West With Giraffes(91)
So, from that library, nursing more than a broken nose, I headed cross-country to San Diego to find the giraffes. I walked through the zoo entrance, which was unchanged from the day I’d seen it from afar. I wandered a moment, turned a corner, and there they were. A sign announced them to be “Lofty” and “Patches.” But, make no mistake, they were Boy and Girl, full grown, healthy, and tall as tall can be—Boy now taller than Girl and regal as a prince. I sat my blissful self down on a bench to let my eyes drink them in, and out from behind them scampered a giraffe calf. The sign on the fence said his name was “D-Day,” being born on that day of days, June 6, 1944, while the Allied armed forces were invading Europe—what do you think of that? And he was already taller than me.
I spent a week off and on there on that bench. I didn’t expect them to remember me, but I wanted to give them a chance. For two days, they didn’t notice me among the crowd. On the third day, when the keepers weren’t around, I snuck in a couple of onions to offer through the fence—to see what they’d do. Girl ambled over first. Her back leg was scarred but working dandy. She bent her neck down to snuffle me head to toe, exactly like the first night in quarantine, then curled her tongue around the onion in my hand and lobbed it down her throat. When Boy joined us, baptizing me with a blow of giraffe spit, nobody could convince me they didn’t see the boy they used to know.
I planned to find Riley Jones, too, of course. I wanted to see him with the giraffes and hear a bit of his giraffe-speak. I’d walk over close and say, “Hey there, Old Man.” Each day, though, another keeper, younger than the Old Man but just as leathery, came out to tend the giraffes. Each day, he’d nod and I’d nod back. Until one day, he caught me feeding the giraffes onions.
“Hey, you, soldier!”
Some long-gone reflex made me want to run. Instead I came to attention. “Yessir.”
He looked me up and down, eyes lingering on the birthmark on my neck. “What’s your name?”
I paused. “Who’s asking?”
“Is it Woody Nickel?”
“How . . . ?”
He grinned ear to ear. “Riley said you’d show sooner or later. Come with me.” His name was Cyrus, he said, Cyrus Badger. As we walked, he put a hand on my shoulder and told me the bad news. The Old Man was dead, too, that very year. I’d missed him by a month.
“Mabel, this here’s Riley’s boy,” he announced as we stepped into some sort of paymaster’s office. “This is the famous Woodrow Wilson Nickel.”
Before I knew it, I was being handed a check for driving services, back pay.
“Oh, wait,” she said, rummaging in her desk. “Riley left you something.” Laughing, the woman handed me a sack of wooden nickels. “I was supposed to give you the wooden nickels first and call that your pay, but I didn’t have the heart.” She held out the sack until I begrudgingly took it. “Look closely at them, Mr. Nickel. It’s a gift from him,” she said, handing me one. Each nickel was a token good for a visit to the zoo. There were hundreds of them.
Cyrus walked me out, enjoying the look on my face as much as the Old Man would have.
When I found my tongue, I said, “What got him? Did the consumption come back?”
“Consumption?” Cyrus screwed up his face. “He wasn’t a lunger. It was the smokes that did him in, got the cancer of the throat. Where’d you get it being consumption?”
“He said he had it when he was my age after he almost ran off with the circus as a kid. He came out West to work as a cowboy and got his cure cow-punching and eating sowbelly.”
At that, the Old Man’s pal slapped his knee and guffawed. He laughed so hard and long I began to take offense. Wiping tears from his eyes from all the hooting, he said, “Woody, that ain’t Riley’s story, that’s Dr. Harry’s, the founder of this zoo. Dr. Harry tried to run away with the circus as a kid. Then he caught TB, and got his cure by heading West and cowboying—all before he ended up a doctor, moved here, and started up the zoo on a lark. Riley Jones never punched a cow in his life!”
The Old Man lied? I couldn’t believe my ears. “But he couldn’t abide a liar!”
Cyrus smiled. “Well, now, I wouldn’t go so far as calling him a liar. Nobody abides a liar. But everybody sure likes a good storyteller, don’t they? Sometimes the best medicine is a good story. I bet you found that out.”
I threw up my hands. “Well, what was his real story?”
He shrugged. “My money’s on him being a foundling. He never mentioned an orphanage, but he once told me he was on his own by ten. Used to happen in his day more than you’d care to know. Being with the circus, now that was true.”
I was so rattled I couldn’t find my voice, and when I did, I couldn’t do much more than stutter. “Well . . . how about his hand? A lion mangled it in the circus, right?”
Cyrus roared again. I was cracking the guy up. “God love him, I bet ol’ Riley had a thousand stories about that hand,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t feel bad, son. He did it to us all. I once caught him telling two different stories about it on the same day. He was born with it, dollars to doughnuts. Or it might well have been caught inside a big cat’s mouth. If not, whatever happened to it was so bad he never told it true. Which was his right. Some things are so much yours, you just have to keep ’em to yourself. But I guarantee if he could’ve had his ending be a lion’s lunch instead of the cancer, he dang sure would have,” he said, and walked off, with me standing there gaping like a blessed monkey. A few steps away, he stopped and looked back. “Well, come on. You need to meet the Boss Lady.”