“Don’t take this wrong . . . ,” I started up, fumbling for the words. “But back in his circus days, did Mr. Jones ever get in a scrap over some animal cruelty with a man . . . dying?” It was as close I could come to the fat cat’s murderous name-calling.
At that, Cyrus’s face went sober. This is what he said a touch too quick in my memory: “Nope, never heard that. Wouldn’t put it past him when it came to animals, but you could probably say the same about most of us here if push came to shove.” He cocked his head my way. “Besides, everybody deserves a second chance. He sure gave one to a certain Dust Bowl young’un, didn’t he?” He patted me on the shoulder. “Did he ever tell you why he did?”
I shook my head.
“He said ‘the darlings’ told him to.” With a sly grin that seemed more for the Old Man than me, Cyrus turned to go. “Don’t be a stranger, ya hear?” he called back. “He loved telling stories about your ride, and Lofty and Patches will always be glad to see you.”
Lofty and Patches. I went to correct him but stopped short, knowing it didn’t matter, that nothing mattered except they were alive and so was I. Red was gone and so was the Old Man, but I still had the giraffes—and because I did, I also had Red and the Old Man. It’s a strange thing how you can spend years with some folks and never know them, yet, with others, you only need a handful of days to know them far beyond years. As I headed back to the giraffes, I knew I was never letting the Old Man’s darlings far out of my sight again. I was in California and I was with the giraffes. That was as much of a Promised Land—or home—I figured I’d ever need.
So I got a job at the city cemetery. After all, I had an aptitude. On the way out West, I kept thinking I’d hit up the Old Man to be a keeper, maybe even for Boy and Girl. Mrs. Benchley, though, had saved the jobs of all the zoo’s keepers who joined the Armed Services during the war, to give back to them on their return. Plus, within a month, a disk in my back gave way. One too many graves dug, I suppose. So, the job I ended up with was a graveyard night watchman, a position you might find surprising, considering the dead don’t usually need much watching. But it suited me fine, sleep still not being something I was ever good at, the War making it worse. To pass the long nights, I took to reading those books the Old Man loved, the ones by “Mr. Fenimore Cooper,” and while their old-fashioned words could come close to putting even me to sleep, the best Hawkeye parts were dog-eared glory. And soon I had a routine, spending my nights at work and my days at the zoo. Every morning I’d get off as the zoo was opening. I’d grab a salami, some bread, and a pocketful of onions. Then, using one of the Old Man’s wooden nickels, I’d have breakfast with my friends the giraffes, thinking about the Old Man and wishing the magnificent ol’ bastard could join us. Sometimes, Mrs. Benchley herself would stroll by and sit down beside me to watch the giraffes. Before too long, the keepers even started calling me Giraffe Man. Which was fine by me. Fine, indeed.
As the years went by, life slowly became the ordinary thing it was always meant to be. I tried to be a good man, which surely would have surprised the piss out of the boy I was back at Cuz’s. I never passed up the chance to feed a stray dog or cat or stray anything that passed my way, and I never trusted a soul who didn’t like animals. I loved some respectable women and some not so much. I married three, all redheads, you might not be surprised to hear, and I outlived them all. The closest I had to a child of my own was a grown stepdaughter, gone now, too, who once gave me a plaque that said “Time spent with animals is added to your life,” joking how I’d live to be a hundred, if that isn’t a kicker.
But the truth is I kept up my relationships with Girl and Boy better than I did any human, family having become a word without boundaries for me. I made sure they never wanted for onions, leaning in for Boy’s slobbery hello and to pat Girl’s spot in the shape of a sideways heart. I watched them thrive in all the love coming their way, feeling it as full as if it were my own. I saw how their lives lived among us did exactly what the Old Man said they would, making all who met them more alive to this world’s natural wonders most people would never know or care about any other way. Before they were gone, I even got to see them running free in a farm-like park the zoo built out in the desert with a herd of their own making, along with some from other zoos—a “tower” of giraffes, they call it, if you can beat that.
As for what the Old Man said about animals knowing the secret of life? While there were moments I thought they just might speak, his darlings never shared a secret with me in so many words. It didn’t take me long to grasp, though, that in all the time I was spending in their presence—reveling in their company like the Old Man did, seeing the world through their serene sky-high eyes like Red did, and sensing creation through two “towering creatures of God’s pure Eden” like Big Papa did—I had found me a secret to life, and it was the secret to a good life. Maybe that’s what the Old Man meant for me all along.
The years, though, kept passing, and the keepers kept changing. So did everybody else at the zoo, including even the Zoo Lady, Belle Benchley. I bet I told my story a thousand times before all who knew the Old Man were gone. After that, I must have started a thousand times to tell the new folks, too. Yet I never did, sure that my story now mattered only to me, just the twice-told tales of the old man I had become. I wasn’t much of a chatty man anymore anyway, the silence of the graveyard slowly quieting all within me and without. After a while, though, I think it was more than that, more like what Cyrus Badger said about the Old Man’s gnarled hand. Some things are so much yours that you’ve got to keep them to yourself. For thirty years, that’s what I did. I shared my life with the giraffes and they did the same with me, us three keeping our story our own, until the day Girl and Boy were both gone.
Then the years turned into decades.
And I kept on living.
Time heals all wounds, they say. I’m here to tell you that time can wound you all on its own. In a long life, there is a singular moment when you know you’ve made more memories than any new ones you’ll ever make. That’s the moment your truest stories—the ones that made you the you that you became—are ever more in the front of your mind, as you begin to reach back for the you that you deemed best.
So it was that after every living thing I’d ever loved was gone—taking with them big chunks of my very soul—I stumbled upon an old Life magazine. As I thumbed through its pages, I found myself thinking about Red, the Old Man, and the giraffes more than I had in decades, my mind traveling back, back, back to the boy driving the hurricane giraffes. I quaked at the raggedy man I’d have surely become without a hurricane blowing me to the giraffes, and I marveled at the power of a soul’s truest story to staunch life’s cruelest ones. I could’ve lived my entire life in the shadow of Dust Bowl miseries and Hitler horrors. Instead such times held less pain because of two animals I once knew.
But time just kept on passing and I just kept on living.
Until, deep into my nineties, time got away from me.
I had quit going to the zoo, spirit willing but body worn out. What I hadn’t noticed was that my mind was wearing out, too. Time plays its cruelest trick without you knowing it. Even the memories a body holds most dear become like scratchy old phonograph records played too long, fading in and out, with little sound and even less fury. Until you’re only another old man sitting in a wheelchair in a crowded VA room with other old men staring at a parade of TV pictures and stories not your own.
That’s how my own story could have ended, the long goodbye of older-than-old World War II vets like me whose bodies outlasted their stuttering minds.
Yet that’s not what happened.
Yesterday, long after I was told I’d lived over a century, which was as strange a thing to hear as you might suspect, I saw a giraffe filling the screen of the crowded room’s TV. I stirred from my foggy mind to hear a deep-voiced TV man talking. Giraffes had all but vanished from the earth, he said, like the elephants and tigers and gorillas and rhinos. Warring, poa
ching, and encroaching, he said, were emptying the jungles and silencing the forests and turning zoos into arks enough to make Noah weep. Thousands of animals and birds and even trees were at the point of no return, he said, going the way of the Old Man’s sky-blanketing passenger pigeons.
Gone as gone could be.
The TV kept talking, and pictures of doomed birds and animals and plants kept rolling—as if it would list all the world’s wild things if someone didn’t stop it—so I rushed over in my wheelchair and punched the TV to stop it myself.
As the orderlies came running, though, I sank back into my wheelchair, realizing that punching all the TVs in the world wouldn’t save the giraffes. There wasn’t a thing an old man could do. How could this happen? A world with no jolting giraffe joy or traveling bird waves or soaring forest glory seemed an ugly, barren, and soulless place fit only for the dust storms and the cockroaches and the likes of us. If they can go extinct, dear God Almighty, let me go extinct too! I was desperate to be gone—graveyard gone—fearing, like always, I’d just keep on living.
Then, for the first time in eighty years, I dreamed.
My nightmares had pretty much stopped after my ride with the giraffes. Whatever had stoked them seemed gone with the stray-dog boy I left behind. I went back to no dreams at all. But after the War’s end, I went to find Red and met you. That night, after dozing off on the train to San Diego, I saw Augusta Red as an old woman. She was standing in a little red house, opening a package, and inside was a giraffe. I tell you it rattled me good. I feared Mr. Big Reporter’s punch had started up my nightmares again, and cruelly so. Never mind the mailed giraffe. Red was never, ever going to be an old woman. Yet I dreamed no more. For decade upon decade upon decade, I went back to a life without dreams of any kind, which suited me fine.
Last night, though, after getting rolled back here and put to bed by a pack of orderlies, I closed my eyes and heard a sound I hadn’t heard since I was eighteen . . . the soft, rich, purring thrummmm of humming giraffes . . . and I knew I was inside a dream. Because there, in my room, was Girl poking her long neck into my room’s fifth-floor window, snorting at me to get out of bed and through the window. So, in my dream I do. I am back on top of the rig somewhere in Virginia, wrestling with Girl’s head as Red is telling stories of giraffes in the sky, in paintings, in Paris, and I find myself awash with those stories she told from long ago as if they were alive, as if we could all live forever inside their telling.
Then the rig vanishes. I’m back in bed, once again dreaming the dream of Red as an old lady in a little red house, opening a package and finding a giraffe.
And I see it’s not Red.
It’s you.
At that, I bolted straight up in bed, full awake, and in my mind’s eye, the dream finished itself like a vision—I am once again on the road with the giraffes, the Old Man, and your ma. But this time you are there, too. You are there in the Packard as Red snaps her pictures. You are there in the flood as she sacrifices her dreams to rescue the giraffes. You are there as Boy saves her and the you that will be you from the coot’s gutshot. You are there on the rig’s top as Red is telling giraffe stories of masterpieces and legend. And she is telling another story—our story.
To you.
That’s when I knew I’d been a foolish and selfish man.
It is a foolish man who thinks stories do not matter—when in the end, they may be all that matter and all the forever we’ll ever know. So, shouldn’t you hear our story? Shouldn’t you know how two darling giraffes saved me, you, and your mother, a woman I loved? And it is a selfish man who takes stories to the grave that aren’t his and his alone. Shouldn’t you know your mother’s brave heart and daring dreams? And shouldn’t you know your friends, even though we’re gone?
I knew, then, there was something an old man could do. I found a pencil and I began to write.
Few true friends have I known and two were giraffes, one that didn’t kick me dead and one that saved my worthless orphan life and your worthy, precious one.
They’re gone now. So surely am I. If the TV was right, there are no giraffes in the world to boot, gone with the elephants and tigers and the Old Man’s sky-blanketing pigeons.
Yet, somehow, I know there is still you. There is still this story that is yours as good as mine. If it goes extinct with those creatures of God’s pure Eden, that’d be a crying shame—my shame. Because if ever I could claim to have seen the face of God, it was in the colossal faces of the giraffes. If ever I had a story I should be leaving behind, it’d be this one, for them, all of them, and for you.
So, here and now, before it’s too late, I have written it down. If there is any magic left in a world without gentle giraffes, if that bit of God I saw in those sky-high wonders is still alive somewhere holy and true, a good soul will read these pencil scratches of mine and do this last thing I cannot do.
And one bright and blessed morning, the giraffes, the Old Man, me—and your ma—will find our winding way forever to you.
. . . As I lower my pencil, I hear a noise at the window.
It’s Girl.
Her glorious giraffe neck stretches near again, and I feel the same clutch around my heart on first spying her and Boy down the dock so long ago.
“We did it, Girl,” I say, pointing at these words. “You happy? I’m happy.”
Snuffling, she blows a satisfied spitball my way.
I start to ask the darling why she’s back. But, as my heart misses a beat . . . then another . . . and . . . another . . . I know. I drink in my final look of my true friend as she fades away.
Goodbye.
Shaky hand to old, old heart, I smile down at these last scribbles.
Time to stop.
Time to go . . .
. . . and I reach over and close the window.
EPILOGUE
The VA liaison put down the last writing pad from Woodrow Wilson Nickel’s antique footlocker and gazed around. It was already late afternoon, and she was now far behind schedule. But she didn’t look at her watch. Instead she gently bundled up the pads scattered around her, placed them neatly back in the footlocker along with the tiny antique porcelain souvenir giraffe, and walked in to see the hospital administrator.
“Do you have a moment?” she said. “There’s something I should show you.”
A few days later, inside an office past a mural of legendary “Zoo Lady” Belle Benchley, the current director of the San Diego Zoo leaned back in his chair. On his desk lay stacks of scribbled writing pads that had been sent over from the VA Center, the last of which he had just finished reading. He gazed out the window at the forest-like grounds in the direction of the zoo’s new Institute for Extinction Prevention, where, nearly a century before, an enclosure had housed the zoo’s first giraffes.
Then he touched the screen on his desk monitor, and the zoo security director appeared.
“Yes, sir?”
“If we wanted to find someone,” the director asked, “where might we start?”
In that way, one bright and blessed morning, a slim, freckled eighty-six-year-old New Jersey woman with a shock of once-red curls sat reading a special-delivery message—as she had done a dozen times since it had arrived—when the doorbell of her little redbrick house chimed. She whisked the door wide to find two delivery men holding a World War II–era antique trunk, and she motioned them to set it down gently on her hardwood floor.
As the door closed behind them, she opened the military footlocker and found a giraffe. For a moment, she admired the tiny porcelain San Diego Zoo souvenir. Then, closing her fingers around it, she picked up the first batch of writing pads, eased herself into the nearest chair, and began to read.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In 1999, while doing deep dives in the San Diego Zoo’s archives for a project, I uncovered a batch of yellowed news clippings chronicling the kind of story that captures the imagination and never quite lets go. A place as colorful as the San Diego Zoo has stories galore, but t
he scope and audacity of this one was remarkable:
In September 1938, on the orders of the zoo’s famous female director, Belle Benchley, two young giraffes survived a hurricane at sea, then were driven cross-country for twelve days in little more than a tricked-out pickup truck to become the first giraffes in Southern California. While the giraffes saw the USA from their sky-high windows, over five hundred newspapers carried the story day after day to their readers’ delight.
As I read those old clippings, I kept seeing a bored little farmgirl staring out her window when suddenly two giraffes whiz by. Finding a telegram from Lloyd’s of London insuring them, as I recall, for “blowouts, acts of God, tornadoes, dust storms, and floods,” I was hooked all the more. I searched for a trip diary by the keeper who managed the feat, a man named Charley Smith. Like most rough-and-tumble zoo men of the time, though, he wasn’t the kind of guy who wrote in diaries.
So that was that.
Then, a few years ago, I began thinking about those giraffes again—but for a disturbing reason. Here in the early twenty-first century, giraffes along with far too many other species are now threatened in what is being called “the sixth extinction,” which is about as scary-sounding a name as it should be. As I brooded over the future of the world’s most iconic wild animals, I found myself back in 1938, traveling the winding roads of America with two young giraffes, seeing things in my mind’s eye no one will ever see again and imagining how those two animals must have made people they met all the more human. Maybe that’s what really had me. Realizing we could lose them, I wanted to spend time thinking about why creatures who share our world can move us so. Belle Benchley’s memoir My Life in a Man-Made Jungle being an international bestseller during one of the worst eras of the twentieth century proves that connection. There’s more going on than the “circle of life”—Hitler was threatening, the Great Depression was persisting, yet two traveling giraffes lightened the load of an entire country.
West with Giraffes: A Novel Page 29
