Authors: Diane Hammond
Neva looked at the shattered nails and underlying abscesses. “What medication’s she on for this?”
To Hannah Sam said, “It’s okay, baby, you can put your foot down now.”
Hannah put her foot down.
“Right now, nothing. We tried everything the zoo doc recommended, but it seemed like none of it made any difference, plus it put the girl off her hay. So me and Mama—that’s my wife, Corinna—we’ve tried some homeopathic cures, you know? Looks like they haven’t helped much this time, though.”
“Homeopathic cures? Like what?”
“Well, Mama could tell you more about that than me, but let’s see.” Sam leaned against Hannah, thinking. The elephant wrapped her trunk around his head affectionately. “Ointments and creams, mostly. Baby doesn’t like to stand still for poultices. Right off the top of my head, there was witch hazel and ribwort, calendula, comfrey, and that’s about all I can remember. We’ll have to ask Mama. We were thinking about trying echinacea tincture, but I don’t think shug would take to that. Her stomach gets upset real easy.”
“Did any of them help?”
“The comfrey helped some. The witch hazel seemed like it was soothing, but I don’t know if it had any healing powers.”
“Have you tried applying Copper-Tox over the top of them?” Neva said.
“Don’t know that one, miss,” Sam frowned.
“It acts as a sort of liquid Band-Aid, sticky so it stays on for a
long time. Stuff smells to high heaven and it’ll give you one hell of a headache if you’re around it too long, but I’ve seen it make a difference at least in keeping medication in place so the abscess has a chance to heal.” Neva put her hands in her pockets.
“I’ll ask Doc. Maybe he doesn’t know about that one.”
“Who’s the vet here, again?”
“Doc Richards.”
Neva frowned. “I guess I don’t know him.”
“’Bout my age, ready to retire soon. He worked for Miss Biedelman when she was still alive. He’s been around here longer than anyone but me and Hannah.”
“Is he a good vet?”
“He never killed anything, at least as far as I know. He usually comes to see Hannah every week or two.”
“Has he ever had you give her footbaths of peroxide, beta-dyne, and chlorhexidine?”
Sam frowned again, raking his fingernails up and down Hannah’s side. She made a low, contented rumble and put her trunk into the canvas treat bag Sam wore strapped around his waist, fetching up two chunks of apple and popping them in her mouth like candy. “Not those, miss, but we’ve tried Epsom salts,” Sam said as he pushed her trunk away. “Warm water and salts a couple times a day. She took it all right, but it didn’t seem to do anything besides make her sleepy. By the time the ten minutes was done, why she’d be sawing logs.” Sam chuckled gently. “Breaks my heart, seeing the girl in pain.”
“Does she limp?”
“Not much. I believe she has a touch of rheumatism in the joints, though—she takes after me that way. Seems like she stands still more than she used to. Except for our walks, of course.”
“You walk her?”
“Sure,” Sam said. “It does her good, gives her a chance to see some things, stretch out a little, let her poor feet touch some grass. Plus you meet people. Yesterday we met a real nice boy, lives with an aunt. Too many kids out there are bringing themselves up these days. My folks never did have a lot, but there was plenty of love to go around. My mama used to say to all us kids,
You help yourself to a hug whenever you want one, sugar. They’re warm, and they’re free
.”
Neva smiled. “Do you ever put sand in her yard?”
“Never have. Just hay.”
“So how does she show pain?”
Sam smiled. “She doesn’t show it, she just comes right out and says it. She’s a talky thing, talks all day long.” His smile faded. “I love my girl, miss. Me and Hannah, we’ve been together forty-one years. Miss Biedelman trusted me to take good care of her, and I’ve done the best job I could. It’s about time for me to be retiring, been time for a couple of years already, but I can’t do it unless I know my baby’s in good hands. You show me you’ve got those hands and I’ll do anything I can to make the rest easy on you. I will, and Mama will, too.”
Neva folded her arms and regarded him for a minute. “If you could give Hannah anything in the world, what would it be?”
Sam rubbed his cheek along Hannah’s leg absently. “That’s easy. I’d give her a good place to live and someone who’d never leave her.”
“But she could easily live for another twenty years. No keeper’s going to commit to being in one place that long.”
“Didn’t say anything about keepers, miss,” Sam said quietly.
“I’m sorry?”
“I meant other elephants.”
Neva sighed. “Well, given what I know about this zoo, that would take a miracle.”
“I dream about it sometimes,” Sam said before he could think better of it.
“Sure. We all dream about having more money and better living conditions for our animals.”
Sam nodded, but it wasn’t what he’d meant.
N
eva Wilson prided herself
on both her nerve and durability. In fifteen years as a zookeeper she had worked with large, intractable animals from killer whales to polar bears. She seldom cried, never balked, and rarely wavered in her opinions. She had been married once, but that was a long time ago. She was a zookeeper’s zookeeper, fierce, tough, single-minded, and dedicated to the animals in her care.
Unlike any of the dozens of backup keepers Sam Brown had been given over the years, Neva had not washed up on the unpromising shores of the Max L. Biedelman Zoo because of diminished circumstances. She had worked at some of the best zoos in the country, and trained under some of the finest senior elephant keepers in the world. But lately she’d begun to believe that she needed something more; some sort of purpose. She’d
decided that she would become an elephant-care ambassador, bringing what she knew to one of the country’s many mediocre, backwater, needy facilities. The Max L. Biedelman Zoo had advertised for an elephant keeper less than three weeks later. It wasn’t accredited by the American Zoo Association, and neither Neva nor any of her colleagues had ever heard of the place before. A week later her interview with Harriet Saul and the zoo’s top management convinced her that the zoo’s leadership was clueless, arrogant, misguided, and blind. It sounded perfect. No missionary to the darkest heart of Africa brought along more zeal than Neva Wilson did. When she was offered the job at a salary that was not quite half what she had been earning, she accepted on the spot.
At the end of her first day, she pulled into her driveway and climbed out of the beat-to-shit tin can that was her current car—the latest in a long line of beater vehicles reaching all the way back to her sixteenth birthday. She took perverse pride in the fact that not one of her cars had ever rated a Blue Book value of more than fifteen hundred dollars, and many had been worth significantly less. She was, by necessity, a fair mechanic.
Instead of an apartment, she’d rented a detached, converted garage in Bladenham’s historic neighborhood. It was just her kind of place: carpeting laid directly over the concrete slab, tiny kitchenette, tinier bathroom, dirt-cheap rent. She wouldn’t be there much, anyway—she was used to spending up to twenty hours a day at work, coming home only to shower, sleep, and change clothes.
She pulled into the driveway just as her landlord, Johnson Johnson, came out the back door of his house and approached her across the narrow lawn that separated her apartment from his house, a 1920s craftsman bungalow with a deep front porch
and leaded windows. She guessed he was in his late thirties, tall, balding, and impossibly thin, with a sweet, vague air about him. Neva couldn’t decide whether he was afflicted or simply shy. He lifted his hand uncertainly and said, “Hi.”
Neva pulled a stack of Biedelman Zoo uniform shirts out of her car. “Would you mind?” she said, handing them to him so she could reach in and extract a second pile of sweatshirts. “Okay, you can just set those on top of these,” she told him. He did. “Thanks.” And then, because he was still just standing there with his mouth slightly open, she added, “That should do it.”
“Okay,” he said, nevertheless failing to walk away. “You work at the zoo?”
“My first day.”
“I like the zoo.”
“Really? What’s the best thing about it?”
“They have animals.”
She waited for more, but evidently he was done. “Well, it is a zoo,” she said. “What is it that you do?”
Johnson Johnson looked at his feet. “I make things.”
“What kinds of things?”
He shrugged. Neva thought it was as though he had learned social discourse from a book.
“Look,” she said, beginning to run out of patience, which had never been a strong quality of hers. “Is your real name Johnson Johnson?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t imagine anybody actually naming a baby Johnson Johnson.” She kicked her car door shut with her foot.
Johnson Johnson flushed with pride.
“Okay,” Neva explained. “I have to go in now.”
“Okay,” he said, but it was as if she’d never spoken. “Have you seen my cat?”
“You have a cat?”
“Yes. He’s an orange tabby. He has six toes on each foot.”
“A polydactyl,” Neva said, brightening.
Johnson Johnson looked at her uncertainly. “Well, a cat.”
“Yes—polydactyl is the term for six-toed cats.”
“His name is Kitty.”
“Of course it is.” It had been a long day; Neva felt hysterical giggles rising. Trying to outrun them, she said, “Look, I’m sorry, but I really have to go in now.”
“Oh.”
And so she did. As she took the key from the lock and closed her door, she could still see Johnson Johnson standing in place, his hand finally lifted in farewell.
The interior of her tiny house was cheerful, even incandescent, with bright yellow doors, orange walls and fiery red baseboards. Somebody in its past had had color-courage. She put her things away and dumped canned chicken noodle soup into a pot, encouraging the front burner of her little Pullman stove to choose life. Chances were excellent that she would stand right there and eat her soup directly from the pot once it was heated. For years she had resisted her mother’s efforts to teach her to cook.
You can only eat tuna casserole so many times, Neva,
she had told her a hundred times.
Sooner or later the body will rebel.
In the end it hadn’t been the body but Neva’s ex-husband Howard who had rebelled, not against her tuna casserole but Neva’s refusal to choose a different career path. He’d wanted to know how she could be passionate about jobs that listed shoveling shit as one of their major duties. When Neva was promoted out of the San Diego Zoo’s African savanna exhibit to become a
full-time elephant keeper, he’d said,
So, what—you go from small shit to bigger and more dangerous shit, and that’s the dream of a lifetime?
As she ate her soup, Neva thought about Samson Brown. She’d never met a keeper with so little training. He knew nothing about protected contact, operant conditioning, environmental enrichment, or any of the other cornerstones of modern animal husbandry and training. Still, it was clear that he had enormous natural gifts. His work with Hannah showed flawless instincts as well as obvious devotion. By taking Hannah for walks around the zoo each day, he gave her feet some relief from the unyielding concrete in her barn and small yard. It also gave her a change of scene, a relief from the sameness of her exhibit. Her diet was good, her appetite excellent, and her attitude seemed positive, even in light of the poverty of her surroundings and her complete and nearly lifelong isolation from other elephants.
And though Hannah’s feet were ugly and she already had arthritic knees and hips, they weren’t nearly as bad as some she’d seen. Maybe there was something to Sam’s wife’s homeopathic remedies. They had certainly done the animal no harm, which was probably more than could be said of the zoo veterinarian, a local DVM who, she’d learned, spent most of his time working with cows.
“Truman, come here for a minute,”
Harriet called from her office as Truman tried to slip past her door to go home. He stopped with a sigh: she seemed to take a perverse pleasure in preventing him from leaving on time. Nevertheless, he stepped into her office and shut the door part way, raising his eyebrows
at Harriet:
Close it?
She nodded, and he pulled it to. Outside the door, Brenda would be all ears. Truman had known her to turn the entire switchboard over to auto-answer if she thought she might overhear something juicy.
He stood in front of Harriet’s desk, or in front of what he assumed was Harriet’s desk if only he could see it beneath the mounds of paper. The office was squalid with half-filled coffee mugs and partially eaten nachos teetering dangerously atop shifting dunes of paper. Mess notwithstanding, she seemed to know the exact location and content of every single memo, report, spreadsheet, and phone message, right down to the bare wood.
Harriet nodded toward a visitor’s chair that was relatively clear of debris. A single pink message slip had floated down from above to rest there, but it was an old message so Truman just sat on it. He needed to be out the door in no more than ten minutes if he was going to pick up Winslow from his piano lesson on time.
“I’ve been looking at this,” Harriet said, holding out a financial statement he had prepared for her earlier in the day. “Are you sure about the numbers?”
“Very sure,” he said. “A number of school groups cancelled last month.”
“Do we know why?”
“Evidently the Pumpkin Patch had a corn maze.”
“We’re losing business to a
farm stand
?”
“Apparently so.”
In disgust, Harriet tossed the sheet of paper on top of a half-eaten grilled cheese sandwich.
“Look,” Truman said. “I’d like to ask my father to review the old City files pertaining to the zoo.” Matthew Levy was
a retired federal court judge and lifelong Bladenham resident. “Maybe there’s money we’re entitled to that no one remembers anymore. Special funds of some kind, or maybe a small endowment. With the kind of administrative turnover the zoo has had in the last decade or so it’s a long-shot, but I think it’s worth looking into.”
“Well, I can’t pay him,” Harriet said. “That’s the first thing.”
“No, that’s just fine.”
“Tell him to go ahead, then.”
Truman smiled. You didn’t
tell
Matthew anything. You laid out a case as carefully as you could and then you stood back to see if it stuck. He stood up. “I’m sorry, Harriet, but I’ve got to go pick up Winslow. You’re leaving soon, too, I hope?”
“Eventually.”
“It would probably do you good to take the evening off.”
“Maybe when things slow down,” she said vaguely, already mining her desk for a buried document. She didn’t seem to have much of a home life. He gathered that she lived alone, and kept birds—finches, as he remembered.
As he closed Harriet’s office door behind him, he saw the hem of a coat whip out the main door. Brenda, with her sly sense of timing, was done for the day.
Winslow was in the front window of his piano teacher’s house, watching for him. Truman could see the boy’s pale moon face, framed by curtains, sweeten with relief as he saw Truman’s car pull into the driveway.
“Hey,” Truman greeted the boy as Winslow climbed into the car. “How was Mrs. Leahey? How was the lesson?”
“It was okay. She gave me a new piece.”
“Still Mozart?”
“Yeah.” Winslow nodded. “It’s hard.”
“Well, she’s always going to give you something hard,” Truman said. “She warned us.”
“I know. It’s okay.”
“Homework?”
“Math.”
“Ah.” The day’s inventory behind them, Truman fell into a reverie for the rest of the drive home. The boy might have the demeanor of an accountant, but he had an artist’s soul. Shortly after Rhonda left them, Mrs. Leahey had called him at work and said,
He’s very musical, Mr. Levy
.
With your permission, I’d like to push him, see what he’s capable of.
Truman had agreed, of course, and on the wings of Mozart, Winslow had risen and soared. Truman often sat just outside the den while he practiced, listening. In Winslow’s playing the boy was all brilliant hues and soft, rich shadows. Truman wondered sometimes whether, if the two of them had been outwardly vivid people, Rhonda would have stayed with them. But he was not a colorful man. Winslow was not a colorful boy. Their riches were subterranean.
Once home, Truman sent Winslow upstairs to begin his homework while he thawed a Tupperware container full of spaghetti sauce he’d prepared over the weekend. His freezer was neatly stocked with chili, stew, chicken tetrazzini, beef stroganoff, all meticulously labeled and dated. He liked to cook and got a quiet satisfaction from maintaining order and readiness in the household. If he had been a caveman, he would have been the one awake late into the night, taking inventory of the spear-points and stone axes.
Rhonda had been a disorganized, impulsive woman as likely to leave discarded pantyhose on the living room floor as in the dirty clothes hamper. She prided herself on being a strewer.
Order is for mediocre minds, Truman,
she had often told him. She mocked the absence of clutter in the house now, mocked the way Truman and Winslow arranged the books alphabetically, stored CDs by musical genre and composer.
My god,
she’d told him after she’d moved out,
it’s as though dead people live here.
It was true that Rhonda was not an easy woman to survive.
When the pasta was ready, Truman called Winslow and while they ate in companionable silence, Winslow patted his foot on an imaginary piano pedal, keeping time to some piece of music shining in his head.
The Beauty Spot hair salon
was in the half-basement of Sam and Corinna Brown’s small white clapboard house. Corinna had fixed it up with gingham curtains and a pink salon chair and big mirrors on the walls that had little etched doodads in their corners. Her sink was pink, too, and her customers’ protective smocks were black with pink musical notes spilled all over them like someone had had an accident with a tune. No one she knew could read music, so she’d never figured out if the notes went to a real song. Not knowing was fine with her, though; in her opinion, it didn’t always do to know the exact nature of things. The best moment for a box of chocolates was before you bit into one. Once you knew it was coconut, the magic was over.
“How are you doing under there?” Corinna hollered, thrusting her hand under the hairdryer hood and poking at Bettina Jones’s curlers. Bettina was half deaf anyway. Put her under a hair dryer and she became a gently smiling imbecile.
“Honey, you’re just about done!” Corinna shouted.
Bettina smiled expansively and without a shred of comprehension. She’d been one of Corinna’s customers for nearly forty
years. When Corinna had first started doing her hair, neither one of them showed a single sign of wear, and now look at them—Corinna with her stout bosom and Bettina with all that gray, which Corinna could never talk her into coloring.
I’m exactly the age I am, girl, and I’ve got nothing to apologize for,
Bettina was always saying. As a beautician, Corinna thought Bettina had plenty to apologize for, Bettina being a naturally homely woman who failed to even attempt improvements, but she’d learned to keep her thoughts to herself.