The Elephant in the Room

by Holly Goldberg Sloan

  She knew that boy.

  It was Mateo Lopez.

  Sila closed the curtain, which was how her mother liked the room.

  Had he walked there before and she’d never noticed?

  11.

  Hours earlier Gio had driven Chester Briot to Oregon First Bank on 7th Street because the ringleader insisted on cash for the purchase of his elephant. But the branch didn’t have $41,000 in currency; they were able to give him only $10,000. Phone calls were made, and Gio and Chester went to four more bank branches in town to collect the rest.

  It felt to Chester as if they were robbers, and at every stop he was getting more and more excited. By mid-afternoon the money had been collected, and two of the enormous Briot Family Circus trucks and one of the vans drove through the large wooden gates and rolled to a stop in front of Gio’s pink farmhouse.

  Veda was in the larger truck.

  And a bear named Mr. Pickles was in the smaller one.

  Gio didn’t pay for the bear. Chester realized that someone like Giovanni Gardino only comes around once in a lifetime, and so he threw in Mr. Pickles as part of the deal, along with his metal cage, which had been custom built with steel bars, rotating wheels, and a double-locked sliding door. Chester was turning over (besides the elephant and the bear) eleven fifty-pound bags of elephant supplemental feeding pellets, six bags of assorted rotting fruit, forty pounds of cull carrots (the ones that are twisted or crooked and not up to supermarket standards), and five bales of hay.

  There were also two metal eating troughs; an aluminum water tub; many lengths of ropes, chain, and rubber padding; a decorative pink harness with a matching custom-made saddle; three different ornamental headpieces with giant ostrich feather plumes, sequins, and gold braiding; six blankets; ankle bells made to fit around all four of Veda’s feet; shovels and cans for poop collection; a special ladder and long-handled brushes for elephant bathing, as well as a box of tools to cut elephant nails and take care of Veda’s foot pads.

  The final item was an official, government-issued notebook with the title Standards and Practices for Elephant Management and Care. It had never been opened and was covered in plastic. Chester turned his back to Gio so that he could rip off the wrapping and bend a few pages to make it seem used. He stuffed inside a bill of sale from when he bought Veda years ago.

  Not much came with the bear.

  The truth was that Chester wasn’t generous. He just didn’t know who would buy his elephant supplies, and getting rid of the stuff meant he would be in a position to immediately unload both of the heavy-duty trucks and the supply van. He tried to sell the vehicles to Gio, explaining that they had been modified specifically for animal transport and he couldn’t imagine how Gio would ever move Veda without it. But Gio passed. Veda was never leaving him to go anywhere, he said. Not if he could help it. And the bear wasn’t getting much thought at this point.

  Rodrigo, the person responsible for the elephant, lowered the custom liftgate on the truck and pushed up the heavy sliding door. He used the bullhook, which was the metal tool outlawed now in most states, to move the elephant backward. It looked like a long, metal spear, and in addition to the pointed end, there was a blade-like hook coming out of one side. It was the hook that did the talking.

  Veda rested her back foot onto Gio’s property and felt the clay-like soil, not asphalt or cement, beneath her. She didn’t detect the familiar smell of portable toilets, overflowing commercial dumpsters, or the grease of deep fryers. She didn’t hear cars. Or trucks. Or motors of any kind. There were no sounds of people. Or their loud music.

  This wasn’t a truck stop, a county fairground, a cheap motel, or a civic center parking lot.

  Veda slowly lifted her trunk and let it sway gently in the afternoon air. The elephant inhaled the sharp, tingling smell of the pine needles from grand fir trees. She detected vine maple. White alder. The pungent smooth madrone tree bark. She got a whiff of the delicate pink manzanita blossoms. There was wild ginger growing somewhere. Cedar. Sweet woodruff. Western lark. Osoberry. Engelmann spruce. Sword ferns. Golden currant.

  The elephant’s body seemed to grow taller as her nose absorbed the variety and complexity of natural odors. Veda’s enormous ears suddenly flared wide. She heard the wind rustle in the treetops and the sound of chirping sparrows, towhees, and buntings. Two bullfrogs called out from a ditch nearby, and somewhere close dozens of bumblebees buzzed in and out of a hive.

  Veda heard it all.

  It was a symphony to her.

  It was the call of the wild.

  The elephant moved away from her mobile prison and looked out past the farmhouse where she saw only open space. There was a sloping landscape of leafy trees, meadows, and in the distance, golden hills.

  And then her eyes fell on Gio.

  He stood perfectly still.

  Veda turned to him. He didn’t seem afraid. He seemed to be in awe.

  The elephant took several steps forward and stopped. Gio stretched out his hand, and Veda’s trunk extended to meet it. Gio whispered, “This is all yours now. This is your forever home.”

  Chester made certain the bear was moved in his wheeled cage out of the second truck and into the old barn so fast that Gio never saw it happen. The old man stood motionless alongside Veda, whose trunk was carefully investigating the top of his gray-haired head, strand by strand. Chester tried not to explode from sheer excitement. He had pulled off the highway to get donuts and would be getting back on the roadway only hours later with over forty thousand dollars in cash and without a two-ton elephant and a cranky bear. Chester had heard Gio’s story as they collected money and had decided he was the one, not Gio, who was winning the state’s Powerball lottery!

  Chester’s plan before he went into the Hole in One bakery (if he could say he’d even had a plan) was to try to find a zoo for his elephant. But Chester had never received an exotic animal permit. He didn’t do the regular (and required by law) veterinarian checkups. He had never been caught breaking the rules because the circus was forever on the move, always wheeling into a new town, in a new state, with new officials. So as long as Chester kept printing out false documents and acting with great confidence and authority, he’d never had a problem.

  But he had to get this deal done as quickly as possible before the enormous burden of elephant ownership sunk in and Gio had second thoughts. He needed to be somewhere untraceable before this eccentric old man wearing expensive bedroom slippers could change his mind. Or at the very least before the guy got his foot smashed when Veda went in the wrong direction.

  Chester tried hard to look sad, but he wasn’t sure it was very convincing, when he announced, as if into a microphone, “Veda, it is here that we say our goodbyes. This is where I leave you.”

  The elephant was having none of it. Veda’s final act in the farewell charade was to drop her trunk to the ground, scoop up dirt, rocks, and pine needles, and in one well-aimed motion fling it all right at Chester.

  He could have lost an eye.

  Veda had scored a direct hit. After Chester recovered, wiping his cheeks with his sweater sleeve, he managed to sputter, “I’ll miss you too. Don’t be angry. Believe me, this is all for the best.”

  Pretending that the elephant had reacted harshly because she was so sad to see him go, Chester went straight to the large transport truck, slamming the door shut with such force that the whole vehicle swayed.

  Gio watched Veda allow Rodrigo, her daily caretaker, to touch her hind leg, but as the man said goodbye, she wouldn’t look at him. Rodrigo moved to hand Gio the bullhook, saying, “Here. Use this to control her.”

  Gio shook his head. “You can keep that.”

  “You’re going to need it. Trust me.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “She’s stubborn,” Rodrigo insisted. “You don’t have to poke her hard. Just give her a nudge with this when you ne
ed her to move. She knows. Makes her afraid.”

  “I don’t want her to be afraid.”

  “She’s dangerous. Do you understand? She can kill you if she wants to—it wouldn’t be hard. There are all kinds of ways for her to do that. Not just trample you to death.”

  Gio found the man’s harsh tone unsettling. “You should go.”

  Rodrigo shook his head in dismay. He tossed the metal hook on the ground at Veda’s feet and got into the truck. His last words before he started the engine were, “She’s smarter than you think. And a whole lot stronger. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  The man who had been dealing with the bear was already waiting in his truck with the motor running. He leaned out the window and shouted at Gio, “For a reward of a chunk of raw salmon you can get Mr. Pickles to ride a tricycle, especially if you got a whip in your hand. He can clap his paws together if someone sings ‘If You’re Happy and You Know It.’ He can blow a few notes on a trumpet. I’m not saying he wants to do any of that. I’m just saying he can. But I’d leave him alone for a while. He’s a real grump this time of day.”

  And with that, the three Briot Family Circus vehicles headed off the property and disappeared down the road. Gio wasn’t sure it was possible, but he thought he heard Veda sigh with relief once the high wooden gates closed behind them. He knew he did.

  Chester Briot’s euphoria over selling Veda didn’t last very long. The ringmaster had no way of knowing that once Veda was gone from his daily world, he would be gripped with a sadness that was unshakable, unrelenting, and unsolvable.

  A dark cloud hit the man and he was troubled by recurring nightmares where he was trapped in a cage, transported in a truck for miles on end, never to arrive at a destination. It wasn’t just the persistent terrors that came to haunt him. From the day he sold Veda, Chester was plagued with dryness in his eyes that caused him to have problems blinking. It took a specialist in Salt Lake City to finally make the correct diagnosis: Chester Briot had keratoconjunctivitis sicca, or severe dry eye syndrome. His tear ducts were closing off. He could no longer cry. Going forward, every hour on the hour when Chester was awake, he needed to put artificial tears in his eyes.

  Once the elephant was gone from his world, it was as if a curse had set hold. Chester didn’t believe in such things, but if he could later trace back his various health problems (and he tried many, many times), it would all lead to the afternoon he sold Veda. Maybe it was something in the dirt the elephant had thrown at his face. Regardless, Chester would find himself thinking about her every day for the rest of his life.

  Veda, on the other hand, would never think about him again.

  12.

  The first thing Gio did once he was alone with Veda was go inside his farmhouse to change out of his bedroom slippers. If the elephant moved in the wrong direction and he got in the way, she could easily break his arthritic toes. Or worse.

  “I’ll be right back. Just wait here,” he had told her. He had put a full bag of red apples at her feet. They were, Rodrigo had said, a special treat.

  It was only moments later, as Gio was tying the laces on his boots, that he heard a crash. He ran out of his farmhouse to find the apples still in a mound, but Veda standing with her right foot on the now-destroyed first step going up to the porch. She’d been trying to follow him inside.

  “Are you okay?” Gio shouted. He wasn’t worried about losing a wooden step or even an entire front porch. “I’m so sorry! I shouldn’t have left you alone.”

  His only concern was for Veda. And she must have felt that: She hadn’t taken her eyes off of him. Gio reached for an apple and held it out. Veda’s trunk carefully took it from his flattened palm.

  She was such an amazing combination of power and grace, he thought.

  Chester had explained that Veda was on the small side for an Asian elephant, weighing just over five thousand pounds. Yet from that moment on, she followed Gio around like the world’s largest new puppy.

  After he’d looked through the big pile of supplies that the circus people had dumped in front of the farmhouse, Gio remembered the bear. There had been so much excitement, he hadn’t given any thought to his other acquisition. Mr. Pickles was inside his cage in the barn, moving around with agitation.

  Veda, who had followed Gio, had been able to move right through the opening of the double doors, which were just tall enough to accommodate the top of her head. She stood at a distance from the bear cage, eyeing Mr. Pickles with what looked like little enthusiasm.

  Gio found four enormous bags of cheap dog food piled in the corner of the barn. A case of grape jelly was leaning against the dry dog food. A note read:

  MR. PICKLES EATS IN THE MORNING AND AT NIGHT. TEN CUPS OF DRY DOG FOOD EACH TIME. YOU CAN GIVE HIM ANY BRAND OF FOOD. IT DON’T MATTER. THE BEAR LIKES IT IF YOU PUT SCRAMBLED EGGS OR JELLY (GRAPE IS BEST) ON TOP. IT’S UP TO YOU. HE WILL EAT THE DOG FOOD WITHOUT THAT WHEN HE GETS HUNGRY ENOUGH.

  HE KNOWS THE WORD “NO.” SO SAY THE WORD “NO,” AND BE VERY LOUD ABOUT IT.

  MR. PICKLES HAD HIS CLAWS REMOVED WHEN HE WAS YOUNG. HE ALSO HAD FOUR TEETH PULLED. THE BIGGEST ONES. HE WOULD NEVER SURVIVE IN THE WILD BUT YOU STILL GOTTA WEAR THICK LONG-SLEEVE SHIRTS AND BEST TO PUT GLOVES ON WHENEVER YOU ARE NEAR HIM.

  DO NOT TURN YOUR BACK ON THIS BEAR.

  EVER.

  MR. PICKLES LIKES TREATS. BUT HE CAN GET MEAN ABOUT WANTING THEM.

  REMEMBER! YOU ARE IN CHARGE, NOT MR. PICKLES. DO NOT ROUGHHOUSE OR WRESTLE WITH MR. PICKLES. EVER.

  HE HAD HIS INCISORS PULLED BUT HE CAN STILL BITE HARD.

  Gio put down the note. It was then that he saw an electric cattle prod leaning against the wall. There was a second note taped to the four-foot weapon. He was horrified as he took hold of the prod and read:

  HE KNOWS WHAT THIS MEANS. IF YOU WAVE IT AND SHOUT ORDERS HE WILL LISTEN. IF HE DOESN’T, GIVE HIM A ZAP.

  TWO ZAPS REALLY GETS HIS ATTENTION.

  Mr. Pickles froze when Gio picked up the weapon. He watched like a statue as Gio carried the prod to a storage cupboard, tossed it inside, and shut the door. Gio then walked over to the metal enclosure to look at the bear more closely. He saw that the fur was mostly gone on the animal’s elbows and parts of his legs. On his backside, his entire coat was flattened down to a smooth, greasy-looking carpet. Gio figured this could only mean that Mr. Pickles had been forced into the same position in his cage for far too long.

  The thought of so much confinement combined with the electric prod broke Gio’s heart. He immediately unlocked the cage door and unhooked the two security latches that held it firmly in place. He then slid the heavy metal panel open and stepped back quickly, all the while keeping his eyes on the bear.

  At first, Mr. Pickles didn’t move. Then the tip of his nose twitched. The bear stared at the open cage door.

  At Gio.

  At the elephant.

  At the big, empty barn.

  The look on Mr. Pickles’s face seemed to say: “Is this some kind of trick?”

  Gio was riveted as the six-hundred-pound mammal lumbered in slow motion out of the cage. He appeared a lot stronger once his whole body could be seen. The bear was thick, his step was heavy, and as he moved, the air filled with a sharp smell. Then suddenly his slow-motion hesitation came to an abrupt end and he switched gears. The bear was instantly a blur of speed as he went straight for the bags of dry dog food. Mr. Pickles ripped open the top sack in what to Gio was terrifying quickness. The orange, red, and yellow pellets of Feeling Free tumbled (with no irony, Gio thought) onto the dirt floor of the barn. But Mr. Pickles didn’t eat a single chunk of the newly liberated dog food mess. He spun around, maybe expecting someone from the circus to appear from the shadows and start yelling (or worse).

  When that didn’t happen, the bear looked confused, and then invigorated! He returned to explosive action. Veda swun
g her trunk as if to say “stay away,” and Mr. Pickles kept his distance. He was fast as he circled the barn, peering into the empty stalls, taking a roll in dirt clods, and then returning to his four feet. In a flash of moving fur he changed course and went straight past Veda and out the barn’s double doors.

  Gio couldn’t believe that his own legs could still run hard as he took off after the bear. It was the first time in over twenty years that he’d been in a full sprint. Mr. Pickles went straight for Gio’s farmhouse. His paws might have looked large and inept, but that was far from the truth. He bounded over the step that Veda had crushed and turned the knob on the front door as if he’d lived there all his life.

  13.

  Gio did his best to sound in control as he shouted a thunderous “NO!” But Mr. Pickles gave no indication that he’d ever heard the word before. Once inside the house the bear knocked over a coatrack, upended a lamp, and broke a big porcelain bowl on a side table. He went straight for the kitchen to the refrigerator, where he opened the freezer, and in only seconds was holding a gallon of chocolate mint ice cream in his front paws. He pulled off the top of the container and scooped the contents into his mouth in greedy gulps of pure pleasure.

  Veda, standing outside at the kitchen window, watched as Gio ran shouting into the room. Mr. Pickles tossed the empty ice cream tub in Gio’s direction and got hold of two frozen, single-serving chicken potpies. He ripped into the cardboard boxes, and his teeth snapped down hard. He seemed to have no trouble swallowing icy chunks of pastry and chicken with rock-hard gravy.

  The bear next went for the non-freezer section of the refrigerator. He got hold of two sticks of butter, swallowing them with the waxed paper still on. He tossed mustard, ketchup, and relish bottles aside, but when he came across a container of maple syrup he grunted so hard with obvious glee that snot came out of his nose. He tore the top off with his teeth, splattering cold, sticky sweetness onto the kitchen walls.