Poison Ivory (18 page)

“Oh my,” Mama said, a look of genuine concern on her face.

“The elephants were hungry and thirsty, and despite my father’s best efforts, they began to wander off the reserve into neighboring farms. One farm was particularly attractive, because it had lush banana groves. Banana plants, as you know, are about ninety percent water.”

“I did not know that,” Mama said.

“One night the elephants got into the banana grove and totally destroyed it—I mean nothing was left. Dad was aware it had happened; he and his men had tried to head them off, but were afraid of starting a stampede through a nearby village. The kicker is that the owner of the banana farm didn’t complain; even though he was wiped out, he didn’t say one word.”

“Maybe he loved elephants and felt sorry for them.”

“Hardly,” Mr. Curly snarled. “He was a white man, fairly well off, with a swimming pool.
It
was something the elephants had overlooked on their first foray onto the farm. On their second visit to the farm, now that the banana plants were gone, the pool became their destination. Unfortunately the owner was ready and waiting: the water was laced with strychnine.”

“How awful!” Mama cried.

“Indeed. The herd was decimated. Many of them died agonizing deaths right there on the farm. Legally, by the laws of the country, the banana farmer was able to claim the ivory of any elephant that died on his land.”

“But he murdered them!”

“Yes, but we never able to prove it. We did autopsies on the few that were able to make it back onto the reserve before collapsing, but by then the pool had been drained and cleaned. Besides—and more important—this fellow had friends in high places. Of course he had a problem disposing of the corpses, but the ivory more than made up for his banana crop. He even bragged about it in a letter to the editor of
Our African Republic
. His ‘poison ivory,’ he called it. Get it?”

“I’d like to ‘get’ him,” Mama said. “With my cudgel.”

“On second thought, you’re quite a woman, Mrs. Wiggins. It’s too bad I have to ‘off’ you.”

“
Must
you?” said Mama. She removed her grimy spectacles and batted her unadorned eyelashes at her soon-to-be executioner.

“Yes, and I abhor whiners. Now, where was I? Oh yes, the banana farmer who made all the money on the poison ivory was to become my father-in-law. He became my idol, you know. Just look at how much smarter than my father he was.”

“Since you’re dumber than a post, bless your heart,” Mama said, “we can hardly take your word for it.”

H
a! Such moxie! If you were about fifty years younger, then perhaps
you
could be my Lady Bowfrey. After all, you do seem to possess a fine pair of breeding hips.”

Mama spat on the leaves at her feet. “I’d rather be a serving wench.” she said.

“A literal spitfire,” Mr. Curly said.

“What happened to your poor father?” I said.

“He got fired from his post, of course. Took up a series of low-paying clerical jobs—of the kind suitable for a white man—but totally unsuitable for a man of his rank. He died ten years ago, a broken man. But the point I’m trying to make is that there is no future for elephants in the wild. In one hundred years mankind will marvel that their great-grandparents were able to see them roaming wild in the bush. No, make that fifty years.”

“Because people like you kill them,” Mama said. “If I had a hairbrush and was fifty years younger, you wouldn’t be able to sit down for a week, young man.”

“You’re going too far, old woman. And it has nothing to do with greed; despite AIDS, famine, and constant turmoil over much of the area, the population of Africa keeps exploding. There simply isn’t enough room for large animals like elephants and people both to exist. The same thing goes for Asia. The kind thing, the decent thing, is to euthanize the elephants now, rather than let them starve, or terrorize some native village.

“Back then—when I was a lad—it was an Englishman’s banana plantation that was destroyed, and three hundred workers temporarily lost their jobs. But human lives could have been lost. Is that what you prefer to see happen?”

“Harrumph,” Mama said. “Evil men can always justify their ways. It’s not like you care; you already said that you don’t have a conscience.”

“Get up, you old crone! You’ve had your five minutes of rest. I’ve got two properly dug graves waiting for the pair of you. I had to use a backhoe, since I couldn’t count on you ladies to do the job. By the way, I hope you’re not averse to sharing. Remember the fellows you met yesterday? You’ll each get one in your grave—I hope you’re not particular about who gets whom.”

Mama stood slowly with the aid of her stick. She was trying to communicate something to me with her eyes, but unfortunately I didn’t understand.

“I want the one in the plaid shirt,” she said.

What an odd thing for her to say. Clearly she
wanted me to respond, but how? Wasn’t there some famous saw about not trying to overthink a problem? Perhaps I should begin by supplying her with the obvious solution, I thought, which was simply by being contrary.

“You can’t have him,” I said. “He’s mine.”

“No, mine.”

“Over my dead body.”

“Did you hear that, Mr. Curly?” Mama demanded. “Abby wants my dead body over hers.”

“Ladies! You two are incorrigible. I don’t usually enjoy offing women—call me sexist, if you like—but this is one occasion where I’ll make an exception.”

“Mr. Curly,” I said, “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll go along with whatever you want, easy breezy, if you let this old senile woman go. As a matter of fact, let’s just leave the old bat right here in the woods—that should give the coyotes something to chew on for a day or two—and then you can do whatever you want with me. Turn me into shark chum if you like. I’ve been told that I’m very chummy.”

“So that’s what you really think of me, is it?” Mama abruptly stopped marching and stomped a pump into the leaf-strewn forest floor. The heel stuck into the accumulated detritus, and she came up shoe-free and even angrier than before. “Just an old bat, like he said, huh? Abigail Louise Wiggins Timberlake, shame on you!”

“Stop!” Mr. Curly barked. “I’ve heard enough of
you two bickering. I’ll shoot you right here, if I have to.”

We stumbled after him in silence for a few minutes. Then, sure enough, it was Mama who braved his wrath again.

“Abby, do you remember those old Borden’s milk commercials with Lizzie the talking cow?”

I sighed heavily. We were on a death march, and Mama wanted me to waltz down television memory lane with her. What was next? Liberace’s candelabra?

“It was Elsie,” I said irritably.

“No, it was Lizzie, dear. Lizzie Borden. Remember? Like before?”

“Before?”
Before what?
Oh!
I got the picture.

“Mr. Curly,” I said as I stepped away from him and to the right. “Is that a blimp above that tree?”

He put his free hand up to shield his eyes from the rising morning sun that sliced through the widely spaced second growth trees. His other hand still held the gun, but my imaginary aircraft held one hundred percent of his attention.

It took only three seconds for Mama to raise her trusty cudgel and give Mr. Curly a whack across the small of his back. It was enough to send him pitching forward onto the forest floor. Like two hungry Small Hairy Ones, my minimadre and I fell upon him and subdued him—well, with the aid of the snub-nosed.38, which had practically landed at my feet.

“It was just
horrible
,” Mama said. She shuddered dramatically, took a long swig of her Bloody Mary, before launching back into her skillfully embellished saga. She’d already been on
Good Morning America, The Tonight Show
,
Entertainment Tonight
, and a host of lesser shows. And although my name had only passed her lips once in all the various versions of the tale, that was truly fine with me. A gal deserves a little something extra when she turns seventy-five. Besides, I’d just as soon not have the real customs office breathing down my neck.

Since I’d not only heard all million-gazillion versions of her story, but lived it, I wandered into the Rob-Bob’s spacious kitchen to see how her birthday dinner was progressing. Although Bob had issued instructions that no one (including the Messiah and the Buddha) should enter his kitchen while his masterpiece dinner was still being prepared, I didn’t think the rules applied to me. After all, I was footing the bill, and I wasn’t one of the thirty-six guests. I was the Guest of Honor’s
issue
: I was her flesh and blood. Besides, I was Bob’s best friend—after Rob, of course.

At my expense Bob had hired a team of chiefs to serve under him for the evening, whereas he should have hired merely experienced cooks. The chiefs were not responding well to Bob’s somewhat dictatorial style of direction, which made him all the more stressed, and therefore all the more likely to bark out orders. Clearly, Rob’s calming presence was needed, but the other half
of the Rob-Bobs was too busy meeting and greeting and being the suave debonair host, a task at which he excelled. And anyway, at that point Bob would have resented the heck out of him for interfering.

I crouched behind a large plastic trash can to take it all in for a moment. Someone had just dumped a massive amount of onion skins into it; but tears can be a small price to pay for the joy of eavesdropping.

“I’m the meat chef at Maison de la Nez,” said a tall thin man with a prominent proboscis and a questionable French accent. “And I am telling you, monsieur, that there
is
something wrong with these steaks.”

At that very second C.J.—bless her large and unsuspecting heart—sailed through the swinging door. “Ooh,” she squealed, “where did you get those lovely hippo steaks?”

“
You
know hippo meat?” Bob asked.

“Farm-raised pygmy hippo, right?”

“Right, but—”

“Hippopotamuses graze like cattle do, but they convert grass into protein at a much higher rate. The meat has a mild, porklike flavor. If people could learn to set aside their prejudices and try new things, hippo farms could be—
should
be—the wave of the future.”

I popped out of hiding. My sudden appearance caused the faux Frenchman to produce a series of high-pitched squeaks and his face to turn as white as his three story hat.

“Pardonnez-moi,”
I said. “
Je suis une imbecile grossier.”
I turned to C.J. “Where did you learn about hippo meat?”

“Silly, Abby, don’t you remember anything?”

“Uh…I forget the answer to that question.”

“Cousin Loquacious Ledbetter was a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa back in the seventies. When the returned to Shelby he brought a pair of pygmy hippopotamuses home with him. Passed them off as a new breed of pigs. Of course laws were less stringent then—”

Being the
imbecile grossier
that I was, I slipped back out of the kitchen and back into the Rob-Bob’s vast, and expensively appointed, salon. If you want to see Rob shudder, refer to the space as a living room or, God forbid, a “great room.”

Every inch of the salon had been staged. Every fold in the heavy, floor-to-ceiling drapes was manipulated so the drape puddled just right when it hit the floor. The random stacking of books on the massive ebony coffee table was as random as planes landing at O’Hare. The various tableaux displayed on smaller surfaces around the room had been agonized over and reworked ad nausea. In fact, I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that even the dust particles under the custom-covered sofas (should there be any) were arranged just so.

Therefore it was safe to assume that having thirty-six people over for a buffet dinner had to be stressful for an anal-retentive man like Rob. The sound of a thousand nails scratching across
a chalkboard would probably be soothing by comparison. However, for Mama’s seventy-fifth, he managed to keep it remarkably well together.

Just about every man looks handsome in a tux, but Rob looks especially dashing. He keeps himself trim at the gym, tanned on frequent mini-cruises, and I wouldn’t doubt that it was Rob who turned John Edwards on to the four hundred dollar haircut. Although it was a “black tie optional” affair, most folks had opted to deck themselves out in their finest, so here and there I saw a bit of bling that put just the right amount of zing in the room. To top it all off, someone had thought to call the newspaper, which meant that come Sunday morning, Mama’s momentous bash was going to be splashed across the society pages.

“That’s M-o-z-e-l-l-a,” I heard her tell the reporter from the
Post and Courier.
“My sixtieth birthday was really last Monday, but we had to postpone the celebration on account of I had to single-handedly apprehend a murderer.”

Since the reporter didn’t seem to recognize me, I felt free to horn in on the conversation. “Belated birthday wishes, Mozella,” I said. “If you turned sixty last week, pray tell, how old are you this week?”

“Well, of course I’m still sixty—although maybe I’m sixty-one. I’m certainly not seventy-five like some people think I am.”

“That’s certainly too bad,” I said.

“It is? I mean, I could be flexible.”

“Mozella, let’s say that you were really eighty—which is a preposterous idea in this case—folks would say that you were the youngest looking eighty-year-old they had ever seen. On the other hand, if a seventy-five-year-old woman—not you, of course—tried to pass herself off as sixty, or even sixty-one, there might be some who would think to themselves that she’d been ridden hard and put away wet—if you know what I mean.”

“I get your point,” the reporter said. “If you’re going to lie about your age, then
add
years, don’t subtract. Otherwise you might just be getting people to pity you.”

“Exactly.”

“Why Abby,” Mama said with a laugh, “that’s the silliest notion I’ve heard in all my born days, and believe me, there have been plenty of them. But I guess if your theory is true, then I should at least fess up to
real
age, don’t you think?”

“Be proud, Mama,” I said.

The reporter, bless her heart, leaned in, pencil pressed to her pad, ready to scribble away.

“I’m one hundred and three,” Mama whispered in a breathy tone, more reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe than a centenarian. “Ask me what I was doing the day the
Titanic
went down. Go ahead, ask.”

The clinking of a metal utensil against a wine-glass was like an angel sent from Heaven. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” Rob said, although he managed to get only half of us to shut up. Someone—I think
it was a uniformed waitperson—slipped into the kitchen and retrieved Bob.

“May I have your attention!” Bob boomed. In the ensuing hush one might have heard a human hair hit the floor, had anyone been so thoughtless as to shed one at that moment. “Before we open up the buffet line, our guest of honor has asked to say a few words.”

“That would be me,” Mama said happily. To hearty applause, she pranced across the room to where the Rob-Bobs were standing. Then, as if it were choreographed, two muscle-bound men swung her up and set her gently on a dining room chair that was covered with Brunschwig & Fils cashmere (you can bet I wouldn’t have been allowed to stand on it). There followed more applause.

“Doesn’t it warm your heart to see her so happy?” Greg said.

I nearly jumped out of my dress sandals. “Where’d you come from?”

“Shhh, she’s about to start her speech.”

“Friends, family,” Mama said as she looked slowly around the room. “Thank you so much for sharing my eightieth birthday with me.”

Mama waved aside the inevitable gasps and murmurs. “Yes, I know, some of you thought I was younger than that—but, I’ve decided to take a page from my dear daughter, Abby, who’s convinced me, via her own example, to be proud of my age. Abigail, tell them how old you are.”

“Mama,” I growled, “not now.”

“Oh, come on, dear. It’s only a number.”

“Come on,
Abigail
,” some jerk said. “Humor your mother.” Far too many people found this funny.

“I’m forty-eight,” I said. “
There
. Are you happy?”

“Nonsense, dear,” Mama said. “I was twenty-five when you were born. That makes you—uh—”

“Fifty-five!” the jerk hollered.

“My wife
is
forty-eight,” Greg said. “I’ve seen her birth certificate.”

Mama shrugged. “Nevertheless, what I’d like to say tonight is a big thank-you to my daughter for letting me be such an important part of her life. She didn’t have to do it, you know. She could have left me up in Rock Hill to rot on the vine, like an overripe tomato—or would that be a cucumber in my case, since I always seem to be getting myself into a pickle?”