West With Giraffes(19)
I nodded.
“Looks older,” he said, “and a bit like a bullet graze.”
I didn’t answer that, realizing he was the kind of man who’d be prying the truth out of you in seconds if given half a chance, and I wasn’t ready to tell him the truth.
“What’s your name, son?”
My mind still on bullet graze, I snapped, “Don’t call me son.” Quickly swallowing down the fury flit that made me say it, I added, “Sir.”
The Old Man was now eyeing me like a prized pig at an auction. So I sat up and answered properly. “My name’s Woodrow Wilson Nickel. I answer to Woody.”
He glanced at me sideways and started chortling. “Your name’s Woody Nickel?”
“Don’t see what’s so funny,” I muttered.
But something about that seemed to simmer him down. “Riley Jones is mine,” he said. “I answer to Mr. Jones.” With that, he propped an arm on his open window and started giving me giraffe-driving orders. “All right. Listen up. We drive no more than three hours at a stretch before we stop to rest them. We find us some trees and open the top for the darlings to stretch their necks and snack, and we don’t leave until they’re chewing their cud. We stop morning, noon, and night to feed and water, even if we get waylaid going through towns. We watch to see how they’re riding as we go. They’ll be sticking their heads out at their whim from the side windows unless they’re latched. So, watch your sides as well as your overhangs. You give one of the darlings a whomp on their big heads and you’ll find yourself on the side of the road again. We only got twelve feet eight inches to work with on underpasses, so move slow toward each one. We don’t go over forty, traffic be damned. Watch your speed and watch your animals. Got all that?”
I nodded and he went quiet. I knew I should, too, but glancing in my rearview, I caught a glimpse of the shotgun on the gunrack behind our heads. “Would you have shot those yahoos last night?” I heard myself say.
“If they needed it,” he said a bit too quick for comfort. “But I’m not much of a shot.”
I paused. “So . . . you’d kill for the giraffes?”
He snorted. “The Boss Lady will kill me if I don’t get them there safe.” Then he saw I was serious. “Would I kill for the darlings? Might as well ask me if I’d die for the darlings. Sane answer’s no, I guess. But if you really want to know, it always seemed wrong to think an animal’s life isn’t worth as much as a human’s. Life is life.”
Gazing in my sideview at the sight of two mighty African giraffes sniffing American air, I asked what I’d been wondering since I first laid eyes on them. “How did they even get here?”
Something dark passed over the Old Man’s face. “They were minding their own business, being the youngest or slowest giraffes in their herd, the ones lions have for lunch every day. Until loud two-legged lions on wheels with rifles and big ropes came roaring up, making the whole herd bolt so they could grab the stragglers. Or worse. Some trappers thinking nothing of shooting mothers to nab the orphans. What dies you leave for the hyenas or sell as bushmeat in the nearest village.”
“Bushmeat?”
“Meat from the bush—the wild.”
“They eat giraffes over there?”
“It’s Africa. It’s a gotdam buffet,” he said. “We’re all lions except a few like these darlings, God love ’em.”
I flinched and the Old Man saw, studying me like he knew what was on my mind with me knowing he couldn’t be more wrong. “You don’t think so, boy? You never shot a jackrabbit for dinner?”
“’Course I have,” I said, chin out. “I can drop a buck a quarter of a mile away and field dress him on the spot.” Hearing my pa, I added, “They’re just animals.”
“If that’s really what you thought, you wouldn’t be sitting here,” the Old Man said back. “Well, you’ll be happy to know that the Boss Lady doesn’t abide trappers. Trades mostly with her zoo pals all over the world. But these two darlings got rescued after a trapper left them to starve. They couldn’t be taken out and set free, being herd animals without their herd. So she got a call and here they are, because everybody wants to see a giraffe. Some folks need to. Considering what you went through to be here, seems you’re one of those that needs to.”
All I need is to get to California, I was thinking.
“Oh, you say all you want is to get to California,” he went on before I’d even finished the thought, “but you also needed to see a giraffe. You just don’t know why, do you? I’ll tell you why—animals know the secret to life.”
The only secret to life I was interested in was how to stay alive. Besides, I was sure he was snookering me and waited for another chortle. Instead, gazing back at the giraffes in his sideview with the same feisty tenderness I saw in quarantine, he kept talking. “Animals are complete all on their own, living by voices we don’t get to hear, having a knowing far beyond our paltry ken. And giraffes, they seem to know something more. Elephants, tigers, monkeys, zebras . . . whatever you feel around the rest, you feel different around giraffes. It’s sure true of these two, despite the hell they’ve been through.” Eyes still on the giraffes, he actually smiled. “Don’t you worry about these darlings, though. They’re headed to the San Diego Zoo, where it’s warm as toast and green as a garden and washed in sea breezes all year long. Where they’ll never have to worry about their next meal or being safe from lions, and where they’ll be loved by a whole city just for allowing us to know them. Well they should, I say. This world of misery is in dire need of some natural wonder to learn secrets to life from.” He glanced my way. “Here you got two darlings in your back seat. You should be asking them about those secrets while you got the chance.”