West With Giraffes(24)

I nodded.

“I’m not a very good driver. Just started. City girl, you know. You must be first-rate,” she said.

I smiled, sitting up tall. If I didn’t speak soon, she’d think me dumb. I cleared my throat and found my voice. “You following us?” I said a tad too loud.

“You don’t mind, do you?”

I shook my head.

She glanced back at the rig. We could see the giraffes’ heads poking out the top as they nibbled at the trees, and she grinned ear to ear. “Giraffes! Can you believe it?”

I shrugged again, cocky now, like it was nothing. “They’re just animals.”

“Just animals!” She looked at me like I had two heads. “They’re just animals like the Empire State Building’s just a building.” Then her eyes wandered to the birthmark the size of a state-fair prize tomato on my neck. When she saw I noticed, she held up her wrist—she had a bird-shaped birthmark of her own. “A birthmark is a sign of good luck, you know.”

“Don’t know about that.” All I’d ever heard back home was it was the mark of the devil, and I sure wasn’t bringing that up.

“Well, you seem lucky to me,” she said. “Very lucky.” As we watched the giraffes, there was a long awkward pause until, without looking my way, she said, “Why did you punch Lionel?”

I sat up taller. “He grabbed your arm.”

“I can take care of myself, you know,” she said. But her face softened enough for me to think—hope—she might have liked it.

Right then, the giraffes started chewing their cud and their snouts disappeared from view. “Oh . . . oh no.” Red’s face dropped. “Is there any way I might meet them? Is it too late?”

Now I was on the spot. The Old Man’d been letting people meet them all day, hadn’t he? Besides, I’d read her notepad. She wanted to touch a giraffe—and I had the power to make that happen.

I hesitated, but her face opened like a rose and I was done for.

Listening for the Old Man’s snores, I led her to the rig through the shadows of the campfire light. I started to climb to the open top. As soon as I put a boot on the running board, though, they poked their great heads out their windows, and I heard Red gasp, the kind of gasp you’d want to hear all the time. I jumped down to help her step up, but she didn’t need any help. She popped one of those two-tone shoes on the running board, the other on the wheel rim, and reached for both giraffes. As she made the giraffes’ acquaintance, her legs stretching this way and that, I couldn’t help staring at those trousers. Like I’d caught her looking at my birthmark, she caught me looking at her britches. “Stretch?”

I felt my cheeks flush. “I never saw a woman wearing trousers before.”

She laughed. “Well, I won’t be the last—you can take that to the bank,” she said. Then, agile as a cat, she climbed to the open top, straddled the plank between the giraffes’ traveling rooms, and grinned down at me, as if to say, What are you waiting for?

My head all but swiveled off looking back at the Old Man’s hut. His rumbling snores were still going strong, so, stiffening my spine, up I went. As I eased down on the plank facing her, the giraffes pulled in their heads from their windows and surrounded us in the open air, their snouts bumping our knees. Girl butted me so hard looking for onions, I had to grab her big head to stay upright. Red, meanwhile, had touched one of Boy’s horns and got baptized with giraffe slobber, which would’ve sent most women screaming for the ground. But not Red.

Laughing again, she wiped at her face and silky shirt with one hand, patting Boy’s big jaw with the other, and, as her pats turned to soft strokes, the whole of her seemed to unwind. “I’m touching a giraffe . . .” She sighed a sigh so full of reverie I thought she might float away. “They fill me up with wonder just looking at them. I see Africa as big as day . . . I see all the wonders of the world, waiting out there to be seen,” she said, giving me a look of such unbridled, overflowing joy, I thought she was going to kiss me. Even though I’d spent every night at the depot imagining how I’d kiss Augusta Red, it scared the bejeezus out of me. If Girl hadn’t picked that exact moment to butt me sideways, I would’ve found out. Instead Red turned all that feeling toward Wild Boy, her soft strokes turning into glorious caresses. “They are hard to believe, aren’t they?”

Trying to keep from going to complete mush watching her caress Boy, I scrambled for something, anything, to say and heard one of the Old Man’s warnings come out of my mouth. “Careful. Big don’t know from small—”

Boy licked at the air as Red kept on caressing. “Surely they’re not that dangerous, are they?” she asked.

Right then, Girl’s huge head thumped me again. “They can crack a lion’s skull with a kick of their hooves,” I said, grunting as I tightened my hold.

Red paused. “You’ve seen them kick?”

“Seen this one,” I said, nodding at Girl, who now had her snout all but in my pocket. “She’s whopped the Old Man, but not like she wants to send him to kingdom come—not yet anyway.”

“So she’s feisty. Good.” Red reached over to pat her. She looked back at Boy. “But this one’s a gentleman, isn’t he?” He answered by sticking his snout in Red’s crotch, which had her squirming and me this side of bopping him for his bad manners. As he looked up, all giraffe innocence, she laughed again. “A gentleman rascal—even better.” And she went right back to her reverie, brushing her fingers over a diamond-shaped spot on the wild boy’s jaw as if she didn’t quite believe it was there. Then her voice turned soft, dreamy. “Did you know that you’re not the first to take a giraffe across a country? About a hundred years ago the ruler of Egypt sent one to the king of France. They sailed it over on a boat and walked it the five hundred miles to Paris. Can you imagine?” she went on, softer, dreamier. “The whole country went crazy for it—women wearing piled-up giraffe hairstyles, men wearing tall giraffe hats. They say one hundred thousand people lined the streets and watched in awe as the royal cavalry escorted the giraffe to the king’s palace.” She moved her hand down the wild boy’s neck, and Boy shuddered with delight. “And hundreds of years before that, an Egyptian sultan sent one to Florence. It’s actually in frescoes and paintings roaming the town squares and gardens! There’s even a constellation named after it.” She glanced up at the stars. “They say you can see it in the northern Mexican sky. Maybe we’ll be able to see it in the desert.” Then she sighed again, this time so quiet I almost missed it, and I really, really didn’t want to miss it.