West With Giraffes(55)
“We hit a buck about a mile back,” the Old Man said.
The “sundown peace officer” stepped back to the bumper and flicked off a piece of bloody deer pelt. Meanwhile, in my rearview I could see Girl craning her neck to sniff at the space where the pecan man had been. The yokel looked up at Girl. “That animal agitated about something?”
“Deer riled him,” the Old Man said. “That’s all.”
The scruffy officer scratched himself. Then, resting a hand on his sidearm’s grip in the way he must have seen lawmen in Westerns do it, he started moving toward the space where Girl was still sniffing.
At that, the Old Man raised the muzzle of the shotgun to rest on the windowsill, just high enough for the sundown peace officer to see. “You know, officer,” said the Old Man, “I’d keep my distance if I were you. Those are dangerous animals. Real dangerous.”
The yokel paused, staring between the gun barrel and the look on the Old Man’s face, and slowly lowered his hand from his sidearm.
“Like I said,” the Old Man went on, “we’re passing through to get to Little Rock before sundown. We should go.”
“Well, OK then . . . I don’t mean to keep you nice White folks,” he mumbled, then stepped back, stuck out his chest, and waved us by. “You can move along.”
As we picked up speed hitting the open highway, I heard the wind whipping what sounded like the rig’s stashed tarp meant for cold nights or heavy storms, neither of which we’d had so far. When I looked back in the rearview, I saw the tarp rise into view, and with it the pecan man’s face. He had pulled out the tarp enough to skinny under it to cover him and his pecans, his broken straw hat the only casualty. Not until we’d left the town far behind, though, did he ease the tarp all the way back and sit up, Girl greeting him with a lick and a nudge.
The Old Man and I didn’t say a word. There wasn’t much to say, at least not much either of us wanted to say. So we stayed silent, both of us glancing back at the pecan man every few seconds. Soon, he was sitting tall enough to reach up and touch Girl’s snout like he wasn’t quite sure he was touching something real.
On the outskirts of Little Rock, the pecan man tapped on the back window. I pulled over near a dirt street and he hopped down, straightened his broken straw hat, grabbed up the pecan sacks, and, chin up, held one of the sacks up to the Old Man’s window. I could tell the Old Man really wanted to let the pecan man keep his pecans. But when there’s a debt to pay, a man has the right to pay it. So he took the sack. With a nod our way and a last glance back at the giraffes, the pecan man disappeared into the shadows.
We sat there a minute, watching the shadows grow deeper where he vanished, even the giraffes straining for a last look. Then the Old Man set the shotgun back on its rack and said, “Let’s go.”
Putting the rig in gear, I heard a vehicle roaring up behind us.
I looked back and froze.
It was a panel truck . . . a yellow panel truck . . .
ARKANSAS EVENING GAZETTE DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR, said the truck’s sign as it whizzed by.
Swallowing my heart back down my throat, I let off the clutch and moved us on.
Soon as we passed the city limits, we saw a sign pointing to the FAIR PARK ZOO. It led us onto an old cobblestone bridge across a railroad crossing and into the city park, straight to the zoo’s entrance. The zoo’s single building looked like the stone structures I saw in the mountains, no doubt built by the WPA, too. The entrance was set up on a little rise, and the park surrounding the zoo was full of people. Not like you might think, though. Everywhere we looked were down-on-their-luck folks lying about, on benches, in makeshift lean-tos, and in rain tunnels, like the people in Central Park I passed in New York City chasing the giraffes.
“Stay here,” the Old Man ordered, getting out. Moving around a beat cop rousting a tramp away from the entrance, he made his way into the zoo.
“We’re getting giraffes!” screamed a kid who broke away from his mother to run up to us. “Giraffes! Giraffes!” he kept saying, jumping up and down.
A crowd formed, already oohing and aahing as the giraffes stretched down to be touched. I could tell it was like a sweet chorus to the giraffes after the day we’d had, and despite myself, it made me feel good.
The Old Man returned, motioning me to bring the rig around to a gate in the zoo’s high stone fence. By the time we caught up to him at the open gate, he was already talking to a short man in wire-rim glasses dressed fancier than you’d think any zoo man should be—all gussied up in suit, tie, and bowler hat. Soon as we were in, he closed the gate and headed us toward a spreading sycamore along the back wall, perfect for giraffe-feasting.
The zoo was as tiny as the Old Man said. Even in the growing dusk, I could see it all from where I parked the rig. To the left, the front entrance part was a long building housing monkey cages that opened into a breezeway leading to outside paddocks to our right—a buffalo roaming in a big pen, tortoises and prairie dogs inside a dry moat, peacocks, some camels, a lion, a zebra, a brown bear. That was it.
The Old Man and the bowler-hat zoo man stood in front of the rig chatting as I popped the top for the giraffes. When I jumped down, the Old Man waved me over.
“My apologies about the trouble out in front,” the bowler-hat zoo man was saying, his voice as high as a woman’s. “We’ve got the same Hooverville problem blighting our nice park like most cities these days, no matter what we do, and it’s always worse at closing time. Who do we have here?”