Menagerie

by Bradford Morrow

  I paid twenty-five cents to see that circus show and they went on without the lion. They didn’t give us a penny back. I guess the tamer had better look for a new job.

  He better look for his old one.

  Maybe it actually is a man-eater like what it says on the poster is what the lion tamer is thinking. The little ladies who hardly even scream Oh! go to church to see lions curled up with lambs, they never had a pig as nice as pie turn on them and try to bite off their hands. But the lion-tamer’s lion was as nice as pie. The tamer whacks at the cornstalks with the gun barrel, trying to scare it out. It’s still too light to see the fires inside the houses over which such nice pie might be cooking, the settlements being close to the fields because a man can’t farm much farther than he can keep going with the plow. Which is a blessing because it’s not much farther than a person could call out Lion!

  Over eight feet tall is what he shouted out when the lion stood on its legs in the show to dance with him, husband to wife. He said maybe the townspeople should play the show music to get the lion to stand up again and somebody volunteered to hitch up a mare to lug the gramophone over rather than walk the field with the rest of them. Cowards. Why it was only two shows ago sticking his head inside the lion’s mouth that he’d seen that bad tooth, black and yellow, going green.

  Aunt Flo’s second boy, supposed to be home for supper, gets shot first off. Hardly grazed him, but still. Then Hanrahan’s hat fills with holes—it was dangling from the end of his rifle, thank God. A right jittery bunch, most of them. Colonel Horst the worst, the Civil War on his shoulder, each of the leaves on the cornstalk like a flag to him if there’s any blow at all. He claims he surprised the lion and shot it in the leg but nobody saw him do it, but nobody goes into the field or the brush adjacent to look.

  The circus says they want the lion back alive and the townsfolk too. They hire horses so they can see over the tops of the corn, and bring in the aerialist’s nets so as to flush the lion out into them. But after a week they pack up and move on.

  The tamer stays put, out of a job without an animal, and boards with some woman known as Aunt Flo for the time being. He says the other circus was getting too close to theirs in the revenue department and there is nothing like a loose lion for publicity. Good? Flo asks, or bad? Listen to me, he says, last year six circus trains got wrecked and the animals all ran off. Now how would six of them wreck? No other kind of train wrecks so easy as that. It’s just part of the act. He just says he would have switched to contortionist if he’d known about the racket, or trained up a horse. A loose lion!

  A week after the first search is called off, a horse goes missing, and parts of another.

  I’m going to leave what’s left out for bait, says the fuming owner. He lays it, bleeding, on a circle of hay. It’s not fresh but maybe the lion isn’t so fussy.

  Not far away lie two lovers, one of them against the killing of the lion enough that she keeps the other away from “the hunt of your life,” as advertised for two weeks in the local newspaper, keeps him away by the oldest means possible. These two lovers are not married except to other people so each spouse assumed the other’s elsewhere. They have found the McHenrys’ good for them, a farmhouse abandoned in a battle between heirs. Since she is one of the heirs, she can keep the battle going. No one from either side is allowed entrance until it’s settled. She has her alibis and since she is still so young and so newlywed, she hardly has to use them, and since he’s a man he has places to go whereas his bride doesn’t. He is beating his way back to his own homestead, tra-la.

  The bait is took is the news of the week.

  The lion isn’t that big sitting down. The lover steps closer. It’s not like a snake is what he thinks, you want to put out your hand and call it. He doesn’t yell or they’ll know where he is and why he is in the wrong place at the wrong time, but he doesn’t turn his back to it in a run. It’s been shot in the leg, it doesn’t move when it sees him, its eyes narrow. He stares, he thinks he’s casting his power over it, that it is paralyzed by his might. He has been drinking.

  The lion wrangles its head and a halo of dust rises, then it limps off.

  He tells everybody it sat somewhere else.

  The Summers’ boy out calling their good trained dog that is running in the dark drops his torch too close to a hay bale and it catches. Volunteers take all night to put out the fire. After it’s over they find big bones all burnt. They say they saw the lion raise itself up and jump through the fire like at a circus hoop but that the fire jumped higher.

  The tamer isn’t so sure about the bones. Could be a big badger or a cow’s, he says. Did you find teeth?

  Nobody finds teeth.

  Does the lion eat underwear since Mame lost two skivvies from the line? is the kind of question they pepper the tamer with. He doesn’t tell them how the lion scares the bejesus out of him, always has. He never could figure out, he swears, how the lion got past the bars of its cage, must’ve been some voodoo. In fact he was drunk when the first alarm got out, then he closed the cage quick where he had forgotten the latch. He had sung to the lion all week giving it its dinner, making it turn its head where he put down its food, a bit short that week. The revenues had slipped since he’d been refusing to put his head inside on account of that rotting tooth. But he did put his head inside that last time. He had to or lose his job. People would come back again and again to see his head inside that lion. Maybe he left that door open because he was finished even thinking about his head inside that lion.

  He is swinging a hammer for Kolste on the days the Kolste boy has to help at the post office.

  She married into the region, leaving Chicago and Papa behind as most girls do. Church-held suppers, as innocent as that, is where the new wives did the dishes while the new husbands dried. That’s how the two lovers met when it didn’t seem that she would ever meet anyone ever again. For her loneliness, her father had bought her a radio. Sometimes it picked up the Chicago symphony, which she sits and listens to without moving or else dances with her broom to the melodies. It is hardly dance music, and she weeps. Not so anyone can see, not in the open but in the kitchen just after the broadcast when she is making her new husband coffee. Sometimes her husband does see and catches her by the arm and asks if the floor is that dirty.

  A new fellow feeling sweeps the town in its fame of having a lion lost in its whereabouts: Beers are raised in toasts to the town’s bravery, a newborn is named Tiger despite its being a lion that is lost, and the women’s auxiliary draws up a coat of arms with the lion as a sort of human.

  He is dolling himself up for her again, even a tinch of that scented talcum the city boys wear, and he is putting on his best shoes—Off to church? asks Ellie, his wife, bending over laundry she’s been refusing to do unless he makes peace with her in the bedroom way, which he has, he has done his duty, as hard as it is with her so pregnant, he is taking the shortcut to the McHenrys’ about a mile out of the way of his stated destination, he is passing the slate fall and the ashy quarter section and the fence nobody yet fixed at the bottom because there’s a washout so close, a kind of natural fence the way he looked at it, he is leaning hard into the door where it is warped from no woman to look after it properly, he hears her moving in the back room where they like to go and he stops in the foyer, adjusts his wardrobe in anticipation, his face showing red in the ratty old mirror, he pulls the bedroom door toward him.

  She’s in the corner in the half-light of the old curtains rotted and torn, she’s in the corner lying there with someone else.

  No.

  The man steps forward the way he didn’t before. The lion rises, an arm falling to one side. Because of its hurt leg, it doesn’t lunge, the man lunges, and the powerful stench of the lion’s mouth and its paw flatten him. Scrabbling up, he pulls at her body, which is not the thing to do.

  Afterward, the lion jumps out the window they left open.

  What is left over of the woman her husband has a hole dug for and we
eps beside her radio. How did Ellie’s fella know where to look? And in his best clothes? The telephone operator knows why and says so.

  When a moose wanders into town the very next year, someone shoots it right off. They are not going to wait for trouble.

  The tamer runs for sheriff. Vote for me, he says. I’ll protect you. Nobody else wants the job, too dangerous, and having him stay on means that if the cat comes back, they can put him out as bait. What he does is take all that he saves from sheriffing and puts it into stocks. Everybody else who has two cents to his name is doing that, never mind paying for a new planter. The Roaring Twenties may be just about over but this time he’s not going to be left behind.

  An Interview with William S. Burroughs

  Conducted by Bradford Morrow

  WILLIAM BURROUGHS AND I were friends for nearly a decade before I flew out to visit him at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, from April 3–6, 1987. We had gotten to know each other when, in my twenties, I published a variant passage from The Naked Lunch as a small press book, Doctor Benway, with an introduction he wrote for the occasion. In the years following, we mostly met for long afternoons into the night with James Grauerholz and others at my old apartment on West Ninth Street, conversing about everything imaginable. And in Conjunctions:9, I was honored to run an excerpt from William’s amazing tribute to felines, “The Cat Inside,” which includes one of my favorite—of many—Burroughs lines: “Workers are paid in cats and cat food.”

  Anyone I have ever known who met William unvaryingly found him to be a true gentleman, gracious and sharp-witted, an irrepressible, knowledgeable raconteur of the first order. During my stay with him in Lawrence he was in fine form, introducing me to a man who made walking sticks from bull pizzles and teaching me how to throw knives into the wooden siding of his backyard garage. I hadn’t intended to interview him or made any preparations to do so, but as a person who has always loved animals, I noticed over the course of the first couple of days out there that our conversation kept returning to lemurs and a host of other beasts.

  Not unexpectedly, William had a large posse of cats. One basement window of his house was left open so that this tribe of neighborhood kitties could come and go as they pleased, eat the food and drink the water William left downstairs for them. Some were feral, others were moochers from down the block, yet others were official residents with names, but all were in one way or another as devoted to William as he was to them. He was a born animal behaviorist. Cat Fancy magazines were stacked on the coffee table in the living room and the only television shows I saw William watch (with the sound off, as I recall) were nature programs. In short, the man was as devoted to animals as I was. Without giving it much thought, I asked if we could do an impromptu talk about the subject.

  Why was our dialogue never published before now? Quick answer is, when I got back home to New York, I listened to the tape in horror. The audio quality was so poor that transcription seemed impossible. The project, if one could call it a project, was set aside and the tape itself went missing for a number of years. It wasn’t until we decided to do an issue of Conjunctions devoted to animals that I set about searching around in earnest for the cassette and found it. I asked my friend Dan Grigsby, a sound engineer and expert at audio restoration, if he would try to improve the sound quality enough that we could transcribe it. To say we are deeply grateful for Dan’s painstaking work would be a serious understatement. I want also to thank Micaela Morrissette, Nicole Nyhan, Joss Lake, Zappa Graham, Emma Horwitz, and Pat Sims for their combined efforts with me to transcribe this talk. Alas, even with all these attentive ears at work, a few words remain too elusive to include with confidence, so pardon us a couple of lacunae.

  I must express great gratitude to my dear friend of so many years, James Grauerholz, Burroughs’s secretary and now literary executor, for taking the time to read the transcript for accuracy and generously granting permission for its publication here. As the reader will see, the conversation is freewheeling and extemporaneous, but William’s elemental genius, the distinctive way he viewed the world around him and all the beasts in it, humans included, shines through.

  BRADFORD MORROW: Let’s talk about animals. When did you first fall in love with lemurs?

  WILLIAM BURROUGHS: Oh, well, I’d heard about them, I didn’t know much about them. I had a very good impression of them, marvelous creatures. It was stirred since I got into cats. I see lemurs as marvelous animals. See, they were at one time widely distributed all across the world. And now they’ve shrunk back so that they’re only now found in Madagascar, true lemurs. I know there are creatures similar to lemurs found in Borneo. Gliding lemurs, flying lemurs, found in Borneo.

  MORROW: So, the lemurs came out of your interest in cats.

  BURROUGHS: Yes. They’re kind of a combination of monkey and cat and they’re humans.

  MORROW: But lemurs, they’re not in the cat family.

  BURROUGHS: They’re not in the cat family nor are they in the monkey family. They call them prosimians. They’re not monkeys. There are no monkeys in Madagascar. And also there are no predators.

  MORROW: You mentioned you can see lemurs somewhere in the United States.

  BURROUGHS: Oh, yes. There’s the prosimian center at Duke University. I’ve corresponded with them. They’ve got three hundred lemurs in a natural habitat. I showed you the pictures. Yes, and I’m going down there to talk to them and see their lemurs. Apparently lemurs tame very readily. The pictures show the lemurs climbing all over people. Beautiful creatures. They’ll just jump up on their shoulders.

  MORROW: Those are ring-tailed?

  BURROUGHS: Ring-tailed, yes. Those are also known as cat lemurs …

  MORROW: Cat lemurs.

  BURROUGHS: Because they purr, like a cat. They are the easiest to tame. Some of the larger lemurs like the spotted and the black lemurs are not so easy to tame. It takes time.

  MORROW: Cats, you’ve always loved cats?

  BURROUGHS: My whole life, oh yes. When I moved here, I was out in the country and that’s when I think a mess of cats came around and I formed an attachment to this one who would keep coming over. We had a stone house at the top of the hill where we had all these cats.

  MORROW: And you told me about a snake, when we were together last in New York, that you liked too.

  BURROUGHS: Oh, I don’t judge the snakes.

  MORROW: What are your favorite animals?

  BURROUGHS: Lemurs.

  MORROW: Lemurs are your favorite—you like them even better than cats?

  BURROUGHS: Well, we don’t have to draw a line. I like cats, I like lemurs, I like raccoons, I like—skunks are marvelous animals. When I was a kid, we used to have descented skunks as pets. They make great pets. But now the vet says it’s practically illegal for him to treat a skunk or a raccoon because of rabies. The ordinary vaccination doesn’t always take with lemurs, with humans, with skunks, or raccoons. People are discouraged from making pets out of them—they make very gentle pets. But skunks are great. Skunks are like ferrets, weasels, raccoons. Some of them are called ringtail cats, but it isn’t a cat. It’s essentially a raccoon but it’s much smaller than a raccoon. It’s like a miniature raccoon; they only weigh about four or five pounds. But in the wild, the wild cats, there’s lots of cats, wild cats, that are much smaller than house cats. There’s one, the rusty spotted cat that only weighs four pounds at maturity. A miniature cat …

  MORROW: You were telling me yesterday about this project for an animal center in Lawrence of some sort.

  BURROUGHS: Well, a no-kill animal shelter.

  MORROW: I think that would be a great idea.

  BURROUGHS: Well, yes, they have two in New York, outside of New York City. Also there’s one in Chicago called Tree House. There’s one outside of New York, in Bronxville or somewhere, called the Elmsford Shelter. I got a list of them somewhere in my Cat Fancy, and there are about ten of them scattered around.

  MORROW: If you had your way, how would you ru
n a shelter, how would somebody do that?

  BURROUGHS: Well, I’d write to Tree House to find out how they do it. But what you do is, well you have to enclose animals and monitor them, photo them, get them spayed and neutered. Some get stopped from breeding, get put up for adoption and all that. It’s no big trick nor is it necessarily very expensive. They have these food dispensers. These need to be filled, every day and week.

  MORROW: There are stray dogs in Lawrence.

  BURROUGHS: Well, naturally, yes, there are. I’m not interested in dogs.

  MORROW: (Laughs.) I won’t ask. Birds, you have a bird feeder.

  BURROUGHS: I have a feeder. Well, I just don’t care for them all that very much, about birds. I like crows. I had a pet crow for a while. Crows are more intelligent than birds. It was a long time ago, about sixteen years, I had a pet crow. I had its wings fixed. But whenever it heard one of the other crows, it would just go nuts, go flapping out there.

  MORROW: Where was that?

  BURROUGHS: Outside of St. Louis. This crow would eat bananas out of my hand very eagerly and then it pecked viciously at my fingers.

  MORROW: When the banana was there?

  BURROUGHS: No, no, anytime. He wanted to eat but didn’t like me, so I let the wings grow back.

  MORROW: Was he a lame crow? Well, you don’t go to a pet shop and buy one.

  BURROUGHS: No, you don’t. Someone brought him when he was very young. But he just wanted to be with the other crows, so I let his wings grow out.

  MORROW: And that’s how that story ended?

  BURROUGHS: He flew away with the other crows.

  MORROW: Be hard to keep a crow and cats at the same time.

  BURROUGHS: Well, I didn’t have cats then.

  MORROW: What other animals have you kept?

  BURROUGHS: Oh, I’ve had a ferret. And I had an angora goat. It was a little goat. Little goats are the cutest things. Put out your fist and they don’t budge. Cute little thing.