“This here is Woodrow Wilson Nickel, my young driver,” the Old Man said. “We had a bit of miserableness this morning in Tennessee that made us wish for a secure night’s sleep this side of the river. So we thank you in advance for the short-notice hospitality.”
“Any friend of Mrs. Benchley is welcome here,” the bowler-hat man said, his eyes darting past me to the giraffes already nibbling the tree. “Where’s your home, Mr. Nickel?”
Home? I didn’t have a home, least not one I wanted to chat about.
The Old Man piped up. “We met young Mr. Nickel back East, and he’s been helping us out in a pinch.”
The bowler-hat man wasn’t really listening, though, his social nicety already forgotten under the spell of the giraffes. He sighed, staring up at them. “What we wouldn’t do for giraffes. Sure you don’t want to let them stay awhile?”
The Old Man didn’t even dignify that with an answer. I didn’t know what to think until both of them broke out laughing.
“Mrs. Benchley would have us both tarred and feathered!” hooted the bowler-hat man. “For what it’s worth, I called our vet to come look at the female’s leg. It’ll make his day. Don’t think he’s ever seen a giraffe. Ah, here he is.”
The zoo’s vet was as far from the white-coated Bronx Zoo vet as he could get, dressed in stained khakis, smelling of manure, with a pop-eyed look on his face to rival my own at my first sight of the giraffes. He forced himself to focus on Girl’s leg. “You say she’s been in the rig the whole time? That must’ve been some miserableness you had. Looks more like she’s been running and kicking to beat the band.”
When the Old Man didn’t answer, I made the mistake of looking at her leg myself, and I thought I might retch. It was way worse than back in the cornfield, blood and pus oozing from everywhere. Because of me, I thought. I had lowered the side. I had taken the twenty-dollar gold piece. I hadn’t warned the Old Man—and I’d hurt Girl. I couldn’t breathe, feeling a weight pushing against my lungs so bad that Mr. Percival T. Bowles might as well have been sitting his fat ass right on my chest.
“Get the onions,” the Old Man said.
Grabbing the sack, I crawled up the side and started feeding onions to the Girl as fast as she’d take them. While the vet doctored away, medicating and rewrapping, I kept feeding the Girl until the vet called it “done as done could be” for traveling. “Don’t suppose you can leave her here until that leg decides if it’s going to heal,” he said.
The Old Man shook his head.
“Well, then, it goes without saying that it’d be good if you can get her on solid ground as soon as you can,” the vet said. “I’ll come in early to check her in the morning before y’all leave and give you more sulfa and supplies for the road. It’d be an honor.”
At that, the bowler-hat man slapped the Old Man on the back, like we were all having a gay ol’ time, and said, “Let’s go send Mrs. Benchley a telegram.”
“I’ll catch up with you,” the Old Man told him. As the two zoo men left, he motioned me down. Pushing back his fedora, he settled his hands on his hips and waited until I was standing in front of him, then leveled his gaze at me and said, “I know what I promised you at Memphis, but I had to make a choice for the darlings’ sake. And now it looks like I need you to keep going. Otherwise, we’re stuck here for longer than her leg might stand. If we can dodge any more bad luck, we’re only about three days out and we’ll be to California, like you wanted.” He paused. “You OK with that, Woody?”
It was the first time the Old Man had called me Woody. He wasn’t turning me in to the cops . . . and I was still headed to California. I couldn’t find my tongue. All I could do was nod.
“All right then.” He gave me a couple of awkward hard pats on the shoulder, something he’d never done before, either, and said, “It’s safe in here. We should both get a good night’s sleep. What’s ahead is as different from what we’ve already gone through as the moon is from the sun. But you already know that,” he added, “since we’ll be passing through your old stomping grounds.”
That zapped me like a thunderbolt out of blue sky. “What?”
“The highway,” he said. “It crosses Okie-land and the Texas Panhandle to get West.”
“But we’re going the southern route,” I mumbled. “That’s what you said, the southern route . . .”
“This is the southern route.” He cocked his head. “We’re in Arkansas, boy. Did you think we were going by way of New Or-leens?”
Yes! I did! I wanted to shout. That’s a southern route! Cussing myself for being so lamebrained, I didn’t know what to do. I can’t go back through the Panhandle! I can’t even go near—I’d be chancing too much after what I did! I kept thinking, my mind screaming with it. Yet I couldn’t tell the Old Man. He’d want me to tell him why, which I wasn’t about to do. It even occurred to me that he might somehow know. Is that why he kept me on after finding the cash roll in my pocket—to take me back to the Panhandle county sheriff for a reckoning there?
But he can’t know . . .
The first time a poor soul gets a bit of grace in his wretched life, especially from a man who, by his own pronouncements, abides no chicanery, it’s a hard thing to recognize let alone accept, and even harder to trust. I knew what to do with judgment, having a young lifetime of experience with that. This level of kindness, though, if kindness it be, only made me prickly and even a bit fearful, since I hadn’t forgotten what Percival Bowles had warned at the mention of the Old Man’s name.
The Old Man was talking. “You’ve never been to a zoo, have you? Don’t tell fancy four-eyes, but while the animals seem healthy enough, this zoo’s a sideshow compared to the San Diego Zoo.” He waved toward the front. “Stroll around if you want, but don’t let the darlings out of your sight. I’m going to get a real meal with this sawed-off pal of the Boss Lady’s, and I’ll bring you some back in an hour. Best I relieve you early as well, to make sure you sleep good. Here on out, who knows what kind of sleep we’ll be getting.”
Then he was gone.
I stood there feeling buckshot, gazing up at the giraffes in a way I hadn’t allowed myself since Yeller’s because of guilt. Girl’s and Boy’s mighty snouts were peeking out the top, their tongues reaching for the sycamore branches, and the sight gave me a stab of such pure feeling that my knees buckled. I had to put a hand on the rig’s fender to steady myself, overwhelmed by the full weight of the last two days as I drank in the sight of the two gentle, forever-forgiving giraffes . . .
. . . who deserve better than me.
Something had gone and changed without me looking. I was barely recognizing myself. Keeping Percival Bowles’s double eagle and pocket fortune? That didn’t surprise me a lick. I did both without a thought. The shot I fired to protect Girl from the lackeys? I did that without thought, too, like I was protecting my own. But they weren’t my own. I had as little claim on them as I did on Red. And now I was about to hazard going back through the Panhandle for a couple of animals that weren’t even mine? I rocked back on my bootheels, skittish as a calf, knowing this time I had to cut and run . . . yet each glance at the giraffes was like a knife to the heart. I didn’t want to go back to the life of a stray-dog boy, but wasn’t it better than what might be waiting for me if I drove back into my Panhandle past?
At that moment, like a sign, I heard a freight train. It was coming this way.
Forcing my eyes from the giraffes, I moved toward the front of the little zoo. The chattering people still inside were all heading for the exit. Muscling up my runaway courage, I stared at the exit, my fist clutching the gold coin in my pocket. I can find my own way to Californy, I told myself. I still got the twenty-dollar gold piece . . . I’ll be fine. The giraffes don’t need me. They’ll be fine, too . . . They won’t even notice I’m gone. And the Old Man? He’ll stomp on that crummy fedora, then the bowler-hat guy will find him a real driver to get the giraffes to Mrs. Benchley just fine . . . more than fine . . .
Peop
le were trickling by me, vanishing through the exit. I took several big breaths and joined them. As I stepped into the crowd, though, someone grabbed my arm. I whirled around, ready as always for a scrap.
It was Red, holding her camera with one hand and putting her arm through mine with the other.
“Stretch, there you are!” she was saying. “Are the giraffes OK? Who were those awful men yesterday? I almost lost you in the fog, and found the rig like that and—”
“Where did you go?” I said, cutting her off.
Her eyes took on the look of a doe in headlights. “Nowhere. I was a bit delayed.”
“I keep thinking I’m saying goodbye to you.”
She squeezed my arm. “Everything holds a goodbye someday, Woody. But not us, not yet. Now tell me what happened! Those men were trying to steal the giraffes, weren’t they? And you shot one—I saw you! You could’ve killed him!”
“I winged him,” I grumbled, wondering why everybody was questioning my shooting skills. “If I’d wanted to kill him, he’d be dead.”
Red gave me the same funny look the Old Man did. “What did the police say?”
“They didn’t say anything. He didn’t call ’em.”
“Mr. Jones didn’t call the police? Why not! Tell me everything!”
But I didn’t feel much like doing that, thinking more about police bulletins and runaway wives than fat cats and circus lackeys. Instead I said, “Why didn’t you stay to see for yourself?”
She paused. “I was certain Mr. Jones would call the authorities, and I thought it best if I didn’t get involved.”
“Why not?” I pushed.
Letting go of my arm, she changed the subject. “Isn’t that the saddest thing outside?” She nodded toward the park’s Hooverville beyond the exit. “Look what the man by the entrance handed me after I took his picture.” She pulled a card from her shirt pocket.
She flipped it over. “Look at all this on the back, too.”
“It’s only a hobo card,” I muttered.
“Bums have cards?” she said.
“A hobo’s not a bum. A hobo’s proud of being a hobo.”
“Really! Well, it worked. I gave him a penny. It’ll be a great shot,” she said, replacing the card in the breast pocket of her white silky shirt, and despite myself, I couldn’t help but stare. It was like something movie stars wore, that shirt, just like her trousers.
As I watched Red pop a new flashbulb in her camera, happy as a hog in rain, I felt my fury flare high and hot and straight her way. I wanted her to feel as bad as I did for her own piece of traveling treachery—and worse, I needed her to. I couldn’t take it a second more. “Why was that Chattanooga deputy after you?”
She stiffened. “What?”
“You sped up. I saw you. He said you stole the Packard.”
At that, her face fell. “I didn’t steal it. I borrowed it.”
“I borrow things all the time,” I kept on. “And what I’m doing is stealing them. Did you borrow the Packard guy’s money, too, for all this traveling?”
“Don’t be fresh, Stretch,” she snapped, and then paused again. “Did Mr. Jones hear this, too?”
“Sure he did.”
Her face fell lower, but it wasn’t low enough for me.
“Are you running away to have a tryst with some gent?” I went right on.
That made her jaw drop. “What kind of question is that?”
“The deputy said you might be violating some ‘man act’ about husbands’ wives running away with other men. Are you?”
“You know good and well I’m by myself!”
Then are you somebody’s wife? I longed to say next.
But she was already waving a hand like it could dismiss the whole thing. “Lionel will get his Packard back when I’m done. He’s the one who refused to come.”
My gut did a backflip. Mr. Big Reporter? But he’s old, pushing thirty if a day.
“I have to do this story whether he likes it or not,” she was saying. “I’m trying to make us all famous! Don’t you want that?”
“You’re already doing the story.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, yes I am . . . but I have to have the photographs . . . It’s Life magazine! Stretch, please let’s stop. You won’t understand,” she said, moving toward the monkeys.
I didn’t understand and I needed to. Maybe the guy was as much a lout as he looked. Maybe he needed another punch in the face. I had to know, so I followed her to the monkeys. As she raised her camera, I reached over and pushed it down. “Tell me what was so bad back home that you didn’t want to stay.”
What she said next she said so quiet I almost missed it. “Home’s not the place you’re from, Woody. Home’s the place you want to be.”
I waited for her to go on. Instead, staring at the whooping, screeching caged monkeys, she said, “Do you ever think about the fact they’ll never be free again?”
“The monkeys?”
“All of them,” she said. “Even the giraffes.”
Still feeling full contrary, I said the most contrary thing I could think of. “Well, maybe they like it fine. They don’t ever miss a meal. Or have lions nipping at their heels. Or dust blizzards killing off everything they ever knew. Some of those folks right outside would probably trade places with them on the promise of such alone.”
She screwed up her face. “That’s not what I mean . . . I mean what if you had to live the rest of your life not spreading your wings?”
I was pretty sure we weren’t talking about monkeys or giraffes anymore, but didn’t care. “Giraffes don’t have wings.”
Knowing she wasn’t going to charm me this time, she sighed. “We still have a deal, don’t we?” She held out her free hand. She wanted to shake again.
I didn’t.
“Woody, please.”
I slowly put out my hand, and she moved right past to hug me, head against my chest, her camera digging into my still-hurting-like-hell rib. Then she looked up and gave me that sad, tight-lipped smile of hers. Suddenly I wanted to kiss her like I’d been imagining ever since the depot, despite all my pent-up fury—and it made my bewildered heart hurt so bad I wished I’d never laid eyes on her. So when she aimed that camera my way and clicked, its flash blinding me all over again, I welcomed it. I was blinded by her the first time I saw her, I’d been blind the whole time I’d known her, and I was blinded by her the very last time I was ever going to see her. It was almost a relief.
“You know, I better keep on seeing you down the road. We’re more than halfway, and, oh, the pictures, Woody. They’re incredible.”
I felt a kiss on my cheek and she was gone.
Blinking myself back to sight, I just stood there until I heard the sound of the freight train again, and I set my mind to catch it. Marching to the exit, I pushed my way through as the park’s streetlights came on, and bumped square into a beat cop giving the bum’s rush to a hobo.
“Sorry, sir,” said the cop—to me—and went right back to yanking the collar of the smiling hobo, who kept trying to give him a card.
Set back on my bootheels, I paused to get my balance. As the last of the exiting visitors streamed past, I was bombarded by the sights and sounds of the Hooverville straight ahead—the clamoring noise, the trash-can fires, the shelters of cardboard and huddles of tar paper. It was all I could hear and all I could see.
Above the racket, though, I thought I heard the echo of a giraffe wail. I knew that couldn’t be. The Hooverville din was far too loud to have heard any such thing.
I shook it off.
Then I heard it again.
Stepping back through the zoo entrance, past the monkeys, I inched toward the rig, sure I’d only imagined it.
As I turned back toward the exit, though, I felt a soft crunch under my boots. I seemed to be standing on what looked like oats . . . There was a trail of it coming from the direction of the buffalo pen, like something had snitched feed from a trough and scurried past. The giraffes were stomp
ing. Looking up, I saw something crouching in the truck’s shadows. Wishing for the shotgun, I crept closer, readying for anything with claws.
Instead, there stood someone holding the onion and pecan gunnysacks and staring up at the giraffes. He was so caught up, I almost got to him before I stepped on a twig.
He whirled around, clutching the sacks to his chest.
As Boy and Girl upped their stomping, neither of us moved. I could see him in the faint light coming from one of the park’s streetlamps. Raggedy and barefoot, he was about my age but much, much scrawnier, nothing but scary skin and bones. Where I was sporting a birthmark on my neck, he had a half-healed burn across both neck and jaw, the kind of burn you get from a fall on a hot rail or a scuffle over a bum’s fire barrel. Too wretched a sight to be a hobo, too young to be a bum, he’d been a luckless railrider—I was sure of it. But he wasn’t now. Now he was stealing food meant for animals, hunched over like a junkyard dog. We locked eyes, and what I saw gave me the willies. There was nothing left there but fear and hunger and what he’d do to keep both at bay.
Right then, one of the giraffes kicked the rig hard enough to shake the frame. When I glanced up he ran right at me, knocking me flat on my ass—exactly like I’d done to the Old Man in quarantine—and I hit the ground hard, the stink of him on my new clothes. The last I saw of him were the gunnysacks slipping over a stone wall too smooth for scaling. Yet there he went. Just like a cat.
Lying there in the dirt and spilt oats, I stared after that raggedy boy, stuck in the moment. In the years since, I have sometimes seen his face in the mirror for no reason I can say. Back then, though, the only thing that snapped me out of it was the sound of the rig rocking, swaying, the axle groaning to breaking. The giraffes were about to flip the rig where it sat. Scrambling up on my boots, I kicked a loose onion and scooped it up. Then I was straddling the cross plank between the Old Man’s darlings like I’d thought I’d never do again. Girl and Boy moved close and the rig went still. I stroked both their mammoth jaws, cooing the Old Man’s giraffe-speak and feeding them the onion, peeling off its layers one by one. As their big heads lingered, surrounding my young self like living shelter, my heart swelled with the boy-in-knickers feeling from the cornfield again, making me feel lighter and shinier and safer in a way I still can’t explain. We stayed that way for a good long time, until the two reached once more for the sycamore’s leaves, their quivering nostrils the only reminder of the latest lion at their heels.
West with Giraffes: A Novel Page 18
