The Cry of the Sloth (7 page)

Thank you for the pictures. They were quite a surprise. I had rather expected, I don’t know why, a dumpy creature with pimples and large black shoes, not an attractive young woman in tennis shorts. It’s no wonder the good pastor had his hands all over you. I hope you won’t think that an insensitive remark, and I am not trying to excuse him, but I believe in acknowledging what’s in front of me.

Sincerely,

Andy Whittaker

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Dear Dahlberg,

I turned down your last submission due to its lack of merit, and the fact that you are Canadian had nothing to do with it, but if it makes you feel better to believe that, then go ahead.

With regards.

Andy

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Dear Peg,

I know you don’t like hearing from me or Mama, but I have to ask you a question. I really wouldn’t if it only concerned me, but other people are involved.
Home and Ranch Magazine
is planning to run a longish profile of me called “The Making of a Writing Man,” and they want photographs from my childhood. They want one of you as well, perhaps even several. I have looked through all Mama’s photos and there is not a single picture of me between the ages of about seven and fourteen, and I have been wondering why. There are many of you and Papa and Mama and even the animals. But of course the magazine won’t run any of those, attractive as they are, if I can’t produce at least two or three of me. Obviously someone has gone through the photo albums and systematically removed my pictures. I know that sounds fantastic, and whoever did it was quite careful and patient, moving around the other photos to fill the blank places. I am not making any accusations, though I can’t imagine who else might have done it. I’m talking about opportunity and motive. If you did take them, perhaps accidentally, and did not utterly destroy them by shredding or flushing, perhaps you could return a handful.

Your brother,

Andy

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ATTENTION ALL TENANTS

IF YOU HAVE MISLPACED YOUR MAILBOX KEY, CONTACT PHELPS IN 1A. SHE HAS A MASTER KEY AND WILL RETRIEVE YOUR MAIL. DO NOT TRY TO PRY THE BOXES OPEN!

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Dear Mr. Fontini,

I have received your message. I have given it careful consideration. I can assure you it is not plausible to blame the plumbing. There is nothing wrong with the plumbing. Not only did Sewell find nothing wrong, but I personally went over every inch of it after the first incident. I went over it with ruler and calipers. The tub’s overflow pipe is of the standard size. If you don’t trust me or Sewell (who is after all a licensed plumber), you are welcome to call the city inspector, assuming you can get him to come, which I doubt once he hears both sides of the story. “If not faulty plumbing,” you will say, “then why has the ceiling fallen on my supper, not once but twice?” The explanation, I believe, lies close at hand, indeed, one could say it is even closer than that. I think you would do well to look attentively at your wife while she bathes. If you do this, I think you will observe the following sequence.

(1) Mrs. Fontini turns on the taps and lets the tub fill while she removes her garments, looks for the shampoo, perhaps not finding it right away, goes to the linen closet for a clean towel, etc.

(2) While she is thus occupied, the water in the bathtub is busy rising to the level of the overflow pipe, the excess gurgling down it, which doesn’t bother her, as she knows there is a large electric water heater in the basement.

(3) Getting into the tub, she overlooks her own not-inconsiderable bulk as well as Archimedes’ experience in the bath, where he discovered that for every cubic inch of Mrs. Fontini submerged in bath water a corresponding cubic inch of said water will rise toward the rim of the tub.

(4) She either never knew or has forgotten that the overflow pipe is designed to handle only the gradual rise in water occasioned by an open faucet and was never intended to cope with sudden surges. Perhaps her arms, though large and braced firmly against the sides of the tub, are simply not up to the task of effectuating the gradual lowering of the rest of her bulk into the water, and as a consequence she just lets herself plop.

The cumulative effect of steps (1) through (4) is a tidal surge that overtops the tub’s meager levees and spills bucket-size dollops of warm bath water onto the bathroom floor. From there it makes its way under the influence of gravity down between the tiles and onto the sheetrock of the kitchen ceiling. At which point its descent is not stopped but merely slowed, while the sheetrock gradually softens until it is finally soft enough to tumble precipitously onto your supper. I don’t want to be the cause of discord between husband and wife, but unless you would like to be billed for the regular replacement of the kitchen ceiling I suggest that Mrs. Fontini convert to showering, or, if she really must have baths and is unable or unwilling to lower herself into the water at a normal pace, that you devise some sort of lowering mechanism for her, perhaps a tackle using ropes and pulleys. With this I wish you every success, but please do not use nails in the walls. In the meantime, you must remit to the Whittaker Company $317 for repairs to the ceiling.

Sincerely,

The landlord

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What does it mean that I have such a gift for writing unpleasant letters? Does it say something about my character, that maybe I am not a nice person? Or maybe it just means that other people are not nice persons. I once struggled to write simple thank-you notes when people sent me presents; the notes always sounded totally insincere. It never helped at all that I sometimes actually liked the presents. It was the same when I used to tell Jolie that I loved her. I could hear myself sounding like the worst kind of ham and liar, even though I really did love her. I suppose this was part of the reason I was so horrid to her later. Now I write people whom I barely know, and the letters positively sparkle, especially when they give me an opportunity to be unpleasant in a snide way to people who can’t do anything about it. Maybe Baudelaire was right, and the spleen really is the creative organ.

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Dear Mrs. Lipsocket,

You have been sending me your poems off and on for four years. For the first three of those I labored to comment, comforting you with platitudes, while covertly advising you tactfully to chuck it. Yet you have continued against all odds. You have written me pitiful letters. You have wrung my heart with descriptions of your literary sufferings, with which I have sympathized; your outsized ambitions, which are so like my own; your ovarian problems, the cruelty of your library committee, and your husband’s philandering, which I have felt incompetent to address. You have been the cause of a broken sleep in which I dream that I am beating small animals. Faced with this, I surrender. I have not kept copies of your past efforts, and your present work seems worse than ever, so I leave it up to you: choose any six lines, and I will print them. After that I am not going to open any envelopes from you.

Sincerely,

Andy Whittaker

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Kind Sirs,

I read in the paper about Fellowship Christian Tabernacle’s program “Neighbors Helping Neighbors.” I was moved by your efforts and the huge amount of money you have raised—all those bake sales, raffles, and car washes. I was particularly impressed by the two-and-a-half tons of aluminum cans. I am not a member of your church, or any church, but I gather from the article that you still consider me to be your neighbor. I am appreciative of that sentiment, and if ever I do go to church—which I may in the future—it will certainly be at your establishment. I am a widower living alone. I am not old, but my health is far from perfect. I have a noise in my chest. I am finding the care and cleaning of my house increasingly taxing and difficult, especially getting the dust bunnies out, which I now see are everywhere under things, especially beds and sofas. I find that when I bend over the noise gets worse, and my breath makes them scoot away and become harder to catch. The house is old and full of china knickknacks—treasures of my late wife—that have to be picked up and dusted and put back, which takes hours and is difficult for someone whose hands have a tendency to shake. I would be broken-hearted if I dropped one. I know I would hear Claudine reproach me, as she was ever wont to do, and I couldn’t bear that now. I have everything needed except a squeegee to wash the windows. My wife always used balled-up newspaper and vinegar, which I never thought was a good idea, since it left black streaks, although she denied this. My phone service has become unreliable due to work they are doing in the street. I am home almost all the time, so if you think that I am a “worthy cause” you could just send someone over.

Your neighbor,

Andrew Whittaker.

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Dear Harold,

Thanks for your letter; it was so very friendly. I too would like to have a regular correspondence. You must have read between the lines of my letter that I am really not well. It’s not just the chest; I am finding the house in which I am now living to be very oppressive, especially when it rains, as it has been doing practically nonstop for days, especially when it is untidy and cluttered, as it inevitably is, for reasons I can’t get to the bottom of, since I seem to be always cleaning. It’s not the rain itself so much as the silence the rain brings with it, the way the sound of the rain on the roof and windows makes the quiet inside the house so much more noticeable, perhaps because it drowns out the little noises I otherwise make, the padding of bare feet on the floor, the scratching of a pen, an occasional gentle clearing of the throat. I think of you and your work outdoors with plants and animals, and I am horribly envious. I lie on my back on the floor, looking up at the ceiling for leaks, and I think of you bouncing across the furrows on a tractor. I suppose it is often sunny down there. I have been working on a new story, set in the Wisconsin farm country (where I have never actually been), and it would be great if you could answer some technical questions now and then. Maybe I could even come down for a short visit, get a feeling for farm life. Your family sounds wonderful, and I am very fond of animals, especially baby donkeys.

I have decided to move out of my house into a smaller place, where there will be less room for ghosts, and I have been packing things into boxes. I have a regular wall of boxes stacked in the living room. I can scarcely see out the front windows anymore. In the evening, when the light through the rain-streaked panes has softened the edges of the boxes, they look like sandbags, and I have the comfortable feeling of being fortified. I have closed off the dining room, since it’s jam full of stuff I brought up from the basement, and the hall is almost full as well. There is a hemmed-in feeling to the house now. Fortified, or hemmed in—it’s difficult to know what one feels nowadays. Packing the books has been particularly slow, because I keep finding ones I had forgotten I owned, and I end up sitting on the floor reading, my quiet breath and the occasional scrape of a turning page drowned, as I mentioned, by the constant susurration of the rain.

Among those forgotten books, I discovered a huge encyclopedia of mammals, which Jolie must have bought years ago when she imagined she could write stories for children with animals in them, with animals in the stories. Or perhaps it descends from my father, who was fond of animals, especially dogs. My mother, who is still alive, says he had always wanted me to become a veterinarian and was disappointed when I decided to major in English, though I don’t remember him ever saying anything about that to me. Right now, the life of a busy veterinarian strikes me as quite interesting and desirable, as something I might have striven for had it occurred to me.

I must never have looked at the book before. You can’t imagine how many animals there are that almost no one has ever heard of—sportive lemurs, needle-clawed bush babies, warty pigs, oriental spiny rats, punctated grass-mice, golden-rumped elephant shrews, and fairy armadillos, to pick a few at random. Such fabulous names—it’s obvious that among those creeping around in the jungle in pith helmets were at least a few mad poets. And what do you know about the ai? Next to nothing, I imagine. So you’ll be surprised to learn, as I just have, that it is a variety of three-toed sloth, even though it has, in fact, three fingers. For some reason the early naturalists were quite confused when it came to fingers and toes. This seems to me odd; are you ever confused about them? I wonder if it had anything to do with the fact that they wore gloves, the naturalists, I mean, in those days often wore gloves. All sloths have three toes. As for fingers, some have two and some have three. The ai (
Bradypus torquatus
) has three of each, that is, six at each end of it, evenly divided. It moves so slowly and hangs out (literally) in such damp leafy places that green algae grows on its fur. As has happened to me during the current monsoon, or so it seems. There is mildew on everything, and I myself am feeling quite mossy in spots. As for inactivity, I don’t think I’ve moved two hundred yards in the past two days. Where would I move to, with the rain coming down as if for Noah’s flood? The sloth is, I suppose, the only green mammal. That’s odd when you think about it, considering how many green creatures there are otherwise, grasshoppers and frogs, for example. The green coloration is thought to help it hide from predators; from jaguars, I suppose, who must mistake it for a pile of leaves. The resourceful animal is, furthermore, alleged to breed colonies of “cockroach-like moths” in its green fur, though to what useful purpose the book doesn’t let on. Nor do I get a clear picture of those little creatures—I can’t imagine a less cockroach-like insect than a moth. I have not personally, even during the worst of my pluvial solitude, bred any of those, though I did a few nights ago find something awful crawling inside my pajama shirt. I had turned off the light and had just lain down on the bed. I always begin the night on my back, because it’s a yogic principle, and also lately because of the noise in my chest, which seems to become less intense in that position, or maybe just less audible, due to the soft pillow folding up around my ears. Though the creature must have been in there ever since my shower an hour earlier, it only began moving about when it found itself being crushed between my back and the mattress. It possessed, as I could tell from the texture of its walk, little spines along the backs of its legs. It was like being stabbed with rows of needles. I of course sprang up and tore off the shirt, pulling it violently off over my head. In the process I inadvertently flung the creature across the room—it struck the wall with a loud
tick
. It was quite dead when I found it in the morning; a large black beetle.