by John McManus
Already I’d confessed by accident, via fleeting thoughts, so it shouldn’t have been hard. I sucked in air, steeling myself. “Last week it was ninety-five in Austin,” I said, delivering words at a small fraction of the traveling speed of memories. “The air was humid, sultry, maybe Africa feels that way?”
Gracie was pretending not to be bothered, but I could see her listening. “All day we drank on the rooftop deck of this shabby marina bar,” I said to her. “Billy, our bassist, was afraid we’d get too plastered for the show, and Aisling told him, ‘Don’t be a gaywad, I’ll find us cocaine.’”
Like everyone she’d ever taunted, Billy folded to her demand. That’s the kind of girl she was, I explained to Gracie. We toasted and drank. In that winter heat we were matched to our time and place, said Ren, the guitarist. I agreed. We improvised a song about it and sang it with some politicians who’d driven up from Uvalde. In the distance the Austin skyline poked above the juniper like little filaments of wire. I had probably read that description in a book, but I put it in the lyrics just to show off. “You have a gift,” said one of the politicians. I nodded, smiling. Hearing I had a gift was why I wrote songs. I loved for people to think of me as a genius who gambled ever more carelessly with his life. It turned me on to imagine dying young. By sound check we could barely walk. In the nick of time, though, Aisling came through as promised, and what a show: our shirts off for hours of noise and love that the crowd really felt for us, it wasn’t the drug tricking us into believing it. Girls loved us, boys did too, and a few of them invited us afterward to a mansion on a cliff above the foam-green Colorado.
As meticulously as I could, I pieced through that night: Aisling disappearing, some girls leading me into a vanishing pool where we stripped and swam and made out until one said, “You two kiss,” and I turned to see Billy there. Gaywad, I thought, guiding his head in with my palm. I made love to his tongue with mine. Was he weeping or only wet? He seemed to like it in any case. I help people, I thought as I hoovered up another line. The girls’ skin gleamed in reflected moonlight. There was a full moon, and it had risen over foliage so Californian that I decided we were back home on the West Coast.
As I dried off, a man with faraway hillbilly eyes and a liter of gin said, “I’d like to book you for South by Southwest.”
“If you’ll give me some gin.”
“This is filtered water.”
“It says gin right there.”
“Bar’s on the terrace.”
“Guess we’ll play Coachella instead,” I said, exulting at my wit. I turned to recount the scene to the girls, but the pool was empty. So I wandered into the garage to find Aisling alone in the passenger seat of a Jaguar XF.
I got in beside her. The keys were in the ignition, turned to accessories, and “Lumber” was on. I remember because she skipped over it with a jab of her finger. Why, was it a weak song? “It’s weak because it’s about you,” I said, and so on until she called me a con artist like my no-good dad.
I couldn’t help it, I turned the engine and gunned the car in reverse, sending the garage door crumpling off its runners.
We went screeching backward down a steep driveway. “Cheaper ways to jerk off, pissy-pants,” Aisling said.
“I’m wet cause I was swimming with two girls.”
“Same name, same acorn, same tree,” she said, as I spun us around toward a far cluster of city lights.
I think she was too busy mocking me to buckle her seatbelt. My songs were plagiarized, my cock was small, I would never feel real love. Over her drivel I couldn’t think which way led back to Sunset Boulevard. At a split I veered abruptly downhill. Her stomach must have fallen out, because she shut up.
“I don’t think this is the way,” she said.
“Depends where you’re going.”
“This goes nowhere.”
Never would I have asked my fiancée the way to somewhere, but damned if a GPS didn’t power up and advise, “Left turn, mate,” in a congenial cockney accent.
“Follow directions,” said Aisling with the force of a gavel strike, leaning in to push the wheel left with all her might. We went spinning off the shoulder. The car skidded across talus until the ground fell away and we were sailing into space. Ahead of us a cantilever bridge spanned a wide, moonlit river. I had never seen this section of Los Angeles. Aisling howled. Was she upset? “We’re only having a wreck,” I said, before we hit the water.
There was more—climbing the hill, hitching a ride on Capital of Texas Highway—but I trailed off. Two of Gracie’s friends had appeared on the hilltop. The phone was playing the album’s closer, “Turgenev.” I imagined the other elephants were too far away to hear me croon a vow to commit Ike Senior’s same crimes if it earned his respect in heaven, but Gracie heard. She studied me like her own eye in the mirror.
“Like I told you, I didn’t leave her for dead,” I said, feeling sort of desperate now for Gracie’s forgiveness. Before she could give it or deny it, my song faded into a ring.
I answered. “James,” said a woman the device named as Franklin Pierce. It took me a minute to figure out why she sounded familiar.
“Yep,” I answered, meaning I was my father.
“Where are you?” Haley said.
“By the elephant fence.”
“And the others?”
She believed I was Ike Senior. “They’re on their way.”
“James, stay inside while this happens.”
“Sure, Franklin Pierce.”
“Wait until it’s all over.”
“I’ll sit playing solitaire.”
“I’ve enjoyed getting to know you,” she said, sounding on the verge of tears.
She hung up. When I called back, the phone gave a busy-circuits signal.
What Haley wanted, I realized, was for my father to stay in the house while she and Frank harvested ivory.
I’d been seeing evidence for days now: they would shoot the elephants, saw off their tusks, and sell them on the black market. It would happen in thirty minutes, I thought, as Gracie languished in the mud, reading my mind as indifferently as ever. It struck me what a tiny fraction of her mass her tusks comprised. It was the same with oysters and pearls, men and their gold teeth.
And then it came to me: I had it backward, this elephant hated all human beings equally. We were torturers who had chained her in a cage for almost a lifetime. Most elephants were dead because people had killed them. In fifty years they would all be gone. What did Gracie care if I had killed a girl?
She was glad I’d killed a girl. It was one less human.
I’d known something was wrong with Haley from the moment I saw her, I told myself as I hurried uphill. If I’d wished to live with Haley in another country, half of me was bad like her. It was time to let that half die, and save Gracie whether she wanted it or not.
Alone on the porch, a beat pounding in my head, I scrolled through the phone contacts looking for Elephant Sanctuary. I tried Sanctuary. No luck. Clara wasn’t listed either. I hit redial and got another busy-circuits signal. I paused for a drink. Pouring, I spotted a copy of the New York Times lying open to a picture of me, Ike Bright, Jr., in tuxedo and boutonnière.
In the picture I had fallen over backward in the sand in a beach chair. Beside me, Aisling, in a bikini and ball cap, was tying my shoelaces together.
I stared down at the caption until I could read a single word, gold. Then immediately I flung the paper out of sight so fast that a number of possibilities remained.
The lead investigator in my case was named Gold. My bounty was to be paid to Aisling’s father in gold. In the wake of my new notoriety, my records had gone gold. I had misread manslaughter and mistaken that word for gold.
“Catching up on the news?” said Ike Senior behind me, causing me to drop the bottle. It crashed with a thud on the porch floor and spilled.
“I’m telling Clara your elephant plan,” I said.
“My plan to give them my money?”
“To sell Gracie’s tusks.”
“That was a ruse, to test how evil you find me.”
“Then it’s a redundant ruse.”
“I was hoping we had a future.”
“You and me both, Dad.”
“But you believe I would hurt those elephants.”
“Fool me twice,” I said, pulling out the phone.
“Well, I’ve fooled you more than twice, Junior.”
I could hear an engine approaching. We both turned to see a police car pull up in the ditch. A tall black man in a fedora got out, the poker player from before.
“Am I interrupting?” he said as he strode toward us.
“What’s this about?” said Ike Senior.
“You’re harboring a murder suspect, old man.”
Here’s what I thought, just for a minute: that this cop would earn a bounty from Aisling’s father by betraying mine and giving me to the state of Texas. My dad had trusted everyone, even me. In a pinpoint storm’s eye I felt glad to know Ike Senior wasn’t betraying Clara. But then his inscrutable grin never diminished as the policeman climbed the stairs. It seemed to me that Ike Senior should stop grinning. Before I knew why he didn’t, the cop was handcuffing me to the porch railing.
“You can’t do this,” I said, still expecting my father’s smile to wane.
“Turn yourself in, file a complaint,” he said, taking the phone out of my other hand.
“How much money?” I said, still believing that the money was because of me.
“News will tell you a thousand per pound,” said Ike Senior, “as if there’s just one black market in the world. In Beijing you’ll fetch close to two thousand.”
It hit me, all of a sudden, how dimwitted I’d been to assume there was a bounty. In three days people haven’t survived their first stage of grief, let alone set bounties.
“You’re monsters,” I said.
“My buddy wanted to let you help,” Ike Senior said, “but I told him what you’re like. You’re as bad as that animal rights activist you brought home yesterday.”
“Gracie, charge,” I shouted, aloud and in my head, screeching like I did in the songs Gracie hated so much.
“He believes Gracie talks to him,” said my father.
“She does,” I said. “She’s smarter than we are.”
“That night in New Orleans? I taught you how not to be a mark.”
“I blacked it out. What you taught me is to be a drunk.”
“You drink too much, that’s for sure.”
“Why are you doing it?” I asked, but I knew. Because he was good at it. Because of adrenaline. Because of alcohol. He had a lot of nerve, telling me I drink too much.
“They’re old and sick,” he said. “If you never forgot things, wouldn’t you want to die?”
“You said they’re like people.”
“People, elephants, I roll the same way with all animals. Hey, it’s in the blood. You think I didn’t know all along why you’re here?”
“Why am I here?”
“I’ve done stuff in my day, Junior, but leaving her to die? That was low.”
As my father stepped down from the porch, I was speechless, but only in my voice. Not in my head. Flee, I shouted to Gracie in my head as Ike Senior led his buddy toward the garage. Charge the fence. Tell your friends. Except she wasn’t answering me anymore.
My father and his partner emerged with two automatic rifles apiece and crossed into the sanctuary. They disappeared over the rise. I was working my handcuffs down the railing. When they were low enough for me to kneel, I leaned forward and caught my breath. Now I could relax a little. It was during that spell of calm that I came up with my final song, which never made it onto the album. I didn’t get a chance to write it down. It’s about regular elephants, not vampires. It takes place fifty years from now, in the year 2062. In it, the computers of 2062 learn to decipher the part of elephant speech that’s too low for human ears. Although elephants are extinct by then, videos of them remain online. In my last song the citizens of my future play elephant videos one by one, as their computers translate, and it’s like finding ten thousand Anne Frank diaries; the people weep over those staggering words and say, “We wouldn’t have let that happen.” The African videos are bad enough, with their desperate cries while gunmen mow down elephants from helicopters, but the worst come from Arkansas, from the sanctuary, where every old lady brings her own history of exquisite torture to the watering hole and compares notes with the other cows there, puzzling out what’s next.
I succumb to something like postpartum depression after writing a good song, but in that moment, listening for the first gunshot, it felt nice to finish one. I heard the distant wail of another siren. No, no, no, I thought, because as awful as Gracie’s fate was, I had quit feeling sorry for myself. It faded, the siren. For a few seconds before it picked up again, I felt proud of not screwing up. I would stay free. If Ike Senior was dealing in ivory, he could smuggle me across the border with my songs. No one would steal the songs, not that I’d guessed yet that anyone would try. I was in luck. I supposed it derived from my having inherited my father’s inscrutable poker face, which girls called enigmatic. Most of them couldn’t get enough of it. Not just girls, but critics, too. Critics sought my answers, trusted that they were full of subtext. Comment on the metaphorical structures in your songs, the critics would say to me, and I would reply, “There aren’t any.”
BETSY FROM PIKE
THE MEDIA WOULD REPORT that the teenage Satanist rest-area murderers all hailed from Letcher County, but Betsy grew up in the Daniel Boone Trailers in bordering Pike County. When she was young, her neighbor Jimmy would sing a ballad that went, Don’t you remember Sweet Betsy from Pike? Who crossed the wide mountains with her lover Ike. Daily Jimmy crooned its verses about Sweet Betsy, her lover, their cattle, their rooster, their pets. He said he’d written it about his sweetheart. He sang it while Betsy rocked on the bench swing, waiting for her ma Irene to get done relaxing. Irene’s boyfriend, Floyd, would call to her when they were done, and Betsy would come running, because she loved Floyd, or she did until Irene soured up on them like a jug of milk. Her ma used to toss meat to the three-legged dog, laugh as it galloped toward the meat; now she quit emerging, took to sleeping through the days. One day Floyd tried to rouse her and she said, “It’s daylight, dipshit.”
“Let’s see a doctor.”
“Let’s leave me be.”
“Love you, Irene.”
“Get out of my face,” Betsy’s ma said into her pillow, at which point Floyd decided she wasn’t inside herself anymore.
“Find her some help,” he told Betsy, packing up his things, and then Betsy quit being inside herself too.
Floating high above their farewell hug, she could see ten trailers and across the mountain into Letcher County. From such height she could hardly ask for Floyd to take her along, or say, “Be my dad,” as he drove away from Kentucky. She was twelve and a half. After a long trance like her ma’s, she left her bedroom to find Jimmy, her singing neighbor, on the couch.
“Your ma’s still in bed, Sweet Betsy, and Floyd’s in Tampa,” Jimmy said, his glassy eyes fixed on Betsy’s chest.
“I’m off to Tampa myself.”
“Not if I cut off your legs,” he drawled, so languidly that Betsy didn’t begin to shriek until he was up and tackling her.
Ma will come, she kept telling herself as Jimmy tugged at her T-shirt, smelling of Cheetos and motor oil, but the door stayed shut. She gave up struggling enough for him to unzip her jeans and touch her down there, saying, “That’s all I wanted. Does it feel okay?”
It felt like the cops might come drag her away. To prepare, Betsy locked her mind in jail, where she sewed, wore stripes, played ball, until jail was tolerable enough to let Jimmy kiss her. “I’ve liked you forever,” he said. Next morning he strapped Irene into the car and drove her to the state hospital. He leased his trailer to a mechanic. He moved in with Betsy, signed drop-out
-of-school forms, put her on Depo-Provera, called her his belle, and so on like that for some years until Betsy awoke one day from a nap and a dream, tied a rope round the neck of the three-legged dog, and walked it down the river gorge to the vet clinic.
Behind the counter at the clinic stood a pale boy whose dyed hair matched his black jeans and black turtleneck. “Need this fellow put down,” Betsy said to him.
“Name?” asked the boy, looking weak and skinny enough to be overpowered. Betsy glanced to the stump of the dog’s missing leg. In the dream, she had been injecting kids at her school with euthanasia drugs, and now she planned to steal a shot of pentobarbital to use on Jimmy before driving to Florida.
“Tricycle,” she said.
“Sorry about that.”
“He’s seventeen, plus cancer.”
“It’ll be a few more minutes.”
The dog was sniffing around at Betsy’s feet. What was its real name? “Hamburger,” her ma used to shout at it, in a voice fading from her memory. Would the shot work faster in Jimmy’s heart or in his neck, she was wondering when the boy said, “Grab Tricycle.”
She carried the dog into an exam room. The gruff, alert woman across the table had only to eye it before Betsy saw that her plan would fail. They know, she thought, readying herself for jail once more, but the vet produced a needle, swabbed the dog’s leg, and whispered, “Poor sweet thing.”
Stroking the dog with one hand, she stuck it with the other. It began to gasp. “That’s just agonal breaths,” the vet said; “don’t worry.”
Betsy wanted to retort that she wasn’t fretting about some dog, but she kept quiet until it was over. Back in the lobby the boy asked her for money. “Ain’t got none,” she said.
“Did you think it’s free?”
She shook her head. She hadn’t considered the matter at all.
“Have you got a boyfriend?”
“Sort of,” she said, feeling cowardly again. Jimmy had sprung back to life in her mind.
“I’ll bill you later if you dump that dude and go with me.”