West With Giraffes(60)

I pushed the cot off me and sprinted from the office, not stopping until I’d climbed up the rig and laid eyes on the giraffes safe inside. Only then did I look down at the Old Man, who was staring at me exactly like the first time I’d run to the rig in my skivvies, back at Round’s Auto Rest.

Heart thundering, I asked, “Do you have bears in cages in San Diego?”

“We got bears, but in a nice big pit.”

“Mountain lions?”

“No. Not a one.”

“A raccoon?”

“Now who’d want a raccoon?”

“Rattlesnakes?”

“Those we got. We’ve dug thousands out of the zoo’s hills to trade to other zoos. Australians even got some.”

“How about rushing water? You got rushing water?”

“Well, we got the ocean,” he said. “What’s wrong? This little zoo got you going?”

I shrugged. It was all I had the energy to do.

He ordered me down. “Sit.”

I dropped down beside him.

“Let me regale you a bit more about the place we’re headed,” he said. “You think that prairie dog dry moat over yonder is good? In San Diego, you got African lions with nothing between you and them but a moat. In fact, if the Boss Lady had her way, the weather’s so nice they’d fence in all of Balboa Park and let the animals roam. The fencing may be rusty and the money’s always tight, but it’s about as aces a place to be an animal among us humans as there is. I ever tell you about the penguins?”

Leaning back on the cab door, I listened to the Old Man talk, wanting to tell him about this new nightmare and even about Aunt Beulah, yet knowing it wouldn’t help a thing.

Instead I gazed again toward the road.

West.





. . . “HON!”

I’m on the floor. I don’t know how I got here. “Where’s . . . where’s my pencil?”

“Let me help you up, then we’ll find your pencil.”

I feel Big Orderly Red grab under my armpits and set me back in my wheelchair. “Oh, hon, you hit your head. That’s going to leave a mark. What happened?”

I think my heart stopped. But I’m not telling her that. I look around for Girl. The window’s open, but she’s not there.

And I remember why.

Rosie reaches toward the window. “You’re cold as ice. We better close this.”

“Girl might come back!” I roll to stop her, hit the bedstead, and start tumbling out again.

Rosie grabs me. “I better call the nurse.”

“NO, NO, don’t! A nurse’ll drug me and I can’t stop, I have to finish! I’m past my time, way past—you know I am! The rest is all I have left to tell her, and for her it’s the most important part! It won’t make sense to her unless I finish—you have to let me finish!”

Sighing, Rosie glances down at the last thing I scribbled.

Across Oklahoma.

“I don’t recall Oklahoma, hon,” she says. “Now that I think of it, I don’t recall anything past Arkansas. Did you tell me the rest?”

“Yes,” I lie.

“Well . . .” She pauses, pushing the same graying strand of hair behind her ear. “If you lie down awhile, I won’t call the nurse for now. Deal?”

I nod.

“There,” she says as she helps me from my wheelchair onto the bed. “You haven’t eaten all day bent over that desk. That’s probably what happened.”

I know it’s not, my heart missing a beat. “Where’s . . . where’s my pencil?”

She picks it up from the linoleum and lays it on the desk. “You can go back to your trip once you’ve had a nice nap. Rest first, promise?”

I nod again.

She leaves.

I lurch back in my wheelchair, grabbing up the pencil. Taking a deep breath, I place my hand on my heart a moment. Then keep on going.

Here’s where I begin to wish . . .





11

Across Oklahoma

Here’s where I begin to wish.

I wish I could jump ahead.

I wish I could skip to the finish without having to ride through Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle again in those Hard Times.

The land you grow up in is a forever thing, remembered when all else is forgotten, whether it did you right or did you wrong. Even when it flat near kills you. Even when it invades your dreams and stokes your nightmares. Even when you run from it never to return, then find yourself headed straight back for it, and the best you can wish for is to drive through it with your head down and your wits about you, dodging the worst of it so you can get on with your young life somewhere else.

Like they say, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. But that never kept a beggar from wishing.

There were two main roads to California from the Dust Bowl. Route 66 took most of the load and the fame, swooping down the plains from Chicago through Oklahoma toward Los Angeles. The other, the “southern route” heading to San Diego, cut across the bottom part of the Texas Panhandle, my part. Nobody I knew called it the Lee Highway. It was just the road west, and it was the road we were traveling whether I much liked it or not.

The green of the land began to fade not far over the Arkansas state line into Oklahoma. Even the blue of the sky changed as we drove deeper into the state, the color lighter, hazier, thinner. My ma used to tell me tales of the clear big beauty of the Texas Panhandle sky when she and Pa first started homesteading their piece of land, but it might as well be a fairy tale to me, my childhood sky always an iffy thing and soon a deadly one. You may have heard of the worst day, the duster of all dusters, called Black Sunday. In April of ’35, a black cloud came roaring onto the horizon enough to scare a multitude of saints. It was the Great Plains blowing at us, the storm from hell that blew three hundred million tons of topsoil off Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. When it hit, it blackened the skies so bad that your hand in front of your face went unseen, the static in the air so bad that the slightest touch of anyone or anything turned sparks into black magic flames. And it kept blowing. In fact, the dirt blizzard blew east so thick and hard and swift that it actually darkened the skies of Washington, DC, even the congressmen, they say, having to close their windows to stave off the dust. That day is a point of historical fact for most. It was point of no return for me and mine. That was when, cough by cough, my baby sister and my ma began to die of the dust pneumonia, along with an earthly host of other folks young and old. For months on end, it was all anybody could think about. The dust never quite left the air, descending and rising like a biblical plague with yellow clouds of swarming grasshoppers and brown skies raining down mud. Even after the air cleared, the worry never did. Each year brought more dusters, each holding the dirt in the air longer and spreading the dust pneumonia deeper, real rain only the stuff of unanswered prayers. Nesters and tenant farmers alike left in droves. Those who stayed would talk about little else right up to the very day we came riding through. Because that day there was wind. With wind came a hint of dust. And with dust came the old dread—even with a pair of giraffes from the other side of the world passing right in front of their eyes.