Authors: Diane Hammond
Neva tore through her own slice. “I can’t wait to show you these drums Johnson’s made for Hannah. And his sink.” She caught the look Truman gave her. “I know. Just wait until you see them. Let’s show you now. It won’t take long, and then we can finish eating.” She turned to Johnson Johnson. “Is that okay with you?”
“Okay,” he said. They’d already sampled perfection; eating the rest could wait.
Neva led the way upstairs. Johnson Johnson trailed behind. When they reached the landing, Neva put her hands over Tru
man’s eyes until he was in position, then pulled her hands away. “Ta-dah!”
Truman looked, tapped, gonged. “These are extraordinary. Really—they’re
beautiful
.”
Johnson Johnson flushed with pleasure.
Truman turned to Neva. “You know, folk art has really come into its own in the last decade or so.”
“Any idea what they might sell for?”
Truman frowned. “Well, if people knew they were to benefit Hannah—or, say, an anonymous but needy elephant—I’d bet a set like this could sell for two thousand, twenty-five-hundred dollars. Maybe more. I have friends who own an art gallery in Seattle. They could give us a better idea.” He turned to Johnson Johnson and said, “Would you be willing to make some of these for us to sell?”
“He’s already said yes,” Neva cut in.
“We couldn’t pay you at all,” Truman continued. “You understand that.”
Johnson Johnson pulled himself up to his full height and said, “Course.”
“Look,” Neva said. “Why don’t we get dinner over with and bring the drums to Hannah? I want Johnson to see what she does with them. Harriet won’t be there this late, will she?”
Truman consulted his watch. “Probably not,” he said. “Though with her, you can never be sure.”
“Can I use your phone?” Neva asked Johnson Johnson.
“Okay.” He watched her, liking the way she went around his kitchen absently touching everything. Blind people did that. Johnson Johnson did that, too.
Neva called Sam and Corinna’s house. She let the phone ring eight times, but no one answered. Then she dialed the elephant barn. After four rings, Sam picked up.
“Sam? Is Corinna there, too?”
“Uh huh. We’re watching Laurel and Hardy. Shug likes them, though I’ll be damned if I know why.”
“Well, stay even if the movie ends. We’re bringing something for Hannah.”
“We?”
“Just wait for us.”
“Now you’ve got me wondering.”
“You’ll never guess,” Neva said, and hung up.
Johnson Johnson followed her down to the elephant yard. Neva carried one drum and Johnson Johnson carried two. Truman and Winslow had headed off to the mansion to make sure Harriet Saul wasn’t there.
“You’re sure Hannah won’t ruin them if she hits them too hard?” Neva asked as they set the drums down while she unlocked the gate.
“Well, if she re-tunes them it’d probably be so she can play her own songs better. Maybe elephant music doesn’t sound like people music.”
“Huh,” Neva said, amazed anew by the cottage industry that was Johnson Johnson’s mind. Sam met them at the barn door and helped them bring the three drums inside. Once they were safely through, Neva introduced him and Corinna to Johnson Johnson.
“Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” Sam said, shaking hands and then turning to inspect the drums. “Just look at these,” he said. “Shug, come over here and see what this man’s made for you. Music!”
Hannah shambled over from the television, cradling a small rock in the crook of her trunk. Neva patted her. “Johnson, meet Hannah. Hannah, this is Johnson Johnson.”
Johnson Johnson held out his hand to shake, Hannah put down her rock to stretch her trunk, and they met someplace in the middle. Then Hannah walked her trunk up Johnson Johnson’s arm, sniffing.
“Cats,” Neva explained.
“She’s big,” he said.
“Well, she’s an elephant.”
“Uh huh.”
Truman and Winslow slipped in the door. “We’re all clear,” Truman said. “How’d she like them?”
“She hasn’t actually noticed them yet,” Neva said. “We’re still making introductions.”
Done assessing Johnson Johnson, Hannah stretched her trunk toward Sam, nosing around his pocket. “No treats left in there, shug,” he said. “Here’s your treat, right here. You sure you’re okay with her giving them a test drive?” he asked Johnson Johnson.
Johnson Johnson just colored and hugged himself a little tighter. Sam gave Hannah one of the mallets, and she wrapped her trunk around it and swung aimlessly.
“Baby girl, you’ve got to try banging it on Mr. Johnson’s drum like this.” Sam brought the second mallet down on one of the drums, producing a ringing G major. Hannah opened her eyes wide and lifted her trunk in great excitement. Sam slapped her shoulder supportively. “You can do it, too, shug. Go on, now.”
Hannah hit the drum once, and then again, and soon there was a halting chain of notes, all perfectly pitched. Johnson Johnson rose up on his toes and bounced. Sam turned to him and grinned. “You’ve done something awful nice, Mr. Johnson. Sugar’s never made music before.”
“Well, you know.” Johnson Johnson tucked his chin in embarrassment and pride. Sam clapped him on the back reassuringly.
Truman leaned toward Winslow and said, “What do you think Miles would make of this?”
“He’d probably wish he had a trunk.”
Sam said, “Is Miles your pig?”
“Yeah.”
Sam chuckled. “Most pigs think they’re God’s gift. You put one of those drums on the ground, I bet he’d just pick up that mallet in his mouth and whale away.”
Neva watched Hannah play a riff between the two drums. It might have been music. Even if it wasn’t, the notes were pleasing.
“I think we might want to talk about something,” Neva said.
All eyes turned.
“I think we need to talk about money.”
“The bad word,” Sam said.
“I know, but I think it’s going to be up to us to get started. Even if we got the okay to move her out tomorrow, we’d need two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the sanctuary to take her. Plus whatever it’ll cost to transport her.”
“That’s a whole lot of money,” Corinna said. “We’re ready to give what we’ve got, but it won’t look like much against that kind of need.”
Truman cleared his throat. “Let’s wait before we have this conversation. It’s getting late, and I’ve asked my father to do a little snooping. I don’t want to say anything more at this point, because it’s too soon to get our hopes up.”
Hannah had wandered off to find her tire, and everyone else began yawning and searching for jackets and car keys. Sam shackled Hannah to the wall for the night, whispering reassuring words Neva couldn’t make out.
As Neva let the door swing shut behind her she looked back
at Hannah, alone and chained to the wall in the gloom. The elephant was already rocking slowly from side to side, silently and relentlessly. By morning, Neva knew, her ankle would be bleeding beneath the shackle, as someone might cut bright, secret wounds with a razor blade.
M
artin Choi had a plan,
and that plan did not include covering a beat for the
Bladenham News-Gazette
for the rest of his life. He was going places, and to do that he needed page-one bylines, unexpected story angles, scoops. He felt that his newfound access to the inner workings of the Max L. Biedelman Zoo might help him get there. Harriet Saul had made it clear that he would be on the inside of breaking news. That didn’t mean he was going to sell out and become her boy, though. He would use his investigative skills, look around, develop inside sources. He was twenty-four years old. He wanted to be working for the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
by his twenty-sixth birthday. He had sixteen months to get there.
“So where’d Brenda go?” he asked the new girl behind the zoo’s reception desk.
“Dunno. She was canned.” The girl cracked a piece of gum. Her fingernails were two inches long—wicked, curved things that Martin regarded with a certain amount of horror. She was pretty, though, at least prettier than Brenda, who’d had a surgically repaired harelip. This one might have an incipient weight problem, though. He couldn’t tell for sure.
“You like working for the zoo?”
She shrugged. “It’s okay. It’s a job.”
“Yeah.” Martin shifted on the uncomfortable plastic chair in the zoo’s waiting room. Harriet’s door was still closed, and he could still hear her on the phone. “So, hey,” he tried. “You read the
News-Gazette
much?”
“Nah.”
“I had a page-one story a couple of days ago.”
“Huh.”
“It was about the landfill, and how people are throwing away more and more stuff instead of donating it to charity. Kind of a different angle, you know?” He’d worked hard on that story, even going so far as to rummage around for a couple of hours to document a sample of what was there: two working black-and-white television sets, a perfectly good exercycle, four coffee tables, and a clock.
He’d kept the clock.
“So you think she’ll be done pretty soon?” he said, jerking his chin over his shoulder toward the closed office. “I mean, I’ve been here for half an hour.”
“I don’t know,” the girl said. “She can talk, I’ll tell you that.”
Martin subsided, promising himself he’d wait just fifteen more minutes. He had his limits.
The phone rang and the receptionist picked it up, nodded at it, and put it down. “Mrs. Biedelman will see you now.”
“I didn’t think Maxine Biedelman ever married.”
“Yeah? Well, anyway, Herself is in.”
Martin lifted and stood in stages: first his camera bag and accessories, then his cameras and several lenses, finally his bandoleer of film canisters. It took a while. The office door opened and Harriet appeared looking impatient.
“Hey, yeah, great to see you again,” Martin said, freeing a hand and extending it. “I appreciate your taking the time, you know, on so little notice.”
“It’s fine.” She led him into the surprisingly grimy inner sanctum of her office, showed him to a chair, and sat down herself like royalty behind her desk. “What story are you working on?”
“Tell me about the drums,” he said.
“Drums?”
“Yeah. The elephant was playing a couple of steel drums, real fancy. Drew a big crowd and everything.”
“When?”
“Now. This morning.”
Harriet’s left eye twitched. “Why don’t we just go down there and see?” she said ominously. Martin wouldn’t want to work for the woman; wouldn’t want to work for either of them, Maxine Biedelman or Harriet Saul.
Clanking like Marley’s ghost, he set off after Harriet, who was steaming ahead so fast Martin lost her in the crowd when they got to the elephant exhibit. By the time he found her, she was talking through the fence to a woman employee inside the exhibit—hissing, really. “And when did you think you’d let me know about this?”
“Look, it was strictly spur-of-the-moment,” the woman said. “No one planned it. The man who made them is my landlord. I
didn’t even know he was working on them until he gave them to me last night.”
“Did anyone else know about this?”
“No.”
“I’ll bet. I’m going to have Truman put a letter in your personnel file, documenting that you’re now on probation.”
“You’re kidding.”
Harriet turned her back and walked away.
“You’ve got to be kidding!” the woman called after her.
“So do you care to make any comments?” Martin said, trotting up beside Harriet.
“What?”
“Comments about the drums.”
Harriet gave him a withering look. “I think you can see for yourself that Hannah’s received a set of drums, which she’s using. It’s all part of our environmental enrichment program, to improve the quality of Hannah’s life.”
“Has there been something wrong with her quality of life?”
“Don’t get smart with me, Martin.”
Martin subsided. “Sorry.”
“You have enough for a story,” Harriet said. “Stay as long as you want to, but don’t interview my employees. If you need any more comments, come to me, not to them.”
“Hey, sure, okay,” Martin said, and watched as Harriet’s sizable khaki haunches receded from the exhibit and up the hill to her office. Then he looked around and took stock. A crowd of visitors was still watching Hannah bang on the drums. Two boys stood on the periphery of the crowd, kicking dust at each other.
“Hey! You guys have a minute or two to talk to a reporter?”
The boys exchanged looks, then shrugged. The African-
American one said, “Yeah, sure. You gonna take our picture, too?”
“I might. So tell me what’s going on here.”
“Hannah—she’s the elephant—she’s playing these cool new drums someone made for her.”
“Johnson somebody,” said the other boy, a pale kid with a few extra pounds on him.
“That his first name or his last name?” Martin asked him, taking notes.
“Both,” the pale kid said.
Hannah seemed to be playing a slow-motion riff on the drums, banging one, then the other. Martin watched, scribbled some more. “So what does she think of them?”
The boys rolled their eyes at each other, and the black kid said, “You better ask Hannah that.” Smartass.
“Oh, yeah, right,” Martin fake-laughed. “Hey, you’re quick, kid.”
“Uh huh,” he said.
“Yeah, Speedy Gonzales,” the pale boy said, elbowing the first one in the ribs.
“Cut it out!” The boys started sparring but subsided as the crowd of visitors around them applauded for Hannah, who had walked away from the drums, dropping the drumstick in the dust so she could pick up her tire.
“What now?” Martin asked.
“Hell, you’re the reporter,” said the smartass.
“Yeah, well, thanks, kids.” Martin started moving away toward the heart of the crowd when he heard the pain-in-the-ass kid holler after him.
“Hey, mister! You going to get our names so you can put us in the paper?”
Martin turned back. “Okay, shoot. Why aren’t you guys in school, anyway?”
“It’s Thanksgiving break,” the smartass said. “Man, aren’t you supposed to know that kind of thing? You write the damn newspaper—”
“Yeah, well, it must have slipped my mind, okay? You bust my chops, kid, and I’m leaving without names,” Martin said.
“Sorry, mister. He’s Winslow Levy, funny name, his dad works here,” the other boy said, jerking his thumb in Winslow’s direction.
“Your father works here? Really?” Martin asked Winslow, perking up. The kid might have potential as a source.
“Uh huh,” said Winslow. “And he’s Reginald Poole. It has an ‘E’ on the end. The Poole part, not the Reginald.”
“Yeah,” Reginald said. “I help out here sometimes.”
“Oh, yeah? So what do you do exactly?” Martin asked. This could be rich.
“I help when Sam takes Hannah for walks.”
“She goes for walks? You mean like a dog? Must be a pretty big leash, huh, kid?” Martin cracked himself up. “Jeez, I’d sure hate to see the bone.”
Both boys looked at him with disgust. “She’s an
herb
ivore,” Winslow said.
“Okay, okay, hey, sorry. Jesus, doesn’t anyone have a sense of humor around this place?” Martin said.
“So how come they’re not called florivores, anyways?” Reginald said to Winslow.
“Florivores?”
“Flora, fauna, like that. Florivore.”
Winslow considered this. “Well, they don’t call carnivores faunivores, either.”
“Hey—Boy Wonder!” Martin broke in. “How about standing over there by the elephant and the drums so I can take your picture? How do you call her over, anyway?” Martin made kissing noises, the way you’d summon a household pet.
“That won’t work, mister,” Reginald said.
“Yeah? Well, show me something that will.”
Reginald turned around and waited to catch Hannah’s eye. When he did, he said as softly and precisely as Sam, “Hey, sugar.”
The elephant walked toward them, getting as close to Reginald as she could from the other side of the fence. The drums were in the background, but it was good enough. Reginald and Winslow posed for him. Martin snapped three, four, five pictures.
“Are we going to be on the front page?” Winslow said.
“Probably not, sport, but you might be in tomorrow’s edition someplace.”
“Hey, Reginald,” Winslow said. “We’ll be in the paper. Did you hear?”
But Reginald was paying attention only to Hannah, who was shifting her feet and making low noises to him. “She knows me,” Reginald said. “Did you see her come over? She knows me.”
Truman sat at his desk,
looking at a memo Harriet had tossed there with instructions that it was to be placed in Neva’s personnel file immediately. She obviously meant for him to read it; otherwise she would have put it in the files herself. It was an ugly thing, closing with,
I, Harriet Saul, recommend immediate termination if or when this employee acts without prior authorization in the future
.
Christ.
Truman slipped the memo into the file, locked the drawer, and called the elephant barn. Neva answered.
“Hey,” Truman said.
Neva said, “Hi. How’s life up there in the gulag?”
“Scary. Would you have dinner with me tonight?”
Neva sighed. “I don’t think I’d be very good company.”
“Please say yes.”
“All right, as long as I don’t have to be perky. I’m definitely not up for being perky.”
“I’m not feeling all that perky myself. How about meeting me at Teriyaki Time at six-fifteen?”
“Okay.”
Truman hung up the phone and pressed the heels of his hands hard against his eyes. It was only 10:05 and he could feel a pounding headache coming on. He decided to martyr himself and attend Harriet’s morning lecture—she might find his attentions soothing.
He came out the front door just as Harriet prepared to make her salutations from the porch. Not to be upstaged, she nodded to him regally and gave him a moment to pass, descend the stairs, and find a place among the visitors.
There were probably a hundred people gathered around the porch. Even in November the zoo was comfortably full. Yesterday they had received a phone call from a tour bus operator, asking about group rates.
“Good morning!” Harriet boomed, slapping her riding crop smartly against her puttees and doffing her rough-rider hat. “My name is Maxine Biedelman. Welcome to my zoo!”
Applause broke out, and several women shushed their children. The group pushed forward as one to hear better.
“The thing is, she’s weird as hell, but you’ve got to hand it to her, this whole Maxine Biedelman thing works,” a young man laden with camera gear whispered to Truman as they stood together on the outskirts. Truman hadn’t even noticed him there. Now he recalled having seen him at the zoo once or twice.
“You’ve seen her do this before?”
“Sure, a couple of times.” The young man extended his hand. “Martin Choi,
Bladenham News-Gazette
.”
“Truman Levy.”
“Hey, then I just talked to your kid down at the elephant barn.”
“He’s a big fan of Hannah’s.”
“Yeah, well, he and a buddy of his were telling me they help with her sometimes.”
“Not officially,” Truman said, alarmed. He could only imagine what Harriet would say if she saw Winslow quoted in the paper.
“Gentlemen,” Maxine boomed, sending death rays out to Truman with her eyes. “If you aren’t fans of mine, kindly move along so others can hear.”
The crowd laughed and Truman apologized, calling, “Yes, Maxine, I was only discussing your new lemurs with this fellow. He wants to know if they should be met at the station with a cage or a net.”
“Ah,” Harriet said, accepting her cue. “It seems that the people of Bladenham don’t always know what to make of me. Why, when I brought my first zebra home, there was nearly pandemonium. That was only one of many times we’ve found ourselves on the front page of the
Bladenham News-Gazette
. Isn’t that right, Martin?”
Martin Choi grinned and acknowledged the crowd. Truman
slipped away under the cover of laughter. This wasn’t the first time he’d seen someone transformed by a theatrical role, but it was certainly the most startling. Harriet’s performance was electric, though god knew if she was actually basing her role on the real Max Biedelman. Rhonda had had a theatrical bent, too. Her whole life was a play, with herself occupying center stage. There had been moments during their marriage when Truman could almost hear her practicing her lines. He’d pointed that out to her several years ago, and she’d said,
Oh, really, Truman, grow up. Nothing is truly spontaneous, it’s all been rehearsed before. The only difference is, most people aren’t honest enough to admit it.
The thought had depressed him then, and it depressed him now.
Just as he reached his desk he heard muffled applause from the lawn—Harriet taking her bows, no doubt. A half-hour later, she appeared at his cubicle, flushed with success.
“You’re really very good,” Truman told her, because she was.
“Yes, I am,” Harriet agreed. “I think it’s time we talked about renovating the ballroom.”
Sam removed his zoo ball cap
and said to the receptionist, “Miss Saul wanted to see me.”