West With Giraffes(94)

Then the rig vanishes. I’m back in bed, once again dreaming the dream of Red as an old lady in a little red house, opening a package and finding a giraffe.

And I see it’s not Red.

It’s you.

At that, I bolted straight up in bed, full awake, and in my mind’s eye, the dream finished itself like a vision—I am once again on the road with the giraffes, the Old Man, and your ma. But this time you are there, too. You are there in the Packard as Red snaps her pictures. You are there in the flood as she sacrifices her dreams to rescue the giraffes. You are there as Boy saves her and the you that will be you from the coot’s gutshot. You are there on the rig’s top as Red is telling giraffe stories of masterpieces and legend. And she is telling another story—our story.

To you.

That’s when I knew I’d been a foolish and selfish man.

It is a foolish man who thinks stories do not matter—when in the end, they may be all that matter and all the forever we’ll ever know. So, shouldn’t you hear our story? Shouldn’t you know how two darling giraffes saved me, you, and your mother, a woman I loved? And it is a selfish man who takes stories to the grave that aren’t his and his alone. Shouldn’t you know your mother’s brave heart and daring dreams? And shouldn’t you know your friends, even though we’re gone?

I knew, then, there was something an old man could do. I found a pencil and I began to write.

Few true friends have I known and two were giraffes, one that didn’t kick me dead and one that saved my worthless orphan life and your worthy, precious one.

They’re gone now. So surely am I. If the TV was right, there are no giraffes in the world to boot, gone with the elephants and tigers and the Old Man’s sky-blanketing pigeons.

Yet, somehow, I know there is still you. There is still this story that is yours as good as mine. If it goes extinct with those creatures of God’s pure Eden, that’d be a crying shame—my shame. Because if ever I could claim to have seen the face of God, it was in the colossal faces of the giraffes. If ever I had a story I should be leaving behind, it’d be this one, for them, all of them, and for you.

So, here and now, before it’s too late, I have written it down. If there is any magic left in a world without gentle giraffes, if that bit of God I saw in those sky-high wonders is still alive somewhere holy and true, a good soul will read these pencil scratches of mine and do this last thing I cannot do.

And one bright and blessed morning, the giraffes, the Old Man, me—and your ma—will find our winding way forever to you.





. . . As I lower my pencil, I hear a noise at the window.

It’s Girl.

Her glorious giraffe neck stretches near again, and I feel the same clutch around my heart on first spying her and Boy down the dock so long ago.

“We did it, Girl,” I say, pointing at these words. “You happy? I’m happy.”

Snuffling, she blows a satisfied spitball my way.

I start to ask the darling why she’s back. But, as my heart misses a beat . . . then another . . . and . . . another . . . I know. I drink in my final look of my true friend as she fades away.

Goodbye.

Shaky hand to old, old heart, I smile down at these last scribbles.

Time to stop.

Time to go . . .

. . . and I reach over and close the window.





EPILOGUE

The VA liaison put down the last writing pad from Woodrow Wilson Nickel’s antique footlocker and gazed around. It was already late afternoon, and she was now far behind schedule. But she didn’t look at her watch. Instead she gently bundled up the pads scattered around her, placed them neatly back in the footlocker along with the tiny antique porcelain souvenir giraffe, and walked in to see the hospital administrator.

“Do you have a moment?” she said. “There’s something I should show you.”



A few days later, inside an office past a mural of legendary “Zoo Lady” Belle Benchley, the current director of the San Diego Zoo leaned back in his chair. On his desk lay stacks of scribbled writing pads that had been sent over from the VA Center, the last of which he had just finished reading. He gazed out the window at the forest-like grounds in the direction of the zoo’s new Institute for Extinction Prevention, where, nearly a century before, an enclosure had housed the zoo’s first giraffes.

Then he touched the screen on his desk monitor, and the zoo security director appeared.

“Yes, sir?”

“If we wanted to find someone,” the director asked, “where might we start?”



In that way, one bright and blessed morning, a slim, freckled eighty-six-year-old New Jersey woman with a shock of once-red curls sat reading a special-delivery message—as she had done a dozen times since it had arrived—when the doorbell of her little redbrick house chimed. She whisked the door wide to find two delivery men holding a World War II–era antique trunk, and she motioned them to set it down gently on her hardwood floor.

As the door closed behind them, she opened the military footlocker and found a giraffe. For a moment, she admired the tiny porcelain San Diego Zoo souvenir. Then, closing her fingers around it, she picked up the first batch of writing pads, eased herself into the nearest chair, and began to read.





AUTHOR’S NOTE