West With Giraffes(27)

Feeling the contents of my stomach roaring up, I swallowed it back down, focusing all I had on keeping the rig steady as cars kept whizzing and the giraffes kept rocking.

Parking his fedora on the seat between us, the Old Man went dead still, and in a voice mighty close to the one he used to calm the giraffes, he said, “Now. Take it slow. Slow and smooth. Don’t mind a thing around you.”

Up ahead, I could see a river and signs. Lots of signs. One of them was pointing the way to the NATIONAL ZOO over the FRANCIS SCOTT KEY BRIDGE. The traffic was getting thicker, but I kept driving like a granny, slow-slow-slow. So slow a DC motorcycle cop with his lights flashing was driving up beside us. The Old Man, not looking the least bit surprised, gave the cycle cop a nod, and the cop moved back behind us.

I knew, within seconds, he’d be telling me to make the turn to the DC zoo. When I glanced at him, though, he started talking fast. “Listen up. There’s no taking the giraffes out of the rig ever, because once they’re out, there’s no guarantee we’d ever get ’em back in, and that’d be the death of them one way or the other. You don’t tell a giraffe what to do. You ask. They may have taken a shine to you, but that’ll mean nothing if they decide later on it doesn’t. They’re not your pets or your Panhandle horse. You respect them as wild animals. Got it?”

I nodded so hard my teeth rattled. I was going to California.

“OK then,” he said. “You can drive us to Memphis.”

I was sure my ears weren’t working right. “Californy,” I corrected him.

“Memphis,” the Old Man said again. “The road to Memphis is smooth sailing, you’re driving decent, and we’re making good time. Time is everything now, the darlings’ bones so gotdam delicate. We still have lots of daylight to get down the road and we should take it. There’s another zoo in Memphis where I’ll have time to call way ahead for a new driver to be waiting so we won’t be wasting a day or more like we’ll be doing here,” he said as the bridge exit appeared.

“I can go the distance,” I said quick.

“Take it or leave it, boy.” The Old Man nodded toward the bridge. “Right now.”

I took it.

With that, the Old Man turned his gaze back to the road. “All right. Slow. Smooth. Exactly like you been doing.”

A second cycle cop appeared, lights flashing and siren rolling. The Old Man made some sort of forward-ho gesture for him and the traffic slowed even more in our wake as we moved on through the city. At the city’s edge, the road narrowed back to two lanes, the cycle cops veered off, and the giraffes popped their heads out to watch them go while I forced myself calm. As we moved into the countryside and everything quieted all the way down, I studied my sideview mirror, wishing to see Red but also wondering what had just happened. “Why didn’t the cops take us to the DC zoo?”

“’Cause I never called.”

I chewed on that a second. “How’d they know about us?”

“The Boss Lady.”

And I chewed on that a second. “The Boss Lady is Mrs. Benchley?”

“That’s right.”

“A woman is the boss of the whole San Diego Zoo?”

“That’s right,” he said, propping his arm on the windowsill. “Looks like a granny, dresses like a schoolmarm, swears like a sailor, and still charms snooty zoo galoots with their fancy educations.”

“. . . How’d she get that job?”

“Way I heard it, the gent who started up the zoo from a menagerie after the Great War rang up civil service for a bookkeeper since they barely had money for a keeper much less a staff. She showed up and started doing everything from taking tickets to nursing sick animals until she was running the place.

“Then she started doing those radio shows and movie newsreels, and got famous telling stories about the zoo. But, I can tell you for a fact, she’s got stories she won’t be putting on those.”

“Like what?”

“Well, like the time she walked into a pen with an escaped baboon.”

“On purpose?”

“The woman wasn’t stupid, boy. Why, I’ve seen a ninety-pound baboon throw a grown man across a service yard. No, it had gotten into the area behind the monkey quadrangle and was having a gay old time, rattling cages of all the screeching monkeys and loping round and round. By the time I got there, five keepers were shouting and swinging clubs trying to scare it back in its pen. The closer the men got, the scareder and wilder and crazier the baboon got—and you hadn’t seen crazed until you’ve seen a crazed baboon. I was sure it was going to charge us. Then, right that holy minute, the Boss Lady appears from the other end. She’d heard us in her office, thought we were chasing rats, and was coming to tell us we were disturbing the visitors. We yelled at her to run, but before she could do a thing, the baboon headed right for her.” The Old Man shook his head. “I tell you, I braced for the worst. The Boss Lady knew full well she was in mortal danger. One gnash of that baboon’s jaws could break her neck. But what does she do? The woman doesn’t run. She doesn’t hide. She forces a smile—and just opens her arms. And what does that baboon do? It jumps into them, wailing like a baby!”

“Then what’d she do?”

“What else could she do? She carried that big baboon back to its pen—with six grown men watching, struck dumb at the sight. We braced for a bawling out, but she was so mad she didn’t speak to us for a week.” He went on to tell me more Boss Lady stories, like the times she picked up an escaped rattlesnake. And took a streetcar home with a sick baby kangaroo in a basket. And mailed fleas to somebody back East for a flea circus until the post office got wind of it.