West with Giraffes: A Novel

by Lynda Rutledge

  “Who are you?” I say.

  “Ah, Pops, you say that every night.”

  I’m not anybody’s Pops and sure not his. But he reminds me of Seventh Son, so I don’t growl at him. “I stayed at a colored motel once,” I tell him. “It was nice.”

  “O-kay,” he says.

  “The giraffes liked it, too. Didn’t you, Girl?” I say toward the window.

  He frowns. “You seeing an old girlfriend right now, Pops?”

  “No, my friend Girl.”

  “You mean your girlfriend.”

  “No. Girl.” I point back over my shoulder at her.

  “O-kay,” he says again, looking right through Girl like she isn’t there.

  “She’s a giraffe,” I say. “You’re staring right at her. She’s in the window.”

  “Pops—” He screws up his face like he doesn’t have good sense. “We’re on the fifth floor.”

  “Yeah?” I pause. “Yeah.” I turn toward the window.

  Girl is gone.

  “Listen,” he is saying, “maybe you should take a break from whatever that is you’re doing. You’ve got to pace yourself at your age.”

  My age? I look down at what I’d just wrote.

  It’s my birthday.

  Wait. No, it’s not.

  It was.

  My heart stutters again as I remember.

  I’m over one hundred . . .

  “If you promise not to attack the new TV, we’ll let you come down to the rec room if you want. Nothing’s worth making yourself croak, right? Pops?”

  With a glance back at the empty window, I start writing again.

  Faster.

  10

  Into Arkansas

  I once knew a man who didn’t know his own birthday. He was a lucky man. He lived his life each day like any other, never quite knowing his age, therefore never knowing a birth date’s yearly tyranny. I can do without them, thank you, having had many, many more than my share. The thing about birthdays is you’re rocking along drawing breath, living sunrise to sunrise, becoming who you’ll become without a thought put to it—until the day you popped into this world arrives. Then whatever happens, good or bad, you’ll forever mark it in memory along with the passage of ticking time, a date on a calendar forcing you to look behind with no way to change things and look ahead with no way to know what’s coming. When I reach back for this birthday on my ride with the giraffes, that’s what I recall my new eighteen-year-old-self feeling as I stood on the banks of the Mississippi River, a river so wide that, if you try crossing it, you can’t see where you’re going. With no idea what was ahead for me and no time to ponder what was behind, I was traveling blind.

  We’d just passed through Memphis proper after the fat-cat chase. The giraffes were riding heavy, the green Packard was either hiding or waiting down the road again, and I was still discombobulated. With every sign we’d seen pointing back to the Memphis Zoo as we drove through the city, I had mourned my lost California ticket, eyeing the Old Man for any change of heart and still worrying about some Old Man–style retribution. But he kept on looking back, shotgun in hand, until we saw the bridge up ahead and he motioned me to stop near the riverbank before we crossed over.

  As the Old Man parked the shotgun under an arm and started checking the rig, out popped the giraffes’ snouts, their nostrils sniffing the watery smell. But I couldn’t make myself move. All I could do was stand and stare at the skinny bridge disappearing over the river like it was falling off the edge of the world—and I felt my stomach do the same. HARAHAN BRIDGE, the sign had said, 4,973 FEET LONG. Almost a mile. I had come over it heading toward Cuz, but at night on a train down the middle. From what I could see, cars and trucks were crossing on single lanes slapped on either side that were scarcely more than boarded-over tracks.

  “I’m driving the rig over that?” I mumbled.

  “No choice,” the Old Man said. “Plus, it’s rough. So help me get their heads in and let’s hope they keep ’em there.”

  No choice. My gut, though, was telling me if I went over that bridge, I was making a choice, one that I wasn’t quite understanding. And I still wasn’t ready. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

  Right then, one of the giraffes kicked the rig and the Old Man sprung up the side to latch their windows himself. “Let’s go,” he called down to the sound of stomping and snorting.

  I’m jumpy about the water, that’s all . . . like the giraffes, I kept telling myself as I crawled behind the wheel and pulled us into the traffic entering the bridge. Taking one last look over his shoulder, the Old Man placed the shotgun back on the rack.

  With a thump and a bounce, we were on.

  Every tire taking a beating, every tooth in my jaw rattling, we crept along. On my side was the track going down the middle, and I tried not to think what would happen if a train came along. On the Old Man’s side was water, water, and more water, the jutting trestles the only thing between us and a free fall of giraffe, truck, and body parts to a muddy Mississippi splashdown.

  “K-keep it s-steady . . . ,” the Old Man said as we jolted along, cars stacked up behind us and getting more so with every minute.

  WELCOME TO ARKANSAS, said the sign halfway across the bridge.

  “S-s-steady—” the Old Man kept on saying. “Steady-y-y.”

  With one last bone-jangling bounce, we were on the other side, rolling once again onto solid ground, both giraffes popping their latches to sniff the good earth.

  The delta land spread out flat on either side as far as all four of us could see, and the Old Man started showing signs of relaxing. The racked shotgun stayed put and his glances over his shoulder stopped altogether. Heaving a hefty sigh, he leaned back, took that fedora off his head, and set it on the seat between us. Soon, as the railroad track once again veered out of sight, we were back to good traveling speed and the soothing rhythm of the road. That was nothing, though, compared to the soothing sight of that fedora lying quiet between us.

  For a couple of miles, we rode in silence, watching the black delta land stretch into cotton fields from here to yonder. I could see acres and acres of pickers’ backs bent low, pulling their “whole-9-yards” cotton bags behind them, only a few near the highway unbending in time to see the giraffes go by. Still looking plain pitiful with dried blood on his shirt and a crusted-up gash on his temple, the Old Man then spied a grocery and dry goods store on the dirt road skirting the highway and ordered me to stop. Steering around a farmer driving a mule-driven rickety wagon, I parked us this side of the store.

  The Old Man got out and flipped open Girl’s trapdoor, and she was still so exhausted she didn’t even kick when he dared to touch the rewrapped splint.

  “Water ’em,” he ordered as he flipped the door shut, his face grim, and headed into the store. When he returned, he was wearing a new shirt, his head gash was cleaned up, and he was carrying a gunnysack of onions to replace the one used to smack the driver.

  “I called Little Rock,” he said as we climbed back into the truck cab. “We’ll be overnighting at their pint-sized zoo.” Then he said, “I haven’t forgot what I promised you about Memphis, boy. But things have changed. We’ll talk about it tonight.”

  I started to reach in my pocket for the comfort of the double-eagle gold piece. Glancing at the Old Man, though, I thought better of it and put the rig into gear.

  For the next few hours, the Old Man was lost in his thoughts, with me worrying what those thoughts were. It was October but the air was so thick with heat and moisture, you’d have thought it was hot-damn August. The giraffes, though, seemed to like it fine, having not pulled their heads in once since the Memphis bridge.

  By the time the sun began to set, we were getting close to Little Rock, piney woods framing the winding highway. All seemed normal enough as we approached a tiny town that looked like every other tiny town we’d been through . . . until we saw the big homemade sign:

  NIGGER, DON’T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON YOU HERE

  R
iding the rails, I’d heard of “sundown towns” with signs warning “colored” travelers not to be caught there after dark. Now I was seeing one. I was staring so hard at the thing, I almost ran the rig up on a wreck not twenty yards past it.

  There, spun around sideways to the highway, was a rusted-out Model A truck with PECANS FOR SALE painted slapdash on the side. The entire head of a very dead big-antlered buck was stuck in the front grill, and the radiator was gushing pink water. I veered in time to miss the truck but not the buck’s back end. Blood, deer parts, and pecans sprayed across the highway—and as we passed, parts squishing and pecans crunching, a Black man in a straw hat scrambled for the tree line.

  Both the Old Man and I looked back. I was staring at the deer parts we’d flattened. The Old Man, though, was staring at that tree line.

  “Pull over,” he ordered.

  I thought he wanted to check the rig’s front bumper. Instead he climbed out, walked to the tree line, and called out something I couldn’t quite hear. He must have gotten no response, because he started up again, this time pointing toward Little Rock, then back at the sign, then up at the setting sun. With that, the pecan man eased out from the trees, straw hat in hand. They talked a second, then the pecan man followed the Old Man to the rig, eyes darting between the road and the two giraffe heads swiveling to get a good look at him. When the Old Man opened the cab door and pointed to the bench seat’s space between him and me, the pecan man shook his head.

  “Nossuh,” he said.

  The Old Man tried reasoning with him, but the pecan man kept glancing down the road and shaking his head.

  “Nossuh. No-SUH.”

  Not until we heard a car coming did the situation change—the pecan man sprinted back to the trees.

  As the car passed, the Old Man fumed, picked up one of the water cans between the rig and cab, and shoved it into his floorboard. Then he called toward the pecan man, pointing to the now-empty water-can space behind the cab.

  The pecan man peeked out. Shoving his straw hat back on his head, he rushed to his wrecked truck and grabbed up as many lumpy gunnysacks from the wrecked truck as he could handle. Hustling back to the rig, he squeezed himself into the water can’s empty space behind the cab, pecan sacks cradled in his arms.

  After the Old Man did his own squeezing into his seat, legs straddling the big metal water can, I put the rig in gear and steered us onto the road, eyeing what I could see of the pecan man in my rearview. Stretching out her front window, Girl’s long tongue was nibbling at his straw hat, making the pecan man weave and bob until another car whizzed by and the pecan man pulled his straw hat as low as it would go.

  As we entered the one-horse town, I recall feeling the sweat pop out on my forehead. I’d already felt scared lots of times in my young life, but this was a different kind of scared. It wasn’t like we were going to roll through unseen with a couple of giraffes, and if somebody, anybody in this damn town, noticed the pecan man, there might be forewarned hell to pay. The sun wasn’t down yet, but it wasn’t far from it. I didn’t feel a bit better when the Old Man moved the shotgun from the rack back to his lap.

  The burg’s downtown was only four blocks long, barely more than a wide place in the highway. As we rolled slow through it, a handful of people, all unsurprisingly White, came out of the storefronts to stare. I glanced back for the pecan man.

  He wasn’t there.

  “STOP!” the Old Man yelled, and I stomped on the brakes.

  A red-faced yokel in a shabby tan uniform with an old sidearm on his hip had stepped right in front of the moving rig and put up a hand. Eyeing our bloody front bumper, he walked over to look in at us from the Old Man’s window. On his uniform was written in what looked like leaky blue fountain pen ink: “Sundown Peace Officer.” It didn’t take much imagination to see him in another kind of uniform, the kind with a hood . . . and I found myself wishing for Big Papa’s clan complete with those sharp, nasty-looking scythes.

  “You’re creating a hazard, mister,” the yokel grumbled. “What the heck are you toting there?”

  “Giraffes.”

  “Uh-huh. You with a carnival? We don’t much cotton to carnivals around here. Too much riffraff among other undesirables. We like a peaceful town after sundown,” he said, tapping his uniform’s inky title. “And it’s almost sundown.”

  “We’re only passing through, if you’ll let us on by,” the Old Man said. “Trying to make the Little Rock Zoo before dark.”

  “Uh-huh.” He eyed the Old Man’s head gash and nodded toward the rig’s front. “There’s blood on your bumper.”

  “We hit a buck about a mile back,” the Old Man said.

  The “sundown peace officer” stepped back to the bumper and flicked off a piece of bloody deer pelt. Meanwhile, in my rearview I could see Girl craning her neck to sniff at the space where the pecan man had been. The yokel looked up at Girl. “That animal agitated about something?”

  “Deer riled him,” the Old Man said. “That’s all.”

  The scruffy officer scratched himself. Then, resting a hand on his sidearm’s grip in the way he must have seen lawmen in Westerns do it, he started moving toward the space where Girl was still sniffing.

  At that, the Old Man raised the muzzle of the shotgun to rest on the windowsill, just high enough for the sundown peace officer to see. “You know, officer,” said the Old Man, “I’d keep my distance if I were you. Those are dangerous animals. Real dangerous.”

  The yokel paused, staring between the gun barrel and the look on the Old Man’s face, and slowly lowered his hand from his sidearm.

  “Like I said,” the Old Man went on, “we’re passing through to get to Little Rock before sundown. We should go.”

  “Well, OK then . . . I don’t mean to keep you nice White folks,” he mumbled, then stepped back, stuck out his chest, and waved us by. “You can move along.”

  As we picked up speed hitting the open highway, I heard the wind whipping what sounded like the rig’s stashed tarp meant for cold nights or heavy storms, neither of which we’d had so far. When I looked back in the rearview, I saw the tarp rise into view, and with it the pecan man’s face. He had pulled out the tarp enough to skinny under it to cover him and his pecans, his broken straw hat the only casualty. Not until we’d left the town far behind, though, did he ease the tarp all the way back and sit up, Girl greeting him with a lick and a nudge.

  The Old Man and I didn’t say a word. There wasn’t much to say, at least not much either of us wanted to say. So we stayed silent, both of us glancing back at the pecan man every few seconds. Soon, he was sitting tall enough to reach up and touch Girl’s snout like he wasn’t quite sure he was touching something real.

  On the outskirts of Little Rock, the pecan man tapped on the back window. I pulled over near a dirt street and he hopped down, straightened his broken straw hat, grabbed up the pecan sacks, and, chin up, held one of the sacks up to the Old Man’s window. I could tell the Old Man really wanted to let the pecan man keep his pecans. But when there’s a debt to pay, a man has the right to pay it. So he took the sack. With a nod our way and a last glance back at the giraffes, the pecan man disappeared into the shadows.

  We sat there a minute, watching the shadows grow deeper where he vanished, even the giraffes straining for a last look. Then the Old Man set the shotgun back on its rack and said, “Let’s go.”

  Putting the rig in gear, I heard a vehicle roaring up behind us.

  I looked back and froze.

  It was a panel truck . . . a yellow panel truck . . .

  ARKANSAS EVENING GAZETTE DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR, said the truck’s sign as it whizzed by.

  Swallowing my heart back down my throat, I let off the clutch and moved us on.

  Soon as we passed the city limits, we saw a sign pointing to the FAIR PARK ZOO. It led us onto an old cobblestone bridge across a railroad crossing and into the city park, straight to the zoo’s entrance. The zoo’s single building looked like the stone structure
s I saw in the mountains, no doubt built by the WPA, too. The entrance was set up on a little rise, and the park surrounding the zoo was full of people. Not like you might think, though. Everywhere we looked were down-on-their-luck folks lying about, on benches, in makeshift lean-tos, and in rain tunnels, like the people in Central Park I passed in New York City chasing the giraffes.

  “Stay here,” the Old Man ordered, getting out. Moving around a beat cop rousting a tramp away from the entrance, he made his way into the zoo.

  “We’re getting giraffes!” screamed a kid who broke away from his mother to run up to us. “Giraffes! Giraffes!” he kept saying, jumping up and down.

  A crowd formed, already oohing and aahing as the giraffes stretched down to be touched. I could tell it was like a sweet chorus to the giraffes after the day we’d had, and despite myself, it made me feel good.

  The Old Man returned, motioning me to bring the rig around to a gate in the zoo’s high stone fence. By the time we caught up to him at the open gate, he was already talking to a short man in wire-rim glasses dressed fancier than you’d think any zoo man should be—all gussied up in suit, tie, and bowler hat. Soon as we were in, he closed the gate and headed us toward a spreading sycamore along the back wall, perfect for giraffe-feasting.

  The zoo was as tiny as the Old Man said. Even in the growing dusk, I could see it all from where I parked the rig. To the left, the front entrance part was a long building housing monkey cages that opened into a breezeway leading to outside paddocks to our right—a buffalo roaming in a big pen, tortoises and prairie dogs inside a dry moat, peacocks, some camels, a lion, a zebra, a brown bear. That was it.

  The Old Man and the bowler-hat zoo man stood in front of the rig chatting as I popped the top for the giraffes. When I jumped down, the Old Man waved me over.

  “My apologies about the trouble out in front,” the bowler-hat zoo man was saying, his voice as high as a woman’s. “We’ve got the same Hooverville problem blighting our nice park like most cities these days, no matter what we do, and it’s always worse at closing time. Who do we have here?”