West With Giraffes

by Lynda Rutledge

waking

wheel, engine idling, and the

stray boy heading toward Cuz.

eased the cycle past the carcass,

your

didn’t know what to say. “I’ll

time. Shifting my weight from

She perked up. “All night?”

long, wide plank from below the rig that I didn’t

on the front porch stools geehawed

blurt out, “I didn’t . . . I wouldn’t

hands. Why isn’t he yanking

wheel

truck

what I’d just wrote. It’s my

Old Man said. Even in the growing

part was a long building housing

me Woody. He wasn’t

couldn’t tell the Old Man. He’d want

being a

you?” She stiffened. “What?”

me. “Are you running away

the smiling hobo, who kept trying to give him a card. Set back on my bootheels,

groaning to breaking. The giraffes

“If you lie down awhile, I won’t

Black Sunday.

historical fact for most. It was

with only two buildings on opposite

“Mostly the Jesus-jumpers. You know, the Holiness

singing a favorite gospel song

slowed and disappeared from

worse fore it gets better,” he

leftovers, say, of some built-in

hardscrabble childhood, where the

the rifle and pistol rusting in the dirt, then move to the

beside her, offering her something

came down and headed to the motel room, leaving me the first shift, as usual, with the giraffes. Instead of

but I guess it’d save me a lot of explaining to the

ear. “Riley said you’d show sooner or later. Come with

grasp, though, that in all the time