West With Giraffes(89)

I couldn’t.

On such small things, entire lives turn.

Stumbling on the track’s cinders, I staggered to a halt, so light-headed I had to throw my head over my knees. When I looked up, all that was left to see of the train as it slipped away was the caboose . . . the brand-new, redder-than-Red caboose . . . and the old do-or-die fury I thought was gone came roaring back. Moving on stray-dog-boy reflex alone, I found myself beside the shining cream-and-blue Harley still parked where I’d spotted it. Next thing I knew I was on it and gone.

For miles, as my head began to clear, I kept telling myself I should pull over, should go back, should rethink this stupid old move, and when I didn’t, I told myself that after I caught the train I’d never, ever do such a thing again.

I kept up with the train as the highway followed the rails, until the tracks headed straight through the mountains. As the train disappeared, I kept zooming along the winding highway, hoping to catch up at El Centro.

But I missed it again by seconds.

So, I kept on going. To Yuma.

I made it to the other side of the Ocean-to-Ocean Bridge, ripping through Yuma looking for the station, before I got nabbed, the sound of the coming train cruelly filling the air.

To the Arizona sheriff I was only another lying, thieving Okie orphan who had no business on a shiny new electric horse, stealing people’s motorcycles on my way to stealing a little of everything from everybody for years to come. Who’s to say that wouldn’t have been true only a few weeks before? The reason I gave for stealing the cycle was even a poor one to my own ears. He didn’t believe a word of my tale of trains and giraffes and highways, despite my pleas to go ask the California trooper back on the bridge. “Do you think I’m a fool?” the sheriff growled. He’d had his fill of boys like me, which he proceeded to make mightily clear, his hooked nose stuck all but up my own.

Right then, the boy I was back on Cuz’s boat dock would’ve pitched a hollering fit to call the Old Man or even Belle Benchley herself. The giraffes’ boy, though, the one I’d become between the Atlantic and the Pacific, couldn’t bring himself to do it. Maybe because I couldn’t abide the Old Man knowing the throwback piece of thieving I’d done after everything we’d been through. But maybe more because I knew it wouldn’t change a thing, this sheriff not letting me off even if the Old Man showed up riding the giraffes themselves. The sheriff didn’t know the Old Man. Or Belle Benchley. This wasn’t California. This was Yuma, home of Okie Town, with hundreds of boys exactly like me. I stole a motorcycle. Simple as that.

Since this was 1938, and Hitler was already starting to stomp across Europe, the choice I got was the choice all such thieving orphan boys got to avoid going to jail—joining the army.

“It’ll make a man outa you,” he said, making my choice for me.

It would be seven years and a world war before I found out whether Red got on that train, and even longer before I got back to San Diego.





16

Home

About the time I’d put in my army stint and was ready to get out, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and I got put right back in, along with every able-bodied American man for the duration of the War.

I was twenty-five before my return to the USA.

I’d like to say I saw action on the battlefield and returned a hero, war making a man of me like the sheriff said. But war’s a cruel place to grow all the way up. I was part of the Quartermaster Corps in Europe. I worked with the dead. We were the ones that came in after the battles, collected the bodies and dug the graves. The army said I had an “aptitude” for it, and I still don’t know what that means. What I do know is my sudden aptitude appeared after I told the wrong officer that I’d had my fill of death, and he said, “Fill of death, huh.” Suddenly I had the aptitude and would soon have more than my fill of death. There was no glory in it, just duty. And it made me wish my eyes were filled with Panhandle dust again, until I learned how not to see and not to feel so as not to think as I performed my duties, day after horrible day of death.

Such things beat memories of your life before the War right out of you unless you hold on to something and hold on tight. Most soldiers held on with sweethearts and family, writing letters to people writing letters back. What does an orphan hold on to, though? So, as the days with the dead turned into years, I let myself slip away.

When it was over, I came home by transport back across the ocean, heading to New York Harbor, still carrying the War with me. But as we traveled through a storm at sea, I began to feel something again. What I felt was the giraffes. As the ship bucked and swayed, I realized I was riding the same ocean Boy and Girl had. I closed my eyes, and instead of being strapped in the hold of an army ship in 1945, I was strapped in a crate on the deck of the giraffes’ transport in the Great Hurricane of 1938, heading toward America. The other soldiers couldn’t sleep for thinking of home and family. Me, I couldn’t sleep for thinking of the hurricane giraffes. I had held on to something. As we rode the swells of the storm, I was once again driving two “towering creatures of God’s pure Eden” cross-country. I was seeing the Packard in my rearview and hearing Girl kick the Old Man. I was leaning off a mountain, meeting Moses’s clan, spying the fat cat, and shooting the thieving lackey. I was bucking a flash flood, wrestling a desert coot, watching Boy save us, and feeling Red’s lips against mine. I was again hearing what the Old Man said about the wiry man with the elephant and dog—that there’s no explaining the world, where you find yourself in it and who your friends turn out to be. And I began to remember who my friends were.