Whistling for the Elephants (18 page)

Junior
threw some onions on the grill and smacked them down with his egg slice. ‘So
what do you know?’

‘I know
that there’s never going to be a better shortstop than Bud Harrelson.’

‘Amen.
So did you think of a new name for the stand?’ he asked.

A
McDonald’s had opened in town and Frank had decided he needed to update his
business. We had been talking and I said he needed a snappier name than Walchinsky’s
Hot Dog Stand.

‘How
about Frank’s Franks?’ I said. ‘And you could have a slogan;
Be Frank
—
Frank’s
Franks Are Best.’

Frank
screwed his eyes up and looked at me. ‘A slogan? Like on a button?’ I nodded. ‘I
like that. Yeah, I like that. Buttons. Rockefeller, he’s got buttons. See.’ He
held up a campaign button which read
We Want Rocky.
It was like a lot of
American politics — simple and to the point. Frank shook his head in amazement
at the idea. ‘We could have buttons,’ he repeated.

If it
was raining or business was slow, Junior would let me sit inside behind the
counter and eat my supper. I would sit next to him while he cut up onions,
tears streaming down his face. Inside the stand, on the wall, Frank had black
and white photographs from the opening of the hot-dog stand. There were
balloons and ribbons and everyone was dressed up. At the back of the picture
was an elephant wearing a sequinned coat and a top hat.

‘Only hot-dog
stand in America designed by an architect and opened by an elephant,’ Junior
would say. Then he would put down his knife and go through the people posing
from the past. ‘That’s Mr Burroughs, everyone called him John Junior;
Sweetheart and her son Harry; my father; Billie Blake; and that’s Grace
carrying Phoebe. Used to bring her down here all the time.’

I knew
Grace from the magazine and the others were starting to be familiar too.

‘Phoebe.
She had a wheelchair.’

‘John
Junior’s sister. Frail as a bird. She had polio when she was a kid. It didn’t
matter how much money John Junior made, he couldn’t make her better. Then Grace
came along. You never saw two people happier together. Grace would carry her
everywhere. Everybody said she was Phoebe’s legs and Phoebe was her heart. That’s
how come Pop got the stand. Phoebe wanted a hot dog so Grace got John to build
her a hot-dog stand.’ Junior wiped his sweaty red face with a towel and sat
down.

‘You
been out to the house?’ I nodded and he smiled. ‘What a place. Took three years
and every builder in the county to build it. Of course, it didn’t help that
Billie kept changing her mind. She was a gal. She had been to Europe once and
she wanted all of it in one building. She used to sit drawing pictures of
houses and driving John crazy. “Billie,” he would say, “you can have what you
want but you have to decide on one style.” In the end I think it was a little
wacky. The front was that place in Venice — the Doge’s Palace, I never been —
and the tower from Madison quare Garden in New York. And big. Thirty bedrooms,
fourteen baths, plus kitchens, pantries and servants’ quarters. People came
from Paris to do the plaster on the walls, they got chairs handmade in
Florence, floors from South America, artists to paint ceilings, wood walls from
Italy You should see the organ in the tower gallery. Four thousand pipes. Fifty
grand. I don’t think anybody ever played it. I was only little but there was
money then. The parties my dad used to cook for. But it couldn’t last. There
wasn’t the money to make it last. One time Billie wanted a gondola so John
Junior gets a gondolier too. You know the Dapolitos? That was Eddie’s father,
the gondolier. I think it’s why he still lives by the water.’

So that
was my life. Walchinsky’s in the evening, driving at night, and the zoo during
the day. I was learning a lot at the zoo. Cosmos gave me jobs to do and the
insect woman, Helen, let me in for free. I already knew that when the rear ends
of female baboons went red and swollen they weren’t sick, just in estrous. That
meant they wanted mating. I also knew that the books said Girling the Gorilla
was supposed to be mainly foliverous. That meant he was supposed to like leaves
and stems and things from plants, but you got nowhere with him unless you gave
him spaghetti with tomato sauce. He wasn’t like Father, he loved it. Girling
was also scared of the plastic dividers in ice-cube trays. Miss Strange didn’t
know why but he would back off as soon as she produced one.

I didn’t
see a lot of Miss Strange. She kept in the office when the zoo was open. Cosmos
had done a great job on the pets corner — Manitou Manor — and for a while a few
families even came. The kids loved Cosmos. She would sit on a bale of hay,
tooting her flute, while they fed the goats and stroked the rabbits. The angora
rabbit had babies and I spent for ever holding them. They were just the same colour
as their mom.

‘That’s
genetics,’ I told Cosmos with ten-year-old knowing.

She
looked at the bunnies. ‘Yeah, neat. Aren’t mothers just the most? They are like
… everything. The Algonquin believe that Gluskap made the whole world from
the body of his mother.’

I found
that hard. Everybody had these weird ideas about mothers. I was sure you couldn’t
make anything out of mine. Not even sweat.

If
Cosmos wasn’t telling stories then she was whistling, and if she wasn’t
whistling she was carving new whistles and giving them away. She also made a
thing out of old sewer pipes for us to crawl through and feel what it was like
to be prairie dogs. None of this could really hide the fact that the place was
falling down, but I loved it. I became kind of a mini-know-all, standing in
front of the polar bears declaring to all and sundry:

‘The
girl is Hypatia. She was far out. She was like, a scientist, mathematician and
philosopher. In her time she was the leading intellectual of Alexandria. She
taught philosophy, geometry, astronomy and algebra at the university. She
invented the astrolabe and the planisphere. Anyhow she had this really
powerful philosophy about scientific rationalism. That you could sit and figure
everything out. Well, Cyril, the boy? He hated that. He was like, this big
Christian, which was really new then. It was like, the fourth century and Cyril
was Patriarch of all Alexandria but I mean if he was going to have that job
then I think he could have had like a better name. So Cyril hates her because
she’s so smart, and he gets this mob of monks to drag her from her chariot,
strip her naked and torture her to death by slicing her flesh from her bones
with shells and sharpened flints.’

People
were sometimes impressed. It was thrilling. Then the campaign over the zoo
heated up and folks started feeling uncomfortable about coming. There was a
rally in the town, a Meet the candidates event in front of Torchinsky’s Funeral
Parlour where both parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, announced their
mayoral tickets. Harry, as the incumbent, was announced first. He began his
speech with a sure-fire winner.

‘How
about them Senators?’ The Sassaspaneck Senators, the high-school football team,
had had a very good year. The crowd went wild, waving red and blue banners and
tossing fake boaters in the air. ‘Was that some season or what?’ More cheering.
Everyone in the crowd could have run a touchdown themselves. Judith sat at the
back, perched on a chair from Torchinsky’s. She had a fixed smile on her face
which only make-up remover could shift. She never said a word. She didn’t clap
or cheer either. Just sat. It was kind of spooky.

‘When I
was quarterback for the Senators, people used to ask me what I felt, and I told
them: pride. I was proud to be from Sassaspaneck. Proud to be quarterback for
the best high-school team in the county. And I’m still proud. The Senators
represent everything that is good about this town. They are young, talented men
and they are winners. And we need to reward that. I have been your mayor for four
years now and I am going to spend the next four years giving this town a place
to show off our pride. At my own expense I have commissioned architect’s plans
for a new Senator stadium. It will be the latest, the greatest and the most
modern stadium in the state.’

‘Where
you gonna put it, Harry? In your yard?’ came a cry from the crowd. Harry
laughed and held up a map of the town.

‘Right
here.’ He pointed to the zoo. ‘If elected I will close the zoo. I think we all
agree that the place has become a health hazard and it has had its day. I say,
let’s clean up this town. Close the zoo. The Senator stadium is the future.’
Abe and Hubert surprised themselves by cheering together. So that was it. Harry’s
close-the-zoo platform. Then the Democrats had their turn. The local party gave
the announcement the usual build-up and then declared:

‘The
Democratic candidate for Mayor of Sassaspaneck is Joey Amorato!’

To be
honest, the place didn’t exactly erupt. There was more of a murmur which went
through the crowd.

‘The
dog catcher?’

‘They
chose the dog catcher?’

‘Do
they mean Joey?’

‘I didn’t
even know he was a Democrat.’

I don’t
know why, but Joey had decided that 1968 was his year to stand tall. Maybe
everybody knew that Harry was unbeatable so they let Joey stand as a token.
Whatever, little Joey came out fighting.

‘Hey. I’m
Joey Amorato and I don’t just know you, I know your dogs!’ As an opening line
in a fierce campaign it probably lacked something.

‘What
about the stadium, Joey?’ called Tony from the door of his pizza parlour.

Already
Joey was into tricky territory. In his time at Sassaspaneck High, Joey had
never been on a single sports team. Everybody knew this. He had always been on
the chubby, unfit side. Indeed, it was his inability to run which had led to
him being bitten by a dog in the first place.

‘I
think there are more important things in this town,’ he began. —

‘Like
the zoo? You gonna come out for the zoo ‘cause you like dogs?’ shouted someone,
and everyone laughed. It was not an auspicious start. Harry laughed loudest of
all. Joey stood on the platform looking at him. Judith, seated between them,
didn’t move a muscle. The two men had very different agendas. Harry wanted to
close the zoo, but Joey didn’t care about that. He wanted to close out Harry.
The zoo was about to get caught in the middle and so was I.

One night I had slipped
out to drive the car as usual. It was always the same time. I would watch TV
till a commercial came on with a deep man’s voice.

‘It’s
ten o’clock,’ he would say like he was Orson Welles. ‘Do you know where your
children are?’ It was delivered in such a way as to suggest you might also know
where some other people’s children were. Father would have been sitting at the tantalus
for some time by then, so he never noticed me leave. I drove very slowly
because even on my fruit box I couldn’t see real well. Down to the Yacht Club
entrance and round and back to the stop sign. Then I had to back up to avoid
going on to Amherst, which I figured, as it was a main road, probably wasn’t
allowed. That night I had tried a little spying, but it hadn’t gone well. The neighbourhood
was very tense since Perry had arrived. Uncle Eddie had sided with Sweetheart.

‘You
can’t turn away any kid,’ he said, almost raising his voice.

But
Aunt Bonnie said the kid ought to go. That it was upsetting Judith. I couldn’t
figure it out because Aunt Bonnie liked kids. She said it was all about family.
I parked the car for a while and went round the back of the Dapolito place.
Maybe Aunt Bonnie was having ice cream. In the backyard I could just see her
lying on Eddie Jr’s trampoline. I knew she was in estrous because she had a
very red bottom and Harry was mating her. When I looked across the yard to the
edge of the water I could see that Joey was watching, which I didn’t think was
nice. I ran back to the car.

I don’t
know why but it made me feel panicked so I shot the car into reverse and pulled
straight out on to Amherst. There seemed to be cars coming from every direction
and I drove kind of wildly down the road. I didn’t know what the hell was going
on. Mating, that was about reproduction, but Aunt Bonnie already had kids. She
had kids and then she sent them away for the summer. Harry had a kid who he
didn’t want to talk about and now she was dead but
her
kid was here and
Harry didn’t want him. Perry was family How could you not want family? And why
was Jocy watching? It wasn’t nice. I knew it wasn’t nice. I thought he liked
Judith more than he was supposed to, but why was he watching Aunt Bonnie?
Nothing made any sense. I don’t know how long I was gone. Maybe a half-hour,
because I couldn’t find any place to turn around. I would keep seeing a good
space, then lose my nerve and pass it. When I got back, I turned the car round
at the end of the street and pulled up outside Sweetheart’s house kind of
shaking. Karen Carpenter was singing to me on the radio but it didn’t help.

Sweetheart’s
front door was open and I could hear that she and Harry were arguing. I could
see them half lit through the screen door. Sweetheart was holding Perry and
Harry was trying to grab the kid off of her.

‘You
know what it did to me. Don’t do this again,’ he was yelling.

‘It is
not his fault,’ said Sweetheart, clinging on to Perry, who was crying. Harry
made a grab for the kid.