Hall of Small Mammals (2 page)

An hour later, her son's show comes on. It's a rerun about the Glyptodon, a prehistoric armadillo thing with a spiky tail shaped like a mace. The Glyptodon is the size of a small car. They name him Glypto-Donny. Tommy narrates Donny's reentry into the wild, in this case a reedy riverbank, the water brown and slow. The camera follows Donny through the reeds. Through the trees on the opposite bank, only for a moment, Mawmaw sees what looks like the top of a condominium. Donny doesn't do much except nose at the reeds. Tommy enters the scene and walks right up to the beast. Her son looks so small in comparison. He knocks on its hard shell. Donny doesn't seem to notice. The show ends with the Glyptodon in the back of a truck headed for the zoo. Samantha, a sturdy, petite woman with curly blond hair, gives Tommy a thumbs-up, and then there's the quick stream of credits.

No light outside yet, but she goes downstairs to put on the coffee and check on Shirley. All the mixed nuts are gone from the bowl. The mammoth makes a squeaking sound in the back of its throat.

Later that morning, Tommy appears, disheveled and quiet. They're eating breakfast when his phone screeches noisily—a pterodactyl ringtone?—against his cereal bowl.

“Not at the table,” she says. “Please.”

But Tommy takes the call. He goes into the living room. She can hear that he's upset.

“Of course, yes, she's safe here,” he says. “She's holding up well. I told you everything would work out fine if we just—” He paces. “Okay, well, we knew that was a possibility. But listen, please don't do anything drastic. Just take a deep breath. Have you
had breakfast? Go get one of those egg sandwiches you like and take a walk. I'll be back soon. We can sort this out together. One step at a . . .”

Mawmaw goes out back for a menthol. She smokes two a day—one after breakfast, one after dinner. A self-imposed rule. It's been this way ever since she was a teenager. No one called her Mawmaw back then. She was Louise Baker, the dark-haired beauty who scooped ice cream at the drugstore after school.

A crow lands on the top rail of the dog pen, and then flies away. The little mammoth hardly moves. It's almost like a mannequin. Why isn't it moving? It moves. Mawmaw realizes she's been holding her breath. The mammoth shuffles to the back of the pen, on the other side of which is a stretch of woods. Sometimes the deer emerge from those woods to eat the small green apples when they fall. Shirley Temple Three might like to see that, she thinks, and then takes a final drag of her menthol. Tommy says that the mammoth is from the late Pleistocene. It's been yanked out of its own time and lives outside God's natural laws.

God created the world in seven days, but those days weren't necessarily twenty-four-hour days. Each one of His days might have been a million years long. Human time means nothing in the realm of Heaven, where the clocks probably don't have hands but golden arms, and the arms belong to God. On which day did the mammoth get created? It wasn't on the seventh day, since that was the day of rest. Quite possibly it came into the world on the morning of the fifth and went back out again that same afternoon.

She is grateful to have been included at all in the grand parade of Creation, but thinking of entire creations already come
and gone, it's hard not to feel a bit lost in the procession. Mawmaw has experienced this anxiety before. “The anxiety of smallness,” her pastor called it once and advised, in these situations, that she imagine a zipper running down the length of her back, a flesh-colored set of teeth that when unzipped split apart to reveal a dazzling white vastness as big and deep as the universe itself. But to have invested something so big in something so small and limited, it often seems to her, was probably unfair—or even dangerous.

When she goes inside, the plates are still on the table. She finds Tommy upstairs, packing his bag. She asks if everything is okay, and he says of course it is, then adds, “But I have to leave a little earlier than expected.”

“Is everything okay with Samantha?” she asks. “I assume that was Samantha?”

He gives her a curious look, then continues collecting clothes off the armchair and floor.

“Are you dating the zookeeper from your show?” she asks.

“Dating her? I don't know,” he says. “Does it matter? Listen, Maw, I'm sorry, but I need to get back to Atlanta for a few days. I'll come back once things get sorted out.”

“What about . . .” She motions out the window to the other houseguest.

“Don't hate me, Maw. Please don't hate me, but Shirley has to stay here for a while. Not for too long, I promise. It's just that, well, if you want to know the truth, people are asking questions. Samantha's in some hot water. They want proof of death. Someone at the zoo must have made a call.”

“And you're helping her because why?”

He grimaces. “What do you want me to say, Maw? That I'm doing it all for love?”

Mawmaw is quiet. His doing it all for love certainly wouldn't make the situation
less
palatable.

“Fine,” he says. “Sure, Samantha and I might have something. Maybe. And so that's why I have to leave and sort this all out. She might have broken a few laws.”

Mawmaw doesn't bother to ask him how many laws are currently being broken in her own backyard.

“Whatever you do,” he says, pulling up the handle of his roller suitcase, “don't tell anyone about the mammoth. Once this business with Samantha settles down, we'll figure out what to do next. I promise.”

•   •   •

She's been babysitting the mammoth for not quite a month when it starts losing hair. Mawmaw sits in front of the pen on a kitchen stool. The days are getting warmer, and she doesn't know what to do. Clumps of the mammoth's blond tangles are spread across the ground, and its exposed skin is red and irritated. It rattles the gate with its curvy tusks.

“I'm not going to lie to you. I'm worried,” she says to Shirley. “Tommy's not returning my phone calls. Don't look at me like that. I know exactly what you're thinking. Tommy's not calling? What a surprise, right? You got fleas, is that it? Or are you molting? Is this normal? You're probably not used to this weather, are you? Eighty-eight degrees today, and it's only going to get hotter. What happens then?”

Mawmaw wonders if the mammoth might be scratching itself raw along the fence, but over the next week, looking out the back window, she never catches it in the act. Mostly it just stands there in the heat, breathing heavy. But the hair continues to fall out. One patch of skin looks so rough that Mawmaw takes out her lotion and rubs some on the spot with two fingers.

“Just so you know, this is expensive lotion. I have to order it special. I use it on my face—otherwise I get dry between my eyes. Does that feel better?”

She calls Tommy and gets his voice mail. When the temperature hits ninety, she brings Shirley inside the house to cool off for a little while. Guiding the animal down the hallway is a challenge. The mammoth comes up only to her waist, but it is a hefty creature, much too heavy to lift or shove. Mawmaw steers it toward the laundry room, where the dryer is tumbling a load. She moves some cleaning supplies and boxes onto the shelves along the back wall, clearing a space on the floor. She spreads a plastic tarp and cranks up the air-conditioning. She fills the mammoth's bowl with beans and orange peels and mixed nuts—always nuts—and a little hay that she picked up at the garden-supply store. With some old bath towels she creates a nest beside the washing machine. She tells Shirley good night and closes the door.

By the time she climbs into bed that night, the house is nearly an Arctic tundra, and she needs four blankets to keep warm. In the morning she puts on a sweatshirt and a jacket. The laundry room smells like the circus. She shovels the dung into buckets and dumps the buckets in the woods behind her house. She burns citrus candles to mask the scent.

•   •   •

Tommy still hasn't returned her phone calls by the time Shirley has her big television debut on
Back from Extinction
. It's been on the calendar for weeks, and Mawmaw lets the mammoth come into the living room as a special treat. She offers Shirley a small bowl of milk and sinks into the couch just as the episode begins.

Mawmaw knows the theme song by heart, the horns and jungle drums that float above a highly scientific electronic beat. Tommy narrates a few basic facts about woolly mammoths. How they haven't walked the earth for thousands of years, how in some cases they were overhunted by early man. The show is very protective of the technology that gestates the mammoth, and so it skips ahead to post-birth with a montage of Shirley's first year, as her legs and trunk elongate, as her coat thickens, as her tusks sprout outward. Then Tommy enters the action. He asks one of the scientists what mammoths used to eat, and the scientist, a limp smile on his face, informs Tommy that frozen mammoths have been discovered with bellies full of leaves and grasses. They also like fried eggs and grapefruit rinds, Mawmaw adds, not to mention M&M's.

“Look at you, Shirl. You see yourself? Pretty impressive.”

In the next scene, Shirley is loaded into a truck and dropped off in the middle of the Canadian Arctic, in an area that approximates conditions on Bread Island thousands of years ago. In the back of the truck, with a fur-lined hood pulled tight around his pinkish face, Tommy explains that Shirley has been wired with cameras and a tracking device and that now, for the first time in
thousands of years, we're going to get a glimpse of a mammoth in the wild. Mawmaw knows that Shirley will survive, but still she grips her armrest.

The mammoth loses interest and wanders into the kitchen.

“You're missing it,” Mawmaw calls. She can hear its tusks knocking against the walls as it migrates to the back of the house.

•   •   •

Shirley stops losing hair. Gray scabs form a light crust over the bald patches, which break apart under a wet washcloth. But Mawmaw is still concerned about her patient. Shirley isn't drinking enough water. She seems lethargic. She comes down with diarrhea. Mawmaw discovers it, the dark green puddles across the tarp. She leads Shirley back to the dog pen so that she can clean up the mess. She tosses the whole sheet of plastic in the trash and lays out a new one.

“What can I do for you?” Mawmaw asks, leading Shirley back inside. “Would Pepto help? More sunlight?”

The next morning Mawmaw wakes up to find even more diarrhea. The mammoth is trying to hide behind the washing machine, her tusks tapping the metal side.

Mawmaw gets on the computer and searches for “elephant + flu,” but the sites aren't especially helpful. She dips her fingers in the water bowl and presses them to the mammoth's wrinkled gray lips beneath the trunk.

“Come on. You can do this. Just a little. You need this.”

She wets her fingers again and this time the mouth opens a little to receive them, but when the water drops pass Shirley's lips she shuts her mouth tight again, as if the liquid were toxic.
Mawmaw strokes her tusks and knobby forehead, brushing loose strands away from her dark eyes.

She calls Tommy's cell, but gets his voice mail again.

“Tommy. Shirley Temple is dying. I just thought you should know. I'm doing the best I can, but I don't think it's going to be enough. Maybe Samantha should have put her down like they asked her to. Maybe something really is wrong with her. I don't know why you brought this goshdern thing to my house.”

Mawmaw imagines finding the mammoth dead, its blond hair stiff with dried excrement, its eyes white and milky. She won't be able to lift it. She'll have to carve the mammoth into chunks to get it outside again. She imagines the jagged saw blades, the mess.

This is all Tommy's fault. What kind of a fool son did she raise up? This mammoth doesn't belong here, or anywhere.
Back from Extinction
is a cruel television program. The cruelest. Shirley is a clone, and that means ten thousand years ago her exact copy walked the earth. The original Shirley had parents, and maybe even children. The original Shirley probably died in some kind of ice pond or avalanche or tar pit. Ten thousand years from now scientists could make a Mawmaw clone. What would the world be like then?

Then a terrible thought: What if today is still God's seventh day and He still hasn't woken up yet from His rest? That would explain why He's been so quiet lately. What if, when He wakes up on the eighth morning, He decides He doesn't like what we've been up to down here? Maybe He'll be grumpy with us and stamp out all the lights again, return the world to darkness. In ten thousand years, the earth could be cold and barren, an endless frozen wasteland more suitable for mammoths than for humans.
If they—whoever they are—do grow a new Mawmaw out of a petri dish, she can only hope that someone will set her up in a nice warm room. And if that Mawmaw gets sick she can only hope that they'll do what's right and call a doctor.

She finds a vet in the yellow pages. His name is Dr. Mark Sing. She promises to double his fee for a house call, and he comes over that evening. His hair is dark and shiny. He has a leather bag that she hopes is full of instruments and medicines. He takes off his tan blazer, then puts it on again. The house is still cold. Mawmaw's last electricity bill was astronomical. “You have to swear to me that you won't tell a soul what you see here,” she says, and he shrugs like he's heard this all before.

“I'm serious,” she says, and across a blank sheet of paper writes,
I won't tell a soul.
“Sign this. I want to have it in writing.”

The man looks tired. He removes his glasses and rubs his left eye with the palm of his hand, the gold watch snug around his wrist. He signs the paper, and she leads him down the hall and opens the door. The mammoth is nested in the bath towels. Mawmaw has done her best to clean the room. Vanilla candles burn on the washer. The plastic tarp crinkles under their feet. Dr. Sing opens his mouth but doesn't say a word. He kneels down by the mammoth, runs his hand through the hair, caresses its knobby forehead. Shirley doesn't seem to mind, and Mawmaw considers this a good sign.