Chris Offutt - The Same River Twice - A Memoir

“All right,” Barney said. “We’ll make it so Gabe don’t know what we’re up to.”

“Nobody better say nothing,” Arnie said. “Promise?”

“Deal,” Barney said.

The men nodded. We walked to the gorilla cage, which was bolted to a flatbed truck. Arnie fastened a banana to the end of the elephant prod.

“Gabe,” he whispered. “You awake in there.”

Gabe’s tiny close-set eyes showed red in the flashlight’s beam. Arnie waved the banana. “You hungry? I sneaked you a snack.” He lifted the elephant prod until the banana was above the cage, just outside of the bars. “Come and get it, big boy.”

Gabe moved to the front of the cage. We squatted for an up-angle view while Barney played the flashlight on Gabe’s crotch. The gorilla used the bars to pull himself erect on legs that seemed permanently crooked. His big thighs were matted with fur.

“Up, Gabe,” Arnie said. “You almost got it.”

The gorilla stretched higher. He shifted his weight to one leg and reached his hand through the top of the cage, inches from the banana. He thrust his other leg out for balance. Clearly illuminated was a pair of testicles the size of chestnuts. The men collapsed on their haunches, laughing and hooting. Gabe quickly dropped to a crouch and backed into the shadows. The men laughed harder.

“Goddamn it!” Arnie yelled. “You promised to be quiet.”

“You win,” the horse man said. “By default.”

He handed the bottle to Arnie, who knocked it aside. He snatched the flashlight and aimed the light through the bars. Gabe sat hunched in a corner, head bowed. He glanced at us with an expression of terrible humiliation, then hid his head. The men hushed and slowly moved away.

“You sons of bitches,” Arnie said. “You promised!”

He continued cursing into the night until his voice broke and we heard a sob. He started talking to Gabe in low tones. I crawled under the elephant truck to sleep, remembering my former roommates’ preoccupation with the heft of Marduk’s lingam. Men’s tendency to take an interest in one another’s genitals is not so much sexual as simply wondering how they stack up against everybody else. Most men need confirmation that someone’s equipment is smaller than theirs, even if it belongs to a gorilla.

After lunch, Flathead always strolled the grounds to ensure that everyone was ready for the afternoon show. Sometimes the clowns or the magician were so hung over they needed an injection of sucrose and Dexedrine. Flathead carried a small case of prepared syringes. That morning Gabe refused to eat breakfast, keeping his back turned in the cage. Flathead wanted to give him an injection but Arnie refused, promising to have his gorilla ready for the matinee. Gabe missed both performances and Flathead was furious. If Gabe didn’t perk up, Flathead warned, they’d sell him to a Mexican zoo.

The animal trainers avoided each other all day. They took care of the animals and went to sleep without talking. Sometime late in the night, Barney woke me by rapping on my feet. The trainers stood in an awkward circle. The horse man pushed his shoes against the earth while the tiger man paced back and forth. Barney was very still and Arnie stood by himself, facing away.

Barney handed each of us a banana. He stepped to the gorilla cage and held the flashlight so that it shone on his face.

“I’m sorry, Gabe,” he said. “I was a little drunk. When I was married, I cheated on my wife. Now you know something on me.”

He peeled the banana and gently slid it into the cage. One by one, each of us took our turn apologizing to Gabe, who sat motionless in the shadows. Everyone told him something personal and gave him a banana. On my turn I faced the darkness and muttered my greatest secret — the transvestite in New York. Gabe didn’t answer.

Arnie went last. He was crying. He opened his pants and said, “See, they ain’t that much to mine either,” Arnie stuffed four bananas through the cage and claimed credit for bringing all the men to apologize.

We slipped away, leaving them to talk in private. The next day, Gabe performed exceedingly well. After the show, the trainers sat in their customary circle, arguing the fine points of manure, each defending his animal.

The circus roamed deeper into the South and I was rewarded for my diligence with a promotion that, like most advances I’ve received, proved my undoing. Someone had quit and Flathead offered me the job because of my size — the circus diet and strenuous labor had cost me several pounds. I was practically a wraith. Flathead introduced me to Mr. Kaybach, a dirty-haired man whose odor was a point of personal honor. As long as I stayed upwind, we got along well.

He showed me how to wriggle into my costume, an oilskin sheath with a hidden zipper. He warned that it was hot and I should wear only underwear. Tattered quilting padded the interior to swell my torso. Two flippers hung from my chest which I could operate by careful insertion of my hands. The back of the costume tapered to a pair of rubber flippers set close together. A surprisingly realistic mask completed my transformation into a walrus. I peeked through tiny slits between two tusks. Kaybach explained our routine and I waited eagerly inside the dark tent for my debut.

The audience encircled a pool of water containing fake ice floes and false rocks. The dark hump they saw was Louie the Great Trained Walrus, direct from the Bering Straits, the Smartest Walrus in Captivity. To further the illusion, Kaybach dumped a wheelbarrow load of ice cubes into the fetid water. He explained that Louie communicated with standard head shakes, and could clap his flippers in mathematical tally.

He called my name and I plunged off the rocks and through the shallow water. By squatting inside the oilskin bag, I could make Louie appear to rear on his haunches.

“Are you a girl walrus?”

I vigorously shook my head no.

“He’s a male, folks! Take a look at those tusks. We lost three Eskimos capturing him. Very sad.” A pause for the audience to consider their own danger. “Are you married, Louie?”

Again I shook my head.

“You got a girlfriend, Louie?”

I shook my head.

“Do you want one?”

This was my cue to launch myself across the pool toward the nearest woman in the audience. She usually screamed and people backed away. Kaybach yelled at me to settle down. I appeared to defy him momentarily before slinking back to the center of the pool. By this time, enough water had leaked in to make my skin slimy.

“You know how bachelors are, folks,” Kaybach continued with a broad wink. “And everyone knows what seafood does to a fellow.”

He asked a few more questions — what state we were in, who the local mayor was — arranging a multiple choice for me to answer yes or no. When I was correct, he threw a dead fish which I forced through the mouth flap to lie cold and smelly against my chest. Kaybach told the audience that I could only count to ten and invited them to stump me with problems of arithmetic. Someone asked the sum of five plus two. Kaybach yelled the question to me and I clapped my front flippers seven times. After a few more tests, a circus plant bullied his way to the front and shouted that he’d seen this on TV and it was a fake. He said the walrus was trained to respond only to the voice of its master, who spoke in code. Kaybach assured everyone that this was not true. He suggested that the man ask his own question, providing the answer didn’t go past ten.

“Square roots,” the plant said.

“What’s that?” Kaybach asked.

“A number times itself.” The plant turned to the crowd. “You know, from high school. The square root of a hundred is ten because ten times ten is a hundred.”