As round as he was tall, the cop guffawed and headed our way to meet the giraffes. Then he led us to a diner, where customers rushed out and waitresses appeared carrying two plates piled high with ham and eggs. They laid them on the truck’s hood and I’d wolfed down both before I realized I’d eaten the Old Man’s, too. The town newspaper’s editor was posing him with the giraffes for pictures. Then Boy gave the round cop a snake-tongue lick as Girl flicked off his cap, and the crowd hooted with delight.
As the Old Man waited for another breakfast, he said, eyebrow cocked, “You get enough to eat?”
I nodded, sheepish. To please him, I went around to the diner’s water pump out back and did a little dabbing. I was still a Dust Bowl boy never trusting a full stomach, though, so I came back through the market next door and pocketed a potato. As I settled into the driver’s seat, the Old Man crawled in the passenger side, dropped a package of dry goods and a gunnysack full of onions and apples between us, and said again, “You get enough to eat?”
I nodded again.
“Good,” he said, “because if you ever steal anything else, I will leave you on the side of the road. I cannot abide thieves or liars. Don’t make me say it again.”
“Yessir,” I answered, clutching the potato in my pocket, sure he was about to make me hand it over. Instead he shoved the dry goods package my way. “Open it.”
I tore at the brown paper. Inside were work clothes, a whole outfit. Brand-new.
“Put ’em on,” he said.
I stared at them, not quite sure what to do, as if I didn’t know how to put on clothes. The thing was, I didn’t—not new ones. I was seventeen years old and never had a thing new, not even skivvies, nothing but hand-me-downs my whole life. I started peeling off my snitched shirt.
“Jesus-Joseph-Mary—farmboy!” the Old Man groused. “Change out back. And this time, really use the water pump.”
So, after finding a suitable tree to change behind, I shed my raggedy things, did a true cleanup with the help of the water pump, and started putting on my new clothes. They were only work clothes, but they felt like a millionaire’s luxe duds. To this day, I don’t know if I’ve ever felt the same sensation those first new clothes gave me. I whipped off my holey undershirt and pulled on the new one, savoring the thought that mine was the first skin it’d touched. Next, I slipped on the new cotton twill shirt, smoothing down the fabric as I fastened each new button. Then I stepped into the denim pants, rolled up the bottoms that were amazingly too long, and cinched the new belt as far as it would go. He’d even gotten me a pair of socks. So, last, I shook off my boots and eased those beauties on, them offering the most sinful-rich feeling of all.
Tugging at everything, I headed back to the rig. The Old Man looked me up and down, giving the air between us a sniff. “Better.”
Not having much practice with thanks, I didn’t know what to say. “I’ll pay you back,” I mumbled. It was as close to a thank-you as I knew how to get, and from the shrug the Old Man gave me it was probably as much of one as he’d take.
I started up the rig. A cheer came from the crowd.
“Don’t take any wooden nickels!” the round cop called as we pulled away.
The Old Man outright cackled. “Too late,” he called back, cutting his eye at me.
But I didn’t care. I was driving the giraffes in a big, fancy rig. In new clothes. Me, Woodrow Wilson Nickel. I sat up tall, glancing back at the empty road, wishing Red could see me now.
“Remember, you’re only getting us to DC,” the Old Man said, my fine feeling being deaf to any such truth. In fact, the Old Man’s gift began to poke at some part of me wanting to confess what happened my last Dust Bowl day that was fueling my nightmare. That’s what the smallest bit of kindness could do to a seventeen-year-old orphan feeling his first bit of luck. But I knew no good could come from a guilty spiel about a sure crime when it came to my chances to keep driving to California. So I kept my mouth shut.
For a few miles, we rocked along as the Old Man looked for a good giraffe rest stop. When he spied a tall leafy tree nicely off the road, he motioned us over. As I rolled us to a stop, he popped on his fedora and got out, so I followed. “Think you can do some climbing without getting yourself killed?” he asked.
“Yessir,” I said.
“Hear me now,” he said. “These are wild animals, not farm animals. With wild animals, there’s predators and there’s prey. Predators use claws, prey use hooves. Giraffes, being prey, can kick with every hoof they got deadly enough to crack a lion’s skull or break its spine. You rile them, their front hooves can kill you and the back hooves can maim you. So don’t rile them. Just making ’em jittery can get them kicking, and I’ve got to deal with that splint. Clear?”
“Yessir.”
“OK, pop the top to let the darlings munch.”
By the time the Old Man had gotten out of the cab, I’d already climbed up and unlatched the top. Girl’s snout poked out quick, but I didn’t see Boy. I peeked over the side. He was on the floor, his big body curled up, legs under him, and worst of all, his neck looped over his back. Jumping to the ground, I gasped out, “Boy’s down—”
The Old Man flipped open the wild boy’s trapdoor. There was the giraffe’s whole body close enough to touch. Spreading the fingers of his bad hand as far as they’d go, the Old Man placed them on the wild boy’s looped neck and began to stroke. Boy uncurled it to flick his tongue at the pleasure of the Old Man’s touch, and instantly rose to his feet by Girl.
“It’s a good sign,” the Old Man said my way. “They like your driving. Which means I like your driving.”
I was still rattled. “Giraffes lie down?”
He shrugged. “Back on your Okie farm, you never saw a horse lie down?”
Sure I had. But they weren’t giraffes. Then I thought about the Old Man’s shrug. “Have you ever seen a giraffe lie down?”
“Can’t say I have,” he answered, unlatching Girl’s trapdoor. “In fact, the few zoo bigwigs that have had giraffes will tell you they don’t. Except to die.”
Die? “How do you know it’s OK then?”
“I can feel it,” he said. “If either do it again, though, they’ll never do it at the same time, I suspect. Least as long as the female’s leg is in a bad way.”
“Why?”
“Lions. Somebody’s got to keep watch.” Gearing up to check her splint through the trapdoor, he leaned sideways, surely thinking he was going to have to do their dance. She was already stomping a bit, knowing he was there. “Keep back,” he ordered.
“I can help,” I said.
“You’ll do no such thing,” he said my way, leaving his shoulder wide open, and Wild Girl kicked.
WHOP.
Groaning, he staggered back.
So, before he could tell me not to, I grabbed the cab’s gunnysack, climbed up the side of the rig, and held out a sweet onion to Girl, who lapped it right up and waited for more. Soon, like the first night in quarantine, both giraffes were sniffing me all over for onion delights. The Old Man watched for a minute, then carefully finished his splint inspection as Girl kept getting onions for no more whops and Boy got them just because Girl got them, fair being fair.
As the giraffes went on nudging me with their snouts, I could feel the Old Man eyeing me again. He took his Lucky Strike pack from his shirt pocket, tapped out a smoke, lit it, and hunkered down on his haunches against the tree, motioning me down. I hopped to the ground. He held out his pack. Tobacco might as well have been chewing gum back then—my churchy ma even dipped snuff, nastiest stuff you ever saw. I’d already done more than my share of coughing in my young life, though, and wasn’t stupid enough to take up smoking until the War. When I shook my head, he stuffed the pack back in his pocket, took a long suck of his Lucky, and settled back against the tree, resting both arms over his knees. The cigarette was dangling between his mangled fingers. It was the first time I’d had a real good look at them—one finger was half gone, and the oth
ers looked like they’d been chewed on by something fierce and spit out to heal all wrong.
“If I let you help me with the darlings,” he was saying, “whatever you do, don’t let me catch you inside. Big don’t know from small. They could love you like their mama but still crush an arm or leg without a clue. And don’t be lulled by the fact they’re young. After all they’ve been through, add that to what we’re asking of them and they’re about as skittish as you’d be in the same situation. You hear?”
I nodded.
Sucking the guts out of the smoke, he flicked the butt in the road, grabbed up a water bucket, and began filling it from the rig’s jugs as the giraffes bent his way. As he cooed his giraffe-speak to them, I felt as if I were eavesdropping on something personal.
“You got a feeling for animals, don’t you?” I heard myself mumble.
He held out the full bucket until I took it. “That’s a safe bet.”
“My pa said it’s a weakness.”
“Did he now,” said the Old Man, filling the other bucket. “I look weak to you?”
“. . . No, but he said animals were put on earth by God for our use, that it’s the natural order, and bucking it’s childish for a grown man since we got to either eat or kill them to survive.”
“And God knows you got to survive,” the Old Man said under his breath.
“You agree with him?” Sarcasm wasn’t a thing I heard much down on the farm.
“What?” he said, only half-listening.
“You agree with Pa?”
“Well, now,” he said, handing me the second bucket, “I did say we’re all lions. Lions got no choice but to always be lions. We do. By the way, you got a feeling for animals yourself whether you and your pa like it or not.” He nodded up at the giraffes. “The darlings know it. They knew about Earl, the sumbitch, and they fixed that, didn’t they?”
The giraffes were stomping a little for us to get a move on with the water buckets. So I did, as the Old Man sat down on the truck cab’s running board, lit up a new Lucky, and began eyeing me again. I felt the hackles rise on the back of my neck as he kept it up, like he was a mountain lion sizing me up on the Panhandle plains. The longer it went on, the sorrier I was I’d kept him talking.
Finally, he said, “You know what an abattoir is? My first job was in one, younger’n I had any business being in such a place, not even twelve years old. They bought old horses on their way to the glue factory to shoot ’em, skin ’em, sell the hides, and feed the meat to the animals. The keepers’ job was to keep their string of animals alive and healthy, and old horse flesh was how it was done. They’d bring their big knives and take what they needed for the carnivores—the tigers and lions.”
“At the San Diego Zoo?”
“You going to let me talk here? No, not the zoo. My job was being the Judas goat, leading the horses peaceful to the slaughter. All too soon I was the one cutting off meat to feed the carnivores. But I never got used to it, the horse being as noble a beast as they come. So, seeing as I was still a boy and didn’t have the luxury of quitting, I got philosophical about it. I got to thinking it was sort of a last noble duty of a damn noble breed, and I’ll tell you a secret. Early on, I started thanking each one of them—just like Hawkeye.”
I looked at him funny.
He bounced it right back at me. “Hawkeye—The Deerslayer, Last of the Mohicans . . . Good God, boy! They’re books. By Mr. Fenimore Cooper. Didn’t you read ’em in school? Hell, I barely got enough schooling to learn my ABCs and I read ’em all.” Eyes shining, he gestured grandly with the hand holding his Lucky and said, “‘A man can enjoy plunder peaceably nowhere.’”
I was pretty sure he was quoting from a book, but the only quoting I’d ever heard was from the Good Book, and I never saw anybody do that gesturing with a cigarette.
He leaned my way. “Hawkeye was a frontiersman back in colonial days—a legend with his long rifle. He could drop a stag springing in the air at one hundred paces. Back then,” he went on, waving the Lucky overhead, “flocks of passenger pigeons were so big they blanketed the sky, blacking out the sun. Everybody else plundered them for sport and silly hat feathers with their blunderbusses, blasting away—until the birds vanished forever. Not that magnificent ol’ bastard, though. Hawkeye never killed a living thing without good cause, and whenever he shot a stag to eat, he always paused to thank it for its life to save his own.” The Old Man leaned back. “That spoke to me as a kid in a slaughterhouse. So I started doing like Hawkeye. I still do. Other people say grace. Me, I say thanks to what I’m eating. Its life for mine.” He paused, absently rubbing his sorry-looking hand. “Soon enough, I’ll be returning the favor even if it’s only to the worms. We’re just meat when it’s all done. That’s the natural order. What do I care where my meat goes after I’m not using it anymore?” he said, standing up. “Not that I wouldn’t mind being thanked.”
With that, he took a last suck of his smoke, crushed the butt with his boot, then climbed into the truck cab. The Old Man had left all the get-going chores for me to do, either lost in his Hawkeye thoughts or trusting me. I figured it was the former, but I was going to prove him right if it was the latter. So I put the water buckets back in their place by the jugs, then closed the trapdoors, and when I climbed into the cab to get us going again, he was sitting there gazing out at the road. As I put the rig into gear, he finished answering the question that I’d all but forgotten I asked.
“Life is life no matter who or what is living it, boy—a thing to respect,” he said. “You don’t get that, then you’re just a waste of skin.” Then he flipped a hand toward the road. “Now, daylight’s burning.”
As I steered the rig back on the road, I was a bit flustered, having gotten more than I bargained for with all his talk. The Old Man was about as different as different could be from Pa and Cuz and any other full-grown man I knew, though you couldn’t tell by looking at him. On the outside, he was as rough-looking as any outdoor man, but inside he was one surprise after another. Little did I know there were some mighty big surprises yet to come. In fact, I was so awash in the Old Man’s words, a mile would pass before I thought to check behind us for Red.
The road was still empty.
For a while we rode in blessed silence. When we spied a railroad crossing up ahead, though, I felt the Old Man tense again. As we got close, the signal went off and the arms went down. A train was coming. It wasn’t a passenger train or even a freight train like the ones I’d hopped. It was a circus train—painted in bright yellows and reds—the same colors as the panel truck that morning. The circus train couldn’t have been twelve cars long, but to my eyes it was big-time. The crossing was on flat pastureland with only a few scraggly trees between us, and I could already see the signs on the train cars. We were going to be so close, we’d be locking eyes with both men and beasts.
But the Old Man was having none of it. “Stop—back here,” he ordered.
So I pulled the rig off the road near the scraggly trees. Within seconds, I was having to wave two cars around us, an Oldsmobile sedan with New Jersey license plates and a rattletrap Chevy. While they took their ogling time passing us, they soon were the ones locking eyes with the circus travelers as the train approached the crossing, hooting and tooting.
BOWLES & WATERS TRAVELING CIRCUS EXTRAVAGANZA, said the sign on the train’s fancy Pullman car. Here came a circus organ wagon. There went a lion in a curlicue cage. Next came the elephants and horses, lots of horses. But no giraffes. Back then, nobody much this side of Africa got to see a giraffe. Fancy East Coast zoos were always trying to have them, but the cold was too much, killing them fast. Circuses kept trying to have them, but the traveling was too much, killing them even faster. So, while I knew they were special, I didn’t know how special—to the point of being all-out coveted—but I was about to find out.
The giraffes were craning their necks toward the loud train and the Old Man was all nerves. Throwing open the truck door and tumbling out, he said
, “Help me get the giraffes’ heads in! We don’t want any trouble.”
I didn’t much like the sound of that, especially since it was way too late to get their heads in. The train was already passing.
And at that very moment, so was the Packard.
A blur of green shot past us as I climbed up the rig’s side. Jolting to a stop behind the other cars at the crossing, Red bailed out in all her curly-headed glory, camera in hand. She snapped the train and cars, then turned to snap us. When she saw me, she was so surprised she lowered the camera to look at me looking at her. And I was surely looking at her.
“Hurry, boy!” the Old Man hollered my way.
From the old Chevy, a man rushed toward us. “I’ll be darned if those aren’t giraffes—you with that circus?”
I was too busy trying to get Girl to let me close the window to answer. After a couple of tries pushing that huge head where it didn’t want to go, I threw up my hands, looking back for the Old Man so he could go ahead and chew me out. But the train had finished passing the crossing and he was squinting hard enough after it to pop a blood vessel.
The family from the Oldsmobile then joined the party. “I know who you are!” the mother crowed, scooting toward us with her little ones. “I read about you in the papers. Look here, children! They’re going to California! Those are the hurricane giraffes! They’re going to live with Belle Benchley in the San Diego Zoo! We’ve seen her in the newsreels, haven’t we, children?” she went on. The Old Man wasn’t listening. His attention was glued to the circus train’s little red caboose with its banner hanging off the back: DC TONIGHT! Because as it disappeared around the bend, a big, potbellied, mustached man strode through the caboose’s back door in time to stare at us. Hard.
The Old Man cussed under his breath.
When the railroad crossing arms lifted, nobody in line wanted to leave as long as we were there, so we had to pull around them. With the giraffes bobbing their necks back toward the crowd, we crossed the tracks and disappeared around the same bend. I watched Red in my sideview mirror until she was no longer in sight, wondering if the Old Man noticed her. But his mind seemed stuck on that circus train.
West with Giraffes: A Novel Page 7
