West With Giraffes(65)

“Yes,” she said, holding my gaze.

I flinched. “To that reporter?”

“Yes.”

I flinched again. “Then why are you here and not with him!”

“Because I want to be here more.”

“But you got a husband.”

She leveled her gaze and again said, “Yes.”

I’d never been around any married women except my ma or women like my ma. The idea of her being hitched but not hitched to his side wasn’t sinking in. “But he wants you back with him.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe he only wants the Packard back.”

I then heard words come out of my mouth that I’d have thought chump talk only two weeks ago. “You don’t love him?”

That got her squirming. “What I feel is between us.” She sighed. “He’s a good man, whatever he thinks of me.”

“A good man? He put out a police bulletin on you!”

“Yes.”

“But why’d you marry him?”

She sighed again. “You won’t understand.” She was fighting with herself, turning as red as her hair.

I didn’t care. “You said you’d answer any—”

She cut me off. “You think you’re the only one with a story you don’t want to tell?” Hand to her chest, she started talking fast. “I was in a bad situation and I needed out.” She dropped her hand. “So, I did it the usual way women do. I got married.”

“But why him? Why Mr. Big Reporter?”

“Because he was Mr. Big Reporter,” she answered. “With his big job and big car. I was seventeen. He was safe. That was all I thought I needed, and it was for a time. It truly was.” She paused. “But then, every week, he’d bring home another Life magazine. I started seeing the world through those photos. And I started to want . . . to need . . .” She stopped to cough, then the cough turned to a gasp, another and another, like back at Big Papa’s—short, desperate, hollow gasps—and they shocked me all over again, sounding so much like my ma’s death rattles. She pressed her lips tight against each new gasp like she was mad at having to do it and throwing all her will at them to stop.

Until, at long last, they obeyed.

For a moment she sat clutching her shirt and breathing small, quieted breaths. Then, hoarsely, she mumbled, “I know I promised, Woody, I thought I could . . . but I can’t . . . please.” With that, she struggled to swallow, like the truth was stuck in her craw. “You don’t have to tell me anything, honest you don’t.”

As I watched her push her cascade of curls back from her face, I lost all my contrary. I couldn’t tell if what she’d said was the truth or not, since it wasn’t the whole truth. Right then, though, I didn’t care a fig what the whole truth was. I had my own truth stuck in my own craw, didn’t I? Even if she told me all that only to hear my miserable Dust Bowl tale, I didn’t care. I wanted to tell her. But it didn’t make it any easier to put words to the misery.

I wasn’t even sure where to start . . .

You ever wake up covered in dust, the air so thick with it you have to suck it in or die? You ever wake up with the fear that another of your animals, sucking in the same dust, didn’t make it through the night? You ever spent years of such days, living in fear and dirt, from the day you bury your baby sister to the day you bury your ma? And what you don’t know, what you can’t know, is that same day—that day of days—will end with you the only living thing left on a patch of worthless Panhandle land, your face and boots splattered with blood?

But my whole truth—the truth I still don’t have the grit to commit to this writing pad just yet—that truth I wasn’t telling.

Instead I told her the story of every Dust Bowl orphan . . . that women like your ma died from dust pneumonia from too much honoring and obeying, staying through all the signs of a biblical curse, because men like your pa said to. That if you were unlucky enough to be born to such mas and pas, you were halfway to dead yourself. That the animals that kept you alive were on their way to dead, too, starving from the inside, how farmers like yourself cut open dead cows to find only dirt. How you had to endure each morning knowing you could wake to find another one laid out on the ground, needing to be put out of its misery. And how, after a while, you were half-crazy with it, realizing that all of us needed to be put out of our misery. The land was having its revenge, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and it was past time to quit even if you didn’t know what to quit to. Some folks couldn’t do it, couldn’t let go, men like your pa who didn’t know how to quit without ending up dead himself . . . which is what your pa goes and does . . . with a smoking rifle still in your grip . . . raised and aimed right at him.

That is what I tell her. All but the rifle part. I say such a story is just one of a thousand ways you get to be an orphan in this land, a thousand ways that are all the same way. “The only thing left is to find somewhere else, somebody else, to be,” I ended, jaw set to keep it that way.

“But, Woody . . . you’ve come right back here,” she murmured. “Why would you do that?”

I gave her the answer I’d been giving since the hurricane. “I want to go to Californy.” With that, I glanced toward Girl and Boy chewing their cud. When I turned back to Red, her eyes were wet. She placed her hand on mine as comfort. I pulled it back, still too raw with memory. So she leaned over to hug me like she’d done in Little Rock, and I let her. Then, like hugs sometimes do, it was followed by a small peck of a kiss more comfort than caress, even if on the lips. Yet I knew nothing of such things, and even if I had, it wouldn’t have mattered. Because it was Augusta Red I was finally kissing and I wanted it to last—to be the first kiss to end all kisses I’d been imagining since the long nights at the depot. So, when she started to lean away, I put my hand through her curls at the back of her head to hold her there, to make the kiss mean worlds more than she ever meant it to mean, to make it mean what I wanted it to mean.