West With Giraffes(22)
Finally, he said, “You know what an abattoir is? My first job was in one, younger’n I had any business being in such a place, not even twelve years old. They bought old horses on their way to the glue factory to shoot ’em, skin ’em, sell the hides, and feed the meat to the animals. The keepers’ job was to keep their string of animals alive and healthy, and old horse flesh was how it was done. They’d bring their big knives and take what they needed for the carnivores—the tigers and lions.”
“At the San Diego Zoo?”
“You going to let me talk here? No, not the zoo. My job was being the Judas goat, leading the horses peaceful to the slaughter. All too soon I was the one cutting off meat to feed the carnivores. But I never got used to it, the horse being as noble a beast as they come. So, seeing as I was still a boy and didn’t have the luxury of quitting, I got philosophical about it. I got to thinking it was sort of a last noble duty of a damn noble breed, and I’ll tell you a secret. Early on, I started thanking each one of them—just like Hawkeye.”
I looked at him funny.
He bounced it right back at me. “Hawkeye—The Deerslayer, Last of the Mohicans . . . Good God, boy! They’re books. By Mr. Fenimore Cooper. Didn’t you read ’em in school? Hell, I barely got enough schooling to learn my ABCs and I read ’em all.” Eyes shining, he gestured grandly with the hand holding his Lucky and said, “‘A man can enjoy plunder peaceably nowhere.’”
I was pretty sure he was quoting from a book, but the only quoting I’d ever heard was from the Good Book, and I never saw anybody do that gesturing with a cigarette.
He leaned my way. “Hawkeye was a frontiersman back in colonial days—a legend with his long rifle. He could drop a stag springing in the air at one hundred paces. Back then,” he went on, waving the Lucky overhead, “flocks of passenger pigeons were so big they blanketed the sky, blacking out the sun. Everybody else plundered them for sport and silly hat feathers with their blunderbusses, blasting away—until the birds vanished forever. Not that magnificent ol’ bastard, though. Hawkeye never killed a living thing without good cause, and whenever he shot a stag to eat, he always paused to thank it for its life to save his own.” The Old Man leaned back. “That spoke to me as a kid in a slaughterhouse. So I started doing like Hawkeye. I still do. Other people say grace. Me, I say thanks to what I’m eating. Its life for mine.” He paused, absently rubbing his sorry-looking hand. “Soon enough, I’ll be returning the favor even if it’s only to the worms. We’re just meat when it’s all done. That’s the natural order. What do I care where my meat goes after I’m not using it anymore?” he said, standing up. “Not that I wouldn’t mind being thanked.”
With that, he took a last suck of his smoke, crushed the butt with his boot, then climbed into the truck cab. The Old Man had left all the get-going chores for me to do, either lost in his Hawkeye thoughts or trusting me. I figured it was the former, but I was going to prove him right if it was the latter. So I put the water buckets back in their place by the jugs, then closed the trapdoors, and when I climbed into the cab to get us going again, he was sitting there gazing out at the road. As I put the rig into gear, he finished answering the question that I’d all but forgotten I asked.
“Life is life no matter who or what is living it, boy—a thing to respect,” he said. “You don’t get that, then you’re just a waste of skin.” Then he flipped a hand toward the road. “Now, daylight’s burning.”
As I steered the rig back on the road, I was a bit flustered, having gotten more than I bargained for with all his talk. The Old Man was about as different as different could be from Pa and Cuz and any other full-grown man I knew, though you couldn’t tell by looking at him. On the outside, he was as rough-looking as any outdoor man, but inside he was one surprise after another. Little did I know there were some mighty big surprises yet to come. In fact, I was so awash in the Old Man’s words, a mile would pass before I thought to check behind us for Red.
The road was still empty.
For a while we rode in blessed silence. When we spied a railroad crossing up ahead, though, I felt the Old Man tense again. As we got close, the signal went off and the arms went down. A train was coming. It wasn’t a passenger train or even a freight train like the ones I’d hopped. It was a circus train—painted in bright yellows and reds—the same colors as the panel truck that morning. The circus train couldn’t have been twelve cars long, but to my eyes it was big-time. The crossing was on flat pastureland with only a few scraggly trees between us, and I could already see the signs on the train cars. We were going to be so close, we’d be locking eyes with both men and beasts.
But the Old Man was having none of it. “Stop—back here,” he ordered.
So I pulled the rig off the road near the scraggly trees. Within seconds, I was having to wave two cars around us, an Oldsmobile sedan with New Jersey license plates and a rattletrap Chevy. While they took their ogling time passing us, they soon were the ones locking eyes with the circus travelers as the train approached the crossing, hooting and tooting.
BOWLES & WATERS TRAVELING CIRCUS EXTRAVAGANZA, said the sign on the train’s fancy Pullman car. Here came a circus organ wagon. There went a lion in a curlicue cage. Next came the elephants and horses, lots of horses. But no giraffes. Back then, nobody much this side of Africa got to see a giraffe. Fancy East Coast zoos were always trying to have them, but the cold was too much, killing them fast. Circuses kept trying to have them, but the traveling was too much, killing them even faster. So, while I knew they were special, I didn’t know how special—to the point of being all-out coveted—but I was about to find out.