I shrugged, biting my tongue.
“She alone?” asked the deputy.
“Seemed so,” said the Old Man. “She was snapping pictures, saying she was with Life magazine.” He paused. “Right, boy?”
I shrugged again. Feeling the deputy’s eyes still on me, I feared what was coming next.
“What’s your name, son?” asked the deputy.
The Old Man cut in. “His name’s Woodrow Wilson Nickel, deputy.”
“That name’s got a familiar ring to it. Have we met, Mr. Woodrow Wilson Nickel?”
I shook my head, certain now that a Panhandle bulletin had been in all his bulletin reading.
“He’s named after a president. Maybe that’s it,” the Old Man cut in again. “Deputy, he’s been driving us for days and he’s doing a fine job.”
“Still. Maybe I should take a look at his license while I’m here. Let’s see it, son.”
At that very moment, though, what did I see coming up the road but a green Packard—and behind the wheel was a flash of red curls. I tried hard not to look. God knows I tried. But look I did. And when I did, so did the deputy.
“What the . . . Was that the floozy?” The paunchy old deputy whirled around so fast he all but fell on his fanny as the Packard sped up and vanished around the bend. “Stay here! Don’t y’all move!” he croaked back at us, scrambling to his cruiser and peeling out after Red.
“Like piss we are,” the Old Man said. “Let’s go.” As I hustled us onto the road, the Old Man kept giving me his hollow-eyed stare. “Is there something you need to tell me about this girlie?”
I shook my head a bit too quick and a bit too hard.
While I didn’t know a thing about Red when it came right down to it, I was acting like I was guilty of knowing something, but the something I knew was more about me. I wouldn’t have cared if she’d robbed a bank, since I wasn’t but two steps from doing something like that myself. I wouldn’t have cared if she was a runaway, because I might have been one myself if Ma and Pa hadn’t died first. But a wife? That I cared about. Even more, God help me, than the dying heart part. Yet I heard myself say, “You going to turn her in if she shows up again?”
“I’ve had many a pretty woman turn my head, so I know what you’re feeling,” he answered. “We’ve got enough troubles, boy, so yeah. I will. If the girlie’s not lying about herself, she’ll be fine. And if she is, we’ll be finer without—” But the Old Man never finished the thought, erupting with one of his long-string cusses loud enough to make me jump right out of my skin. He was gaping past me. The highway was passing the railyards, and in the field between the highway and the tracks was the circus, packing up after its Chattanooga show. There’d be no hiding the giraffes this time. Not thirty yards from us, two men were hanging the new sign on the red caboose: MUSCLE SHOALS TONIGHT!
While the Old Man saw only the circus, I couldn’t take my eyes off the railyard. It was where I’d first jumped a freight after my ma’s Mason jar money played out on my way to Cuz. Wandering around that station scrounging food and trying to figure out what to do, I’d bumped into railriders about my age. Back then, thousands and thousands of them were hopping freights right along with the hoboes and tramps. I can still hear one of them talking it up: It’s freedom, pally! Plows and cows are for suckers! So I’d joined up with them, and that’s exactly what it felt like to my farmboy self. Freedom. We were now so close to the circus, though, try as I might I couldn’t ignore the vile racket—animals roaring, creatures caterwauling, men bellowing, whips snapping.
“Speed up!” the Old Man yelled.
As I did, though, the paunchy deputy appeared heading back our way, motioning us to pull over.
As I rolled us onto the shoulder, I thought the Old Man was going to bust. We were straight across from the gut-wrenching din, the elephant cattle cars not a stone’s throw away.
Steering the cruiser up close, the deputy hollered, “Did you see her? Did the floozy double back?”
We shook our heads.
“Stay put this time! Don’t move a lick!” Spinning the cruiser around, off he went again.
So this time we stayed, getting more and more miserable as the bellowing, wailing, and whip-snapping got louder and harder and rougher—until the Old Man came unglued. “Look how those sumbitches are treating their elephants!” he yelled.
I didn’t want to look. God knows I didn’t want to. But I did, and then I couldn’t look away. The elephants, trumpeting loud and wretched, were being prodded onto the cattle car by workers with pointed poles.
“You know what circus people call those magnificent creatures? They call them rubber cows!” the Old Man sputtered. “See those poles they keep poking their ‘rubber cows’ with? They’re called bullhooks with three-inch barbed spikes! There are places on an elephant you can stick that spike to make them feel bad-bad pain, and in cheap outfits like this one, there are always measly little men who get sick pleasure out of finding those places.” Then his voice dropped low, deadly. “To the point you wish elephants were like lions, ripping and reaping . . . to the point it can tear at your heart when they don’t . . . to the point that anybody with a heart can only watch a measly little man using a hook with pleasure until it’s a matter of time before anybody with a heart is going to give him a taste of that bullhook in his own measly, miserable hide.” Before I had a chance to think about what I’d just heard, he said, “Nossir, that right there is the kind of shady outfit that might decide to acquire a couple of giraffes the easy way. To hell with that deputy—get us outa here!”
And it dawned on my thickheaded self how the Old Man knew all this. He’d worked for a circus, maybe even run off to join one as a kid. As I sped us out of the railyard, I was so sure of it I almost asked. He was still glaring at the elephants, thinking thoughts I didn’t want to hear, full of circus things I didn’t want to know, and I was already feeling more than I could stand over nightmares and dying hearts and runaway wives. So much so that when I spied a handful of tramps and railriders running to hop a slow-rolling freight train, I was wishing I was hopping it, too, being anywhere but here.
Freedom, pally!
As I watched, though, a tramp with a cooking pot on his back stumbled on the track and as he scrambled not to be hit, I saw his face. It was the face of all tramps . . . weathered, blotched, woebegone . . . like the tramp’s face I saw thrown off to die for his shoes.
Almost running the rig right off the road with that bottled-up memory, I whiplashed the giraffes and threw the Old Man into the dashboard worse than back in DC. You’d think that would have had him chewing me up and spitting me out, but he barely did more than yowl, still bad-bewitched by his circus thoughts.
Five miles passed before I was driving proper, and it’d be another five before I could rid myself of the tramp’s face. By then we were well past Chattanooga, farmland surrounding us again, the road lined with store billboards touting jams and jellies, sorghum and cider, RC Cola and Jax Beer.
On my side, the highway was running along the rail’s right-of-way with only a thin line of pine trees as a divide. Mile after mile, the Old Man kept eyeing that tree line and I wished I didn’t know full well why. We could hear a train coming, and within seconds, a fast-moving freight train was roaring past the opposite way. The clickety-clack was so loud, both giraffes thrust their heads out the train’s side so forceful the rig lifted off the road. I leaned the other way, like that could stop the top-heavy rig from lurching into the trees. When the Old Man did it, too, though, I saw he was trying to yell over the clamor, motioning me to pull over. So I braked hard, jerking us to a stop on the shoulder. As the freight roared on, the Old Man grabbed Big Papa’s gunnysack, crawled up the side away from the train, and began pitching those onions in the giraffes’ windows, one after the other. He was trying to get the giraffes to pull their heads in—which they did—and, even though we now knew latches meant nothing to giraffes, he latched the windows anyway. After the long train passed, the Ol
d Man and I, ears still ringing, sat inside the truck cab without the will to move until the echoes died away.
“How long’s the track going to be right next to the road?” I mustered up the courage to ask.
“All day,” was the Old Man’s answer.
For the next hour, we rode along eyeing the tracks and our side mirrors, the giraffes riding quiet inside, the skies turning gray to match our mood. I kept looking back for Red. There were lots of cars on that nice highway but no green Packard. If she was back there, and I knew she was, she was hiding pretty good from both the law and us.
Finally, we heard another train, this one approaching from behind. Seeing flashes of yellow and red in our mirrors, we knew it was the circus. Railcars of elephants, horses, and lions draped with posters of clowns and a top-hatted ringmaster inched closer and closer until they were traveling right beside us.
This time there wasn’t enough shoulder to pull off. I had to keep going. Frantic, the Old Man searched the road ahead for a turnoff with no luck.
The train was now so close the lions might as well have been in the truck cab with us. The only thing we had going for us was that the giraffes were still riding quiet inside the rig, unseen.
“C’mon, darlings . . . stay put,” the Old Man kept saying under his breath, glancing every few seconds back at the latched windows. “Stay put now.”
But then one of the circus cats roared, and out popped the giraffes’ heads searching for the lions. With that, the giraffes were seen, all right. A bearded lady by a Pullman window noticed first. Then a potbellied man with a handlebar mustache raised his window to lean halfway out the window to look. It was the same guy on the caboose back in Maryland.
I thought the Old Man was going to explode into little pieces where he sat, hollering and pointing at a country road up ahead. Turning so quick, we all but did it on two wheels and we didn’t stop until we saw the red caboose pass with its new sign flapping: MUSCLE SHOALS TONIGHT!
By the time we found our long way back to the highway on the narrow winding roads, the train track had veered away and the circus had surely made it all the way to Muscle Shoals.
The next twenty miles down the Lee Highway were blessed quiet. We’d traveled a lot of silent miles by that time, but that silence was a loud one. As the sky grew darker and grayer, we drove into a low area with a small storm brewing complete with sudden, dense fog. The cars behind us might as well have vanished.
For ten long minutes, we weren’t moving faster than a crawl, hoping everybody else was doing the same.
From the fog, a sign zipped past.
YELLER’S MODERN TOURIST CAMP
100 YARDS AHEAD
“Pull in there,” ordered the Old Man. “We’ll figure out how to get by that train tomorrow and on to Memphis while they’re busy loading. If we time it right, we’ll get to their turnaround stop ahead of them and that’ll be that.”
“They’ll be turning around?”
“It’s a southern circuit outfit,” he said. “Unless things have changed. And things don’t change.”
A hundred yards ahead, the sign popped into view again.
YELLER’S MODERN TOURIST CAMP
YOU MADE IT
We could make out the tall pine trees framing the entrance, their trunks painted bright yellow. I turned in and rolled the rig toward the red neon OFFICE sign glowing like a fog light in the middle of the grove.
The place was an auto-trailer camp, not an auto court. Except for the owner’s trailer and what looked like some rental trailers, it seemed we had the place to ourselves, although we couldn’t be sure because of the fog. After a few meet-the-giraffes moments for Yeller himself, complete with food right off his own trailer’s table, which we devoured on the spot, he lit his lantern.
“Sure glad you saw our sign with this fog, considering those fellers,” Yeller said, nodding at the giraffes. “We’re the only place for miles this side of Muscle Shoals.”
We followed him through the fog as he lit lanterns along the way. Thirty yards past the sleeping trailer we’d rented, he motioned me to park the rig at the camp’s edge under a row of leafy trees, their yellow-washed trunks surrounding us in the deepening fog as if framing the whole world. Hanging his lantern on one of the trees, Yeller waved and headed back toward the neon office light.
Dusk falls queerly in a fog. As we cared for the giraffes, the light around us turned from white-gray to gray to gray-black until the only light left was the glow from the lanterns spread around the deserted camp. The Old Man announced he’d take the first sleeping shift as usual and headed back to our trailer.
But I didn’t do the usual. I didn’t crawl up and stretch out on the plank between the two giraffes to gaze at the stars. I wouldn’t be seeing any stars that night, but it wasn’t the fault of the fog. In fact, as soon as the giraffes were chewing their cud, I closed their windows and top for the night before they had time to move toward me, closing my heart for the night as well. As I sat down on the running board, tetchy and worn out, my mind still full of murdered tramps and rubber cows and runaway wives, I wasn’t sure what to fret over first. I had to remind myself we’d be hitting Memphis tomorrow. Only one more day and none of it will matter anymore. I’ll be on my California way, I kept repeating, and soon I was lost in puffed-up thoughts of riding in a fancy train Pullman headed to the land of milk and honey, where I’d live like a king plucking fruit from the trees and grapes from the vine and sipping from the cool, clear rivers.
All I had to do was get to tomorrow.
Bracing for a longer night than usual, I looked around for Red to show up before I remembered I didn’t much want her to. But that didn’t keep me from expecting her. In fact, I expected it so much that when I saw something move, I got up to face Mrs. Augusta Red.
Instead, from the shadows came a tall figure, strolling like he was taking a walk in the woods. He was almost to me before I saw his face, and what seemed to come out of the fog first was his handlebar mustache. It was the potbellied man from the train—wearing a yellow cutaway suit with a red bowtie and knee boots—like he’d jumped off the train’s poster, the ringmaster come to life. He even had on the top hat. Then I noticed he had something in his hand. It was an ivory-handled cane, and I was wishing for the Old Man’s shotgun, having heard of firearms hidden in such sticks.
“Percival T. Bowles at your service,” he said, tipping his top hat. “And who might you be?”
“Not sure that’s any of your business,” I said, eyes on the cane.
He placed both hands atop the cane. “You look like a fine young man. Maybe you saw our circus train, Bowles & Waters Traveling Circus Extravaganza,” he went on, showing his coyote teeth in what I took to be a smile.
“I saw.”
He drummed the top of his cane with his fat fingers. “Don’t talk much, do you? Mark of a wise man. You like the circus, son?”
“Don’t call me son.”
“Ah. A particular man as well as a wise man. I respect that,” he said, then went right on. “We’re right down the road. Two performances tonight. On my way back there now, as you can see,” he added, nodding at his clothes. He pulled some tickets from his breast pocket. “Here’s some free passes, if you’d care to join us. Ringmaster’s deluxe.”
“Don’t want ’em.”
He flashed that coyote smile again. “Don’t blame you a bit. You got a circus right here, don’t you?”
As he put the tickets back in his breast pocket, his cutaway coat opened enough for me to spy a holstered gun on his hip.
He saw that I saw.
“Ah.” He fingered it. “Did I forget to mention I’m also the lion tamer? A lion tamer never knows when he’ll have to take down an animal, you know.” Resting his hand back on top of the other, he gazed past me at the rig. “This is some fine job you got here.”
“Not a job,” I said. “Just driving them.”
“Well, now, I’d give you a job. I’m about to be doing some hiring. Expec
ting to have giraffes very soon myself.”
The hackles on the back of my neck were standing straight up. It was the feeling I used to get while hunting in the Panhandle brush, like a wild pair of eyes was watching me. I squinted into the fog all around us as the ringmaster parked his cane over an arm and pulled something new out of his breast pocket. He palmed it, then opened his fist and held it toward me. It was a twenty-dollar double-eagle gold piece, the first I’d seen in my life, and the tree lantern’s glow made it look all the more golden.
“Heads up!” he said, then tossed it to me.
I caught it and it was all I could do not to close my fist around the piece of gold. “Feels nice, doesn’t it?” he said, reaching over and scooping it out of my palm. “You a betting man? I’m sure you’d agree fifty-fifty odds are pretty good, correct? How’d you like this double eagle? All you got to do is call heads or tails and it could be yours.” He flipped the coin and slapped it onto the back of his hand. “Call it.”
When I didn’t do so, he cocked his head. “Come now, young man. Which is it? Heads? Or tails? If you win, you don’t have to take it. It’s all in good fun.”
I paused. “Heads.”
He raised the hand covering the coin. Tails. Then, grinning so big and oily I could’ve slipped on it, he turned the coin over . . . It was tails on the other side, too.
I jerked back. “What are you trying to pull!”
“Good trick, don’t you agree? Works every time. You ever heard anybody say ‘tails up’?” He held out the coin. “It’s yours. Smart young lad like yourself can make good use of it.”
“Don’t want it,” I muttered. “Don’t like tricks.”
“Ah, an honest man, too.” He flicked his wrist and there were two gold pieces in his palm. He flicked again and there was only one. “Young man, I promise no tricks. Only a proper offering of services. Here’s a real double-eagle twenty-dollar gold piece. Go ahead. Check it.”
I turned it over in his palm. It had the appropriate amount of sides—one heads, one tails.
“All you have to do is give me a peek at the hurricane giraffes,” he said, nodding toward the rig.
West with Giraffes: A Novel Page 14
