West with Giraffes: A Novel

by Lynda Rutledge

  Falling out of the hut’s bed, I threw myself out the door.

  It was still dark.

  The Old Man, sitting on the rig’s running board, got up at the sight of me in my skivvies appearing out of nowhere, barefoot and big-eyed. Trying not to think of Aunt Beulah, I slid against the truck, full awake. I told the Old Man I was staying. He scowled. “Well, you’re not doing it in your drawers.”

  So, after I came back fully dressed, the Old Man headed for the hut to sleep the few hours until sunrise, leaving me with the giraffes and my cornfield worries to greet the dawn. I sat on that running board and stared wide-eyed into the country dark, as deep a dark as I’d ever seen. At first light, I moved toward the field beyond the camp area, expecting a cornfield and a train track. There was nothing but pines. I’d never been happier to see a bunch of trees.

  Not until that moment did I remember Red. I looked back at her hut. The Packard was gone.

  6

  To Washington, DC

  Memories stick to things. Out of nowhere, something finds your nose, ears, or eyes and you’re on the other side of the country or world or in a whole other decade, being kissed by a doe-eyed beauty or punched by a drunken pal. You’ve got no control over it, none at all. One whiff of dust whenever they clean my room and I’m back in the Panhandle staring down a brown blizzard. One glimpse of pink peonies and I’m back in WWII France, standing over a fresh battlefield grave.

  And one howl of a rolling old police siren and I am back in the moment I’m driving the rig smack into Washington, DC, seconds from a nervous retch.

  Just an hour before, as we tended to the giraffes preparing to leave Round’s Roadside Auto Rest, the Old Man kept to himself whatever thoughts he had about my peculiar behavior during the night, and I was glad of it. Because as soon as we got back on the road, we started seeing signs for DC one right after the other. When we saw one that said WASHINGTON DC 3 MILES, we spotted the city ahead—and in the middle was something big and pointy. It was the Washington Monument. Of course, I didn’t know that and I wasn’t about to ask the Old Man. He was already fidgeting that fedora of his, but before I could wonder why, I knew. The highway had widened to an extra lane on both sides and cars completely surrounded us. That’s when a police car, with that siren a’rolling, whizzed past on the shoulder so fast that I jerked the wheel and threw the Old Man into the dashboard, his fedora flying to the floor. Cussing, he grabbed it up in time to be thrown against the door as the giraffes rocked the rig. Clenching the steering wheel, I thought I might retch as I grasped the full reality of what I had talked my way into—I was driving two colossal African beasts right into big-city traffic.

  Feeling the contents of my stomach roaring up, I swallowed it back down, focusing all I had on keeping the rig steady as cars kept whizzing and the giraffes kept rocking.

  Parking his fedora on the seat between us, the Old Man went dead still, and in a voice mighty close to the one he used to calm the giraffes, he said, “Now. Take it slow. Slow and smooth. Don’t mind a thing around you.”

  Up ahead, I could see a river and signs. Lots of signs. One of them was pointing the way to the NATIONAL ZOO over the FRANCIS SCOTT KEY BRIDGE. The traffic was getting thicker, but I kept driving like a granny, slow-slow-slow. So slow a DC motorcycle cop with his lights flashing was driving up beside us. The Old Man, not looking the least bit surprised, gave the cycle cop a nod, and the cop moved back behind us.

  I knew, within seconds, he’d be telling me to make the turn to the DC zoo. When I glanced at him, though, he started talking fast. “Listen up. There’s no taking the giraffes out of the rig ever, because once they’re out, there’s no guarantee we’d ever get ’em back in, and that’d be the death of them one way or the other. You don’t tell a giraffe what to do. You ask. They may have taken a shine to you, but that’ll mean nothing if they decide later on it doesn’t. They’re not your pets or your Panhandle horse. You respect them as wild animals. Got it?”

  I nodded so hard my teeth rattled. I was going to California.

  “OK then,” he said. “You can drive us to Memphis.”

  I was sure my ears weren’t working right. “Californy,” I corrected him.

  “Memphis,” the Old Man said again. “The road to Memphis is smooth sailing, you’re driving decent, and we’re making good time. Time is everything now, the darlings’ bones so gotdam delicate. We still have lots of daylight to get down the road and we should take it. There’s another zoo in Memphis where I’ll have time to call way ahead for a new driver to be waiting so we won’t be wasting a day or more like we’ll be doing here,” he said as the bridge exit appeared.

  “I can go the distance,” I said quick.

  “Take it or leave it, boy.” The Old Man nodded toward the bridge. “Right now.”

  I took it.

  With that, the Old Man turned his gaze back to the road. “All right. Slow. Smooth. Exactly like you been doing.”

  A second cycle cop appeared, lights flashing and siren rolling. The Old Man made some sort of forward-ho gesture for him and the traffic slowed even more in our wake as we moved on through the city. At the city’s edge, the road narrowed back to two lanes, the cycle cops veered off, and the giraffes popped their heads out to watch them go while I forced myself calm. As we moved into the countryside and everything quieted all the way down, I studied my sideview mirror, wishing to see Red but also wondering what had just happened. “Why didn’t the cops take us to the DC zoo?”

  “’Cause I never called.”

  I chewed on that a second. “How’d they know about us?”

  “The Boss Lady.”

  And I chewed on that a second. “The Boss Lady is Mrs. Benchley?”

  “That’s right.”

  “A woman is the boss of the whole San Diego Zoo?”

  “That’s right,” he said, propping his arm on the windowsill. “Looks like a granny, dresses like a schoolmarm, swears like a sailor, and still charms snooty zoo galoots with their fancy educations.”

  “. . . How’d she get that job?”

  “Way I heard it, the gent who started up the zoo from a menagerie after the Great War rang up civil service for a bookkeeper since they barely had money for a keeper much less a staff. She showed up and started doing everything from taking tickets to nursing sick animals until she was running the place.

  “Then she started doing those radio shows and movie newsreels, and got famous telling stories about the zoo. But, I can tell you for a fact, she’s got stories she won’t be putting on those.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, like the time she walked into a pen with an escaped baboon.”

  “On purpose?”

  “The woman wasn’t stupid, boy. Why, I’ve seen a ninety-pound baboon throw a grown man across a service yard. No, it had gotten into the area behind the monkey quadrangle and was having a gay old time, rattling cages of all the screeching monkeys and loping round and round. By the time I got there, five keepers were shouting and swinging clubs trying to scare it back in its pen. The closer the men got, the scareder and wilder and crazier the baboon got—and you hadn’t seen crazed until you’ve seen a crazed baboon. I was sure it was going to charge us. Then, right that holy minute, the Boss Lady appears from the other end. She’d heard us in her office, thought we were chasing rats, and was coming to tell us we were disturbing the visitors. We yelled at her to run, but before she could do a thing, the baboon headed right for her.” The Old Man shook his head. “I tell you, I braced for the worst. The Boss Lady knew full well she was in mortal danger. One gnash of that baboon’s jaws could break her neck. But what does she do? The woman doesn’t run. She doesn’t hide. She forces a smile—and just opens her arms. And what does that baboon do? It jumps into them, wailing like a baby!”

  “Then what’d she do?”

  “What else could she do? She carried that big baboon back to its pen—with six grown men watching, struck dumb at the sight. We braced for a bawling out, b
ut she was so mad she didn’t speak to us for a week.” He went on to tell me more Boss Lady stories, like the times she picked up an escaped rattlesnake. And took a streetcar home with a sick baby kangaroo in a basket. And mailed fleas to somebody back East for a flea circus until the post office got wind of it.

  After that, he told me story after crazy story about life at the zoo, making it all sound mighty exciting, until we came to the Virginia state line. “There you go, boy,” he said, pointing to an official-looking sign announcing the road’s name: LEE HIGHWAY. We’d made it to the Old Man’s cross-country “transcontinental auto route,” the southern route he’d been talking about, and the farther we cruised down the fine smooth road, the more my destiny feeling returned and the more I was sure I’d make it to California. If I’d had a map, I’d have seen the fancy highway was two lanes paved all the way to San Diego right through the desert, its smooth concrete looking like the world of tomorrow to anybody who’d ever tried to drive farther than the nearest cotton gin.

  But I’d also have seen something else—the Lee Highway wasn’t going south. It was already south. I’d heard “southern route” and imagined what was south to my Panhandle mind, that being Louisiana and Texas Gulf Coast and a skirting of the Mexico border. In only one more day, though, the road was going to turn and go straight-arrow west—right back through the Texas Panhandle where I came from—and I couldn’t hazard that for reasons I never wanted the Old Man to know.

  Little did I know that being dumped at Memphis might be the saving of me. As I drove that nice highway with the hurricane giraffes, hanging on to my California dream and feeling God Almighty and the Heavenly Host again on my side, I hadn’t a clue what I was risking behind that wheel. It was far more than a couple of mighty precious giraffe necks. It was my own.

  Before long, we seemed to be gaining alti—

  . . . “Lunchtime, sunshine!”

  —Rattling me clean out of the story and back into my room is Greasy.

  “You interrupted me in the middle of a sentence!” I holler as he busts through the door again.

  “But it’s lunchtime, sunshine, the best part of the day, and you didn’t touch your breakfast. That’s a bad boy.”

  “Quit talking to me like I’m a child, you little pipsqueak! Go AWAY. Can’t you see I’m busy?”

  He grabs my wheelchair handles again. “C’mon now.”

  I throw on the brakes.

  He pulls them back up.

  I push them back down. Dropping my pencil, my heart . . . freezes.

  “Hey—” I hear Greasy’s voice from far away. “Hey, hey—goddamn! You dying? I’m going for the nurse!”

  He rushes out the door as my heart starts up again. Mmmphgh.

  “Whew.” Rattled, I rub my chest, take a deep breath, and look around. Over in the window, Girl is wiggling her rubbery lips at me. “I could’ve used your help, you know.” Uneasy, I pick up my pencil, forcing myself to focus.

  And I hear the shuffling of dominoes.

  Real slow, I turn around. There, sitting on the bed shuffling, is Rosie. She’s younger, though, her hair brighter, longer . . . with no hint of gray.

  I blink.

  She’s still there.

  A game and a story . . . she’s saying . . . “Then you take your pills. Why don’t you tell me about the Old Man, Riley Jones, again? I do love a man with a dark secret. Or maybe the night you slept in the cab with you-know-who! No, wait. The mountains—that was so exciting. Yes, that’s always been one of my favorite parts.”

  Then she isn’t there anymore.

  “Did you see her, too?” I ask Girl.

  Girl nods her big snout.

  I take another deep breath. “Oh, good. I was beginning to worry I was seeing things,” I say, and turn back to my writing pad, headed to the mountains.

  7

  Over the Blue Ridge Mountains

  Before long, we seemed to be gaining altitude.

  I could feel us climbing as I began working the gears more. Despite what the Old Man said about the Memphis stretch being smooth sailing, I knew full well that mountains stood between us and the flat side of Tennessee. I’d never even seen a mountain, much less driven up one—much less driven a rig with two-ton giraffes over one.

  But at least mountains, I told myself, wouldn’t have cornfields.

  By midmorning, right after we’d had a stop by the side of the road for some tree-munching and neck-stretching and bandage-checking and Girl-kicking, we crossed over a stone bridge that looked like it had been crossed by George Washington himself. And we started going up. There was no maybe about it anymore.

  At a burg called Thornton’s Gap, the two-lane highway narrowed and we went around our first hill, then another and another. I geared down. Up. Then down again. I began to feel heat doing the same up and down my neck. The giraffes were moving back and forth with the rig, their big weight shifting. Even the Old Man had a healthy grip on his door frame.

  Then the signs started coming.

  ENTRY TO THE BLUE RIDGE MOUNTAINS AND SHENANDOAH NATIONAL PARK, said the first one.

  SCENIC SKYLINE DRIVE—FIRST LEFT, said the second.

  Any other time, I might’ve thought something called Skyline Drive was a hot-dog-and-damn sight worth seeing. But now was not any other time.

  Then came the third sign: LEE HIGHWAY—KEEP STRAIGHT AHEAD.

  My spirits rose.

  “Just follow that sign,” the Old Man said. “I scouted this. It’s an easy up and over, then back down to the highway proper.”

  My spirits rose even higher. Until we came upon the biggest sign of all.

  In the middle of the road, at the intersection of Skyline Drive and the Lee Highway, sat a barricade with a DETOUR arrow as big as Dallas, pointing up that Skyline Drive.

  “What the—” the Old Man muttered.

  About fifty yards down the detour was what looked like a football-field-long tunnel clear through the mountainside. A sign announced the name, as if they were proud of it: MARY’S ROCK TUNNEL AHEAD—TURN ON LIGHTS.

  I pulled us to a stop. The Old Man jumped out and marched past the sign to the bend in the road ahead. What he saw made him cuss and throw down his fedora. Scooping up the hat, he pulled it low over his brow and began pacing the length of the rig, the giraffes moving their heads along with him, until he stopped to stare back the way we came. He was thinking about turning us around. If we did, that would be the end of my rig driving.

  He crawled in the cab. “Side railing’s gone as far as you can see,” he grumbled. “Something took it out, a rock slide or a car going over.” He fidgeted with his fedora, then turned to look straight at me. “You ever driven in mountains, boy? Don’t lie to me.”

  I didn’t want to lie big so I lied little. “Not that much.”

  As he stared down the Skyline Drive detour, the whole of him drooped. He took off his hat and slapped it on the truck’s seat the way I already knew meant he was tired of thinking. “Guess we should take them back to DC and wait, even though that means taking them outa the rig. Which means losing more days . . . and maybe worse.” He turned, stared me full in the face, and said, “Now’s the time to tell me if you got any thoughts on the subject.”

  The Old Man hadn’t decided. He wanted bad to keep going. He just didn’t want us going off a cliff. All I had to do was say I could handle it. Instead, looking at the tunnel, what I heard myself say was:

  “We have to go through that?”

  He paused, and I thought that was it. “It’s tall enough,” he said. “I can talk you through. It’s the afterwards that matters.”

  “The . . . afterwards?”

  “Turnouts, switchbacks, and overlooks to grind every gear you got before we level out and ease down back to the Lee.”

  “How far?”

  “That’s not your worry right now,” he said.

  I didn’t like the sound of that.

  “There’ll be no turning around once we start and there’ll be no seco
nd chances,” he went on. “We can go back to DC—there’s no shame in it, and I’ll still buy you that ticket back to New York. I had my chance to wait for an experienced driver, but we were making good time and the darlings had taken to you. So I didn’t. It’ll be on me,” he said, adding under his breath, “’Course if we end up at the bottom of the mountain the hard way, it’ll be on me, too. But in that event we’ll all be past caring.”

  That’s the way he posed it. Either he believed my driving-skill lies or he was not telling me something, which was more likely the case. At the time, though, all I could think was what my rowdy young self had been thinking since leaving the harbor dock—Californy.

  I straightened my spine, and with the hubris of a selfish boy with nothing behind and everything ahead, I said, “I can do it.”

  “Hope to God I don’t regret this,” he muttered, setting his jaw. “OK. Here’s what you’re going to do. You’ll move us real slow into the mouth, not jostling our passengers or whomping their heads one little bit. It’s a long tunnel, and your first thought is to hug the side of the mountain. But you can’t see the side of the tunnel, so instead what you do is follow the yellow line down the middle, keeping your tire right on it. If you don’t think you can do that, then we need to put their heads in right now. If we do, though, there’s no good place for us to let their heads back out for a while, and that might be a big problem if they get jumpy. Because on the other side it’s going to curve and curve and curve some more before we level out, and they’ll be doing it blind. So we got to decide right now which way to play it—with a couple of two-ton beasts blindly being bunged around inside their boxes or with their windows open, so they can see what’s coming and help us balance the rig.”

  I stared a little stunned at him after all that, then looked back at the giraffes, who were already shuffling so much we could feel it up front.

  “Open or closed?” he pressed.