Bound to Happen
Before any of the rest started, the scene had already irritated Charles. Everything just looked wrong, degraded: the poor she-elephant sucking exhaust wafting in from the busy artery beyond the hedge; her tender wearing not some African garb but ludicrously baggy pants and a cap with its flattened bill on sideways; the trio of dusty sparrows squabbling over hayseeds in dung; the inept painting, which rippled across the feed shed’s corrugations, of a sunrise over a savannah.
Surrounded by such absurdity, how could Charles call on reason and calm, not his strong suits anyhow?
Clearly, the tender holding the big animal’s halter was pretending to be a bad-ass black, neck chains and all, an effort that struck Charles as both annoying and silly in a blond kid– or in any white person, come to that. But he had other concerns too. Looking at the boy’s muscular arms and his glowering, acne-fretted face, Charles worried about turning his daughter over to some would-be hoodlum, or even a real one. He felt sure he saw hatred in the young man’s eyes. Its motive wasn’t quite clear, though Charles had a guess or two..
Impatient, Lily sat on the elephant’s back as the keeper glared at her father. Her older sister Elizabeth waited, holding Charles’s left hand. He reflexively clenched and unclenched his right. The big wicker saddle obviously had enough room for both the children– even a couple more, in fact –but the tender had growled, “I make the rules, man.” Barely out of adolescence, he was exploiting his petty authority. Or maybe he got a cut of the extra two bucks for a second ride, which would likely mean quite a lot to him. Charles was straining to be measured.
Another elephant trumpeted from some far-off corner of the zoo, and the saddled one switched her tail like a fly-strafed cow and flared her epical ears. The afternoon sun glinted off her hide, the tattooed sinews of the keeper’s arms, Elizabeth’s pink barrette. This small cluster of sensations gave Charles an odd headache and added to his sense of being on a misguided course. But then what course would have been right? At home, things just seemed cleaner and clearer.
Home. Where was that for this kid? Somewhere nearby, Charles figured. He could see old brownstone buildings, some of their upper windows boarded over, others apparently blackened by flame. Morris Chisolm, the new zoo chair, had urged an effort at “community relations,” which mainly meant hiring people from the neighborhood, above all as many young ones, African-American and white, as possible. He said he wanted to keep them out of trouble, which was a decent impulse, however naive.
Charles’s asked for the girls to ride together mostly because he wanted to escape stench and noise and squalor as quickly as he could. And the sad-faced animals too, behind their rusted steel bars; the indolent snakes behind scratched glass; the birds confined by some trick of lighting. He pictured the swales and woods of his rural landscape, but they seemed impossibly far away.
His wife had gone to her medical conference, and Charles had imagined it would be easier to amuse the kids at the zoo than at the house. He resented his own lack of resources: couldn’t he have dreamed up some game, indoor or outdoor? Margaret would have. Now he dealt with this youngster intoxicated by his own trivial clout. Nobody benefited from his rules, nobody would have been harmed without them, but his sole power lay in saying no, and he meant to wield it.
Such penny-ante intransigence, wherever he encountered it, always drove Charles to anarchical fantasy. To him, bureaucrats were villains, plain and simple, and this snot-nose appeared to be in training. If he could only jump on the elephant’s back himself, he’d charge out the open gate like a rodeo hero!
But how about the girls? And how did you move an elephant out of a walk in the first place?
The keeper knew how. He carried a metal hook, and without taking his attention off Charles, he used it now to prod the elephant into a shamble among dust and manure balls. She waved her trunk like a pennant, grunting a fart-like noise.
How did the keeper walk, let alone trot, with the crotch of his pants at his knees? He narrowed his eyes at Charles with each pass, flourishing the hook; I turn elephants with this thing, he said without saying.
A ride meant six trips around the ring; Charles made sure to count each one, and with every turn, he matched the attendant’s glower. His wife would have reprimanded him for his conviction– typical, perverse –that even a tiny insult amounted to an undoing of his dignity if he let it pass. High school stuff, and Charles knew it.
“Look, daddy!” Lily chirped. “I’m up high!”
Charles smiled vaguely, his eyes still on the boy with the hook. He should just let one daughter finish and then explain to the other that he’d changed his mind about giving her a ride. He’d lace the explanation with contempt; this lowlife had to know he wasn’t worth any real attention.
And yet he seemed to be.
A sudden urge to inspect himself came over Charles, so strong he almost had to resist it physically. He’d scoffed at the handler’s get-up, and though as he considered his own– scuffed hiking boots, jeans, a flannel shirt with a right-angle tatter on its pocket, a plain baseball cap– he saw nothing notable, still he felt he was the one who might appear clownish, emphatically uncool, the way his teenage niece teasingly said he was whenever they got together.
Charles looked at the forearms poking from his rolled sleeves, with their orange freckles and perpetual pink sunburn. He resembled something boiled, he thought, maybe a shrimp. In that instant he imagined himself feeble as a shrimp too.
It felt impossible that, before all this started, he’d actually intended, zoo protocol be damned, to hand over a tip after the girls’ rides– or ride, as he preferred. Now he’d spit on the kid’s feet if he dared. Elizabeth would complain about missing her turn, but Charles could explain how it would be wrong to give more business to someone so rude.
He might console her by a promise of ice cream. There was a stand right outside the gate, and it seemed high time to head that way in any case. But even as he considered this recourse, Charles chafed against letting things go at a subtle snub. Yes, it would be absurdly wrong to put a daughter of his on that elephant simply because he wanted more time to figure how to get even with a punk. Still he meant to put her on.
Charles had one uncomfortable advantage: he knew Morris Chisolm from far back in private school days, and they’d ended up in the same class at Princeton, a place that prompted nostalgia in Morris, whereas for Charles, the older he got the more he felt active loathing for the Ivy League institutions, smugness factories all. So he felt more than just a little compunction at one of his thoughts, namely that he could exploit his slight relationship with Morris if he chose. It was the sort of trick the powerful always pulled on the disenfranchised, and yes, he despised himself for considering it.
Charles despised Morris too, though with no particular heat. He wouldn’t waste passion on someone so lifeless, someone who’d no doubt taken the zoo chair simply because he was the kind who was expected to take such positions. It could as easily have been the symphony, the arboretum, the art museum. Family tradition. noblesse oblige, all that– none of it having to do with real aptitude.
In fact it was ridiculous for a person like Morris to chair a zoo. Charles would have bet the man’s awareness of the natural world extended to pigeon droppings on the sills of his brownstone, or the squirrels cavorting in the pocket park beside it. He and his wife likely owned an overweight Labrador too. Who knew? Charles had no more interest in Chisolm’s private life than in his public one.
“You’re just the chap for our board,” Morris had told him only a month back.
Who in hell had said “chap” in America for a century?
To be sure, Charles had now and then been half tempted to join the board, as Morris kept urging, just because the zoo scientists were doing such great research, especially on the mountain gorilla. Charles had never seen such an animal, or any ape, in the wild; still, merely to imagine one there made him glad at such wonder as remained in the world.
The elephant was making its final round, and the keeper still had his eyes locked on Charles’s. Was that studiously cultivated resentment part of the world’s wonder too? Likely not. And the caged animals weren’t either. Charles seemed always to want something else, something beyond dailiness, no matter he could never define it. When he thought about how blessed he’d been –two healthy kids, a handsome and brilliant wife, and thanks to her, adequate money, a house in beloved hinterland– he knew he was a virtual monster of greed not to be happy with what he had.
What the hell was wrong with him, and did this glowering, pimply kid intuit the defect in him without knowing what it was? If so, Charles could understand the animosity, or at least he thought he could. But the tender kept deleting what little good sense Charles possessed. It was partly that the eyes under that stupid crosswise cap were angry, yes, but also a little amused. Charles felt his fists ball up again; he took them out of his pockets, let them hang. He heard a snort. Was it the elephant or the handler?
No, he’d never join Chisolm’s board of trustees, wouldn’t drive the two hours from his woods for monthly meetings. He had too many other enthusiasms, ones that Morris would scarcely have understood. Charles knew the cry of a grouse for her brood, species of ducks by their silhouettes in flight, a riled otter’s stench, the squalls of mating porcupines, a hare’s reasons for browsing its own manure. So on.
He told himself he’d use up the heavy pile of change in his pockets to pay the handler, looking for as many pennies as he could find. Let the punk count them coin by coin. He hoped he’d have trouble with the addition. Charles knew he was being a skunk, but he smiled at the idea.
“That other kid goin’ too?” the attendant asked with a smirk. The question broke Charles’s reverie.
That other kid.
“I want them both to go this time,” Charles answered.
“And I just told you that ain’t the way it works, man.”
Did the boy slightly raise his hook? He’d probably use it if things ever came to that. He was a lot smaller than Charles, but what violence Charles had ever known followed rules. You weren’t going to get stomped or killed if you went down; you might even shake hands with the better man. People in this sort of neighborhood defended themselves however they could. Period. Do or die. Again, Charles understood such a matter, or thought he did. America had spawned a desperate underclass, and he could hardly blame its members for their survival techniques.
But maybe that was a lot of café Marxist sanctimony. When was a thug just a thug? Was he looking at one? The young man had signaled from the start that he could turn dangerous in a heartbeat.
The sound of a nearby engine distracted Charles. Through a gap in the hedge’s smog-washed foliage, he noticed a car bump up on the narrow sidewalk no more than thirty feet away. The driver parked right there. Seeing the light bar on its roof, he saw it was a cruiser, and he relaxed. He could call the attendant’s bluff now. He could play the tough guy. The cop was his insurance.
So it seemed Charles could rail all he wanted about inequities in the nation’s social oppressiveness– and then enlist it when necessary. He hated himself.
And what if the officer were just planning to coop a little while? Maybe coffee and a doughnut, a few minutes of baseball on the radio, even a few of sleep? And thinking about it, Charles realized the cop couldn’t just jump the metal fence and the hedge anyhow before things went out of control; he’d have to go around to the entrance.
But he could shoot through the chain link. Charles loathed himself even more profoundly for having so much as that passing thought.
“I don’t see any sign about one rider at a time, son,” Charles said, evenly.
“I ain’t your fuckin’ son!” the keeper snapped back.
“No, what you are is a filthy mouth. There’re kids here!”
The elephant tender seemed to be struggling for words, but before he found them, Charles snarled, “Show me where anything says two little kids can’t ride–
man.”
Now he heard conversation. This couldn’t really be happening, could it? He recognized a certain, distinctive nasal drone. Morris Chisolm himself must have been shortcutting to the higher-ups’ private lot and run into the policeman. It was as though the world were actively testing Charles’s vaunted moral convictions. The two men seemed familiar with one another; they were chatting close enough by that he could nearly make out their words.
He expected Elizabeth to be whining and pulling at him, eager to take her own ride, and yet she stayed quiet as death. Lily still sat on the elephant, staring out over the grounds as if trying to find someone she knew. Things weren’t right; the girls grasped that, even at six and four, whether or not they knew what had gone awry.
The keeper dropped his eyes. Had he identified at least one of the voices himself? He seemed to shrink slightly as he stretched to lift Lily down. Charles jostled him aside with his hip, holding his own arms up. Still in her odd little trance, Lily didn’t seem to notice.
The attendant muscled back, trying to box Charles out like a basketball player positioning himself for a rebound. He let the hook fall as he held Lily, it seemed almost delicately. Charles picked the tool up, flung it to the far end of the pen.
The keeper let the child down; she trotted over to her sister’s side.
Charles inhaled the odors of fried food, mentholed tobacco, dirty clothes. The keeper’s breathing came shallow and fierce. The hatred in his expression was even more evident than before.
The hook shone in the browned crabgrass.
The mumbled talk still sounded through the hedge. Charles and the elephant handler held their hands at belt level. Something was bound to happen now.
No easy answers... Brilliant!
Excellent depiction of our current zeitgeist.