As I got closer to the depot, though, I could hear the conductor yelling his “All aboard!” I could see the last passenger get on and the train begin to move. I’d hesitated too long. It was pulling out and I was still a block away. Dodging cars and statues and benches and fences, I sprinted down the tracks after it, high-stepping to keep from stumbling over the rails, my heart pumping so hard I was gulping air as the train picked up speed. Still feeling Red’s kiss on my lips, I kept telling myself that I’d hopped freights before. I can do it, I can catch it, I can—
I couldn’t.
On such small things, entire lives turn.
Stumbling on the track’s cinders, I staggered to a halt, so light-headed I had to throw my head over my knees. When I looked up, all that was left to see of the train as it slipped away was the caboose . . . the brand-new, redder-than-Red caboose . . . and the old do-or-die fury I thought was gone came roaring back. Moving on stray-dog-boy reflex alone, I found myself beside the shining cream-and-blue Harley still parked where I’d spotted it. Next thing I knew I was on it and gone.
For miles, as my head began to clear, I kept telling myself I should pull over, should go back, should rethink this stupid old move, and when I didn’t, I told myself that after I caught the train I’d never, ever do such a thing again.
I kept up with the train as the highway followed the rails, until the tracks headed straight through the mountains. As the train disappeared, I kept zooming along the winding highway, hoping to catch up at El Centro.
But I missed it again by seconds.
So, I kept on going. To Yuma.
I made it to the other side of the Ocean-to-Ocean Bridge, ripping through Yuma looking for the station, before I got nabbed, the sound of the coming train cruelly filling the air.
To the Arizona sheriff I was only another lying, thieving Okie orphan who had no business on a shiny new electric horse, stealing people’s motorcycles on my way to stealing a little of everything from everybody for years to come. Who’s to say that wouldn’t have been true only a few weeks before? The reason I gave for stealing the cycle was even a poor one to my own ears. He didn’t believe a word of my tale of trains and giraffes and highways, despite my pleas to go ask the California trooper back on the bridge. “Do you think I’m a fool?” the sheriff growled. He’d had his fill of boys like me, which he proceeded to make mightily clear, his hooked nose stuck all but up my own.
Right then, the boy I was back on Cuz’s boat dock would’ve pitched a hollering fit to call the Old Man or even Belle Benchley herself. The giraffes’ boy, though, the one I’d become between the Atlantic and the Pacific, couldn’t bring himself to do it. Maybe because I couldn’t abide the Old Man knowing the throwback piece of thieving I’d done after everything we’d been through. But maybe more because I knew it wouldn’t change a thing, this sheriff not letting me off even if the Old Man showed up riding the giraffes themselves. The sheriff didn’t know the Old Man. Or Belle Benchley. This wasn’t California. This was Yuma, home of Okie Town, with hundreds of boys exactly like me. I stole a motorcycle. Simple as that.
Since this was 1938, and Hitler was already starting to stomp across Europe, the choice I got was the choice all such thieving orphan boys got to avoid going to jail—joining the army.
“It’ll make a man outa you,” he said, making my choice for me.
It would be seven years and a world war before I found out whether Red got on that train, and even longer before I got back to San Diego.
16
Home
About the time I’d put in my army stint and was ready to get out, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and I got put right back in, along with every able-bodied American man for the duration of the War.
I was twenty-five before my return to the USA.
I’d like to say I saw action on the battlefield and returned a hero, war making a man of me like the sheriff said. But war’s a cruel place to grow all the way up. I was part of the Quartermaster Corps in Europe. I worked with the dead. We were the ones that came in after the battles, collected the bodies and dug the graves. The army said I had an “aptitude” for it, and I still don’t know what that means. What I do know is my sudden aptitude appeared after I told the wrong officer that I’d had my fill of death, and he said, “Fill of death, huh.” Suddenly I had the aptitude and would soon have more than my fill of death. There was no glory in it, just duty. And it made me wish my eyes were filled with Panhandle dust again, until I learned how not to see and not to feel so as not to think as I performed my duties, day after horrible day of death.
Such things beat memories of your life before the War right out of you unless you hold on to something and hold on tight. Most soldiers held on with sweethearts and family, writing letters to people writing letters back. What does an orphan hold on to, though? So, as the days with the dead turned into years, I let myself slip away.
When it was over, I came home by transport back across the ocean, heading to New York Harbor, still carrying the War with me. But as we traveled through a storm at sea, I began to feel something again. What I felt was the giraffes. As the ship bucked and swayed, I realized I was riding the same ocean Boy and Girl had. I closed my eyes, and instead of being strapped in the hold of an army ship in 1945, I was strapped in a crate on the deck of the giraffes’ transport in the Great Hurricane of 1938, heading toward America. The other soldiers couldn’t sleep for thinking of home and family. Me, I couldn’t sleep for thinking of the hurricane giraffes. I had held on to something. As we rode the swells of the storm, I was once again driving two “towering creatures of God’s pure Eden” cross-country. I was seeing the Packard in my rearview and hearing Girl kick the Old Man. I was leaning off a mountain, meeting Moses’s clan, spying the fat cat, and shooting the thieving lackey. I was bucking a flash flood, wrestling a desert coot, watching Boy save us, and feeling Red’s lips against mine. I was again hearing what the Old Man said about the wiry man with the elephant and dog—that there’s no explaining the world, where you find yourself in it and who your friends turn out to be. And I began to remember who my friends were.
As I rocked and rolled in that transport, riding those waves, I planned what I’d do the moment we docked.
I’d find them.
I’d find her.
And I’d find you.
I tracked down Mr. Big Reporter, Lionel Abraham Lowe, to a little New Jersey house with a green grass yard. When he opened the door, the way he eyed my uniform I’d have bet all my army pay he was 4-F, probably for flat feet or flat head.
So, I quickly said what I came to say. “I want to speak to Red.”
He stiffened. “Who?”
“Augusta, your . . . wife.”
Easing the door shut behind him, he looked me in the eye. “Augusta died years ago. Who’s asking?”
I staggered back like I’d taken a punch. I must have looked seventeen again, all the years and all the graves falling from my face, because he recognized me. His eyes grew wide and fierce, his face flushed, and his fist came flying.
And I let it.
I staggered back another step with the blow and just stood there, blood gushing from my nose. He stared at me bleeding all over his stoop until I crumpled down on his front step, then, fetching me a towel, he eased down beside me.
A moment passed, the two of us hunched there, waiting for the towel to staunch the blood.
“How’d she die?” I mumbled.
“Her heart, of course,” he answered. “In her sleep. About a year after our daughter was born . . . That’s how we met.”
“What?”
“Her heart,” he said, looking off. “I found her on a curb holding her heart, unable to catch her breath. I offered to take her to the hospital. She had no money, but when I offered to pay, she said no. So, I took her to the indigent clinic and waited with her, those gasps not stopping until they gave her a shot of some kind.” He paused. “She came from money, you know. Her father was one of the ones who jum
ped from their Wall Street windows in the crash of ’29, when she was twelve. For years she and her mother were shuffled between relatives, most scratching to get by themselves, until her mother lost her mind and went wandering. Augusta was out looking for her. I spent days helping her look, figuring I’d get a story out of it, considering the Wall Street jumper angle, whether we found her mother or not. That happened all the time during the Depression, people vanishing, never to be heard from again. But we found her, all right. Too late. By that time, though, I’d forgotten all about the story and Augie didn’t have anywhere . . .”
The front door creaked open.
There you stood. With his face. And her red curls.
“Go on back inside, sweetheart,” he ordered, “go on.” He looked at me more anxious than fierce. “Leave my daughter out of this. She’s only six,” he whispered. “She doesn’t know a thing about her mother’s wild streak . . . running after giraffes of all things . . . by herself. You and that zookeeper letting her! She was a woman, for God’s sake! With a heart condition! She could have died out there alone. She asked too much . . . she always asked too much!”
With that, he fumed and stood up. But there was more I wanted to know. Did Red get in her magazine? Did she ever see Africa? Did she get to stretch her wings?
Before I could ask, though, the door opened again.
“Lionel? Who is that?” There stood a pretty brunette wearing a print dress and smelling of lavender with a baby on her hip.
I got to my feet.
“Just a soldier looking for somebody who no longer lives here, dear,” he told her.
“You’re bleeding,” she said.
“Yes, dear,” he answered for me. “He had a sudden nosebleed, but we fixed it, didn’t we, soldier? I’ve already offered him a towel. No need to worry. Now he has to be on his way.”
“Well, God bless you, sir. Augie Ann, this man won the war for us!”
Augie.
You came close, and I got to see you smile.
Herding his family back inside, he said loudly my way, “Sorry not to have been able to help you, soldier.” Then Lionel Abraham Lowe closed the door on me, his eyes telling a tale of their own. He’d loved Red. I wasn’t sure of it until that moment, and it made me feel better for you.
I found a library and went scouring through back issues of Life magazine. I’d hoped she’d made it in somehow, even without us. Of course, she wasn’t there. This Margaret Bourke-White photographer she loved was everywhere, taking pictures of the War all over the world. But no Augusta Red.
Yet as I sat there in that library, safe if not yet sound, I heard Red’s last words to me as if she were still standing in front of me: We had us an adventure, didn’t we, Woody Nickel?
“Yes,” I answered, right out loud. “Yes, we did.”
I wanted to run back and tell you. Your ma did have an adventure—a proper one that made her heart sing for a time even if it couldn’t make her heart strong. Along the way, she did see Africa—in the back of a truck, in the eyes of the giraffes, down the road going west—and she was as daring and brave as could be. I ached for you to know. The War had made me an honorable man, though, if it did nothing else. I was asked to leave you alone, so I did. You being their daughter, I had no rights in the matter, despite my deep feelings for Red. Truth is, I’m not sure what your ma was to me, even now. Nothing I come up with rings true. I didn’t know her long enough to say she was the love of my life, although it can deeply feel that way here and now as I write. But if a man leads a handful of lives inside a long life like mine, I can say she was the love of my first life. That I can surely say.
So, from that library, nursing more than a broken nose, I headed cross-country to San Diego to find the giraffes. I walked through the zoo entrance, which was unchanged from the day I’d seen it from afar. I wandered a moment, turned a corner, and there they were. A sign announced them to be “Lofty” and “Patches.” But, make no mistake, they were Boy and Girl, full grown, healthy, and tall as tall can be—Boy now taller than Girl and regal as a prince. I sat my blissful self down on a bench to let my eyes drink them in, and out from behind them scampered a giraffe calf. The sign on the fence said his name was “D-Day,” being born on that day of days, June 6, 1944, while the Allied armed forces were invading Europe—what do you think of that? And he was already taller than me.
I spent a week off and on there on that bench. I didn’t expect them to remember me, but I wanted to give them a chance. For two days, they didn’t notice me among the crowd. On the third day, when the keepers weren’t around, I snuck in a couple of onions to offer through the fence—to see what they’d do. Girl ambled over first. Her back leg was scarred but working dandy. She bent her neck down to snuffle me head to toe, exactly like the first night in quarantine, then curled her tongue around the onion in my hand and lobbed it down her throat. When Boy joined us, baptizing me with a blow of giraffe spit, nobody could convince me they didn’t see the boy they used to know.
I planned to find Riley Jones, too, of course. I wanted to see him with the giraffes and hear a bit of his giraffe-speak. I’d walk over close and say, “Hey there, Old Man.” Each day, though, another keeper, younger than the Old Man but just as leathery, came out to tend the giraffes. Each day, he’d nod and I’d nod back. Until one day, he caught me feeding the giraffes onions.
“Hey, you, soldier!”
Some long-gone reflex made me want to run. Instead I came to attention. “Yessir.”
He looked me up and down, eyes lingering on the birthmark on my neck. “What’s your name?”
I paused. “Who’s asking?”
“Is it Woody Nickel?”
“How . . . ?”
He grinned ear to ear. “Riley said you’d show sooner or later. Come with me.” His name was Cyrus, he said, Cyrus Badger. As we walked, he put a hand on my shoulder and told me the bad news. The Old Man was dead, too, that very year. I’d missed him by a month.
“Mabel, this here’s Riley’s boy,” he announced as we stepped into some sort of paymaster’s office. “This is the famous Woodrow Wilson Nickel.”
Before I knew it, I was being handed a check for driving services, back pay.
“Oh, wait,” she said, rummaging in her desk. “Riley left you something.” Laughing, the woman handed me a sack of wooden nickels. “I was supposed to give you the wooden nickels first and call that your pay, but I didn’t have the heart.” She held out the sack until I begrudgingly took it. “Look closely at them, Mr. Nickel. It’s a gift from him,” she said, handing me one. Each nickel was a token good for a visit to the zoo. There were hundreds of them.
Cyrus walked me out, enjoying the look on my face as much as the Old Man would have.
When I found my tongue, I said, “What got him? Did the consumption come back?”
“Consumption?” Cyrus screwed up his face. “He wasn’t a lunger. It was the smokes that did him in, got the cancer of the throat. Where’d you get it being consumption?”
“He said he had it when he was my age after he almost ran off with the circus as a kid. He came out West to work as a cowboy and got his cure cow-punching and eating sowbelly.”
At that, the Old Man’s pal slapped his knee and guffawed. He laughed so hard and long I began to take offense. Wiping tears from his eyes from all the hooting, he said, “Woody, that ain’t Riley’s story, that’s Dr. Harry’s, the founder of this zoo. Dr. Harry tried to run away with the circus as a kid. Then he caught TB, and got his cure by heading West and cowboying—all before he ended up a doctor, moved here, and started up the zoo on a lark. Riley Jones never punched a cow in his life!”
The Old Man lied? I couldn’t believe my ears. “But he couldn’t abide a liar!”
Cyrus smiled. “Well, now, I wouldn’t go so far as calling him a liar. Nobody abides a liar. But everybody sure likes a good storyteller, don’t they? Sometimes the best medicine is a good story. I bet you found that out.”
I threw up my hands.
“Well, what was his real story?”
He shrugged. “My money’s on him being a foundling. He never mentioned an orphanage, but he once told me he was on his own by ten. Used to happen in his day more than you’d care to know. Being with the circus, now that was true.”
I was so rattled I couldn’t find my voice, and when I did, I couldn’t do much more than stutter. “Well . . . how about his hand? A lion mangled it in the circus, right?”
Cyrus roared again. I was cracking the guy up. “God love him, I bet ol’ Riley had a thousand stories about that hand,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t feel bad, son. He did it to us all. I once caught him telling two different stories about it on the same day. He was born with it, dollars to doughnuts. Or it might well have been caught inside a big cat’s mouth. If not, whatever happened to it was so bad he never told it true. Which was his right. Some things are so much yours, you just have to keep ’em to yourself. But I guarantee if he could’ve had his ending be a lion’s lunch instead of the cancer, he dang sure would have,” he said, and walked off, with me standing there gaping like a blessed monkey. A few steps away, he stopped and looked back. “Well, come on. You need to meet the Boss Lady.”
In a minute, I was standing in the presence of Mrs. Belle Benchley, the famous Zoo Lady. She still looked so much like the schoolmarm at the zoo entrance back that October day in ’38 with her arms stretched wide for the giraffes, I felt a rush of feeling that almost bowled me over. She was coming out of her little office behind the boiler room when we walked right up.
“Guess who this is!” Cyrus beamed. “This here is Riley’s boy he talked so much about. Mr. Woody Nickel.”
“Well!” She stuck out her hand to shake. “How do you do? How do you do!” We had the nicest chat you’d ever want to have, until the phone jangled behind her and she disappeared back inside.
Cyrus walked me back through the zoo to send me on my way. Before I left, though, I wanted to ask one more thing about the Old Man if I could make myself do it.
West with Giraffes: A Novel Page 28
