The Mourning Parade

by Dawn Reno Langley

  The dogs circled at Andrew’s ankles, as excitedly as Sivad had greeted him, but Andrew ignored them, so they sniffed at Natalie instead. She patted their heads and watched two more join them: a Golden Retriever mix and one that resembled a Beagle. All appeared healthy and clean. Unlike the strays she had seen on the streets of Bangkok, these were pets. Their little group grew larger by the second as more dogs arrived. By the time they reached the stairs, they had become a pack of six dogs and three humans. Buoyed by their cheerful energy, Natalie couldn’t help but smile.

  She mounted the stairs behind Andrew and Sivad and realized why she hadn’t seen anyone else. This must be where everyone starts their morning, Natalie reasoned. Several groups filled the platform. People in their early twenties, probably volunteers, circled around one of the long picnic tables and spoke English, but the group of cigarette-smoking young men sitting and standing at the far end of the platform near the elephants spoke Thai. Under the overhang at the back of the building, a third group—three Thai women—bustled around an open cook-stove, clouds of steam rising above them.

  No one paid attention to her arrival, which Natalie thought strange. Being ignored felt more uncomfortable than if she’d been ambushed, but perhaps they were used to seeing people arrive for daily visits and figured Andrew would take care of her.

  “You’ll meet the mahouts and the elephants they care for in a little bit,” Andrew told her. “Each elephant has a caretaker, their mahout, and first thing in the morning, they have to feed the ellies, then take them for a mud bath. It’s the busiest time of day. I’m sure you’ll get right into the swing of things once you see how everything works.” He reached for some overripe bananas and tossed them to one of the elephants. “You have so many skills we need, but you’ll probably find there’s lots to learn, as well. Like feeding these giant eating machines. These guys eat sixteen to eighteen hours a day, and most of them have special diets because of their advanced age or the various injuries they’ve suffered at human hands. We’re too damn cruel.” He shook his head, but it was a momentary pause before he grabbed her elbow and spun her around to face the group of people at a picnic table.

  “Everyone, I want you to welcome Dr. Natalie DeAngelo just over from America. She’s a fabulous vet with lots of big animal experience in North Carolina. She’ll be here for the next year, so make sure to make yourself available. Answer her questions and all that.” He smiled at her and patted her shoulder. “Now, let me introduce our crew. This,” Andrew gestured to his right, “is Dr. Peter Hatcher. Been the resident vet for, what, eight years, Peter?”

  Hatcher was a pale, blond man, tall and thin. When he shook her hand, his knobby wrists belied the strength in his grip.

  “Welcome to the sanctuary,” he said, his British accent far more clipped than Andrew’s. “You here for the month or are you staying more permanently?” He gave her a tight-lipped smile, or at least she thought it was a smile. His eyes didn’t light up at all.

  “Clean the dust out of your ears, Peter! We’re lucky to have Dr. DeAngelo with us. One of the brightest in equine surgery, she is. Not one of our university volunteers, though she certainly looks young enough, doesn’t she? A bright little brown bird!” Andrew reached over and wrapped an arm around her shoulders like a great uncle. “She trained in North Carolina. Fulbright scholar for North Carolina State out of Raleigh. One of the best programs in the States. I respect what they’ve done with their husbandry program. Great work. I suspect she’ll be a great help to us in the year she’s here. I’m quite excited about having her.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t say anything to me, Andrew. We usually discuss such things.” Hatcher’s words dripped icicles as brittle as his pale blue eyes.

  Andrew’s grip tightened on Natalie’s shoulder. “We can talk about this another time.”

  “Maybe we need to talk about it before Dr. DeAngelo—that’s the name isn’t it?—gets settled in.” He nailed Natalie with a penetrating stare that made her pull her chin back as if he’d slapped her face. “You wouldn’t have known that I know Dr. DeAngelo, unless you’d told me she was coming, Andrew, but since you didn’t bother saying anything, I’ll just tell you now.” He turned to Natalie. “Do you have any idea who I am, Doctor?”

  Shit, should I? Natalie felt her cheeks redden. She should have done more research, she thought, but getting everything wrapped up in the past month had left her little time to do any kind of research at all. Closing the clinic, getting the house ready, packing for the trip. That was enough. She flipped through the business cards in her mind. Had she met him at a conference? Had he written a book or an article recently? Made a breakthrough of some sort? She came up blank.

  “Obviously, you have no idea.” He drew himself up, straightened his shoulders, and huffed like a discontented Oxford professor. “Let me introduce myself. Peter Hatcher of Yorkshire. Trained at the Royal Veterinary College. Ring any bells?”

  Everyone had begun listening to the conversation. A small group had gathered. All silent.

  She shook her head, feeling absolutely clueless. “I’ve been to the Royal Vet, but that was many years ago when I was a Fulbrighter.”

  “And after you came home and continued your surgical work, did you have any connections with the school?”

  “Peter, is this really necessary?” Andrew forced a smile but placed a warning hand on Peter’s arm. Andrew glanced at the redness around Peter’s hairline and the accompanying beads of sweat. For some strange reason, the man appeared ready to lose control.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I did.” Natalie pushed harder to remember a Hatcher from the school, but she couldn’t place him. He was distinctive looking, tall with stringy muscles and a face quite sharp in its angles. She wouldn’t have forgotten him.

  “And you were one of the final readers for dissertations, weren’t you? Never mind, you don’t have to answer. I can tell by your face that you’re starting to put two and two together.

  “Listen closely, Andrew, because this is the kind of person you’ve just hired. I did my research work on formulating a cement we could inject into a horse’s broken leg. It worked. It did.” He pointed a finger into the air, as if to add an exclamation point to his comment. “We had plenty of studies to prove it, but when the dissertation got to Dr. DeAngelo, well, she became the fly in the ointment. She questioned everything we’d done. Every blessed report. Every statistic. Basically said we had not been able to validate our research and debunked my work completely.” He laughed sharply. If possible, his eyes hardened even more.

  He stared directly at her as he continued. “I had to start again from scratch! Different topic. New study. Hours and hours and hours of work. And years of my time. Years! And you know what was so damned ironic? The cement worked. She started using it—my cement—in her clinic a year after she read my dissertation. A year after! And did she ever give me one ounce of credit? She never admitted to the academics who credited her with the glue that it wasn’t her invention. This is the woman.” He pointed at her and looked at Andrew. “This is the cheat you’ve hired.”

  As Hatcher ranted, some of the volunteers walked away, looking over their shoulders. Natalie remembered the dissertation. Yes, it had needed work, but she hadn’t realized until much later that her questions had caused such an uproar. She remembered the research about eight months later when she was approached with a new product, much like the one discussed in the dissertation.

  “Yes, I used the cement,” she told Hatcher, “but I never claimed I invented it. Someone else sold it to me—a pharmaceutical rep from South Africa. The rest of the surgeons in the field had the option of purchasing it, as well. I was just the first to use it. I would never steal anyone’s research, Dr. Hatcher. That’s not the way I work. Honestly.”

  His eyes narrowed as he looked at her. “I don’t believe you, and Andrew, I don’t want to work with her. Period.”

 
Someone gasped. Natalie felt a burning in the pit of her stomach and wanted desperately to escape, but the small group of people who were left tightened around her, as if in suspense about what Hatcher might do next. No one spoke for half a minute. Natalie glanced at Andrew, the only person at the table that she knew, and she didn’t really know him all that much. Why would he believe her when Dr. Hatcher had worked here for years? She held her breath, wondering whether she would be on the next truck back to Bangkok, heading home.

  Andrew twisted his mouth and let his hand drop from Peter’s arm, as if disgusted by his actions. Obviously, they had some history. “We’ll talk about this later, Dr. Hatcher,” he said in a voice low enough that only the three of them could hear. “For right now, you’ll welcome Dr. DeAngelo. You and I will discuss your concerns after lunch. My office.”

  Though Natalie hadn’t known the philanthropist personally for very long, Andrew Gordon had a reputation for being in control of his own ship. To her, that translated to keeping a close eye on his subordinates, especially those in charge of running any of his sanctuaries in Asia and Africa. But it appeared he was being challenged, and years of watching for signs of aggression in animals told her the two men could very easily have been facing off against each other as wolves often did. Years of experience also told her that this wasn’t the first time these two men had confronted each other.

  Andrew grabbed Natalie’s shoulder, turned his back on Hatcher, and led her to an empty table in the middle of the expansive ten-foot-high concrete platform. “I’ll get us some tea. You can take a peek at our residents.” He swung an arm around, then retreated to a table where everyone had gathered to dispense their morning drinks.

  All around the edges of the platform where she sat, elephants stood patiently waiting for their breakfast. Occasionally, one would grunt or snort or flap its ears, but otherwise, they were as quiet as apparitions. For a few moments, she studied the elephants’ heads, noting the differences in their ears and their coloring. None of them were totally gray. Several were freckled, some pinkish, and others nearly white. Andrew returned with two cups of tea, as well as some nam tao-hu, a hot soy breakfast drink, and pa tong go, the deep fried bread sticks Danny had developed a taste for when he had tried them in the hotel in Bangkok.

  “So, the story. Our story. We founded the sanctuary in 1989,” Andrew began, a proud smile on his face. “Took this ten-thousand-acre trust, determined to make it home for abused elephants. The whole region is a mountainous jungle, as you can see, and the Kwai river gives us a headache when it regularly overflows its banks, but here and there, pockets of deep springs feed the river even during dry season and that gives us a constant source of water for the sanctuary and our elephants, which is incredibly important. Wish we had this river in Kenya. Water’s always a problem there.”

  He took a sip of his tea and looked out into the distance, thoughtfully, as if seeing past the jungles and the river and its challenges. It was a few moments before he started again.

  “That first year, when the sanctuary smelled of wet and rotten vegetation, a storm left the old-timers talking for months. That damn storm was so strong the river created new tributaries and moved buildings as though a colossal hand lifted them and plopped them—kaput!—right smack down somewhere new like they were the tiniest of frogs. God, that was bloody awful.” Andrew screwed up his mouth and shrugged his shoulders as if disgusted by the memory.

  He pointed to where Natalie guessed the buildings were and turned back to her, his mouth open, ready to speak, when a blood-curdling scream rent the air. She dropped her cup. A thousand prickles of fear brought every inch of her skin to life.

  __________

  The elephant, the one they call Sophie, wants air. She gasps for it. Her life depends on it.

  But she can’t. She can’t breathe, and the fear pounds in her chest, drums in her middle ear, clouds her vision.

  It’s the pain that has taken her breath.

  Her leg burns as if she’s stepped into a giant fire ant mound, as if thousands of the biting creatures have crawled under her skin, snapping and burning at every inch of her leg. She tears at it with her short tusks, doesn’t care that she’s ripping the skin. She wants the pain gone. All of it. Now.

  The elephant screams, vocalizing her pain with the trumpet, feeling the power of her own voice as it rides up from her belly to her abdomen to emerge in full force through her opened mouth. She lets the roar of her scream ripple into the jungle, climb up the mountainside, into the fish-scale clouds hanging low in the sky. And once the echoes stop, she screams again, and the sound acts as the key that opens up every other sensor in her body.

  She opens her eyes and sees the crowd of humans around her. Feels their tension, their fear of her.

  She smells the men. Their anger. Their distress. And something else. Something threatening. Cruel.

  She hears voices yelling, the high-pitched sounds of human screams, the inconsistent orders from the mahouts. The sounds color the air with fiery streaks of crimson and orange that mimic the sizzling anger burning Sophie’s eyelids.

  She screams again, and this time, a glint of brightness catches her eye and stops her mid-bellow. A sharp pain in the wound steals her breath. A searing agony creates a fire from her knees up into her chest, into a set of lungs still tight, still unwilling to let her breathe.

  She stumbles.

  Her lips part. She feels her tongue loll. She stiffens her legs, forces herself upright again, because she’s used to being strong. She’s afraid of what will happen if she collapses to the ground.

  The men. She fears the men.

  Everywhere she looks, a human. Everywhere, the glint of that sun-dagger that split her skin. Everywhere, the acrid scent, the human life colors and sounds.

  Now, they all jumble. The smells, the sounds, the colors. Too many men. Too much noise.

  And the pain. Daggers of pain as large as mountains.

  She bellows and lunges, snapped back instantly by the large rope at her ankle.

  She wants to run into the rivers where the tide rises as high as the arms of the river trees. She wants to rut her tusks along the edge of the soft thick forest, ripping ravines into the mud that smells of other elephants’ traces and thickens the air with its burnt and spicy odor. She wants to feel the strength in the legs that once could travel dozens of miles a day without a muscle quiver.

  She wants the pain to stop.

  For a very long time, she has lived with the burning flame in her leg. It engulfs her body with a heat that makes it possible to feel every pump of blood moving through her veins. The pain gives her no respite, no moment when she can breathe freely without the ever-present burn, no time when she can close her eyes and sleep for more than fifteen minutes without a jabbing reminder of the sore that has festered on her leg for all the days and nights of her time among humans.

  She shakes her head, her giant ears flapping so hard that her teeth snap shut.

  The men. The men cause the pain.

  She tilts her head back to the sky, lifts her trunk and screams once more. A long, murderous scream designed to keep the men, those men who caused her pain, at a distance. A scream designed to warn.

  Four

  The spirit of a man will sustain

  his infirmity; but a wounded

  spirit who can bear?

  -Proverbs 18:14

  Mahouts scrambled toward the sound. Andrew sprinted along the length of the platform toward the commotion, as did everyone else, sweeping Natalie along with them. The trumpeting grew to a roar as they rounded the corner. People yelled. Her feet pounded in time with her heartbeat. Blood thrummed through her ears. Sweat dripped into her eyes. She realized she wasn’t in the best shape for a sprint through one hundred percent humidity.

  Within seconds, Natalie spotted the source of the roars: a group of mahouts struggled to contain a giant fem
ale elephant. The ellie’s ears flapped angrily as she paced and charged. Backward. Forward. Her eyes rolled as the mahouts circled her, each holding a short hooked staff, an ankus. Her great feet shuffled, pulling the thick ropes that held her, and each time she reached the end of the ropes, she roared in full voice, a sound that literally shook the trees around them.

  None of the other elephants had been tethered. The sanctuary staff prided themselves on letting their elephants roam free. Why had this one been hidden? She was obviously dangerous, but so much so that the mahouts needed ankuses?

  The mahouts shouted commands at the elephant, none of which she obeyed. Instead, she roared her anger and wheeled on them. The ropes groaned and stretched. They wouldn’t hold the big girl much longer.

  A line of sweat popped out on Natalie’s upper lip, and she checked for a line of escape, just in case. The PTSD she’d fought for the past year took hold. Her vision darkened, sounds sharpened. She heard the phantom gunshots, saw Danny’s face in her mind’s eye—imagining the awful, blank look on his face. Her hands shook uncontrollably. She shook her head to dispel the image. Started counting.

  Several people knelt on the ground to the elephant’s right tending to something she couldn’t see. Natalie’s head swam for a second, but then her veterinary training kicked in, and with one cautious glance toward the elephant, she headed for the group. She held her breath, hoping that the elephant hadn’t killed someone. Her heart sank when the crowd parted for a second, long enough for her to see Dr. Hatcher’s blonde hair, and between his knees on the ground, a yellow lab, its legs askew.

  “He’s still alive,” Hatcher said to no one in particular. “But I don’t know if his leg’s broken. If that crazy elephant had been roaming free, this dog would be dead. No doubt.”

  Instinctively, Natalie pushed through the group and sank to the ground beside Hatcher. She ran her hands down the dog’s forelimbs. “Broken in several places. Feels like the metacarpal and the radius.” Her fingers moved swiftly but knowingly over the dog’s torso, then along the spine. “I don’t think there are any other broken bones, but . . .”