West with Giraffes: A Novel

by Lynda Rutledge

  The Old Man’s face made it clear it did not.

  With that, the dungarees were all in a lather. I thought they just might pounce on him. From the look on his face, I thought he just might want it.

  “We got her here . . . ,” a voice rang out, and you could almost hear the words left hanging in the air: Now save her, ya bastard.

  The Old Man, his hand still on the downed one’s great head, didn’t move.

  As the grumbling grew louder, though, a dented gray panel truck came rattling toward the rig from the street with a sign on its door so faded I could only make out the word “Zoo.” Out from it hopped a stubby, well-scrubbed college-boy type in a white coat clutching a black doctor bag. He strode past us like he was on a holiday, headed to the Old Man.

  “We’ve got to get her on her feet or she’s done,” the zoo doc said by way of hello. The Old Man motioned to the harbormaster, who whistled over a couple of longshoremen with crowbars, who started yanking at the crushed crate around the tangled giraffe. But it wasn’t fast enough for the Old Man. He started pulling at the smashed planks himself, gnarled hand and all. When there was nothing more to yank, the crane’s harness—still around planks under her body and feet—went taut, groaning like it was alive as it pulled the giraffe upright. When she faltered, the dungarees rushed by me, plunging their hands in to help the Old Man steady her. With one more tug, everything went full upright and the harnessed female was up on three of her four feet in a flash, violently so, everyone but the Old Man jumping back. And there it was. Her back right leg, from knee to fetlock, looked as if someone had taken a ball-peen hammer to it. She wobbled, fighting to stay up on her three good spindly legs.

  “Steady . . . girl . . . steady . . . ,” the Old Man purred as the zoo doc felt along her body.

  “Her internal organs seem intact,” he said. “This leg’s the telltale.”

  I thought it was good news until I remembered they shoot horses for less.

  Opening his black bag, he cleaned, splinted, and wrapped the leg, then stepped back as the longshoremen lashed freight panels snug around her. When they were done, the Old Man, still cooing his giraffe-speak, reached in and uncinched the crane’s harness.

  The girl teetered. Then she was standing on her own.

  Seeing that, the Old Man and the zoo doc started talking fast and low. I inched closer.

  “But if I reject her as unfit, it’s a death sentence and you know it!” the Old Man was saying.

  The zoo doc frowned back at the T-shaped boxcar rig. “How long you hoping to take to get there?”

  “Two weeks if we make good time.”

  The zoo doc shook his head. “Better cut that in half.”

  The Old Man threw up his hands. “How can I do that? We got to go slow—even slower now because of that leg!”

  “I’m saying a week tops because of that leg. You better start thinking how.”

  “Fine. So?”

  Glancing back at sirens in the distance, the zoo doc fumed. “Go ahead and sign off for both. Don’t want to disappoint Mrs. Benchley yet. They’ve got the time in quarantine to see if the young female stays tall—if we even get there. But, Jones, if I were you, I’d tell Mrs. Benchley the whole truth, that even if the female’s still upright before you hit the road, odds are your road trip will still do her in. Better if Mrs. Benchley hears it now instead of when you’re figuring out what to do with a dead giraffe on the road.”

  As the zoo doc left, the Old Man marched over to the harbormaster and signed some papers. Then the crane grabbed the patched crates and swung the giraffes over to a harbor flatbed, where longshoremen tied them down. With that, the backslapping dungarees scattered, the Old Man popped the rig’s hood signaling a let’s-go to the goober driver as he climbed in, and I watched it all pass—two colossal storybook animals from the other side of the world on the back of a harbor flatbed with a contraption rig trailing behind.

  I stared after the giraffes, knowing the moment I wasn’t thinking about them I’d be forced to face my sudden return to life as a stray-dog boy. Other creatures’ miracles don’t mean a thing when you’re still working on your own. As the trucks got smaller and smaller, my wandering, wretched future got bigger and bigger. I took a breath. My ribs throbbed, and as the trucks kept on shrinking from view, I thought I might retch.

  Feeling something squish under my bootheel, I looked down. I was standing on the telegrams the Old Man had tossed on the wet dock. Scooping them up, I read them quick and remember them whole.

  Said the first:

  Said the second:

  The wet telegrams turned to mush and slipped through my fingers. But my eyes were still seeing that final bright and shiny word—a word with more storybook meaning than giraffe for a Dust Bowl boy.

  California.

  The giraffes were bound for the land of milk and honey. Moses and the Chosen People couldn’t have longed for the Promised Land any more than hardscrabble farm folks longed for “Californy.” Everybody knew all you had to do was find your way there without dying on the road or rail, and you’d live like a king plucking fruit from the trees and grapes from the vine.

  And how could anybody lose the way following a couple of giraffes?

  I felt my eyes grow as big as the thoughts I was thinking. I was miserable-damp, I had an eye that was half-swollen, a couple of teeth loose, a rib throbbing like a tom-tom, and an arm that wasn’t working quite right. But it didn’t matter a bit. Because with that one bright, shiny word dancing before my eyes, I had something no Dust Bowl orphan had any business having. Although I was living in a time when such a thing was as likely to kill you as save you—I had a flickering hope.

  The giraffes turned the corner and vanished from sight.

  So I started to run, splashing through the water and the muck after them as fast as my bunged-up bones would go.

  For a mile, I ran along the cobblestones following the giraffes. Workers clearing the streets dropped their shovels to gawk. Firemen pulling a body by its arms from a storm drain stopped to gape. Linemen working on dangling electric lines paused in the sizzle to stare. Block after block, as storm-woozy people hung from windows calling to their pals to come look, I kept running behind the slow rigs, not knowing where we were going or what to do next. At the blocked Holland Tunnel exit, the rigs stopped just as a motorcycle cop came roaring up, shouting at the rig drivers to follow him uptown, even though there were elevateds that way the high-riding crates would have to squeeze under—lots of them.

  At the Ninth Avenue elevated, a man riding with the flatbed jumped from the truck, pole in hand, brushed back a sizzling live wire, and measured the clearance.

  “Eighth of an inch,” he yelled back. The flatbed slipped slowly under.

  The rig moved on to the next one a few blocks down. Again the pole man jumped out. “Fourth of an inch,” he called back.

  Another couple of blocks—

  “Half!”

  On we went, this way and that, edging up through the city, minutes turning into hours. The East River was still flooding the nearby streets, and a factory was ablaze in between, so the cop kept us west. We skimmed Central Park, dozens of woebegone folks and wide-eyed ragamuffins gaping at the passing giraffes from under soaked boards and walkways as if watching a dream. On we still went, until the George Washington Bridge was straight ahead. The cop was leading us to New Jersey. I panicked. I couldn’t run over a bridge.

  Across the street, I saw a joe hop off a motorcycle outside a storefront and rush inside, pointing back at the giraffes, the machine sliding to the puddled pavement like it was a two-bit bicycle. It had barely hit the ground before I found my legs wrapped around it. With one eye on that motorcycle cop, I pumped that electric horse twice, skidded left then right like some bucking bronco—and held on.

  By the time I caught up with the giraffes on the bridge, half a dozen reporter cars appeared out of nowhere, sandwiching in around me, their camera guys hanging out the windows, flashbulbs flashin
g against the gloomy skies.

  On the other side, two New Jersey cycle cops took up the escort, dodging the storm’s flotsam and jetsam, until the two big rigs bumped over a track by a deserted depot and stopped in front of a gated sign: US QUARANTINE. Behind the gate were gabled tin-roofed brick barns spread out as far as the eye could see. We were at the federal quarantine station, where animals shipped into the country were inspected, from cows and horses to camels and oxen, and now, giraffes.

  As the guard waved the two big trucks through, the reporters swarmed the gate. I stopped by a massive uprooted oak near the road and had barely turned off the cycle before they’d all rushed back to their cars, except for a fancy green Packard bumping to a stop behind me. A reporter in suit and tie with a fedora cocked just right got out of the driver’s side and headed for the guard hut.

  “Wait here,” he called up to his camera guy, who was crawling up on the Packard’s hood. And the sight seared itself whole and perfect in my eyes, it’s sparkling so fresh even now in my old man’s memory—because the camera guy was a camera gal.

  Much younger than the duded-up reporter, she had red curls all over her head, a fiery halo of raging waves she surely battled into submission every morning, and she was wearing trousers—the first woman I’d ever seen doing so in real life. There she stood, snapping pictures on the Packard’s hood in her white girly shirt, two-tone shoes, and two-legged trousers. And there I stood, feeling like I’d been hurricane-walloped again. If it wasn’t love at first sight, it was sure something painfully akin to it.

  “Oh, hello, Stretch. Are you here for the giraffes, too?” Red said, looking down at me with eyes that about knocked me out on their own. They were hazel and I must have moved closer in their sway. Because as she snapped a picture, she popped a flashbulb bright enough to blind a blind man—and me.

  “Lionel! Come quick!” I heard her yell.

  “Hey! Get away from her!” the reporter yelled, shoving me as I blinked back to sight. Stumbling, I scrambled away.

  “What’d you do that for!” I heard her say as I ducked behind the downed oak. “I only thought you’d want to talk to him for the story, Mr. Big Reporter!”

  “For God’s sake, Augie, that kid’s nothing but a tramping punk who’d slit your throat for chump change. Don’t be naive—he was looking at you,” the reporter said back. “Let’s go. The guard said the giraffes are quarantined for twelve days. I’ve got all I need, and you’ve got time to get all you need without entertaining vagrants.”

  A minute later, they were gone. The cops were gone. The giraffes were gone. And I was miles from anywhere I knew, with night coming on, clueless for what to do next.

  I stowed the cycle behind the toppled oak, and I crouched down to watch and wait near a cow carcass. Just as I’d had all I could take of the skeeters feasting on my hide, the gray panel zoo truck jolted to a stop at the gate. As the guard waved the stubby zoo doc through, I started worrying whether the lame giraffe had stayed tall. I decided to see for myself.

  Spying where a raccoon had burrowed under the fence, I squeezed under. Mud caked down my backside, I hustled toward the biggest, tallest barn as the zoo truck, the empty harbor flatbed, and some joes in khaki work-duds were leaving. I peeked inside. The barn was full of shadows, its walls lined with haystacks. On the left was a cot, in the middle was the rig, and on the right was a sky-high wire pen holding both giraffes. The splinted girl giraffe had stayed tall. Finally out of their crates, they were facing each other, necks touching, scooched so close you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. Like they couldn’t much believe they were alive and were circling the wagons to keep it that way.

  The Old Man—Mr. Riley Jones, according to the telegram—was nowhere to be seen, but the driver had grabbed a big juicy apple from the truck’s cab and was leaning against the rig eating it. I watched him chomp it down to nothing, then pitch the core into the hay, and I marked the spot. I hadn’t eaten since before the hurricane, so even an apple core covered with goober spit could soon start looking good. During the Hard Times, being hungry was a basic state of being, least for most folks I knew. After the dust killed off the livestock, Dust Bowlers were eating prairie dogs and rattlesnakes and making soup from tumbleweeds. When you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, that’s all life is—you’re nothing but a feral thing chasing your hunger every minute of the day.

  Wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve, the goober driver strutted over and rattled the pen’s fence, spooking the giraffes, then laughed and did it again. Rocking on my bootheels, fists clenched, I wanted so bad to relieve him of his front teeth that I didn’t hear the Old Man returning until it was too late. I had to duck inside, diving behind a hay pile.

  Already barking orders at the driver, the Old Man marched right past. “Earl!” he yelled. “Come here!”

  Next thing I know he’s telling the driver to leave for the night and pushing the squeak-squawking barn doors shut behind him . . . trapping me inside. Cussing my fool self, I settled in to wait until I could figure out how to sneak out unseen.

  As night fell, the only sounds in the barn were the giraffes snorting and stomping. The Old Man flipped a metal lever on a wall panel near his cot, the dangling electric light lamps came on, and the place turned bright as day. And there I cowered, nothing between me and him but hay. If he’d looked my way, he would’ve seen me for sure. But he only had eyes for the giraffes. Watching the giraffes in a tenderhearted way I couldn’t quite figure for such a man, he started cooing his giraffe-speak so soothingly it was calming me down. When he stopped, only the giraffes’ quiet snuffling filled the air. He pulled the switch, the lights went off, and the barn went full dark except for an outside light streaming through the high wire windows, casting shadows across the barn. Then the Old Man flopped on the cot and was soon snoring like a buzz saw.

  Of course, that was my chance to sneak out. But there was still the matter of the produce waiting for the taking, and I had to take. So I headed quiet but quick to the rig’s blindside, stepped on the running board, and spied two gunnysacks on the cab’s seat, one with apples, the other sweet onions. Grabbing one from both, I stuffed the onion in my pocket and shoved the apple in my chompers, all but swallowing the thing whole.

  As I grabbed another onion, though, I felt eyes on me.

  Readying for a scrap, I spun around to see I had an audience. Not a dozen steps away, the giraffes had moved near the pen’s fence, and they had both turned their long necks to stare at me. There are lots of things that can make a body freeze in its tracks. Having a couple of two-ton beasts eyeing you from behind a flimsy piece of fencing is surely one of them. I should have been backing away. Instead I inched nearer until I was by the pen studying the living magnitude of them—from their huge hooves to their wide bodies and up, up, up their spotty necks to their knobby horns. I got a crick in my own long neck staring up at the giraffes’ colossalness. They could knock this pen down, I recall thinking. Yet they weren’t doing any such thing. In fact, the boy giraffe had now shut his eyes. He’s sleep-standing like my old mare, I realized, wincing at the memory. The girl, though, was still staring at me with those round brown-apple eyes exactly like she’d done at the dock, except now she was staring down. Way down.

  Have you ever looked straight into the eyes of an animal? A tame one’s figuring you out, what you’re going to do and what that means to it. A wild one can chill you to the bone, surveying you for either supper or survival. But the gaze of that giraffe was different. It seemed to hold neither fear nor design. Her cantaloupe-sized nostrils snuffled the top of my head through the wire fence and I let them, if only because I couldn’t make my legs work. Blowing warm stink breath, she left my hair damp with giraffe spit. Then she bumped the fence with her snout, trying to get to the onion I was still clutching. I held it up. Her long tongue snaked through the wire and snatched it back through the fence, her neck rising to send it sliding down her long throat with a mighty gulp, th
en she inched near again until the smell of her surrounded me. She smelled of fur . . . and ocean . . . and sweet foreign farm dung. Before I knew what I was doing, I’d reached my hand through the wire to touch a spot on her flank as big as a granny’s butt in the shape of a sideways heart.

  For the longest moment, we stood there like that, the rough feel of her warm pelt full on my outstretched hand—until I felt another tongue licking my fingers. It was the wild boy, his long neck stretching over the back of the wild girl to me. I jerked my hand out of the fence wire and his tongue followed, poking it through the fence to lick at my britches’ pocket. He wanted my stashed onion. So I dug in my pocket to get it for him—and out came Cuz’s lucky rabbit’s foot with it, falling right through the fence wire to land by the girl’s huge hoof. Not until I felt the boy’s tongue flicking at my fist could I tear my eyes away from my lost lucky charm and serve up the onion.

  As both giraffes stomped and swished their tails at the onion delights, my eyes wandered back to Cuz’s rabbit’s foot still lying by the wild girl’s hoof. Needing all the luck I could get, never mind how dead “lucky” Cuz was, I decided I had to get that rabbit’s foot back.

  Ducking through the fence’s opening, I was cocksure I could grab it quick and slick. As I closed my fingers around the rabbit fur, though, Wild Girl shuffled her hooves—and her wounded leg thumped me. Swiveling her big haunch, she bumped me so mightily that when I landed I bounced. Scrambling backward, I flung myself out of the pen. When I glanced back, she was giving me a look so offended that it had me all but begging her pardon.

  Just then, the Old Man snort-snored loud enough to wake the next county and broke me out of my giraffe spell. Cramming the rabbit’s foot in my pocket, I lurched toward the barn doors. I was halfway to them when I remembered the driver’s produce free for the taking and, damn me, I had to take. Sneaking over to the truck’s cab, I had loaded up my arms when I realized I wasn’t hearing the Old Man’s snores anymore—I was hearing the clomp of his boots. He was going to catch me where I stood unless I dropped the produce and ran.