West With Giraffes(3)
Finally, I struggled up on my boots again, tied up my trousers with a piece of soggy boat tether, and wandered back to the dock.
There I sat, pure miserable, watching ship after ship limp into harbor.
Until I saw the giraffes.
Up the dock, a storm-clobbered freighter was unloading. I don’t remember getting to my feet or moving. I only remember standing in the middle of the freighter’s crew in their blue dungaree uniforms, staring. There, before me, were two giraffes under a dangling crane that had just unloaded them like a pack of tires. One was alive and swaying inside a cracked but upright crate, the colossal beast’s head thrusting up treetop tall, the other, lifeless, sprawled across the entire width of the dock, its crate crushed around it like an accordion. Back then, nobody knew much about giraffes, but in the little schooling I had before the dust came, I’d seen a picture of one, so I was able to put a name to the wonder. Staring at the downed one, I was sure I was gazing at a real-life carcass of a real-dead giraffe . . . until the carcass opened a brown-apple eye to gaze up at me. And the deathly look in that eye sent a familiar shiver down my young spine.
I knew all about animals. Some you worked, some you milked, some you ate, some you shot, and that was that. You learned early not to make a pig a pal or your pa would soon be forcing you to thank Jesus for the blessing of eating everything but its squeal. Even feeding a stray dog would get you a whipping for taking food out of the family’s mouth. “What’s wrong with you? It’s just an animal!” my pa kept saying. There was no room for such weakness past being a boy in knickers, especially when, at the risk of hellfire, the worst two-legged human was better than any soulless four-legged animal—or so I was taught. Problem was, whenever I locked eyes with an animal I felt something more soulful than I ever felt from the humans I knew, and what I saw in that sprawled giraffe’s eye made me ache to the bone. The giraffe’s eye had stopped moving, taking on a pallor I’d seen too many times in an animal’s eyes right before my pa would be deciding whether to eat, bury, or burn them. I pushed in closer, waiting for the seamen, all looking like damp hell themselves, to shove me back where I belonged.
Instead they were suddenly parting like a dirty-blue Red Sea.
Coming right at us was a shiny new truck with a wood contraption strapped to its long flatbed that would’ve made Rube Goldberg proud. Shaped like a squatty T, it looked like a two-story homemade boxcar plopped down on the entire length of the truck bed, wooden window openings along the top, trapdoors along the bottom, and a short step-up ladder nailed on each side. I jumped out of the way as the driver—a goober-looking guy with cauliflower ears and enough Dapper Dan pomade on his hair to grease an engine—jerked the rig to a halt.
The passenger door swung wide, and out crawled a leathery old man with a face like a mule. That’s what I’ve called him all these years—the “Old Man”—but here and now as I write, older than old myself, I’d bet the farm he wasn’t much past fifty. He had on a rumpled jacket, a yellowed white shirt, and hangdog tie. One of his hands looked gnarled, and propped on the back of his head was an old fedora that looked like it’d been stomped on so much it had forgotten whether it was pork-pied or pinched.
Slamming the door, he seemed headed toward the mutton-chopped harbormaster, who was waving what seemed to be a couple of telegrams his way. Instead the Old Man tromped right past, striding to the giraffes as if unaware of any other living thing on the dock but the giants before him.
First, he went to the upright crate with the standing, swaying giraffe—the male—and started talking to it low like secrets. The giraffe slowed. The Old Man reached in to gently stroke it, and the giraffe’s swaying stopped. Getting down on his haunches by the sprawled female, he started up the same soft giraffe-speak. She began to quiver. He put his hand through the crushed crate slats to touch her, and as the giraffe lay still as doom, he began stroking her big head with that gnarly hand until she closed her eyes. For a moment, the only sound in the world was the giraffe’s labored breathing and the Old Man’s cooing against the waves lapping against the dock. Then the harbormaster stomped over to shove the telegrams under the Old Man’s nose. The Old Man took one look at them and tossed them to the ground, a fury flit crossing his face I knew far too well—he had him a temper, too.
Right then, the ship captain appeared from the harbormaster’s hut, his uniform ripped and face bruised, and the dungarees turned toward him as one.
The Old Man glared his way. “You kill my giraffe?”
“Mister,” the harbormaster cut in, “they lost one of their mates out there and it’s a miracle they made it in with or without your fancy animals if that means a thing to you.”
The Old Man’s face made it clear it did not.
With that, the dungarees were all in a lather. I thought they just might pounce on him. From the look on his face, I thought he just might want it.
“We got her here . . . ,” a voice rang out, and you could almost hear the words left hanging in the air: Now save her, ya bastard.
The Old Man, his hand still on the downed one’s great head, didn’t move.
As the grumbling grew louder, though, a dented gray panel truck came rattling toward the rig from the street with a sign on its door so faded I could only make out the word “Zoo.” Out from it hopped a stubby, well-scrubbed college-boy type in a white coat clutching a black doctor bag. He strode past us like he was on a holiday, headed to the Old Man.