West With Giraffes(83)

In a few minutes, the coyotes seemed to up their howls across the desert, and their echoes made it sound like they were lurking right on the other side of the dark. So when I noticed movement below, I readied for a wild thing.

“Woody?”

Red.

The howls got louder and she climbed up double time.

With a quick pat for Girl, Red sat down on the cross plank by me, her legs dangling over Boy’s side, and Boy brought his mammoth head around to snuffle her. She rested her head on his muzzle, her arms reaching full around his neck, like she was giving him the thanks he deserved after saving her, saving us all, from the desert coot. She stayed that way for as long as Boy let her, which was a mighty long time.

When she let go, I started babbling. “Nice out here, huh? The desert smells real different, seems to me. The giraffes sure love it. Where they come from must be more like this than anything else so far, I was thinking. Or maybe they know they’re about to get out of this rig. They’re sure due, all right . . .”

Red touched my arm to stop my chattering, and then turned to straddle the cross plank facing me. The giraffes moved their big selves even closer, their pelts warm against our legs, so Red stretched her arms out to touch both of them at the same time. As her touch turned to strokes, she said, as gentle as a whisper, “Do you know what I like best about photographs?”

“What?” I said.

“They stop time.” Then she smiled that sad, tight-lipped smile I hoped never to see again.

She was starting her goodbyes.

The thing about knowing you’re doing something for the last time is that it takes the joy right out of it. I’ve done lots of things for the last time in my long life, but I didn’t know it. This time I’d know it. The goodbyes were near . . . tomorrow from Red, the next day from the giraffes. I could barely abide the thought. I watched her there, in the glow of the motel sign, her arms wide, her curls wild, her trousers and shirt rumpled to ruin. She looked exactly like she should for someone who’d gotten stuck in a moving rig with a pair of giraffes and who’d lost everything but the clothes on her back. Yet she looked like a picture to me.

We sat like that a long time and no time at all, the way that such things can be both, the only sounds the snuffling of giraffes to a chorus of coyote howls. The air was getting chillier. I knew she was about to say it was time to go back to her room. That’s the way it always had been. Instead she said in a voice so soft, so weary, I barely recognized it, “Woody, could I stay? I’d rather not be alone tonight . . . and you and Boy and Girl are . . .”

When she couldn’t finish the thought, I finished it for her by asking the giraffes to allow me to close the top. They agreed. So, easing onto the ladder, I motioned Red to climb down and I closed it. Then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, I dropped down, took Red’s hand, and led her right back up. As Boy and Girl popped out their windows to surround us, I was still holding her hand as we lay back on the flat top. Side by side. Eyes to the sky. Full up once more with yearning, I admit I wanted to touch much more than her hand, although I had no experience in doing any such thing. The Old Man had been calling me a boy all this time, and rightly so, because even at eighteen I was still one in all the ways that mattered, like this one. Yet even if I could do as my whole body was telling me to do—to lean over and try the kiss again, offering up my longing in the slightest hope she felt the same—I knew it was no good. It was not what she was asking for. How I knew, I didn’t know, still surprised by any notion that was the least bit selfless. Even though every last inch of me was on sweet fire, I wasn’t going to hazard a thing that would not keep her there beside me that night. So, when she shivered and I slowly put my arm around her, she let me. I pulled her close. After all we’d been through that day, that was enough. That was glory. There we lay safely, together, under a sky bursting with shimmering stars, surrounded by the giraffes, the night quieting us so full that we both fell into a deep and abiding sleep.

When I opened my eyes, a half moon was far above, the giraffes had pulled in their own heads, and Red was no longer beside me. I gazed a moment where she’d gone and back to where she’d been, committing the night to full memory—the chill of the desert air that pulled us near, the feel of her thick curls against my arm, the snuffling giraffes surrounding us, and the position of the stars above us—savoring every little thing, exactly as I’d done at the depot after first laying eyes on both her and the giraffes. This far down the road, though, the giraffes seemed to be the only part of the whole world left unchanged.

I got up and opened the top again. The giraffes raised their heads to meet me, Girl laying hers for a fine moment in my lap, just like back in the cornfield. Then I stretched out again on the plank between them, their breath warming me in the cool air, and went back to searching for a constellation in the shape of a giraffe, filling an empty space in the sky.

The next day through the desert was what the Old Man would surely have dreamed every day on that trip would’ve been, the passage through such wide-open space a surprise in its pleasure. In the deep desert back then, if something went wrong—a rod blowing in your engine, a radiator overheating, even a flat tire—there was a whole lot of nothing you could die in. Even if we were lucky enough to have somebody come along to help, they wouldn’t have room in their vehicle for a couple of giraffes. So we should have been all weep and worry about making it through such a dangerous space without a hitch.