“Oh yes, you be sure to let her know,” he said, and flashed me a big smile. “But be sure to get your story accurate. I’m buying the sanctuary. From her. And I’m buying the land next to it. About six thousand acres. She knows all about it, but make sure you tell her, and mention my name a few times, Tom Pennington, because she always gets mad as hell when she thinks Harry has done something behind her back.”
Tom left as soon as I slammed out of his car. He gave me a curt salute with his two fingers along with the parting words “I would take a shower if I were you. That horse shit is pretty ripe,” before roaring down the driveway. I stood there, defeated. I hadn’t really overheard anything, hadn’t saved anything, and had mortified myself. There was nothing to tell and no one who was of sound mind to tell it to. Worse than that, I had totally confirmed Tom’s earlier notion of me being amazingly stupid, a fool, and an idiot. I may have the order mixed up.
I stood in front of the elephant barn, feeling as though a lifetime had passed since my arrival early that morning. My mud-encrusted jeans were beginning to harden around my legs. Richie’s truck was gone from the front of his house, the elephants were already in their field, so there was nothing more for me to do except go home; take a long, hot shower; rub a bottle of liniment into my throbbing leg muscles; and wait for Richie to call me with his list of really nice men. I heard the sound of a car coming back up the driveway and spun around, my heart beating in fast expectancy. Tom was returning! Coming back to apologize, or explain what was going on, or maybe to take my hand and press it to his lips and beg my forgiveness. I would apologize, too, and give him a chance to explain himself, and beg his forgiveness and hug him. Okay, given my mud-coated state, maybe postpone the hug. But I didn’t recognize the red Subaru that pulled into the parking lot. Diamond-Rose jumped out.
“Hey!” she exclaimed. “I wanted to talk to you.”
“Are you crazy?” I asked, gesturing to the car. “You hitched a ride? In New York?”
She flapped a hand at me. “We do it all the time in the bush. Whatever Rover is passing through. I think she’s your neighbor. Want me to introduce you?”
“No thanks,” I said, thinking, how wonderfully perfect this was. A neighbor. I hadn’t really met any of my neighbors yet, and now here was Diamond-Rose dressed in her safari clothes like some early Halloween costume, ready to happily introduce me to my own neighbor, while I was standing around looking like a breaded chicken cutlet. My neighbor eyed my clothes, gave me a wan smile, and left.
“I’m going home,” I said to Diamond. “And if I never see another horse—”
“Speaking of horses,” she said, “remember my idea about training those horses down in the field?”
I nodded. “I suppose.” She pushed me ahead of her, down the path.
“Well,” she said, “if we’re going to sell those horses to raise money, we’ve got a lot of riding to do. And we’re going to start today.”
We rode six horses apiece, each one a mystery followed by a revelation. Some reared, some stiffened their legs as soon as they were mounted and refused to move an inch, one rolled over in protest, one backed up almost the whole length of the field, another whipped his head around to one side and pulled my shoe off with his teeth.
Diamond was sitting on a palomino that was spinning in small circles. “This one isn’t so good if you’re in a hurry to get somewhere,” she called out, but I couldn’t answer as the horse I was riding had gotten down on his knees.
“This one might be saying his prayers,” I yelled back just before I jumped off.
Diamond had brought a large red felt-tipped marker, a pencil, and a pad, and after writing a big red number in the middle of each horse’s forehead, she wrote the corresponding number on her pad along with a little note about its training and behavior.
“Great system,” I said admiringly as I dismounted from my last horse and leaned against his rump to keep from toppling with fatigue.
“Yep,” Diamond agreed. “I have to say, I’ve got it all organized. That’s my forte.”
Margo was bedded for the night, and I lingered with her in the barn because I really didn’t want to go home and face the disarray that Diamond was certain to have left for me. Margo had finished eating and now was reaching down for another trunkful of hay, which she tossed over her back.
“Dinner is not a fashion statement,” I chided her, but had to smile at how comical she looked with hay draped across her head. She rumbled contentedly and tossed another trunkful across Abbie’s back. Properly covered, Abbie sunk down into the sweet-smelling straw and closed her eyes. I had forgiven Margo her tantrum. How many times had I ridden a horse, only to be bucked off? How many times had I been kicked, stepped on, knocked over, flung across riding rings? Elephants, except for their massive size, were no different in their behavior. A tantrum was a tantrum, but they generally forget about it as soon as it’s over. I would just have to be more careful.
“I love you, Margo,” I whispered ardently.
Her amber eye scanned my face. She pushed her trunk through the bars, and I let her wrap it gently around me. Her whiskers prickled through my shirt, and she rumbled very softly. Maybe she was telling me that she was happy here, happy that she had someone to love her and watch over her. Maybe she was apologizing for hurting me. We stood together, and she held me in her great, strong trunk, and we listened to the rain just beginning to fall against the roof. I wondered if she sensed how stressed I’d been? Did she understand, somehow, that there were plans being made to send her away? Had she been trying to tell me that we would have to say good-bye?
Or had she been trying to tell me not to let her go?
I sighed and kissed her good night and walked out of the barn into a light rain. I opened my car door to find Diamond waiting inside.
“Glad we finished riding when we did,” Diamond announced, pointing to the rain on the windshield.
I slid behind the wheel of the car. “Yeah, and that was a good idea you had,” I agreed. “You know, to mark their heads so we know which ones we rode.”
“Yep.” Diamond put her head back against the upholstery, exhausted. “It was that marker that I found that gave me the idea.”
I paused, car key in hand. “The red marker from my kitchen?”
Diamond nodded. “It’s from that shiny white board thing on your fridge, why?”
I started laughing, with tears born of frustration and fatigue. Tears ran down my face. I laughed until I couldn’t breathe.
“What?” she asked.
“Marking the horses was a great idea,” I gasped, getting more hysterical with each word and stuttering them out between hoots. “Except for…one thing…that red marker is…water soluble!” I took a deep breath and pointed to the rain. “All your hard work is going to…wash off.”
Chapter 26
HOW MUCH SHOULD YOU CHARGE FOR A LIFE when it’s sold into ownership? To whom does it belong? Tusker was going to cost thirty-five thousand dollars. The horses we were selling were worth only eight or nine hundred apiece. Was Mousi being sold to the slaughterhouse for meat this very moment? He was chubby. Do you sell life by the ounce? By the pound? Wasn’t there some kind of immutable stewardship that every living creature is entitled to? And despite my ethical reservations, it was up to Diamond and me to set prices on the horses we were selling.
The good thing was that we were selling horses. It seemed that we had an edge on the market. Short, calm, overweight, bucket-headed horses were in great demand, and that’s exactly what Mrs. Wycliff had accumulated over the years. We managed to sell ten horses in two weeks and now horse number eleven, having met all the prerequisites, with the bonus of being remarkably unattractive, was being loaded into a lovely well-kept trailer to become a gift for a ten-year-old girl.
The horse had been at the sanctuary for two years, having been left behind in someone’s backyard after they moved. My guess is that he patiently waited for his owner to remember he was still back there
. Waited patiently for his owner to return home and feed him his dinner or to offer him a bucket of water to slake his thirst. Waited patiently, faithfully, quietly for weeks, while his life was being starved away. Until someone noticed, and he was brought to the sanctuary, where Mrs. W. named him Sprinkles, in honor of the black dots that splattered across his white coat, and just like that, his life was restored. Diamond put a price tag on him, someone came to ride him and thought he was wonderful, and now his life would become a gift to someone else.
Of course Diamond and I had made sure to inspect his new home, had the mother sign papers that stated we could drop in unannounced anytime to make sure he was okay and that he was to be returned when he wasn’t wanted anymore. That’s how it should be done when you sell lives. Too bad Marielle hadn’t thought of it.
Now Diamond and I stood together in the parking lot and watched Sprinkles’s black-polka-dotted rump wiggle up the trailer ramp and disappear as the tailgate was shut behind him.
“I hate selling animals,” I grumbled. “If that was a person, it would be considered immoral.”
“If that was a person, we could send him out to get a job to support himself,” Diamond replied. “He isn’t and we can’t, and we need to make money and room to save more.”
“I hope we never have to take him back,” I said as the trailer made a track of dusty spirals down the driveway before rounding the corner, out of sight. “Doesn’t it bother you that Sprinkles has no say in where he’s going to be spending the rest of his life?”
Diamond stepped in front of me. “You know, sometimes we don’t either,” she said impatiently. “But with his sale, we’ve made a total of eighty-five hundred dollars, and it’s enough money to throw the fund-raiser.”
Margo was cranky. Again. She was pacing her stall when I let myself into the barn and even slapped Abbie with her trunk for getting in her way. Abbie squealed a protest and stood chastened in a corner until I quickly brought her mother a tub of grain garnished with sliced carrots, sweet potatoes, and apples, which Margo graciously allowed Abbie to share. When their breakfast was finished, Margo grumbled and threw her tub at the bars, though I suspected that I was the more likely target, standing just outside. The tub hit the bars with a crash, and I shuddered from the memory of having been flung like that not too long ago. I waited until Margo settled and allowed her trunk to be stroked before I gave her the daily donut treat. I didn’t want to reinforce the wrong behavior.
“Here’s a little mood elevator,” I said, handing her a jelly donut through the bars. She popped it into her mouth, then slipped her trunk back through the bars to give me a hard push. I skidded back and lost my balance, landing once again on the floor. Apparently, jellies weren’t the drug of choice this morning.
“Good thing you stayed outside the bars,” Richie said, entering the barn just as I hit the floor. “She’s been a little out of sorts lately.”
I righted myself and brushed the hay from my jeans. “Does she hate me?”
“If she hated you, she would have killed you,” Richie said, his face serious. “She’s had any opportunity to do that.” He picked up the long stick he used to guide her down to the bottom field and opened her gate. “Maybe it’s the change of seasons.” He led her out, then pointedly called over his shoulder, “or maybe she’s just plain lonely.”
Margo marched through the gate and out the barn doors, with Richie careful to stay at her shoulder, instead of leading in front, the way he used to. Abbie trotted behind them, and I followed Abbie, mulling over the significance of Richie’s remarks. Margo had her child and she had us—it seemed to me she had all the companionship she needed. Or did she? Was the need for her own kind so strong that it surpassed her affection for us? It had been little more than a year since she had left her wild family behind, and I knew she remembered them. Elephants remember everything. But surely our love was enough. I stopped at the top of the hill and watched as Margo swung her great body from side to side, marching next to Richie in slow elephant steps. She was going down to the pond. Where she went every day. Elephants in the wild wander hundreds of miles, and Margo was walking the same seven or eight hundred feet to her little pond. Every deadly boring day.
And I suddenly knew Richie was right. Margo shouldn’t need to walk next to anyone. She was an elephant, a wild creature, and she deserved her independence. She needed her own kind, her own sovereignty, her own leaders and followers. She needed to walk with them over huge fields and complicated landscape. She had been trying to tell us that there was a void in her life. To keep her here was wrong. To keep her isolated from other elephants was cruel. If I loved her, I had to let her leave. It would be the completion of her rescue.
“Sorry about the microwave,” Diamond said to me in a defeated voice when I got home. Apparently it had produced a lightning storm of sparks that eventually burned out the magnetron tube because she had stuck in a can of soup to heat for lunch, forgetting that microwaves hated metal. She was sitting at the kitchen table, fingering the blackened can and drinking a cup of coffee.
“That’s okay,” I said wearily.
“I’ll get you a new one tomorrow,” Diamond said. “I promise, first thing.”
I knew she didn’t mean to destroy anything. She just acted impulsively, drawing from her experience in the bush to sort things out. The trouble was, experience in the bush did not exactly translate to domesticity.
Bedsheets, for instance. They had pockets at the corners to fit the mattress. But after she’d washed the sheets, the art of folding them totally confounded Diamond. She had tried every which way, until one day, exasperated, she just rolled them into lumpy piles and heaped them up like colorful beach balls in the linen closet. From then on, she left her bed tidily made and returned to sleeping on the floor under her heavy safari jacket.
And then there was the remote control to the television in the little den downstairs. Actually, I had two remotes: one was for the satellite television, and one was for the CD player, though Diamond could never quite figure out where the music was coming from.
“Where the hell are the satellites?” she had asked me, peering up at the ceiling. And how could I explain that pushing a button on a rectangle of black plastic made the TV in front of us send beams into the heavens to change the station we were watching. Okay, maybe it didn’t quite work like that, but Diamond accidentally deprogrammed each remote at least four or five times a week, sometimes in the middle of whatever we were watching, and the problem was that I had never quite mastered how to fix them.
My computer mystified her, and she regularly tried the TV remote to change an Internet site. She melted plastic containers into colorful puddles in the oven and stood flustered in the supermarket, staring at the skin and hair care products with amazement.
“Why does anyone need anything more than a nice soaking rain?” she would ask. I had no answer for her. Especially since she rarely saw a need for that, either.
I knew Diamond wanted to go home. And home meant sitting on a horse, traveling broken trails, listening to the wind for a certain cry that meant danger, sniffing the air for the telltale scent of a predator coming her way.
In her own way, she, too, was a child of the jungle. It didn’t judge her—it had only wrapped itself around her and allowed her to survive.
And now I watched her as she got up to pour herself another cup of what was left of the morning coffee, even stronger for having been fermenting in its grinds all morning, and sit down again at the kitchen table. She looked solemn.
“Doesn’t that keep you awake?” I asked her.
“Coffee doesn’t bother me. I like to sleep light,” she said. “So I can be ready.”
I gave a little laugh. “But you’re safe here.” She nodded and burst into tears.
“You know, I was civilized once,” she sniffed. “Honestly. I bet I could fit in again. I’m trying so hard.”
I knew she had grown up in the city. That she had done all the things that are part
of the civilized world. Opened gifts on Christmas morning, ridden subways and buses, and walked through shops that sold everything. I also knew that she had shoplifted food for dinner when her aunt had spent all their money on bottles of vodka, and that her Christmas gifts ultimately wound up being sold off for the same reason. I knew all those things about her. And I knew she had gladly left them all behind for wide skies and tall, rude trees and nights filled with a meadow of stars.
“What does civilized mean, anyway?” I asked, snapping open the bottle of wine I had brought home and passing it to her to take the first drink. It had been a question long on my mind, the quality of being civilized. “We’ve both lived civilized, and we’ve both lived wild.” I stopped and took a breath before giving voice to something that had been on my mind since I had come home. “And I think wild was infinitely better.”
“Civilized is overrated,” Diamond agreed. “You can be civilized in your heart without all the other stuff.”
The phone rang behind us, and Diamond-Rose reached for it and handed it to me.
I could see on the caller ID that it was Richie, which struck me as odd, since I had just left the farm.
“Hey,” he said after we exchanged hellos, “are you ready for some news?”
“Only if it’s good,” I said.
“It isn’t,” he replied. “I just got a phone call. We found that really nice man.”
Chapter 27
SOMETIMES FATE MAKES A MISTAKE BECAUSE NO one was listening.
An Inconvenient Elephant Page 17
