“Woody,” she whispered, “I need to tell you something.”
I didn’t like the sound of that.
“I never made those calls,” she confessed, wringing her hands. “I tried to. But I couldn’t talk to him yet . . . and I still can’t.” Dropping her hands into her lap, she stared straight at me. “So now I’ve got to convince Mr. Jones to drop me at the Phoenix station tomorrow instead. Do you think he’ll agree? I’ll call Lionel on the way. Cross my heart. I only need a little more time . . .” Her face said she wasn’t lying this time, but who was I to say?
The Old Man slipped back into the truck cab and turned to Red. “The detour to the El Paso train station is that way. We’ll be there in less than an hour.”
She breathed in, raised her chin, and said, “Mr. Jones, I’d be much obliged to you if—”
“She needs to take the train from Phoenix, and there’s no detour for that, right?” I cut in, giving him the eye.
The Old Man had been busting a gut to be nice, so I was praying he wasn’t going to launch into his whole “not abiding a liar” spiel, if he suspected such.
Instead he said, “I’ll pay for your ticket from here. Least I can do.”
Neither of us was expecting that.
“That’s very kind, Mr. Jones,” she said quick. “I’m certain, though, the money will be waiting at Phoenix. Truly.”
I was giving the Old Man the eye so hard I wouldn’t have been surprised if my eyeball had popped right out. But he nodded, giving me the eye right back.
So we took the Y toward Phoenix, heading into the deep desert. We still weren’t talking much, except for my apologies every time I sideswiped Red’s leg shifting gears. Red, though, didn’t seem to notice, a far-off look taking over her eyes that I’d seen before. It was the same look she had at the quarantine station, sitting alone in the Packard and staring toward its front gate. Before everything.
At dusk, we pulled into a place the Old Man had chosen on the way out. It was not an auto court. It was a “motel,” a newfangled place that wasn’t much more than a strip of rooms with a space to park your car between each room, but they were fronted by a little oasis with real palm trees, and we had the place to ourselves. Parking the rig on the desert dirt a few yards past the end, we took the room right by it, and the Old Man sprang for the room next to us for Red. Thanking him for his kindness again, she went in, glancing back at me with those hazel eyes as she closed the door.
The Old Man went to tend the giraffes, but I kept standing there until I heard him calling me to help. By the time I’d blinked away Red’s glance and caught up to him, he was already checking the Girl’s bandaged splint. He looked so relieved I figured she had to be doing OK, but I wasn’t sure until he stepped up the rig’s ladder to the open top to pat the Girl, who was already contentedly chewing her cud. Then, without another word, he came down and headed to the motel room, leaving me the first shift, as usual, with the giraffes. Instead of climbing up the rig, though, I found myself at Red’s door, heart pounding, feeling a pining I couldn’t quite name, much less handle. Every tingling, yearning muscle of my eighteen-year-old body wished for something I didn’t have the courage to ask for.
Not until I heard the sound of coyote howls in the hills was I able to move—and it was back to the giraffes.
Heart in my throat, I climbed up the rig. Breathing deep to calm down, I eased onto the cross plank between the darlings while they went about their cud chewing, taking passing whiffs at the sudden cool change in the air with nightfall as well as every inch of me. I must have smelled like part of the desert. Maybe that night, I was. The moon wasn’t out yet and the sky was something to see. The dark of the desert you’d think would be total on a moonless night. It isn’t. Everything is shades. Maybe because there is so much of nothing between you and the horizon, the stars shine brighter and bounce off what is there more. The stars were so clear I decided to look around for Red’s giraffe constellation since we were close to the Mexican sky where it was supposed to be easiest to spy, and I felt less heavy just in the looking.
In a few minutes, the coyotes seemed to up their howls across the desert, and their echoes made it sound like they were lurking right on the other side of the dark. So when I noticed movement below, I readied for a wild thing.
“Woody?”
Red.
The howls got louder and she climbed up double time.
With a quick pat for Girl, Red sat down on the cross plank by me, her legs dangling over Boy’s side, and Boy brought his mammoth head around to snuffle her. She rested her head on his muzzle, her arms reaching full around his neck, like she was giving him the thanks he deserved after saving her, saving us all, from the desert coot. She stayed that way for as long as Boy let her, which was a mighty long time.
When she let go, I started babbling. “Nice out here, huh? The desert smells real different, seems to me. The giraffes sure love it. Where they come from must be more like this than anything else so far, I was thinking. Or maybe they know they’re about to get out of this rig. They’re sure due, all right . . .”
Red touched my arm to stop my chattering, and then turned to straddle the cross plank facing me. The giraffes moved their big selves even closer, their pelts warm against our legs, so Red stretched her arms out to touch both of them at the same time. As her touch turned to strokes, she said, as gentle as a whisper, “Do you know what I like best about photographs?”
“What?” I said.
“They stop time.” Then she smiled that sad, tight-lipped smile I hoped never to see again.
She was starting her goodbyes.
The thing about knowing you’re doing something for the last time is that it takes the joy right out of it. I’ve done lots of things for the last time in my long life, but I didn’t know it. This time I’d know it. The goodbyes were near . . . tomorrow from Red, the next day from the giraffes. I could barely abide the thought. I watched her there, in the glow of the motel sign, her arms wide, her curls wild, her trousers and shirt rumpled to ruin. She looked exactly like she should for someone who’d gotten stuck in a moving rig with a pair of giraffes and who’d lost everything but the clothes on her back. Yet she looked like a picture to me.
We sat like that a long time and no time at all, the way that such things can be both, the only sounds the snuffling of giraffes to a chorus of coyote howls. The air was getting chillier. I knew she was about to say it was time to go back to her room. That’s the way it always had been. Instead she said in a voice so soft, so weary, I barely recognized it, “Woody, could I stay? I’d rather not be alone tonight . . . and you and Boy and Girl are . . .”
When she couldn’t finish the thought, I finished it for her by asking the giraffes to allow me to close the top. They agreed. So, easing onto the ladder, I motioned Red to climb down and I closed it. Then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, I dropped down, took Red’s hand, and led her right back up. As Boy and Girl popped out their windows to surround us, I was still holding her hand as we lay back on the flat top. Side by side. Eyes to the sky. Full up once more with yearning, I admit I wanted to touch much more than her hand, although I had no experience in doing any such thing. The Old Man had been calling me a boy all this time, and rightly so, because even at eighteen I was still one in all the ways that mattered, like this one. Yet even if I could do as my whole body was telling me to do—to lean over and try the kiss again, offering up my longing in the slightest hope she felt the same—I knew it was no good. It was not what she was asking for. How I knew, I didn’t know, still surprised by any notion that was the least bit selfless. Even though every last inch of me was on sweet fire, I wasn’t going to hazard a thing that would not keep her there beside me that night. So, when she shivered and I slowly put my arm around her, she let me. I pulled her close. After all we’d been through that day, that was enough. That was glory. There we lay safely, together, under a sky bursting with shimmering stars, surrounded by the giraffes, the night qu
ieting us so full that we both fell into a deep and abiding sleep.
When I opened my eyes, a half moon was far above, the giraffes had pulled in their own heads, and Red was no longer beside me. I gazed a moment where she’d gone and back to where she’d been, committing the night to full memory—the chill of the desert air that pulled us near, the feel of her thick curls against my arm, the snuffling giraffes surrounding us, and the position of the stars above us—savoring every little thing, exactly as I’d done at the depot after first laying eyes on both her and the giraffes. This far down the road, though, the giraffes seemed to be the only part of the whole world left unchanged.
I got up and opened the top again. The giraffes raised their heads to meet me, Girl laying hers for a fine moment in my lap, just like back in the cornfield. Then I stretched out again on the plank between them, their breath warming me in the cool air, and went back to searching for a constellation in the shape of a giraffe, filling an empty space in the sky.
The next day through the desert was what the Old Man would surely have dreamed every day on that trip would’ve been, the passage through such wide-open space a surprise in its pleasure. In the deep desert back then, if something went wrong—a rod blowing in your engine, a radiator overheating, even a flat tire—there was a whole lot of nothing you could die in. Even if we were lucky enough to have somebody come along to help, they wouldn’t have room in their vehicle for a couple of giraffes. So we should have been all weep and worry about making it through such a dangerous space without a hitch.
But it lulled, that day. No people to speak of, no trouble to bear.
It was a day of no lions.
We had left an hour before dawn again. By the time we were watching the moon set on one side of us and the sun rise on the other, we’d all fallen into a moving bit of peace. I’d felt a sliver of that peaceful feeling after we’d made it through the mountains. This time, though, it was long and lingering and soul-soothing deep. It seems now like the closest thing to praying I’d ever done. When I’d lived a little longer and heard people talking about such things, calling it by spiritual names, I’d want to scoff but couldn’t. In the years ahead, through the War and beyond, it was this quiet day moving through the unmoving land with Boy and Girl and the Old Man and Red that I returned to when I needed it most. Like the jolting joy of giraffes amid the traveling bird wave, its peace passed any understanding, any attempt at words. You only get a few of those in your whole life if you’re lucky, and some only get one. If that be true, this was my one. When I remember it, I’m not eighteen in the memory. I am whatever age its comfort came to me, be it 33 or 103, and I am driving us all, through the timeless red desert, headed nowhere in particular, just someplace good. Together.
We stopped twice that morning, once this side of Silver City and once more near Globe, long enough to water the giraffes and stretch our legs. We did it without more than two words between us, the lull was so deep. Not even the train track in the distance trailing us all day wrecked my lull. It should have shook up all sorts of fretful thoughts of murdered bums and raggedy boys and fat-cat pocket fortunes, not to mention the twenty-dollar gold piece still tarnishing the inside of my pants pocket. But it didn’t. Despite those things happening to the Dust Bowl boy I was only days before, I didn’t feel much like that boy anymore.
Red had finally called Mr. Big Reporter at Silver City. “Lionel . . . ,” I heard her say as she closed the phone booth door. I didn’t eavesdrop. Didn’t have to. I could make out what was happening by watching her from a ways off. It was the same high-volume talk I’d heard them have back in New Jersey, if now one-sided, until she got to the news that’d shut any man right up. Then she leaned on the back of the wooden phone booth, and it seemed neither of them said a thing for a long time.
She came back to the rig saying he promised to wire the money to Phoenix for her train ticket before the end of the day. There was no reason not to trust the louse since she hadn’t called him until that moment. But of course, I still didn’t. As we pulled up to Phoenix’s big fancy train station, peaceful was the last thing I was feeling. This was only a drop-off, the Old Man had made plain. We still had several hours of daylight left and the Old Man wanted to keep going, San Diego less than a day away, so I stopped the rig right in front of the station and hopped out to make way for her. The Old Man showed his manners by getting out, too.
Red stepped down and collected herself.
“Thank you, Mr. Jones,” she said, straightening her clothes, hair, spine.
“Goodbye, Mrs. . . . ,” he said back, stumbling again over what to call her. He also seemed to be struggling to say something else. In my memory, I like to think it a thank-you of some sort or even an apology, but it was probably neither. Whatever it was, it didn’t come. All he could muster was a tip of that fedora. With a glance my way, he then turned to deal with the crowd already ogling the giraffes, who were already happily ogling them back.
I walked her to the big arrivals and departures board outside the station doors. That day’s streamliner, the only East Coast–connecting train, had already left, and there wouldn’t be another until the same time tomorrow. The telegraph office where any wired money would be waiting was inside the station, though, and the Old Man was already waving me back.
I started to walk inside with her anyway.
She stopped me. “No, Woody, you’re not going in with me.”
“But you’ve got to stay all night and you’ve got no cash,” I said. “What if the money’s not there before the wire place closes? What if you need to take Mr. Jones up on his offer?”
“It will be,” she said, “and I won’t. Don’t worry.”
Then she touched her stomach, and that made me ask what I had no business asking. “What’re you going to do?”
“I’ll wait,” she said.
“No, I mean . . .” I didn’t know how to say what I meant. “Your heart.”
Flashes of something sad and tough passed over her face. “Ah, Stretch, I made that up. Never trust a woman who wants to meet your giraffe.” She was lying. I saw it plain. Just when she was leaving, I could tell. “I’m still going to be the next Margaret Bourke-White. You wait and see,” she went on, offering up that tiny tight-lipped smile.
Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out the twenty-dollar gold piece and held it out.
“No.” She shook her head so hard her curls bounced.
Grabbing her hand, I pushed the twenty-dollar piece into it, and I took my time being sure it was square in her palm and a longer time to let go as her fingers closed around it.
There was that tight-lipped smile again. “I don’t know when I can pay you back.”
“Don’t want it back,” I said. “Not mine. Not Mr. Jones’s, either.”
“Oh,” she said, as if she figured I’d snitched it. Which I deserved.
Squeezing the coin tight, she started to turn toward the depot but stopped and gazed past me at the giraffes in a way that was more drinking-in than last-sight . . . and then did the same at me.
“We had us an adventure, didn’t we, Woody Nickel?” she said.
Before I could answer, she hugged me hard and kissed me square on the lips long enough for me to place my hand on the back of her head, lace my fingers through her soft curls, and kiss her like a full-grown man, exactly as I’d always imagined. Then, stepping back, that far-off look taking ahold of her face once more, she said, “I’d do it again, you know.”
Whether she was talking about stealing the Packard to follow us, lying to keep it up, dashing her magazine dreams to save the giraffes, or kissing me with a kiss to end all dreamed-upon kisses—it didn’t matter.
The goodbye had come.
By the other side of Phoenix, the Old Man was talking. A lot. I needed desert silence again, bad. He was having none of it. The man was a blasted magpie. The closer we got to San Diego the happier he got and the moonier I got. It was only hours away now. I half thought he was going to make us keep driving,
but there was a mountain pass to get through and we’d be hitting it at night. Considering our less-than-dandy mountain experience, I was mighty glad to hear we’d be waiting until morning. Of course, that meant more Old Man chatter. Maybe because we were driving through desert sand, he couldn’t talk enough about how lush the zoo was, how anything’d grow there. How the founder, a man he called Dr. Harry, walked all over the grounds poking the soil with the tip of his cane and dropping seeds he’d brought back from around the world, and how, abracadabra, the place was now brimming with greenery from all over. To hear him tell it, the Okies got it right when it came to San Diego. Any other time, listening to all he was saying, I’d be salivating for it, too. Now all I was hearing was another goodbye. So, I spent his magpie-chattering miles staring at either the road or the giraffes, ignoring his paradise talk altogether, holding on hard to the paradise I still had.
Somewhere along that stretch, we heard a train whistle. The train track was trailing the highway off in the distance. The tooting grew louder and louder until a freight train was passing with railriders hanging out the empty boxcars all down the way. It wasn’t until the long train was clean out of sight that I realized the Old Man had stopped talking. He was studying me with that right-through-me stare I thought we’d left back in Texas. He opened his mouth to comment, like he always did after one of those looks, and I tensed. Instead he hung his elbow out the open window, cocked that cruddy fedora back, and said, “Did I ever tell you my life story?”
Well. That perked me up. Maybe I was finally going to find out about that hand of his and even about what Percival T. Bowles had called him. If so, I could already tell he was going to take his sweet time getting to it.
But what did we have but time?
He was born, he said, back East “to a wastrel” who had thirteen sons by his first two wives, and six more with his third one, the Old Man’s ma. By the time he was in knickers, his pa had up and died and his ma was supporting the whole kit and caboodle with a boardinghouse. That, he said, was when things got “interesting.”
West with Giraffes: A Novel Page 26