I can’t remember when it changed. What city? What season? Now when we do the elephant walk we gotta look straight ahead, keep our mouths shut, avoid eye contact. The extra hands keep pace between us and the sidewalks, carrying a long line of rope, thick as rolled up newspaper. That rope is dental floss to an elephant, but it’s a barrier for the nutcases. I feel bad for the parents who show up. Those with little ones especially. A mother stuffs the pamphlet in her purse, but by then it’s too late, she’s seen the glossy photos. She looks up, dazed first, then disgusted. And then we move on and it’s another mother, and another after that.
But this was Canada, a civilized country. Sarah’s city. As soon as we pulled in last night, I called five restaurants, asking about their vegan food and if they got flowers or candles or something nice. When she didn’t answer her phone I thought maybe she would surprise me at the barn.
We hoofed through her back streets, the girls in top form, frisky almost, my body humming hope drivel. Hoping Sarah hadn’t paid for a ticket so I could treat her to the show. Hoping she could still eat cotton candy now she was a vegan. Hoping I could find an iron for my new shirt.
The morning was warm. A pleasant kind of muggy. We sweated along, eyes straight ahead. There was some kind of ruckus up round the next corner, two police cars, a bulge of spectators facing away from us, jeers and gasps, and a low-pitched chant with words I couldn’t make out. Ronnie hesitated. She doesn’t like corners, the not knowing what’s next, and I had to prod her shoulder to keep her moving. “Come on now, Ronnie!” I shouted, so she’d know I meant business.
As we started the turn, I got my first glimpse. Halfway up the block there was a small metal cage, dog-kennel size, mounted high in the back of a pick-up parked along the street. Inside, a woman. Young. More a girl really. She was crammed behind the bars, hugging her knees. Naked it looked, painted bright orange, with tiger stripes.
The chant was louder now. The usual hooks and chains stuff. The group surrounding the caged girl turned to us like a wave. Most looked like anaemic kids, pale and skinny. They held signs on posts too heavy for them, with blown up pictures of a dead caged tiger, an elephant getting hit with a pitchfork.
A man holding a crying kid yelled to the sign people, “Get a job why don’t you.”
I hoped like hell Sarah wasn’t anywhere in that crowd; I wanted her to see the magic, not this part. I grabbed Ronnie’s ear with my fingers for support. She was happy enough now that she’d conquered her corner, clipping along real good, ignoring the fruitcakes come to save her. I glanced back, grateful to find the others rounding the bend. After that, I had trouble taking my eyes off that girl in the cage. So did other men, the ones not holding the signs. A few were starting to yell things at her from somewhere in the crowd. Hey, baby, I’ll teach you a few tricks.
A fresh-faced girl pulled away from the others and yelled, “That’s him.” She jumped up and down and pointed, her ponytail bobbing. It was me she was pointing at. “Ivan. Ivan the Terrible.”
The girl in the cage shook the bars. A few of the guys clapped for her. I could see clenched white teeth against her pumpkin skin. I thought she was making growling noises, but I couldn’t hear past the din.
“Ivan. Ivan the Terrible,” they were chanting now.
“Gonna hook the elephant?” yelled the ponytail girl. “Try it, Ivan. Try it.”
Some beefy greaser had hoisted himself up the sidewalk side of the parked truck. He was trying to reach into the cage. The girl had barely enough room to turn around, or pull away if a man’s hand started pawing through the bars.
“It’s okay,” I whispered, hoping Ronnie would hear me. Hoping that tiger girl would hear me, too.
We marched forward. The group booed and crowded close to Jacob, the newbie walking alongside us with the rope. He looked scared as hell.
“Be cool, Jacob,” I said, loud enough to be sure he heard. They all heard.
“Better listen to Ivan,” a girly boy yelled. “Listen up or you’re gonna get beat.”
The two cops stepped forward and raised their arms and told everyone to stand back and settle down.
“We have a right to protest,” said a hungry-eyed boy holding a megaphone. The group quickly formed a circle around him and the cops. “We have a permit.”
“You can’t obstruct the elephant walk,” the cop shouted. “You know the rules.”
Only here was a girl in a striped birthday suit and nobody caring squat about the guy diddling with her cage. We were almost alongside her by this point. So close I couldn’t look at her. It felt obscene, to gawk into a cage with a girl inside. But I didn’t want to lose sight of the asshole poking out from the far side of the truck. His fingers reaching. Nobody doing nothing about it.
We were less than ten feet away. “Hello, Ivan.” The tiger said quietly. The same unsmiling, oh-it’s-you voice that I’d been clinging to across the miles, the years.
I flung my head up too quickly, spooking Ronnie, who flung her head too. I stared past the bars into my daughter’s sea green eyes. I yelled at Ronnie to hold. She froze mid-stride.
“Told you I’d be here,” Sarah said fiercely. This was a voice I didn’t recognize. But she was my girl, crushed into a metal cage. My little girl, nearly naked.
Jacob gripped his rope like he was drowning. Bliss trumpeted from down the stalled line. After that, you could hear a pin drop.
“Sarah, for god sakes. Get down from there. Cover yourself.”
“You can’t make me, Ivan.”
“Sarah, for god sakes.”
“How does it feel, Ivan? You can’t make me do anything I don’t want to do.”
The damn cops, the damn crowd, they were all turned to her, gawping up at her painted body. And still that drooling creature hung off her cage. Something inside me snapped. Some piece I didn’t know was me. I dug into Ronnie to stop her from swaying, screamed at her to hold, and then I lunged under her trunk and under Jacob’s rope and flung myself towards the pick-up to land one solid strike into the small of dickwad’s sweaty back.
* * *
When I lost Sarah that morning, my heart lurched so violently I think it might have stopped beating. She was supposed to be right there behind the rope, sitting cross-legged on her hay bundle. I flung around in circles, screaming her name, scaring the bejesus out of Happy, who fled like a rabbit despite his huge red shoes. Sarah. Sarah. Come here, baby. Where are you, baby?
“Jesus,” one of the hands yelled from across the barn. “Ivan, look.”
“Oh god, oh god,” from another.
“Ronnie. Ronnie’s got her.”
Then the barn went quiet. Ronnie stood on her platform, waiting patiently for her chains, as still as a stuffed elephant, my baby girl between her front legs. My baby girl, crumpled in a ball on urine-soaked planks, clinging to 10,000 pounds of wild, her skinny white arms trying to wrap themselves around the great leathery ankle folds.
I tried not to think, tried not to hear Sarah’s mother. I bent down and placed my stick on the ground, and when I came up, my legs felt too spongy to hold me.
“You’re a good girl, Ronnie,” I crooned, starting at last to get my legs to work. I approached her in slow motion, holding out my empty hands. “Good girl, Ronnie.”
She stared back at me with eyes big as fists.
It was in that moment that Sarah got the hiccups. For such a little girl, she made a hell of a racket. I bargained with God to take my soul or my balls or anything else, just don’t let Ronnie get spooked by the noisy little gasps rising up from under her.
“You’re my girl, Ronnie,” I had almost reached her. “Stay still now.”
“Bad daddy,” Sarah sobbed, clinging even tighter to Ronnie’s ankle. She was crying pretty good by then.
Somehow, without moving a leg muscle, without taking her eyes off me, Ronnie stretched down her trunk, and
when she found the top of Sarah’s head, she rested it there. She held onto my daughter with her rippling finger-like tip until I could reach under and scoop her away.
* * *
Dickwad got his five minutes of fame. Seemed for a day or two, he turned into a number-one elephant activist. He said he was planning a civil suit; his bullhooked back still hurt apparently. But then he wound up in jail for cracking his common-law’s ribs and the suit kinda fizzled.
The ringmaster made a fuss as I was packing my stuff. I was the best elephant trainer he’d ever worked with, it had been a privilege, my legacy would carry on. But I could tell—hell, even a camel could tell—he couldn’t wait to wash his hands of me. I’ve known him over twenty years. It’s all I’ve ever known.
Now I got an apartment in Nebraska with a parking lot view that never changes. I got a cell-phone too, with tiny arrow buttons for God knows what. I don’t expect it to ring, but I need it for when I’m ready to make the call. That day might come.
I work at the Sunnybrook Zoo, a disgrace as far as zoos go. I’m in the mammal house, shovelling shit mostly. Kaylee is the lone elephant, ex-circus, so crippled she can barely stay on her feet while she bangs her head against the concrete wall. I’m supposed to keep on my side of the bars. “Protected contact” they call it, but I wonder who and what they’re trying to protect. Sometimes, after the zoo shuts down for the night, I wait until Kaylee and me are alone, and then I slip through her gate and wrap my arms around her wrinkled, scarred chest and steal great greedy gulps of her elephant air.
The Water Bottle Thief
Chris Benjamin
She was strapped to the bed with the empty water-cooler jug. Strapped down by Mr. Lamkey’s leather belt. He’d be back soon, right?
She didn’t get why the water bottle was there—that five-gallon jug. She remembered stealing it from the youth shelter but that was for her, not Lamkey. Fucking Lamkey. If anything, the bottle—the ten dollars she’d get for it at the depot—was to ward off Lamkey, de-necessitate him, as her brother, Private Jollimore, would put it.
Anyway, apparently it hadn’t gone down that way. Apparently there’d been drugs and booze because the last thing she remembered was her worker coming in the building while she was walking out lugging the water bottle—and bolting.
She didn’t remember seeing Lamkey at all. Yet here she was, strapped to his bed—again—with her goddamn ten-dollar water jug. She was on her left side with her right arm draped over it. She had on a men’s t-shirt. It smelled like dumpster cologne. Like Lamkey. The jug didn’t have a cap, so she blew into it to hear that deep soul trailer-park sound—twuu twuu—and instantly regretted it thanks to an obscene pounding in her head, and the fact that the room picked up and spun itself around. And back again, and the other way, refusing to find equilibrium, like it had an elastic running arse to mouth. And then she puked into the jug and passed out.
When she woke it was totally dark except for the streetlight squeezing through the blinds. Lamkey was snoring beside her, but with his head by her crotch and his dick at her face. The strap was gone but the jug was still there, still stinking of her puke.
She took a deep breath to see if it would stay down. It did. No nausea, just that pounding head. And the room was kind of tilting like it was balanced on a ball.
She sat up, slowly slowly, straining her abs. She was naked now. Abs. What abs? She looked down at her flabby belly. Two years ago she’d been Graham Creighton Junior High’s 200-metre champ.
She felt a little nauseous but she could hold it. She needed to leave. She wondered if Lamkey even paid her. Not likely, that scum-choda. Probably scored her drugs though. That was his main use. That and shelter.
The clock said 2:36. She pivoted her legs off the bed, slowly slowly, so it hurt her groin. She looked down again. What a mess. She needed to get back on the pill. Or stop running into Lamkey.
She looked at him, his greasy combover, moustache that would embarrass most high school boys, skinny limbs, and six-pack belly—like a six pack every night. This wasn’t supposed to happen—he had a court order to stay away from the shelter.
Where were her clothes?
She rummaged through his drawers, through t-shirts with 1980s ad slogans and velour track pants—old enough to be vintage in the right combination by north-end hipsters. She couldn’t be seen in this stuff. People would know.
She opened the closet next to the bed. She couldn’t completely open the door because the bed was in the way. It was darker in the closet so she had to pull out the hangers to see. She stole a glance at Mr. Pervy. Snoring away.
On the hangers were dresses—mostly slutty. His or his victims’, she didn’t know. She found one her size, navy blue with little roses, low cut but not enough to make her look like a hooker. She slipped it on, grabbed her jug and left barefoot.
She couldn’t get into the shelter so late and they probably wouldn’t let her anyway because of the damn water jug. But it was her ticket. She’d cash it in and if she could bum a few more dollars after that she could buy enough cellphone minutes to call her mom in Yarmouth and hash things out. Jesus what a trail of fire she left there after the bitch kicked her out. No, not the bitch. Her mother. She had to suck it up buttercup and apologize, for whatever she’d done wrong. No more bouncing shelter to Grandma’s to Daddy’s to Lamkey’s. She couldn’t live like this forever.
She stashed the water bottle in the dumpster outside the computer science building, hoping no one would steal it. That fucking water bottle. She needed the money. How else was she supposed to get it? Well, there were ways. But when she was leaving the shelter, headed anywhere really, she saw that fucking water cooler, where the workers stood around drinking from cone-shaped paper cups talking about mortgage rates and property taxes and how their kids were in the ninety-ninth percentile or some shit like that and broke all the records and read at a tenth-grade level in preschool and on and on and on and on. Must be nice. Twots.
Fuck ’em. There’d been no one around and no one saw her with the water bottle until she was on her way out. The worker, Kelly, saw her and shouted something. “Hey, is that our water jug?” Something like that. And she bolted. It was done and at least she’d be able to get the cellphone minutes.
She walked to the garage attached to the shelter. It was unlocked. The staff always complained about youth hanging out in there but they also left the thing open. Softies. She went inside, closed the door behind her, and found some cardboard to lie on.
The same damn worker woke her in the morning.
“Don’t you go home, Kelly?”
Kelly looked surprised, put her hands out, palms up. “I just came from home,” she said. “What are you doing in the garage, Tegan?”
“I’m not Tegan anymore.”
“What are you?”
“I’m me. My new name is Dandelion.”
“What are you doing in the garage, Dandelion?”
“It’s this beautiful flower nobody wants.”
Kelly frowned. “I’d actually love to have you stay in the shelter, Dandelion. But you owe us a water jug.”
“Really? That’s all I got to do and we’re cool?”
“That’s it. And stay out of the garage.”
“OK. Sure, Kelly. Thanks.”
The jug was strapped across his back with a belt. He was about two hundred metres away from the computer science building.
“Fuck.”
He was ambling along, bum left leg just like…Lamkey. He turned around and smiled, his tobacco-black smile, bottom two front teeth missing.
She ran to him. “Hey Lamkey, my jug. Thanks, man.”
“Where’d you disappear to in such a hurry, Baby?” He wheezed when he talked. She needed a TB test. He was looking kind of yellow.
“Can I have my water bottle back?”
He horked on the sidewalk and squin
ted in the rising sun. “That was some beautiful night, huh Darling?” He reached his arms out toward her.
She slapped his hands away. “I need my goddamn bottle!”
“I was surprised to find it,” he said. “After you talked so much about how it was yours and you had every right to it and no bitch could take it away, you know?” He wheezed.
“Yeah well I needed to store it. Give it back.”
“Ain’t that my dress, Sweetie?”
She looked down at the roses on the dress, grease-stained from the garage floor. She looked back at his still-squinting face.
“You can have your bottle if I can have my dress, Sweetie,” he said.
“What the fuck am I supposed to wear? Where’s my clothes anyhow?”
“My place. Between the bed and the wall, right where you stuffed them last night. Remember? We were making love, you know, with me behind you. You were so beautiful, like with the moonlight?”
She felt sick again, head pounding, stomach pounding, vagina pounding.
“Come and get ’em.” He turned and limped toward his house.
“Fuck,” she said.
The clothes were right where he said, and of course as soon as she bent over to retrieve them she felt the dress being hoisted up over her ass. “Get out!” she shouted with a hand wave behind her butt.
“I just want my dress back, Dear,” he said, tugging at the hem. “That’s all I ask. Is that so much to ask?”
She turned to him, jeans and hoodie in her hand, and pushed him back. “Ease off. I’m going to the bathroom to change.”
“Aw, c’mon. You weren’t so shy last night, Dandelion.”
“Who told you that name?” She’d just come up with it in the garage.
“Who told me? I gave you that name last night. The beautiful flower no one wants. Except me. Remember? I care about you so much, Dandelion, when no one else will, you know? You’re so special and nobody even knows it but me. I like to help you out; you know that. Remember those nice sneakers?”
Everything Is So Political Page 9