The boat glided past a little island with a Tobacco Road house on it. I had recently been reading Erskine Caldwell. A barefoot woman stood in the doorless doorway watching us lifelessly, tin coffeepot in hand. A barefoot man in what had once been overalls was sawing a board in the yard, which was the island. Their hair was gray and thin like the grass on the island. A gray woman in a gray slip stood on a ladder painting the wooden house gray.
We glided on, entered the broad blazing bay, and veered. “That’s Guy Lombardo’s boat,” Kitty said as a long white yacht steered by a laughing boy in a green and white silk shirt blew past. She was perched in the prow of our boat eating fried chicken and drinking whiskey, wearing wrinkled pink linen slacks, her blond hair caught up in a gold net from which it kept flimsily escaping. I wondered what there was that was unusual about her. According to my Uncle Pearce, his friend Basil, who was fishing at the stern, had been fired from his government job for keeping Kitty as his mistress. Kitty was rather old now, but Uncle Pearce also said she had once been a circus performer.
Our boat had anchored and Kitty was no longer spilling whiskey down the front of her white polo shirt with the pink-and-blue alligator over her heart. She wiped her greasy pink fingers on the sides of her wrinkled pink linen slacks and said to me:
“Did I ever show you a picture of my favorite elephant, Bimbo?”
“No.” I wanted to learn anything I could.
Kitty reached for a saffron straw bag with a chiffon scarf, a copy of Mademoiselle, a bottle of rose water, a briar pipe and a pair of sunglasses with checkered frames protruding from it. She took from her wallet a tiny snapshot of a mammoth gray elephant with its trunk lifted in the air. I appreciated it, thanked her, and handed it back.
“Bimbo was a jewel, a true love. Now, go somewhere and play for awhile, so I can get drunk in peace. Come back later, when you are sure I have had a chance to forget my sorrows, and I’ll tell you about how I trained Bimbo and my other elephants.”
This was an insult, since I was a college freshman and already dating a man who was required reading at Yale, my philosophy professor, but I did as I was told. I started to walk to the stern of the boat, careful not to touch too lingeringly the heat of the hardwood deck with my bare feet, and on the way encountered my Uncle Pearce, just emerging from his nap in the dark cabin below.
“Hello there,” said Uncle Pearce. He then informed me that all my professors were Red Communists and ought to be deported to Russia, where they belonged.
“Well …” said I, shifting from foot to burning foot. This was his boat, after all, and I was only a timid girl guest.
“Remember that I’ve told you this,” said Uncle Pearce. “You will be grateful to me some day.” He took a swig of whiskey from his flashy silver hip flask, faced around and descended to the dark cabin, where there were bunks, to resume his nap.
I decided to join solitary Basil for some fishing. I grabbed a rod and sat down beside him, but he ignored me. The radio was on — an effeminate voice talking about Emerson’s works — with no one listening.
“The way he combines Yankee shrewdness with an almost Oriental mysticism …” were the words I caught.
I fished in the incandescent heat with both hands tightly on the rod and often lifting it to feel that plunk that means you are holding bottom. The sun was like a corona, a golden chandelier gone mad — “the glorious lamp of Heav’n,” as Dryden called it. Shivery spears of ghostly light green grass grew from the sandy bottom of the bay forming island mirages. Silence, the silence of the sea.
“Have you known Kitty long?” I asked Basil conversationally.
He did not turn. He was middle-aged — a tall, barrel-chested, blunt-bodied, sun-tanned man in white, like Uncle Pearce. I was wearing only a sleek black Catalina bathing suit and my long red-gold hair was being burnished by the sun — at least, if you can describe a bad case of sunburn complete with blisters that way. I felt hot, giddy, lonely. My throat was dry and I longed for a sarsaparilla.
“Don’t mention that woman’s name to me,” Basil snarled after a time.
He switched off the beginning of a discussion of Emerson’s Oriental mysticism. We went on fishing in the silence but neither of us caught anything, not even a guppy, one of those eensie creatures I had in my goldfish bowl at home. My two favorite guppies were named Will Rogers and Will Hays. I got tired of lifting my rod to feel the plunk that meant I was holding bottom. I imagined Kitty would be sufficiently inebriated by now to talk to me. I put down my rod and skittered back to the prow of the white boat, careful as always of the heat of the hardwood deck on my bare feet. Uncle Pearce was still sleeping. He was a very tired man, like everyone in my family.
“Hello there,” Kitty greeted me. She did not seem especially drunk but I knew she was. “Has that bastard Pearce been saying I was once a circus performer?”
“Well, yes, I believe he did speak of something of the sort,” answered I.
“I was never a circus performer. I mean, I never walked the tightrope or got sawed in half or anything like that. I was a trainer of circus elephants, that’s what I was.”
“Will you tell me about it?”
“Yes, if I can get those two bastards out of my mind.” Kitty was still using her greasy pink fingers to eat fried chicken, but now she began to talk:
“Training elephants is very much like teaching children, which I’ve also done. The first thing a five-year-old kindergartner learns is the alphabet, because it is the basis of all his future communication with the human race. In the same way, the first thing a trainer must teach his animals is their ABC, the elementary movements which are the foundation of the more complex tricks they will eventually perform in the ring. Elephants are my big, lumbering, docile girls whom I teach to walk, to stop, to come to me, to lift a leg, to lie down — at a word of command. During these lessons I stand in the center of the practice ring while grooms bring the elephants around me. If, for instance, I want Bimbo or some other particular elephant to stop, I call her name, say the word “stop” and at the same time cue her with a whip — flicking it in front of her face, but never actually striking her. At first her groom may be obliged to act as a brake, pulling back on her long ear. Soon, however, she will understand what she is being expected to do, and will come to a halt on her own. Then I reward her with sugar, in the case of my dear Bimbo, with a lot of sugar.
“Do you know, I’ve had many careers besides this one. I’ve been not only a schoolteacher but a university librarian and a salesclerk in a gift shop. I’ve been a nightclub dancer in Detroit, an artist’s model in New Orleans, a call girl in Chicago. I’ve been a babysitter, a cleaning woman, a short-order cook. But the thing I’ve enjoyed most of all is teaching my elephants their ABC.
“Once the ABC has been learned, the elephants are ready to be introduced to the outside world. In the beginning I take them for petites promenades, only a short distance from the stables. Elephants are sensitive, and can feel lost and grow fearful. But every day we go a bit farther. Presently I steer them closer to the road which winds past the winter quarters. I can sense how terrified they are at the roar of the traffic, poor things … They become accustomed to it, and soon are grazing peacefully in the field bordering the road, and I know that in a few more days I will be able to take them on the road itself. I am skilled at taking my elephants out on the roads. If Bimbo or someone shows any sign of fright — say at the deafening noise of a large truck — I go immediately to her side and whisper sweet-nothings into her ear …
“When it is clear to me that my elephants know their ABC of basic tricks and their road drill, I start to instruct them in some of the harder routines which are part of a polished act. The most important thing for me to remember here is that I must never lose my temper, no matter how long it takes one of my little friends to learn a trick. One outburst of anger on my part can spoil all the friendship and trust created over months of patience and love. Also, I know that I must never ask an elephant to do what she cannot do. I must teach her only the tricks that nature has made her capable of performing.
“Teaching an elephant to dance is not difficult. After all, everyone can dance, as dancing is only a matter of moving one’s feet to music. When I was a nightclub dancer in Detroit I had had no prior training, yet I found it the simplest thing in the world. Bimbo found that dancing was not much more than an extension of her ABC. All she had to do was lift one leg and then another in time to the music. Of course, if the rhythm was a waltz, she would rotate as she did this. All my elephants have tended to look upon dancing as child’s play.
“Once, do you know, I even taught Bimbo to rumba. I had this idea of Bimbo wearing a grass skirt and shaking her body so that the skirt would sway. This was easier than I’d anticipated. I took a piece of sackcloth and threw it over her shoulders, shouting the word “rumba.” The sackcloth made her uncomfortable, so after awhile she shrugged her shoulders to take it off. So I succeeded — and when the sackcloth fell to the earth, I handed her a few lumps of sugar. We did this for a week, and she soon learned that when I shouted “rumba!” I required her to shake her body. Then I was able to get rid of the sackcloth and pretty her up with the grass skirt she would wear in the ring.
“Bimbo was my favorite, as cute as an ivory idol and a real charmer she was, but I took no less strict an attitude with her than I did with my others. The discipline and training of an elephant depend upon contrast — this is to say, reward or satisfactory reaction when the elephant does as I wish, and disapprobation or discomfort when she does not. An elephant must have absolute respect for her handler — and to be frank about it, this begins with her fear of me. Fear of punishment, I mean.
“My elephants love me, I know that. They love me because I have proved I have every reason to be feared, and because they know I will not administer any pain nor abuse to them unless they have disobeyed me. I have a wonderful relationship with my elephants. They are very good, very obedient, and they work in order to obtain my affection and my praise.”
Kitty finished eating her second plate of fried chicken and poured herself another glass of whiskey.
“I talk to you as though I were still an elephant trainer,” she said, “whereas now I am actually only the dream girl of that bastard Basil. I’m on the skids now, for real. Go away, will you? I am in danger of becoming sober, and I want to make sure that does not happen. Go play in the water or something.”
Her gold net with the blond hair flimsily escaping from it slipped sidewise. Her wan, beautiful features were contorted with distaste. I decided to go swimming and climbed down the ladder of the boat.
I began to wonder about the depth of the water in the bay, and grasped a rung of the ladder firmly. I swam round the boat from the ladder and walked on the anchor rope, paddling with my hands to keep upright in the ice cold green. I let go and found that the water was not deep.
Uncle Pearce had risen from his nap. He and his friend Basil, combining Yankee shrewdness with an almost Oriental mysticism, stood near the shore in green water up to their waistlines and talked about how invigorating it was.
I went under. I explored the sandy bottom with my eyes open and found a dead horseshoe crab, some Easter egg stones, an empty whiskey bottle, a jellyfish who stung me on the leg, a lady’s platform shoe, a poisonous-looking spiky dark red plant, two delicate brownish pink shells like the ears of a faun and a mass of dank dark green seaweed.
I came up. I climbed the ladder and stuck my head over the side of the boat. “Kitty, why don’t you come on in with the rest of us?” said I. “The water’s fine.”
Kitty did not answer. Her eyes were closed, her wide hips were sprawled on a white sailcloth folding chair, she was surrounded with bottles and I wondered whether she were asleep.
“Kitty, may I talk to you?” said I. “I let you talk to me, and I thought maybe you could reciprocate. I’m a student, you understand. My grades are good so far but I don’t know how long that will last, as I hardly ever read anything on the course-lists. I read as I have read all my life — exactly as I please.”
“Those bastards,” mumbled Kitty in her drunken sleep. “Those bastards, those goddamned incredible bastards. Won’t leave me alone. Blame me for everything. Take out all their hostility on me. Oh Bimbo, my darling, my dearest friend. Bimbo, Bimbo, Bimbo. Make those stupid bastards go to hell. Stupid. Stupid. Pick them up in your trunk, Bimbo, and dash them against a brick wall. Bimbo. My sweet Bimbo.”
Darkness was coming down, sending shallows of black light through the bay. Kitty looked now, I mused, like the people on the little island with the Tobacco Road house on it, that we in our boat had glided past. She was barefoot, lifelessly holding a whiskey glass in her hand, and her hair was gray and thin like the grass on the island. Her clothes looked gray, and her sleeping face.
Her skin was wan and gray, like elephant hide. The glass dropped and broke, and she began to snore. I climbed back down the ladder and paddled away.
Ruth Jespersen is the author of two collections, The Strange Ordeal of Edwin Banquo and Other Stories and Pop and Other New York Tales. Her fiction, poems, plays and journalism have appeared in numerous periodicals here and abroad. She lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida.
