What he couldn’t see was that there was now another car behind us. A sedan had pulled out from a farmhouse’s driveway, weaving in and out of my sideview mirror. It was a Packard and a woman was behind the wheel. I blinked at the sight, thinking it to be Red so much I wondered if I’d conjured her, but this Packard was brown and the driver was a granny in white crocheted gloves and hat. She’d pulled so close gaping at the giraffes, Girl’s head out one way, Boy’s the other, she didn’t seem to know what was happening, and worse, neither did the giraffes. Boy’s head was sticking much too far over the road.

  The logging truck driver laid on his horn.

  The circus truck driver stomped on his brakes.

  Bowles’s pistol jolted to the floor.

  Wild Boy, God bless him, pulled his head in.

  And the Packard granny slammed on her brakes. But it was too late for the circus truck to swerve behind her. The logging truck was already on us. Bowles’s driver did the only thing he could do. He swerved left, bouncing across weeds and dodging trees to land full on the railroad right-of-way. He hit the track so hard we could hear all four tires blow—pop pop pop pop—followed by the sound of the logging truck horn’s AAAAAAagngnggggggngg as the big truck roared past and gone.

  Quaking down to the tip of my boots, I slowed the rig so much that the brown Packard passed us, the granny’s face white with fright, and I had no doubt mine looked the same. As the train track began mercifully veering away, I pulled myself together and geared the rig back up. The Old Man, though, was still gripping the shotgun and eyeing the road. I could barely look at him for fear of what I’d see in his face. I wanted to explain. There was a stray-dog truth behind it all, though, and how did I explain that? I barely was aware of it myself. All I could do was blurt out, “I didn’t . . . I wouldn’t . . .”

  “Was that all of it?” he said, not looking my way.

  “Yes,” I lied, unable, even then, to part with the gold piece still in my pocket.

  We rode in silence for miles. Then we began seeing signs for Memphis. The Old Man, shotgun still in his lap, had yet to look my way, so I braced myself for what he’d do. I was sure I’d kissed the California ticket goodbye
, but for all I knew he was planning to hand me over to a Memphis sheriff as well, and that I couldn’t let happen, still strapped with secrets of my own.

  Up ahead, the MEMPHIS CITY LIMIT sign appeared.

  I geared down.

  “Keep driving,” the Old Man said. “Let’s get ahead of the sumbitches’ turnaround and stop this once and for all. If the darlings let us keep this pace, Little Rock’s only another four hours.”

  I wasn’t quite getting it. “We’re not stopping?”

  “Keep driving,” was his only reply.

  That quick, I wasn’t leaving one way or the other at Memphis. Yet I still had the Old Man’s precious cargo in my lying blackguard hands. Why isn’t he yanking me from behind the wheel while he has the chance? I wondered. Was he planning some kind of Old Man justice up the road? My discombobulated young self was getting more so by the second, with four more hours ahead to ponder every awful way the day might have gone and how it would shape the days to come—including Bowles’s murderous claim at the mention of the Old Man’s name.

  And if that wasn’t enough, as we passed a roadside fruit stand, out pulled a green Packard.

  I glanced down at something flapping with the breeze in the Old Man’s floorboard. It was yesterday’s newspaper he’d bought in Chattanooga.

  Tomorrow had turned into today.

  It was my birthday.

  I was eighteen.

  . . . “Pops?”

  Someone’s knocking on my room’s door again. This time, it jars me from these scribbles enough to make me all but jump out of my skin.

  “Leave me be for the love of GOD!” I yell, patting my heart as the orderly marches right in like the rest.

  Catching my breath, I pull myself off the Memphis road to take a good look at him. “You’re Black.”

  “Nothing wrong with your eyes, Pops. I was told to come check on you, since you hadn’t eaten all day.”