by test
But right then, I didn't know that the elephant's body was under my window because the sky was dark all the time, grey and brown, the same as the water that was all around us. Everything flowed, sky and water and time itself, so you couldn't tell the difference between each day, or even where the water ended and the sky started.
The second or third day, a log floated in the front door and started banging away at the piano. Charles laughed at first and said the old piano had never been in tune anyway, but after a couple of hours of the bang-bang-bang, he stopped making jokes. The piano was only partly covered by water, and the log, pushed in a steady, thunderous rhythm by the current, struck the keyboard in random chords. Every hour or so, the current shifted the log to a different set of keys and a new song banged out to the beat of the river.
I'm going to floot the piano out the front door. I can't stand the racket.
But I cried and said, Don't. I'm too weak to help if you get into trouble. We'll put little pieces of cloth in our ears and it won't be so bad.
The earplugs worked for Charles and me, but not for the baby. She kept pulling them out and wouldn't stop crying long enough for me to feed her and give her something to take the place of the tears. The water continued to rise, lapping against the pictures hung on the downstairs walls and coming slowly up the stairs. Then the bangs and chords changed and the sound came from underwater, so it sounded like you were swimming in a pond, listening to someone playing piano on the bank while you were underwater. Charles and I took out our earplugs, and even though the plunking was muffled, Margaret still cried, wailing, gulping air and tears.
That night, the sound of the underwater music drifted into my sleep and I dreamed I was playing the piano in our sunken house, moving my arms and fingers through the sluggish Mississinewa. Charles stood beside me, clapping
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the beat of the current on top of the piano while Margaret squirmed out of his arms and floated up and up, her white baby gown trailing like wings behind her.
I sat straight up in bed then, awakened by Margaret's screams. Grabbing the baby and her crib, I shook Charles awake. I whispered to him, Will the cradle float? Charles sat up quickly and took the crib out of my hands.
Maybe we're going crazy. From the din.
I said, We can't stop the noise and we can't make her sleep.
Well, Charles said, there's the brandy.
He got a bottle of apple brandy down from the closet and soaked his handkerchief in it and stuck it in Margaret's mouth, rewetting the cloth every few minutes, and she sucked enough of it to finally fall asleep.
Some days later, we were awakened by calls of Hello in there coming from outside our window. The rain had stopped, and Wallace Porter had sent some of his roustabouts on a raft made out of the side of a circus wagon. Charles rigged a rope with the sheets and lowered Margaret in her cradle, then me, then climbed down himself. And wouldn't you know that as we rounded the front corner of the house, we heard the piano shatter blessedly apart and watched it float in pieces out the front door. Charles and I cried and hugged each other, pointing to the piano shards and laughing like crazy people, which I suppose we were, from no food for two days. We sat there on the raft, listening to no rain hammering the roof, no baby crying, no piano plunking, no elephant bellowing, just the miraculous quiet of the current.
The men who saved us were strong from raising tents and sweeping barns, but they had dark circles under their eyes, dead eyes in sad faces that hardly nodded to us before they started heading towards the winter quarters. Charles asked, What's happened to everything? But they didn't reply, so Charles grabbed a plank of wood and started rowing, trying to keep us on course while I sat at the front of the raft and stared into the muddy water where faces of the dead floated up to say Help me please. But it was too late, I knew, and their faces sank back down into the mud. Some of the faces were folks from town, but some were strangers and I wondered how far they had come down the Mississinewa and how far they would go before they would finally stop and how anyone would know who to send them back to.
Animals from the menagerie floated around us or were snagged in branches, and dogs and cats and cows, too. A horse tried to swim to us, eyes wild and blowing water out its nose. Charles threw a rope around its neck and tried to carry it along, but later the rope was pulling straight down, like we'd caught a big fish, and he cut the line off with his pocket knife.
Something big and grey moved below the surface, so I leaned over, when a big burst of air and water in front of me wet my face and I was looking right into the eyes Wallace Porter's prize hippopotamus, Helen. She circled us once and sank back underneath the raft. One of the roustabouts stopped rowing and
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said Maybe she will live and that's all any of them ever said the whole time we were on the raft.
We rowed into the winter quarters and saw Porter's house sitting grandly on an island in the middle of swirling water and most of the animal barns halfdrowned. The roustabouts set us down on the island and the maids ran down the hill, wrapped the three of us in blankets, and helped us towards the house. One woman gave sandwiches to the men, who ate them without speaking and set off again to look for more faces and drag them back to Porter's house.
We found Wallace Porter in his study, which smelled of cigar smoke and whiskey. He was drunk and delirious, mumbling about judgment. Why didn't God tell me to make the circus float, he yelled and shook my shoulders, I would have done it. Then he stepped back and wiped his hands down the length of his face and said in a solemn voice that there was food in the kitchen and plenty of rooms to sleep in. I couldn't stand to see him like that, with so much gone, so Charles and I turned and left his study. We ate some soup in the kitchen and gave Margaret some milk and slept and slept. When Charles woke up, he said I dreamed last week and lived it all over again and I told him I'd done the same, every moment.
Finally, the sun came out, and at first, I thought there was no way in heaven that the earth could soak up that much water. I never did think all that water came from the sky, anyway, because it seemed like most of it sprang up from holes in the earth, from a China flood many years ago, a slow tide always moving through the earth. I think nothing ever happens and then stops happening when it's over. Maybe the Mississinewa Reservoir is nothing more than that same flood from 1913, come back to see us again.
When the water was gone, Wallace Porter opened the front door and Charles and I walked with him down the drive and across the field toward the winter quarters. There were no sounds at all, not even birds, and for a moment, I felt as if the only people alive on the earth were those who'd made it to Porter's house. We could barely take a step without moving branches out of our way, walking around uprooted trees, wagons, roofs, barrels. Everything looked as if it had been boiled and burned and tossed in a tornado, settling down like silt wherever it was.
This must be why the animals were scattered over the fields in the strangest poses, their eyes open and looking up at the flat sky. An elephant lay on its side, big chunks of its hide gouged out, but the blood had all flowed away somewhere. A Bengal tiger hung by its hind legs from a tree down by the river, caught up in the branches. We walked into the gorilla barn and found three dead, trapped in their locked cages.
That day, every time I turned away from death, there was another carcass, another body, and I'd start shaking again. But I don't think I was as sad as Porter was when we walked into Jennie Dixianna's bunkhouse and found her
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pinned to the wall, trapped by her four-poster bed. Charles and I walked back outside, where we heard Porter crying, moving the bed to set her free.
I whispered to Charles, Why didn't she just swim away? Charles had no answer until Porter let us in and we watched him pick up all the empty whiskey bottles scattered over the floor. When his arms were full, he looked around, as if for a trash barrel, and seeing the state of the room, started crying. Her face is still with me, grey as fire ashes, with
leaves and branches twined in her hair like some kind of brownie or fairy.
Charles carried her body up to Porter's house and I asked Porter what we should do about all the carcasses. He sighed like a man letting go of his last breath.
Burn them. Tell the men to cover them in kerosene and burn them.
Maybe if we'd had one of those backhoes, like the ones they used to dig out the reservoir, we could have buried them in one mass gave and erected a cross to mark the place. But we did what we could. We set all the animals on fire, then closed all the doors and windows in Porter's house to keep out the smell, but the stink of roasted, rotten flesh seeped in through the wooden shutters and under the doors, and none of us could eat for those two days.
When we walked outside again all the skeletons were charred black in the sun, not an ounce of flesh left on them. No one knows what Porter did with the skeletons, and most don't care, as long as the bones of the past are sunk somewhere for good. Eventually, though, everything is revealed, floating on the water's surface or tossed on its receding shore. Maybe Porter tossed the bones into a ravine covered now by the reservoir, and one day some shiny ski boat will run smack dab into an elephant's ribcage and crash and wonder how in the world that happened. I'll tell you how. Flesh may burn and rot and wither, but bones stay around for almost forever.
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Prance Williams Swims Again
by Matt Devens
I remember when America was spelled P-A-N-A-C-H-E; when I was six years old and hid from San Francisco's dragontail wind in the folds of Father's greatcoat while he pointed toward the Bay and said, There, son, is nostalgia in the making. We shivered happily on the wharf and watched a hog-tied Jack Fairlane slam through the jagged blue waters off Alcatraz with no fewer than two Cunard liners in tow. Mother's fingers whitened and trembled around her umbrella handle as the bodybuilder parried ink-spitting cuttlefish with gurgling oaths to God and Country and, at least for that day, knocked Great Depression despair on its flaccid ass with a single roundhouse of intrepidity.
Nowadays, Mother and I watch Jack Fairlane's TV show every morning on her old Motorola. I'm sorry, but all the Brilliantine and splendidly monogrammed jumpsuits in the world do not a savior make. This present-day savant of video muscle-moulding simply is not the human tugboat who ferried our hobbled souls out of the Depression. But that fact's lost on Mother, whose daily entrance into the land of the living is cued by Fairlane's five-six-seven-eight. Each morning she sets aside her bowl of farina, shrugs away my token offers of assistance and, with the aid of her aluminum walker, rises to her feet as deftly as any arthritic seventy-five-year-old might. And I invariably flick the set off, free her from her walker, and waltz her through the canyons of bundled old newspapers which wind haphazardly through her small living room. Da-dammit to hell! she sputters as I spin wheatish shocks of her rump-length hair around my fingers. The way Father should have done, and often.
As long as her slippered feet ride atop my own, she's Ginger Rogers. We dip and glide and in this small commotion bump from the wall a lacquered memento of a long-ago vacation in the Rockies, upset the tableau of lead toy soldiers that has occupied the dining-room credenza top for the last thirty years, and dislodge from the bottom of her lungs girlish laughter that's an unfamiliar, but very much welcome salve to my ears. The crash of Mother's onyx paperweight from Carlsbad Caverns punctuates our final jeté and she says That's enough, that's enough. We're no dancers. Now set me down.
Giggles space her short, halting breaths as I lower her into her chair, and seem to retract altogether into the old wedding photographs flanking either side
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of her. You get weirder by the minute, she's wont to say. . . . No, more peculiar by the minute are the words she'll use because I am her son.
But it's good to dance, I counter. Did you ever dance with Father?
A surge of memory clouds her eyes and the years that had spun off of her with our every pirouette reassemble themselves in the lines and crags of her face. Your father and I exercised to Jack Fairlane, she says. Now turn my program back on.
Fairlane's a pathetic old charlatan, I grumble.
To which she offers the resolute pronouncement: Jack Fairlane taught us to survive.
She always hangs me out to dry with that one. I used to think day-to-day survival in itself was just cause for celebration. What more could have been asked of people in a time when one had to count his potatoes and patch the soles of his shoes with cardboard? But then, we've all worn new shoes for the last forty years, so why not dance in them?
One day in 1933, a few months after we moved from San Francisco, I asked Father where he and Mother might go hoofing. It was a torpid summer day in northern Illinois, and the waves of the small lake on which we were fishing slapped the prow of our rowboat in a most indifferent way. Father sighed and pulled a spoon from his tackle box. While his thick, work-cracked fingers affixed the lure to my leader, he said, Oh, if we were to go dancing, I suppose the Aragon Ballroomor maybe the Trianon. But then, we're no dancers.
Oh, I said.
We cast our lines into a rippling image of sun, and not long afterward, Father got the first bite. We got us dinner, boy, we got us dinner! he said, his voice arcing and jerking like his fishing pole. The brim of his dumpy fedora bled dark with perspiration as he reeled the fish in closer to the boat. His fierce, squinting stare wound itself around the line, reinforced it, made it hum.
Sure ain't seaweed, I said.
At the moment, though, all of Father's concentrative powers were engaged in breaking that two-foot walleye pike as if it were an unruly colt; understandably, he neither heard what I'd said, nor felt his fillet knife leave the sheath dangling at his hip. In the same liquid motion, I sliced the taut line with the knife and leapt over the side of the boat. I truly believe I would have caught the fish with my teeth had Father not grabbed my ankle as I was going over Our capsized boat bouyed us until we were rescued, and unfortunately allowed Father a free hand with which to clench my nape. I didn't wince or cry or try to bite his hand; the bubbly trails of our sinking gear did that for me. He spun the handle on his vice-like grip until I thought my neck pores would spout blood, but he let go when the two-foot walleye surfaced belly-up between us. The fish's body was a putrefying mosaic of scabs and gashes, and the accumulation of old hooks in its gills and snout held the afternoon sun like a gypsy's
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earrings. Looks as if the old mule simply swallowed its last hook, Father said lamely while the dents his fingertips had left in my neck filled themselves in.
One night about ten years later, Father finally asked me why I did it. By then I had come to perceive him simply as the orange glow of a cigarette bobbing in the dark, the jangle of a belt buckle, the sweet funk of gin vapors. By then he had yet to take Mother dancing, and two weeks later would be stretched out on the mortician's slab, envenomed by his own liver, the thought of cutting the rug with Mother never having seriously entered his mind. For certain, he and Mother had swallowed Jack Fairlane's radio wave vitamins with smiles as healthy as horses', and survived. Father was surviving, if only in the word's most elemental sense, as his Why? lolled pitifully in the darkness of my room. I told him if he really wanted to know, it was his fault.
I never would have jumped in after the gypsy walleye had Father not taken me to the Chicago World's Fair a few days prior, where I first saw Prance Williams. At the fair, Father gave me a quarter and the run of the place before he joined the legions of hot-blooded young men struggling for an ample peek at Sally Rand and ultimately resenting her ostrich plumes. I rode the rocket cars until I was nauseated, and let a phrenologist divine the secrets life would soon reveal to me just before two women whose breasts he had felt earlier arrived with a policeman to shut down his booth. On my way back to meet Father, I passed a large, unmarked circus tent which I saw no one enter save two men whose felt berets and handlebar moustaches lent them a certain air of aesthetic sophistication. T
he men gibbered in Spanish while they pulled a hand truck loaded with movie cameras and banks of lights into the tent. I strolled over to get a better look and saw by signs discreetly posted at the entrance that whatever was going on inside was closed to the public. I wormed into the tent via the shallow rain trench running beneath its canvas walls, and was instantly mesmerized by the talced assembly of muscle and brooding grace that was Prance Williams. While Jack Fairlane was in some sunny part of the country squat-thrusting to visions of candybars and weight machines bearing his name, Prance was, at that moment, emulating the splayed shape of elms with little more than two sewer caps attached to the ends of an iron bar.
