The Masterwork of a Painting Elephant

by Michelle Cuevas

  For all the Birches in my life, my parents in particular

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  ONE But He Has Such Big Ears

  TWO Pizzazz Shmizazz

  THREE As Simple as This

  FOUR The Too-Small-for-a-Name Town

  FIVE A Painting Elephant

  SIX Scientific Names and Other Zoological Facts

  SEVEN The Elephant (Not Quite) in the Room

  EIGHT Red Balloons

  NINE The Amazing Singing Hoboes

  TEN The Great Golden God

  ELEVEN Svelte Hippos and Colorful Zebras

  TWELVE Catching Silver Fish

  THIRTEEN Slim Spatucci: Talent Guru

  FOURTEEN A Signature Is Not Hard to Find

  FIFTEEN A Beret and a Cupcake

  SIXTEEN Postcards

  SEVENTEEN A Wolf in Frog’s Clothing

  EIGHTEEN Sometimes the World Is Littered with Peanut Shells

  NINETEEN The Triumphant Return of the Bumbling Pigeon

  TWENTY L’Art de la Mer

  TWENTY-ONE Beneath Our Feet

  TWENTY-TWO The Best Position There Is

  TWENTY-THREE Trout-Bellied Rainbow Skies

  TWENTY-FOUR The Masterwork of a Painting Elephant

  Copyright

  ONE

  But He Has Such Big Ears

  My name is Pigeon Jones, and I was raised by a painting Indian elephant. This is how my adventure started: one day when I was an infant in my crib, a pigeon flew into our house through the window. This is not, as you may be thinking, why I am named Pigeon. The bird did, however, cause my mama to become quite upset.

  “Get that filthy bird out of here,” she shouted. “Don’t let it touch the baby.”

  My papa didn’t see the bird at first, but he stayed calm, sat still, and whispered under his breath, “Just be quiet now. Wait till she lands.”

  The pigeon was fat. And clumsy. She landed on the side of my crib and flapped her wings so hard she got tangled in the solar-system mobile overhead. Several planets went flying. Venus fell into my crib with a thud and missed my head by only a few inches.

  My mama screamed, “Grab that stupid bird.”

  The bird didn’t seem to mind being called stupid, and when Papa approached, she climbed onto his outstretched arm one foot at a time.

  Papa put the bird on a tree branch outside the window, and that crazy bird began to sing. Loudly. And not very well.

  My mama and papa came over and stared down at me. The sun filtered through the leaves on the tree and dappled the light, making continents on my skin. I wasn’t crying. In truth I was enjoying the show from my crib.

  “The baby kept calm through the entire commotion,” Papa said thoughtfully. “Through the flapping and the flying and a planet almost falling on his head. I wonder if he can hear?”

  “But he has such big ears,” Mama gasped. “How could anyone not hear with those enormous ears?” It was true. I had ridiculously big ears. Huge. Gigantic. They looked like someone had taken dinner plates and attached them to the sides of my head. I was, in this way, quite unlike my parents, who both had remarkably small ears. I think this made it hard for them to hear each other, so they’d end up yelling most of the time.

  But the doctor confirmed that there was nothing at all wrong with my big ears. My papa got more and more interested in the way the world looked and sounded to me, such a calm and unconcerned baby. Every time he heard or saw something interesting, he’d say, “I wonder how the baby”—they hadn’t yet given me a name—“would sense that?” and write it down. He had long lists all over the house describing things like how it sounds when someone steps on dry leaves or when a dog laps water or the unexpected noise when a child’s toy drops in the next room. His plan was to ask me all these things as soon as I was old enough to talk. Of course, as with many plans in life, by the time I could talk, most of the lists would have turned yellow and been forgotten.

  And if you think my papa sounds a bit strange, then you’ve never had the pleasure of meeting my mama. After I was born she became possessed by a heart-racing, hand-wringing sense of worry that something awful might befall me.

  “He’ll get eaten by a tiger,” she’d cry. “Or hit by a bus. I just know it.” She had daily panic attacks and would have to put her head between her legs and breathe into a paper bag.

  She worried and worried, until one day, overcome by tears, she was sent to bed for an indefinite amount of time by the doctor.

  “Perhaps there is someone to help you care for the baby,” the doctor suggested.

  “I suppose we have no other option,” Papa said sadly. “We must do this for the baby’s sake.” And so, that very night, my mama and papa tucked me into a basket, placed me on the steps of an orphanage, and left town, never to return. Attached to my blanket was a note that read:

  PLEASE GIVE ME A HOME.

  (AND, IF IT IS NOT TOO MUCH TROUBLE, A NAME.)

  LOVE,

  THE BABY

  TWO

  Pizzazz Shmizazz

  Let us leave me and my sad little babiness on the steps of that orphanage for a moment and move across town to the Soap and Suds Car Wash. There worked an elephant. This elephant’s name was Birch since he was as white as the bark on a birch tree. Birch worked for a man named the Ringleader. This man had run a circus for fifty years, but when the circus closed, the Ringleader had to run the Soap and Suds Car Wash to make a living. He was pretty bitter about that and treated most of his employees as if they were performers.

  “Smile while you wash,” he’d tell the boys soaping up the hood of a Chevy. “Arch your back. Point your toes.”

  He was hardest on Birch. Technically, all Birch’s job entailed was sucking up clean water with his trunk out of a wooden barrel, then spraying the soap off the cars. This made Birch sad because an elephant’s trunk is an amazing thing. It shouldn’t be wasted on washing cars. It should be doing things like touching and lifting. It should be greeting and caressing. It should be doing all the important things.

  But the Ringleader didn’t care about that, and nothing Birch did was ever good enough for his boss. “Birch, I want to see some pizzazz,” the Ringleader would say. “I want to see showmanship. I want to see your zest for the performance.”

  But Birch had no pizzazz. No showmanship. No zest. In fact, he had never much liked being in the circus, or working at the car wash, or being told what to do at all. Pizzazz shmizazz! Birch felt, as many people do, that he was meant for a life full of more … more … more something.

  And why would an elephant think this? It all started, as many dreams do, with a glimpse of pure beauty.

  It was spring and the circus was in Paris for a week. During a break between shows, Birch decided to do a little sightseeing and wandered over to the Louvre, a very impressive museum. He had a hunch they wouldn’t let him inside, so he lingered by a side entrance where he saw men moving paintings out of the building and loading them onto a truck. And that’s when he almost saw it.

  The painting was large and rectangular and covered with layers of padding inside a crate. One of the men carrying the painting saw Birch staring at it and stopped. “You like art, big guy?” the man asked the elephant. “This was painted by a man who had a long white beard, same color as you.”

  Birch’s eyes got wide. His heart wondered what the artist had painted.

  “It’s a painting of a bird that dies in flames and is born again from ashes,” the man said. “A phoenix.”

  Birch never did get to see the painting. But for the rest of his time in the circus, he haunted the tents and cotton-candy stands whispering to th
e wind about the time he almost saw a painting of a phoenix.

  In the meantime, the painting sat in the cold basement of an art restoration business, its paint fading and chipping, its colors staring out at the world waiting to be refurbished by an artist to whom it did not belong.

  But what a glorious masterpiece Birch imagined all those years. He envisioned the artist walking the wild fields among scarlet and gold, searching for the right colors to paint the phoenix. The artist painted by dipping his brush into the flowers and used the stream like a child’s water glass to wash his tools, turning it milky brown. He worked until the ink-colored night surrounded him. He continued painting without his eyes, knowing that in the morning the dark would be gone. Maybe the blackness became a bird as well—a raven spreading its strong onyx wings and departing at dawn.

  The most glorious works of art, the ones that bring the purest joy—perhaps they need not be touched or known, but seen only with the heart.

  Birch often thought about the painting while he washed cars at the Soap and Suds. The way the bubbles formed on the hoods of the cars and caught rainbows of color—blue, green, and iridescent pink, like the inside of a clamshell—made him long to be an artist.

  “Back to work. Stop daydreaming,” the Ringleader yelled, and popped the bubble Birch had been staring at. The dream rose up, humming like a swarm of bees, and departed.

  Birch knew that throughout history there have been many jobs that elephants have performed.

  Elephant Jobs:

  With elephants’ vast employment history, it was not inconceivable that one could be an artist. It was, however, unheard of. And, as with most unheard-of things, there must be a first one to do it before it can be spoken on the tongues of history: the first one able to make us stand still long enough to be astonished by the world.

  And so life was mostly a dream for Birch until the day a baby—me to be exact—crawled in and lit up his world like a firefly under the bell of a flower.

  THREE

  As Simple as This

  I was born a restless sort, a tumbleweed, a wanderer if you will, and the night my parents left me on the orphanage steps, I didn’t wait around to be found. I crawled right out of that basket and made my way into the world.

  I crawled clear across town and settled for the night in a pile of leaves near a building housing an old car wash. Around midnight a storm arrived, racing from the edge of the forest, changing quickly from a few fat drops to curtains of water and sideways-blowing wind. Every man, woman, child, cat, and mouse huddled inside and listened to the sound of the water on the tin roofs. There are some people in the world who immediately close the windows when it begins to rain and other people who run outside. As fate would have it, Birch and I both fell into this second group.

  Not far away from me stood an ancient tree. On one large limb, it held a dense garden of moss and orchids and other plants that have a hankering to grow up high. The rain filled up the bugle bells made by the curled leaves, as well as saturated the dirt around the roots, and finally the weight became unbearable for the old tree after all those years on earth. First an especially strong gust of wind whipped, and a limb broke and crashed to the ground. Then the tree swayed and creaked, finally slicing through the smaller trees and bushes like the parting of the Red Sea. The tree lay on its side, a portion of the root system exposed, bathed in the deep black soil. When the tree fell, it fell a foot away from where I was sleeping. The bang woke me, but I didn’t cry. Birch saw me just the same.

  He approached slowly, put his trunk down, and used it to sniff my head. It felt like a suction cup, and I laughed. He lifted me up with his trunk until I was eye-to-eye with him. “My name is Birch,” he said. “They call me that because I’m white, like a birch tree.”

  “Agga blap gurgle,” I replied.

  “I suppose you’ll need a name,” Birch said. “And since I’m named after a tree, and you’re so tiny, maybe you could be named after a bird. It should be something noble. Something regal. Something elegant. Maybe Falcon or Hawk. Snipe or Kingfisher. Finch or—”

  Just then, a clumsy bird landed on the branch of a tree near us. It was fat and gray and had several feathers missing. I liked that bird. I clapped my hands and giggled.

  “Pigeon?” Birch said. “You want to be named Pigeon?”

  I clapped my hands again.

  “But pigeons are disgusting,” Birch said. “They’re the rats of the bird world. They eat garbage. They’re too fat to fly more than five feet.”

  “Excuse me,” the pigeon said to Birch. “But not all of us can be as svelte as you.” The pigeon stayed on her branch and sang us a few songs before leaving. She wasn’t very good, but I liked the sound. I suppose it reminded me of home.

  “Pigeon it is, little baby,” Birch said. “And you’ll need a last name, something simple, something like Jones. Yes, Jones.” And that, friends, is how I became Pigeon Jones.

  * * *

  The next morning Birch approached the Ringleader. The elephant made a trumpeting sound and then held me up for the Ringleader to see.

  “That baby has extraordinarily large ears,” the Ringleader sneered. “Back in the circus days, I might have been able to give him a job as a big-eared circus freak, but now all I have is this car wash. Do you want me to … wash the baby, perhaps?”

  Birch shook his head no. He picked up the bucket he used to wash cars and threw it out the door. He lifted a sponge and threw that too, just to make his point.

  The Ringleader looked confused. “Quit? You quit? You can barely stop daydreaming long enough to rinse the cars. You’re the least talented elephant I’ve ever met and you quit? You’re fired!”

  Even as a baby, I didn’t like the Ringleader one bit. I didn’t like his haughty tone or his curled mustache. I didn’t like the way he quickly scuttled from place to place like a crab scrambling sideways over his own shadow.

  The first thing Birch did after becoming unemployed was to spend some money. He went to the store and bought a basket. Inside the basket he placed a baby blanket, a rattle, and a bottle of milk. Birch lifted the basket onto his back and then, using his trunk, put me inside. He really did look like a birch tree now, with black wrinkles against white bark and a small nest in his branches.

  I looked around with my big baby eyes. The view from Birch’s back was nothing but endless blue sky. I saw the shape of a giant bird overhead, circling like a mobile over a crib. For a moment it sailed past the sun, so all I could see was its silhouette. I cooed, and then it flapped, and the world was once again full of lovely, lovely light. I soon fell asleep to the steady drum of Birch’s heartbeat saying over and over, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

  Birch lived near the edge of town and slept in a makeshift house, which was really just a roof with three walls made from planks of wood off old circus train cars. The boards had pictures of animals painted on them, but when Birch took them apart and put them back together, the animal parts got mixed up. Now the walls had lion heads on hippo bodies and monkey feet attached to alligator smiles. That’s where Birch and I slept, and we both felt pretty good about that, since nobody could reach me without a ladder.

  That first night I found it hard to sleep and tossed and turned on Birch’s back. All the commotion woke him up and, as gently as he could, he reached his trunk over his head and inside the basket. Slowly, he tickled my stomach with the tip of his trunk, then pulled away, then tickled again. I smiled, then laughed, and reached out my tiny hands.

  A baby’s hands are, some would say, the softest things in the world. An elephant’s skin is not. An elephant’s skin feels like the dry heel on the foot of a man without shoes. However, when I placed my hand on his trunk, Birch knew he had never experienced anything so delicate in his entire life. As he felt my newborn touch, he said, “Where has this been? I’ve been looking everywhere to feel something as simple as this.”

  FOUR

  The Too-Small-for-a-Name Town

  Many people th
ink living on the back of an elephant is pretty strange, but I always felt safe with Birch, like those tiny fish that live harmlessly under the bellies of sharks. Safety, like love, is an odd thing, and it doesn’t always come in a package that we get to choose. Because elephants are so fiercely protective of their babies, I was never allowed to leave Birch’s back. I mean never, never. Never ever. It’s where I slept, ate, played, and showered with the help of Birch’s water-loaded trunk. I didn’t mind. By the time I was nine years old, I even had my own howdah house on Birch’s back. That was where I kept my few personal effects: my toothbrush, chamber pot, comb, and books. An elephant’s back is closer to the sun, and my world was calm, bleached with warmth and brightness.

  Plus, there are lots of people who were raised by animals:

  Furthermore, the people in my town weren’t easy to shock since the place was full of circus performers. A long time ago the circus would settle down during the off-season in a small town. The town was so small that it didn’t even have a name. One winter the circus shut down for good, and most of the folks said, “Staying put here is just as fine as staying put somewhere else,” and they stayed in the too-small-for-a-name town. Soon it became a normal place full of not-so-normal folks.

  There were some former circus performers who fell into their new professions easily after the circus shut down: Franz the Fire-Eater became a well-respected fire chief and Jacques the Giant painted houses. “I don’t even need a ladder,” he’d explain. Four-Arm Fanny started flipping burgers at the local diner, and there was no stopping her spatula. And there was Finn the Thin Man—he cleaned chimneys, just slipped right up inside.

  Since I never had the chance to really know my parents, I made up stories about their lives. I told them to myself so many times before falling asleep, they began to seem close to real, like paintings of memories, like works of art where liberties have been taken with tone and scale. I could look through the broken colors and see their lives. My mama and papa had worked in the traveling circus too. Yes, why, I bet that’s how they met. I imagine my mama was the bearded lady, and if I could just talk to her now, she would tell me the story of how she grew her beard. “I was the beautiful daughter of a rich man,” Mama would say. “And my father wanted to marry me to a neighboring merchant, but I did not love him and prayed constantly to be spared this fate. The night before the wedding, I grew a beard, which immediately extinguished my future husband’s ardor.”