West With Giraffes(2)

All I have to do is close my worn-out eyes for the smallest of moments.

And it begins.





1

New York Harbor

Boats were flying through the air, streets were flowing like rivers, electric lines were exploding like fireworks, and houses of shrieking people were being blown out to sea—the date was September 21, the day of the Great Hurricane of 1938. The entire coast from New York Harbor to Maine got smacked so hard it was the stuff of legend, seven hundred souls gone to their final reward as wet as mackerels.

Back then, you got no warning. You’d notice a storm over the water and you’d be worrying how bad that cloud looks when the banshee wind and rain hits and you’re scrambling for your life. The dock piling I’d wrapped my scrawny young self around got whipped airborne. Next thing I know I’m waking up in a ditch with a tramp yanking on my cowboy boots. Seeing me rise from the dead, he yelped and ran. I was still in one piece somehow, if black, blue, and bloody, with only my suspenders popped off and gone. So as the rest of the living world began hollering for help or hearses, I wiped the dried blood off my face, grabbed hold of my trousers, and struggled to my feet. The boathouse where I’d been standing had blown away along with Cuz, my third-cousin boss. Found him in a shallow pool of boat shards, a sloop’s mast stuck straight through him. I wasn’t much to look at even before my hurricane-wallop—an overgrown farmboy with a face newly scarred and a neck sporting a birthmark the size of a state fair prize yam—but I sure looked better than Cuz. I’d say I was lucky, but I hadn’t had enough of a relationship with the word to use it. I’d say it was the worst day of my life, yet it was already far from it. I can say this. I never thought I’d see a bigger eyeful than that hurricane as long as I lived.

But I was wrong.

Because the last thing you think you’re going to see in the middle of flipped boats and buildings afire and bodies dangling and sirens wailing is a couple of giraffes.

I’d been there not six weeks, Dust Bowl dirt still coating my young rowdy’s lungs—and despite my God-fearing ma, that’s what I was, a dirt-farm rowdy, pure as a cow pie, cunning as a wild hog, and already well acquainted with the county sheriff, the dust layering my every breath leaving little room for the Holy Spirit to breathe on me. Cuz’s bilge-rat boathouse was where I landed after the Dirty Thirties blew so fierce in my corner of the Texas Panhandle that every nester and sharecropper for miles was flung clean off the map. Some like my ma, pa, and baby sister left the hard way, six feet under. Some hit the road with the Okies to California. The rest, like me, headed toward any kin who’d take them in. The only family I had left in the world was an East Coast stranger to me named Cuz, who might as well have been the man in the moon to a seventeen-year-old Panhandle boy. But there’s being alone and there’s being an orphan alone in an empty wasteland digging graves for all you ever loved with no one to ask for help except the sheriff—which I dared not do for reasons I cannot yet bear to confess.

Sitting there by my ma’s, pa’s, and baby sister’s graves, I let evening turn to morning. Still covered with the dead dirt that had killed us all, I dug up my ma’s Mason jar of coins from her withered garden and stumbled dry-eyed toward the highway. Not until a long hauler stopped his truck to ask me where I was headed did I find out I was mute.

“You an Okie?”

I tried to answer. Nothing came out.

“Cat got your tongue, kid?” the driver said.

Still I couldn’t spit out a word. Eyeing me good, he jerked a thumb toward his empty truck bed and dumped me at the Muleshoe train station . . . right across from the sheriff’s office. I waited for the next train east with one eye back at his door, knowing I was unfit to answer questions he’d surely have if he saw me, and just as the train pulled away, the sheriff strode out to look straight at me looking straight back at him.

Jumpy at every stop after that, I got as far as Chattanooga with my ma’s coins. From there, I hopped a boxcar until I saw some tramps fling a bum off the train after stealing his shoes. Then I swiped a motorcycle and rode it until it ran out of gas, snitching food along the way like a stray dog, until I had some snitched from me by a bum with a straight razor. That got me hitching straight to Cuz, where I found myself eye to eye with more water than my thirsty eyes could take in. When Cuz asked me who the hell I was, I had to scrawl my answer with a coal lump on the dock, to which he harrumphed, “Figures I’d get a dumb one, being from that side of the family,” and put me straight to work for my supper. For forty silent days and nights, I called a moldy cot in the back of the boathouse home. Now I didn’t even have that. Nobody was left to come look for me and nobody was newly dead I’d mourn, Cuz proving himself to be such stone-hearted scum I was already plotting to snatch his cash and run.

Holding up my pants in the hurricane rubble, I stood wobbly over what was left of the man I’d traveled half the USA to find, then reached around the bloody mast pole and picked his dead pockets. When I found nothing but his lucky rabbit’s foot, I started kicking him so full of my own hurricane fury that I kicked myself back to speech—I was kicking and cussing Cuz, the gray sky, the black ocean, the putrid air, my ma’s precious Jesus and his cruel God Almighty Father—until I slipped and landed on my backside, eyes to the drizzling sky. With that, the logjam inside me busted wide, and I lay there sobbing like the lost boy I was.