West With Giraffes(6)
Wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve, the goober driver strutted over and rattled the pen’s fence, spooking the giraffes, then laughed and did it again. Rocking on my bootheels, fists clenched, I wanted so bad to relieve him of his front teeth that I didn’t hear the Old Man returning until it was too late. I had to duck inside, diving behind a hay pile.
Already barking orders at the driver, the Old Man marched right past. “Earl!” he yelled. “Come here!”
Next thing I know he’s telling the driver to leave for the night and pushing the squeak-squawking barn doors shut behind him . . . trapping me inside. Cussing my fool self, I settled in to wait until I could figure out how to sneak out unseen.
As night fell, the only sounds in the barn were the giraffes snorting and stomping. The Old Man flipped a metal lever on a wall panel near his cot, the dangling electric light lamps came on, and the place turned bright as day. And there I cowered, nothing between me and him but hay. If he’d looked my way, he would’ve seen me for sure. But he only had eyes for the giraffes. Watching the giraffes in a tenderhearted way I couldn’t quite figure for such a man, he started cooing his giraffe-speak so soothingly it was calming me down. When he stopped, only the giraffes’ quiet snuffling filled the air. He pulled the switch, the lights went off, and the barn went full dark except for an outside light streaming through the high wire windows, casting shadows across the barn. Then the Old Man flopped on the cot and was soon snoring like a buzz saw.
Of course, that was my chance to sneak out. But there was still the matter of the produce waiting for the taking, and I had to take. So I headed quiet but quick to the rig’s blindside, stepped on the running board, and spied two gunnysacks on the cab’s seat, one with apples, the other sweet onions. Grabbing one from both, I stuffed the onion in my pocket and shoved the apple in my chompers, all but swallowing the thing whole.
As I grabbed another onion, though, I felt eyes on me.
Readying for a scrap, I spun around to see I had an audience. Not a dozen steps away, the giraffes had moved near the pen’s fence, and they had both turned their long necks to stare at me. There are lots of things that can make a body freeze in its tracks. Having a couple of two-ton beasts eyeing you from behind a flimsy piece of fencing is surely one of them. I should have been backing away. Instead I inched nearer until I was by the pen studying the living magnitude of them—from their huge hooves to their wide bodies and up, up, up their spotty necks to their knobby horns. I got a crick in my own long neck staring up at the giraffes’ colossalness. They could knock this pen down, I recall thinking. Yet they weren’t doing any such thing. In fact, the boy giraffe had now shut his eyes. He’s sleep-standing like my old mare, I realized, wincing at the memory. The girl, though, was still staring at me with those round brown-apple eyes exactly like she’d done at the dock, except now she was staring down. Way down.
Have you ever looked straight into the eyes of an animal? A tame one’s figuring you out, what you’re going to do and what that means to it. A wild one can chill you to the bone, surveying you for either supper or survival. But the gaze of that giraffe was different. It seemed to hold neither fear nor design. Her cantaloupe-sized nostrils snuffled the top of my head through the wire fence and I let them, if only because I couldn’t make my legs work. Blowing warm stink breath, she left my hair damp with giraffe spit. Then she bumped the fence with her snout, trying to get to the onion I was still clutching. I held it up. Her long tongue snaked through the wire and snatched it back through the fence, her neck rising to send it sliding down her long throat with a mighty gulp, then she inched near again until the smell of her surrounded me. She smelled of fur . . . and ocean . . . and sweet foreign farm dung. Before I knew what I was doing, I’d reached my hand through the wire to touch a spot on her flank as big as a granny’s butt in the shape of a sideways heart.
For the longest moment, we stood there like that, the rough feel of her warm pelt full on my outstretched hand—until I felt another tongue licking my fingers. It was the wild boy, his long neck stretching over the back of the wild girl to me. I jerked my hand out of the fence wire and his tongue followed, poking it through the fence to lick at my britches’ pocket. He wanted my stashed onion. So I dug in my pocket to get it for him—and out came Cuz’s lucky rabbit’s foot with it, falling right through the fence wire to land by the girl’s huge hoof. Not until I felt the boy’s tongue flicking at my fist could I tear my eyes away from my lost lucky charm and serve up the onion.
As both giraffes stomped and swished their tails at the onion delights, my eyes wandered back to Cuz’s rabbit’s foot still lying by the wild girl’s hoof. Needing all the luck I could get, never mind how dead “lucky” Cuz was, I decided I had to get that rabbit’s foot back.
Ducking through the fence’s opening, I was cocksure I could grab it quick and slick. As I closed my fingers around the rabbit fur, though, Wild Girl shuffled her hooves—and her wounded leg thumped me. Swiveling her big haunch, she bumped me so mightily that when I landed I bounced. Scrambling backward, I flung myself out of the pen. When I glanced back, she was giving me a look so offended that it had me all but begging her pardon.
Just then, the Old Man snort-snored loud enough to wake the next county and broke me out of my giraffe spell. Cramming the rabbit’s foot in my pocket, I lurched toward the barn doors. I was halfway to them when I remembered the driver’s produce free for the taking and, damn me, I had to take. Sneaking over to the truck’s cab, I had loaded up my arms when I realized I wasn’t hearing the Old Man’s snores anymore—I was hearing the clomp of his boots. He was going to catch me where I stood unless I dropped the produce and ran.