In full view of my giraffe audience, I took a running leap, jumped on the back of the rig like I was hopping a freight train, and caught a slight hold as the rig rolled into the stream, my boots struggling to stay put on the splashed bumper. Somehow, when the rig bounced onto the other side, I was still attached. With every moment that passed, though, I was losing more of my grip, and it didn’t much help that the giraffes’ necks were so long they’d both bent them around to watch, Boy so close his tongue was licking my hair. I almost fell off trying to bat the snaky thing away.
As the rig entered the little sleeping town and my boots struggled to keep their toehold, I looked for something, anything, to snitch before I fell off. Nothing. As light broke, we passed the city limit sign on the other side of town, the cop car already turning around to head back. I tell you, I despaired. My grip was about to go and my boots were losing their bumper toehold. I either had to go up or was going to go down. In a matter of seconds, I’d be tumbling into the ditch and that’d be that, nothing left to do but lick my wounds as I watched the rig and my dream disappear for good. So, with no help from Boy, who continued to lick my hair, I reached high and pulled my beat-up self on top of the rig. There I lay, spread-eagle, grasping for handholds and dodging bugs as the Old Man lurched us all down the road.
Until, that is, the morning’s first rubbernecker appeared.
Stunned at the early-morning sight of giraffes on his country road, the driver swerved way too close to the rig, and the Old Man must’ve jerked the wheel the other way—because I was suddenly airborne. Bouncing once on my bad rib, then again on my side, I landed spread-eagle in the ditch, and I must’ve howled pretty loud doing it. Because next thing I knew the Old Man was in my face.
“Holy hell, boy, were you on top of the rig? You should’ve broken your fool neck! What kind of stunt were you trying to pull? No, don’t answer that.” He yanked me to my feet. “Anything busted?”
My britches were split and my knee was bloody. As the giraffes snorted at me, he ran his rough hands over my limbs. Leaving me wobbling, he retrieved the zoo doc’s kit, ripped the tear in my britches wider, and bandaged up my bloody knee, taking a little too much pleasure splashing Mercurochrome—nasty red stinging antiseptic we used to call “monkey blood”—on all my skinned-up parts, which had me yelping so loud the giraffes upped their snorting.
“You’ll live.” Pulling a dollar bill from his wallet, he flicked it at me. “Here’s a dollar. Put out your thumb,” he said, grabbing up the kit and heading toward the rig.
“You’re leaving me here?”
“Somebody’ll be along to give you a lift back to town so you can use that dollar to call your people and go home.”
“I don’t have people and I don’t have a home,” I called after him. “I want to go to Californy.”
“That’s not my problem,” he called back over his shoulder.
The giraffes were snuffling loud and jumpy, swiveling their necks back and forth between us. At the sight, I swallowed hard, squared my shoulders, and called out, “No, your problem is your bad driving is going to give the giraffes whiplash—and how’s Mrs. Benchley going to like that?”
He got a hitch in his step at the mention of this Mrs. Benchley I remembered from the telegrams. Pulling his fedora low, though, he kept walking.
And I heard myself yell, “You need a hand!”
With that dunderheaded choice of words, the Old Man stopped all right, pivoting full around to catch me staring at his gnarly hand.
“What did you just say?” he growled, shooting me the stink eye of all stink eyes, to which I wisely kept my trap shut. He threw open the driver’s door, climbed up, and cranked the motor.
It sputtered and died.
He cranked it again.
“Don’t flood it! Go easy on the pedal!” I hollered. When it rumbled to life, I yelled, “What if that hadn’t started? You need me!”
What I really, really wanted to say was that I needed them.
Grinding those gears rougher and jerking the giraffes’ necks harder, the Old Man bounced the rig back on the road. As I watched the giraffes rolling away once more, my heart dropped all the way to the Land of China.
Then the rig stopped.
The Old Man was waving me up.
I ran as fast as my bloodied knee would let me, and when I got to his door, he said, “You really good with engines? Don’t lie to me now.”
“I’m a true genius,” I lied to him.
“You got a license?”
“’Course.”
“And you can drive this thing?”
“It’s got gears and a clutch, doesn’t it?” I said.
“Let’s see. I only need you to get us to DC.”
“But . . . you’re going to Californy.”
“We are. You’re not.”
“But why DC?”
“Southern route starts there. Wasn’t stopping, but Earl the sumbitch changed that,” he answered. “We’ll be getting a new driver with their zoo’s help. That is, once the Boss Lady asks, and I don’t look forward to that chat with her. Worst of it is we’ll be hung up there for at least a day, maybe more. Every day we tarry is more dangerous for the darlings. But I got no choice,” he added, muttering another sumbitch under his breath. “When—if—you get us to DC safe, I’ll buy you a train ticket back to New York.”
“I don’t want to go back. I can get you to Californy. I swear on my ma’s grave, I can.”
The look he shot me could’ve stopped a rhinoceros. “You’ll be OK with DC, boy, or you can stay here on the side of the road waiting for the kindness of strangers. What’ll it be?”
So I nodded. He swung the door wide, moved over, and I pulled myself up quick before he changed his mind.
Jangling all our molars, I found my way through the first few gears. As each mile got smoother, though, I started feeling something new—I wasn’t quite sure, seeing as I’d never felt it before, but I think I was feeling lucky.
That’s when I noticed a car behind us growing bigger in my sideview mirror with each passing second, until it slowed and began to follow from way on back.
It was a Packard. A green one.
Feeling my first fit of pure happiness, I’d have bet the farm that inside it was a flame-haired, camera-toting woman in pants.
. . . “Hon, I got your breakfast!”
Pushing the door open with her hip, it’s Big Orderly Red again. Just as I’m putting the period on the end of my sentence.
“Don’t want it,” I call over my shoulder.
“I warmed it back up for you,” she says, setting the tray of powdered eggs and godawful coffee on the bed nearest the window. Girl takes one sniff and shakes her big head.
“You’ve got to keep your strength up for your writing, don’t you?” Rosie tries.
I keep scribbling.
“Why don’t you take a break? We can play a game of dominoes—a game and a story—like old times,” she says, looking over my shoulder. “It looks like it’s getting good, too!”
I keep scribbling.
“So, who did you say you’re writing to?” she tries next.
I keep scribbling.
She sighs. “OK, you’re onto me. I’ll go.” As she does, though, she gives my shoulder a squeeze and says, “But, hon, are you writing to Augusta Red? Because if you are, where’re you going to send it?”
My heart flutters at that. I glance back at Girl in the window, peacefully chewing her cud. Then I take out my pocketknife, sharpen my pencil, and get back to driving the hurricane giraffes.
4
Across Maryland
So. There I was—Woody Nickel—driving giraffes with a freckled redheaded beauty hot on my trail. Since every dog has its day, maybe it was just that my stray-dog-boy day had come. God knows I was due a little Light Shining on me from Above, whether I believed in such things or not. Like most people, denying it never got in the way of relying on it. Here and now, older than old, I’ve lived long e
nough to believe then not believe, then believe and not believe more times than I can count, life being the bumpy ride it is. But I can say this. Luck it may have been. Yet if ever I’ve known a destiny feeling, the kind that makes you feel bigger than you are, moving you to something better than you are, it was that moment driving those giraffes with the green Packard in my mirror. I didn’t know quite what to do with it, barely able to breathe for fear I’d scare the grand thing away. Every few seconds I checked my mirror, squinting hard back at the Packard until I was sure it was Red behind the wheel. Alone.
“Button up.” The Old Man was frowning at my shirt.
My snitched shirt was too small to button all the way, but I gave it a good try with my free hand. “Sorry I tried to punch you back at quarantine,” I mumbled, cutting my eye his way.
“If you’d done more than tried, you wouldn’t be sitting here,” he said, eyeing my last button, both of us knowing it wasn’t going to budge. “Fine. Drive.”
I drove us around a curve. We leaned into it, both glancing in our sideview mirrors at the giraffes. They leaned fine, too. We were up to thirty-five miles per hour.
“That’s good. Right there,” he ordered. I could feel the Old Man’s eyes still on the woebegone sight of me, and they stayed on me long enough to make me antsy.
“What happened to your people?” he finally said.
“All in the ground.”
“What happened to your farm?”
“Dust took it.” I glanced back at Red, and my flickering hope flared up sky-high again. “I can go the distance. I can. I want to go to Californy.”
He fumed. “You and every other Okie.”
“I’m not an Okie.”
“Sure you are. I hear your twang.”
“I’m from Texas. The Panhandle.”
“Same thing,” he said. Back home, those were fighting words. If you were on the road with your life on your back, though, it didn’t matter if you were from Kansas or Arkansas or Texas—you were an Okie. “Don’t be having that Californy dream. Things aren’t like you’re thinking.” He eyed me again. “When’s the last time you ate?”
“I’m not hungry,” I lied, thinking he was still looking for an excuse to boot me. “I don’t eat much.”
Next he was studying the bruises on my arms, the scrapes on my face, and the loose tooth I kept tonguing. “You in the hurricane?”
I nodded, tonguing the tooth.
“You want it to fall out, keep doing that.”
I stopped.
“You get that scab on your face from the hurricane, too?”
I nodded.
“Looks older,” he said, “and a bit like a bullet graze.”
I didn’t answer that, realizing he was the kind of man who’d be prying the truth out of you in seconds if given half a chance, and I wasn’t ready to tell him the truth.
“What’s your name, son?”
My mind still on bullet graze, I snapped, “Don’t call me son.” Quickly swallowing down the fury flit that made me say it, I added, “Sir.”
The Old Man was now eyeing me like a prized pig at an auction. So I sat up and answered properly. “My name’s Woodrow Wilson Nickel. I answer to Woody.”
He glanced at me sideways and started chortling. “Your name’s Woody Nickel?”
“Don’t see what’s so funny,” I muttered.
But something about that seemed to simmer him down. “Riley Jones is mine,” he said. “I answer to Mr. Jones.” With that, he propped an arm on his open window and started giving me giraffe-driving orders. “All right. Listen up. We drive no more than three hours at a stretch before we stop to rest them. We find us some trees and open the top for the darlings to stretch their necks and snack, and we don’t leave until they’re chewing their cud. We stop morning, noon, and night to feed and water, even if we get waylaid going through towns. We watch to see how they’re riding as we go. They’ll be sticking their heads out at their whim from the side windows unless they’re latched. So, watch your sides as well as your overhangs. You give one of the darlings a whomp on their big heads and you’ll find yourself on the side of the road again. We only got twelve feet eight inches to work with on underpasses, so move slow toward each one. We don’t go over forty, traffic be damned. Watch your speed and watch your animals. Got all that?”
I nodded and he went quiet. I knew I should, too, but glancing in my rearview, I caught a glimpse of the shotgun on the gunrack behind our heads. “Would you have shot those yahoos last night?” I heard myself say.
“If they needed it,” he said a bit too quick for comfort. “But I’m not much of a shot.”
I paused. “So . . . you’d kill for the giraffes?”
He snorted. “The Boss Lady will kill me if I don’t get them there safe.” Then he saw I was serious. “Would I kill for the darlings? Might as well ask me if I’d die for the darlings. Sane answer’s no, I guess. But if you really want to know, it always seemed wrong to think an animal’s life isn’t worth as much as a human’s. Life is life.”
Gazing in my sideview at the sight of two mighty African giraffes sniffing American air, I asked what I’d been wondering since I first laid eyes on them. “How did they even get here?”
Something dark passed over the Old Man’s face. “They were minding their own business, being the youngest or slowest giraffes in their herd, the ones lions have for lunch every day. Until loud two-legged lions on wheels with rifles and big ropes came roaring up, making the whole herd bolt so they could grab the stragglers. Or worse. Some trappers thinking nothing of shooting mothers to nab the orphans. What dies you leave for the hyenas or sell as bushmeat in the nearest village.”
“Bushmeat?”
“Meat from the bush—the wild.”
“They eat giraffes over there?”
“It’s Africa. It’s a gotdam buffet,” he said. “We’re all lions except a few like these darlings, God love ’em.”
I flinched and the Old Man saw, studying me like he knew what was on my mind with me knowing he couldn’t be more wrong. “You don’t think so, boy? You never shot a jackrabbit for dinner?”
“’Course I have,” I said, chin out. “I can drop a buck a quarter of a mile away and field dress him on the spot.” Hearing my pa, I added, “They’re just animals.”
“If that’s really what you thought, you wouldn’t be sitting here,” the Old Man said back. “Well, you’ll be happy to know that the Boss Lady doesn’t abide trappers. Trades mostly with her zoo pals all over the world. But these two darlings got rescued after a trapper left them to starve. They couldn’t be taken out and set free, being herd animals without their herd. So she got a call and here they are, because everybody wants to see a giraffe. Some folks need to. Considering what you went through to be here, seems you’re one of those that needs to.”
All I need is to get to California, I was thinking.
“Oh, you say all you want is to get to California,” he went on before I’d even finished the thought, “but you also needed to see a giraffe. You just don’t know why, do you? I’ll tell you why—animals know the secret to life.”
The only secret to life I was interested in was how to stay alive. Besides, I was sure he was snookering me and waited for another chortle. Instead, gazing back at the giraffes in his sideview with the same feisty tenderness I saw in quarantine, he kept talking. “Animals are complete all on their own, living by voices we don’t get to hear, having a knowing far beyond our paltry ken. And giraffes, they seem to know something more. Elephants, tigers, monkeys, zebras . . . whatever you feel around the rest, you feel different around giraffes. It’s sure true of these two, despite the hell they’ve been through.” Eyes still on the giraffes, he actually smiled. “Don’t you worry about these darlings, though. They’re headed to the San Diego Zoo, where it’s warm as toast and green as a garden and washed in sea breezes all year long. Where they’ll never have to worry about their next meal or being safe from lions, and where they’ll be loved
by a whole city just for allowing us to know them. Well they should, I say. This world of misery is in dire need of some natural wonder to learn secrets to life from.” He glanced my way. “Here you got two darlings in your back seat. You should be asking them about those secrets while you got the chance.”
A gust of wind blew through the window, and he took off his hat to fan the air between us. “For sweet chrisesakes, boy, you’ve got to clean yourself up. You’re a walking pigsty!” We spied our first town a couple of miles ahead. “There. We’ll stop for some grub and the mercy of a water pump. Then we’ll find a good rest stop for the giraffes down the road.”
Excited that Red might see me in giraffe-driving action, I glanced back. The Packard wasn’t behind us anymore, though, which seemed odd.
Then the Old Man did something odd himself. When a yellow-and-red panel truck in front of us pulled over near a railroad crossing, he tensed, and as we bumped over the crossing, he stared down the tracks.
By that time, though, I was doing my own staring. A patrol car was parked by the city limit sign up ahead . . . It was the exact model as my Panhandle sheriff’s. I stiffened bad, before I saw it was only the town’s cop, hopping out of his cruiser to wave us over.
West with Giraffes: A Novel Page 6
