by Rick Bass
And now the Omos saw, emerging from the other side of that lens of heated, brilliant light, the metamorphosis of terror and unholy beauty and power into a ragtag procession of two large and dilapidated wide-tired trucks, with steam rising from beneath the hood of each, and the larger truck misfiring badly, its burned-out valves clattering a death knell.
Limping along in front of the two trucks was a posse of half a dozen bedraggled men, pant cuffs rolled up and straw hats askew, with four of the men being tugged wearily along by lunging, baying bloodhounds, whose peals grew clearer and louder.
The trucks rattled to a stop in the Omos’ yard, and the men tied the leaping hounds to the bumpers of the hissing trucks and hobbled over to meet the Omos: walking toward them as if not clearly seeing them, limping along at the edge of heat stroke. When one of the men reached out his hand to shake with Max Omo, he missed Omo’s hand entirely.
They were with the circus, the driver of the larger truck explained, and had come searching for their elephant. They had been tracking it since daylight—the circus had been in Odessa, two nights before—and they cast suspicious glances at the great mound of yellowing salt, and at the barn, as if believing that the Omos might be harboring the creature.
Marie went to get brine water to give to the gasping hounds, and Max Omo led the posse over to the small wedge of shade offered by his porch, where the men sat and then lay down in stages of collapse, rolling onto their backs and sides and even their stomachs, like children taking a nap. Only the elephant’s trainer, an Indian gentleman who, despite the day’s heat, was dressed in the traditional garb of his profession, refrained from collapse, and that only because he had been riding in one of the trucks the whole way.
In broken English he explained that they had already gotten their trucks stuck a dozen times that morning—the men digging out with their hands and shovels, and one truck pushing or pulling the other through the salt and the sand—and when Marie inquired about the nature of the elephant, the trainer, whose name was Mufti, informed her that he had had the old bull almost all his life, that the elephant was himself forty-seven years old, and in full musth, very dangerous and full of breeding hormones, and that they should consider themselves lucky he had not demolished their shack, with them in it, for the simple reason that it might have appeared an eyesore to him.
“A fleck,” Mufti said, “a piece of dust.” He had a whip and a holstered pistol on his hip and said that though he was very fond of the elephant, he feared he might have to protect himself against it, though he was hoping that the trek across the sand would be dulling somewhat the animal’s excesses. He said this loudly, as if for the benefit of his associates, rather than the truth.
Max Omo wanted to know what such a creature was worth, and when Mufti answered that in India the animal could easily bring the equivalent of between $10,000 and $20,000, Max Omo stared with incomparable Germanic scorn at the assemblage of sleeping ass-whipped middle-aged men and then told Mufti, “I will go and get your elephant.”
5
WHILE MAX OMO AND MUFTI gathered water for the trip, the other men continued to nap, snoring and drooling like the hounds themselves, which had crawled under the frames of the still-hissing, leaking trucks, where they had then dug holes in the salt.
The water was too briny to go into the trucks’ radiators, so Max Omo had to pour expensive antifreeze gurgling into the maws of the trucks, as well as another of his inventions, a golden mixture of the glittering residue of aluminum hydroxide flakes, which would float in suspension in the radiator until the water became hot.
Under pressure, then, the flakes would be forced into the cracks through which the radiator fluid had been leaking, where the magical flakes would continue to hydrate in the warming waters, swelling to a thousandfold of their previous size, and aligning themselves into tiny warped sheets of a thin, metallic substance, as impermeable but brittle as a sugar glaze broiled quickly upon a cake.
More jarring would eventually knock those little false-welds loose over time, depositing in the bottom of the radiator a sludge of broken sheets of spent aluminum, which made the radiator run rougher and hotter than ever, and, when this happened, the engine was usually lost.
But Omo had not yet discovered that about his invention, knew only that it seemed to be a miraculous stopgap solution to the desert heat that plagued and finally consumed any piece of machinery that required water for its maintenance.
Mufti watched as Max Omo tapped, magisterially, the last of the sparkling flakes into the radiator, and Mufti murmured, “I have come to the right place.”
The boys already saw their father as a wizard—their entire universe was but the shining wide skillet of the lake, through which elephants passed, they might have assumed, with some frequency, and whose tides and yields their father had not so much learned as commanded to perform at his beckoning. It was for them a universe beyond the horizons of which the world might as well have fallen off to nothingness.
It surprised Marie to see that her husband could be respected among the strangers of the world: competent, even helpful, and a leader—he who could not coax her heart, nor any of their hearts, out of the ivory cages of their rib-bones, with never a word of praise or other kind gesture for any job done well, or done at all.
And in some futile, helpless way of both possessor and possessed, it pleased her to see that it was this way. He might be wrong in his mistreatment of her, or he might be justified—perhaps she was unworthy—but either way, it appeared that he was strong in the world; not just within the confines of Juan Cordona Lake, but in the larger, wider world beyond.
Marie studied Mufti with a mixture of curiosity, attraction, and repulsion—the holstered pistol and whip, the scent of incense upon his body, as well as, faintly, the odor of the elephant that she had scented lingering in the dunes. She glanced at her husband as if seeing him anew, and was excited by the adventure upon which they were about to embark, though still, she hoped they would not find the elephant, or that if they did, that he would continue to make good his escape.
“We must hurry,” Mufti told them. “He will burn in this sun. He drinks over forty gallons of water a day. It was madness, to bring him to this part of the world. Always, I have succumbed too easily to greed.”
“Does he know how to find water?” Max Omo asked. “Will he be drawn to it, like a mule, a horse, or a cow?”
Mufti nodded. “He will not be able to stay away from it,” he said. “Wherever it is, he will find it.”
Max Omo hunkered down on his heels and with a stick sketched a rough map in the marbled salt floor upon which they squatted. As the twig scratched at the surface, Marie could smell the sharper, damper odors that were released, and the scents were familiar and comforting as well as nauseating.
“Once he gets out of the dunes, it’s downhill to Horsehead Crossing,” Max said. He sketched the path and direction that led to Castle Gap.
“Must we cross the great desert to get there?” Mufti asked, as if riding in the back of the circus truck, while the other searchers led their hounds, had been the hardest ordeal of all.
“We can take a dirt road down there,” Max said, thinking out loud. He sketched that route, then looked out at the broken furrows the animal had plowed through his sleeping lake. “I don’t care how good a swimmer you fancy him to be, he’s likely to have trouble if he tries to drink there at the crossing. If he just sticks his trunk in, he might be okay, but if he gets a mind to wade in and try to cool off, like they do in Africa—”
“India,” said Mufti.
Max Omo shook his head. “I don’t care where he’s from, he’s likely to find that crossing more than he bargained for.”
They rose and rousted the dogs and their sleeping handlers, and the circus attendants who had traveled with them. They loaded barrels and buckets of water into the back of the smaller circus truck. The larger one, an enclosed van, was as hot as the cookstove, a violent, stifling, dead airspace so superheated th
at it seemed even a single breath or stirring could ignite it into an inferno; it was into this enclosure that they would attempt to herd the elephant, if they found him.
Because it was too hot, the dogs and their owners rode high atop the covered van, where in addition to staying cooler, they hoped to be able to sight or take scent of the elephant in the distance; and they set out into the bright day in a swaying, rumbling caravan, the Omos all piled into their truck and the overcrowded circus trucks, temporarily revived, traveling behind them; and Marie felt more alive than she had in years, invigorated and rejuvenated by the hunt, and filled with the feeling that her life was going to change: that it had somehow just taken a brighter turn for the better, whether they found the elephant or not.
They reached the crossing an hour later, traveling down the last of the little sand roads that had led them there. The vehicles were all still running strong. They walked up and down the bluff—it was about a ten-foot drop into the rushing water—and looked for tracks to see if the elephant had passed through, but there were none.
A great blue heron was surprised by their approach and leapt into the sky with a troubled rasp. It climbed crookedly, seemingly suspended over the rushing waters, and then flew higher, finally finding its graceful rhythm.
Marie stared after the bird until it was gone completely, and still she stared. Mufti watched her watch the bird, and knew then more deeply that which he had already understood at first glance. He had seen and met perhaps a thousand women who, when the circus came to town, would gladly and desperately have abandoned their homes and husbands and families to travel with it, and to travel with him: not knowing the words of his new language, nor the rules or customs of the circus culture, but willing nonetheless to travel every other day to a new town, and to sleep each night bedded down amongst the caged animals; to learn new odors, new patterns, and new work: and to know, for the first time, a complete unraveling of the past to which they had each been chained for so long.
Some of the women came to him after the performance, asking or even pleading to join—believing, in some injured place far within them, that they would be happy in such a life; that no other place in the world could be so well-designed for them as the traveling cast of the freakish and the foreign, the wild beasts and aliens.
Mufti had learned, from those almost nightly encounters, how to differentiate, in even that first glance, the merely sad and hopeless from the truly disturbed; how to separate, and speak to, the troubled or forlorn as opposed to the crazed.
Only once had he relented and allowed one of the women to join the circus, and travel with them. The arrangement had immediately caused such jealousy and animosity among the other circus members that the entire act threatened to fall apart. The issue had resolved itself however when the new woman was mauled by the tiger one afternoon, as the tiger pushed open the door to its cage at feeding time. The woman survived, barely, losing both an arm and a leg. She was returned to the care of her family, where, largely immobilized, she received thereafter the attention she had been looking for, though not of the type that she had needed or desired.
What they all wanted, Mufti had noticed, was not so much freedom as a new set of borders and rules. They wanted to trade a familiar imprisonment for an unfamiliar one; and their unhappiness was, in Mufti’s opinion, due to the fact that they were comfortable with neither boundaries nor freedom; that not since childhood had they had the experience of dwelling in both lands, passing back and forth freely from one to the other.
The modern world did not seem set up to accommodate such passages for either men or women, in his opinion.
When they stood before him outside the tent, arms outstretched, palms uplifted, they were weeping for their lost childhoods, and those days of dreaming.
“Jumpers,” the circus members called them scornfully; and watching Marie watch the heron fly crookedly away, Mufti saw that if she was not yet a jumper, she was close enough: too close.
The men and boys and Marie sat in the shade of the circus trucks with the hounds and sipped the warm brine water they had brought, and Mufti and his two helpers told them stories of the circus for nearly an hour before Max Omo began to grow impatient. The noon sun overhead was baking his salt lake, squeezing riches out of it by the minute. He urged the other men to consider leaving one truck stationed at the crossing as a lookout, and taking the other two into the desert to search for the animal.
There was no circus scheduled for that evening, and Mufti was satisfied to sit in the shade a while longer and wait for the elephant to come to him. Max Omo, however, would hear nothing of it. He argued for the men with hounds to be deployed up through the center of the dunes while Omo’s truck and the circus van flanked them on either side.
At first Mufti agreed—any plan was fine with him, he said, as long as he didn’t have to go back out in the sun—but no sooner had he spoken than Marie, like a chess player hunting down the king, proclaimed that she too would stay by the river and watch, and wait.
That plan was more than fine with Max Omo—he knew that either of them, the woman or the Indian, would slow them down out in the dunes—but Mufti, wanting no part of a domestic calamity—he had been in too many already, and the sadness that always attended him in the days afterward had to it almost precisely the flavor of that sun-heated brine water—reversed his position immediately, volunteering to go out into the desert with Max Omo himself, or the dog handlers, or anyone; and cracked now if not broken, and too chastened to change her mind, Marie kept to her original pronouncement, and stayed with the second circus truck, in the shade, while the others went off into the desert.
She was numb to the sight of the posse striking off into the terrible whiteness, felt no pain or even discomfort or regret that she was neither traveling with them any longer nor whiling away the afternoon in pleasant conversation with the elephant trainer.
A younger and less time-hardened woman—even an earlier version of herself—might have felt pain, watching them set off—separated so completely from not just her goal but the general commerce of fellow humans—and a younger, less hardened person, or her earlier self, might even have still known hope, knowing that the day would end, and that they would return.
But watching the heat swallow them—it looked as if they were stepping through a white curtain—Marie felt only a jaded heartlessness. She was aware of something seeping out of her as one might feel faintly the blood trickling from one’s nostrils. It seemed to her that whatever was draining out of her was leaving her in the fashion of water and seeping down into the earth, vanishing through the dried, platey crevices of sunbaked mud cracks.
But of true sensation, she felt nothing, only the last of an ancient vitality draining out of her, and traveling back down into the dust.
Max Omo and Mufti and the others found the elephant pretty quickly. Though there was no discernible breeze, the dogs had caught his scent. Max Omo, in the truck on the left, and Mufti, in the truck on the right, saw the hounds catch the scent at the same time, saw them lunge in a single wave, jerking the frazzled houndsmen along with them—the houndsmen yanking back on the chains and leashes, sending up showers of flashing sand around their ankles like the spray of sunlit water.
One of the handlers stumbled and went down on a folded ankle, but did not let go of the leash, which was wrapped around his wrist. He continued to hold the leash with both hands as his dog, a big bluetick, dragged him on his belly across the hot sand and down a dune.
Both Max Omo and Mufti accelerated their trucks, Omo’s engine laboring, whining at the abuse, and Omo winced, imagining that he could feel the friction of each straining stroke upon the delicate, lubricated valves—and at the top of the next ridge, with their engines beginning to smoke, they saw the elephant.
He was lying on his side at the top of a high dune, as if the effort of reaching only that one single crest, rather than the cumulative effects of the journey, was what had felled him; and even from that distance, they could sme
ll him burning, cooking in the sun.
It was an odor exactly like that of a roast baking in the oven, a huge ham not of mutton or pork, but delicious beef, and even in the truck, Max Omo could smell it, and it filled him with an immediate pleasure, took him back to childhood, when his mother would fix a huge lunch for their family on Sunday after church, the wheel of the century having only just clicked forward a few years, 1904, 1905, and the bones and muscles and blood of the dreaded Comanches not even entirely rotted away to worm-food in their countless unmarked graves and nongraves, the repositories of the chewing beetles that remade history daily.
The odor spurred him on. He did not plan to eat the elephant, but he accelerated the truck toward the odor with anticipation or inexplicable and surprising happiness: as if some part of him far within believed, however illogically, that he was going to meet up with his mother again, and the rest of his family, and his childhood.
Mufti likewise was stimulated by the odor, though he had never eaten beef, not even during his sojourns in Texas, and never would; and he had certainly never eaten elephant, nor could he conceive of such a thing. And Mufti did not associate the pleasant smell with the hastening decomposition of his aged companion, but instead perceived it to be merely some favorable background aroma—a barbecue at some nearby ranch: as if just beyond the last visible dune lay some mythic sylvan glade, where a happy, loving family worshiped their God not weekly but daily, and then came home midday to fix, in celebration of their life of prayer and hard labor, an incredible feast, dining midafternoon at a great oaken table with shimmering leaf-dappled light reflecting from the pond just outside the dining room window and a breeze stirring the curtains and tablecloth, bathing the diners with the odors of the kitchen, and the meal, and the green lawn and great farm beyond.
