Elephant Bangs Train

by William Kotzwinkle

  They stood on the blazing airstrip, gazing deeply into each other's eyes. Clarkbar laid his thumb upon her forehead, between her brows.

  'Beware of false swamis,' he said, and departed.

  The advice was wasted on romantic Adria, who quickly fell in with magicians. Soon she was leaving her body at night on plunges to the heart of the earth, where she danced in dreams of red and green, adorned in luminous macaroni. The violent nature of the handsome demons excited her fancy, and they were not averse to burying their thunderbolts in her mortal coil.

  When her visa expired, however, Adria was tired of witchery, and wanted to go home, to the lawns of La Spina, to its familiar walls and gardens. To the beat of a dark drum, slapped in the moonlight by black hands, she boarded an Air India coach. By strange coincidence, her travelling companion was the distinguished psychologist, Doctor B. F. Goodreich. Moonlight gleamed on the swept wing. Adria told him of her vision on Otukisama Bridge.

  'Amitaba is a projection,' said the exalted physician. 'That is to say, my dear young lady, you are Amitaba.'

  Norton Blue and his double-dyed crew were waiting for Adria at Roma International Airport, blowing paper snakes. At the sight of Blue's head, on which a Bulgarian postmark was tattooed, Adria burst into tears.

  The depraved band boarded a rented limousine and drove to La Spina, where a welcome party for Adria had been going five days. Music and laughter filled the air, and exotic slide shows designed by the master, Blue himself, flickered in several rooms, featuring the degraded Brazilian café star, Captain Diez y Ocho and his defiled gorilla.

  Blue showed Adria to the kitchen, where a wizened oriental in ceremonial robe was supervising the preparation of meals.

  'In view of your Eastern trip,' said Blue, 'I took the liberty of hiring Fat Tong here. He is a disciple of D. T. Yumabachi, the Macaroniotic Master. Yumabachi, as you may recall, ate but a single macaroni a day boiled in dog's milk, slept standing up in a cupboard and lived to the remarkable age of twenty-seven. Delicious,' said Blue, taking a spoon of soup.

  In the third week of the party, Monsignor Farina visited Adria secretly in the night by the rose trellis outside her balcony.

  'Signora,' said the priest, waving a smoking censer, 'you must be more discreet.'

  'Father,' said Adria, 'the old ways are gone.'

  There was a knock at her door. The prelate quickly crawled down the trellis to the ground. The paparazzi, led by Blue, leapt out of the bushes with their cameras.

  'Back, back!' cried Monsignor Farina, waving a sprig of garlic in the air.

  Eyes watering, unable to focus, Blue cringed.

  Monsignor Farina fled out the gate, chased by the dogs, his bald head shining like a poached egg in the moonlight.

  The paparazzi revived Blue with brandy. He sat up, saw Adria on the balcony in her pale dressing gown.

  'What do you suppose accounts for their firmness, gentlemen,' said Blue, pointing to Adria's heaving bosom, 'hormone cream in her cannoli, perhaps?'

  The paparazzi lifted him up, adjusted his electric tie. 'I must go to her,' said Blue, and taking hold of the trellis, ascended to the balcony.

  'Will you marry me?' he asked, clinging to the railing.

  Adria looked at him, did not speak.

  'We might have a small ceremony,' said Blue, 'you in a rubber gown, I in a chicken suit . . .'

  'Norton,' said Adria in a whisper, her fingers moving over the jewel of Amitaba which she wore around her neck.

  'Yes, my dear?'

  She put her arm through Blue's. Turning him towards the western sky, she pointed to the dark horse nebula. 'I belong to one out there,' she said.

  Blue held a small plastic viewer to his eye, pointing it at the moon. 'Peculiar posture this woman is in, look here—'

  'He's very old,' said Adria, 'and has united himself with—'

  '---with a seeing-eye dog, it's an extraordinary pose—'

  '—with the principle of nature,' said Adria.

  'Here,' said Blue, handing her the little viewer, 'when you turn this wheel, the dog sits up and begs.' He let go of the balustrade and climbed slowly down the trellis to the ground.

  Spring came; Adria went out to enjoy the gentle wind blowing on the hills. The sun was climbing behind La Spina. For a moment it seemed to balance on the crest of a hill, and out of the glaring disc stepped a figure, walking down the wooded path alongside the estate.

  At first, Adria thought he was dancing, then she saw a hapless spastic, whose walk was that of a tangled puppet, manipulated by a fiend. He was a shrunken wretch, and carried a small seabag on his shoulders. His arms seemed hidden somewhere up behind his back, but then Adria saw he had no arms at all, only little hands, like flippers, growing out of his shoulders. He wore a sailor's blue watch cap, and as he walked, whistled through fish-lips, a senseless tune.

  Agog, Adria feasted her eyes on famine. The little man's head was off-centre, permanently turned several degrees to the right, so that he appeared to walk sideways in drunken fandango. He flopped by her, but she could not see his face, for his neck was buckled towards the other side of the path.

  Circling gulls jeered at him. What did he care, he was born in a bone warp. Below were the olive trees, ahead the horizon, his goal the waterfront, for he was a wharf rat, and hung like flotsam by docks and piers, crouching for a bone from the ship's mess, hoping to be shanghaied and drowned. His chest was collapsed; hunf-tweet he breathed and flung himself on, past the villa, making to go forward his monstrousness, snort, snort.

  Adria manoeuvred in front of him. The sun was behind her dragon gown and her luxurious curves were apparent. The wharf rat's miserable left eye was focused up the road, but his right was obliquely upon her; pure symmetry terrified him, and he steered his wreck past her, averting his gazes.

  'Please,' said Adria, and stepping around him, looked into his face. It was a gargoyle, with temples bloated like a hammerhead shark; he had no eyebrows and his nose was a baboon's. His skin was sick and prickly as a plucked chicken. In human traffic, he was a monster. What archetype inspired his existence, to what class of being he was avatar of beauty, cannot be known by a groping mortal. Yet something in Adria responded, some frimpish bugle in her own spirit blew at the sight of the fluke, for she groped his rope belt, trying to detain His Monstrosity for lunch at La Spina.

  The little ugliness struggled up the path, dragging her behind him. His twisted legs were strong, but his wind was short, and he weakened.

  'Come with me,' said Adria, 'I'll give you something to eat,' and she manoeuvred him into the flower gardens of La Spina, down the stone walkway, to the marble pool given her in a moment of supreme indiscretion by United States Senator Sparrow Bowlwater, who had attempted to snorkel her at a health spa. The pool was shaped like a cowboy boot; the stupefied spastic sat on the toe, barking for air.

  'Darling,' said Adria, massaging the muscles of his neck, a sailor's nightmare of knots.

  He looked at her suspiciously out of the corner of his toad-eye, then pointed to his reflection in the water.

  'Yes, beloved,' said Adria. She fingered the buttons on his ragged middy blouse, and finally removed it, unveiling a lizard-scale skin with odd clumps of hair and the duck-like flappers which grew out of each shoulder.

  'May I get comfortable?' asked Adria, and removed her gown, pressing a breast into his fin-fingers. He fondled it abstractly. She encircled him from behind with her legs but in her passion went too far, and the duck-man tumbled forward into the pool. He flapped his fins for a moment, then sank.

  Adria dived after him. He sat on the bottom, a hideous blowfish, bubbles rising from his mouth. She clutched his belt and brought him to the surface, shoving him on to the patio where he lay, flopping.

  She applied pressure to his warped seachest. Gasping, he opened his eyes.

  'Yes, darling, you need air,' said Adria, and with some difficulty removed the trousers off his corkscrew legs. The
mock-sailor lay naked, then, and she beheld his precious cargo—a mouse's sack and a rat's tail.

  Out of the bushes stepped the deteriorate Blue, quietly motioning his cameramen into position. They fixed tripods, read the light.

  Adria lowered herself slowly on to the little sea urchin, slipping his cargo into her hold.

  The cameras began grinding. 'Oh, god,' moaned Adria, and cast off, rowing gently, up and down.

  'Arf, arf,' said the wharf rat, in diverse spasm, making signals with his flippers, legs twitching.

  'Down, darling,' said Adria, shaking her poop-deck, 'take me . . . down stream.'

  'A mystical invocation,' said Blue, 'are we running sound?'

  'Definitivamente, signore.'

  Adria felt waves breaking around her, heard the roaring of surf.

  'Arf!' sang the duckman, staring at the sky. 'Curious tongue,' said Blue, 'get a boom mike in there.'

  The waves tossed Adria up, then let her down, and the wharf rat's oar sank deep into her salty lagoon. She closed her eyes, saw the blue ocean and floating upon it, a stink-weed bud. The waves broke around it, stirring its homely petals. She squeezed her thighs together, locking the dwarf-sailor's oar. The stink-weed flower turned in a whirlpool, opening slowly.

  'Darling,' groaned Adria, quivering on the mainmast,

  'I'm sinking . . .'

  'Arf!'

  'Sink me, sink me!' cried Adria, as the waves rushed in, warm and bright, drowning her.

  'Arf, arf!'

  The stink-weed opened; in it sat a thousand-finned seaman, with jewelled hammer-head, frog-eyes glowing like pearls. I am a traveller, he whispered, and exploded into a thousand seamen, and they sailed down the foaming crest to the cove.

  'Adria,' said Blue, 'cheat your head a little to the right, that's it, darling. Camera One, close up on that.'

  Adria bathed her lover at poolside, cooing like a seabird in his webbed ears. Tenderly, she buttoned him into his trousers and slipped the middy blouse over his head.

  The wharf rat stood before her in his little blue hat. She removed from around her neck the jewel of Amitaba and gave it to him along with a macaroni sandwich. He put them in his seabag. Then, bending over, he picked up a small round stone in his flipper and handed it to her. Shouldering his bag, he flopped out the gate and struggled down the path, towards the farther valley, without looking back.

  Adria went after him. 'No, my dear,' said Blue, restraining her, 'you can't keep him here.'

  'I must,' said Adria, weeping. 'He is Amitaba,' but as she spoke a veil fell away from the day and she saw all around her the face of Amitaba, hideously beautiful, sublimely twisted, written in the leaves, the gates, the road, in Norton Blue's electric tie.

  'All right, gentlemen,' said Blue, signalling to his camera crew, 'wrap it up. I should like to be in the gutter before sunset.'

  Nippy

  HE WAS a low cur, born of the streets, descended from so many lines of body, bone and blood that he was nearly not a dog at all, but seemed to represent a nether region of the species, some exiled post on the last receding ledge of the canine family, beneath which there was only the dark domain of the rodent, to whom he bore a remarkable resemblance.

  His name was Nippy for he had teeth as sharp as needles and biting people was his first love, though he was also fond of chewing shoes and table legs.

  We shared my room, but that was all we shared, for Nippy could not be trained or trusted. He would not sit up, roll over, or be a watch dog; he watched only for a chance to escape, and if he got out of the house without his leash, ran straight for the garbage dump.

  On a leash, he would bite anyone he came near, with a preference for the tender white meat on the leg of our neighbourhood priest, though he would settle for the dark meat of the priest's housekeeper.

  The rest of the walk he spent winding the leash around a tree, under a fence, or into some bushes, forcing me to release my grip or be blinded by pickers. Off he would go, chasing some dark fugitive scent, the leash trailing behind him.

  Perhaps our closest moments were those spent in the chase, for they are the only ones I remember clearly—running down grey alleyways in the afternoon, between buildings, over fences, off of walls, Nippy plunging into space, with me behind him.

  Finally, he went too far. Mother, Father, and I had gone away for the weekend, leaving Nippy locked in my room with a bowl of food and water. When we returned, I ran straight to my room to see my little friend.

  The room was covered with feathers. Nippy had pulled the pillow off my bed and dragged it around the room, shaking it in his teeth no doubt, like a soft white goose he had by the throat, slamming it up and down on the floor until it lay limp and empty, its feathers spreading in a mist which had settled over everything in sight.

  Lying on the floor was a tall wooden clothes tree he'd managed to topple after leaving some dark wet stains on its carved claw feet. My father's fishing hat, which had hung on the tree, was in the middle of the room, ripped to shreds, like a murdered bird.

  'What did you do?' yelled my mother, waving her finger in Nippy's face, which I quickly covered with my own.

  'What did you do here?' shouted my father, picking up his battered hat and chasing Nippy around the room with it, landing several loud slaps on the dog's bony brown behind, as the mist of dancing feathers was swept into the air.

  'Who did this?' yelled my mother, blowing feathers from her nose and mouth, and pointing to a malodorous deposit Nippy had made, not on the newspapers which she and I had so carefully laid down for him, but on my game linoleum, right in Little Miss Muffet's lap.

  My father opened the back door to sweep out the feathers, and Nippy darted out between his legs.

  'Let him go,' said my father. 'If he wants to go, let him go.'

  I went after him, but he'd got older and wiser, especially to the ways of the alley. He was far ahead, free and going farther, without a leash, without a collar, without a thing of ours but his name.

  'Come back, Nippy!' I cried, but he didn't look back. The day was grey and the wind strong, with something irresistible in it, a wild smell blowing up from the underworld.

  He turned a corner far away, and when I turned it after him, he was already into the garbage dump, racing down the dusty road, through the smouldering trash, into the world of the rats.

  I ran along in the junk, to where the road bent down to a great shelf of trash, and sighted him bounding over the tin cans, headed for the woods beyond the dump.

  In those woods, the hobos lived; sometimes you'd hear of a girl going in there with young men for dark pleasures, and into these woods Nippy plunged, through the large weed leaves, seeking his own sinister joys.

  I had nothing to offer him, standing in my short pants and suspenders, peering across the smoking dump into the forbidden wood. He was older than me, a thousand years older, an old dog of ancient ruin, going, gone.

  Elephant Bangs Train

  Reuters News Service Nairobi, Kenya May 25, 1969

  YELLOW FLOWERS on the hillside tempted him upwards. He climbed the green slope, pulling the flowers up with his trunk and swallowing them down. The herds were grazing and there were no screams. The cats had hunted and eaten in the coolness before dawn and were sleeping now on the sunlit cliffs. The elephant's custom was to eat from sunup to sundown, and he tossed his tail happily, for the yellow flowers were exceptional.

  He nibbled his way on to a plateau, where a peculiar path appeared, wide and covered with stones, like a river-bed. The flowers grew between the stones and he ate his way along the strange path, wondering what animal made use of it. On either side of the path was a shining bone, hot, with unfamiliar scent, curving through the trees. Never had he seen anything like it in his own part of the jungle.

  He had wandered far from the herd, on the trail of greener leaves, and dark-winged birds of death circled in the sky of the unknown land, but he was not anxious. He had dealt with the leopard
and impaled the sleek cheetah. With the lion, there had never been dispute, for it was not good for kings to quarrel. He continued down the path, consuming flowers and grass.

  Suddenly the monkeys began to chatter, as when a big cat reveals himself and races through the grass. The antelope scattered on the plain. The elephant stopped eating and heard, far off, the roar which had frightened the antelope. It was like many elephants running, but he could distinguish no familiar voice. He returned to his eating, with ears forward, and one eye to the trees. The ground began to tremble, and he continued to eat, with no further pleasure, the yellow flowers.

  He saw a great shadow slip through the distant trees. It seemed like many, yet he saw only one body, moving fast. Black dust flew in the air above the treetops, and the monkeys cried Run! Were he not of noble breed, he might have done so. Indeed, were he a dog or jackal there would be no issue. Since he was a king there was no question. He remained on the path and watched the long shadow advancing.

  Bright and glistening, with many teeth, a great swift serpent came out of the trees. He faced it, ready to debate over territory. It was dark-headed, with cold, expressionless eye, and lashed an enormous tail.

  Slowly it came towards him, and he blew an introductory note of warning, but it was lost in the hiss of the great snake. Almost atop him, it swallowed up the bones and flowers on the path, and screamed for him to stand aside. His ears twitched with pain from the scream, but he did not move, for the thousand eyes of the jungle were upon him.

  The serpent pushed him, and roaring with anger, he pushed back, but the stones slid beneath his feet. He slipped backwards, and the sharp cold teeth of the serpent came between his legs, knocking him off balance. He struggled to hold on to the serpent with his trunk, but his legs were pushed from underneath him. The ground slipped away, he fell, and bleating furiously, tumbled down the hill.

  Dumbfounded at the outrage, he struggled to his feet. The serpent passed without further attack. Its tail clicked triumphantly, and its harsh scent filled the air, burning his nose.