He shook his head. “Let’s get past all this.”
We crossed the state line, once and for all out of Texas. Within another mile, we were already into the scrubby hills of New Mexico that wanted to be full-out desert but weren’t quite ready to do it yet. The sun was almost up. We needed to be looking for a place to pull over and take care of the giraffes. But I was only half seeing anything at all, still thinking about Red. And the flood. And the farm. I guess the Old Man was doing the same, because he looked at me and said, “I think I need to hear what happened out at your pa’s farm.”
My eyes landed on a passing Joshua tree, sprouting arms toward heaven. I was out of time again, and this time there’d be no flash flood to save me.
Ever since running toward Cuz’s, I’d been rehearsing a good lie, fearing that what happened would find me no matter where I went. Yet, after the flash flood, I wanted more than ever to stay with the giraffes, to see them safe to California even more than getting my own hide there. I didn’t know which would keep me driving—the lie or the truth. You can carry around a heavy load only for so long, though, before you’ve got to set it down, and that goes double if you’re only eighteen.
So I took a deep breath, squeezed the wheel tight, and told the Old Man the truth.
“We were about to put my ma in the ground,” I began. “Only a burial, me and Pa, at the church graveyard by my dead baby sister . . .”
We didn’t have money for a real funeral, I tell him, and there was nobody to come anyway, the rest of Arcadia either dead from dust lung themselves or lit out along with the ginner, who was the closest thing to a preacher the tiny church had. As Ma got sicker, I kept thinking we’d pack up and go, too, but we never did. We had nothing left. Less than nothing. So all we could do for Ma was swaddle her as best we could, Pa pulling wood off the barn to make her a pine box. With our truck broke down again, we were planning to hitch our old mare to the wagon and pull Ma to the graveyard. We’d set Ma and her pine box in the wagon, put on our best Sunday go-to-meeting clothes, and then Pa had gone to get the mare.
When he doesn’t come back, I go looking for him and I find him on the far side of the barn, standing over the mare. She was the last animal we still had, the pigs and chickens all eaten when the last crop failed and the cow dying in the last dust storm. I figure she’s dead, too.
As I come closer, though, I see the mare’s brown-apple eyes move to stare up at me. I feel sick, because I know she is dead, but she just doesn’t know it yet.
Then, and only then, do I see the rifle in Pa’s fist. He is holding it out to me, ordering me to put the mare out of its misery, because I should learn to accept death as part of living, because I should start acting like a man. He is saying it in a way he knows I will obey or wish I had.
But I don’t take it. I gaze back at the horse’s wide, scared, suffering eyes and I know I should. And I know I can’t. I don’t have it in me. Because that old mare is the only animal I’ve known for my entire miserable life—since I first pulled breath. Since I was big enough to jabber at her and tend her and plow behind her. God help me, I know, at that moment, she is the only living thing I have ever loved besides my ma. I cannot be the one to take away her life, not when her life takes in my whole life. Not even if it is an “act of mercy,” because mercy holds no meaning for me. It is all I can do not to yell this at Pa, even though I know he does not abide such disrespect, and I have felt the whip of his belt at even the hint of it. This time, though, I don’t care about his belt. I don’t care about his hollering. I just stand there. So, he shoves the rifle into my ribs until I take it.
“Time you carried the load around here!” he says. I notice a thing in his eyes that isn’t ire or panic or grief but something cold beyond them all, like his small, pitiful heart has shriveled and died with Ma, and I was about to find out what was left.
“Do it!” he yells.
I still can’t.
Marching back to the house, he returns with his Great War pistol, loading it as he comes. “Do it!” He slaps the barrel shut and, brandishing the revolver, marches straight at me. “Do it now!”
But it’s not the pistol that scares me most. It is the wild, gone-wrong look in those eyes that is sending a shiver into my bones. So I point the rifle in my hands at him, sure that he will lower his pistol at the sight. Yet he does not, as if I’m pointing a toy at him, as if I’d never shoot. He is still marching toward me, pistol still up, aiming those crazy eyes at me so devil-fierce I forget to breathe.
“It’s just an animal!” he is hollering as he gets close enough to slap my rifle barrel away. “And you ain’t no boy in knickers no more. It’s time I made a man outa you!” Pistol to my neck, he is shoving me with his free hand, pushing my rifle barrel toward the mare’s head, her scared eyes looking straight at me. “Do it! Or as God is my witness, I’ll do it to you . . . you lily-livered, yellow-bellied worthless excuse for a son!”
And I do it. The mare jumps with the power of the shell hitting her head and goes limp, her blood splattering my face and my boots, her dead eyes still staring my way. I begin to blubber like a baby, feeling the puke rising, hating my pa for making me shoot my horse, and hating God Almighty if mercy be a thing so hateful.
Pa is talking, his pistol bowed only slightly. I think he will surely say what will save us both. That it’s time to give up. Time to go to Californy like everybody else. Time to live instead of die.
Instead, his voice oddly quivering, he says what I cannot abide. “All right then, let’s get it hauled into the barn. We’ll skin it, sell the hide, and dry what meat there is to eat. That should keep us going till we get a new crop in the ground. Rain’s coming, you can feel it.”
With that, I swivel the rifle back his way, because I know he is never going to leave. He’s going to stay and breathe dirt until his lungs fill up like Ma’s and my baby sister’s, and he thinks he can make me do the same.
I move in front of the mare, and I am now the one hollering. “I’m not skinning her and I’m not eating her—and you’re not either—I’d sooner shoot you dead!”
Gaping at me, his spineless son talking back for the first time, Pa lowers his gun. I know if I lower mine, if I pull myself back from the fury that’s possessed me, this will stop. I will feel the sting of the back of his hand and it will be over. We will go on with our misery, since there’s no one to put us out of it. Because that is what we do. Because quitting the misery takes the kind of heart and soul neither of us has ever had.
But I do not lower my rifle.
Instead I keep spitting out words I know he can’t abide. “If that made me a man, I should put you out of your misery!” I holler, now the one brandishing a firearm. “If that made me a man, then you’re not a man or you’d have put Ma out of her misery!” I holler on, now the one spewing, seething. “If that made me a man, then you’re not a man or you’d put yourself out of my misery—”
The crazed thing in Pa’s eyes disappears. I watch it go, my fury tamping down as it flickers. In its place, though, something dead passes through his eyes that I shudder to see even now. He raises his pistol again, training it on me. I see his finger moving. He is squeezing the trigger. I scramble backward, rifle up, gaping at that trigger finger, not believing what I am seeing. My life slows to nothing but staring down my rifle barrel at my pa’s trigger finger. For all of my flamed-up fury talk, I am sure I could not shoot my pa—nor could I believe he’d shoot me. Yet there we are, two dead-inside beings holding guns on each other.
Until I realize something new . . . I’m seventeen. I don’t have to stay even if he does.
I can leave. I will leave.
Time to live instead of die—without him.
I take a step back and then another, lowering the rifle to turn and just walk away, when I hear the click of his pistol’s hammer.
Whirling around in time to see the pistol blast, I feel my cheek burn, grazed by his pistol’s slug. Then hearing my own rifle fire, I see his shoulder pop back, hit by my
rifle’s bullet—
—and there we stand, two dead-inside beings who have shot each other.
I find my feet if not my balance, and I throw down the rifle.
Pa, standing like he doesn’t even feel my bullet in his shoulder, lowers his pistol, too.
Then he shoves it under his chin.
And shoots.
I reel back, spattered now in both bloods, both bodies at my feet, my lungs forgetting how to breathe. As new puke mingles with the blood on my boots, my mind is stuttering with only one thought—
I made my pa kill himself.
Until another thought comes home to roost—
I could have been the one doing the killing. If he hadn’t done it, my young fury would have. I’d have shot my pa for making me shoot that mare. I’d have shot him for letting the dust take my ma and my baby sister. I’d have shot him dead if he’d tried to make me stay. I knew it to be true beyond true.
“. . . I could have been the one,” I finished telling the Old Man, squeezing the wheel even tighter.
For a long moment, I couldn’t go on, until I heard the Old Man speaking in the same timbre he used for the giraffes.
“Son,” he murmured, and I tensed at that word, “you need to tell me it all.”
Sinking back into my own skin, I braced to tell the rest. “The dust was so bad that static electricity was always in the air like black magic,” I told him. “Any spark could set it off, sometimes flaming right in front of us, silver-blue flames we’d have to stomp out before they set ablaze. So the shooting must have started the fire.”
I paused, parsing my words, because it wasn’t our gunplay that started the fire, it was mine. I had staggered back from the puke and the blood, and I started firing at the house. I emptied the rifle, and I picked up Pa’s pistol and did the same, clicking long past empty, screaming myself hoarse as the silver-blue sparks began flying like the hell I felt I was in . . . until one took to the wood and burst into true flames, taking my homeplace back to the devil. I did not tell him that. I lied by omission, as church people call such sins, desperate for the Old Man to not know my own dust-fever crazy.
Instead I said, “The place was matchsticks. There was no saving it and nothing worth saving.” So I’d sunk to the ground, I told him, watching my house burn until the flames had taken it full. When it was over, when I found my feet again, I pulled more wood off the side of the barn and built another pine box. I put Pa in by Ma, hitched myself to that wagon, and pulled it to the churchyard to bury them both by my baby sister. After I finished, I sat there letting evening turn into morning, then stumbled back to my ma’s dead garden to dig up her Mason jar of coins from its hiding place, before I lit out.
But not before digging another grave, as best I could, for the mare where she lay. “Because nobody was going to eat her—nobody,” I mumbled, “not even the buzzards and the coyotes.”
And they found her anyway.
Then I was done, but it was not done with me. The reliving of it had fired up my leftover fury so bad, I thought I might burst into flames right there behind the wheel. I knew I had to tamp it down, but I wasn’t quite doing it. Feeling a tug from the rig, I slowed, focusing hard on the gears, on my driving, on anything but the burning inside, until I found the courage to glance at the Old Man.
He’d pushed his fedora back on his head and was sitting silently, eyes on the road, arm propped on his open window. When he spoke, it was barely above a mumble itself.
“People look at you peculiar if you talk about the feeling you got for animals, saying animals have no souls, no sense of good or bad, no value up next to humans,” he said. “I don’t know about that. Sometimes I think animals are the ones who should be saying such things about us.” He shook his head. “Animals can tear your heart out. They can maim you. They can kill you dead on instinct alone and saunter into the next minute like it was nothing. But at least you know the ground rules with animals. You can count the cost of breaking the rules. You never know with people. Even the good can hurt you bad, and the bad, well, they’re going to hurt you but good.” He dropped his arm from the window to rub his gnarled hand. “It’s why I keep choosing animals. Even if it kills me. One day, it probably will.”
He stopped talking. Yet I kept listening. I thought for sure he was going to tell me about that hand. Or why Percival Bowles had called him what he called him. Or both. I yearned for it, for anything to help free me from myself. But he propped his arm back on the window and went the kind of silent I knew I was supposed to leave alone. Instead I squeezed the wheel near to bending and asked what I feared most. “You going to call the sheriff?”
He cut his eyes back at me. “Now why would I do that! We got giraffes to get to San Diego.”
“But I made my pa shoot himself.”
“You did no such thing. He did it to himself.”
“But I shot him. I could’ve killed him.”
“You winged him.”
“What?”
“That’s what you said back in Tennessee,” the Old Man answered. “‘I winged him,’ you said. ‘If I’d wanted to kill him, he’d be dead.’” As if that was enough for the Old Man, he looked back at the road and said, “That’s your first story, but it doesn’t have to be your only story. That’s up to you.”
What he was going to say next I’ll never know, because right then the rig wobbled so bad it felt like the tires lifted off the road. Then it did it again, this time knocking us both off our seats. We both jerked around to look back at the road Pullman at the same time.
“There!” the Old Man pointed. “Pull in.”
Up ahead was a dusty, weathered sign.
COOTER’S
GAS. WATER. FOOD.
DESERT ANIMALS COME SEE
The place was set back from the road and we had too much on our minds to give it a once-over. As we got close, though, it started looking bad. Except for the water cistern on stilts, the building was ramshackle, its roof already half caved in. I rolled the rig toward the gas pumps. They were both broken and had been for a long time, so I pulled on past them and stopped.
“I don’t like the looks of this,” the Old Man said. “Let’s check the giraffes and get going.”
The giraffes were pushing their heads out their windows and pulling them right back in, making noises I’d never heard before. It sounded like one of them was going to kick a hole in the trapdoor, it was rattling so hard.
Hustling back to open the warped trapdoors, I glanced toward the far side of the tumbledown building and froze at what I saw.
A bear. A mountain lion. A raccoon. Rattlesnakes.
All in cages.
In the glaring red-dirt sun . . .
“Howdy, strangers!” came a high-pitched voice from beyond the cages. Out stepped the shortest, hairiest, most googly-eyed, leathery geezer I’d ever seen—one eye milky and one not exactly looking our way. “Welcome to Cooter’s,” he said, picking up a stick and poking the animals.
“Stop that!” the Old Man yelled.
“Just trying to get ’em to put on a show for you,” the milky-eyed coot said, still poking. “You’re the first customers I’ve had in a coon’s age.”
“You’re killing them like this,” he said, waving at the cages set out in the sun.
“Oh yeah? What do you know?”
“I work at a real zoo!” the Old Man spit out. Then, with a glance back at the rig, he sucked in his fury and pulled out his wallet. “We only need to check on our giraffes. We’ll pay you for the trouble and be on our way.”
“Hot diggity-dang, I was right!” the man crowed, rushing over to grab the money from the Old Man. “When I saw you drive in, I said to myself, ‘Cooter, that truck’s got a load of giraffes.’ But I wanted to make sure you saw them too before I said anything. Didn’t want you to think I was crazy. Hold on.”
He disappeared inside the building.
Remembering the rest of my Little Rock nightmare, I scrambled for the truck’s gunrack as
out came the man with a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun.
“No, no, leave those be,” said the man, aiming both barrels at me. Skittering over, he grabbed both the Old Man’s rifle and shotgun off the rack and flung them deep into the scrub, the shotgun skidding all but to the road.
“What the—what is wrong with you?” the Old Man roared. “I just gave you money! You want more? What the hell do you want?”
“Whaddya think I want, mister real zoo,” he snapped. “I want them giraffes. Still, I’m a reasonable man. You got two. I’ll take one. That way we’ll both be happy.”
The Old Man gave the desert coot a look that should have sent him straight to hell. “I’m not giving you a giraffe! You’re not going to shoot us. You’d be hanged and you know it.”
Then Cooter smiled a smile that still can make me cringe now almost ninety years later. Because the next thing he said was this: “True enough. But nobody’s going to hang me for shooting critters, and a giraffe’s a critter. So if you don’t choose, mister, I’ll shoot one and feed it to the critters I already got.” At that, the crazy geezer banged on the rig until both giraffes popped their heads out again, so he could point the sawed-off shotgun at them. “Boom!” he shouted. “Boom, boom!”
The Old Man was ready to tear the man’s head off, and the old coot knew it, swiveling the gun his way. “Perhaps this moment calls for a demonstration,” he said. He backed up to the row of cages and shot the caged raccoon dead, the shotgun pellets splattering guts all over the cage.
“Got-dam!” howled the Old Man.
The coot narrowed his gaze. “You know, I’ve been mighty profane myself in this life, but I don’t think I’m tolerating any blasphemy in my establishment since God’s being good to ol’ Cooter today. So you watch your language. That goes double for your young’un toting that devil mark on his neck,” he said, waving the gun at my birthmark. “I’ll be taking one of your critters now. I’ll give you a moment to decide.”
“Now wait—” pleaded the Old Man.
“Mister, I can do this all day. Nothing to me.” The coot opened a cage holding nothing but jackrabbits, grabbed one by the scruff, and dropped it in the top of the mountain lion’s cage. At that, my leftover fury burst into full flame. Because I knew what we were about to hear. A jackrabbit’s scream sounds exactly like a human baby if the kill isn’t quick. I’d become a crack shot by the time I was ten to avoid ever hearing it again. As the mountain lion ate the rabbit alive, its entrails hanging from the cougar’s teeth, the jackrabbit’s screams filled the air. The shrieks went on and on and on, and the part of me still holding together after telling my story came undone. I lunged for the sawed-off coot and found myself instead facedown in the dirt. The Old Man had tripped me before the coot blew me full of buckshot. Under the Old Man’s glare, I pulled myself up, the air filled now only with Cooter’s cackling.
West with Giraffes: A Novel Page 24
