§
The Devil and Carl go off into one of the back rooms of hell, and Louis waits. When Carl emerges, he's wiping tears from his face, and when the Devil emerges, he is smiling bravely, abandoned again in the Underworld.
“Boy-O,” says the Devil. “Looks like Carl wants you up there.”
Louis looks around at the perfectly mounted hydra ghost, at the jellied mold of Dante, labeled simply “Cartographer,” at the feathered phoenix ignitus interruptus.
“Does this mean I'm dying?” asks Louis. He's only 28. At the museum he was in the middle of the Nile, and next, it would have been wild game, a particularly nice and nearly intact lion skin acquired from a dowager.
“Dying isn't such an awful thing,” says Carl, comforting him.
“Dying is just a pneumatic tube,” says the Devil. “One goes up, one down.”
“Does this mean I'm dead?” asks Louis.
“You're in demand,” says Carl. “Look at your work.”
Louis looks down at his stomach instead, checking for a seam. There is none. “Am I an angel?”
“You'll be the official taxidermist. There are privileges to your position,” says Carl. “I'm offering you your dream job, Louis.”
Discovery:
Job Description: All things bright and beautiful may be the aim of the collection, but one may, when falling in with God, never realize that one is being interviewed. God, all Alpha and Omega, all open-armed and bare-chested in one's bed, may never be discovered to be a collector on hiatus from his curation. Nature contains the tentacle and the thorn, the tusk, the membrane, the perfect dusty fish scales of butterfly wings. Nature contains the kissed, the loved and the employed, the insects. Heaven's inhabitants may only be examples of everything that has ever existed on Earth. A taxidermist in heaven must stitch and stuff, smooth and arrange. Sometimes he may return to the bed of the curator, and stay there a century, drifting in a sea of feathered reckoning. Then will he return to the eternal skinning and sewing of souls. Compensation commensurate to experience.
§
Louis takes a moment.
“What if you die?” Louis says, and then points at the Devil. “What if he does?”
“Then you preserve Carl and put Carl in the collection,” says the Devil. “Or me, for that matter. One day. You never know. I prefer a barbed wire armature.”
“I like papier-mâché,” says Carl, “though if it's available you might be better served by making an armature of spun glass.”
“If you're kind, you'll bring me up to the higher place for display, Boy-O, when I go,” says the Devil, and then he passes Louis his valise, and kisses him on the cheek in the prickly way one kisses the lover of one's love.
A little scrap of ghost hangs out of the bag, and Louis tucks it in. If it is so ambitious, it deserves to ascend. He follows Carl into the pneumatic capsule, and then, with shocking speed, the great winds of heaven pull them up, and up, from beneath the skin of the Earth and into the vault of the sky.
If You Were a Tiger, I'd Have to Wear White
The lion sat in a lounge chair, his cocktail coupe full of something redder than bourbon and darker than blood. He lapped at it unhappily, his eyes settling on nothing in particular. He was flanked by two aging blondes in tarnished spangles, their diamante balding, but still impressive, even in the unforgiving light of the California afternoon.
Leo, the star of the opening sequence of every Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Film since the 1920s, and I, a 28-year-old journalist on assignment for a men's magazine, looked out at the half-full pool. A few of the pythons and boa constrictors drifted on their backs, their skins shedding into the chlorine. I'd gotten used to it. I'd been here six weeks and the Forever Roar refused to give me the time of day.
He'd initially attempted to decline my interview altogether, but his contract required it. This didn't mean he was planning to speak to me. I gathered he was miserable and disgusted. He'd come up in the glory days, the inheritor of the three-legged stool and the ring of fire, and now his paradise was tainted.
Jungleland, by the time I drove through its rusting gates in ’68, was bankrupt and officially plotted to hit the block.
Dr. Dolittle, cast with Jungleland's residents, had been released the year before. It was the final humiliation, a generation of serious actors performing in a skin show, their dialogue spoken by human ventriloquists. The animals went on strike, of course, but there was no union.
The compound's pachyderms — who'd once elegantly congaed in a small ring before retiring to practice their Martha Graham-choreographed scarf dances — stood by the side of the road, shamefacedly trumpeting for traffic, but the cars stopped coming.
The owners of Jungleland padlocked the gates.
I typically covered hippies and communes in Northern California, but the magazine had sent me here to see if I could find ten thousand words of zoo scandal, crimes, or perversions, it didn't matter to them. Species mixing, ligers and tigons, or maybe just a wading pool full of the sacrificial blood of giraffes. The magazine was looking for an article one part cult massacre, one part Barnum, but above all, they were looking to profile the Forever Roar, who'd remained mum for the past twenty years. It was their last chance. An ecology group had threatened to buy Leo at auction, take him to Africa and release him into the veldt.
The lion, in his trademark velvet jacket, wasn't veldt material. The world had gone seriously downhill if it thought sending an actor known for his portrayal of King Lear to a rural grassland was a good deed, but things were bad here and no one wanted to say just how bad. Lately, one of the panthers had escaped and prowled Thousand Oaks screaming for justice and trying to organize the housecats, but everyone had ignored him.
Jungleland was no longer what it had been.
Home in its heyday to two thousand animal actors and their human colleagues, the place had housed everyone from day players on Robin Hood to the rhesus monkeys who'd been sent off to cure polio. The lions of Jungleland had always been famous. They were all called Leo in public, though MGM had been through five lions before this one: Slats, Jackie, Coffee, Tanner, and George. Now there was Leo. No one knew his real name. I'd thought I might coax it from someone, but the residents of Jungleland were not as voluble as I'd imagined they'd be.
The place was a Sunset Boulevard of drunken rages, drownings in the pools, and a herd of gazelles who refused to change out of their pajamas. The day I arrived, I glimpsed a fretful chimpanzee who'd played opposite both Tarzan and Jungle Jim and now spent all her time dressing up in old feathers. She swung naked into a plaster tree and was gone before I could ask for an interview.
The leopards were using heroin and even the ostriches, traditionally abstemious, were drunk. A cancerous camel strutted the perimeter, spitting tobacco juice. The residents were lonely in their various sections of the park, all of them stretched on old recliners in their terrycloth robes, drinking forlornly from bottles and bent tin dishes.
All the animals at Jungleland were actors. The few humans who still lived here were elephant fetishists from disbanded animal shows, seasonal workers who'd missed the impalas of their previous lives, costumers, cosmeticians, and the tiger trainer, who'd been fired, but who now lived amongst the big cats and had no interest in coming out. After her expulsion, she'd hidden herself with the felines. The erstwhile owner had warned me about her before I arrived.
“Don't mess with Stark,” he muttered. “She's a living hell.”
I was more interested in the Forever Roar than in the tiger lady, but I'd get the story any way I could.
One of the blondes leaned in to look closely at Leo, examining a piece of mane that seemed out of place, though it was still groomed into its signature pompadour. It was well-known to everyone here that the lion relied on small falls and mane-pieces, as well that he felt no shame about it. The blonde lit the lion a Kent. Leo took it, inhaling with a sense of worldly weight. He was not always so calm. He was famed for his mercurial te
mperament, his tendency to fly into a rage from a standing start, but no one around him seemed to blame him for his volatility, though he'd actually bitten a reporter in ‘66.
“He's a lion, after all,” breathed one of the blondes, in what passed for a conversational whisper, dragging on her own cigarette. Her accent was New Jersey through and through, and it reminded me I hadn't called my mother. “That's not as bad as a tiger, but lions, Mike-”
“Mitchell,” I corrected her. “Mitchell Travene. I've published stories in The New York Times, Harper's Magazine and Playboy.”
She laughed.
“Big name then, I get ya, but I never heard of ya. Mitchy, you gotta know the big cats can't be asked to behave domestically. Nobody falls for a big guy and gets away safe. He offer you a beer? You can have one from the Frigidaire, you want.”
The lion turned and stared briefly at the blonde, who blushed and took the beer back. Lila was in possession of a slick red claw scar that stretched from just below her left earlobe to the inside of her right wrist. A rhinestone cuff covered it, but above the edge of the metal, the line was ragged. Her counterpart and twin, Lola, sported a similar mark from the corner of her mouth.
Lola eyed me from behind her cat's eye glasses.
“We've had people write stories about us before,” Lola said, suspiciously. “And none of ‘em got it right, did they Leo, honey?”
The lion took a thoughtful drag, but did not respond. It was that kind of day. It had been that kind of day for weeks now. Nobody was talking, and everyone was in a bad mood.
In the room beside the pool, a movie projector was showing an MGM film and I cocked my ear to hear the familiar roar, perhaps the only sound I'd ever get out of him: Leo tossing his head against a screen of stars. That roar, of course, was an amputation. The live version (I'd been told) began with a moan, which grew into the credit-sequence section and ended in a series of short guttural shouts. The cut had long been a bone of contention between the lions and the studio.
Even so, Leo had posed and roared for a generation's worth of movie premieres and award events. To the great cats, that kind of work was the equivalent of pornography. He'd worked closely with every major starlet, almost always in the fur, but in truth, Leo preferred to stay dressed. His paws were tender, and so he wore slippers. His maroon silk dressing gown was open to the waist. He coughed delicately and one of the blondes ministered to him with a handkerchief, looking apologetically in my direction.
The Forever Roar had a cold and was in foul humor. The tip of his tail flicked irritably and a little man in white came running, bearing a kit for tail shining. Polishing cloth, coconut oil, a comb made of bone. Leo waved him away.
The lion wanted solitude, walks, and the occasional party; a bar corner with a chair built to accommodate his girth; an entourage of his makeup artist; someone to carry his wigs and hats; and a few of his girls to tend him, but that world was gone. When he performed for the microphones and the cameras, the lion had the charisma of a roadside revivalist. Twenty years back, he could've led a cult.
Today, the lion was feeling his age. He'd been famous too long. He hadn't been to Manhattan in years and Hollywood, formerly his stomping ground, was less friendly to lions than it had been. Animal shows were waning and the only place the lion truly felt himself these days was Vegas, where he strolled between the tables, pinching and purring, performing occasionally. Even Vegas was less than heaven for lions, and the new acts had his kind performing like trained bears. Leo had no desire to dance. He was the Forever Roar, not a meow sideshow.
Though the lion was never alone, he was single and had been for as long as anyone could remember. My editors speculated that he had a secret situation on the side. His status was one of the things I'd been sent to discern.
Not that I was having much luck.
“You have to give The Roar what he wants,” his friend and former manager, Juan, a stout man in pinstripes, had told me back in LA. “You want to give him what he wants. You're good to him, he's good to you. You mess the lion around, on the other hand…”
He let it hang.
The lion clearly thought I was messing him around.
The Roar had lately been replaced in the popular imagination by a sarcastic talking horse. Since ’61, Mr. Ed had been holding court in the lounges Leo had formerly run. The televised Ed was a syndicated horse-ghost, his actual body transported to a comfortable stall here at Jungleland. Society had a short memory. Shortly after I'd arrived here, I'd interviewed Bamboo Harvester, the palomino who'd played Ed, but he only wanted to talk about Blonde on Blonde, a copy of which I'd brought as an offering. Lola and Lila had already told me the horse had a tranquilizer problem. Whatever it was, he had little to tell me about Leo. The lion was said to loathe both Mr. Ed and Bob Dylan (Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat rubbed The Roar the wrong way), and he gave the stables a wide berth when he was taking his afternoon constitutional.
I was reduced to hack detective work, observing the lion's surroundings in hopes of gleaning clues.
To my joy, there was something to be said for my gumshoeing. On the wall of the lion's cabana was a framed photo inscribed affectionately by Greta Garbo. In it, she and Leo sat waiting for their close-ups, Greta bundled in black leather with fur cuffs and a black cloche, Leo in the fur, his chest thrust out, standing on a block.
There'd been rumors over the years, all rebuffed, though when the mood struck him, Leo had sometimes twitched a whisker to imply that the denials were not all they seemed. There was a story about their meeting across a crowded film set, the two of them in a convertible speeding out across the desert, a stick-up at a convenience store, a midnight phone call to Juan for bail money. He'd been a young lion and Garbo newly in America when she'd visited Jungleland, then called The Lion Farm.
I wondered. Everyone wondered.
“No comment,” Garbo said through her press agent, after repeated inquiries.
The photos that existed of their first meeting did not, my sources said, tell the whole story. Here I was, not the first reporter to try to pluck it out, but I'd probably be the last, if the conditions at Jungleland were any indicator.
I took a sip of my Tanqueray and tonic, smuggled in from the hippos, and waited for the lion to speak.
Leo coughed. His velvet voice was not in form. His roar was hardly marketable, and I tried for a moment to imagine the way Leo, as a young lion, had tossed his mane. There was plenty of filmic evidence. Though he was still majestic, Leo was now missing at least one tooth. Jungleland had dismissed its dentist.
It was bad out here and I wanted to go home, but the words I needed were sealed behind the lips of the most famous lion in America, the lion who, even now, was smoking two cigarettes at once and flexing his claws.
“Talk to me about Garbo,” I pleaded, for the hundredth time. “Just a little detail. Just a small something or another. I'll take an anecdote. What are you going to do, Leo? Keep quiet forever?”
“He ain't gonna give it to you, Mitchy,” said Lola.
“He never done before,” said Lila. I'd already failed at seducing them both, first with compliments, to which they were immune, and then with new glittery leotards I'd commissioned for that purpose in the garment district. Lola and Lila didn't care about me. They were the lion's blondes.
“Go talk to the tigers,” Lola finally told me, grinding out her cigarette in an ashtray shaped like a palm tree. “Talk to the tigers and their lady. She's got a mouth on her, you betcha. Leo's not gonna talk to press, period. You gotta know that much by now, Mitchy.”
I took a last glance at the lion, his silk robe, the way it was starting to fray at the seams. The lion turned his head slightly and looked at me, seeming to see me for the first time. He opened his mouth. I tensed.
He yawned, and a fly flew past his teeth, unnoticed. His eyes glowed dark yellow. I watched as Lila shimmied her rhinestone rubies briefly for him. The lion looked mournful.
I took
Lola's advice and went to see the tiger lady.
Mabel Stark had been Mae West's double in I'm No Angel, but that was thirty years in the past, though the souvenir program I'd managed to dig up still listed her as “The Greatest of All Lady Trainers in History.”
Her eyelids flipped open when I walked up and I heard several growls from the dark behind her, which I tried to ignore.
“Up, Boy,” she said, and snapped her fingers. A tiger walked out of the cabana. Its stripes were faded, the roots showing. Stark smelled of blood and floral perfume. She was drinking and so was I.
“Tssk,” Stark said to the growlers. Her mouth opened like a half-broken zipper. “No need to be bodyguarding. This is just a pulp-pusher. What you boys need is an agent.” She turned toward me. “Are you from Creative Artists? I didn't think so.”
Stark was almost eighty, though she refused to disclose her birthdate. Her body had been taken apart and put back together a hundred times, and she was more scar than skin. She was dressed in her trademark tight white leather suit and her hair, yellow-white as the leather, was pin-curled. The overall impression was that of a walking tusk with scrimshawed facial expressions. Her eyes, however, were wide and blue, strangely youthful, and her fingers twitched constantly, flourishing and flourishing again, like she was practicing an encore. The suit could only be a thousand degrees on the inside. She looked as though she felt cool.
A tiger rumbled just behind me and I flinched.
Stark laughed. She was the only human I'd seen treat the tigers like animals. Everyone else treated them like the highly decorated Chekhovians they were. The tigers of Jungleland were Siberian and fluent in Russian, though some fluke had left most of them with the colloquial pseudonym of “Satan.” A couple of them were descendants of the tigers of the Moscow Art Theatre. They seemed to humor her. She was old now, but she'd been their dance partner a long time.
The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods Page 35
