An Inconvenient Elephant (25 page)

“IT
IS
TUSKER,” I ANNOUNCED AS SOON AS WE GOT
back. I felt disgusted and soiled and was ripping off my clothes before I made it into the bedroom suite, not even caring that I had an appreciative audience in the form of Jungle Johnny, Diamond, Grisha, and Tom.

“I like Plain-Neelie undressing her clothes,” Grisha announced gleefully as my miniskirt flipped across the room, the low-cut blouse and push-up bra following. I threw the shoes in the garbage and began scrubbing at the mascara with a sanitary wipe from my handbag while I pulled clothes together for a shower.

“Not that it matters what elephant it was,” I was saying, grabbing jeans from my suitcase.

Jungle Johnny was sitting at the edge of the sofa and hanging on my every word. Maybe not hanging on my words
so much as hanging on whatever of mine that was visible. Grisha was searching for another pack of cigarettes, and Tom was racing for a bath towel from the bathroom to wrap around me.

“We have to get those elephants out of there,” I said with urgency. “And I don't care how we do it. It's inhumane. It's misery!”

“Grisha liked Plain-Neelie in special makeups. Like beautiful Russian woman,” Grisha called after me as I headed for the bathroom. “Don't wash off makeups!”

“Grisha can find himself a beautiful Russian woman,” I countered as I ducked inside. “This one is spoken for.” I gave Tom a sideways look.

“Is that my cue?” He laughed.

“No,” I said, irritated by his laugh. “I didn't mean you, I meant Tusker.” I shut the bathroom door behind me and took a shower, ungluing my hair, scrubbing the sadness and grime and rage and cruelty from my skin. When I emerged, half an hour later, Jungle Johnny was napping, Tom was reading at the table, Diamond had left on an errand, and Grisha was happily puffing himself into oblivion.

 

Diamond returned an hour later with a shopping bag. “Last-minute stuff,” she said, and sat down at the table where everyone had gathered.

“Trucks are ready,” Jungle Johnny was saying. He had a tiny screwdriver, the kind used for repairing eyeglasses and was prying the camera from my handbag. “We use trucks all the time. They have no lettering on them, plain faded blue trucks. We use them for emergency seizures. People don't
remember faded blue, so we can move them around and no one notices. I ordered two of them, one for each elephant.”

“Someone has to get in and open the gates to the pens,” I said. “They have big padlocks.”

“I have men to do that,” Tom replied. “They'll carry bolt cutters, check for alarms, monitor our movements, back us up, everything we need.”

“And they have security dogs,” I said. “I didn't see them, but Julian mentioned them.”

“Easy,” said Tom. “Sedatives mixed into hamburger meat.”

“It has to be perfect timing,” said Jungle Johnny. “Grisha has to keep that Lance guy occupied, while we get the elephants out of there. He has to invite Lance and his men to dinner, get them drunk, tell them he wants to hunt
after
dinner. By the time they get back to the ranch, the animals will be gone. Tomorrow night is the only chance we'll get.”

“Why tomorrow?” I asked.

“Lance Imperialle has other clients,” Tom said. “We made sure Grisha was the first to contact him after the elephants came, but if we don't work fast, someone could move in and outbid us.”

 

We had dinner in the hotel dining room. Our group was loud and happy and boisterous. Diamond and JJ, as he kept insisting to be called, seemed to be hitting it off; Mrs. W. was tucked neatly under Diamond's chair; and I fiddled with the huge shrimp cocktail in front of me, my stomach in knots from what I had seen that day. I finally pushed it away and drank wine while the others ate.

“JJ has a TV show,” Tom said.

“For kids,” said Jungle Johnny. “Try to teach them conservation.”

“I like kids,” said Diamond, and they smiled at each other.

After dinner, Tom stood up. “I think we should convene to the honeymoon suite,” he said, “and finish our conversation. That is,” he gave me a mischievous smile, “if the honeymooners don't mind.”

“I don't mind at all,” I said to him. “It may be my only chance to use one.”

 

They were refining plans for the next day. Tom and Grisha and Diamond. Apparently my job as wife was done. Grisha's would be wining and dining Lance Imperialle and Julian by himself, while the rest of us worked behind the scenes.

The trucks would be moved to just outside the far end of the ranch. Tom's men would be cutting away a large portion of the chain-link fence earlier in the day, but would roll it back into place so that the breach was not noticeable. JJ and Diamond and I were going to slip inside, release the elephants, and drive them to the end of the property, through the opened fence, and up into the truck. That simple. That crazy.

And everything would depend on the speed of the elephants. We weren't even sure they would leave their cages. And once out, they had to be marched across the property to the waiting trucks.

And the whole time, Grisha would have to keep Lance Imperialle and Julian happily eating and drinking and concentrating on the huge profit they were going to make.

Everyone was on edge—there were variables in every corner of the plan.

“Why can't we just let the authorities take the elephants?” Diamond asked at one point. “We could file a complaint.”

“They'll be dead by the time anything gets to court,” Tom said. “Let's hope Neelie got some good shots. They'll be used to build a case.”

“I've done a lot of seizures,” said JJ. “And it's always the same story. The authorities just had no
idea
anything like this was happening right under their noses.” He shook his head in disgust.

“We'll all be wired together,” Tom announced. “I have enough electronics to launch a rocket. You'll all have mikes and earphones and GPSs. Johnny will carry the bullhooks.”

“Bullhooks!” I repeated. “What do you mean, ‘bullhooks'?”

Tom made a face. “We are going to have to get those elephants out of their cages fast. We won't have time for civilities. They have to be driven out any way we can.”

“Plain-Neelie, we cannot throw oranges this time,” Grisha agreed.

“But bullhooks?”

“Well, we don't want to use them, but this is life or death,” Tom chided me. “If it's going to be a problem—”

“Bollocks, we'll both be fine,” Diamond said firmly, giving me a kick under the table. “A determined woman is the equal of the strongest man.”

“Women hold up half the sky,” JJ interjected with his peculiar Kenyan homily. I looked at him and I looked at Diamond. They dressed alike, thought alike, both given to
cheesy proverbs—it was too perfect. I wondered if she noticed, too, but Diamond only stood up and yawned.

“I guess I'll get some sleep,” she said.

JJ stood up, too. “I can walk you to your room, Diamond,” he said, then blushed to the roots of his blond hair. “If you don't mind. Maybe we can have a cup of coffee before we call it a night.”

“I don't mind at all,” she said, and gave him a beatific smile. “You can call room service while I take a nice, hot shower.” She bent over to retrieve Mrs. W. “I don't want to forget Mum,” she added, then explained, “she and I are sharing a room.”

“I like a person who honors her elders,” JJ replied, taking the urn from her. They left together.

“If Diamond is even taking a shower,” I said to Tom, “this must be true love.”

His eyes met mine, and he gave me half a smile. “Do you believe in stuff like that, Neelie?” he asked.

“Actually, no,” I said. “I don't believe in anything anymore.”

 

Tom and Grisha and I went down to the dimly lit bar where Tom had a bourbon, Grisha enjoyed a vodka, and I had another glass of wine. They quietly finalized a few more details for the next day, and I mulled over my change of heart. Had my heart changed? I stole a glance over at Tom and wondered what I wanted from him. I loved him, I wanted to spend my life with him, and he loved me—Diamond was right, I would be a fool to let him get away twice—yet all the unrest I had felt from a year before was still with me. I finished my wine.
Maybe he wouldn't mind if we put marriage on the back burner for a while. That would solve everything, I thought.

Grisha yawned. “Grisha is ready for sleeping now,” he declared. I looked over at Tom, about to ask him if he had gotten me my own room for the night.

“Go to his room, Neelie,” Tom directed me softly. “Go up with him.”

I stood up. Grisha gave me a little bow and offered me his arm. I took it, and we walked together to the elevator, Tom watching me until the door closed behind us.

 

I wasn't worried at all. Grisha had always been a total gentleman. From the first time I met him, spending my first week in Africa, peeing behind baobab trees while he stood guard, he was honorable and good.

“Plain-Neelie,” he said, when we reached our room, “you can have bed. Grisha does not mind crouch.”

I undressed in the bathroom and came out into a darkening room and sat down on the king-size bed. “Have you ever done anything like this before?” I asked Grisha, who was sitting in a chair near the window, the drape opened just enough for him to see out.

“Marriagement?” he asked. “
Nyet
! Grisha makes many romance, but never marriagement. Too heavy travel! Too heavy risk!”

He lit another cigarette and took a long drag. “Grisha suffers from”—he paused to think of the right words—“wild heart.” He thought about his words for a moment and then repeated them. “
Da
. Grisha cannot make explainment to you, but—”

“You don't have to explain,” I said to him. “I think I know what you mean.”

How odd, I thought. I had actually meant to ask him if he had ever taken elephants under these circumstances, and he had misunderstood, but suddenly his answer set my thinking on another course.

I had been floundering. Fretting. I had come home to New York, to a house that I was so proud to have purchased for myself. And yet I was as uncomfortable in it as a mismatched shoe. It felt tight and rubbed at me in all the wrong spots.

I grew up suburban. And I had always chafed at my childhood. It had been so neat and properly contained, and even though I thought I would grow up to emulate it, I couldn't. Yet I didn't know what else I wanted. Tom had come along and taken me to Zimbabwe, and we rescued Margo, and it was the beginning of even more unrest within me. I had found some answers during the year I spent with the baby ellies, but there was something else. Something I could not or didn't want to define just yet.

I lay back on my pillows and tried to sort it out.

“
Da
,” Grisha said into the darkening room, his voice filled with both sadness and acceptance. “Grisha cannot be domestic. Grisha suffers from wild heart.”

SOMETIMES THE WORLD BECOMES MORE THAN A SUM
of its parts. Sometimes the cruel part, the viciously indifferent part, the part that is so unspeakably mean overwhelms everything good and humane and forever unbalances the ratio of kindness and goodness. Then the world becomes irredeemably ugly and filled with nothing but darkness.

When we found Margo, she had been wounded. Trying to nurse her calf and unable to keep up with her herd left her vulnerable and starving. When I first saw Tusker, he had been the butt of cruel taunting, even though he had done nothing but innocently seek food. When I saw him again, he was a trembling skeleton. And the worst part was that it hadn't been the lack of rains over the lowland plains of Kenya or the sparse growth of savannah grasses that caused it. It hadn't been natural at all. It had been part of human
design, a cruel act that forever disarranged the karma of the human race.

I sat up almost all night, nervously thinking about how we were going to get Tusker off the ranch. About all the things that could go wrong and the danger we would all be in. When I was finished torturing myself with that, I thought of Tom and me and Diamond and JJ and Grisha—who was the happiest out of all of us. I wondered who was the most content with their life, and whether their work or love was the most responsible. By dawn, I hadn't solved anything philosophically, but I did manage to give myself a raging headache.

I slept for about an hour when I heard a rap at the door. Room service. The room suddenly bloomed with the delicious scent of food. By the time I sat up, Grisha was already at the table and digging into a huge American breakfast.

“Grisha likes this room servant,” he declared. “Come sit with your husband, Plain-Neelie. We eat before everyone comes.”

I joined him at the table. It was set for two. There was a lid over my plate, and I lifted it to reveal eggs Benedict and fresh strawberries.

“Wow,” I said, “you nailed my favorite breakfast.”

Pleased, he closed his eyes and smiled. “Husband should know how to make pleasure with marital wife.”

I laughed.

He cut into his egg and ate a piece. “Grisha is thinking, Plain-Neelie,” he said, “that he gives you wrong information. Grisha is thinking all night. He is thinking maybe wild hearts need—” He looked at me, and his eyes held something, a longing, and for a moment I thought he was going to
declare his love for me, and my mind was already racing for a nice way to deflect him. I took his hand, and he continued. “Maybe, Grisha is thinking, maybe sometimes wild hearts need to come home. Grisha thinks you are suffering from this, too.”

His last words were almost whispered, an obvious effort for him, and I jumped from my chair and went to him and embraced him. He put his arms around my waist, and we held each other.

I caressed his hair and murmured, “Thank you,” and kissed the top of his head before we broke apart.

He rose from his chair and gave me an apologetic smile along with a little bow. “Grisha gets ready now,” he said. “Everything moves on Grisha's shoulders.”

The day passed quickly enough. Tom informed us to take everything with us when we left the hotel since we wouldn't be coming back to it. He had made reservations in another one across town, in another name, so that we wouldn't be traced.

Grisha dressed in exquisitely bad taste: brand-new starched-looking gold-brown pants, a tan-and-orange plaid shirt, and brand-new boots, ready to hunt. The rifles would be supplied by the ranch and then taken back. His contract, a carefully worded document to protect the ranch from prosecution for illegal hunts, called only for a night of entertainment at a hunting lodge. Two large blue vans rolled past the hotel on their way to the ranch, and just the sight of them made my stomach quake from nerves.

The Rolls came by at precisely four thirty to take Grisha to the ranch and pick up Lance Imperialle and his aides.
The rest of us—Tom, Diamond, JJ, and I—got into another rented car, a simple green sedan not nearly as luxurious as Grisha's. Diamond placed Mrs. W. on her lap.

“Can't you leave that urn in your suitcase?” I hissed at Diamond as she got into the car with us.

“I don't think she'd want to miss out on something like this,” Diamond replied.

“The more the merrier,” said Jungle Johnny. Diamond flashed him a grateful smile.

 

The blue trucks were waiting, parked alongside the road that backed the ranch. The men had already done their job, snipping the chain link with bolt cutters and peeling it back like the lid of a tin can. They had lured the dogs, all four of them, and given them the dose of sedatives mixed with hamburger meat, and now the dogs were sleeping peacefully under a nearby tree, in a large mottled heap of black and tan fur.

Diamond, JJ, Tom, and I slipped through the fence. Tom carried a pair of bolt cutters and snipped down the thornbushes, clearing a path as we went. Diamond carried the GPS and a compass and the same bag she had brought back from yesterday's errand, though I still didn't know what was in it. Jungle Johnny carried several bullhooks. I could barely look at them. I was assigned to carry two large rifles. For what purpose, I didn't want to know.

“They're loaded” was all Tom said to me.

The air was warm and tacky, like a child's lollipop. My tee stuck to my arms and back, and my jeans hugged my legs. I could feel sweat running down the back of my knees, my hair growing slick, even my feet sweating inside my boots.
Maybe it was nerves, but it seemed that the bushes looked even more oppressively thorny from the ground, thicker and uglier, growing in tight formation, and they snagged at us mercilessly, giving up a hold on our clothing only to bite at our skin and hair.

Diamond was following the compass on her GPS. Her stride was steady and stealthy, and I had to admire how she moved with perfect confidence, slipping this way and that, checking and rechecking her coordinates, as though she had walked the land many times.

“Here,” she mumbled, moving to the right, “this way. Now we turn here.” Tom followed, snipping down bushes, ripping at the vines, measuring the width of the path we were making.

It was a long walk, and we had to execute each step with precision. There wouldn't be another chance. We were coming from the back side of the ranch, so we wouldn't be passing the other animal cages, and I was glad of it. I couldn't bear to see those faces again.

There was a large enclosure ahead of us. The familiar form of Shamwari, rocking, rocking, rocking filled its entirety.

“We get Tusker first,” Diamond said, and Jungle Johnny agreed. “Tusker is the elder. If we move him, Shamwari should follow out of respect.”

We pressed on another half mile or so, moving quickly. My breath came hard. It had been so easy to travel these distances in the jeep, and I wasn't that fit to move through the humidity, over the brush, pulling away the low-hanging Spanish moss that wrapped into our hair like moist brown-
green spider webs. But it was quiet. We said nothing to each other. Tom made a motion, and we followed the line of his hand.

Suddenly Tusker was straight ahead. Tom moved swiftly to the back gate and clipped the lock off in one neat motion. He pulled at the gate and we stood back. Tusker didn't appear to notice.

“We've got to get him out of there right now,” JJ said softly. He slipped inside, behind the elephant. Tusker just stood, his trunk down, his ears close to his head. JJ bent down to examine the leg chains and then held his hand out behind. Tom slipped him the bolt cutters and JJ clipped the chains from Tusker's legs, one, two, three, four. I counted them compulsively, one, two, three, four. Everything seemed to be taking so much time.

“He's emaciated,” said Tom. “I hope he has the strength to move.”

JJ pushed Tusker lightly on the rump. There was no response at all. He didn't move his head, he didn't take even one step forward. It was as though we were invisible to him.

I was sick. It was as though he had died somewhere between his life in Zimbabwe, the clown of the camps, the majestic plunderer of cars and dustbins and lovely lily ponds, and here, in this dry, soulless, ugly hell, he had died. Only his hulking shell was left, waiting for the rest of him to be called away.

“Move on, move on,” JJ said to him, slapping him on one hind leg, but Tusker only backed up a confused step.

“The bullhook,” Tom ordered. “We've got to get him out of here.”

JJ slapped Tusker on the rear with the bullhook now, the sharp end of it biting into the animal's flank. I turned away, sick.

“Please just move,” I prayed. “Please.
Please
.”

Tusker stepped back again. The bullhook had made its mark, and he responded in bewilderment. Tom slipped behind him as well, with a bullhook, to stand on his other side. Diamond and I stepped aside so that Tusker could have a clear view of the open gate.

“Come on, man,” JJ said. He looked at Tom, and I knew what they were thinking. If we can't even get him out of the cage, how are we going to move him across the ranch before Grisha returns. The whole prospect suddenly seemed impossible.

Tom lifted the bullhook over his head and gave Tusker a hard whack against his back legs. Tusker's head jerked up from the pain, and he spun around and around in a circle but still made no noise. It was eerie and sickening. The men flattened themselves against the chain link to move out of his way. He circled again. We were tormenting him. He didn't know what else to do.

Diamond opened the bag she was carrying. Oranges. Grisha had laughed at the idea, but she reached in and pulled one out, holding it in front of Tusker's trunk. He was shaking now, his legs shook. He looked at the orange and looked away.

“Give me the bullhook,” she called to Tom. He handed it to her, and she sliced the orange in two with the sharp end and rubbed a piece of it on the tip of Tusker's trunk. We waited a minute. Slowly, as though a ghost were whispering
in his ear, Tusker lifted his trunk to his mouth and tasted the moisture from the fruit.

“Let's go,” Diamond ordered. “JJ, stay in the rear and keep driving him forward.” She walked ahead, and I followed her. Tusker took a shaky step, then another, then stopped. Diamond ran back to wipe the fruit again on his trunk. He took another step, another. In a few minutes, he had cleared the cage and was standing outside.

“Bollocks! There's no way we can move him like this,” Diamond said. “It'll take all night.”

“Fuck,” Jungle Johnny snapped. “This is becoming a mess.”

Diamond looked around. “You get the other one out,” she ordered Jungle Johnny and Tom. “Open the gate and get the other one out. We'll get him moving, I promise. We'll bring this one right past Shamwari.”

“You have a magic flute?” Tom asked. “He's not moving.”

Sure enough, Tusker was rocking from leg to leg and rumbling to himself.

“Get me up there,” said Diamond.

“Up where?” asked Jungle Johnny.

“On his back. Get me up on his back,” Diamond ordered. “I'm going to ride him out of here.” She handed her bag to me while Jungle Johnny lifted her onto the chain link fence. Pushing the tip of her foot into each link, then grabbing herself up with her hands, climbing like the baboons I had seen in Kenya, lifting up swiftly, gracefully into the canopy of the trees. She managed to climb to the top of the enclosure, where she stood, balanced over Tusker's back. In an instant, she dropped down and scrambled across his back to sit right
behind his head. Not used to the strange weight, he shook his head up and down and turned sideways.

It wasn't such a crazy idea.

People ride elephants all over the world. The secret, what they don't tell the rest of the world, is that the elephants are trained from the time they are about four, systematically starved and beaten and tortured into submission. Thailand, India, all of those lovely countries that worship the elephant beat and starve them into submission to ride them. This wasn't so different.

Diamond leaned over and grabbed Tusker's ears. Elephants' ears are exquisitely sensitive. “Get Shamwari out of his cage,” she said to Jungle Johnny. “I know I can get Tusker going. Neelie, oranges!”

Tom gave me one of the bullhooks, and I resolved I would use it if there was any chance of Tusker turning back. I walked slowly in front of him, luring him with oranges as he took small, unsteady steps behind me. Diamond pulled his ears, one way, then the other.

“Like a horse,” she called down to me. “Sometimes you just have to get on and ride 'em. They do catch on.”

We walked. The broken elephant and Diamond and I. Every time he stopped, I rubbed the orange on his lips, his tongue, almost putting my hand into his mouth. “Come on,” I urged him, I begged him. “Walk.”

He did walk. Mechanically, slowly. Even broken, there was something inside of him that still wanted to live. I smacked him with the handle end of the bullhook when he paused. We had to get out of there. I had to keep him moving.

Tom and JJ were having trouble with Shamwari. His gate was open, his chains were off, but he was still swaying mindlessly from leg to leg.

“Get on him,” Diamond called over. JJ quickly scaled the sides of the cage and lowered himself onto Shamwari's back and settled, like Diamond, behind his head.

But Shamwari continued to rock. Back and forth, leg to leg, shaking his head from side to side, his eyes blank and unseeing. I ran over to rub the orange on his trunk, but there was no response. I rubbed it on his lips. Nothing.

I reached into the bag. There were only one or two oranges left and a can of something. I pulled it out. Enamel spray paint. Bright red.

“What the hell is this for?” I called up to Diamond.

“Oh, right,” she said. “Spray his head. Now! Spray both their heads.” I did, without knowing why. I reached up and sprayed the foul-smelling paint, covering their foreheads with huge red splotches of enamel.