Hall of Small Mammals (3 page)

“Can I ask you where it came from?” he says. “How long you've had it?”

“I'm sorry, but no. She going to be all right?”

He opens his bag and removes an electronic thermometer. He taps it a few times against his palm, as if uncertain whether he
should proceed. Finally he lifts the mammoth's thin hairy tail and inserts it quickly. Shirley's head jerks around and the tusk collides with the doctor's left shoulder, almost knocking him over. The thermometer beeps. He looks at the reading. Mawmaw asks if it's high, and he says he's not sure exactly, because he doesn't know what's normal. He says what he really needs is a blood sample, to run some tests, but Mawmaw can't permit that. He gets up off the floor and goes into the hall. On the wall he sees a framed picture of Tommy in his khaki duds.

“He's the one from that show.”

Mawmaw doesn't answer.

“Could be a mammoth flu, for all I know,” he says. “She definitely seems dehydrated. I suppose I could give her fluids intravenously.”

Mawmaw agrees that he should, and that's the plan. Fortunately, Shirley doesn't protest when he inserts the needle. Mawmaw pays Dr. Sing triple his usual fee and shows him the piece of paper again. “Who would believe me anyway?” he says, and takes the check.

The next morning the mammoth has her appetite back. Mawmaw cooks her rice and yogurt. She lets her out into the yard and runs a stiff wire brush through her matted blond coat. The mammoth seems to like being brushed. Then she wanders to the edge of the property to root around. Mawmaw pulls the excess hair out of the brush, stretching and curling the strands between her fingers.

“I could make a Shirley sweater. I bet it'd be warm.”

That night Mawmaw is in her bed when she hears the first wail. She's taken a pill, but she's wide awake now. The mammoth
lets out a long guttural cry that almost shakes the house. Maybe her cries are a reaction to the vet's visit and the fluids he administered—or maybe the fever and the dehydration were only early symptoms of some deeper crisis. Mawmaw waits for another, but it doesn't come. She might have dreamed it. She's on the verge of sleep when it erupts again, that slow mournful bellow. Pulling the top blanket over her shoulders, she sticks her veiny feet into her Goofy slippers and flips on every light switch on her way downstairs. In the laundry room, Shirley is staring at the floral-print wallpaper, as close to the wall as her tusks will allow.

“What's going on in here?”

The mammoth doesn't move.

“You need to drink more water. That's all it is. You've got some kind of flu. You need sleep.”

Mawmaw has an extra pill in her pocket. She takes it into the kitchen and coats it in a gob of peanut butter. The peanut butter sticks to the food bucket when she brings it out to Shirley. The mammoth's trunk grabs the gob and tucks it into its gray mouth.

“Whatever's bothering you, we can talk about it in the morning.”

She gets back in bed and nestles under the weight of the blankets. A few minutes later, the mammoth repeats the sound, but this time, instead of trailing off into nothingness, it ends with several shrill, trumpetlike staccato bursts. Mawmaw considers turning on her television but doesn't. She's worried. Maybe it's mating season. If so, how tragic. Shirley is separated from her closest mate by ten thousand years. Then comes another wail. The mammoth lets up only at the first hint of sunlight.

•   •   •

The mammoth's night terrors have been happening for a week when Tommy finally calls. She can hear street noise behind him.

He says he's so sorry she's had to deal with Shirley these past few months, but if the mammoth dies of its sickness, maybe it's for the best. For everyone. He says the network still hasn't figured out that Samantha took the mammoth, but they've been keeping an eye on her. And on him. That's why he hasn't been able to bring Shirley back to Atlanta. “I was actually beginning to worry I might have to come down there and euthanize her myself,” he says.

“And how would you do that exactly?”

“God, I don't know. A shovel, I guess. Or maybe I could poison it.”

“And what would Samantha have to say about that?”

“Why, you plan on telling her?”

Mawmaw is quiet. So, her son would protect his girlfriend from that tragedy but not his own mother. No doubt they'd bury Shirley in the backyard, and every time Mawmaw walked across the grave she'd have to remember what her son had done.

“Thankfully, I don't think it's going to come to all that,” he says. “Not if she's sick. Right?”

Mawmaw doesn't mention Dr. Sing's visit. She doesn't mention the wailing. She doesn't tell him that Shirley's problem might not be physical but spiritual. She lets him think she wants it dead too.

•   •   •

Calling Pastor Frank is a risk, but Mawmaw is desperate. Three years ago Pastor Frank prayed over the body of a young girl with
brain cancer, and despite the doctors' dire prognosis the girl survived for another two years.

He arrives five minutes early and, without being asked, removes his large black sneakers at the door. He pulls her into a deep hug and pats her back. In the living room, she offers him coffee.

“No, thank you,” he says. “I get jumpy.”

He's examining the items in the spacious living room: the oil portrait of baby Tommy on the wall, the antique tea cart with the porcelain teacups, her mother's old electric organ with the thin black pump pedals. Possibly he's wondering how Mawmaw could afford such a nice living room with what had been a modest church salary.

“My son bought me this house after I retired,” she says. “A total surprise, believe me. I didn't ask for it.”

“It's lovely,” he says. “You look exhausted. Everything okay?”

“My dog is dying. I haven't been sleeping well.”

“I'm sorry to hear that. Never easy. I still get teary-eyed thinking about our Pomeranian that died two years ago. Copperhead bit him.”

“Did you pray for him?”

“For the dog? Well, it happened so fast. He was dead within hours. Do you have any tea? Noncaffeinated?”

“Of course,” she says, and goes into the kitchen. As the water heats, and then as the tea bag steeps in the Mickey Mouse mug, she imagines what happens next, the moment of first contact. She tries to picture Pastor Frank, the tarp crinkling under his knees as he places his warm hands over Shirley's tangled hair. She
imagines his words as a light, almost liquid, that forms an amberlike shell around the mammoth's body.

She takes the tea into the living room. Pastor Frank is leaning over the electric organ, tapping the keys. He hasn't turned it on, so it produces no sound. She offers him the tea.

“You know, my wife and I don't have cable,” he continues, “but we've been hearing an awful lot about your son's show recently. Is it true they brought a Neanderthal back from the dead? Two ways of thinking about these things.” The pastor's thin brown hair is brushed back with pomade. He has one finger on a low B-flat and another on a high one. “Two scenarios. In scenario one, God killed off the Neanderthals because He wanted it that way and therefore we're going against His will by bringing one back. In scenario two, there never was such a creature as a Neanderthal, and the so-called fossils were put there by the Devil himself. The second scenario is frightening, of course, because that would mean we're breathing life into the Devil's creations.”

Mawmaw can feel the pulse in her temple. “They never brought back any caveman,” she tells him. “Only animals.”

“Still,” he says, as if that settles it.

They sit down in the wingback chairs, facing each other. Mawmaw isn't sure whether or not to proceed with her plan. After a long silence, he asks her if she'd like to pray for her son.

Pastor Frank reaches out for her hands. How many times over the past thirty years has she put her hands in his and said the words? How many times has he shined the light into the shadows of her heart? He knows all there is to know: about every sordid encounter she ever had with Tommy's father; about her visit to the
clinic and what she almost did there, the blue gown and paper-thin slippers, so thin they barely existed at all; about every dark dream, every dark thought; her doubts about God, about Hell, about what happens next.

Pastor Frank is praying for her son. He's asking God to bring Tommy home again, to protect him from evil forces at work in the world, to reveal to Tommy the path back to God. His words hover in the space above her head, a wispy cloud in a night sky, breaking and re-forming in the high atmospheric breeze. From below, her feet planted firmly on the ground, Mawmaw could reach out for those clouds if she wanted, poke her fingers through them, but she doesn't. She recycles Pastor Frank's words, borrows their power. She recites a silent prayer of her own, this one focused on the creature in the next room, their two prayers, she hopes, working in tandem.

“Can you add my dog?” she interrupts.

“Of course,” he says. “Do you want to bring her out?”

“She's at the vet.”

Pastor Frank smiles and gives her hands another squeeze. He speaks softly, almost in a whisper. He asks God to keep watch over sweet little—what's the dog's name?—to watch over sweet little Shirley Temple. “Lord,” he says, “we praise all the beauty in Your creation, the fish and the birds and the turtles and the squirrels and the cats and the dogs and even the possums.”

•   •   •

The wailing at night does not stop. A neighbor calls to complain about the noise, and Mawmaw blames the television, her bad
hearing. She tries a night-light in the laundry room. She tries stuffing towels under all the doors to muffle the sound. She prints out pictures of the tundra and other mammoths and tapes them to the walls. Some nights, half asleep, Mawmaw worries that the noise is emanating from within the catacombs of her own body. Opening her mouth she half expects the cries to amplify. She is able to sleep only in spurts. She dreams that Shirley is her guide through a world of snow and ice and unidentifiable landscapes. Every direction looks the same, but Shirley knows the way. Where they are going is important, but in the morning Mawmaw can no longer remember why.

One night, she gives the mammoth three pills. The next night, four. But, no matter the dosage, they don't seem to have any effect.

“What is it?” she asks, downstairs again, desperate, the lights flipped on. “What do you need from me? Is this mating season? I'm sorry to tell you this, but you got no one to mate with. You're on your own. You got to hush up. I've tried everything I know to try. I'm going out of my mind.” She steps backward into the hall, the door to Shirley's room still open. “Is this what you want? You want out? Here.” She opens the door to the backyard. “Do whatever you need to do.”

She stomps back up the stairs and climbs into bed. A little after midnight, thank God, the cries downstairs finally stop.

•   •   •

What wakes her in the morning isn't a noise but a light. Bands of gold and yellow sunlight crawl slowly across the end of her
bedspread. She's quite certain no morning has ever gleamed in this particular way. She feels like she's been asleep for a thousand years.

Only once she's on the stairs in her bathrobe and slippers does she remember leaving all the doors open for Shirley. The mammoth isn't in the laundry room—or anywhere else in the house.

“Come on out, wherever you are. Don't play tricks on me.”

She steps outside into the sunlight and peeks under the edge of the porch, just in case Shirley managed to squeeze herself underneath. The far corner is where the dog went to be alone in the end. But the mammoth is not there. Nor is it anywhere in the yard or the dog pen. Shirley has escaped.

Of course, there's no one to call for help but Tommy. His voice mail picks up after a few rings.

“Call me back. It's about Shirley,” she says vaguely.

As soon as she hangs up, she regrets the message. Her son doesn't need to be involved, not if his solution is poison-laced candy or a bop on the head with the shovel. An unsettling image begins to take shape: her Tommy, no longer handsome but totally devolved, a swollen caveman's brow, hunting spear in his grimy hand, bits of broken leaves in his long and matted hair.

She climbs into her car and drives up and down the block, too afraid to actually yell out Shirley's name. Two streets over she spots a hulking shape beside a brick house, but when she gets closer the shape is only some yellow pampas grass. On a cul-de-sac, a white-haired man in a blue tracksuit is walking his Jack Russell terrier. The sight of the man with his dog, the parallel rhythm of their strides, almost brings a tear to Mawmaw's eye.
When she pulls up alongside the man, he leans down to her open window.

“Something wrong?” he asks.

“Sorry, but you seen anything kind of odd this morning?”

“Like what?”

She's not sure what to say. “I lost my dog. A real big one.”

“Sorry to hear that. You tried animal control?”

“I will,” she says. “Good idea.”

She drives home again and gets on the phone.

“Listen,” she says, once she has a woman on the line. “Have you gotten any of what'd you say were ‘odd calls' this morning?”

“Like what?” the woman asks.

“Like, for instance, about a real big and sick hairy dog?”

The woman breathes deep. “Ma'am, are you calling to report a big and hairy sick dog?”

Mawmaw hangs up. She opens a cabinet for breakfast but isn't very hungry. Next to the cereal boxes is a tub of mixed nuts. Upstairs she flips on the television in her bedroom. She waits for Shirley to show up on the morning news, then the afternoon news, then the evening news.

She goes outside to smoke a menthol, but can't remember which end is which. The ash flakes on the brick at her feet. She pictures Shirley in the oncoming beams of interstate traffic. She pictures her in a hunter's crosshairs, then her head stuffed and mounted
as a trophy
.