West With Giraffes(32)
“Her leg OK?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. Instead he said, “You did good, boy, but no offense, this was my mistake. I should never have asked it of you. I wasn’t expecting that gotdam detour . . . yet if we had turned back . . .” He paused, cutting himself off. “For sure now, I’ll be seeing about getting an experienced man in Memphis for the rest of the way.”
Jitters or not, that almost had me loudly taking exception. It wasn’t me that almost sent us over the side—it was Red and her Packard. I was doing fine before that bump. Once you get that close to going off a mountain, though, I guess you only remember the scare, even if you’re the Old Man.
He could change his mind again, I told myself as I watched the mountain man trudge from the store. After all, I thought, taking a deep breath, what can happen now that’d be worse than almost falling off a mountain?
As if in answer to a young fool’s thought, the mangy man yowled.
“Gimme back my hat!”
He was hollering at Wild Girl. Her long neck, stuck full out her window, was moving in jerky, unnatural ways, and from her throat came a sound so horrid the memory can make my skin crawl even now—she was gagging.
The hat was stuck.
The Old Man got quick to his boots as the store’s owner came running out. “Damn your eyes, Phineas, it thought that twig hat of yours was a tree!”
I was on my feet by then, but all I could do was stare at that gyrating neck, hardly believing what I was seeing. She was fighting for her breath, flailing wild, unable to pull herself back in her window to get her neck straight.
Grabbing the gas pump’s water hose, the Old Man turned it on full force and, climbing quick up by Girl, tried to aim the water hose down her throat. “Steady the hose!” he hollered down. I grabbed the back end, and the Old Man shoved the hose past her tongue—the hose water flowing like a mighty river down her massive craw and flooding right back up like a spouting geyser, hat and all.
Girl gave a mighty sneeze and went back to chewing her cud.
The mountain man grabbed his upchucked hat and went back to his mule.
The Old Man climbed down and the store owner turned off the water.
And me—with a death grip still on that hose, I dropped back to the running board, soaked and gulping.
“Huh,” mumbled the store owner, surveying the mess. “You’d think it would’ve gone down, not come back up. Wouldn’t ya?”
Plopping down beside me, the Old Man heaved a great sigh, then got right back to his feet. I got up, too, thinking we were moving on. Instead he shuffled toward the store. “You get the darlings ready,” he muttered. “I’m having me another beer.”
A few miles ahead, we connected back up with the Lee Highway again. For the next hour, we glided through scenery that I wished I was more in the mood to enjoy—forest on one side and glory-green valley views on the other. I still hadn’t quite beat my jitters, though, so when the Old Man had me pull into a log cabin camp nestled in the forest along the highway, I was glad of it. We had it to ourselves from the lonesome look of the place, and after the usual happy ogling by the camp manager, we began our giraffe-tending. But this time it felt different. The Old Man stared at Girl’s splint even longer than he did at the store, and I could see why. The wound was oozing through the bandaged splint. The rough ride had banged it up bad enough to bleed.
Frazzled, the Old Man muttered, “Get the onions.” He pulled the zoo doc’s black bag out of the cab. I stood on the side ladder and offered onions to Girl through her window. At first, she wouldn’t take them. When she did, it was only one. I kept on holding them out to her, though, as the Old Man gently unwrapped the bandaged splint, dabbed powder from the glass bottle on the oozing wound, and wrapped the splint again. When she let him without a peep, I knew what he didn’t tell me before we headed into that tunnel. Girl’s leg was much worse than he was letting on.
Stuffing the black bag behind the cab’s seat, the Old Man pushed his fedora back and gazed blankly at the setting sun. “Handle the rest, will you, boy?” he mumbled, and trudged to the cabin without another word.
So I climbed up the side ladder far enough to throw open the top. The sight of the giraffes standing safe in their traveling suites should have soothed my nerves. But when they moved toward me like they’d done on the mountain, the moment came flooding back . . . I’m on the switchback . . . Red hits us, jolting the giraffes toward the drop-off . . . I’m hanging off the side, begging-pleading-praying for their towering selves to hear me . . . to trust me . . .
To come to me . . .
Away from free fall . . .
I was safely clutching the side of a parked rig, yet I was quaking in my boots, the way that almost sailing off a mountain can rattle a person to the bone when the near-death truth of it sinks in. I forced myself to breathe until I could loosen my grip on the rig. But instead of climbing down, I crawled up to the open top. I needed the air, I needed the sky, and I needed the company, even if I couldn’t admit it. I sat down, straddling the cross plank like I’d done the night before with Red. This time, though, the giraffes weren’t bumping me for onions. They moved as close as they could to me, the way they had to each other their first night in quarantine. Like they were circling the wagons around me. Surrounded by such colossals, I should have felt shaky and small, yet their mammoth presence made me feel big, and calm, and sweetly safe in a way hard to describe and even harder to resist. I knew better. Yet I found myself overcome with feelings for them that I couldn’t hold back.