Hall of Small Mammals

by Thomas Pierce

  “My son bought me this house after I retired,” she says. “A total surprise, believe me. I didn’t ask for it.”

  “It’s lovely,” he says. “You look exhausted. Everything okay?”

  “My dog is dying. I haven’t been sleeping well.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Never easy. I still get teary-eyed thinking about our Pomeranian that died two years ago. Copperhead bit him.”

  “Did you pray for him?”

  “For the dog? Well, it happened so fast. He was dead within hours. Do you have any tea? Noncaffeinated?”

  “Of course,” she says, and goes into the kitchen. As the water heats, and then as the tea bag steeps in the Mickey Mouse mug, she imagines what happens next, the moment of first contact. She tries to picture Pastor Frank, the tarp crinkling under his knees as he places his warm hands over Shirley’s tangled hair. She imagines his words as a light, almost liquid, that forms an amberlike shell around the mammoth’s body.

  She takes the tea into the living room. Pastor Frank is leaning over the electric organ, tapping the keys. He hasn’t turned it on, so it produces no sound. She offers him the tea.

  “You know, my wife and I don’t have cable,” he continues, “but we’ve been hearing an awful lot about your son’s show recently. Is it true they brought a Neanderthal back from the dead? Two ways of thinking about these things.” The pastor’s thin brown hair is brushed back with pomade. He has one finger on a low B-flat and another on a high one. “Two scenarios. In scenario one, God killed off the Neanderthals because He wanted it that way and therefore we’re going against His will by bringing one back. In scenario two, there never was such a creature as a Neanderthal, and the so-called fossils were put there by the Devil himself. The second scenario is frightening, of course, because that would mean we’re breathing life into the Devil’s creations.”

  Mawmaw can feel the pulse in her temple. “They never brought back any caveman,” she tells him. “Only animals.”

  “Still,” he says, as if that settles it.

  They sit down in the wingback chairs, facing each other. Mawmaw isn’t sure whether or not to proceed with her plan. After a long silence, he asks her if she’d like to pray for her son.

  Pastor Frank reaches out for her hands. How many times over the past thirty years has she put her hands in his and said the words? How many times has he shined the light into the shadows of her heart? He knows all there is to know: about every sordid encounter she ever had with Tommy’s father; about her visit to the clinic and what she almost did there, the blue gown and paper-thin slippers, so thin they barely existed at all; about every dark dream, every dark thought; her doubts about God, about Hell, about what happens next.

  Pastor Frank is praying for her son. He’s asking God to bring Tommy home again, to protect him from evil forces at work in the world, to reveal to Tommy the path back to God. His words hover in the space above her head, a wispy cloud in a night sky, breaking and re-forming in the high atmospheric breeze. From below, her feet planted firmly on the ground, Mawmaw could reach out for those clouds if she wanted, poke her fingers through them, but she doesn’t. She recycles Pastor Frank’s words, borrows their power. She recites a silent prayer of her own, this one focused on the creature in the next room, their two prayers, she hopes, working in tandem.

  “Can you add my dog?” she interrupts.

  “Of course,” he says. “Do you want to bring her out?”

  “She’s at the vet.”

  Pastor Frank smiles and gives her hands another squeeze. He speaks softly, almost in a whisper. He asks God to keep watch over sweet little—what’s the dog’s name?—to watch over sweet little Shirley Temple. “Lord,” he says, “we praise all the beauty in Your creation, the fish and the birds and the turtles and the squirrels and the cats and the dogs and even the possums.”

  • • •

  The wailing at night does not stop. A neighbor calls to complain about the noise, and Mawmaw blames the television, her bad hearing. She tries a night-light in the laundry room. She tries stuffing towels under all the doors to muffle the sound. She prints out pictures of the tundra and other mammoths and tapes them to the walls. Some nights, half asleep, Mawmaw worries that the noise is emanating from within the catacombs of her own body. Opening her mouth she half expects the cries to amplify. She is able to sleep only in spurts. She dreams that Shirley is her guide through a world of snow and ice and unidentifiable landscapes. Every direction looks the same, but Shirley knows the way. Where they are going is important, but in the morning Mawmaw can no longer remember why.

  One night, she gives the mammoth three pills. The next night, four. But, no matter the dosage, they don’t seem to have any effect.

  “What is it?” she asks, downstairs again, desperate, the lights flipped on. “What do you need from me? Is this mating season? I’m sorry to tell you this, but you got no one to mate with. You’re on your own. You got to hush up. I’ve tried everything I know to try. I’m going out of my mind.” She steps backward into the hall, the door to Shirley’s room still open. “Is this what you want? You want out? Here.” She opens the door to the backyard. “Do whatever you need to do.”

  She stomps back up the stairs and climbs into bed. A little after midnight, thank God, the cries downstairs finally stop.

  • • •

  What wakes her in the morning isn’t a noise but a light. Bands of gold and yellow sunlight crawl slowly across the end of her bedspread. She’s quite certain no morning has ever gleamed in this particular way. She feels like she’s been asleep for a thousand years.

  Only once she’s on the stairs in her bathrobe and slippers does she remember leaving all the doors open for Shirley. The mammoth isn’t in the laundry room—or anywhere else in the house.

  “Come on out, wherever you are. Don’t play tricks on me.”

  She steps outside into the sunlight and peeks under the edge of the porch, just in case Shirley managed to squeeze herself underneath. The far corner is where the dog went to be alone in the end. But the mammoth is not there. Nor is it anywhere in the yard or the dog pen. Shirley has escaped.

  Of course, there’s no one to call for help but Tommy. His voice mail picks up after a few rings.

  “Call me back. It’s about Shirley,” she says vaguely.

  As soon as she hangs up, she regrets the message. Her son doesn’t need to be involved, not if his solution is poison-laced candy or a bop on the head with the shovel. An unsettling image begins to take shape: her Tommy, no longer handsome but totally devolved, a swollen caveman’s brow, hunting spear in his grimy hand, bits of broken leaves in his long and matted hair.

  She climbs into her car and drives up and down the block, too afraid to actually yell out Shirley’s name. Two streets over she spots a hulking shape beside a brick house, but when she gets closer the shape is only some yellow pampas grass. On a cul-de-sac, a white-haired man in a blue tracksuit is walking his Jack Russell terrier. The sight of the man with his dog, the parallel rhythm of their strides, almost brings a tear to Mawmaw’s eye. When she pulls up alongside the man, he leans down to her open window.

  “Something wrong?” he asks.

  “Sorry, but you seen anything kind of odd this morning?”

  “Like what?”

  She’s not sure what to say. “I lost my dog. A real big one.”

  “Sorry to hear that. You tried animal control?”

  “I will,” she says. “Good idea.”

  She drives home again and gets on the phone.

  “Listen,” she says, once she has a woman on the line. “Have you gotten any of what’d you say were ‘odd calls’ this morning?”

  “Like what?” the woman asks.

  “Like, for instance, about a real big and sick hairy dog?”

  The woman breathes deep. “Ma’am, are you calling to report a big and h
airy sick dog?”

  Mawmaw hangs up. She opens a cabinet for breakfast but isn’t very hungry. Next to the cereal boxes is a tub of mixed nuts. Upstairs she flips on the television in her bedroom. She waits for Shirley to show up on the morning news, then the afternoon news, then the evening news.

  She goes outside to smoke a menthol, but can’t remember which end is which. The ash flakes on the brick at her feet. She pictures Shirley in the oncoming beams of interstate traffic. She pictures her in a hunter’s crosshairs, then her head stuffed and mounted as a trophy.

  She is on her fourth menthol when she hears a car in the driveway. A few minutes later, Tommy comes around the corner of the house, his face gaunt under the porch light. He looks out to the dog pen and seems relieved not to see a mammoth there. If Shirley knows what’s good for her, Mawmaw thinks, she won’t come anywhere near the house tonight, not with Tommy here. She’ll wait until he’s gone again before coming home.

  “I was knocking out front,” he says, his hand up to shield his eyes from the light. “Guess I should have called first.”

  Mawmaw takes another drag of her menthol. In this light, he is only the outline of a man. “What’s the matter?” he says, stepping toward her. “It’s me.”

  The Real Alan Gass

  He’s been living with her for not quite a year when Claire first mentions Alan Gass.

  “I think I need to tell you about something,” she says. “About someone.”

  Walker turns down the stereo above the fridge and readies himself for whatever comes next. They are in the kitchen—formerly her kitchen, now their kitchen. The butter crackles around the edges of the potatoes he is frying in a big cast-iron pan. He runs his hand through his dark hair, as if exhausted. If she confesses an affair, what will he do? First, switch off the burner. Second, grab his jacket and go without a word. The third step could involve fast walking, tears, and possibly a stop at the liquor store. Beyond that, it’s hard to say.

  Claire is on the other side of the kitchen island with her laptop open, an old black T-shirt sagging down her left shoulder, a turquoise bra strap exposed. Until now, she’s been quietly at work. She no longer takes classes, but when she did, they had titles like “Advanced Topics in Sub-Subatomic Forces.” Thanks to a graduate fellowship, she spends most days on the top floor of the physics building at the university, thinking about a theoretical particle called the daisy.

  The daisy is a candidate for the smallest particle in the universe, but no one has devised a way to observe or prove the existence of one. Doing so would probably require re-creating the conditions of the Big Bang, which everyone seems to agree would be a bad idea. The wider academic community has not fully embraced Daisy Theory, as it’s called. Claire’s advisor came up with it, and, like him, Claire believes the mysterious particle is forever locked in a curious state of existence and nonexistence, sliding back and forth between the two. Daisy Theory has helped put Claire’s physics department on the map.

  “I haven’t mentioned him until now because”—she scratches her chin with her chipped electric-blue fingernail—“I was embarrassed, I guess.”

  “Just tell me,” he says, wanting this over with quickly.

  “All right, here it is. Okay. I’m kind of married.”

  “Kind of?” He doesn’t understand. Typically, one is or isn’t married. He races through the possibilities: she’s separated from someone and failed to mention it until now; or rather, she met and married a mysterious man on the sly; or, not a man, but a woman, and what she wants to propose next is an open relationship. No, more likely this is a new and clever update on the same old fight they have about time and priorities. She’s married to her research, and he just needs to get that through his head.

  “No, what I mean to say is, sometimes at night, when I dream, I dream I have a husband.”

  “A dream marriage,” he says. “Okay.” He kills the burner under the pan and scrapes the potatoes onto the plates where already the green beans have gone cold.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking. Does this bother you? You’re not the man in the dream.”

  “Just so I’m clear,” he says. “This isn’t you telling me that you’re cheating on me?”

  “I’m not cheating on you. Not unless you count dreams as cheating. Do you?”

  Walker wonders if this is an elaborate test; if, maybe, he muttered some other woman’s name in his sleep the previous night. Although he sometimes dreams about sex, in the morning the details of his encounters are usually hazy and impressionistic, with floating parts that don’t connect to a specific face. He doesn’t mention this now. A dream marriage, if that’s really what this is about, should probably not bother him. He tells her so.

  “So it doesn’t concern you that I’m in love with someone else in my dreams?” she asks.

  “You didn’t mention love.”

  “Well, I married him, didn’t I?”

  “Do I know the guy? Have I met him? Please don’t tell me it’s your advisor.”

  Whenever she talks about needing more time for her research, Walker knows, that includes more time alone with her advisor. She reaches across the island for Walker’s hand, a gesture that makes him suspect he’s about to get more bad news.

  “It’s not my advisor,” she says. “My husband’s name is Alan Gass.”

  Alan Gass only exists in her dream, she explains. He is an ophthalmologist, a tall man with bright blue eyes and a lightly bearded face. His favorite meal in the world is barbecue biscuits. He is allergic to shellfish. Years ago he played college football, but he’s put on a little weight since those days. On Saturdays he plays golf, but professes to hate what he calls clubhouse culture. He just likes the wind in his hair, the taste of a cold beer on the back nine. Claire has been married to him for almost a decade.

  “Wow,” Walker says. “You have incredibly detailed dreams.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. They’re super-realistic. Sometimes I dream that we’re just eating dinner together, kind of like this. We tell each other about our day. Or we don’t talk at all. We’ve known each other so long, silence is okay at this point, you know?”

  Walker takes a bite of the potatoes. Claire hasn’t shut her laptop.

  “You writing Alan an email over there?” he asks, and expects a full assault of noncommutative geometry, U-waves, big gravity. But when she turns the screen, he discovers that she’s looking at a website with pictures of celebrities eating messy sandwiches and picking out shampoo at the drugstore.

  “So is Alan Gass better-looking than me?”

  “Silly duck,” she says, a recurring joke about his outturned feet. She shuts the laptop and comes around the island. “Silly duck with big sexy glasses.” She plucks the glasses from his face. “Silly duck with snazzy shoes.” She taps his black shoes with her socked feet. “Silly duck with perfect duck lips.” She kisses him.

  He stands and wraps his arms around her waist. A former high school volleyball star, Claire is a few inches taller than Walker, and even more so right now with her blond hair up in a high, messy bun. He doesn’t mind her height, but whenever they ride an escalator together, he claims the higher step to see what it’s like.

  Admittedly, her dream is a strange one—so visceral, so coherent, so consistent—but he can see no reason why Alan Gass should come between them. After imagining a real affair, he feels somewhat relieved. It isn’t as though she is actually married and actually in love with an actual ophthalmologist. What counts is that the real Claire—the waking Claire, the part of her that matters—wants Walker and only Walker, and that is the case, is it not? She says that it is most definitely the case. She kisses him, tugs his hand to her cheek. She is relieved, she says, that he finally knows her secret, a secret she’s never told anyone, not even her parents. What a weight off her shoulders. Anything he wants to ask, he can ask. She will hide nothing from him.


  • • •

  Over the next few weeks, new details emerge. Claire’s dreams began when she was in high school. Walker can’t help wondering about the subtle differences between himself and Alan. Alan grew up Baptist in a small town and doesn’t drink. Walker grew up Episcopalian and drinks a glass of wine every night. Alan regularly wears suits. Walker prefers tight dark jeans and designer T-shirts. Alan volunteers at a free medical clinic. Walker can’t remember the last time he volunteered for anything.

  But Walker tries not to dwell on Alan Gass.

  Walker is the artistic director at a theater downtown. He met Claire there when she volunteered to help at the box office one semester. He was in that particular production. It was a German play about a ghost that wreaks havoc on a town by possessing prominent citizens and causing them to behave strangely. The town believes the ghost is that of a young woman who recently drowned herself because of a broken heart. The townspeople set out to find her body, thinking that will satisfy her, but it does not. The ghost responds by taking over the body of the town mayor and hurling the man off a tall building. To try and appease the ghost, the townspeople gang up on the man responsible for the woman’s broken heart. They tie weights around his ankles and drop him in the ocean. But that doesn’t solve the problem. This man also returns as a ghost looking for revenge. It was a gruesome play. Walker played the second ghost, the heartbreaker. Despite the white gunky makeup, Claire told him he was handsome.

  Alan Gass is a ghost, and Walker knows you cannot fight ghosts. They are insidious. You can’t punch a ghost or write it a drunken email. You can only pretend the ghost is not there, hope it loses interest, evaporates, moves on, does whatever it is that ghosts do when they disappear completely.

  • • •

  They are sitting in the back row of a half-packed lecture hall on campus. Thanks to Claire’s advisor, their university is home to a conference dedicated entirely to the daisy. He is on the stage, pacing before a giant screen of exploding charts and graphics, a headset microphone curled around his ear, a scientific evangelist with brown curls and a bright, boyish face. Daisy Theory is under attack, he warns, from all sides.