Until we heard the sound of a muffled wretch.
“Don’t shoot . . . ,” came a whimper from inside the rig.
“That a woman?” The coot whirled around. “You got a woman in there, too? Let’s see!”
I yanked open Boy’s warped trapdoor. There was Red, huddled under the giraffe’s legs.
The Old Man groaned.
Cooter cackled louder. “You made the woman ride in the back! I always wanted to do that!”
As Red crawled out, batting straw off her face, a leering Cooter sidled up close. “Now that you’ve got her trained, maybe we can make a bargain for her and the giraffe,” he said, circling his gun muzzle around her breast.
Red pushed the barrel away and tried moving toward us, but he poked her to a halt and went right back to pawing her with that gun. Watching that and not being able to do a damn thing to stop it, my leftover fury flamed even higher, as high as the morning I shot Pa. A moment before, with the jackrabbit screaming me clean out of my mind, the coot could have gone right ahead and shot me and I wouldn’t have cared a lick since I’d already have pounded his sawed-off ass to a mighty-fulfilling pulp. Now, standing there watching him grope Red with that gun, I was back to thinking the same daft thing. It must have been written all over my face, because suddenly the Old Man was standing close and talking loud.
“We’ve got to tell him, boy—it’s the right thing to do,” he boomed, giving me the eye. Turning to the coot, he pointed at Girl. “This one’s hurt.”
Cooter squinted, pointing the gun at the Old Man. “I don’t want no hurt giraffe. Let me see.”
As Red rushed out of reach, the Old Man yanked open Girl’s trapdoor, then stepped back.
“You get back, too, the other way,” the coot said to me, and waited until I did.
The trapdoor was shoulder-high for the Old Man and me. The coot’s head, though, was right at the opening, Girl’s shuffling front legs only inches away.
“See it?” the Old Man coaxed Cooter. “On the back leg. You got to look close.”
Gun still cocked at the Old Man, Cooter stuck his nose into the opening exactly like Earl had done the night of the yahoos. His face was almost in the Girl’s range when he pulled his head back out. “Hold on.” He turned his good eye to the Old Man. “Does it kick? You’d like that, wouldn’t ya?”
Smooth as buttermilk, the Old Man said, “Animals don’t kick with their front legs. Everybody knows that.”
“Oh yeah,” said Cooter, leaning back in.
The Old Man and I held our breaths, waiting for him to get close enough for the Girl to kick and save us.
The coot did.
Girl, though, did not. Watching us wild-eyed from above, she stomped and shuffled and snorted and swayed.
But she didn’t kick.
Cooter pulled his head out. “Waaiit a second. Why’d you tell me that? You doing the ol’ switcheroo? If you’re telling me this one’s hurt, maybe it’s the other that’s hurt. Or you could be telling me this one’s hurt, so I’ll think it’s the other’n, when it’s really this one’s that hurt and the other one that’s not. Ha! Nice try.” He waggled the shotgun my way. “Let me see the other’n.”
The Old Man could barely look at me. We both knew the easy way out was gone. Boy had never kicked anybody.
It was then that I knew this was going to end bad. I could not let that happen. Not after hurricanes and mountains and bears and fat cats and flash floods—let alone reliving the worst day of my life. Cooter leaned into Boy’s open trapdoor, this time aiming the gun up at Boy, and even seeing that did not stop me. Because when you’re eighteen, burning with furies from within, there is a moment when you cannot count the cost a second more.
I lunged for the gun.
Hovering over the shrimp, one hand on the barrel and the other clenched around the old coot’s grip, my young self was cocksure I could yank it free.
Yet I wasn’t quite doing it.
The shriveled peewee didn’t weigh a hundred pounds, and he was fighting like Lucifer himself had pitched in. I was still shoulder-high to the trapdoor. Cooter’s head was still leaning in the opening, and the gun muzzle was still aimed up at Boy. I glanced back for help, but the Old Man had run for one of his flung firearms, and I could barely see Red out of the corner of my eye. The rig began rocking fierce, and it was all I could do to hold the coot’s gun steady. The giraffes were panicking, banging the crates, kicking the cracked wood, rearing up the sides . . . until up from Boy’s throat came the beginnings of the horrible giraffe-terror caterwaul.
Hearing that, Red did the one thing she should never have done.
She lunged for the gun, too.
Grabbing the only place left to grab, she clamped onto the ends of the short barrels and pulled, trying to help get them off Boy. The three of us were smashed against the rocking rig, pulling, yanking, twisting, until, from one second to the next, the gun wasn’t pointing at Boy—it was pointing at Red. The coot had somehow swiveled and used our own strength against us to jam the sawed-off muzzle into Red’s ribs.
All the blood in my body rushed to my head, because I knew that with one jerk of his trigger finger, Red was gone. No one comes back from a gut wound like that. Not back then. Not in the middle of nowhere. Even if she tried to let go and run, the gun would go off before she could get out of its way. Red’s slow, brutal death would be the cost I thought I could no longer count.
Her gaze jerked to meet mine. She knew.
Right then, though—as if the giraffes knew, too—both Boy and Girl reared up at the very same time, banging the traveling crates so hard that Red lost her footing, a shriek knocked out of her as she fell.
And at the sound of Red’s own caterwaul, Boy did the one thing we never thought he’d do.
The blessed beast kicked.
His hoof thwacked Cooter’s skull with a sick, hollow pop.
The gun went off, spraying the air.
The geezer crumpled to the dirt, blood oozing from an ear, and I stood stunned over him, both hands still clenching the gun.
The Old Man careened into view, rifle up. “That was a fool stunt—both of ya!” he wheezed. “The giraffe saved both your worthless hides!”
Watching Red get to her feet, I shuddered at what I’d almost done. Then I looked down at Cooter, who was very, very still.
“Is he dead?” I mumbled.
The Old Man pried the coot’s gun from my grip. “Don’t know. Don’t care,” he said.
That’s when we heard the water. The sawed-off shotgun’s blast had hit the cistern up on stilts, and water was spewing from the puncture holes. The Old Man scowled up at the emptying water tank without a bit of surprise.
“Are you calling the sheriff?” I asked for the second time that day.
The Old Man turned full around to gape at me, like I was the one with the sun-fried brain. “You want to hang around to make friends with the local law enforcement?” he bellowed. “What about the darlings? You even thinking about them in this civic duty? What do you think they’ll do with the Boy? It won’t matter a good gotdam he saved us from a nutcase. He’s still an animal and that sumbitch’s still something they’d call human. We’d be stalled here for weeks. Even if they don’t order him put down, that could kill the both of them all by itself. No! Nossir! They’re going to San Diego. Right. Damn. Now.” He set both firearms on the truck’s hood, reached in the window for his fedora, and stalked off.
“Where’re you going?” I called after him.
“One more thing needs doing!”
Shoving the fedora on his head, he headed out to retrieve his shotgun from the roadside scrub, then marched past us to the animals and opened every cage, one by one. The jackrabbits and the bear ran for the hills without looking back. Even the rattlesnakes went slithering off. The mountain lion, sated with fresh rabbit, still licking the blood on his whiskers, was a different story. It watched the Old Man with cold eyes, studying him as it leaped to the ground from his cage. The O
ld Man fired his shotgun in the air, and the mountain lion slipped into the scrub.
“Let’s go,” he ordered, coming our way.
I kept staring at the coot’s sprawled body. “What if the mountain lion comes back?”
“I say let him,” the Old Man snapped, then must have thought better of it, because he grabbed Cooter by a leg and began to pull. I grabbed the other. The Old Man, though, wasn’t heading to the building. We dragged him to the bear cage, stuffed him in by the bear’s half-full water bucket, and slammed it shut.
“Now move, before I throw the raccoon’s carcass in there with him,” the Old Man said, marching toward the rig. “If he’s alive, he can get his sorry self out. If he’s dead, he’ll rot in one piece. He doesn’t deserve to be an animal’s supper.”
The giraffes were still stomping and snorting. The Old Man put the guns back on the truck cab’s rack, then flung the coot’s sawed-off shotgun deep into the scrub, and we all got in. With Red sitting between us, we headed toward the highway as the spray from the water tank’s holes turned the dirt into its own muddy lake. Straight ahead was the DESERT ANIMALS COME SEE sign. I aimed the rig right at it, flattened it into kindling, then turned us onto the road west.
For two miles, the only sound in the cab was me repeating a soft “Sorry” as I kept brushing up against Red’s trouser legs to change gears. I felt like I was moving through molasses, my body having yet to catch up with my brain. I wasn’t alone. Red’s hands started to shake, and she began to sniffle, then the dam busted wide.
“Stop,” she begged. “Stop, please—”
Up ahead was a dusty rest area of stone picnic tables overlooking a small outcropping. Pulling in quick, I hustled out of her way. Red stumbled over to a table, and she didn’t just cry, she sobbed. The Old Man averted his gaze, but I couldn’t take my eyes away until, running her hands through her hair, she stopped, and I felt a reckoning of my own coming on strong.
We tried giving the giraffes water. They wouldn’t drink. Climbing up, the Old Man opened the top and began cooing his giraffe-speak, stroking the giraffes as best he could, so I climbed up and started stroking, too. Leaning over the giraffes, though, I had to work to keep my own balance, feeling wobbly inside and out. I was waiting for the sky to fall, for the sirens to sound, for something to happen as big as the feelings still rolling through me after dodging the crazy coot’s worst.
“Is it over?” I mumbled, looking back down the road. “Is that the end of it?”
“You think you always get to know the end of a story?” the Old Man said. His voice faltered, giving away his own Old Man shakes. “Most times you’re lucky if you get your ending. If this is our ending, it’s a gotdam happy one.”
As we kept on stroking and cooing, the giraffes began believing all was safe again. Girl stopped her stomping, and Boy, snorting a massive sigh, slowly laid himself down to rest.
So the Old Man and I eased to the ground, sat down by Red, and did the same.
14
To Arizona
There are times in life when everything shifts so fiercely you can only hold on, the Dust Bowls and graveyards and hurricanes all forging the You, and the fury, left behind. There are other times, though, when you feel a shift down deep in your bones. Quiet, clean, pure. As we moved on that morning, shaken but alive, I felt that kind of bone-quiet shift. The fury that had ahold of me ever since shooting my pa was gone. In its grip, I thought I could rescue us. Instead I’d almost killed us. It had taken the gentlest of giraffes to save us from the fiercest of lions, and somehow Boy had melted away my fury in the doing. In the days ahead, I’d have reason to ponder whether it was gone for good. But by the time we left the outcropping’s rest stop, I’d felt free of the fury long enough to know I wanted to stay that way.
A few miles down the highway, we felt the morning’s heat begin to rise. Then the land went off the caprock like a shot and we found ourselves in low red desert land. There was nothing as far as I could see—a different kind of nothing than the Panhandle, a bigger, wider, redder nothing.
At the first sign of a real gas station and store, I turned in. As the gas pumper came out, already geehawing at the giraffes, the Old Man said to Red, “The road turns south for a few hours before heading back west to Phoenix, bypassing El Paso, but we can detour over to that train station for you, Mrs. . . .” He paused, not having a name to go with his politeness, then glanced at the bell-shaped public telephone sign hanging over the store’s front door. “Looks like they got a phone if you need it,” he added, climbing out and going inside.
Red, though, didn’t move, having yet to look up, much less talk.
As I opened the door to get out, I looked at her sitting there so silent in the middle of the bench seat. A piece of hay was still stuck in one of her curls. I almost reached to pluck it. Instead I said, “I’m going to check the rig.” I fumbled for my next words. I wanted to say I was glad Cooter didn’t shoot her. I wanted to say how sorry I was for almost getting us both shot dead. I wanted to say more—so, so much more, something that would matter. Like always, I said something else. Staring at the hay in her hair, I heard myself say, “What were you doing inside the rig?”
At that, she looked up, all right. “You think I did it on purpose?” She sighed. “Last night the nice Oklahoma family offered to let me sleep in their Model T, but I knew I wasn’t going to do any sleeping. So, I sat by the fire until my clothes dried and kept sitting there for I don’t know how long. I watched you and the rig through the shadows, and when I saw you take your turn sleeping in the truck cab, I watched Mr. Jones. The longer I watched, the more I wanted to be near the giraffes one last time . . . by myself, you know? So, when Mr. Jones went off to relieve himself in the bushes, I climbed up to the open top and dropped into Boy’s side like I’d done in the mountains and I stroked his pelt for the sweetest time.”
Pausing, she sighed again. “I was only going to stay a minute, but then Boy lay down—I couldn’t believe it. So, I eased into the corner in all that padding to watch him drape his wonderful neck over his back and close his big eyes. When I felt my own eyes close, I let them. I knew I’d wake up when you tended them before we left. But you took off!” she said, throwing up her hands. “I didn’t even hear you close the top! Next thing I know, Boy is up on his feet and we’re bumping down the highway. And I couldn’t open the trapdoor from the inside like I had before, because of the flood.” She took a breath. “I even started yelling and banging, until I saw I was upsetting Boy. It was all I could do to stay out of his way.” She took another breath. “Then you turned into that maniac’s place . . . !”
Stifling a gasp, she had to stop. “I . . . only wanted to say a proper goodbye to them,” she added softly, then shut down again, hand to her heart. I almost reached over and took her other hand, I so wanted to touch her. But I got out and slowly closed the door.
The Old Man appeared with his arms full with sacks of apples, onions, bread, and a salami big enough to feed a work crew. He handed me the bread and salami and climbed up to feed the rest to the giraffes.
“They OK?” I asked.
“They always are, God love ’em. Despite everything we’ve done to them,” he said, offering up the delights.
As I set the bread and salami in the cab’s open window and climbed up to help, Red went into the store. Within seconds, though, she was back in the truck.
Jumping down, I went over to her window. I still had an apple in my hand, so I shined it up on my shirt and offered it to her. She barely noticed.
“What happened?” I finally said.
“I tried calling collect, but he didn’t accept my call.”
I shoved the apple in my pocket. “I thought you said he was a good man.”
“He is,” she mumbled. “He just needs time to remember it.”
As I pulled us onto the road, a highway patrol car whizzed by—back the way we came. I cut an eye at the Old Man, who was gazing, untroubled, in his mirror at the giraffes sniff
ing the wind.
For the rest of that day traveling down the length of New Mexico, we barely saw another soul. One Okie family came up behind us, their old Model T stuffed to the gills. The tin lizzie even had a basket strapped to its running board with a goat in it. As they passed, they didn’t seem a bit surprised at seeing giraffes. Why would they? They were already riding on dreams. They waved, all wearing big Californy-bound smiles. Even the goat. It made me melancholy, but nowhere near as bad as the furniture peppering the roadside like a relic trail of the Hard Times. We started seeing such things—a chifforobe, a broken rocker, a lamp, and the like—Dust Bowlers’ worldly goods either fallen off or dumped when they got too much to carry. It would be that way for the rest of the trip.
At each stop with a phone booth, Red went in to call again. I figured she was trying to remind the guy he was a good enough man to wire her ticket money to El Paso. Each time, though, she returned looking more and more unhappy, and I didn’t have the gumption to pry. Yet we were getting closer and closer to El Paso. Soon we were on the outskirts of Las Cruces where the Old Man said there would be a Y in the road, one way leading south to El Paso, the other way headed west to Phoenix and California.
When we spotted the Y, the Old Man motioned me to pull over before we detoured, and as I got out to check the giraffes, Red grabbed my sleeve.
West with Giraffes: A Novel Page 25