Ralph Helfer (25 page)

“I’
M SELLING
M
O
.”

Mr. North had called Bram into his office. “She’s blind.”

“No she’s not!”

“…in one eye. Her back is a mess!”

“From saving people!”

“And now she’s killed a man!”

“Who was trying to kill her!”

“Look, Bram, although I’ll never understand your…so-called love for this animal, I want to be fair. I will sell her to whoever gives me the most money.”

“But you know I don’t have much money saved on what little I earn.”

“Well, maybe no one wants her and you can get her—
free!
” he yelled, grinding his teeth in a sarcastic way.

“Gertie, what are we going to do?”

For the last hour they had been in the kitchen trying to find a way to raise enough money to buy Modoc. “We don’t have anywhere near the amount of money that old miser will get for her.”

Bram racked his brain for an answer. “We just have to raise enough to buy her.”

“And maintain her,” added Gertie. “Imagine the cost of just feeding her. Even if we do,” continued Gertie, “where can we go? Where do we keep her?”

“
Gertie!
” yelled Bram.

“Well, I’m just being practical.”

“You mean you would not want Mo?” Bram’s voice showed great pain.

“Don’t be silly, I’m just trying to think ahead. Women do that, you know.”

“Hmm.”

Bram called everybody he knew. Kelly, the sideshow people, everybody. Friends, bankers, shopkeepers, pet shops, asking to borrow money to buy Mo. Many were sympathetic to his needs and responded fast and handsomely, others were more skeptical, afraid they wouldn’t get their money back.

“How do you plan on paying it back?” he was asked time and time again. “You can’t make much money with a killer elephant, let alone one that has only one good eye.”

Bram tried in vain to convince them otherwise, but to no avail.

For two months Mr. North offered Modoc for sale to the highest bidder. Bram was surprised that only a few offered to bid. Most were too scared to keep her.

“After all, she did kill a man. And who’s to know when it might happen again?”

Many were afraid that she wouldn’t work for them.

“She ain’t gonna work for anybody ’cept him,” piped up old Mr. Barnes from the Humane Association.

Others, knowing the details of what had occurred and Mo’s love of Bram, refused to bid.

“They belong together, North,” some said. “You shouldn’t separate them.”

Another, “Just go ahead and give her to him, you greedy old fart!”

“Bram, the old man wants to see you,” a roustabout yelled into his trailer door.

Mr. North was exasperated. “The best offer I got was $5,000! I can’t believe it! This world-famous elephant, the Golden Elephant, the one that can do an act without a trainer! $5,000. Huh! Amazing. Well, that’s it. Can you come up with the money or do I call the dog food people!”

“They’re the ones offering the money?” Bram asked. Then, without waiting for an answer, “That’s sick! That’s really sick!”

Mr. North loved to antagonize him. “We even had to weigh her on our truck scales to come up with the right amount. It was the only way. They were buying her at so much a pound!”

Bram had borrowed $6,000. He had never believed it would be enough to buy her. He was elated! But he didn’t want to show Mr. North his feelings.

“Yes, we can match that.”

“You mean beat it, don’t you?”

“Okay. $5,500!”

“Sold!”

Mr. North was rotten through and through. Even to the end. The bill of sale and the payment exchange were to take place at the winter quarters. The season would be over. Bram had found a little house with a bit of property in the back where they could keep Mo. A few friends were going to help out on the payments.

Things were looking up.

They still had some fourteen hundred miles to go. They were in the Rhode Island area and winter quarters were in south Florida.

There were two trains. It was the procedure to allow the staff and equipment to take the first train to reach the facility earlier. This
way they could set up and prepare the quarters for the animals before they arrived.

Bram said his goodbye to Mo. “You just take it easy now. Trains are fun. You can look out the window, see the world go by. There are many cows in the pasture. You like cows don’t you?” He planted a big kiss above her bad eye. “See ya,” he said.

He didn’t like being separated from Mo but it was for only a few days, and it did give him time to prepare everything at the new place before she arrived.

The trains separated in upper New York state. The staff boarded the faster train heading for winter quarters, leaving the keepers to stay and care for the animals on the much slower menagerie train.

At a small whistlestop somewhere in the Ozarks, the menagerie train came to a stop. It was two in the morning. A slight foggy mist had settled over the train depot. All was quiet except for the air brakes hissing their release. The only vehicle in the station was a large low-boy furniture van. The truck was parked in the shadows near the train track. A man smoking a cigar sat behind the wheel.

The sound of a boxcar’s heavy steel sliding doors being opened was heard. A ramp was lowered, the lights from inside blasted the darkness, silhouetting a man leading an elephant down the plank. Only the stationmaster and a luggage boy saw the elephant being unloaded. The man in the furniture van flipped his cigar into the gutter and went to the back of his truck. Opening the huge doors, he winched down a ramp. The other man arrived and loaded the elephant. The two spoke for a minute, exchanged something, then returned to their respective jobs.

The truck drove away as the train pulled out of the station quietly, no slipping of the wheels, no sound, no whistle. Anyone sleeping on the train would never even have woken up.

“Where’s Mo? North! Where’s Mo?”

Bram and Gertie had met the train but Mo wasn’t on it.

“Where is she?” Bram was breathing hard, trembling, talking to Mr. North, who sat calmly at his desk in the lead train. Two big bouncer-type guys stood at each side of his desk. Bram had never seen them before.

“I sold her,” he said, quite matter-of-fact.

“What?
What?
”

“She was mine, I owned her, and I sold her.”

He never looked up.

“
You sold her to me! I have $5,500 for her right here. Where is she?
” Bram’s body was visibly shaking, his voice was reaching its breaking point, as was his control.

“I was offered $10,000 for her…and I took it.”

Bram saw nothing but flashes of red. Not even the brawn of the two strong men was enough to keep him away from Mr. North.

“You dirty bastard!” He leaped over the desk, knocking him off his chair, and proceeded to beat his head against the wall. His fist connected with North’s face, teeth flew, an arm was pointing the wrong way before the heavyweights could dislodge him, hauling him out of the room. “Where is she! Where is she!” he yelled as they dragged him down the hall.

Within minutes an ambulance and police car arrived simultaneously. Mr. North was put on a gurney and wheeled to the ambulance for a trip to the hospital. Bram was handcuffed, put into the backseat of the police car, and hustled off to the local jail.

The next morning the judge sat patiently while the lawyers battled out their complaints in favor of their clients. It wasn’t a matter of why he did it. Everyone knew about Mr. North’s meanness, and when the facts were told, even the prosecutor for Mr. North showed a bit of concern for Bram. He didn’t voice it in court, but in the plea bargaining he was most lenient.

Assault and battery was the crime. A suspended thirty days in jail, one-year probation, and payment of all hospital bills, plus the replacement of one broken desk!

Bram later found out the judge was a friend of a friend and
never did like North since he heard what happened to the victims of the fire.

Bram spent all his money on the lawyer as well as paying for Mr. North’s hospital bill and desk. Mr. North spent one month in the hospital recovering from his injuries.

Bram and Gertie continued their search for Modoc well into the future. But as the months, then years passed, the cold emptiness in Bram was cemented and he rarely lived a contented day. He was helpless to do anything more.

A
N ANIMAL COMPANY
called Gentle Jungle Exotic Animal Rental had acquired the contract to supply all the trained exotic animals for a television series. Gentle Jungle was owned and operated by a man named Ralph. Things were going along great until one morning when he received an early telephone call from the director.

“Ralph, this is J.B. Listen, I know we just wrapped the last show of the season, but I wanted to tell you what was coming up in a few months.”

“Yeah.”

“At the start of next season’s series we’ll need an elephant.”

He said it as though an elephant was an item Ralph carried around in his back pocket. “You have one, haven’t you?” he asked, following a slight hesitation on Ralph’s part. “Haven’t you?” J.B. asked again.

“Sure, of course,” Ralph said, with his fingers crossed. “I was just writing it down. When do you need it?”

“About September. Three months should give you enough time to teach it its act.”

“Act?” he asked.

“Yeah, you know—sitting up, bowing, hopping, all that kind of stuff.”

“Uh…sure, no problem,” Ralph said. “Just send me the script so we can get started practicing.”

Ralph hung up, after assuring J.B. that he would have the best elephant act this side of the Ringling Brothers.

“Who was that?” asked Toni, Ralph’s wife.

“Studio,” he said.

“Oh. What did they want?”

“An elephant.”

“Hmm. Where are you going to get one?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hmm. Did you tell them you had one?”

“Yeah.”

“Why did you do that?”

“’Cause I was afraid of losing the contract.”

“Well,” she said facetiously, “you can always hang a rubber hose from the milk cow’s head. That should do it.”

“Funny, Toni! Very funny.”

For the next five days, Ralph and his associates called everybody they knew to see if anyone had heard of an elephant for sale. A few turned up, priced at around $10,000 each—way over their budget. Plus, one of them was a “batter”—that is, an elephant that throws its trunk with the intent to do bodily harm. They even had a couple of offers from zoos, but none of their elephants was tame, let alone trained.

By the end of the week, things were looking pretty grim. Ralph knew his competition had an elephant, and that if they got wind of the job they could take over the series.

“Even if we did find one,” said Toni, “for—how much did you say?”

“A thousand dollars,” Ralph replied.

“A thousand dollars,” she continued, “what would you haul it in?”

“I don’t know. Maybe its owner would bring it.”

They had exhausted just about every means of finding an elephant when a friend showed him a newspaper ad. It read: “For sale: Old female circus elephant with bad eye, to professional people only. Cheap.” It gave a phone number for somewhere back East—, they weren’t sure where. Ralph called.

“Hello?” a rather burly-sounding voice bellowed in his ear.

Ralph could hear kids screaming in the background. “I read your ad in the Sunday paper about an elephant for sale. Is she still available?”

“Yeah, we got her. She ain’t much to look at, and she needs some meat an’ potatoes, if you know what I mean,” he belched out.

“How much do you want for her?”

“A thousand dollars, mister—that’s it. She’s a steal. Not many around at that price.”

“What’s wrong with her? I mean, any defects, bad habits?” Ralph figured that for that price there had to be something wrong.

“Look—take her or leave her. If you want her, fine. If not, well, we’ll just cook her up and feed her to the dogs. Ha!”

There had been a beat before his answer that told Ralph to believe nothing. He could just visualize this guy—baldheaded, overweight, shirtless, and unshaven.

“Look, I gotta go,” he said.

“Okay,” Ralph replied, “I’ll take her.”

“You will?” came his surprised answer.

“Yeah. But we’re coming all the way from California. It’ll take about a week to get there. Will you hold her for us?”

“If I don’t get too tired, holding all that weight! Ha!”

What a jerk, Ralph thought.

“Send me a few bucks so I know you’re for real, and you’ve got yourself an elephant,” he said.

They exchanged telephone numbers and addresses. As Ralph was hanging up, he asked, “Oh, by the way, what’s her name?”

“Modoc—at least that’s the name she came with. But the locals here call her One-Eye Mo.”

Ralph picked up a used van trailer for about $500. The sides were rusted and two of the tires were bald, but with some oil, a lube job, and new tires, she looked pretty roadworthy. As for the truck, an old Chevy Bobtail had been impounded for nonpayment and was being auctioned off at the police garage—and they hit it lucky.

Everybody they knew pitched in to fix up the trailer. They laid in a new, two-inch plywood floor to support Modoc’s weight. Holes were drilled in the plywood, and heavy leg chains were run through. Lightweight panel boards were installed around the inside to prevent any “nosing” around with the electric cables running through the trailer to the sidelights and the back brakelights.

All the while, everyone was telling them they were crazy to embark on such a risky venture—after all, they were spending all the money, money that was badly needed for the ranch facilities for cage repairs, old bills, and the like. True, the deal
did
sound pretty scary. Ralph had never heard of an elephant selling for $1,000! Either she was on her last legs, or she was a killer rejected by the circus…or both. And if the elephant didn’t work out, what use would they have for the truck and the trailer? But if they were lucky enough to be able to use her even a little bit, she would earn enough money to help the company.

Frank, the ranch foreman, and Ralph took off early one morning, heading for the small town in the Ozarks where Modoc was then residing. Neither one had ever driven a twenty-two-wheel truck and trailer before, but after a thousand miles or so each, they’d stopped grinding gears. Except for an occasional flat tire on the “new” retreads, the four-day trip went smoothly.

Seeing the country from high up in the cab was a new experience. The size and weight of the rig gave them a feeling of power and great energy as they sped across the deserts of Arizona and
lugged up the Rocky Mountains. Texas seemed to take forever, but the Plains states flew by—and from Chicago on, they were on the edge of their seats, anticipating their arrival.

Ralph had never owned an elephant before, but he was experienced in handling them for others. Always one of his favorites in the world of animals, elephants never failed to leave him in awe. He found them to be both extremely intelligent and very sensitive.

They had climbed high into the Ozark mountains. Pulling off the main highway, they entered a small community. After some searching, they finally managed to find the old, dilapidated, one-story house. A broken porch and a yard full of tin cans and old tires gave it a look of depression.

They knocked on the door. It seemed that nobody was home, but the door was cracked open a bit. Ralph could see the inside of the house was in about the same condition as the outside.

“Hello! Anybody here?”

No answer. Walking around the side of the house and across the yard, Frank and Ralph noticed a couple of boys pitching rocks at what appeared to be a large tree. They were heading toward the boys when the voice Ralph had heard on the telephone boomed out: “Hey, you! You’re on private property!”

There was the man, almost identical to how Ralph had visualized him—fat, balding, and gruff.

“We’re the people who called you from California—came to get Modoc,” Ralph said.

“Well, you really
did
come, after all,” he said, ambling over to them. “Thought you might forfeit the money.” He wiped his dirty hands on his dirty trousers.

“I’m Ralph, and this is Frank.”

“Bo Jenkins.”

They shook hands all around. Ralph could smell that familiar circus odor drifting through the air, but couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. Then he heard a squeal that sounded as though it had come from a hurt animal.

“I got ’er!” yelled one of the kids.

“You kids go on home now.”

“I got ’er, Mr. Jenkins! Square in the leg! Here’s your money.” Ralph watched as the kids gave Jenkins a couple of coins. “I don’t have to pay for the second one, right?”

“Yeah, sure, kid. Go on, now—beat it!” he said. An embarrassed smirk crossed his reddening face. He quickly changed the subject. “Come on, I’ll show you Mo.”

They walked over to a four-foot-high barbed-wire fence encircling a lot of roughly two acres. It was barren except for a few shrubs, dozens of beer cans, and soda-pop bottles, and an unusually large number of stones at the far end of the field. There a large dead oak tree straddled the fence. Tied to the base of the tree was a heavy tow chain. It stretched out about fifteen feet and was shackled to the foot of an enormous elephant.

This was Modoc. She was the tallest Indian elephant Ralph had ever seen. She looked to be around thirty to forty years old. A bent tin sign hung on a pole just out of her reach. It read:
ONE-EYE MO—KILLER ELEPHANT. KEEP YOUR DISTANCE!
The sign was full of rock holes and dents.

Ralph felt his face flush with anger. “What do you do? Have the local kids pay you so they can throw rocks at the elephant?”

“Naw! Well, just a few. It helps pay the food bill.”

“By the looks of this elephant, she hadn’t seen a proper meal or even eaten in a long, long time.”

“Look here, mister,” demanded Jenkins, “you either take her or forfeit your deposit. I just don’t care one way or the other.”

Frank was fuming. “Good Lord, Ralph, we can’t show her on camera! The Humane Society people would hang us!”

“I know,” Ralph said, “but we can’t leave her here in this condition.” He turned to Jenkins. “What does that sign mean, ‘Killer’? Is she dangerous?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I was told she is, but I never gave her a chance to show me.”

“You mean you never approach her? Clean or scrub or treat her for worms?”

“
Her?
No way! Hell, no! What do you think I am, crazy? You want to get me killed?”

Frank and Ralph were both ready to deck him. “How long have you had her?” Ralph asked.

“Couple of years.”

“
Couple of years
! You mean she’s been here like this for a couple of years?” He must have had a look of murder on his face, because Jenkins started to back away.

“Look, if you want her, fine, I’ll be in the house. If not—see ya.” He turned and headed toward the house at a rather fast pace.

Frank and Ralph took a deep breath and, holding the barbed wire for each other, climbed through the fence and headed for Mo. As they approached, they saw she was resting her head against the old tree. She had apparently being doing this for some time, since a large worn spot grazed the tree at the same height as her head. She slowly turned toward them, her great ragged ears slowly angling forward, capturing every sound they made.

As they got closer, they could see just how abused she was. She was about a thousand pounds underweight. Her huge backbone arched high in the air, and her skin was stretched taut across a skeletal rib cage, only to hang loosely in huge globs at the bottom of her stomach. She appeared to be blind in her left eye.

It was then that Ralph saw it—from afar, one would never notice, since it was on the far side of the tree—
the end of the heavy low chain disappeared into her ankle
. The chain had been there so long without being removed that the outer skin had actually grown over it. It left the leg looking as though it had an overlarge ankle.

“My God! Frank! That bastard! That dirty bastard!” He turned, heading back toward the house.

Frank stopped him. “Time for that later,” he said.

They stood there, amazed at the total emaciation of the poor old girl. There were bruises and cuts by the dozens, obviously made by the stone throwing. Old, healed gouges showed where large rocks had taken their toll. The hair was missing from Mo’s tail, and
Ralph recalled having seen an elephant-hair bracelet on Jenkins’s wrist. He wondered to himself how he had managed that!

Ralph called to her, “Hi, Mo…Hi, old girl…” She raised her great head high in the air, and for a moment she was silent. Then she made a
whoosh
sound with her trunk and stepped forward toward them. They could hear a distinct grumbling deep down in her stomach. She seemed to beg for them to come to her. Ralph could see her bad eye. It wasn’t so bad to look at, actually; there was just a white cast where the pupil should have been.

Modoc started to come to life. She was swaying and anxious.

“What do we do, Ralph?” Frank asked. “She hasn’t been off those chains in years!”

“Let’s take it easy and be careful. Keep your bull hook close.”

They approached Mo straight on, talking gently. She was straining against her chain so hard that it was ripping out of her flesh. The open cracks oozed with blood and pus. Sometimes in their business, decisions must be made that could mean life or death, decisions based on an ability to read an animal—in this case, a nine-foot-tall, maybe four-ton elephant with the potential to kill in an instant. Ralph’s natural instincts were at work. He felt these were not the actions of a dangerous animal, but rather of one who was affectionate and starved, an elephant that craved the touch of human hands.

With outstretched hands he walked toward Mo. She leaned forward, stretching out her trunk. He reached over and gently touched its tip. It seemed that to her this was like receiving an electric shock, or, more accurately, a jolt of pure energy. At what Ralph believed must have been her first human touch in many, many years, she started to trumpet. Tail held high, head up, ears forward, she pranced around. Both men were thrilled. What ecstasy!

Ralph moved in close. Mo gently laid her trunk over his shoulder, ran it down the full length of his body, and encircled the tip around his toe. Then she started to shake. Her belly rumbled. As a naturalist, he knew this was her way of greeting him. Yet, as an animal lover, he also knew this was the sobbing of joy, expressing years
of pent-up pain and hunger and the deprivation of solitary confinement. Animals, like people, experience loneliness, boredom, and despondency when the comfort of a friendly voice, a familiar smell, or a gentle touch no longer brightens their day.