All the Land to Hold Us (24 page)

Still the elephant kept swimming, its trunk swirling listlessly just above the surface, taking in air in that fashion, with the water up to the base of Mufti's calves, so that now it was as if Mufti was surfing; and he wondered again if it were his own weight, his own desire, his inability to part with and release the elephant, that was driving the elephant deeper.

He slipped off and swam alongside.

The sun was fierce above them now. Mufti was surprised by how strong he felt in the elephant's company. As if he could swim however far was required of him. He hoped that the elephant felt the same way; but even as this hope swelled in Mufti, the elephant began to sink again, forced down yet farther by the iron-weight burden of Mufti's need.

The elephant rising and falling in that manner like the musical notes from some calliope rendered somehow silent, though the piston-piping sound waves continued to pump away—inaudible to most, but possibly able to still be heard or sensed or felt by someone else, someplace else.

“It's okay,” Mufti said, raising the elephant's ear like a fan and speaking into it, even as he swam, sidestroking. “You don't have to go back to the circus,” he said. “You don't have to work for your keep anymore,” he said. “We'll retire. We'll go home,” he said. “Back to where you came from. Just don't give up.”

It seemed to Mufti then that the elephant rose a little more.

They swam side by side a bit farther—another hour; a couple of miles?—and when next they passed through a deep eddy Mufti understood the elephant communicate to him that it was over, that he had covered all the territory he could, and that he would be going under now—that he did so with regret, but that it could no longer be helped, and that Mufti should swim to shore and save himself.

To the end, Mufti could not bring himself to let go; even as the elephant sank all the way under, submerging now like a sounding whale, Mufti dived with the elephant, seizing one of the giant ears, and held his breath for as long as he could, kicking and pulling with bursting lungs, endeavoring to raise the elephant back to the surface.

But the full weight of destiny had him now—the elephant seemed heavier than iron, was sinking at a determined rate, and Mufti too was out of air.

He released his grip and kicked hard for the surface, crying under water: and when he burst into the bright air, coughing and gasping, he treaded water, watching intently downstream, drifting with the current, hoping for the sight of the elephant resurfacing, or even the periscoping trunk—pleading with the elephant to keep on and to travel however many more miles were required.

But there was nothing, only the serpentine sheen of the river winding lonely and onward, silt-colored and silent, hungry only for the next bend, and the next—hungry only for the ocean—and Mufti turned and swam for shore, and pulled himself up onto the damp sand.

He lay there with his face down, covered with his arms, alternately crying and sleeping, with his feet still in the river, and tons of water sweeping past him each minute, and each hour: and the elephant a boulder now, rumbling and tumbling along the bottom, tusks clacking against the rocks, consigned now to the land of spirit and memory, and leaving Mufti behind like some strange alien or outsider not yet permitted to enter into that far more common territory, where all will meet again, and travel together again.

 

It was only another forty miles to Mexico, which was where the elephant made its landfall. His body washed up two days later in a small village just across the border, where it was discovered by a woman who had gone down to the river to do laundry. In the soft gray light of dawn, the elephant had been fog-colored, so that all she noticed at first were the tusks.

She had approached curiously, thinking them to be oddly tilted lengths of driftwood, and of how happy her husband would be that she had found them, so he could cut them up into firewood.

So slow had the horror been to spread, when she began to piece together the patches and outlines of what she was really seeing—her eyes, against her wishes, disassembling her dream of firewood, and reassembling reality—that when the final understanding came, there was still too much of a gap between that understanding, and the emotions of fright.

Instead of acknowledging her fright, she stood there mute before the monolith; and in her silence and disbelief, and in that morning fog, even standing but a few yards away from the astounding sun-swollen beast, she could not quite be sure of where the animal ended and the gray sky and fog began. Even as she was looking right at it, she could not quite be sure of what it was she was seeing.

She remained silent, with the terror that was filling her rising so slowly and so detached from the normal profile of fear that for the longest time she did not even recognize it as her own.

When she did, she fell backwards, as if pushed two-handed by some invisible force:
smitten
, as if in biblical times: as if she had witnessed some forbidden sight.

She rose in a scramble, looking around to see what might have pushed her, and ran back to the village, where at first she had trouble making anyone believe what she had seen. It seemed impossible, rather than simply improbable. They all thought they had already seen everything, and knew everything; that the world was a small and regular, finite place. That elephants could never drift down their slow and muddy river.

 

By noon they had the tusks sawed off. Even two days dead, the elephant did not look entirely mortal—or rather, stiffened as it was now, it looked dead, but somehow preserved, and capable, perhaps, of getting back up again and traveling on, and away from them. They fastened a chain around one of its bent and stiffened legs, lest the current undercut it once more and pull it away from them.

There was the consideration of meat, but even in their need, the villagers could not bring themselves to defile so strange and elegant a creature, and instead they merely gathered around it, sitting and visiting amongst themselves and preparing meals on driftwood cooking fires, speculating and storytelling. For some time it was debated whether to place the tusks over the entranceway to the church or the cemetery, and they finally decided upon the church, preferring to risk the sin of sacrilege among the living rather than disrupting the dead.

The elephant grew in the sun for another two days, the hide thinning and stretching tighter, until it was so taut that when the flies buzzing around the mouth and eyes bumped into it, there was a thumping sound, as if pebbles were being tossed at a drum.

There was at first only the faintest, sweetest odor of rot, though the villagers could hear the myriad intestinal gurglings.

The villagers kept moving their seats and their cooking fires farther from the elephant, in anticipation of when it blew; and each day, they marveled at the increase in size, and wondered if in olden times any creature so large had ever strode the earth, or if such size was and always had been limited to dreams and death.

Some of the villagers considered lancing the elephant to release the pressure, but each time the suggestion was made, it was overruled by those who wished to see further expansion for no reason other than the spectacle. The issue resolved itself, as all knew it must, on the third day, when one of the ravens that had been gathering was finally able to pierce the drum with its beak.

There was a blast as if from a cannon, followed by a piercing whistle (the raven was sent cartwheeling into the river, where it drifted, stunned, before swimming to shore like a small mammal), and a gouting plume of iridescent pink and green entrail soup that released from the rent in the elephant's side with the pressure at first of a fire hose.

The contents cascaded into the river, where the ejecta formed oily pools that rafted downstream, shining in the bright light, and the villagers backed away, stumbling before the toxic stench.

From a distance, they watched as the elephant shrank rapidly back to its normal size—the torrent of entrails lessening, after a few minutes—and the elephant continued shrinking, then, to less than its normal size: the gray sagging skin draping itself over and around the bones and clefts and angles that were no longer padded by fat or muscle, and with all the vital organs expelled vitreous now into the salty river.

By the time the expulsion had ended, the elephant seemed no larger than a logjam of bloated steers, a sight with which the villagers were more familiar; and with the elephant thus exposed and reduced, the ravens waded in, cawing and squabbling, pecking and feeding as if at a trough; and those that could not fit into the carcass perched upon the fallen sunken hulk, painting it with the chalk-streak graffiti of their excrement.

Their croakings and cawings summoned the coyotes and the village dogs, and even the golden eagles; and each day the feast grew, and each day, the elephant grew smaller—the world consuming it savagely, voraciously.

The villagers marveled at the speed with which so marvelous a creation disappeared, and soon enough the salt winds and heated sun, as well as the toothy gnawings and steady peckings of the birds, had scoured away the stench.

The villagers had at first believed the elephant would be too large to move, and had thought they might need to bury it beneath a salt mound, to keep its putrefaction from ruining their village and their water supply; but soon everything was gone except for whitened bone: and such was the size of the feast that the elephant had even summoned from down out of the mountains one night a grizzly bear, not the relatively rare
oso negro
but the mythic
oso grande
, which no one had seen in forty years. No one saw that bear, but the villagers heard the barks and howls of their dogs in a newer, more frantic tenor that could speak only to something rare and unusual and dangerous; and in the morning, along the river, they found the distinctive tracks of the grizzly, and for a moment, they turned away from the future and looked back into the near-past, back to a time when such creatures had still lived in the world, and when the sighting or existence of such a being had been neither improbable nor miraculous, but simply part of the fabric of the made and still-whole world.

Within a year, the elephant's ship of bones had collapsed into indistinguishable silt-wrack, and the massive fertilizer of his repository had nurtured the growth of an enormous clump of willows and tamarisks, in which perched yellow warblers and painted buntings, scraps of color flitting and singing at the edge of the women's vision as they crouched by the river and scrubbed their laundry.

For several years they kept a cautious eye out for the bear that had left the tracks, but were never gifted with any more sign; and though eventually the bear must have gotten old and gone off to die somewhere in the mountain, its own bones now a wrecked shipyard, in the villagers' minds he was still always out there; because it had shown up after all such bears were thought to be gone, they now assumed that it, or another, would always be hidden out there; that a mountain range could never be entirely shed of its grizzlies, for then they would no longer truly be mountains. And in the same manner—accustomed so quickly and easily to the miraculous—they watched regularly, frequently, upstream, as if believing that the river might one day again deliver another elephant to them.

 

East or west, north or south; Mufti had too much freedom, could have traveled in any direction, and he lay there on his own beach for nearly an hour before deciding to travel downstream, walking instead of swimming.

He stopped to sip from the river whenever he got thirsty, and for the first several hours he kept a keen eye out for the elephant, scanning downstream and watching both shores intently, searching for either the resting animal himself, or for tracks that might show where he had exited the river, and made yet another escape back into the desert.

By early afternoon, however—his stomach queasy from the salty river water, and his skull gripped by the heat—he had already become accustomed to his loss, and forgot to even be looking for the elephant. He forgot everything, even his own survival, and veered off into the brushland until the fatigue in his legs and the slope of the terrain guided him back to the river.

He came to a bridge at dusk, and climbed up the embankment—he kept sliding and falling back—and once he was finally up on the road, a hard-surfaced blacktop, he curled up and fell past sleep and into a deeper unconsciousness. In the last beaconlight of sunset, the pavement was still so warm that the blacktop was malleable, as comfortable as a firm mattress, and it accepted the shape of his body.

With the desert already cooling, furry-legged tarantulas came out onto the road, searching for that last warmth—crossing the road like pedestrians, or as if convening for some scheduled gathering; and likewise, desert tortoises, Gila monsters, horned toads, and rattlesnakes slithered out onto the warm road in that last red light, passing by the sleeping Mufti, who was blissful, dreamless in his exhaustion.

Later in the night, the road cooled, and the cold-blooded creatures went on off into their burrows, where they would wait to be summoned by the next day's heat.

Near midnight, a truck approached, a long-haul driver bringing walnuts from California—he would travel on to East Texas, offload the walnuts, and pick up a load of pecans to take back to California—and at first the driver intended to go on past Mufti, believing him to be a car-struck deer that someone had not bothered to drag off the road.

The driver, who himself had been in the land of near-sleep, his mind inhabiting a waking dream in which cocktail waitresses served him iced drinks by the blue waters of a Caribbean pool, shouted when he saw Mufti sit up, and then stand, just as the truck was bearing down on him.

As there had been with the laundress and the elephant down by the river, there was such a gap in the driver's mind between the space of his having believed the innocuous shape to be an old dead deer, and seeing it rise and attempt to flag him down, that he could formulate no thought other than sheer panic; and he drove on, trembling, for a couple of miles, before logic came back to him, and he understood what he had seen.