Authors: Diane Hammond
“I know who you are, son. So what’s your excuse for being here? You too smart to be in school, too?”
“No, sir. I’m sick.”
“Don’t look sick to me.”
Winslow groaned. “Not
sick
sick. Just a
little
sick.”
“Hey, mister, what are you going to do with that hose?” Reginald asked Sam. “You going to give Hannah a bath?”
“Did you hear something, maybe a little bug buzzing around my ear?” Sam asked Neva.
“I didn’t hear a thing,” Neva said, poker-faced. “Must have been the wind.”
“Aw,
you
ask him,” Reginald said, poking Winslow in the side.
“What’s the hose for?” Winslow said.
“Watch.” Sam walked back to the barn and turned on the outside spigot. A perfect arc of water bloomed and fell fifteen feet away. Hannah had been watching the preparations with great interest. She lifted her head and trumpeted nervously.
“Go on, baby girl, you show that water who’s boss.” Sam encouraged her as Neva adjusted the hose to make the arc land farther away, closer to Hannah. “You go, sugar, put your back under there now, you know you’re going to love it,” he said.
Hannah watched him, watched Neva, watched the boys, watched the water.
“Why don’t you get the brush,” Neva suggested.
Sam got a push broom, soaked it under the hose, and then brought it over to where Hannah was shifting her feet in an anxious little dance. Sam touched her side with the wet bristles until, little by little and with the added enticement of peppermints, Sam coaxed her toward the arcing water until she was finally standing directly under the stream.
“Baby’s got it now!” Sam crowed, watching her turn every which way under the hose and then scoop up a big gob of mud with her trunk and toss it onto her back. “Shug looks like a pig in heaven.”
“We have a pig,” Winslow said through the fence. “Me and my dad.”
“That right?” Sam said.
“His name is Miles.”
“That’s a fine name for a pig.”
“You going to walk Hannah today, mister?” Reginald asked.
“Not with you I’m not,
no
sir,” Sam said. “No way some child too sneaky to be in school is going anywhere with me and Hannah. Now if it was just me, we might talk it over. But I can’t have Hannah around someone who doesn’t believe school’s important. It might be a bad influence on her.”
“Aw, come on, mister.”
“Nope, I don’t even want to see your face. You promised me you wouldn’t cause your aunt grief, but I see you doing it anyway. You bring me some schoolwork with a good grade on it and then we’ll talk.”
Reginald shuffled off and Winslow followed. Hannah was still flinging mud.
“He’s pretty strict,” Winslow said.
“Yeah,” Reginald said with admiration.
They hiked up toward the zoo gates and administrative offices. “You don’t live with your folks?” Winslow asked.
“Nah.”
“We live with my dad, me and Miles, but my mom left.”
“Yeah?” Reginald said. “My mom, she got into some kind of trouble, so I live with my aunt.”
“Where’s your dad?”
“He doesn’t live with us. It gets kind of complicated.”
“Yeah,” Winslow said, and stopped outside the Biedelman house. “Well, I better go.”
“Okay, Windermere.”
“
Winslow
,” said Winslow. “Maybe if you come to see Mr. Brown this weekend, I could meet you here.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. I’ll see you Saturday,” said Reginald.
“Okay,” said Winslow.
Neva had come outside
and was leaning against the barn door with her arms folded, smiling at Hannah and Sam. “She sure is a good girl,” she said.
Sam beamed with pride. “See that? You’re already getting partial. I bet you talk to her, too, tell her stuff.”
“Yeah,” Neva said. “She got an earful from me this morning.”
“Baby’s always been good at listening to me, even after all these years.”
Neva looked at Sam closely. “What do you think of Harriet Saul’s pretending she’s Max Biedelman?”
“I think it’s a damn stupid idea. Disrespectful, too.”
“What do you think Max Biedelman would think?”
“She’d be cussing up a blue streak is what she’d be doing. Miss Biedelman sure could cuss, too, when she put her mind to it.”
Hannah bumped Sam with exquisite gentleness. “Hannah doesn’t think much of that Harriet Saul, either, do you, sugar?”
Hannah wrapped her trunk around Sam’s head. “You sure
are in a lovey mood this morning,” Sam told her. “If you’re trying to get into my good graces, sugar, you’re wasting your time. Donuts are all gone, and I’m saving the rest of the peppermints for later.”
“Listen, if she’s in such a good mood, let’s take a closer look at her foot,” Neva said.
“Yeah?” Sam turned to Hannah. “Foot, shug.”
Hannah lifted her foot. Neva probed gently, and Hannah flinched. “Can you see?” she asked Sam. “Damn.”
“Yeah,” Sam said quietly. “It’s worse. You got any ideas?”
“I do, actually,” Neva said, handing Hannah two yams and a gourd as positive reinforcement for her cooperation. “We’re all done, Hannah.” She patted Hannah’s knee and the elephant lowered her foot. To Sam she said, “Let me run something by you. Last night I talked to a friend who works at the Pachyderm Sanctuary outside Redding. She’s worked with elephants for twenty-seven years, and she’s seen more foot problems than anyone I know. I described Hannah’s problem and she told me to soak the foot in apple cider vinegar for at least ten minutes twice a day, three times if we can get Hannah to put up with it.”
“Apple cider vinegar?”
“Bacteria doesn’t like the acidity of vinegar. I know it sounds farfetched, but it certainly can’t do her any harm. Hell, I’d try soaking her foot in fine whiskey if I thought it might turn things around.”
Sam nodded. “What’s that sanctuary you were talking about, miss?”
“The Pachyderm Sanctuary. You’ve never heard of it? It’s a wonderful place, seven hundred fenced acres plus a barn that can house up to ten elephants. Alice McNeary started it with
one old circus elephant about nine years ago—probably ten, now. Since then she’s taken three other circus elephants and a couple more that were in bad situations.”
“What’s it look like? The land and all.”
“I’ve only been there once, but it was beautiful. Mostly rolling fields and woods. Only about two acres have been developed for the barn and Alice’s house. The elephants can go wherever they want. The idea is to give them a place where they can stop working and just be elephants.”
“I think I’ve been there, miss,” Sam whispered.
Neva looked at him. “I don’t understand.”
“What kind of bad situations were those other elephants in?”
Neva frowned, trying to remember. “Well, one was at some tire dealership in Texas that was closing down, and no one wanted her because she was too old. The second one had been by herself for twenty-eight years at some godforsaken zoo in Alabama.”
“Was that why the place took her—because she was alone?”
Neva frowned. “How long has Hannah been alone here, again? It was forty years, wasn’t it?”
“Forty-one, miss,” Sam said softly.
Neva’s eyes locked onto Sam’s. “This might be a good time to start calling me Neva.”
S
ometime in the early morning
—he would never be able to remember exactly when, or under what circumstances—Johnson Johnson got an idea. As soon as Home Depot opened he bought a length of plastic irrigation pipe, lined its bottom with carpet strips, and ran it from his kitchen window into the kitchen window of Neva’s apartment. He made sure it was well sealed against the weather so Neva wouldn’t catch cold. Then he went to the animal shelter. When Neva got home she found a white plastic umbilical cord connecting them across the backyard. She walked straight to the big house and knocked on the kitchen door.
“What’s with that?” she asked when Johnson Johnson answered the door.
Johnson Johnson made his odd windmilling motion, urging Neva to come into the kitchen.
“Close your eyes,” he said.
“No—look, it’s been a long day.”
“Here.” He scooped up a brown cat and thrust her into Neva’s arms. The cat immediately started purring. Neva softened somewhat, running her hands down the cat’s back and watching it ripple ecstatically. She stepped into the kitchen.
“Does she have a name?”
“Chocolate.” Johnson Johnson pointed to a black and white cat just walking into the kitchen. “That’s Chip. I got them so they could come visit you.”
“Come visit me? Through the tunnel?”
“Yes!” Johnson Johnson bounced up on the balls of his feet enthusiastically. “It has carpet in it for traction. I’ll wrap it with insulation so you won’t get cold.”
“I love that! You’ve done a nice thing, you really have!”
Johnson Johnson beamed. “I thought you’d, you know, like it. So, I could order a pizza.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.” Neva set Chocolate down. “I think two new cats and a tunnel punched through my kitchen window are more than enough festivity for today. But, listen.” He looked at her hopefully, his mouth slightly open. “Thank you.”
“Welcome,” he said.
Neva wondered if she’d
done Johnson Johnson a disservice by keeping him at a distance. Every time he saw her, he offered her pizza; every time he offered, she declined. And every time, like the phoenix, he rose again to make the same damned offer.
At some point soon, she’d probably have to let him order the pizza.
Just as she opened her apartment door, Chocolate emerged
from the tunnel, leapt over the kitchen sink, and minced along the countertop, high on her toes.
“So let’s talk,” Neva said, scratching the cat’s ears. “I’d say you stand a good chance of convincing your new dad to buy you those incredibly expensive little cans of cat food with bits of seafood in aspic.”
The cat head-butted Neva companionably and walked on as Kitty, thuggish with one milky eye, slunk out of the tunnel and slouched off to explore. Neva had just started pulling odds and ends from her refrigerator for dinner—deli turkey, a bowl of grapes, a whole-wheat roll—when the phone rang. Piped through the answering machine was a nervous sigh and sounds of distressed throat-clearing.
“Neva? This is Truman Levy. Listen, I’m sorry to call you at home, but I need your advice. It’s about Winslow’s pig—”
Neva picked up the phone. “Truman?”
“Oh, thank god.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m all right, but there seems to be something wrong with Miles. He’s congested, and he feels warm.”
“Have you taken his temperature?”
“God, no.”
“Do you have a rectal thermometer?”
“There’s probably one somewhere from when Winslow was a baby. Do you think that’s absolutely necessary?”
“Animal care is not for the faint of heart, Truman,” Neva said. “Coat the thermometer well with Vaseline and insert it in his rectum for two minutes. If you don’t have Vaseline, use butter.”
“Good Christ.”
“Do you want me to stay on the line?”
“Yes, yes. Please don’t hang up,” Truman said, and she could hear him shudder. “What’s a pig’s normal temperature?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll have found out by the time you’ve finished taking it. If I’m not here when you get back on the line, wait for me.”
“Okay.”
Neva set the receiver down and pulled one of her veterinary books out of a cardboard box. Kitty swaggered across the pages, his gut swinging. Neva picked up the receiver just as Truman was coming back on the line, breathing hard. “His temperature’s one hundred and four point two.”
“Well, it should be between a hundred and two and a hundred and three point six. Check his respiration—how many breaths is he taking per minute?”
Neva heard Truman counting under his breath. “Twenty-five.”
“It should be between ten and twenty,” Neva read.
“He’s snorting and gurgling. Listen. It’s heartbreaking.” Neva heard loud congested snuffles being breathed directly into the receiver.
“Wasn’t your son sick recently?”
“Winslow? Yes, all the kids were. There was some bug going around. It happens every fall.”
“Are you familiar with the term zoonosis?”
“My god, is it serious?”
Neva smiled. “No, no, it means disease transmission between animals and humans. I think there’s a good chance that Miles caught Winslow’s cold.”
“His cold. Pigs can have colds?”
“Well, the porcine equivalent, anyway. We’re not the only ones who can be under the weather sometimes. Anyway, you
might want to take him to see a vet tomorrow, if he isn’t better. For tonight I’d keep him in a small room if you can—maybe a bathroom—so he isn’t too active. Cover him with a blanket if he’ll let you, or at least keep the room warm. Do you have a vaporizer? You could run that for him, if you make sure it isn’t in a place where he can get at it and scald himself.”
The line fell silent.
“Truman?”
She could hear him sigh heavily. “My parents are attorneys. I hold advanced degrees in business and English literature. I have never pictured myself as a swineherd.”
“Then it’s a perfect personal growth opportunity.”
“Yes, well.” His voice trailed off. “You might say a ‘Te Deum’ for us.”
“A whole new future may await you in animal care,” Neva said cheerfully.
“I’d sooner eat flies.”
Truman stayed up most of the night,
checking on the pig’s breathing, topping off the vaporizer and tucking Miles’s little blanket up around his shoulders, if pigs could be said to have shoulders. He tried and failed to remember the cut of pork that would roughly correspond. Eventually he concluded that he’d be better off just pulling up stakes and sleeping in a sleeping bag beside the damned pig on the bathroom floor. He and Rhonda had been less intimate in the last years of their marriage.
Either through nature’s resiliency or the palliative effect of Truman’s presence, Miles began breathing more easily at about three in the morning, and by five had fallen into a peaceful sleep,
tucked into the hollow of Truman’s arm. By seven, the pig’s fever peaked at one hundred and two and Truman had wracking pains through his entire body. He called Harriet’s extension and left a message that he would be staying home, rallied just long enough to see Winslow off to school, and then crawled to the couch in the den. When the phone rang at nine o’clock Truman steeled himself for Harriet’s voice, but instead it was Neva’s.
“So?” she said.
“I kept him in the bathroom all night with the vaporizer—we slept on the floor.”
“We?”
“I no longer have normal feeling in my arms or legs,” Truman rasped.
“What’s his temperature?”
“A hundred and two, same as mine.”
He could hear Neva snort into the receiver. “Look, would you like me to check on you both at lunch? I can bring along some soup from the Oat Maiden.” The Oat Maiden was a café several blocks from the zoo and, from what Truman could deduce, it specialized in dishes made with obscure grains, husks, stems, hulls, rinds, and pith. He was too sick to care.
He gave her directions to his house and hung up, ruminating over the novelty of imagining that someone cared. His mother Lavinia had insisted that coddling bred weakness of character. Thus the list of sickroom comforts he had never received included chocolate ice cream, chicken soup, light reading materials, cinnamon toast, steaming mugs of tea, and a cool hand applied soothingly to the forehead. Lavinia had clapped an occasional chill palm to his brow with the air of a martyr. Perhaps as a result, Truman was not a good patient, but given to whimpering and elaborate descriptions of the fresh hells of illness.
Now he let Miles outside, swallowed acetaminophen, and made a steaming mug of tea to breathe over. Creeping back to the couch, he wrapped himself tightly in an afghan and fell into an interminable fever dream in which, like Sisyphus, he was doomed to push his laden shopping cart through endless aisles at Safeway, only to arrive at the checkout lanes with a mysteriously empty basket. He didn’t wake up again until he heard Neva letting herself into the house. She appeared in the doorway of his den, and in his fever-addled state her oversized zoo sweatshirt reminded him of the particular way men’s shirts looked on slender women fresh from bed.
“Here you are—six-bean soup with veggie garlic sausage,” she said cheerfully, pulling a cardboard soup container from a brown paper bag.
“Why do they call it health food?” Truman said petulantly. “It’s not. No one healthy would eat this.”
“Go on, it’ll be good for you. Have you taken anything? Because you look like you should be on major drugs.”
“I’m just preying on your sympathy.”
“Where’s Miles?”
“In the backyard.”
In fact, Miles had his snout pressed pathetically against the sliding glass door.
“Can I let him in?” Neva said. “Look, he’s so
sweet
!”
“By all means. We wouldn’t want him suffering out there all alone when we’re having so much fun in here.”
“Do you always get ironic when you’re sick?”
“Generally.”
Neva let Miles in, and when she crouched beside him he made brazenly seductive noises and fell like the dead at her feet. She listened to him breathe and ran her hand over his sparse
coat. “He feels cool, and his eyes are bright. I think he’s probably over whatever it was he had. Is he eating well?”
“Oh, my god,” Truman said, stricken. “I haven’t fed him yet.” He told Neva where the pig kibble was, and how much to put in his dish. Miles set to like he hadn’t been fed in days, and then, sated, circled twice and fell heavily into his basket beneath the piano.
“What a good pig,” Neva crooned.
“He’s actually quite musical.”
“Really?”
“Yes. He especially likes Mozart. Winslow’s working on several pieces right now, and Miles stays right there under the piano until he’s done, no matter how long he practices.”
“Clearly a pig with discriminating tastes.” Neva bent down to pet Miles’s head.
Truman watched as the pig snuffled with pleasure. “Truthfully,” he said, “I’d never envisioned pigs as being so—”
“Responsive?”
“Flatulent.”
Neva started laughing. “Well, he’s a pig. Pigs and gas go together.”
“I just wish someone had told me,” Truman said sadly, and pulled his afghan closer around his shoulders.
For the last nine days
Harriet had driven an extra eight miles on her way to work so she could admire her new billboard with its prominent pictures of Hannah beside herself as Maxine Biedelman. Since the billboard had gone up, zoo attendance had increased twenty percent—and in mid-November, to boot. Her one-woman performances were attracting larger audiences each
day, and the question-and-answer periods sometimes lasted nearly as long as the talk itself. She was considering converting the house’s capacious ballroom into an auditorium so her performances could continue in comfort through the winter.
Harriet loved her new persona. As Maxine, she was courageous and accomplished, a woman of sophistication equally at home in Cannes or on the Indian subcontinent. As Maxine she didn’t walk, she strode; she did not merely see, but beheld. The very air she breathed was bracing. Here was a conqueror of worlds. There had been some awkward moments, of course, with disrespectful employees and forgetful managers who continued to address her as Harriet, but as Maxine she had discovered magnanimity: she merely smiled and reminded them of her policy. Sooner or later they would find that calling her Maxine had become second nature, just as they became accustomed to the new names of recent brides.
From the scribbled captions on the backs of Maxine’s childhood photographs, she had sometimes been called Brave Boy, which Harriet thought was a wonderful name. Harriet’s own childhood nickname had been Bucket, a reference to her appetite for fried chicken when she was small. Bestowed so many years ago by her father, the name had been only one among many unkindnesses. She had learned early that she was unlikable, but she didn’t know why. Certainly it wasn’t any child’s intention to be disliked. Harriet understood very well that it was the least attractive children—the Dumbo-eared, the whiny-voiced, the clumsy, the loutish, the unpretty—who craved affection most of all.
When Harriet was seven, her father had died of pancreatic cancer. Five and a half months later, the school principal had come to Harriet’s classroom and motioned to her that she should
join him in the hall. She hadn’t wanted to, but her teacher had nodded curtly in her direction:
Go
. In the hall, the principal had informed Harriet that her mother had been in a car accident and was being treated for serious head injuries in a regional hospital seventy-five miles away. Since Harriet had no other family nearby, someone from Social Services would come to pick her up and take care of her until other arrangements could be made.
Over the following six months she had stayed with a succession of foster families that had failed to like her. Sometimes she wet the bed; sometimes she woke the household with nightmares. At some homes, hands were too busy and hearts too closed; in others, hearts were open but already overcrowded. And at each home she left something behind: outgrown clothes, a stuffed dog, the memory of her mother’s perfume, a pillow; her sense of belonging, of entitlement, of certainty. Already fat, she got fatter. Already homely, she slipped into shabbiness with bangs that went untrimmed and clothes that weren’t always clean. She went to church or didn’t, depending on the household, and if God was ever listening, He wasn’t letting on.