West With Giraffes(59)

Instead, there stood someone holding the onion and pecan gunnysacks and staring up at the giraffes. He was so caught up, I almost got to him before I stepped on a twig.

He whirled around, clutching the sacks to his chest.

As Boy and Girl upped their stomping, neither of us moved. I could see him in the faint light coming from one of the park’s streetlamps. Raggedy and barefoot, he was about my age but much, much scrawnier, nothing but scary skin and bones. Where I was sporting a birthmark on my neck, he had a half-healed burn across both neck and jaw, the kind of burn you get from a fall on a hot rail or a scuffle over a bum’s fire barrel. Too wretched a sight to be a hobo, too young to be a bum, he’d been a luckless railrider—I was sure of it. But he wasn’t now. Now he was stealing food meant for animals, hunched over like a junkyard dog. We locked eyes, and what I saw gave me the willies. There was nothing left there but fear and hunger and what he’d do to keep both at bay.

Right then, one of the giraffes kicked the rig hard enough to shake the frame. When I glanced up he ran right at me, knocking me flat on my ass—exactly like I’d done to the Old Man in quarantine—and I hit the ground hard, the stink of him on my new clothes. The last I saw of him were the gunnysacks slipping over a stone wall too smooth for scaling. Yet there he went. Just like a cat.

Lying there in the dirt and spilt oats, I stared after that raggedy boy, stuck in the moment. In the years since, I have sometimes seen his face in the mirror for no reason I can say. Back then, though, the only thing that snapped me out of it was the sound of the rig rocking, swaying, the axle groaning to breaking. The giraffes were about to flip the rig where it sat. Scrambling up on my boots, I kicked a loose onion and scooped it up. Then I was straddling the cross plank between the Old Man’s darlings like I’d thought I’d never do again. Girl and Boy moved close and the rig went still. I stroked both their mammoth jaws, cooing the Old Man’s giraffe-speak and feeding them the onion, peeling off its layers one by one. As their big heads lingered, surrounding my young self like living shelter, my heart swelled with the boy-in-knickers feeling from the cornfield again, making me feel lighter and shinier and safer in a way I still can’t explain. We stayed that way for a good long time, until the two reached once more for the sycamore’s leaves, their quivering nostrils the only reminder of the latest lion at their heels.

I lay back on the cross plank to watch, seeing their outlines against the stars and hearing their soft nibbling against the sound of the freight train dying away.

Next thing I heard was a gruff voice.

“You up there again, boy?” called the Old Man. “You’re going to break your fool neck doing that.”

Certain I was in a moving boxcar, I grabbed at the plank under me. I’d dozed off. Above me, the stars had moved. The giraffes were still surrounding me, and I sat up feeling as untroubled as I’d ever hoped to be again.

“Come on down,” the Old Man ordered. “The grub’s cold but good. So eat up and go stretch out on the nice cot that fancy four-eyes set up in his office. I’ll wake you when I need to.”

Back on the ground, the raggedy boy’s oats crunching under my boots, I gobbled up the grub, and instead of leaving, I turned to look at the Old Man. He’d plunked down on the running board and was pulling his smokes and his Zippo from his shirt pocket.

“Something on your mind?” he asked, lighting his Lucky.

“I pocketed that cash roll,” I said. “Why didn’t you dump me?”

Clinking the lighter shut, he took a puff, looked my way, and said, “You think I’ve never been hungry?” He left his eyes on me longer than he had to, giving me the same look, full of mercy, that the giraffes gave me after I’d opened their rig for my piece of gold—and it hit me like a punch in the gut.

He was forgiving me, too.

“Now get on to sleep,” he said, and waved me away, the giraffes peacefully chewing their cud above.

As I took in the whole of them, the whole of me welled up . . . and I let a new, clearheaded thought sprout inside my walled-off heart. If home, like Red said, was not where you came from but where you wanted to be, then the rig, the Old Man, and the giraffes were more home—and more family—than any home I’d ever had. For a stray orphaned boy, this home seemed fiercely worth holding on to, with both fists, as long as I could. No matter what might be waiting for me up the road.

With a glance back at the raggedy boy’s stone wall, and another toward the Panhandle, I sucked in all my fearfulness and headed for the bowler-hat zoo man’s office, knowing I was staying put—come what may.

In the tiny zoo office, even with the peace of having made a decision, it took a while to settle down. I lay wide-eyed on the cot in the dark, listening to the monkey sounds and missing the serene silence of the giraffes, until I must have dozed off. Because I found myself standing under a glaring red-dirt sun . . .

. . . I hear Ma: “Li’l one, who you talking to?”

. . . I see animals in cages, a bear, a raccoon, a mountain lion, and rattlesnakes.

. . . I see giraffes floating by in rushing water.

. . . I see a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun aim and fire.

. . . And as the boom-boom ricochets off the office walls, I bolted upright in the dark, hitting the floor in a crumpled lump, cot and all.

I rubbed my head where it hit the concrete, my mind reeling with floating giraffes and caged animals. I couldn’t place any of it. The only thing I recognized was the sight of the gun—until I remembered it rightly. My nightmare’s gun was a rifle. This was a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun. I could not recall ever seeing such a gun in my life.