West With Giraffes(40)

So, as night fell, there we were—me and the giraffes—parked in a colored motel in the middle of Almighty Nowhere. With a last glance back at Second Son standing in the tree shadows, I closed up the top and said good night to Girl and Boy. With my stomach as stuffed and happy as it had ever been in my entire life, I felt myself getting drowsy despite being stuck in a truck in the woods with a man holding a sharp blade nearby. Rolling up the windows against the chill, I stretched out on the cab’s bench seat and was allowing myself to drift nicely into well-fed slumber when the passenger door handle rattled.

Bolting straight up, I watched the handle turn and the door swing wide.

There was Red landing on the bench seat beside me, still wearing that big trench coat.

Breathing hard, she locked the door and rested her hand over her heart. “I decided to come see you and the giraffes . . . if that’s OK.” Glancing around like she was looking for signs of the Old Man, she added, “You are staying out here for a while, right?”

“All night,” I said.

She perked up. “All night?”

I nodded.

Patting her chest, she cut her eyes back at the outline of Second Son standing guard with his scythe in the moonlight. Then she reached over and locked my door. “I . . . haven’t been around Negroes much. Have you?”

I glanced at Second Son, not knowing how to answer. Fact was I’d never seen a Black person until I was riding the rails on my way to Cuz. If there were any in my corner of the Panhandle, I didn’t know where, which to my mind made them smarter than all the White people I knew. That didn’t mean they’d be welcome, especially during the Hard Times with so many folks out of work who needed somebody to be faring worse than them.

The sound of Red patting her chest harder pulled me out of my thoughts . . . She was still trying to catch her breath. “You scared?” I said.

She shook her head, mad at the thought. She still wasn’t breathing right. I started to apologize, thinking I’d riled her, but then she ran clean out of breath. Hand clutching her chest, she was gasping—short, desperate, hollow gasps, the kind I hadn’t heard since hearing my ma’s and baby sister’s dust lungs. It scared me so bad I couldn’t move, frozen by sounds I thought I’d never hear again.

Her gasps slowed, then stopped. Pushing her hair out of her face, she heaved a huge sigh and collapsed against the seat.

I gaped at her.

“I get a little winded sometimes,” she said.

I kept gaping. I wasn’t over what I’d witnessed.

So Red sighed again and said, “My heart’s broken.”

I knew she wasn’t talking about being lovelorn, and I felt a sense of dread. “What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s really broken.”

I leaned away. “That’s not funny.”

“You’re telling me,” she mumbled.

I didn’t know what to think, much less do, and I must have looked it. Because she grabbed my hand and placed it over her heart. On top of her silky shirt. Over her soft, round breast.

“Rheumatic fever. When I was a baby,” she was saying. “It sort of flops instead of beats. Feel it?”

The last thing I was feeling was her heartbeat. “What?” I mumbled.

“My heart. Do you feel it?”

I forced myself to focus, waiting for the heartbeat to come. It didn’t. And now all my focus was on waiting for it. When the heartbeat came, it was . . . beat-beat . . . beat . . . beat-beat-beat . . . pause . . . beat . . . pause . . . pause . . . pause . . . pause . . . beat.

It scared me so bad I wanted to grab her breast tighter, as if I could force her heart to beat right. “You saying it could just stop?” I choked out. “You could die?”

“Maybe.” She gave me that tight-lipped smile of hers. “But probably not tonight.”

Suddenly angry without a clue why, I pulled my hand away. “Then what are you doing way out here?”

Cocking her head, she quietly said, “Woody, haven’t you ever wanted something so bad you had to do it or die trying?”

I knew that I had. I’d thought as much not two days ago.

But this was different.

She was gazing toward the rig. “Did you know giraffes in the wild only live about twenty-five years at the most? Their hearts give out too quick, I guess, pumping up and down that neck. They’re truly blessed not knowing it, but oh, those sky-high eyes of theirs. They’ve seen the world.”

My ears still full of her sputtering heart, I seemed to have lost all good sense. She was talking again. “What?”

“I said, wasn’t that something yesterday at the mountain work camp?” She was changing the subject, finished talking about the fact she could die right then, right there, like we’d been chatting about the weather. “Such fun. It was a corps of Woodys! I felt like Margaret Bourke-White more than ever. Have you seen her Dust Bowl photos? Oh, Stretch, you could be in them with that face of yours.” With that, she leaned over and cupped my jaws with her hands. This time, I was sure she was about to kiss me on the lips. Instead she trained her whole being on my prairie face like she was taking a photo with her eyes. I was as stunned as if I’d been buckshot. I’d never been looked at this way, and sure not in moonlight. At the time I had no idea what kind of look it was. Now I know it was fueled by the “love of mankind.” But like any seventeen-year-old boy, especially one already roiling with too much feeling, I mistook it as personal as the tingling that was rushing from my cupped face to south of my belt buckle. Feeling myself blush at the whole confusing thing, I thanked God Almighty it was too dark for her to see.