Stories (2011) (35 page)

Mr. Harold got up after five minutes and got inside his car
and fell across the seat and lay there. He couldn't move. He spat out a tooth.
His balls hurt. His face hurt. For that matter, his kneecaps where they'd kicked
him didn't feel all that good either.

After an hour or so, Mr. Harold began to come around. An
intense hatred for the blind man boiled up in his stomach. He sat up and
started the car and headed home.

When he turned on his road, he was nearly sideswiped by a
yellow moving van. It came at him so hard and fast he swerved into a ditch
filled with sand and got his right rear tire stuck. He couldn't drive the car
out. More he worked at it, the deeper the back tire spun in the sand. He got
his jack out of the trunk and cranked up the rear end and put debris under the
tire. Bad as he felt, it was quite a job. He finally drove out of there, and
off the jack, leaving it lying in the dirt.

When he got to his house, certain in his heart the blind man
was inside, he parked next to Mrs. Harold's station wagon. The station wagon
was stuffed to the gills with boxes and sacks. He wondered what that was all
about, but he didn't wonder too hard. He looked around the yard for a weapon.
Out by the side of the house was the blind man's weed-eater. That would do. He
figured he caught the blind man a couple of licks with that, he could get him
down on the ground and finish him, stun him before the sonofabitch applied a
wrestling hold.

He went in the house by the back door with the weed-eater
cocked, and was astonished to find the room was empty. The kitchen table and
chairs were gone. The cabinet doors were open and all the canned goods were
missing. Where the stove had set was a greasy spot. Where the refrigerator had
set was a wet spot. A couple of roaches, feeling brave and free to roam,
scuttled across the kitchen floor as merry as kids on skates.

The living room was empty too. Not only of people, but
furniture and roaches. The rest of the house was the same. Dust motes spun in
the light. The front door was open.

Outside, Mr. Harold heard a car door slam. He limped out the
front door and saw the station wagon. His wife was behind the wheel, and
sitting next to her was the boy, and beside him the blind man, his arm hanging
out the open window.

Mr. Harold beckoned to them by waving the weed-eater, but
they ignored him. Mrs. Harold backed out of the drive quickly. Mr. Harold could
hear the blind man talking to the boy about something or another and the boy
was laughing. The station wagon turned onto the road and the car picked up
speed. Mr. Harold went slack and leaned on the weed-eater for support.

At the moment before the station wagon passed in front of a
line of high shurbs, the blind man turned to look out the window, and Mr. Harold
saw his own reflection in the blind man's glasses.

The signs were set in relay and went on for miles. The
closer you got to the place the bigger they became. They were so enthusiastic
in size and brightness of paint it might be thought you were driving to heaven
and God had posted a sure route so you wouldn't miss it. They read:

WORLD'S LARGEST GOPHER!

ODDITIES!

SEE THE SNAKES! SEE THE ELEPHANT!

SOUVENIRS!

BUTCH'S HIGHWAY MUSEUM AND EMPORIUM!

But Sonny knew he wasn't driving to heaven. Butch's was far
from heaven and he didn't want to see anything but the elephant. He had been to
the Museum and Emporium many times, and the first time was enough for the
sights -- because there weren't any.

The World's Largest Gopher was six feet tall and inside a
fenced-in enclosure. It cost you two dollars on top of the dollar admission fee
to get in there and have a peek at it and feel like a jackass. The gopher was a
statue, and it wasn't even a good statue. It looked more like a dog standing on
its haunches than a gopher. It had a strained, constipated look on its homely
face, and one of its two front teeth had been chipped off by a disappointed
visitor with a rock.

The snake show wasn't any better. Couple of dead, stuffed
rattlers with the rib bones sticking through their taxidermied hides, and one
live, but about to go, cottonmouth who didn't have any fangs and looked a lot
like a deflated bicycle tire when it was coiled and asleep. Which was most of
the time. You couldn't wake the sonofabitch if you beat on the glass with a
rubber hose and yelled FIRE!

There were two main souvenirs. One was the armadillo purses,
and the other was a miniature statue of the gopher with a little plaque on it
that read: I SAW THE WORLD'S LARGEST GOPHER AT HUTCH'S HIGHWAY MUSEUM AND
EMPORIUM OFF HIGHWAY 59. And the letters were so crowded on there you had to
draw mental slashes between the words. They sold for a dollar fifty apiece and
they moved right smart. In fact, Butch made more money on those (75¢ profit per
statue) than he did on anything else, except the cold drinks which he marked up
a quarter. When you were hot from a long drive and irritated about actually
seeing the World's Largest Gopher, you tended to spend money foolishly on soda
waters and gopher statues.

Or armadillo purses. The armadillos came from Hank's
Armadillo Farm and Hank was the one that killed them and scooped their guts out
and made purses from them. He lacquered the bodies and painted them gold and
tossed glitter in the paint before it dried. The 'dillos were quite bright and
had little zippers fixed into their bellies and a rope handle attached to their
necks and tails so you could carry them upside down with their sad, little feet
pointing skyward.

Dutch's wife had owned several of the purses. One Fourth of
July she and the week's receipts had turned up missing along with one of her
'dillo bags. She and the purse and the receipts were never seen again. Elrod
down at the Gull station disappeared too. Astute observers said there was a
connection.

But Sonny came to see the elephant, not buy souvenirs or
look at dead snakes and statues. The elephant was different from the rest of
Butch's stuff. It was special.

It wasn't that it was beautiful, because it wasn't. It was
in bad shape. It could hardly even stand up. But the first time Sonny had seen
it, he had fallen in love with it. Not in the romantic sense, but in the sense
of two great souls encountering one another. Sonny came back time after time to
see it when he needed inspiration, which of late, with the money dwindling and
his preaching services not bringing in the kind of offerings he thought they should,
was quite often.

Sonny wheeled his red Chevy pickup with the GOD LOVES EVEN
FOOLS LIKE ME sticker on the back windshield through the gate of Butch's and
paid his dollar for admission, plus two dollars to see the elephant.

Butch was sitting at the window of the little ticket house
as usual. He was toothless and also wore a greasy, black work cap, though Sonny
couldn't figure where the grease came from. He had never known Butch to do any
kind of work, let alone something greasy -- unless you counted the serious
eating of fried chicken. Butch just sat there in the window of the little house
in his zip-up coveralls (summer or winter) and let Levis Garrett snuff drip
down his chin while he played with a pencil or watched a fly dive bomb a jelly
doughnut. He seldom talked, unless it was to argue about money. He didn't even
like to tell you how much admission was. It was like it was some secret you
were supposed to know, and when he did finally reveal it, was as if he had
given up part of his heart.

Sonny drove his pickup over to the big barn where the
elephant stayed, got out and went inside.

Candy, the ancient clean-up nigger, was shoving some dirt
around with a push broom, stirring up dust mostly. When Candy saw Sonny wobble
in, his eyes lit up.

"Hello there, Mr. Sonny. You done come to see your
elephant, ain't you?"

"Yeah, I have," Sonny said.

"That's good, that's good." Candy looked over
Sonny's shoulder at the entrance, then glanced at the back of the barn.
"That's good, and you right on time too, like you always is."

Candy held out his hand.

Sonny slipped a five into it and Candy folded it carefully
and put it in the front pocket of his faded khakis, gave it a pat like a good
dog, then swept up the length of the barn. When he got to the open door, he stood
there watching, waiting for Mr. Butch to go to lunch, like he did every day at
eleven-thirty sharp.

And sure enough, there he went in his black Ford pickup out
the gate of Butch's Museum and Emporium. Then came the sound of the truck
stopping and the gate being locked. Butch closed the whole thing down every day
for lunch rather than leave it open for the nigger to tend. Anyone inside the
Emporium at that time was just shit out of luck. They were trapped there until
Butch came back from lunch thirty minutes later, unless they wanted to go over
the top or ram the gate with their vehicle.

It wasn't a real problem however. Customers seldom showed up
mid-day, dead of summer. They didn't seem to want to see the World's Largest
Gopher at lunch time.

Which was why Sonny liked to come when he did. He and Candy
had an arrangement.

When Candy heard Butch's truck clattering up the highway, he
dropped the broom, came back and led Sonny over to the elephant stall.

"He in this one today, Mr. Sonny."

Candy took out a key and unlocked the chainlink gate that
led inside the stall and Sonny stepped inside and Candy said what he always
said. "I ain't supposed to do this now. You supposed to do all your
looking through this gate." Then, without waiting for a reply he closed the
gate behind Sonny and leaned on it.

The elephant was lying on its knees and it stirred slightly.
Its skin creaked like tight shoes and its breathing was heavy.

"You wants the usual, Mr. Sonny?"

"Does it have to be so hot this time? Ain't it hot
enough in here already?"

"It can be anyway you wants it, Mr. Sonny, but if you
wants to do it right, it's got to be hot. You know I'm telling the truth now,
don't you?"

"Yeah . . . but it's so hot."

"Don't do no good if it ain't, Mr. Sonny. Now we got to
get these things done before Mr. Butch comes back. He ain't one for spir'tual
things. That Mr. Butch ain't like you and me. He just wants that dollar. You
get that stool and sit yourself down, and I'll be back dreckly, Mr.
Sonny."

Sonny sat the stool upright and perched his ample butt on
it, smelled the elephant shit and studied the old pachyderm. The critter didn't
look as if it had a lot of time left, and Sonny wanted to get all the wisdom
from it he could.

The elephant's skin was mottled grey and more wrinkled than
a bloodhound's. Its tusks had been cut off short years before and they had
turned a ripe lemon yellow, except for the jagged tips, and they were the color
of dung. Its eyes were skummy and it seldom stood anymore, not even to shit.
Therefore, its flanks were caked with it. Flies had collected in the mess like
raisins spread thickly on rank chocolate icing. When the old boy made a feeble
attempt to slap at them with his tail, they rose up en masse like bad omens.

Candy changed the hay the elephant lay on now and then, but
not often enough to rid the stall of the stink. With the heat like it was, and
the barn being made of tin and old oak, it clung to the structure and the
elephant even when the bedding was fresh and the beast had been hosed down. But
that was all right with Sonny. He had come to associate the stench with God.

The elephant was God's special animal -- shit smell and all.
God had created the creature in the same way he had created everything else --
with a wave of his majestic hand (Sonny always imagined the hand bejeweled with
rings). But God had given the elephant something special -- which seemed fair
to Sonny, since he had put the poor creature in the land of crocodiles and
niggers -- and that special something was wisdom.

Sonny had learned of this from Candy. He figured since Candy
was born of niggers who came from Africa, he knew about elephants. Sonny
reasoned that elephant love was just the sort of information niggers would pass
down to one another over the years. They probably passed along other stuff that
wasn't of importance too, like the best bones for your nose and how to make
wooden dishes you could put inside your lips so you could flap them like Donald
Duck. But the stuff on the elephants would be the good stuff.

He was even more certain of this when Candy told him on his
first visit to see the elephant that the critter was most likely his totem.
Candy had taken one look at him and said that. It surprised Sonny a bit that
Candy would even consider such things. He seemed like a plain old clean-up
nigger to him. In fact, he had hired Candy to work for him before. The sort of
work you wanted a nigger to do, hot and dirty. He'd found Candy to be slow and
lazy and at the end of the day he had almost denied him the two dollars he'd
promised. He could hardly see that he'd earned it. In fact, he'd gotten the
distinct impression that Candy was getting uppity in his old age and thought he
deserved a white man's wages.

But, lazy or not, Candy did have wisdom -- least when it
came to elephants. When Candy told him he thought the elephant was his totem,
Sonny asked how he had come by that, and Candy said, "You big and the
elephant is big, and you both tough-hided and just wise as Old Methusla. And
you can attract them gals just like an ole bull elephant can attract them
elephant females, now can't you? Don't lie to Candy now, you know you
can."

This was true. All of it. And the only way Candy could have
known about it was to know he was like the elephant and the elephant was his
totem. And the last thing about attracting the women, well, that was the thing
above all that convinced him that the nigger knew his business.