West With Giraffes(93)

The years, though, kept passing, and the keepers kept changing. So did everybody else at the zoo, including even the Zoo Lady, Belle Benchley. I bet I told my story a thousand times before all who knew the Old Man were gone. After that, I must have started a thousand times to tell the new folks, too. Yet I never did, sure that my story now mattered only to me, just the twice-told tales of the old man I had become. I wasn’t much of a chatty man anymore anyway, the silence of the graveyard slowly quieting all within me and without. After a while, though, I think it was more than that, more like what Cyrus Badger said about the Old Man’s gnarled hand. Some things are so much yours that you’ve got to keep them to yourself. For thirty years, that’s what I did. I shared my life with the giraffes and they did the same with me, us three keeping our story our own, until the day Girl and Boy were both gone.

Then the years turned into decades.

And I kept on living.

Time heals all wounds, they say. I’m here to tell you that time can wound you all on its own. In a long life, there is a singular moment when you know you’ve made more memories than any new ones you’ll ever make. That’s the moment your truest stories—the ones that made you the you that you became—are ever more in the front of your mind, as you begin to reach back for the you that you deemed best.

So it was that after every living thing I’d ever loved was gone—taking with them big chunks of my very soul—I stumbled upon an old Life magazine. As I thumbed through its pages, I found myself thinking about Red, the Old Man, and the giraffes more than I had in decades, my mind traveling back, back, back to the boy driving the hurricane giraffes. I quaked at the raggedy man I’d have surely become without a hurricane blowing me to the giraffes, and I marveled at the power of a soul’s truest story to staunch life’s cruelest ones. I could’ve lived my entire life in the shadow of Dust Bowl miseries and Hitler horrors. Instead such times held less pain because of two animals I once knew.

But time just kept on passing and I just kept on living.

Until, deep into my nineties, time got away from me.

I had quit going to the zoo, spirit willing but body worn out. What I hadn’t noticed was that my mind was wearing out, too. Time plays its cruelest trick without you knowing it. Even the memories a body holds most dear become like scratchy old phonograph records played too long, fading in and out, with little sound and even less fury. Until you’re only another old man sitting in a wheelchair in a crowded VA room with other old men staring at a parade of TV pictures and stories not your own.

That’s how my own story could have ended, the long goodbye of older-than-old World War II vets like me whose bodies outlasted their stuttering minds.

Yet that’s not what happened.

Yesterday, long after I was told I’d lived over a century, which was as strange a thing to hear as you might suspect, I saw a giraffe filling the screen of the crowded room’s TV. I stirred from my foggy mind to hear a deep-voiced TV man talking. Giraffes had all but vanished from the earth, he said, like the elephants and tigers and gorillas and rhinos. Warring, poaching, and encroaching, he said, were emptying the jungles and silencing the forests and turning zoos into arks enough to make Noah weep. Thousands of animals and birds and even trees were at the point of no return, he said, going the way of the Old Man’s sky-blanketing passenger pigeons.

Gone as gone could be.

The TV kept talking, and pictures of doomed birds and animals and plants kept rolling—as if it would list all the world’s wild things if someone didn’t stop it—so I rushed over in my wheelchair and punched the TV to stop it myself.

As the orderlies came running, though, I sank back into my wheelchair, realizing that punching all the TVs in the world wouldn’t save the giraffes. There wasn’t a thing an old man could do. How could this happen? A world with no jolting giraffe joy or traveling bird waves or soaring forest glory seemed an ugly, barren, and soulless place fit only for the dust storms and the cockroaches and the likes of us. If they can go extinct, dear God Almighty, let me go extinct too! I was desperate to be gone—graveyard gone—fearing, like always, I’d just keep on living.

Then, for the first time in eighty years, I dreamed.

My nightmares had pretty much stopped after my ride with the giraffes. Whatever had stoked them seemed gone with the stray-dog boy I left behind. I went back to no dreams at all. But after the War’s end, I went to find Red and met you. That night, after dozing off on the train to San Diego, I saw Augusta Red as an old woman. She was standing in a little red house, opening a package, and inside was a giraffe. I tell you it rattled me good. I feared Mr. Big Reporter’s punch had started up my nightmares again, and cruelly so. Never mind the mailed giraffe. Red was never, ever going to be an old woman. Yet I dreamed no more. For decade upon decade upon decade, I went back to a life without dreams of any kind, which suited me fine.

Last night, though, after getting rolled back here and put to bed by a pack of orderlies, I closed my eyes and heard a sound I hadn’t heard since I was eighteen . . . the soft, rich, purring thrummmm of humming giraffes . . . and I knew I was inside a dream. Because there, in my room, was Girl poking her long neck into my room’s fifth-floor window, snorting at me to get out of bed and through the window. So, in my dream I do. I am back on top of the rig somewhere in Virginia, wrestling with Girl’s head as Red is telling stories of giraffes in the sky, in paintings, in Paris, and I find myself awash with those stories she told from long ago as if they were alive, as if we could all live forever inside their telling.