West With Giraffes(85)

Squeezing the coin tight, she started to turn toward the depot but stopped and gazed past me at the giraffes in a way that was more drinking-in than last-sight . . . and then did the same at me.

“We had us an adventure, didn’t we, Woody Nickel?” she said.

Before I could answer, she hugged me hard and kissed me square on the lips long enough for me to place my hand on the back of her head, lace my fingers through her soft curls, and kiss her like a full-grown man, exactly as I’d always imagined. Then, stepping back, that far-off look taking ahold of her face once more, she said, “I’d do it again, you know.”

Whether she was talking about stealing the Packard to follow us, lying to keep it up, dashing her magazine dreams to save the giraffes, or kissing me with a kiss to end all dreamed-upon kisses—it didn’t matter.

The goodbye had come.

By the other side of Phoenix, the Old Man was talking. A lot. I needed desert silence again, bad. He was having none of it. The man was a blasted magpie. The closer we got to San Diego the happier he got and the moonier I got. It was only hours away now. I half thought he was going to make us keep driving, but there was a mountain pass to get through and we’d be hitting it at night. Considering our less-than-dandy mountain experience, I was mighty glad to hear we’d be waiting until morning. Of course, that meant more Old Man chatter. Maybe because we were driving through desert sand, he couldn’t talk enough about how lush the zoo was, how anything’d grow there. How the founder, a man he called Dr. Harry, walked all over the grounds poking the soil with the tip of his cane and dropping seeds he’d brought back from around the world, and how, abracadabra, the place was now brimming with greenery from all over. To hear him tell it, the Okies got it right when it came to San Diego. Any other time, listening to all he was saying, I’d be salivating for it, too. Now all I was hearing was another goodbye. So, I spent his magpie-chattering miles staring at either the road or the giraffes, ignoring his paradise talk altogether, holding on hard to the paradise I still had.

Somewhere along that stretch, we heard a train whistle. The train track was trailing the highway off in the distance. The tooting grew louder and louder until a freight train was passing with railriders hanging out the empty boxcars all down the way. It wasn’t until the long train was clean out of sight that I realized the Old Man had stopped talking. He was studying me with that right-through-me stare I thought we’d left back in Texas. He opened his mouth to comment, like he always did after one of those looks, and I tensed. Instead he hung his elbow out the open window, cocked that cruddy fedora back, and said, “Did I ever tell you my life story?”

Well. That perked me up. Maybe I was finally going to find out about that hand of his and even about what Percival T. Bowles had called him. If so, I could already tell he was going to take his sweet time getting to it.

But what did we have but time?

He was born, he said, back East “to a wastrel” who had thirteen sons by his first two wives, and six more with his third one, the Old Man’s ma. By the time he was in knickers, his pa had up and died and his ma was supporting the whole kit and caboodle with a boardinghouse. That, he said, was when things got “interesting.”

“It was around the corner from the Barnum & Bailey winter grounds,” the Old Man went on. “Soon as I could, I started sneaking in to see the elephants and the lions and tigers and monkeys.”

“That when you started at the abattoir?” I cut in.

“You gonna let me talk here?” he said, and went right on. “After a while, the kinkers and the roustabouts got tired of running me out, so I got chummy with the funambulists, you know—the tightrope walkers. They got me rope walking with them.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

He chortled, popping the side of the cab’s door. “I got so good, they said they’d take me with them when the circuit began. I would’ve done it, too, if one of my older brothers hadn’t hauled me back home before they hit the road. By the time I was about your age, though, I caught the consumption. The only cure for a lunger back then was to head out West. So I did. It was the making of me, I tell you what. I highly recommend it. For four years, I rode as a cowboy, punching cattle on the Colorado plains, riding night herd, living on sowbelly and sourdough biscuit, and I got my cure. I never got the elephants and the lions and tigers out of my system, though. Next circus I saw, I signed on.”

“As a ropewalker?”

“Naah. They didn’t have any of that. They weren’t Barnum & Bailey. Not even close. No, I only signed on to be around the animals. Before long, though, I was in a fistfight every day with some razorback who was mistreating an animal. So, before I ended up dead or in jail, I headed to San Diego and their new zoo, where I’d heard that the animals get treated better than the people. I hope to die there, I do.” He smiled so nice I hardly recognized him. “Not before we get these darlings into its gates, though. Right, boy?”

It was a kindness the Old Man was performing, getting my mind back where it belonged, for the giraffes as well as my own moony self. It was working, maybe a little too well. We were pulling into Gila Bend, which was nothing much more than a little oasis with a well and a fountain in sight of the mountains, when I realized he hadn’t told me what I wanted to know.

“Wait, what about your . . .” I pointed to his gnarled hand. “Was it lion taming?”