The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015

by Adam Johnson

  When the head is removed, the elephant begins to speak in a morbid throat-flatus. Air escaping the trachea makes sounds of growls and shudders and sighs. This is not upsetting. By now, it is not elephant but a wrecked Volkswagen made of flesh.

  The job wears on. How much of the creature, I ask Jeff Rann, do the skinners intend to take?

  “Everything,” he says. “This’ll probably feed a hundred people.”

  The skinners cut away fire-hydrant-sized wads of meat and fling them heavily into a Land Cruiser’s bed.

  The carcass is winnowed to a pile of innards that calls to mind one of those inflatable-looking sports arenas. In the flawless blue above, a fleet of delighted buzzards has begun to wheel.

  The work is mostly over. Will Waldrip can now retire from the job. He is abundantly daubed in blood and is exhausted, though chipper. “A little different than quartering out a whitetail,” he says.

  Amid the spare parts lying in the grass is the elephant’s jaw, from which we can know the elephant’s age. An elephant gets six sets of teeth in its lifetime. This one was on its final set, and judging from its condition it was probably about 53. The sand of the savanna is hard on an elephant’s dentition. Five to seven more years and it’d have blown through this set and starved to death, assuming neither Jeff nor the poachers got him first.

  Looking at this rummage sale of elephant flesh inspires an equally messy inventory of contradictory thoughts.

  Eww.

  Then a sort of wordless, inner viola fugue that accompanies the sight of a magnificent organism that has been treading the savanna since the Kennedy administration, now scattered in pieces on the ground.

  Then, this retort: Yeah, but wasn’t the leather your wallet’s made from once the property of a factory-raised cow whose sole field trip from the reeking, shrieking bedlam of the factory farm was a terrified excursion to the abattoir? And don’t you gobble bacon and steaks whenever you get the chance? And aren’t “hypocrite” and probably also “pantywaist” accurate words to describe a person who gets queasy at an animal being flayed but who eats meat and/or dons leather shoes?

  Right, but elephants are so smart, and old.

  A caged chicken once beat you at tic-tac-toe. I don’t hear you crusading for the pearl mussel, which can live for over a century.

  But elephants are so splendid to look at.

  Unlike a ten-point buck?

  No, but okay, look: We can assume that most people, for whatever totally arbitrary reason, have an affnity for elephants over chickens and pearl mussels. Sure, it’s the same illogical pro-mammal bigotry that lets people mourn the slaughter of dolphins and not mind so much the squashing of an endangered spider. BUT? Isn’t it a little bit fucked, when the average person looks at an elephant and goes, “Aww, what an amazing animal,” to be the one guy in a thousand who goes, “Yeah, cool, I want to shoot it”?

  So it’s bad to shoot elephants because other Westerners arbitrarily sentimentalize them? Consider your fantasies of grenading the deer who eat your gardenias. Multiply that by about 10,000 and you’ve probably got a good approximation of the feelings of the Botswana farmer who wakes up to find that elephants have munched a full year’s worth of crops.

  No, I mean I guess I just don’t really understand the impulse behind wanting to shoot this big amazing animal, or how, after shooting one, you’d want to jump up and down.

  So what’s she supposed to do? Cry and drop into the lotus position and sing a song in Navajo? It’s not terribly hard to understand why people go hunting. They go hunting because they find it exciting. As Robyn herself put it, you get a primal thrill. And whether or not you want to admit it, you had the thrill, the neurochemical bong-load that hit you when the elephant died. It made Robyn Waldrip jump up and down and it made you go on a pompous, half-baked death trip, which is your version of jumping up and down. You were at the party, bro.

  But I’m not the one who shot the elephant.

  No, you’re the one who came on this hunt so that you could ride the adrenaline high while at the same time reserving the right to be ethically fastidious about it. I mean, what really distinguishes your presence here from Jeff Rann’s or the Waldrips’?

  Maybe only this: Though the harrowing intensity of the elephant’s death will, in time, denature into a fun story to tell at cocktail parties, right now I would trade all of it—the morbid high, the anecdote for my memoirs—to bring this particular elephant back to life.

  Chapter 7: The Buzzard in the Baobab Tree

  The elephant’s skull is buried. Its flesh has been hung out to dry. The Waldrips are booked at Jeff Rann’s safari camp for eight more days, but these folk are hunters, and the notion of spending a week doing nothing but observing creatures of the wild holds little interest for them. So tomorrow, they will go to South Africa, because Will Waldrip Jr. wants to undertake something called a “springbok slam,” which involves shooting one of each of that species’ four subvarieties. Jeff has an extra elephant tag for his concession in Tanzania. He offers this to Will Sr., and Will declines.

  Our last evening in camp, we go for sunset cocktails at a locally famous baobab tree. The tree is craggy, Gandalfian, and 1,000 years old. It has a crazed unruly spread of branches, which inspired the folk saying, Jeff tells us, that “God pulled the baobab out of the ground and stuck it upside down.” A leopard sometimes hangs out in the man-sized cave in its trunk. The leopard isn’t home. The only locals on the scene are a squadron of huge buzzards, resting in the baobab’s branches. The camp dumps its hunting refuse not too far from here, and the buzzards, Jeff tells us, have likely spent the day gorging on the remains of Robyn’s elephant. At our approach, they take grudging flight in a storm of black wings.

  While Jeff’s wife is arranging the cocktail table, the party moves in to have a look at the leopard hole. Suddenly the sounds of shrieking pierce the quiet of the dusk. My first thought is that the leopard was home after all and has mauled one of the children. But it turns out that one last buzzard had been hiding in the tree. The bird had gobbled so much of Robyn’s elephant that it couldn’t take off. So, to attain flight weight, the buzzard started puking on the safari group. Fran, the Waldrips’ nanny, got the heftiest portion of Robyn’s elephant, on her shoulders and hair, and Jeff Rann got speckled a bit. The elephant huntress herself dodged the vomit entirely as the bird set a course for the sun.

  VICTOR LODATO

  Jack, July

  FROM The New Yorker

  THE SUN WAS A WOLF. The fanged light had been trailing him for hours, tricky with clouds. As it emerged again from sheepskin, Jack looked down at the pavement, cursed. He’d been walking around since ten, temperature even then close to ninety. The shadow stubs of the telephone poles and his own midget silhouette now suggested noon. He had no hat, and he’d left his sunglasses somewhere, either at Jamie’s or at The Wheel, or they might have slipped off his head. They did that sometimes, when he leaned down to tie his shoes or empty them of pebbles.

  Pebbles?

  Was that a word? He stopped to consider it, decided in the negative, and then marched on, flicking his thumb ceaselessly against his index like a Zippo. His nerves were shot, but unable to shut down. No off button now. He’d be zooming for hours, the crackle in his head exaggerated by the racket of birds rucked up in towers of palm, tossing the dry fronds. What were they doing? Ransacking sounds. Looking for nuts or dates, probably. Or bird sex. Possibly bird sex. Maybe he should walk to Rhonda’s, ask her to settle him. Or unsettle him. Maybe he wanted more. Share was what she should do, if she had any. He always shared with her. Not always, but it could be argued.

  Rhonda was a crusher, though, a big girl, always climbing on top. Her heft was no joke, and Jack was a reed. Still, he loved her. Ha! That was the tweak coming on. He’d never admit to such a thing when he was flat. Now his immortal brain understood. He wanted to marry Rhonda, haul her up the steps of her double-wide, pump out about fifty kids. In the fly-eye of his mind he saw them, curled
up like caterpillars on Rhonda’s bed.

  Jack picked up the pace. The effect of his late-morning tokes was far from finished. Though he’d pulled nothing but dregs (the last of his stash), it was coming on strong, sparking his heart in unexpected ways.

  So much gratitude. Jack made a fist and banged twice on his chest, thinking of Flaco, a school friend, now dead, who’d first turned him on to this stuff—a precious substance whose unadvertised charm was love. It was infuriating that no one ever mentioned this. The posters, the billboards, the P.S.A.s—all they talked about were skin lesions and rotten teeth. Kids, sadly, were not getting well-rounded information. If Jack hadn’t lost his phone, he’d point it at his face right now and make a documentary.

  Traffic, a lot of it. On Speedway now, a strip-mall jungle, which, according to his mother, used to be lined with palm trees and old adobes, tamale peddlers and mom-and-pop shops. Not that Jack’s mother was nostalgic. She loved her Marts—the Dollar and the Quik and the Wal. “Cheaper, too,” she said. She liked to buy in bulk, always had extra. Maybe he should go to her place, instead of Rhonda’s, grab some granola bars, a few bottles of water for his pack. Sit on the old yellow couch under the swamp cooler, chew the fat. He hadn’t seen her in weeks.

  Weeks?

  Again, the word proved thin, suspect. “Mama,” he said, testing another—an utterance that stopped him in his tracks and caused his torso to jackknife forward. Laughed to spitting. He could picture her face, if he ever tried to call her that. She preferred Bertie. Only sixteen years his senior, she often reminded him. Bertie of the scorched hair, in her sparkle tops and toggle pants. “What’s it short for?” he once asked of her name. She’d told him that his grandfather was a humongous piece of shit, that’s what it was short for.

  Of course, Jack had never met the famous piece of shit, had only heard stories. Supposedly he and Grandma Shit still lived in Tucson, might be anywhere, two of Jack’s neighbors. He might have passed them on the street, or lent them an egg or a cup of sugar.

  Jack tittered into his fist. What eggs? What sugar? There was fuck-all in the fridge. In fact, depending on his location, there might not even be a fridge.

  Buses roared past, their burning flanks throwing cannonballs of heat at the sidewalk. Jack turned away, moved toward himself, a murkier version trapped in the black glass façade of a large building. Twenty-two—he looked that plus ten. Of course, a witch’s mirror was no way to judge. The dark glass was spooked, not to be trusted. Hadn’t Jamie said, only yesterday, in the lamplit corner of the guest bedroom, that Jack looked all of sixteen? “Beautiful,” Jamie had whispered, touching Jack’s cheek.

  Beautiful. Like something stitched on a pillow, sentimental crap from some other era. The lamplit whisperings had made Jack restless, the dissolved crystal blowing him sideways like a blizzard.

  To hell with Jamie! Last week, after partying all night, Jack had woken up to find Jamie lying beside him, the man’s hand crawling like a snail across the crotch furrows of Jack’s jeans. Half dead, in deep crash, Jack hadn’t even been sure they were his jeans—the legs inside them looked too skinny, like a kid’s. He’d watched the snail-hand for a good five minutes, feeling nothing—and then, with a gush, he’d felt too much. When he leaped from the bed, Jamie screeched, “Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!”—apologizing profusely, claiming he’d flailed in his sleep.

  “Why are you in my bed at all?” Jack had asked, storming into the bathroom with shame-bitten fury. He’d got into the shower, only to find a bar of soap as thin and sharp as a razor blade—scraped himself clean as best he could, until he smelled breakfast coming on hot from the kitchen. It had turned out to be silver-dollar pancakes with whipped cream and chocolate chips. Jack’s favorite. Could the man stoop any lower?

  Jamie just didn’t add up. A bearded Mexican with a voice like a balloon losing air. Wore pleated slacks, but without a belt you could sometimes glimpse thongs. Didn’t smoke, but blew invisible puffs for emphasis. And the name—Jamie—it sat uncomfortably on the fence, neutered, a child’s name, wrong for anyone over thirty, which Jamie clearly was. Plus he was fat, which made his body indecisive, intricately layered with loose slabs of flesh—potbelly and motherflaps. “Stay with me, why don’t you?” he’d said, for no discernible reason, at the Chevron rest-room sink, where Jack had been rinsing his clotted pipe.

  That had been a week ago, maybe two. They’d been strangers in that rest room, the obese man appearing out of the gloom of a shit stall. His words, stay with me, had seemed, to the boy, vaguely futuristic, a beam of light from a spaceship.

  Jack should have known better.

  The sun drilled the boy’s head, looking for something. He closed his eyes and let the bit work its way to his belly, where the good stuff lived, where the miracle often happened: the black smoke reverting to pure white crystal. A snowflake, an angel. He smiled at himself in the dark glass. It was so easy to forgive those who betrayed you, effortless—like thinking of winter in the middle of July. It cost you nothing. Reflexively Jack scratched deep inside empty pockets, then licked his fingers. The bitch of it was this: forgiveness dissolved instantly on your tongue, there was no time to spit it out.

  He’d have to remember to speak on this, when he made his documentary.

  “Welcome to Presto’s!”

  The blond girl stood just inside the black door, her face gaily frozen, as if cut from the pages of a yearbook. Jack comprehended none of her words.

  “Welcome,” he replied, attempting a flawless imitation of her birdlike language. Jack was good with foreigners. Most of his school buds had been Chalupas.

  The girl tilted her head; the smile wavered, but only briefly. Her mouth re-expanded with elastic lunacy.

  “Ship or print?”

  Jack was taken aback. Though it was true he needed to use the bathroom, he was disturbed by the girl’s lack of delicacy in regard to bodily functions.

  “Number one,” he admitted quietly.

  “Ship?” she persisted.

  Jack felt dizzy. The girl’s teeth were very large and very white. Jack could only assume they were fake. Keeping his own dental wreckage tucked under blistered lips, he lifted his hands in a gesture of spiritual peace. “I’m just going to make a quick run to the rest room.”

  “I’m sorry, they’re only for customers.”

  “George Washington,” Jack blurted, still fascinated by the girl’s massive teeth.

  “What’s that?”

  “Cherry tree,” he continued associatively.

  “Oh, like for the Fourth?” asked Blondie.

  “Yes,” Jack replied kindly, even though he knew she was confusing Presidents. Fourth of July would be Jefferson or Adams. Jack had always been sweet on History. In school, when he was miniature, he’d got nothing but A’s. Again he sensed the expansiveness of his brain, a maze of rooms, many of which he’d never been in. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t finished high school, there was an Ivy League inside his head, libraries crammed with books. He just needed to pull them from between the folds of gray matter and read them. Close his eyes and get cracking. See, this was the other thing people never told you about meth. It was educational.

  The girl informed him that there were no holiday specials, if that’s what he was asking about.

  Jack nodded and smiled, tapping his head in pretense of understanding her logic. As he moved quickly toward the bathroom, the girl skittered off in another direction, also quickly.

  Perhaps she had to print, too. Or take a ship.

  Jack giggled, and opened a door leading to a storage closet.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Yes,” Jack said to the man inside the closet. “I understand what you’re saying.”

  “What am I saying?” asked the man.

  “Perfectly clear,” said Jack. He held up his peace-hands, walked back through the room of humming and spitting machines, and exited the building—behind which he quickly peed, before resuming his trek down Speedway.

>   As soon as he knocked at the trailer door, he was aware of the emptiness in his hands. He should have brought flowers. Or a burrito. He knocked again. Sweat dripped from under his arms, making him feel strangely cold.

  “I have flowers,” he said to the door.

  “Go away,” said the door.

  “I’m not talking to a door,” said Jack. “I don’t take orders from doors.”

  “You can’t be here. Why are you here?” The voice was exhausted, cakey. Jack could picture the pipe.

  “Baby,” he said. “Come on. Why are you being stingy?”

  “I’ll call the police, I swear to God.”

  Jack was silent, but stood his ground. He scratched at the door like a cat. After a while, someone said, “Please.” The word sounded funny, like a flute. Jack tried saying it again. Even worse. It almost sounded as if he were going to cry.

  When the door opened, it did so only a few inches—most of Rhonda’s mouth obscured by a chain.

  “You cannot be here, Jack.”

  Jack, who was clearly there, only smiled.

  “I’m okay,” he assured her.

  “You look like shit,” said Rhonda.

  “Sunburn,” theorized Jack. “It’s like a hundred and twenty out here.” He could barely see the girl—or he could see her, just not recognize her. She seemed different, her hair and her clothes fussed up, neat. He smelled no smoke, only perfume. “What’s going on?” he asked, flicking his thumb.