West with Giraffes: A Novel

by Lynda Rutledge

  As soon as the road veered away from the tracks, the Old Man announced, “We’ll stop for the night now and go into DC tomorrow.” Since we still had an hour of sun, that seemed like another mighty strange thing to do. I wasn’t going to say so, though, considering he was still planning to ditch me in DC and I needed more time to figure out how to change his mind.

  In about a mile, we pulled into a little place called Round’s Roadside Auto Rest. It wasn’t much, four rickety-looking huts and some cane-back chairs set in a circle around a courtyard campfire. A plump gray-bunned lady and her two grown daughters came out with the Old Man to see the giraffes, all three wiping their hands on their aprons. The place was a family thing, you could tell, their clapboard house by the road serving as an office and a little café, too, if you can call a table with six chairs a café. The ma pointed to the corner hut nearest a nice live oak grove, the one she thought best for our rig parking. Soon we were set. As we finished tending to the giraffes, complete with Old Man kick, onion bribes, and tree munching, the three women brought us meat pies, potatoes, and coconut cake. I was amazed by the Old Man’s manners. I sized him for someone raised by wolves, roughshod and proud of it. But you should have heard the sweet talk he gave those ladies. “Why, Mrs. Round, you shouldn’t have” and “Thank you kindly, ma’am.” A real charmer.

  When they left, he caught me looking at him funny and waved me toward the hut. “You can take the bed the first shift.”

  “Can’t yet,” I said, not wanting to admit I don’t sleep.

  “All right, I’ll relieve you in a few.” Then I stood there with my hands in my new pockets, trying to figure out what to do. He pointed toward the campfire. “Go sit in one of those cane-back chairs. You can see the giraffes from over there.”

  So I went over and sat myself down.

  It was dark by that time. There was only one other car at the Auto Rest that night. I couldn’t quite see what it was, the only light being from the little courtyard’s campfire. I squinted at the car and sat straight up at what I saw.

  It was a Packard. The more I squinted, the greener it got.

  I positioned the chair so I could see both the rig and the Packard, and waited. I straightened my new duds, situating my scrawny self like a relaxing rig-driving man, and watched the stars come out one by one. By the time the Big Dipper was above me, I saw the door open from the little hut and out she came.

  “Stretch, it is you!” Red called as she came close. “May I join you?” she said, and sat down. The light of the fire made her hair look so red I thought it might burst into flames. Up close, I saw she had freckles everywhere, the mighty, all-over redheaded Irish kind that women hid under pancake makeup shoveled on with a trowel. Not her. Plus, I could see she truly wasn’t all that much older than me no matter how fancy her clothes or car. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty, the way a girl can look too old for her own good—and, at that moment, mine.

  “I can’t believe you’re driving the giraffes!” she said. “The other man’s gone?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m not a very good driver. Just started. City girl, you know. You must be first-rate,” she said.

  I smiled, sitting up tall. If I didn’t speak soon, she’d think me dumb. I cleared my throat and found my voice. “You following us?” I said a tad too loud.

  “You don’t mind, do you?”

  I shook my head.

  She glanced back at the rig. We could see the giraffes’ heads poking out the top as they nibbled at the trees, and she grinned ear to ear. “Giraffes! Can you believe it?”

  I shrugged again, cocky now, like it was nothing. “They’re just animals.”

  “Just animals!” She looked at me like I had two heads. “They’re just animals like the Empire State Building’s just a building.” Then her eyes wandered to the birthmark the size of a state-fair prize tomato on my neck. When she saw I noticed, she held up her wrist—she had a bird-shaped birthmark of her own. “A birthmark is a sign of good luck, you know.”

  “Don’t know about that.” All I’d ever heard back home was it was the mark of the devil, and I sure wasn’t bringing that up.

  “Well, you seem lucky to me,” she said. “Very lucky.” As we watched the giraffes, there was a long awkward pause until, without looking my way, she said, “Why did you punch Lionel?”

  I sat up taller. “He grabbed your arm.”

  “I can take care of myself, you know,” she said. But her face softened enough for me to think—hope—she might have liked it.

  Right then, the giraffes started chewing their cud and their snouts disappeared from view. “Oh . . . oh no.” Red’s face dropped. “Is there any way I might meet them? Is it too late?”

  Now I was on the spot. The Old Man’d been letting people meet them all day, hadn’t he? Besides, I’d read her notepad. She wanted to touch a giraffe—and I had the power to make that happen.

  I hesitated, but her face opened like a rose and I was done for.

  Listening for the Old Man’s snores, I led her to the rig through the shadows of the campfire light. I started to climb to the open top. As soon as I put a boot on the running board, though, they poked their great heads out their windows, and I heard Red gasp, the kind of gasp you’d want to hear all the time. I jumped down to help her step up, but she didn’t need any help. She popped one of those two-tone shoes on the running board, the other on the wheel rim, and reached for both giraffes. As she made the giraffes’ acquaintance, her legs stretching this way and that, I couldn’t help staring at those trousers. Like I’d caught her looking at my birthmark, she caught me looking at her britches. “Stretch?”

  I felt my cheeks flush. “I never saw a woman wearing trousers before.”

  She laughed. “Well, I won’t be the last—you can take that to the bank,” she said. Then, agile as a cat, she climbed to the open top, straddled the plank between the giraffes’ traveling rooms, and grinned down at me, as if to say, What are you waiting for?

  My head all but swiveled off looking back at the Old Man’s hut. His rumbling snores were still going strong, so, stiffening my spine, up I went. As I eased down on the plank facing her, the giraffes pulled in their heads from their windows and surrounded us in the open air, their snouts bumping our knees. Girl butted me so hard looking for onions, I had to grab her big head to stay upright. Red, meanwhile, had touched one of Boy’s horns and got baptized with giraffe slobber, which would’ve sent most women screaming for the ground. But not Red.

  Laughing again, she wiped at her face and silky shirt with one hand, patting Boy’s big jaw with the other, and, as her pats turned to soft strokes, the whole of her seemed to unwind. “I’m touching a giraffe . . .” She sighed a sigh so full of reverie I thought she might float away. “They fill me up with wonder just looking at them. I see Africa as big as day . . . I see all the wonders of the world, waiting out there to be seen,” she said, giving me a look of such unbridled, overflowing joy, I thought she was going to kiss me. Even though I’d spent every night at the depot imagining how I’d kiss Augusta Red, it scared the bejeezus out of me. If Girl hadn’t picked that exact moment to butt me sideways, I would’ve found out. Instead Red turned all that feeling toward Wild Boy, her soft strokes turning into glorious caresses. “They are hard to believe, aren’t they?”

  Trying to keep from going to complete mush watching her caress Boy, I scrambled for something, anything, to say and heard one of the Old Man’s warnings come out of my mouth. “Careful. Big don’t know from small—”

  Boy licked at the air as Red kept on caressing. “Surely they’re not that dangerous, are they?” she asked.

  Right then, Girl’s huge head thumped me again. “They can crack a lion’s skull with a kick of their hooves,” I said, grunting as I tightened my hold.

  Red paused. “You’ve seen them kick?”

  “Seen this one,” I said, nodding at Girl, who now had her snout all but in my pocket. “She’s whopped the Old Ma
n, but not like she wants to send him to kingdom come—not yet anyway.”

  “So she’s feisty. Good.” Red reached over to pat her. She looked back at Boy. “But this one’s a gentleman, isn’t he?” He answered by sticking his snout in Red’s crotch, which had her squirming and me this side of bopping him for his bad manners. As he looked up, all giraffe innocence, she laughed again. “A gentleman rascal—even better.” And she went right back to her reverie, brushing her fingers over a diamond-shaped spot on the wild boy’s jaw as if she didn’t quite believe it was there. Then her voice turned soft, dreamy. “Did you know that you’re not the first to take a giraffe across a country? About a hundred years ago the ruler of Egypt sent one to the king of France. They sailed it over on a boat and walked it the five hundred miles to Paris. Can you imagine?” she went on, softer, dreamier. “The whole country went crazy for it—women wearing piled-up giraffe hairstyles, men wearing tall giraffe hats. They say one hundred thousand people lined the streets and watched in awe as the royal cavalry escorted the giraffe to the king’s palace.” She moved her hand down the wild boy’s neck, and Boy shuddered with delight. “And hundreds of years before that, an Egyptian sultan sent one to Florence. It’s actually in frescoes and paintings roaming the town squares and gardens! There’s even a constellation named after it.” She glanced up at the stars. “They say you can see it in the northern Mexican sky. Maybe we’ll be able to see it in the desert.” Then she sighed again, this time so quiet I almost missed it, and I really, really didn’t want to miss it.

  Boy began chewing his cud again and Girl gave up her onion hunt to do the same, leaving drool all over my new duds. Wiping at the slobber, I said to Red, “You sure know a lot about giraffes.”

  When I looked back, Red was gazing at the giraffes the same way the Old Man did. “They’re so full of everything I’ve never done or seen except in books that they might as well have floated down to earth from that hole in the sky—blown to earth by a hurricane to land in front of me. When I saw them, I knew exactly what I had to do.” With that, she reached to touch both giraffes one last time, then jumped down to the ground before I had a chance to help her.

  When I dropped down in front of her, she seemed out of breath, her hand pressed over her heart, but she was smiling all glory at me. “That was—wonderful,” she gasped. “Oh, Stretch, I—” Suddenly she was bear-hugging me so hard my broke rib was pinching my suffering spine. Then she stepped back just as quick, like the hug even surprised her. “Sorry . . . but you have no idea what that meant to me. Thank you so much,” she said, working to get back to herself.

  I wasn’t in any hurry to get back to myself, though, still feeling the warm ache of her body pressed to mine and being so very glad the Old Man had made me hose off.

  Taking a deep breath as we headed toward the campfire, she sighed one last time. Back to business, she pushed the curls out of her face, pulled the notepad from her shirt pocket, and said, “Does Mr. Jones know I’m following you?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Don’t tell him yet. I want a chance to impress him first. Maybe you can introduce me then, OK?”

  “Sure, but how’d you know his name?”

  “He’s in the newspaper stories. The giraffes made all the papers.” Red pulled a newspaper clipping from the pad and handed it to me. In the flickering light coming from the campfire, I saw it was the same clipping I’d seen in the notepad back at quarantine: MIRACLE GIRAFFES RIDE HURRICANE AT SEA, written by Lionel Abraham Lowe, “Mr. Big Reporter”—and there was the Old Man’s name, Riley Jones.

  “Keep it.” She grinned. “It’s in the papers, so it’s part of history. You’ll be part of history, too.”

  As I slipped it in my new shirt pocket, Red was so pepped up, she was bouncing on her heels enough to make her freckles jiggle. But she was movie-star gorgeous to my seventeen-year-old eyes. Feeling my cheeks about to flush again, I looked away, sure not even the shadows could hide the blasted blush this time. Shifting my weight from one boot to the other, I silently cussed myself cool.

  “Stretch, tell me your story,” I heard her say.

  Pretending to study the campfire, I mumbled, “I’ve got no story.”

  “Sure you do. Everybody’s got one.”

  At that, I looked around at her. “What’s yours?”

  Her face went south. So did her happy bounce as she smiled a tight-lipped smile I didn’t understand at all. “Nobody likes a sad story,” she said. “You’re the one that’s got a good one, I can tell. That face of yours seems right out of a Dust Bowl photo—are you an Okie? Tell me how you got here and it’ll be in Life magazine.”

  Even farmboys had seen copies of Life magazine, which was the closest thing to having a TV you could get, being packed as it was with pictures of the world, especially beautiful women, on every slick full-color page. “You work for Life magazine!”

  “I’m doing a photo-essay,” she said, making a frame with her hands. “‘As the country teeters between a depression and Europe’s looming war, a pair of giraffes, survivors of a hurricane at sea, left a wake of much-needed cheer while driven cross-country to the San Diego Zoo, where lady zoo director Mrs. Belle Benchley awaited.’” Then she clicked the frame like she was snapping a photo. “But it’s the pictures that’ll make it. You don’t have the shots, it can be the Second Coming of Christ and it wouldn’t make it in Life. I plan to do a photo-essay on Belle Benchley, too, when we get there. I’m going to be the next Margaret Bourke-White.”

  “Who?”

  “The first female photographer for Life,” she said. “If you’ve read Life, you’ve seen her pictures. She’s got to be the greatest photographer on earth.”

  I felt my ignorance of the world like a load of horse crap around my neck in the presence of a sea of rosewater. Catching a glimpse of the Packard in the shadows, I proceeded to make it worse. Back then, a woman didn’t drive by herself on the highway. Definitely no lady. Ever. And I heard myself blurt, “Aren’t you scared on the road all alone?”

  She paused, studying my face. “What makes you say that?”

  “Well, you’re a girl,” I went right ahead and said.

  Something flamed up behind her eyes as she flashed me a look so exasperated it seemed to take on a life of its own, as if to say, Ah, Stretch, not you, too.

  I should have been apologizing. Instead, melting at the way those hazel eyes of hers looked all fiery, I felt my cheeks starting to flush yet again. Fighting like hell to hide it, I mumbled, “I’m just saying it’s not safe out here alone.”

  I was a goner and she knew it. I watched the flame behind her eyes cool down, until, with a glance back at the rig, she smiled at me ever so slightly. “Well, I’m not really alone anymore, am I?” Back to smooth city girl, she then raised her chin and said, “How about a business proposition? I’d appreciate your help getting this story, and in return I’ll pay you back any way you say.” She put out her hand. “Deal?” She wanted to shake, so I did, and she shook it as hard as any man.

  “We keep this strictly business,” she said again, still shaking my hand.

  “OK.”

  “Strictly,” she repeated.

  “OK.”

  “I don’t need to be saved or protected,” she went on.

  “OK,” I repeated.

  “So we have a deal,” she said one more time, and we stopped shaking. Or I should say she did.

  We stood there in the dying light coming from the campfire and I felt her leave-taking coming on strong. “My name’s Woody,” I said. I didn’t tell her my last name for fear she’d laugh like the Old Man.

  “Mine’s Augusta.”

  “Augie?” I said, remembering what the reporter called her.

  “Only one person calls me that, only to vex me,” she answered, smiling that tight-lipped smile again. With that, she headed toward her hut, her curls bouncing like they were as alive as she was, and my heart split in two. “I’ll see you down the road, Woody,” she said ov
er her shoulder.

  I wanted to say something a Driver of Giraffes might say, something Clark Gable might say. Instead I called after her, “My last name’s Nickel.”

  She glanced back. “Drive safely, Woody Nickel.” And she didn’t laugh.

  I watched until the dark swallowed her up. Stoking the campfire, I sat down to keep watch for another couple of hours, my mind full of girly trousers and fancy magazines and Paris and old paintings and giraffes floating down to earth. The time flew by. I even thought I heard the giraffes humming again, like I’d dreamed back in quarantine. When I walked over close to listen, I heard only the wind whistling through the trees, so I went back to the fire and my big thoughts.

  The Old Man appeared from the dark as the fire was nothing but embers and the stars had shifted without my notice. “Time for you to sleep, boy. Close the top before you go,” he said, already stirring the fire back to life.

  5

  Asleep

  Inside the Auto Rest hut, still feeling the warmth of Red’s body pressed to my aching ribs, I found myself back at the depot in my mind, imagining our kiss to end all kisses safely happening just in my head. Instead of it keeping me awake, though, I went fast to sleep, the first real sleep since the quarantine night inside the rig. I was walking across France with Girl, leading her by a halter like I used to do with my mare, then . . .

  Hush-a-bye / Don’t you cry / Go to sleep, little baby.

  When you wake / You shall have / All the pretty little horses.

  “Li’l one, who you talking to?”

  Brown-apple eyes stare.

  “Woody Nickel, tell me what happened out there and tell me now!”

  I knew I was inside my familiar Panhandle nightmare . . . until I hear a train in the distance and I’m standing in bright sunlight by a cornfield . . . as a giraffe bursts from the dried stalks, careening and crashing, to the sound of lassos whipping the air . . .