Well, that had me fidgeting once again so bad, there was no hiding it. Because I knew exactly where he wanted to go. It was the only gas station and supply store for miles around my pa’s farm, and I was about to stop at it with a couple of giraffes.
“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.
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, peop
le 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.
The Old Man was gazing down the dirt path to the left—where the carved NICKEL sign was pointing. Not a hundred yards along the ditch was my pa’s dead dirt farm. You could see it all from the church. There was the leaning, ramshackle barn. There was Pa’s broken-down Model T truck. But the Old Man wasn’t looking at either of them. He was squinting at the charred stone fireplace standing like a tombstone over little more than a piece of scorched earth.
He looked back at me, again waiting for me to explain. I knew there was nothing I could tell him to keep the rest of the questions from coming, so I couldn’t make myself say a thing.
With a last look back my way, the Old Man marched through the graveyard and crossed the ditch, heading straight for it all. There was nothing left for me to do but follow, head down, knowing the way by heart. By the time we passed the barn, I was so woozy I could barely walk. As the buzz of flies grew loud, I watched the Old Man stare down at the rifle and pistol rusting in the dirt, then move to the fireplace and the ash heap and the singed metal bedframe and the charred stove until there was nothing left to see.
Except the shallow grave beyond. The shallow, dug-up grave full of picked-clean broken bones.
I felt the ground start to spin. The buzzards and coyotes found her anyway.
The Old Man whirled around. “Tell me those are animal bones.”
I was out of time.
“BOY,” he had to yell, “what happened here?”
I could refuse to tell him. But he would ditch me for sure, wondering who he and the giraffes had been spending their days with. I wouldn’t be able to blame him a bit, since I didn’t know my own self.
So I was down to my only choice, and then all the choices would be his. He’d either believe the story I told or he wouldn’t. He’d either let me keep on to California or he’d leave me in the place I’d run from like my life depended on it, because I was sure it did. As I opened my mouth to answer, I looked behind me to drink in Boy and Girl.
That’s when I saw the water.
I couldn’t quite take it in. I’d spent my entire life not seeing water in that ditch. It was like a mirage, like I’d conjured it by saying it couldn’t be. Yet there it was . . . a trickle. And then, faster than possible, more. Much more. The ditch was a wash, filling up with water from nowhere. The land with a clock of its own didn’t care a whit about the entire life experience of a Dust Bowl boy. Stranded, invisible thunderstorms were gully-washing Panhandle dirt that couldn’t hold squat. The trooper had been right.
A flash flood was on its way.
By then, the Old Man was standing slack-jawed beside me. We looked at each other and at the trickle that had already turned into a stream, snaking back along the ditch toward the church’s graveyard oak and the giraffes peacefully nibbling at its leaves.
No flash flood can get as high as a giraffe, I told myself, trying to keep calm.
“What’s happening!” Red was standing in the dirt path hollering our way. “Where’s the water coming from? Where are the storm drains?”
“Where do you think you are, girlie, New York City?” the Old Man hollered back. “This is the gotdam High Plains edge of the gotdam screwy desert! There’s not even supposed to be water much less a gotdam storm drain!” I watched him gesturing, throwing his hands this way and that, as if he could scare the whole absurd danger away with his own thundering.
Then I was suddenly in motion.
The thing about finding yourself in the impossible-turning-possible right under your feet, you aren’t quite in control of all your faculties. I recall heading back toward the rig and the graveyard. I recall splashing through the ditch water, already ankle-deep, hearing the Old Man behind me. I recall upping my pace, gazing at the giraffes still nibbling at the leaves above graveyard crosses, as tall as tall could be. I recall yelling at Red to back the Packard down the paved road to where it veered away from the ditch—aiming to do the same for the rig and the giraffes as fast as I could.
But I have no memory of the rest of the way there. I found myself already behind the wheel, grinding the starter, stomping the clutch, and gunning it, doing the worst thing I could do. I was flooding the engine, panicking like only a Panhandle flatlander would in a flood. Because there was so much at stake in this wretched place I’d brought these towering creatures of God’s pure Eden. Not the Old Man. Me. I was the reason we were here—I had driven the hurricane giraffes from a killer ocean straight into a desert flood, and not even floating giraffe nightmares had woke me up enough to stop me.
I ground the starter this side of ruin before I could make myself stop. The water was rising in the ditch, lapping at the graveyard’s edge. Smelling the danger, the giraffes had started to stomp and shuffle. The rig was wobbling. Drown in two feet of water, that’s what the trooper had said. My common sense told me that couldn’t happen. Maybe it could to stupid eighteen-year-olds, but not to twelve-foot-tall giraffes. As I tumbled out of the cab to stare up at the giraffes, a hand clamped on to my arm and whirled me around.
“Are you hearing me!” It was the Old Man, his face flushed with new fear. “That’s not pavement,” he
said, pointing down to the hardpan under the left-side tires. “The rig’s top-heavy! The water’s not the danger—it’s the surge. If rushing water jumps the wash and that hardpan goes soft and the giraffes panic—the rig could . . .” He couldn’t make himself say the next word—topple.
“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.
West with Giraffes: A Novel Page 22