by Gene Stone
“Let’s attack the minute they open the door. You crush them with your foot. I’ll attack them with my horns.” The goat was giddy with excitement.
The elephant shook her head.
“We must act normally.”
“Why? We should fight like the others, like every other animal.”
“No,” she said, with force.
“They’re coming,” the goat said, and Nancy focused on what was happening outside of the trailer.
The men in the semis, men just like Hal and Jake, teeth stained with coffee and cigarettes and eyes red with methamphetamine, jumped down from their cabs and walked to the rear of their rigs and rolled up the large steel doors with weary hands. Nancy was familiar with the clanking of metal on metal.
She heard the other animals murmuring in their cages, restless, their awareness growing, their readiness apparent.
One of the weary men, the one who had alligator-like skin and veins running down his neck like a junkie’s dream, called to Hal, who was sitting on the back of the trailer marked Elephant. Nancy could smell the depression on Hal. She suddenly felt sorry for him.
“Hillbilly, how’s the kid?” the man asked. Nancy recognized him by scent more than by sight; she knew he’d been around even longer than Hal. That menthol odor belonged to him alone.
Hal gave the old-timer the middle finger, a human insult Nancy had seen many times.
“I would hate to have to coddle the owner’s son,” said the older man.
“When do the trainers get here, Sam?” Hal asked.
“Hell if I know,” said Sam. His menthol scent bothered Nancy. “Do you know when those assholes get here, Bill?” The man named Bill, who’d joined Hal and Sam, shrugged his narrow shoulders.
“What the hell. How are we supposed to start setting up without them?” Sam asked.
Jake, the owner’s kid, sidled up, straw hanging out of his mouth. He rolled it over and over with his tongue. “You drivers crack met up. We can do whatever we want.”
“Get that Huck Finn bullcrap out of your mouth,” Bill said.
Overhead, a blackbird circled. Nancy couldn’t see it, but she could sense the bird, watching.
Menthol Sam squinted up at the sky. “What the hell is that fella doing here?”
“Who the hell cares about a bird, Sam?” said Jake. “Let’s get this built.”
“Against the rules,” said Hal. “Need trainers present.”
“Forget the rules. Just forget ‘em,” said the kid.
“The boy’s right,” said Sam softly. “We should just get it over with. Get the tent up, get the animals fed, set up the cages. Then we can go into town.”
“Not on my watch,” said Hal.
“Damn you, Hal, my dad’s your boss.” Jake pounded the trailer. Inside, the goat ran under Nancy’s belly. She let the goat seek comfort under her. For a moment her dreams welled up inside, but she pushed them back. She kept her big eyes on those slats, on the blue sky and the yellow land, on the men, their blue eyes and yellow skin.
Hal went to the kid and slapped him hard. The kid fell back and then lunged forward. The two other men, Menthol Sam and Bill, watched. Nancy felt a surge of tension, as Jake, also relentless and ugly, rose and circled the older man. He still had a bit of chew left and spit it in the dust near a rock. A black-necked garter was sleeping there, but the spit didn’t bother the snake or his sunbath.
Both men had their arms up. Nancy had seen fights before, fights that broke out amid the haze of lives lost on the highway, lives lost on fourteen-hour drives from town to anonymous town, every Wednesday or Sunday or Friday. The men were detached from everything but each other; they were a brotherhood built from knowing nothing but put ‘em ups and take ‘em downs, and tired animals performing exhausted tricks.
Jake struck first. His punch was quick and weak, nervous, the one he had to just get out of the way. The punch landed on Hal’s shoulder. Hal countered with a left jab, then a right hook, and the fight was over.
“We wait for the trainers. Like regulation states.”
“What was that?” the goat asked.
“Nothing.”
“Did you notice how the other two just stood back and watched?” The goat pranced when he grew excited. The noise of his hooves bothered Nancy’s sensitive ears. With her long trunk, she calmed him down.
“Humans like to watch, don’t they?” the goat said.
“No. Those humans are predators,” Nancy whispered to the goat.
“How? They have no kill in them. All they have is their weapons and whips. Get them naked. They have nothing.”
How could she tell the goat just how dangerous they could be? She needed him to believe that the mammals had a chance at victory, but she needed to warn him too. It was a delicate game.
“They have eyes that point straight ahead. Those are the eyes of a hunter. But not a great hunter. You’re right.”
The goat was silent.
“Prey have eyes on the side of the head,” Nancy added.
“We need to kill them then. The revolution is happening. We need to join.”
“Goats don’t kill.”
“Now we do.”
Nancy wondered if she had been given so much thoughtfulness, so much memory, so much sorrow for a reason. In the wrong hands this new awareness was dangerous. The goat was too eager. He was thoughtless. He would bolt out without thinking, he would jerk and jolt, leave himself vulnerable, and die.
“Plus,” Nancy said, as if the goat had heard her last thought, “we’re trapped in this trailer until the trainers come anyway.”
The goat grew impatient. “We have to join in.”
Nancy shook her head. “We need to get the tiger and the lion out first. We need to match predator with predator. If I attack, I can get two or three before they aim a gun at me. But they can’t fight the lion and the tiger.”
“How do we let them know that?”
“The lion and the tiger understand what’s happening. They understand combat.”
Nancy shifted her attention to the men outside. Through the holes in her trailer she could see the old man, Menthol Sam, sitting on the back bumper of the trailer.
“I remember when the circus was billed as a sort of paradise,” he was saying. “When I was a kid, it’s where we went when we had nowhere else to go. It was our church.”
“What century was this, Sam?” Hal asked, laughing.
“It was this magical place and people revered us,” Sam said.
“I don’t believe you,” said Jake. “My dad talks like that too, but you old guys are doing what old people always do. Forgetting about what it was really like.”
“What a sad worm you are, Jake. People did revere us. We had a place to be revered and for most of us that was something special. The crowds came to our shows by the hundreds. They wore their best clothes and sat in awe as the lion tamer came out and whipped the lion around the cage and the horses pranced and the trapeze artists flew over them. Without nets.”
“I remember that, Sam. I remember it well,” Hal said. “It was nice back then. Now everyone’s on a drug.” The two older men shared a look of nostalgic silence.
“Who cares about all that?” the kid interjected, smoking drag after drag off his cigarette.
Nancy cared. She remembered setting up those circuses. The poles too heavy for her to lift, but she did it anyway. She had no choice. She remembered the beatings, and the lions’ abrasions and the horses who disappeared when they could no longer prance at just the right tempo. She remembered everything the old men romanticized.
She was beginning to care less and less about what the humans were saying. She had been listening to humans for too long. Knowing the meaning of their words only made the sounds of their voices more intrusive, more frustrating.
The blue hadn’t faded from the sky, but the yellow land was turning beige, almost brown. The blackbird was still circling, but higher now, so that it looked like the foil to a star, a bl
ack twinkle.
Nancy turned away from the men for the final time. She wouldn’t listen again.
“I’m afraid of them,” the goat said.
“Why?”
“I wish I had your size. When we attack I will be the first to go.”
“No. I’ll look out for you.”
A pause.
“Are we friends, Nancy?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t remember,” the goat said.
“What don’t you remember?”
“How I got here. If I’m going to die, I wish I could remember everything, and all I remember are bits and pieces. My mother’s milk. My first show. But everything else is shady and full of fog.”
“Maybe I can remember for you. I recall when you arrived. We were in Dallas. The goat before you died and you could do what she did.”
“What did she do?”
“Bark on command.”
“Dogs bark.”
“It’s an expression.”
“I wish there was another expression for goats.”
Nancy didn’t know what to say. She knew that the men would be feeding them soon, whether the trainers arrived or not. Food was regulated now. When it wasn’t, how thin had she become, that first summer, when she first met Edgar...The blight of a heat wave, the humid New Jersey air, and the hunger. It overtook her, like the heat. It consumed her. She begged for food as best she could, dropping her head low and submissive, but they wouldn’t give it to her. Not until she’d learned to bend down on her hind quarters.
“Nancy? Why do you have a name and I don’t?”
“You already answered that. People come to see me and they come to pet you. A big beast who can stand on one leg and spray water and bend down needs more than what a petting animal needs. She needs a name.”
The goat bleated. “I’d like a name.”
“I’ll give you a name then.” Nancy studied him. “Your name is Joe.”
The goat bleated. “Joe!” He liked it.
“Nancy?”
“Yes, Joe?”
“If all the animals are taking over, why are we even going to another show?”
Nancy pondered this. Her ears perked up. She tilted her head. “Because we haven’t taken over yet. It’s just beginning.”
“How did this even happen, Nancy?”
Nancy smiled.
Then, Nancy and Joe sat in silence because the men outside had become silent. Nancy gazed out through the metal slats. She saw the men putting out cigarettes and dispersing like cockroaches under a neon light. She wanted to know exactly what the lion and the tiger were thinking, and the horses and the baboons, and the giraffes and the smaller monkeys, and then she said to Joe, in a soft but firm voice: “The trainers are coming. And they know. I can sense it. It’s almost time to fight. Are you ready?”
“I am,” said Joe. And he was. He was knocking his head back and forth like a fighter before the bell.
“We will have to ambush them, all at once. The others know.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just do, Joe.”
Joe quit shaking his head. Nancy could sense his fear. She shared it. They both knew what the predators outside their metal cages were capable of; and now they also knew that neither talon, nor claw, nor tooth, nor poison was stronger than an active mind.
The trainers were approaching. The trainers always came sometime after feeding. Nancy looked outside of her trailer, through the slats of metal, and she could see the horizon that she’d been trying to find earlier. There it was. A simple line connecting the sky and the land, connecting two things that she didn’t think had anything in common. She lingered on the image. Then, she turned to Joe.
“Are you ready?”
He couldn’t speak. He nodded, a very human gesture.
“Friend. It’s time.”
Dog
A nighttime gust, heavy with the grime of an upstate New York heat wave, whipped freshly cut shards of grass into the air. The blades were swept up, a swarm of green gnats attacking the fading moonlight, then retreating, turning, turning, and falling silently to the ground. An old-fashioned push mower, its dull blades painted red, bent over itself like an old man in the middle of the yard. Next to it was an open shed housing other grounds-keeping tools: a rake, large clipping shears, a broken-down leaf blower that rested tiredly against the oxidized wall, a half-empty plastic gas tank, and toolboxes of varying sizes, along with an old notebook where plans for a new landscape design had lain for years, nothing now but remnants of faded ink.
Near the shed, a small craftsmen-style home with second-story windows jutting from the roof was framed along the bottom with wooden boxes full of crimson geraniums and pink impatiens. A large porch wrapped around the first floor. A hammock idled empty in the languid wind. A bike lay against the cedar-wood siding. More potted plants—succulents and ferns—dotted the porch.
Behind one of the second-story windows a woman, Jessie, was sleeping soundly, half under a sheet and half exposed, her arms twisted around her body as though seeking protection, making her look younger than her thirty years, her long brown hair tangled in the pillow, her sockless feet dangling off the bed.
And then, it started—a strange sound, coming from the shed. A squeak. A few more squeaks. Then a flurry of taps up the sides of the shed. The tapping stopped briefly. And then a thud on a windowpane, just above the geraniums. Two more thuds. Tapping again. Bodies squeezed through a cracked window, bodies that shouldn’t have fit, penny slots giving way to silver dollars. Three more soft thuds on the carpet of the upstairs bathroom. Then the sound of scurrying, of small victories, of rodent steps.
The three rats stopped at the doorway. They conferred about what to do next. The leader, the one with the longest tail, nodded his head and the other two understood. They contorted their bodies so they could pass underneath the small space between the door and the hallway’s wood flooring and then slinked their way down the corridor.
They approached the first open door where. the leader peeked inside the doorway. He heard the rhythmic breathing, felt the inertia in the body, and knew the human was sleeping. Then he saw the foot, exposed, ripe for attack, primed for the bite and the revenge of those sharp front teeth.
“On three.”
The rat counted down.
“Three,” he said.
Two.
One.
And they were off. Ready to attack. Their eyes weren’t the dead black eyes of sewer rats. These eyes possessed passion, ferocity, and purpose.
His eyes were shut, but he was awake. He could feel the hardness of the floor instead of the usual comfort and calm of his worn fleece bed back home at their old apartment in Manhattan. He missed the corner that Jessie had designated for him, the corner where the sunlight was softened by the half-open blinds and the taller building next door. When the warmth hit him as he slept now, it was just a tickle of heat. He missed his corner.
The hardness of the floor was worse than ever because Jessie had taken him to the groomer a few days prior, where the horrible woman with the breath of spoiled meat had shorn him down to nothing for the summer, his brown-grey hair piling up on the floor.
“What is he?” the woman had asked. “He looks part shepherd, part hound, part everything else.” Jessie just shrugged while he stood in the tub, water running down his shaved body. His long ears drooped low as the woman prattled on and on about the death of fleas and the comfort brought on by dog shears. Grooming made Cooper less hot, but it also made him just less. He felt naked and exposed then, and he felt naked and exposed now.
He turned over, trying to find relief. But something else was making him uncomfortable. He was aware. But the awareness wasn’t hitting him with full force. It danced with him, alerting him to his lack of fur, and to the weight of his breath, entering his body, circling his lungs, and exiting once again. He knew what wind was, he could discern the hardness not just of the floor, but of the air too, of everything; he no
ticed angles—acute, obtuse, perfect angles—and the variations in Jessie’s breathing patterns as she slept; he could sense the outside, but he had no desire to go there. He had no desire to go anywhere. He shut his eyes.
He had never dreamed like this. He was walking proud and tall on two legs, not as some parlor trick to make an owner feel like a master, learned through the trial and error of doggie-treat tribulations, but as a functioning biped. He did this for what felt like a long time, walking to and fro. With his head higher, he felt a surge of pride. He looked through a window at the city scene that lived beyond the glass. Another dog was walking down Avenue A. Also as a biped. She had a bouquet of flowers in her paws. He wanted to go and walk with her. She was promising him something, and though he didn’t know what it was, he knew he wanted it. He gained trust in his legs, and then he rose up off the ground, floating four feet in the air, and turned slowly on an invisible axis, without gravity, without falling. The window disappeared, as did the dog with her flowers.
Then his primal senses overcame his sleep. His eyes opened, his nose twitched. His ears perked. Cooper could smell the intruders. The scent didn’t alarm him as it might have in the past, though it was rank like the groomer’s breath.
Then, in a flash, he saw the rodents’ motion, their teeth bared, aimed at the draped foot, Jessie’s foot.
Not a second’s hesitation: he leapt toward them. He could feel his teeth, the flare of incisors. His breath was heavy, air tickling his lungs, then spewing forth. His nose was wet and twitching. A part of him seemed to be watching himself from above instead of the rats down below.
The leader of the rats jumped back, avoiding Cooper’s paws and teeth. The other two halted, and the three rats rose up on their hind legs, making themselves seem bigger than slipper size.
“What are you doing?” the leader asked, frustration filling his voice.
“I could ask you the same.”
Cooper remained in the attack position. He wasn’t relenting, although a part of him wanted to. A part of him could smell the foot, the human foot, the stink of it. He had always smelled this smell on humans, he realized. But the way he interpreted the scent seemed irrevocably altered.