West with Giraffes: A Novel

by Lynda Rutledge

  “Want me to try putting the giraffes’ heads in?” I asked over the din as he hustled toward us.

  “You think they’re going to let you with all that caterwaulin’?”

  Jumping into the cab, we rolled up the windows as the singers crowded near. Red was snapping pictures in the middle of it all, and at the sight of her, the Old Man’s face went as dark as Black Sunday.

  “Did you call the law on her?” I said.

  He gave me a look like he’d forgotten all about it, like something else was on his mind.

  That gave me pause. “You get a telegram?”

  He motioned toward the road. “We’ll talk about it later. Let’s go.”

  I started the rig and, over the engine rumbling, the song leader waved his arms and hollered, “Page 351, brothers and sisters! Let’s send them off proper!”

  At that, the singers and the tambourines went silent, the mood turning sweet and light and angel-chorus bright. In four-part harmony, they began to sing the most perfect hymn for that singular moment that could ever be. I’d heard it all my life. Yet only then did I hear the words’ meaning:

  All creatures of our God and King

  Lift up your voice and with us sing

  Allelluia

  Allelluia

  Even I had to admit it sounded beautiful.

  For a mile, the Old Man and I rode in blessed silence, the giraffes looking back like they’d acquired a taste for gospel singing, with the windshield wipers slapping time. In another mile, the green Packard was back in my sideview mirror, and I didn’t relax until she slowed and disappeared from view again as we passed through Comanche.

  Five miles past, the spattering rain stopped and we rolled down the windows.

  In another five, you couldn’t tell it had rained at all. The dust was kicking up again, the grit in the air bad enough to leave a mark on my skin, making me pull in my elbow from the window, so it was surely getting into the giraffes’ eyes and nose. We had to try putting their heads in, so we stopped at a wide crossroads. An old-timer with more wrinkles than skin was sitting at the stop sign in a tin lizzie pickup with more rust than paint.

  “You got giraffes in that thang!” he guffawed. “You putting those big heads of theirs in because of the dust?”

  I nodded, then got to it, and the giraffes, having had enough, let me.

  The old-timer was still talking. “First sign of dust in quite a while. Might get worse fore it gets better,” he called to us as we pulled away. “But rain’s coming. You can feel it.”

  We drove like that for a few miles slow and steady, the wind dying down a bit, which made the dust still lingering in the air all the more worrisome.

  The giraffes began to cough.

  Even now, the thought of it can still make my skin crawl. It was a sandpaper on stone kind of sound, half moan, half rattle, and all bad. By then, even the Old Man and I were coughing with the windows up.

  Feeling the rising panic of a Dust Bowl boy who knew a cough was like an invitation to a funeral, I pulled over.

  “What are you doing?” the Old Man said, coughing into his fist.

  I grabbed up the jar of Vaseline I’d added to our supplies at the sound of my pa’s rain curse—it was my ma’s answer to the dust storm’s worst. Whether the giraffes would even let me try it, I hadn’t a clue, but I had to try. With the Old Man following, I climbed up, opened the top, and slopped every bit of the Vaseline in that jar all over those cantaloupe-sized nostrils, wishing I had more. As the Old Man and I stroked their necks and cooed giraffe-speak, their throats moved in ripples like small convulsions . . . until the sandpaper-scratch sound slowed. Less dust was getting in those big snout holes of theirs. Still, I feared it was too little, too late.

  “Let’s wrap the tarp, too,” the Old Man ordered, and I wished to God we’d done it sooner. Once the dust gets in, it keeps going round and round if you’re moving, and we had no choice but to keep moving.

  We rode for a good thirty minutes that way. Their sandpaper wheezing was gone and the wind was now barely more than a breeze. The giraffes, though, were still snuffling and sneezing loud enough for us to hear with the windows up, so we pulled over again and undid the tarp enough to peek in the trapdoors. Heads and necks hanging low, both giraffes were drooling spit, snot, and saliva. Their big bodies were trying to flush out the remaining dust on their own.

  The Old Man ordered me to throw back the top while he filled up the buckets from the rig’s metal jugs. Soon as I was back on the ground, he crawled up the side with one of the buckets, eased it onto the cross plank, and with a grunt, sat down on the cross plank himself. Pocketing a couple of emergency onions, I grabbed the other bucket and followed.

  “Stay right there,” he ordered as I hit the top rung of my side ladder. “Get their heads up,” he said next, “then hold them.”

  Like I could do such a thing if they didn’t want me to. Setting the second bucket down, I waved an onion Boy’s way. Up his slobbery snout came. As I fed him the onion, I put my arms around Boy’s jaw as tender as I could without spooking him, ready to grab when the Old Man was ready. Cooing his giraffe-speak from the other side, the Old Man raised the bucket of water and nodded. I clamped. With a mighty heave, he sloshed the entire bucketful of water at Boy, hitting him full in the face and up those big nostrils. Boy whipped me like a bucking bronco, and then let go a sneeze that covered the Old Man with more spit and snot than I’d seen in my entire life. As the Old Man cussed and wiped and cussed and wiped, I all but bit through my tongue keeping a straight face. Then we moved to do the same to Girl, who’d seen all she needed to see and had her payback ready. The Old Man picked up the bucket and nodded. I grabbed. He sloshed. And Girl, shaking off my paltry arm hold, reared back and let go with the sneeze of all sneezes, sharing the wealth with me as well.

  We slopped to the ground and plunked down on the rig’s running board. As we wiped at ourselves, we listened for more worrisome noises. But we heard nothing more than some righteous stomping and slavering. So we offered the giraffes new buckets of water, which they eyed a moment before gulping down, then stashed the tarp and pulled back onto the road.

  We had to keep moving.

  Soon we were into the worst-hit part of the Okie Dust Bowl. The farther we went, the more barren the view turned. At first, as the clouds began drizzling again, we didn’t much care. After an hour passed with us being the only vehicle on the deserted highway, though, the road itself started looking abandoned.

  All of a sudden, we weren’t traveling alone. Wave after wave of small brown birds were flying along with us in the drizzling rain, sweeping into bubbles and ribbons, flowing close, then away. The miles ticked off and there they still were, a rippling flock with no beginning or end, going on and on across the flat, empty land.

  Even the Old Man was impressed. “Now that is a natural wonder right there.”

  The giraffes noticed, too, their necks swaying along with the endless bird wave.

  “Where are they all going at the same time—and why?” I said, watching as the ribbon fluttered across the barren land only to sweep back again.

  “Maybe it’s about something that just happened,” the Old Man said, his voice quieting as the wave whipped close. “More likely it’s about something that’s about to happen.”

  “But how could they know that?” I said.

  “Animal instinct. Built in since the dawn of little brown birds,” he said. “It’s not like we don’t have vestiges of it ourselves. Like when you feel somebody watching you, or why, at the last moment, you didn’t walk into that pole back at the gas station. Some people feel it so much they believe they got a sixth sense, a second sight, and you can’t tell ’em any different.”

  Well, that made me twitchy as quick as you might think, wondering if the Old Man somehow knew about Aunt Beulah and my new mixed-up nightmares. His eyes, though, never left the birds.

  “’Course, such people are called quacks or nuts,” he went on. “But seem
s to me, such things could be echoes of what birds and animals never lost—tiny leftovers, say, of some built-in survival instinct that thousands of years of human civilizing hadn’t quite quashed.” He shook his head as the birds looped over us in ringlets only to sweep yet again over the plains. “Yeah, I tell you I’ve seen strange things working with animals all these years, strange and wondrous things . . .”

  We both fell silent, mesmerized by the rippling birds, so much so that I forgot about everything else. For two full hours, my sideview mirror was brimming with both birds and giraffes, framing it all like a picture, the giraffes’ long necks swaying along with the billowing birds, and each glance surprised me with what I can only describe as a jolt of joy. On and on it went. The sky kept drizzling, the giraffes kept bobbing, and the birds kept flying, giving the Old Man and me plenty of time to muse. I’ve been told since that there’s a name for something like it—a murmuration—a rare bird gathering that looks like a dancing cloud. Nobody ever explained the forever-flowing ribbon quite to fit my memory, though. Against the unforgiving land of my hardscrabble childhood, where the term natural wonder had no meaning, the sight filled me with a sense of exactly that—wonder.

  By late afternoon, the birds had been with us so long they seemed like passengers hitching a ride on our journey.

  Until, without a bit of warning, a bend in the road took them away.

  They were gone.

  The land emptied back to ugly and barren so fast, I all but got the bends. Forced to once again stare at nothing but dead Okie-land, my mood flipped into a flat-out brood that even glimpses of the giraffes couldn’t fix. Glancing at the Old Man, who was himself looking way too brooding, all I could think about were those passenger pigeons from the Old Man’s Hawkeye story with flocks so huge they’d black out the sky—until they were blasted clean off the face of the earth. Extinction was a word nobody much used back then. As a boy who barely escaped that dead prairie landscape alive, though, I pondered it while we rode on, thinking about all the frontier folks with their blunderbusses who wondered where the pigeons went—like the Okie pas and mas with their plows who wondered where the soil went.

  In the years to come, as the War took over the world and the prospect of going extinct ourselves, by our own hands, became a thing we were forced to ponder, I’d find myself thinking back to that moment of the vanishing murmur, feeling a soul-weary loss beyond explaining. That day, though, it was only an odd traveling melancholy without a name, a feeling as drizzly as the rain still spitting at us from above.

  In that way, we drove until we were almost out of Oklahoma. The Old Man broke the silence by announcing we’d stop for the night at the next auto court that had the tiniest bit of trees.

  About an hour from the Texas state line we spied the Wigwam Trading Post Auto Court & Campsite with stucco teepee-shaped rooms set apart like an Indian village. The nice line of tall planted trees along the back fence sold it to the Old Man, though, who was surely the last person on earth who’d ever spend the night in a plaster room shaped like a teepee. But for the giraffes, that’s exactly what we were about to do.

  At the sight of us, the owner and his wife came scooting out of the office and trading post, the owner whooping with delight and the wife waving souvenir paper Indian headdresses—two for us, two for the giraffes—which the Old Man declined for us all. Soon, the rig was settled back by the trees. Staying there that night with us were only a couple of well-scrubbed traveling families in nice automobiles whose kids thought they’d hit the jackpot with teepees and giraffes. Plus, in the campsite area beyond where we parked, there was one big Okie family who’d pitched a tent, their belongings strapped down over their old Model T.

  As dusk fell, the Old Man and I tended to the giraffes. We checked Boy and Girl for any lingering giraffe ear, nose, and throat problems and got covered with new giraffe spit for the trouble. Girl was so tired out that she barely snuffled when the Old Man checked her bandage. So, to lift the giraffes’ spirits, we let the new crop of giraffe admirers from around the teepee village come close, allowing Girl and Boy to have fun leaning to lick on the kids’ faces and lop off the men’s hats. Even the Okie family couldn’t resist. First came the ma with a baby in her arms, and next the granny who had her menfolk unload her rocking chair and haul it over for her to sit and watch. The Old Man, almost smiling, even let the children feed the giraffes some onions.

  As all the parents corralled their children and their granny either inside their plaster teepees or back to their campsite, a green Packard pulled up a few wigwams down, sending the Old Man’s good mood south. I thought I was finally going to hear the tirade percolating since Chattanooga. Instead he turned to me and said, “We need to talk about the Boss Lady’s last telegram. Right now, though, I got to wire a reply.” Then he headed back toward the office.

  The sky had cleared a bit, the dust gone, the clouds high and patchy, racing past the stars. With a trading post handy, the Old Man cooked us a hot meal of beans and cornbread over a firepit not far from the giraffes. Despite myself, considering the ups and downs of that Oklahoma day, I felt untroubled, the way clean air and a full stomach can make you forget about all your problems for a while. The Old Man must have felt the same, since whatever he wanted to talk about didn’t come up. That was fine by me. Dousing the firepit, he headed to our wigwam with his usual promise to relieve me. So I climbed up top to straddle the cross plank between Girl and Boy for the pleasure of their company as they settled into their cud chewing. The only light was the reflection from the Okie family’s campfire across the way, and it made everything all but glow.

  That is, until I heard Red below.

  “Woody?” she said, stifling a cough. “May I come up?”

  Untroubled no more, I wanted to say no. Instead I nodded, if prickly. Hitching up those trousers, she climbed up to my perch and straddled the cross plank, facing me. I eased back, away from her, like I’d done the night after the mountains. She noticed. Girl greeted her and then returned to her cud chewing, but Boy snuffled up close.

  Red reached out to stroke his jaw, then had to stifle another cough. “I cannot get the dust out of my nose,” she mumbled. In the scant light from the Okie campfire, she looked at me and my “prairie face” the same way she did at Big Papa’s. “Tell me your story, Woody,” she tried. “Please. I truly want to hear it.”

  I didn’t say a word and she knew full well why.

  “OK,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Ask me anything. I promise I’ll answer.”

  So I set my jaw and said, “Are you married?”

  “Yes,” she said, holding my gaze.

  I flinched. “To that reporter?”

  “Yes.”

  I flinched again. “Then why are you here and not with him!”

  “Because I want to be here more.”

  “But you got a husband.”

  She leveled her gaze and again said, “Yes.”

  I’d never been around any married women except my ma or women like my ma. The idea of her being hitched but not hitched to his side wasn’t sinking in. “But he wants you back with him.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe he only wants the Packard back.”

  I then heard words come out of my mouth that I’d have thought chump talk only two weeks ago. “You don’t love him?”

  That got her squirming. “What I feel is between us.” She sighed. “He’s a good man, whatever he thinks of me.”

  “A good man? He put out a police bulletin on you!”

  “Yes.”

  “But why’d you marry him?”

  She sighed again. “You won’t understand.” She was fighting with herself, turning as red as her hair.

  I didn’t care. “You said you’d answer any—”

  She cut me off. “You think you’re the only one with a story you don’t want to tell?” Hand to her chest, she started talking fast. “I was in a bad situation and I needed out.” She dropped her hand. “So, I did it the usual way
women do. I got married.”

  “But why him? Why Mr. Big Reporter?”

  “Because he was Mr. Big Reporter,” she answered. “With his big job and big car. I was seventeen. He was safe. That was all I thought I needed, and it was for a time. It truly was.” She paused. “But then, every week, he’d bring home another Life magazine. I started seeing the world through those photos. And I started to want . . . to need . . .” She stopped to cough, then the cough turned to a gasp, another and another, like back at Big Papa’s—short, desperate, hollow gasps—and they shocked me all over again, sounding so much like my ma’s death rattles. She pressed her lips tight against each new gasp like she was mad at having to do it and throwing all her will at them to stop.

  Until, at long last, they obeyed.

  For a moment she sat clutching her shirt and breathing small, quieted breaths. Then, hoarsely, she mumbled, “I know I promised, Woody, I thought I could . . . but I can’t . . . please.” With that, she struggled to swallow, like the truth was stuck in her craw. “You don’t have to tell me anything, honest you don’t.”

  As I watched her push her cascade of curls back from her face, I lost all my contrary. I couldn’t tell if what she’d said was the truth or not, since it wasn’t the whole truth. Right then, though, I didn’t care a fig what the whole truth was. I had my own truth stuck in my own craw, didn’t I? Even if she told me all that only to hear my miserable Dust Bowl tale, I didn’t care. I wanted to tell her. But it didn’t make it any easier to put words to the misery.

  I wasn’t even sure where to start . . .

  You ever wake up covered in dust, the air so thick with it you have to suck it in or die? You ever wake up with the fear that another of your animals, sucking in the same dust, didn’t make it through the night? You ever spent years of such days, living in fear and dirt, from the day you bury your baby sister to the day you bury your ma? And what you don’t know, what you can’t know, is that same day—that day of days—will end with you the only living thing left on a patch of worthless Panhandle land, your face and boots splattered with blood?