West with Giraffes: A Novel

by Lynda Rutledge

  I lay back on the cross plank to watch, seeing their outlines against the stars and hearing their soft nibbling against the sound of the freight train dying away.

  Next thing I heard was a gruff voice.

  “You up there again, boy?” called the Old Man. “You’re going to break your fool neck doing that.”

  Certain I was in a moving boxcar, I grabbed at the plank under me. I’d dozed off. Above me, the stars had moved. The giraffes were still surrounding me, and I sat up feeling as untroubled as I’d ever hoped to be again.

  “Come on down,” the Old Man ordered. “The grub’s cold but good. So eat up and go stretch out on the nice cot that fancy four-eyes set up in his office. I’ll wake you when I need to.”

  Back on the ground, the raggedy boy’s oats crunching under my boots, I gobbled up the grub, and instead of leaving, I turned to look at the Old Man. He’d plunked down on the running board and was pulling his smokes and his Zippo from his shirt pocket.

  “Something on your mind?” he asked, lighting his Lucky.

  “I pocketed that cash roll,” I said. “Why didn’t you dump me?”

  Clinking the lighter shut, he took a puff, looked my way, and said, “You think I’ve never been hungry?” He left his eyes on me longer than he had to, giving me the same look, full of mercy, that the giraffes gave me after I’d opened their rig for my piece of gold—and it hit me like a punch in the gut.

  He was forgiving me, too.

  “Now get on to sleep,” he said, and waved me away, the giraffes peacefully chewing their cud above.

  As I took in the whole of them, the whole of me welled up . . . and I let a new, clearheaded thought sprout inside my walled-off heart. If home, like Red said, was not where you came from but where you wanted to be, then the rig, the Old Man, and the giraffes were more home—and more family—than any home I’d ever had. For a stray orphaned boy, this home seemed fiercely worth holding on to, with both fists, as long as I could. No matter what might be waiting for me up the road.

  With a glance back at the raggedy boy’s stone wall, and another toward the Panhandle, I sucked in all my fearfulness and headed for the bowler-hat zoo man’s office, knowing I was staying put—come what may.

  In the tiny zoo office, even with the peace of having made a decision, it took a while to settle down. I lay wide-eyed on the cot in the dark, listening to the monkey sounds and missing the serene silence of the giraffes, until I must have dozed off. Because I found myself standing under a glaring red-dirt sun . . .

  . . . I hear Ma: “Li’l one, who you talking to?”

  . . . I see animals in cages, a bear, a raccoon, a mountain lion, and rattlesnakes.

  . . . I see giraffes floating by in rushing water.

  . . . I see a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun aim and fire.

  . . . And as the boom-boom ricochets off the office walls, I bolted upright in the dark, hitting the floor in a crumpled lump, cot and all.

  I rubbed my head where it hit the concrete, my mind reeling with floating giraffes and caged animals. I couldn’t place any of it. The only thing I recognized was the sight of the gun—until I remembered it rightly. My nightmare’s gun was a rifle. This was a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun. I could not recall ever seeing such a gun in my life.

  I pushed the cot off me and sprinted from the office, not stopping until I’d climbed up the rig and laid eyes on the giraffes safe inside. Only then did I look down at the Old Man, who was staring at me exactly like the first time I’d run to the rig in my skivvies, back at Round’s Auto Rest.

  Heart thundering, I asked, “Do you have bears in cages in San Diego?”

  “We got bears, but in a nice big pit.”

  “Mountain lions?”

  “No. Not a one.”

  “A raccoon?”

  “Now who’d want a raccoon?”

  “Rattlesnakes?”

  “Those we got. We’ve dug thousands out of the zoo’s hills to trade to other zoos. Australians even got some.”

  “How about rushing water? You got rushing water?”

  “Well, we got the ocean,” he said. “What’s wrong? This little zoo got you going?”

  I shrugged. It was all I had the energy to do.

  He ordered me down. “Sit.”

  I dropped down beside him.

  “Let me regale you a bit more about the place we’re headed,” he said. “You think that prairie dog dry moat over yonder is good? In San Diego, you got African lions with nothing between you and them but a moat. In fact, if the Boss Lady had her way, the weather’s so nice they’d fence in all of Balboa Park and let the animals roam. The fencing may be rusty and the money’s always tight, but it’s about as aces a place to be an animal among us humans as there is. I ever tell you about the penguins?”

  Leaning back on the cab door, I listened to the Old Man talk, wanting to tell him about this new nightmare and even about Aunt Beulah, yet knowing it wouldn’t help a thing.

  Instead I gazed again toward the road.

  West.

  . . . “HON!”

  I’m on the floor. I don’t know how I got here. “Where’s . . . where’s my pencil?”

  “Let me help you up, then we’ll find your pencil.”

  I feel Big Orderly Red grab under my armpits and set me back in my wheelchair. “Oh, hon, you hit your head. That’s going to leave a mark. What happened?”

  I think my heart stopped. But I’m not telling her that. I look around for Girl. The window’s open, but she’s not there.

  And I remember why.

  Rosie reaches toward the window. “You’re cold as ice. We better close this.”

  “Girl might come back!” I roll to stop her, hit the bedstead, and start tumbling out again.

  Rosie grabs me. “I better call the nurse.”

  “NO, NO, don’t! A nurse’ll drug me and I can’t stop, I have to finish! I’m past my time, way past—you know I am! The rest is all I have left to tell her, and for her it’s the most important part! It won’t make sense to her unless I finish—you have to let me finish!”

  Sighing, Rosie glances down at the last thing I scribbled.

  Across Oklahoma.

  “I don’t recall Oklahoma, hon,” she says. “Now that I think of it, I don’t recall anything past Arkansas. Did you tell me the rest?”

  “Yes,” I lie.

  “Well . . .” She pauses, pushing the same graying strand of hair behind her ear. “If you lie down awhile, I won’t call the nurse for now. Deal?”

  I nod.

  “There,” she says as she helps me from my wheelchair onto the bed. “You haven’t eaten all day bent over that desk. That’s probably what happened.”

  I know it’s not, my heart missing a beat. “Where’s . . . where’s my pencil?”

  She picks it up from the linoleum and lays it on the desk. “You can go back to your trip once you’ve had a nice nap. Rest first, promise?”

  I nod again.

  She leaves.

  I lurch back in my wheelchair, grabbing up the pencil. Taking a deep breath, I place my hand on my heart a moment. Then keep on going.

  Here’s where I begin to wish . . .

  11

  Across Oklahoma

  Here’s where I begin to wish.

  I wish I could jump ahead.

  I wish I could skip to the finish without having to ride through Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle again in those Hard Times.

  The land you grow up in is a forever thing, remembered when all else is forgotten, whether it did you right or did you wrong. Even when it flat near kills you. Even when it invades your dreams and stokes your nightmares. Even when you run from it never to return, then find yourself headed straight back for it, and the best you can wish for is to drive through it with your head down and your wits about you, dodging the worst of it so you can get on with your young life somewhere else.

  Like they say, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. But that never kept a be
ggar from wishing.

  There were two main roads to California from the Dust Bowl. Route 66 took most of the load and the fame, swooping down the plains from Chicago through Oklahoma toward Los Angeles. The other, the “southern route” heading to San Diego, cut across the bottom part of the Texas Panhandle, my part. Nobody I knew called it the Lee Highway. It was just the road west, and it was the road we were traveling whether I much liked it or not.

  The green of the land began to fade not far over the Arkansas state line into Oklahoma. Even the blue of the sky changed as we drove deeper into the state, the color lighter, hazier, thinner. My ma used to tell me tales of the clear big beauty of the Texas Panhandle sky when she and Pa first started homesteading their piece of land, but it might as well be a fairy tale to me, my childhood sky always an iffy thing and soon a deadly one. You may have heard of the worst day, the duster of all dusters, called Black Sunday. In April of ’35, a black cloud came roaring onto the horizon enough to scare a multitude of saints. It was the Great Plains blowing at us, the storm from hell that blew three hundred million tons of topsoil off Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. When it hit, it blackened the skies so bad that your hand in front of your face went unseen, the static in the air so bad that the slightest touch of anyone or anything turned sparks into black magic flames. And it kept blowing. In fact, the dirt blizzard blew east so thick and hard and swift that it actually darkened the skies of Washington, DC, even the congressmen, they say, having to close their windows to stave off the dust. That day is a point of historical fact for most. It was point of no return for me and mine. That was when, cough by cough, my baby sister and my ma began to die of the dust pneumonia, along with an earthly host of other folks young and old. For months on end, it was all anybody could think about. The dust never quite left the air, descending and rising like a biblical plague with yellow clouds of swarming grasshoppers and brown skies raining down mud. Even after the air cleared, the worry never did. Each year brought more dusters, each holding the dirt in the air longer and spreading the dust pneumonia deeper, real rain only the stuff of unanswered prayers. Nesters and tenant farmers alike left in droves. Those who stayed would talk about little else right up to the very day we came riding through. Because that day there was wind. With wind came a hint of dust. And with dust came the old dread—even with a pair of giraffes from the other side of the world passing right in front of their eyes.

  Less than an hour over the Oklahoma state line, the wind began gusting enough to sway the rig. We pulled under a sturdy tree grove to check Girl’s splint and let the giraffes nibble and rest, since it was the last such grove I knew we’d see for a good long time, the trees sparser with each mile. Before we hit the road again, we tried to get the giraffes’ heads in and latch the windows, but they were having none of it and we were too late to try any tricks.

  “You got any idea how long this’ll last?” the Old Man said, holding on to his fedora.

  I didn’t and, more than ever in my miserable farmboy life, I wish I did.

  For a couple of hours, as the wind got worse and the land turned flatter and flatter, we drove slower than usual. A few miles this side of Comanche, we made a stop at Loco, a crossroads with only two buildings on opposite sides of the main highway. One was a two-pump gas station, all red and black and shiny as the new Texaco sign above it. The other was a ramshackle general store and post office that looked like it might topple if you gave it a good push. The store had more metal signs on it than wood, outsized signs for Coca-Cola and Brylcreem and Carter’s Little Liver Pills tacked everywhere you looked. While it seemed odd to the Old Man, it looked normal to me. Metal signs stopped the dust and wind that could even beat tar to seep through a shack’s cracks.

  I pulled the rig into the tiny Texaco station and a gap-toothed, bow-tied gas attendant greeted us, the giraffes leaning down to greet him on their own.

  “Don’t that beat all!” he kept saying.

  On the far side of the pumps a carload was pulling onto the farm road north, whooping back in Spanish at the sight of the giraffes.

  “Migrant workers,” said the gas pumper, holding his cap on against the wind. “That time of year. Been a stream of ’em all week passing through on their way up to Michigan for cherry-picking season. If this dust gets bad again, I swear, I’m heading that way myself.”

  The Old Man watered the giraffes himself so he could give the Girl’s splint another quick check, sending me to the store across the highway for food and a new sack of onions.

  Behind the store counter, a rawboned man sporting a neck goiter the size of a corn ear shoved the last of a biscuit into his mouth. “Whatcha got over there?” he said, wiping his lips with his sleeve and squinting through the screen door.

  “Giraffes.”

  “Don’t say! The things I see going by. Passing through quick, I imagine.”

  I nodded, grabbing up the supplies and plunking them down on the counter.

  The man harrumphed. “Better you do, what with the wind getting up. Critters with throats like that won’t like it if the sky turns brown. Woke up to the dang dust. Hadn’t seen it in months. Whole state’s still recovering from ’35, ya know.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Which made the dusters of ’34 and ’37 look like church picnics, ya know.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “But rain’s coming,” he added. “You can feel it.”

  Hearing that turned me cold—it was a phrase as familiar to my ears as the wind itself, like an anthem of all Dust Bowl hangers-on, the ones too stubborn to leave. My own pa used to say it, right before things usually got worse, and that made me turn around to get one more thing—a jar of Vaseline. Then leaving it all up front for the Old Man to pay for, I went to use the indoor privy at the back of the store.

  Passing by a big barrel of apples, my old pilfering reflex almost had me easing one into my pocket. As I came out of the privy door, though, who do I see standing by the apples but Mrs. Augusta Red. The sight of her twisted me up like a pretzel, especially since I thought back in Little Rock that I’d never see her again. Despite all her sweet talk at the zoo, I wasn’t through with my pique at her, and I was in no mood to hear more. I inched back behind the door to wait her out, and I almost missed what she did next. Glancing toward the clerk still staring out at the giraffes, she stifled a cough. Then, slick as you please, slicker than I’d ever done it, she picked up one of the apples herself, slipped it in her trouser pocket, and strolled out the back entrance to where the Packard was parked.

  For a second I stood there flummoxed, not sure that I saw what I saw and not sure what it meant if I did.

  As I hustled across the road to the rig, craning my neck back for Red, I almost ran right into a pole by the gas pumps, looking around only at the last second.

  “Whoa!” exclaimed the bow-tied gas attendant. “That was close.”

  “Better watch where you’re going, boy. Fast as you were moving, that pole would’ve knocked you on your can,” the Old Man said, closing the trapdoors. “Looks like that store’s got a Western Union shingle, so I might as well check for a telegram from the Boss Lady. Did you get the supplies ready for me to pay for?”

  I nodded, still watching for Red. There she came, leaning into the wind, camera up, scooting across the highway toward us.

  The Old Man fumed at the sight of her. “She keeps turning up. Like a bad penny,” he muttered, then headed around the far end of the rig to avoid her.

  I was sure the Old Man was going to call the law on her, like he said he would, and I had a sudden urge to warn her. But I didn’t. I could only stand there watching her snap pictures of the bow-tied gas pumper and the giraffes. Then she looked up and grinned my way, and I thought I heard singing. I started to pop myself upside the head until I saw a tent out beyond the station surrounded by trucks, tin lizzies, and farm wagons. The sound of singing voices was wafting on the wind from it. I figured it must be a church “revival” like the ones I got
dragged to every year of my life, complete with a pulpit-pounding evangelist and soul-saving altar calls, so I wasn’t about to bring it up.

  But Red sure did. “What’s going on over there?”

  “Oh, they’re having themselves an all-day community sing,” the bow-tied attendant said. “Mostly the Jesus-jumpers. You know, the Holiness crowd. I wish it was the Baptists. Now, they can sing, and they don’t use them jangle-banging tambourines.”

  Red’s face lit up.

  Just then, it began to drizzle.

  A lady near the tent’s opening warbled, “Rain!” and half the crowd came out to see.

  “Praise Jesus!”

  “What a blessing!”

  One soprano thought it worth a few high shout-outs.

  That’s when the lady near the opening saw us. “Brothers and sisters—look!”

  As the rest of the crowd streamed out to gape at the giraffes, the singing died off. For a moment, the only sounds were the wind and the last little tinkles of a tambourine. Then the rain started coming down in a heavy pitter-patter.

  “It’s a sign!” somebody hollered.

  Two different groups broke into two different songs. Somebody started singing a favorite gospel song . . . “I’ll fly away, oh glory, I’ll fly away . . .” while a second bunch burst into another standby . . . “Oh, come to the church in the wildwood . . .” The racket sounded like dueling tambourines on top of a mess of screeching cats. While the song leader broke a sweat trying to get the singers on the same song, the giraffes craned their necks toward the rumpus, their ears swiveling back and forth almost in rhythm with the tambourines.

  As the crowd started holy dancing over to serenade the giraffes, mouths wide to catch either the rain or the ear of the Lord, the Old Man came out of the store across the highway. Arms full of supplies, he had a look on his face that said he was wondering what fresh hell was this.