Whistling for the Elephants (26 page)

Some
two hours later, Judith was still seated on a hay bale outside the barn.
Sweetheart was organizing snacks and Aunt Bonnie had taken over playing with
Perry. The two of them were having a wonderful time. Aunt Bonnie had hung up an
old tire in the barn and she and Perry couldn’t stop laughing. They were
playing at being monkeys and kept pretending to pick bugs off each other.

‘Ugh,
ugh.’ Aunt Bonnie came towards Perry like Girling the Gorilla. He shrieked with
laughter and swung out of the way on his tire. Judith’s face leaked tears. I
don’t think she would have had the energy to go unless someone had carried her
out. I guess with her kids at camp Aunt Bonnie didn’t really have a reason to
go home. Anyhow, they both stayed.

It was
the hottest and probably the hardest day. The uprights for the enclosure were
all dug in now. There were just the crossbars left to do. The women humped and
heaved the last of the track pieces into the places they would eventually go.
Everyone was waiting for Gabriel to come back. He returned in his truck. He was
wearing tight white jeans, a white singlet and no shoes. He leaped down from
the cab like some knight from his white horse. It was ridiculous.

‘God
almighty, look at those muscles,’ whispered Mrs Torchinsky through her moustache.

‘I may
work all day,’ answered Ingrid, who had been ready to quit.

They
weren’t alone. All the women went quite gooey. Stupid, I thought. From the back
of his truck Gabriel took down a big gas tank, some piping and a large metal
mask. He smiled at everyone, aware of his performance, and then began calling
out instructions. While the women heaved and held the solid metal, he began to
weld the crosspieces into place. In his white sleeveless T-shirt and with that
glass and metal mask with blue and purple sparks flying around him he looked
like a god. An unobtainable god. All afternoon long he gave off this
incredible aura. The women worked harder and harder. Women who had never done
anything manual without rubber gloves and a Brillo pad lifted metal into place
and stood under a shower of sparks.

Up at
the barn, Joey continued with his job, examining every nook and cranny of the
crime scene. A couple of times Miss Strange had passed by the barn but she and
Judith never said a word to each other. I think Miss Strange wanted to but
Judith just looked away. By nightfall, the enclosure was nearly finished.
After a sandwich lunch Sweetheart had moved on to organizing dinner. Doreen Angelletta
had called Tony at the pizza parlour and Sweetheart had been to collect. There
was pizza for everybody in the barn. It was getting dark now and maybe twenty
or more women had got together for the food.

There
probably hadn’t been a gathering of women in the town like this for years.
Certainly it was the first one with a disconsolate goose present. Judith sat
silently, matching her body language to the drooping bird. They were in hell
together. Out in the field, the sparks from Gabriel’s work continued to
splinter the air.

‘God,
he’s gorgeous,’ announced Mrs Torchinsky, looking out through the barn doors. ‘And
I seen a lot of fellas.’

‘Yeah,
but they’ve mostly been dead,’ laughed Ingrid from behind a piece of Sicilian.

Aunt
Bonnie sat on a bale with Perry. She was playing some counting game with him.
They kept laughing. It seemed weird to me that she was so good with kids and yet
she sent her own away for the summer. I’d have stayed with her.

‘You be
a horse again, Aunt Bonnie,’ he cried as the game moved on. In the distance the
fire siren sounded but no one moved or even counted the blasts.

‘I haven’t
worked this hard since I gave birth to the twins,’ grinned Doreen Angelletta.

Sweetheart
handed out drinks in Dixie cups. I kept thinking how my Mother would enjoy
that. The Dixie cups.

Doreen
sighed. ‘I think I’m in love,’ she declared as Joey passed by outside. There
was a general shriek of disbelief.

‘With
Joey Amorato?’

‘Ergh,
you’d never get the dog hairs off your clothes. Ain’t that right, Judith?’

‘How
you ever chose between him and Harry I’ll never know.

Everyone
laughed. Doreen was chanting through a crack in the barn door. ‘Gabriel, oh
Gabriel!’

‘What’s
the matter, Doreen? Ain’t your Tony coming up with the goods?’ called one of
the women.

‘Sure,’
said Doreen. ‘Once a year on New Year’s Eve after Guy Lombardo’s been on the
TV. God forbid that Lombardo man ever dies, my married life will be over.’

‘New
Year’s Eve, you’re lucky,’ said another woman. ‘The only person who touches me
is my hairdresser.’

Helen
slipped in through the barn doors. When she saw how many people there were she
tried to leave again but Miss Strange gently grabbed her arm and moved her into
a corner.

‘I lit
the fire,’ Helen said quietly and curled away. Cosmos was explaining one of her
theories to a few of the women. She clutched a piece of paper earnestly as she
spoke.

‘You see,
you have to find your place in the cosmos. Like, it might not be here.’

I
nodded. ‘You mustn’t be an Et cetera,’ I said, which I thought was the worst on
my list.

‘For
God’s sake, Cosmos, you do talk some talk sometimes,’ said Doreen.

‘It’s
like important. You have to find your place in the Great Scheme,’ said Cosmos.

‘And is
this your place?’ asked Mrs Torchinsky to the soft and gentle young woman. I
expected a spiritual reply but Cosmos shook her head.

‘Nah, I
ran out of money on the Greyhound bus just past the zoo. It’s cool. I have to
be here for a while before I move on.’

Doreen
moved on to a subject everyone could relate to. ‘I think Troilus has fallen in
love with Judith,’ she called cheerfully.

Judith
looked at the floor. Maybe she didn’t even hear. She had stopped crying but she
had sunk so far into herself that afternoon that there seemed no getting her
back. There was hay on her once-perfect clothes and her mask of make-up had
begun to fade away. I thought she looked prettier than before.

‘Just
lucky, huh, Judith?’ laughed Ingrid. ‘There’s a hunk in the field and you get
the thunderbolt from a Christmas dinner.’

Miss
Strange looked tired but I think in her own way she was trying to get through
to Judith. She looked straight at her.

‘Don’t
be ridiculous. Animals do not love.’

I didn’t
like the idea of this. ‘Mr Paton loves you,’ I said and I knew it was true. He
was sitting on her shoulder, stroking the indented side of her face.

‘That’s
not love,’ replied Miss Strange, getting mad. ‘I’m just his meal ticket.’

Cosmos
thought for a moment. ‘I think we don’t want animals to have emotion because
then we wouldn’t know how to treat them. Anyway, if they have no emotion it
makes you feel, like, better than them. More than them. But they feel stuff Did
you ever see anything more passionate than the excitement of a dog going for a
walk?’

Miss
Strange snorted. ‘That’s not passion. It’s about gratification.’

Cosmos
tried again. ‘It’s not like humans do emotion real well. They can’t always
express what they’re feeling.’

Doreen
was trying to follow. ‘Yeah, but they do express it, right? That’s what makes
it different. At least people, what do you call it, communicate.’

‘Not
always,’ said Mrs Torchinsky, who lived among the departed. Cosmos’s focus was
absolute. She was not distracted.

‘If
someone from another country didn’t speak English and you couldn’t talk to
them, does that mean they don’t feel anything? I mean we speak the same
language and… Ingrid, try and find one word for what you feel right now. Better
yet, what I am feeling or Sweetheart.’

Ingrid
looked bewildered. ‘I don’t know. Of course, I don’t know.’

‘No you
don’t. Can anyone understand the inner landscape of anyone else’s life? Do you
know what someone else is feeling? Presuming that animals lack feeling is just
an excuse for treating them badly.’

Mrs Torchinsky
was adamant. ‘We are not like animals.’

‘No, we’re
not like animals, we are animals,’ replied Cosmos.

Doreen
looked out the door again at Gabriel. ‘Of course, some men are more animal than
others.’ Mrs Torchinsky laughed. ‘I’m sure you have a point, Cosmos, but I can’t
worry about this. I can’t spend Sundays wondering if the chicken on my table
was depressed. How could you tell anyway? Bad posture?’

The
women started laughing and Sappho clapped along with delight.

‘Yeah,
Cosmos, tell us, do chickens have pecking orders?’

‘Do
penguins have bad days?’

Cosmos
smiled. ‘Did you ever see two herons courting?’ she asked. ‘They wrap their
long necks around each other and reach such a pitch of emotion that I could
have wished to be a heron so I might experience it.’

Miss Strange
tutted. ‘Heron love. Love! Why do women talk about it all the time? It’s no
wonder men think we’re lame-brained.’

Mrs Torchinsky
produced several bottles of red wine and some fresh cups while the discussion
continued.

‘Men
don’t know about love,’ declared Ingrid. ‘All they worry about is size and
performance.’

As the
subject of size had often come up in many of the women’s minds in relation to
Ingrid’s husband Hubert from the Pop Inn, this gave them pause. He was the only
black man in town and even I knew there were rumours about what that meant.

‘That’s
not true,’ declared Doreen, defensive of her Tony.

‘All
right,’ cried Ingrid, getting excited. ‘What is the difference between men and
women?’

‘The
size of your bowling ball,’ volunteered Doreen, and everyone laughed. The women
sat and talked and drank. It didn’t take long for them to get on to the subject
of sex. Miss Strange was getting slightly slurred.

‘Camels
have very civil breeding methods although otherwise they are rather
bad-tempered and I do not recommend them for a pet. If a female in the camel
pack sounds like a cigarette … anyway, if the female goes into heat then the
males won’t fight for her. They just line up single file and in an orderly
fashion to “service” her. When they’re done, they get off and go back to the
end of the line.’

Cosmos
was getting annoyed. ‘Yes, but none of this means animals can’t love.’

‘Oh,
stop bringing love into it,’ snapped Miss Strange so sharply that Mr Paton
removed himself to the other end of the hay bale. Cosmos would not be swayed.

‘Animals
love their babies.’

Helen
surprised everyone by joining in. ‘The female Asian diadem butterfly will guard
her eggs by standing over them. Sometimes, if the eggs don’t hatch, she will do
it till she dies. Her rooted corpse standing watch over her offspring.’

‘Is
that love?’ I wanted to know.

‘A
butterfly will do that?’ said Sweetheart so quietly we almost didn’t hear. ‘That’s
more than Judith will do for Perry.’ Perry had fallen asleep with his body moulded
to Aunt Bonnie. There was a terrible silence, broken by Joey appearing at the
door.

How
Joey ever thought he could run for office I’ll never know. At any rate he
couldn’t deal with the crowd of women who turned their attention to him. He
didn’t really have much to say. He tried to pull his substantial stomach in a
little and smoothed back his hair. He blushed as he spoke.

‘Oh,
yes, hello. Miss Strange. Uh, Judith.’ He looked and smiled at the floor in the
direction of Judith. ‘I have located the entrance manner of the perpetrator and
I think if I stay here the night then I could bring the matter to a useful
conclusion. What I am saying is that I think the dog will come back and I
could—’

Outside
the roar of an engine brought everyone to silence. The thud of heavy boots was
followed by the banging open of both the double barn doors. There stood the
whole of Sassaspaneck Fire Brigade. Defenders of the town and husbands to every
one of the women sitting inside. The men were filthy with soot and smoke. At
the centre of the group stood Harry. In his fireman’s braces, filthy T-shirt
and heavy boots, he looked macho in the way that men believe women admire. He
eyed the group of seated women. Not one of them felt comfortable. There wasn’t a
woman in the room Harry hadn’t seen naked and bulging in his corset store and
he knew it. A dangerous priest who might forget the secrecy of confession. He
stripped them down with his eyes and then wandered over to Joey. Harry was
considerably taller. He stood uncomfortably close to the little man and looked
down at him.

‘Well,
well, an election rally for the Democrats, eh, Mr Amorato? Cornering the female
vote? I think you might be wasting your time, eh, men? I think you’ll find the
ladies will be good enough to vote sensibly with a little guidance from their
husbands.’

‘I wasn’t
… I was here to…’ Joey stumbled over every word.

Harry
patted him on the head and dismissed him with a wave. ‘No need to explain.’ I
thought Joey was going to try and punch him again. Instead he just hitched his
pants up over and over.