by Rick Bass
Of the hundred cases that had been gifted to them, there were now less than five cases remaining, and she often had the uneasy feeling that once that supply of wine was exhausted, some troubling force or development would enter into their lives; though she could not imagine anything more vexing than the wasteland she already inhabited.
She thought of Mufti’s golden-brown tears again and wondered if perhaps when the last of the wedding wine was gone, things might not actually turn better.
She carried the food out to them on rough platters improvised from sheets of plywood, with linen towels draped over them. Mufti helped her set up a long banquet table at the lake’s edge with benches fashioned from the planks of lumber balanced atop the rusting hubs and rims of old tires and wheels, the table pieced together with the hoods and trunks of abandoned vehicles and sheets of tin, which still retained their warmth from the day’s heat.
The men gathered at the table and sat hunched over their plates twin-elbowed, eating in a silence that was intruded upon only by grunts and smacking. They ate as if the meal was unquestionably their due, and they ignored the vision of the sparkling lake at whose edge they were seated.
Marie kept getting up to cook more food for them, and they did not begin to slow down until after all the mutton and all the eggs were gone, and three more bottles of wine; and they talked further amongst themselves.
Marie listened, thinking to herself that certainly she was going to go crazy, surrounded by so many men. She found herself wishing that one of them, Mufti perhaps, might miraculously, as if in the echo of all the strangeness that had already passed, transform himself into a woman. She found herself fearing, too, that in such surroundings she had become too manly, that she thought and spoke and acted as a man—and she stared out at her lake, at the bony sentinels that had attended almost all the days of her adult life, and found that she was acutely aware of the slight salt breeze stirring its way toward the table, and of its cooling effect as it passed beneath her arms and around her legs and brushed against her neck.
She stared out at the long furrow of the elephant’s passage from the night before and wondered at the assemblage and sequence of the world’s parts.
They would not be dining at the edge of the lake in darkness, in the starlight, if the elephant had not passed through on the previous evening—and yet, such scant hours separated the two events, the then and the now, that it seemed as likely, in retrospect, that the elephant might have just passed before them, like a great freighter churning the sea, while they sat at that table, dining. She found herself scanning the lake, hoping for such a thing, believing it possible, and then, worse yet, waiting for it: tuning out the inane conversations of the men, with their talk of engines, hounds, and weather.
She felt the firewall within her mind that had protected her thus far against the savage loneliness dissolving quickly now.
She rested for long hours with her eyes open but unblinking, just as, miles distant, the elephant rested before the river, on the bluff, his eyes also unblinking, and having also approached that final and now almost indistinguishable line between sleeping and dying.
She stirred to the sound of Mufti’s voice, speaking gently to the houndsmen, who were sleeping at the table with their heads lowered into the crooks of folded arms, as if all that they had gorged upon had been poisoned, and they lay dead now before the banquet.
Mufti was speaking to them as if trying to calm their dreams; waking them as a father or mother might awaken children. “Come now,” he was whispering, “we have rested, but time is short now, it is time to go and rescue the elephant.”
And awakening or returning from her own vigil, Marie rose, determined to travel with him even if no one else could be awakened.
Max Omo and the boys stirred also, however, faithful as ever to the call of work—rising with an eagerness that seemed beyond their control. Though when the houndsmen roused to gather their hounds, they found that one was missing; and casting around the cabin for him, and calling out his name—Hondo—they were rewarded with a distant, plaintive whining that came from far out upon the lake, where the hound had followed the scent of the elephant out onto the salt and had become trapped.
At first they did not believe it was him, for they could see only the silhouette of his head and long ears above the salt-line, and believed it to be some smaller animal that he had chased out onto the salt; but when the dog realized they had him spotted, and were discussing him, he tilted his head upward toward the sickled moon and gave the unmistakable bay—sacrificing more position to do so, and sinking deeper, so that now the lower part of his jowls were barely above the surface, and his ears floated atop the salt sludge, the crust cooked dangerously thin by the day’s heat.
“Gott damn,” Max Omo muttered—it seemed certain that the precision of his entire life was unraveling, and for no reason other than that he had, in a moment of weakness, agreed to help a doomed stranger. He hurried over to strap on the flatboard wooden flippers he had made for himself and the boys, which allowed them to sometimes walk with caution across the firmer archipelagos of sludge.
The boys hurried along behind him, the three of them flapping huge-footed out across the shining lake, but by the time they got to the hound he had gone under, and the serpentine ripples of his struggles had already stilled, and the sludge had already congealed back over him.
The rings of where he had gone down were spaced like the growth rings visible in a new-cut stump; and by going out to the center of those ripples, and reaching down into the salt with their bare arms, reaching in up to their shoulders and groping, they were able to find him, and with great effort haul him back up to the surface. But he had already drowned, his lungs were filled with salt, as if it had been pumped into him for a preservative, and although they skidded and dragged him back out across the top as if muscling in to shore some great sodden fish they had caught on a drop line, and once to shore attempted to resuscitate him, he could not be encouraged back to the land of the living, and now they were down to three hounds.
They would have but scant hours to recover the elephant and return him to the circus, but they packed as if going off to war: a fourth truck, and a tractor, and a winch, two come-alongs, more chains and ropes, and—the thought of it made Mufti blanch—a branding iron, left over from the sheepherders’ days.
Mufti watched Max Omo throw the branding iron into the back of his truck. He knew Omo was bringing it only as a prod, but there was some other undercurrent speaking to Mufti that suggested to him that there was another, angrier part of Omo that would, out on the desert plains, feel somehow obligated to use the brand, as if merely to test it out, whether the elephant was moving or stationary, or even alive or dead.
They gassed up, the gasoline fumes as rank and reeking as the slightly fluorescent salt crusts upon their scaly, wind-grimed bodies. Money down the rat hole, Max Omo thought, watching the gas disappear, canister after canister, into the gullets of their vehicles, East Texas crude refined, two cents a gallon, but at least it wasn’t his money. My God, he thought, what is the price of an elephant, how can the world afford an elephant?—and the caravan drove back out onto the lonely desert road at half past midnight, with a slight breeze stirring, a breeze that sent ribbons of sand snaking across the highway like the trailings of ghosts just passed.
When they got back to the elephant’s resting spot, they were surprised to find that he had moved slightly; that he had somehow been able to rise and drag himself another three feet closer to the bluff, but then no farther.
His eyes were shut. Mufti leaned in close against one ear and spoke to him, but there was no response; though still the elephant’s ribs rose and fell, and some of the heat and odor of cooking had left him.
When Mufti and Marie began hauling buckets of river water back up the bluff and pouring it on him, he awakened and stirred, opening his eyes, and he tried to rise to his knees, so that they were all encouraged, and even the houndsmen thought for a moment not of
the money to be gained by the elephant’s survival but of the possibility of the rescue itself.
“Please,” Mufti said to the elephant, speaking quietly, “please.”
Max Omo watched for a moment, and then sent the boys down to the river to begin gathering more driftwood to build a fire for the branding iron.
“I think he is well rested,” Mufti was saying, “I don’t think that will be necessary”—but already Max Omo was igniting the little pile of tinder and kindling, which flared quickly, burning not with the accustomed flames of yellow, red, and orange, but with the iridescence of the burning salts infused within the driftwood: hues of copper, chartreuse, magenta, and turquoise.
The houndsmen watched this spectacle for a moment as if witnessing a sorcerer’s work. Max Omo put more driftwood onto the fire, and placed the branding iron in the flames. The elephant trained its whale-like eye on those leaping colors, and none of the men, nor Marie, were comfortable with the emotion they saw reflected in the dampness of that single eye.
The houndsmen moved two of their trucks in behind the elephant, and with their bumpers shoved gently against the animal’s heft, but again this seemed only to spread the elephant lower and wider against the sand, and the men did not seem to have the heart to push harder; as if, in their rest, they had gained some inkling of maturity, and as if, in its almost-geological endurance, the elephant had begun to earn their respect.
Mufti looked on in a daze. He watched his elephant watch the fire fixedly—the animal paid no attention to the other goings-on—and was reminded of an elephant he had seen as a boy in India, an elephant that would paint with palette and brushes, on large canvases, renderings of exquisite landscapes, landscapes that that elephant could never have seen or known before, but which nevertheless existed in the world: mountains and golden prairies and seascapes and winding rivers lined with cool shady birch trees dappled with yellow light.
As if intoxicated, Mufti continued to watch but was not quite fully sensate as the men, under Max Omo’s orders, maneuvered their trucks and winches into position. Working beneath the night stars as they were, Mufti was reminded of how it was in each new town when the circus first arrived and began setting up all the tents and tarps that comprised the Big Top: all the various rooms and chambers and compartments creating the architecture that must have seemed like a dream to the circus-goers, but which was the truest reality the circus members themselves knew.
Marie went over to where Mufti was staring at the fallen elephant and put her hand on his arm, uncaring of who might see her. So touched was she by his own heart’s ache that she felt it deeply as her own, and felt her heart being drawn or summoned as if from some great depth; as if for all her life, her heart had been like a bird kept trapped beneath an overturned bucket, and that only this specific chain of events, this sequence, and a stranger’s sorrow, an alien’s sorrow greater than her own—had been able to lift or overturn that bucket.
The firelight washed across the two of them, her hand on his bare arm, and flickered across the rest of them, and the elephant; and if Max Omo noticed the consolation Marie was giving the outsider (Mufti’s head now tipping into hers, and his shoulders shaking), he gave no indication of finding it unusual; or perhaps he simply did not recognize the heart in flight.
The ropes and chains were readied; the links of the chains jingled in their slackness, but then became silent as they were stretched taut, as the trucks were positioned for the pulling. Mufti’s tears splashed onto the dry-spotted skin of Marie’s hand, and she patted his arm once more and then released him, and the houndsmen, with the trucks now leaning full into their burden—the ropes and chains bowstring-tight, as if ready for music—rolled up the curtain door of the circus wagon.
Once more, the hounds clambered onto the back of the elephant, slashing and gnawing at the hide with as little discernible progress as were they to begin chewing at the thick bark of a tree. They opened a few more rivers of blood, but the elephant gave them no acknowledgment, kept his eye only upon the fire; and the men, under Max Omo’s coordination, began pulling harder with the trucks, and the boys cranked on the come-alongs that were attached to each of the elephant’s front legs.
It seemed now to all of them that the elephant was again trying to rise, and that, somewhat rested, he might even have had the power to do so, given just a little more time.
But Max Omo had not brought the iron to let it go unutilized, nor was there any way he would be content, once it was heated, to set it aside and let it cool slowly in the sand; and with heavy gloves he picked up the iron and moved toward the elephant. The glowing brand—two wavery lines forming the Cowders’ initials “CC,” with three curling lines beneath the letters, undulating waves—appeared to float unattached through the night, floating and yet possessing only one intent, never faltering in its path toward the elephant’s flank.
The elephant’s eye widened farther, and it struggled harder, but it seemed that the chains and harnesses that had been rigged in the attempt to help hoist it now conspired against it—that there was not enough yaw or pitch, not enough space for the rolling and leaning and lumbering involved in the elephant’s standing—and when the brand found the elephant’s flank (at the last minute, Mufti had run at Max Omo, trying to stop him, but had been unable to), the elephant trumpeted and shuddered violently as if seized by an electrical current, and the hounds on his back lost their footing.
The stench and steam of burning hide filled the night, and in the elephant’s lunge, the brand was knocked from Max Omo’s hand, with the poker-bar shank of it glancing and searing his forearm.
The elephant was standing now, had broken two of the chains that housed it, and had pulled the boys with their flimsy come-alongs off their feet as if their attachment to him was by nothing but the single strand of a spider’s web.
The trucks dug in deeper, wheels spinning harder.
Steadily, the trucks were dragging the elephant in the direction of what the drivers believed to be the elephant’s salvation. The children were behind the elephant, shoving the driftwood prybars under its belly and attempting, foot by foot, to hurry it along in that manner.
There were no other sounds except for the gunning roar of the engines and the tires spinning in and plowing the sand, bringing great rooster-tail cascades of sand down upon the backs of their necks, the sand still heated from the warmth of the day; and once the pullers had come as close to the edge of the bluff as they dared, they turned and traveled parallel to the river, traveling north, with the elephant following them unwillingly, sometimes stumbling though other times being dragged, with his tusks furrowing the sand like a harrow, and in so doing looking not so much as if preparing the sand for the sowing of any one crop or another, but instead like some implement designed to search for something lying just below.
Somewhere near the end, it occurred to Mufti to question the worth of the endeavor; somewhere near the end, he understood for only the first time the great and final distance that would always exist between the elephant’s desire and his, even when the two appeared to be working in synchrony.
But what good was such brutal understanding now, with the other plans set so irretrievably and forcefully in motion?
Even as Mufti was processing the discovery, Max Omo, who had reheated the branding iron, was getting out of the truck and administering a second, duplicate brand to the elephant’s hide, and then a third branding; though the animal had now come to a stop exactly where they had wanted it to, close enough to the bluff’s edge that it could lean over and tumble down the bank, if it wanted to; or if it did not want to, where they could perhaps shove it over the edge with the aid of the levers of driftwood; or, if that was not successful, where they could dig out the ledge beneath the elephant, undermining it with shovels and pickaxes like miners hunting for some rumored cache of ore, until the meniscus of the surface on which the elephant rested thinned to the point that it could no longer hold his burden, and collapsed, the elephant spilling
into the river it had once sought with such desire.
The men shut off their trucks and got out and began unhitching the chains and harnesses before reassembling them into one longer line, which they would keep attached to the elephant so that they could reel it back in, once it was sufficiently cooled and watered.
As if they each and all believed the elephant, if it recovered, would still be capable of making the next evening’s show.
Upstream, they fastened their trucks together with remnants of chain, forming one solid deadweight that they felt confident not even the elephant’s bulk, nor the current of Horsehead Crossing, could displace. For extra security they had the boys fill the backs of the trucks with sand. Then they set about building a sand bunker between the trucks and elephant, as a kind of firewall between man and nature, beast and machine.
Max Omo burned the elephant’s flank a fourth time, and a fifth, though to no avail; the elephant sat perched on the ledge like some great roosting bird. Each brand smoldered anew, and though the pattern, the inscription, was always the same, the cant of each brand was always different, and the brandings soon began to overlay one another, so that they began to appear as crowded hieroglyphs, meaningless.
The elephant’s eyes widened each time the firebrand drew nearer, and tears leaked from those glassine eyes with each clench of steam—the elephant’s body miraculous in that it was still capable of producing any moisture at all—and with each branding, the same shudder rippled through all the thousands of pounds of life. And though thus attentive to the brandings, the elephant still disdained the river below, determined to settle in.
They tried shoving against the wall of the elephant, pushing so hard against the cottonwood lever-spars that the timbers snapped with the sound of cannon fire—and finally they gave up and set to work on the bankside, digging and clawing with boards and shovels and bare hands at the pale cliff wall beneath the star-backed silhouette of the creature.
