Part 5
Mags didn’t answer for long enough that Becca checked the phone screen.
“It pays about half of what you make,” Mags said finally. “There’s a trailer house by the barn with a bad air conditioner and a good porch. I’ll want a year from you, not a summer. And if you’re doing this for a dog, I’d rather know now.”
“She needs a herd and he needs a gate,” Jo said. “And I’m tired of being the one who signs.”
“That’s three reasons,” Mags said. “I can work with three.”
Gil waited until the call was over and Becca had gone back out to the barn. Then he closed his office door, which he did perhaps twice a year.
“Nineteen years,” he said.
“I know.”
“You don’t, or you’d have talked to me before you said it on speakerphone in front of an employee.” He sat down behind his desk and took off his glasses and didn’t clean them. “When Ana died, I wanted to keep her old mare. Twenty-eight years old and blind in one eye, eating money. You told me you can’t build a place around one animal. You said it right in that aisle. I sold the mare to a family in Alma with three girls, and I was angry at you for a year.”
“I remember.”
“And now you’re leaving it for one.”
It was a fair thing to say, and he’d been saving it, and he was entitled to it. Jo sat across from him with her hands on her knees.
“I’m not building anything around her,” she said. “I’m getting out of the way so this place doesn’t have to. You can’t keep a giraffe, Gil. You can’t keep a biting dog. If I stay, you have to choose between them and the place Ana’s barn turned into, and you’ll choose right, and I’ll watch you do it.” She stopped. “I’d rather do the choosing myself.”
He looked at her a long while. Then he put the glasses back on.
“Becca drives the trailer down with Mags’s hauler,” he said. “Then she comes back. I can’t run hoofstock without her, and she wouldn’t leave her grandmother’s place anyway.”
“She told me.”
“Of course she did.” He pulled a legal pad toward him and wrote something on it, which meant the conversation was over and the work had started. “I’ll call the state about the permit. You call that man in Topeka. He’ll want to know where his father’s dog is going.”
Dale didn’t argue. He was quiet on the phone for a while, and then he asked whether Utopia was a real place, and then he asked whether Jo had been practicing.
“Practicing what?”
“B-flat,” he said. “You’re going to need it down there, and you can’t hum.”
That night he sent her two voice memos. The first was the hymn, hummed through twice, slow, in his father’s key. The second was eleven seconds long. In it Dale said, He liked it slower at the gate. Like you’re walking up with a bucket, and then hummed four bars at the pace of a man carrying something heavy.
Jo played them in the truck every morning on the way to the rescue. She played them on the way home. By the end of May she could get through the first line in something near the right key, if no one was listening.
Loading took three weeks of training and a cowbell hung inside the trailer, and when the day came Wren walked up the ramp behind the sound of Becca’s hum with Boone lying at the foot of it like a man at a train station. They left at four in the morning on the fourth of June. Mags’s hauler drove the giraffe trailer, Becca beside him with a monitor in her lap. Jo followed in her pickup with Boone stretched across the back seat over a seatbelt she had finally stopped replacing, and everything else she owned in a rented trailer behind.
Her house in Council Grove was rented to a young couple who taught at the high school. The porch swing stayed.
It was eleven hours to Utopia. At a truck stop south of Oklahoma City, a heeler in a pickup bed barked at Boone through Jo’s window, and Boone answered once, deep, from the back seat. Becca’s text came a minute later: Her ears just went toward your truck.
They came down out of the cedar hills into the Sabinal valley in the last light. Mags Dunlevy was waiting by the barn, sixty-eight and narrow as a fence post, in a straw hat with a sweat line halfway up the crown. Behind her, in a yard of red dirt and live oaks, a tall pale cow giraffe stood at the fence with her ears forward. Mags said Opal had heard the trailer a mile off.
Mags had built Boone’s lane along the east side of the giraffe yard, chain-link six feet high and a hundred yards long, with an open-fronted shelter at the barn end and a crew gate into the yard at the far end. The gate had a gravity latch. Jo lifted it, let it fall, lifted it again.
“He’ll have this open by Tuesday,” she said. “He did a hook latch his first morning in Kansas.”
Mags’s hand, a quiet man named Ray Villarreal, brought a snap clip on a short chain and fastened it through the latch. “Clip goes on every time,” he said. “Every time, or we put a padlock on it.”
“Every time,” Jo said.
The calf came off the trailer in the dark. She stood at the bottom of the ramp with her nostrils working, lost, a hundred new smells and none of her map. Jo went to the head of the lane, where Boone was already lying down with his back to the chain-link and his face to the yard, and she put Dale’s slow four bars into the air as best she could.
Wren turned her head. Then she walked toward it. Behind Jo, at the far end of the lane, metal rang on metal, and she turned in time to see Boone up on his hind legs against the crew gate with one big white paw working the latch, and Ray’s new clip swinging and holding…
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇