Fiction

Grandpa’s vintage black Cadillac pulled up on the parkway in front of our small yellow house, and I watched him from the front window as he rearranged stacks of papers, bowling balls, and trash to make room for me in the passenger’s seat. He already looked warm in the black polo that pulled to cover his paunch, and his silver comb over was starting to melt. As he walked up to the house, he blew his Danish nose in a handkerchief, and I was so excited to spend a day with Gramps.

We were going to the zoo because he wanted to visit its newest edition: the African elephant. The newspaper said it was sick, and Gramps figured we should check on the big guy.

Gramps bought us hot dogs when we walked in the gate, and we ate them while sitting on the train that circles around the entire zoo. I never liked eating with him because his teeth were so old they didn’t seem to work. Dad always told him to seriously go see a dentist, but Gramps always thought he was doing okay. I must have had mustard and ketchup all over my face when we get off the train, ‘cuz Gramps threw his handkerchief my way as we walked to the elephant.

Personally, I liked to look at the polar bears: dangerous and endangered. A polar bear’s skin is black, but in the same way that a white cloud is made up of clear water, the bear’s fiber optic fur is really only the color of ice. The sign under the thick Plexiglas also told me that all polar bears are left-handed. I looked over at my grandpa standing downwind from the elephant, but I was having more fun trying to make my Arctic friend wave back to me with his left hand.

In sickness or in health, Gramps just wanted to hang with the elephant, and he even chatted with the cage attendant about the African beast. He looked so lovingly at the scary face, with its big ears and all of its tragic muddy majesty. I wondered hard at my grandpa’s fascination. On his coffee table in his house there was a picture of a few men in uniform in front of an elephant. Grandpa said that was when he was in Germany. He had been a military man, so he had traveled more places than I could name. Not that I could name many, because, as I realized, I didn’t know much of anything about his past.

He didn’t notice as I wandered away to start my own zoo-venture. I skipped around saying “hi!” to all the rest of God’s creatures. I watched the tiger that was getting a part of his back shaved so an animal doctor could treat a rash. The cool thing about tigers is that they have striped skin, not just striped fur. As I walked from the tiger’s den to the snake pit, I saw an ostrich following me on the other side of the fence. I stopped to measure him up, but I didn’t stay long because the giant feather duster had too much anger in his eyes. There was a mongoose in the zoo, too. I had a puzzling time with him, because a mongoose isn’t a goose, but more like a meercat, which isn’t really even a cat, but more like a prairie dog, which isn’t even a dog, but more like a ground squirrel.

My head was swimming with useless animal trivia, so I decided to check on Gramps. He was a very old man, and I knew I shouldn’t trust him to be alone for too long. There he was, smiling a semi-toothless smile at his friend the big African elephant. The beast was standing right next to Gramps, who barely measured up to the tower of thick grey skin that was the elephant’s front leg.

I stood beside my grandpa, with my fingers laced through the fence and my left foot up on the zoo street curb, a smaller mirror of his stance. At that moment I overcame my little lump of fear, turned to him, and asked, “Gramps. What’s with this elephant?”

As he turned to smile at me I could see that it took him a great deal of effort to pull his watery old eyes away from the hypnotic pendulum of the elephant’s swinging tail.

“Ahhh…” My grandpa has this way of taking forever to start a sentence, and there is nothing more annoying to an anxious little girl. “Well, um, elephants, you know.” But I didn’t. I thought again about the picture on his coffee table with an elephant in it and expected a story about Germany. “Did you know that I grew up in Tennessee?” Well, I did know that, and I told him so. He paused, picked me up, and set me on the railing so I could see the elephant better. I just wanted to hear the story. “The first time I ever saw a real elephant was in 1916. I was fifteen years old and my dad took me to the circus.” I tried to picture my grandpa as a kid, smaller with a full head of hair. I couldn’t imagine it at all.

“Except that elephant—her name was Mary—she killed a man, and crushed the brains out of his head with her foot. So the circus, and the state of Tennessee decided that the elephant needed to be executed. There was a big spectacle, because they didn’t know how. I mean, she was colossal. So they took a huge crane and marched Mary out to the train tracks. And in front of everyone they hanged her by the neck from a derrick car.” My chest got really tight, and I didn’t notice the animal smells anymore.

“The first time, because she was just so big, she fell out. She sort of wiggled out, and I heard her hip crack. So she just sat there, upright and sad while they got a stronger chain.”

By this point I think my grandpa noticed me pouting. He sighed as he jingled the change in his pockets. “So yeah, I saw an elephant hanged. They took her tusks and made them into dice.”