West With Giraffes(4)

“We’ve got to get her on her feet or she’s done,” the zoo doc said by way of hello. The Old Man motioned to the harbormaster, who whistled over a couple of longshoremen with crowbars, who started yanking at the crushed crate around the tangled giraffe. But it wasn’t fast enough for the Old Man. He started pulling at the smashed planks himself, gnarled hand and all. When there was nothing more to yank, the crane’s harness—still around planks under her body and feet—went taut, groaning like it was alive as it pulled the giraffe upright. When she faltered, the dungarees rushed by me, plunging their hands in to help the Old Man steady her. With one more tug, everything went full upright and the harnessed female was up on three of her four feet in a flash, violently so, everyone but the Old Man jumping back. And there it was. Her back right leg, from knee to fetlock, looked as if someone had taken a ball-peen hammer to it. She wobbled, fighting to stay up on her three good spindly legs.

“Steady . . . girl . . . steady . . . ,” the Old Man purred as the zoo doc felt along her body.

“Her internal organs seem intact,” he said. “This leg’s the telltale.”

I thought it was good news until I remembered they shoot horses for less.

Opening his black bag, he cleaned, splinted, and wrapped the leg, then stepped back as the longshoremen lashed freight panels snug around her. When they were done, the Old Man, still cooing his giraffe-speak, reached in and uncinched the crane’s harness.

The girl teetered. Then she was standing on her own.

Seeing that, the Old Man and the zoo doc started talking fast and low. I inched closer.

“But if I reject her as unfit, it’s a death sentence and you know it!” the Old Man was saying.

The zoo doc frowned back at the T-shaped boxcar rig. “How long you hoping to take to get there?”

“Two weeks if we make good time.”

The zoo doc shook his head. “Better cut that in half.”

The Old Man threw up his hands. “How can I do that? We got to go slow—even slower now because of that leg!”

“I’m saying a week tops because of that leg. You better start thinking how.”

“Fine. So?”

Glancing back at sirens in the distance, the zoo doc fumed. “Go ahead and sign off for both. Don’t want to disappoint Mrs. Benchley yet. They’ve got the time in quarantine to see if the young female stays tall—if we even get there. But, Jones, if I were you, I’d tell Mrs. Benchley the whole truth, that even if the female’s still upright before you hit the road, odds are your road trip will still do her in. Better if Mrs. Benchley hears it now instead of when you’re figuring out what to do with a dead giraffe on the road.”

As the zoo doc left, the Old Man marched over to the harbormaster and signed some papers. Then the crane grabbed the patched crates and swung the giraffes over to a harbor flatbed, where longshoremen tied them down. With that, the backslapping dungarees scattered, the Old Man popped the rig’s hood signaling a let’s-go to the goober driver as he climbed in, and I watched it all pass—two colossal storybook animals from the other side of the world on the back of a harbor flatbed with a contraption rig trailing behind.

I stared after the giraffes, knowing the moment I wasn’t thinking about them I’d be forced to face my sudden return to life as a stray-dog boy. Other creatures’ miracles don’t mean a thing when you’re still working on your own. As the trucks got smaller and smaller, my wandering, wretched future got bigger and bigger. I took a breath. My ribs throbbed, and as the trucks kept on shrinking from view, I thought I might retch.

Feeling something squish under my bootheel, I looked down. I was standing on the telegrams the Old Man had tossed on the wet dock. Scooping them up, I read them quick and remember them whole.

Said the first:



Said the second:



The wet telegrams turned to mush and slipped through my fingers. But my eyes were still seeing that final bright and shiny word—a word with more storybook meaning than giraffe for a Dust Bowl boy.

California.

The giraffes were bound for the land of milk and honey. Moses and the Chosen People couldn’t have longed for the Promised Land any more than hardscrabble farm folks longed for “Californy.” Everybody knew all you had to do was find your way there without dying on the road or rail, and you’d live like a king plucking fruit from the trees and grapes from the vine.

And how could anybody lose the way following a couple of giraffes?

I felt my eyes grow as big as the thoughts I was thinking. I was miserable-damp, I had an eye that was half-swollen, a couple of teeth loose, a rib throbbing like a tom-tom, and an arm that wasn’t working quite right. But it didn’t matter a bit. Because with that one bright, shiny word dancing before my eyes, I had something no Dust Bowl orphan had any business having. Although I was living in a time when such a thing was as likely to kill you as save you—I had a flickering hope.

The giraffes turned the corner and vanished from sight.

So I started to run, splashing through the water and the muck after them as fast as my bunged-up bones would go.

For a mile, I ran along the cobblestones following the giraffes. Workers clearing the streets dropped their shovels to gawk. Firemen pulling a body by its arms from a storm drain stopped to gape. Linemen working on dangling electric lines paused in the sizzle to stare. Block after block, as storm-woozy people hung from windows calling to their pals to come look, I kept running behind the slow rigs, not knowing where we were going or what to do next. At the blocked Holland Tunnel exit, the rigs stopped just as a motorcycle cop came roaring up, shouting at the rig drivers to follow him uptown, even though there were elevateds that way the high-riding crates would have to squeeze under—lots of them.