Thomas Pierce - Hall of Small Mammals - Stories

Tommy knows the name Kyle Seevers. Mawmaw doesn’t like secrets.

Her son comes into the kitchen the morning after the reception and asks if he can have scrambled eggs and grits. She can’t refuse him. His hair sticks up in the back. He’s forty-two but could be twelve. Up on her toes, Mawmaw reaches for a pan on a high hook, then down low for a whisk in a bottom drawer. She’s feeling more energetic than she has in months. Her knees are hardly bothering her at all. Tommy sips his black coffee and reads the newspaper. The eggs crackle in the bacon grease.

“And how’s Shirley this morning?” Tommy asks.

All morning Mawmaw hasn’t let herself look out the window above the sink.

“Don’t see nothing out there,” she says.

“Don’t see it?” Tommy is up in a flash and out the back door. She watches him scurry across the grass in his boxers. He goes inside the pen. The mammoth emerges from behind the oak tree in the far right corner. From a distance it’s almost doglike. But that long probing trunk. Those tusks! Tommy squats in front of the mammoth and runs his fingers through the dirty-blond coat.

“Wash your hands,” Mawmaw says once he’s back inside. “Could have diseases.”

“Maw, it doesn’t have any diseases,” he says. Yet she can’t help but notice how thoroughly he scrubs his hands in the sink.

She puts his breakfast plate on the table and sits down to watch him eat.

“How come they let you take this elephant?” she asks. “Isn’t that against the rules?”

“It’s not an elephant. Listen, Maw, I’m going to let you in on a dirty little secret. You know about the Back from Extinction Zoo, right?”

“It’s where that cute little zookeeper takes all the animals to live at the end of every show.”

“Right. Her name is Samantha. Only, she doesn’t take every animal to the zoo. We never say this on the air, but sometimes we clone twins by mistake, and that, legally speaking, is a bureaucratic nightmare. There are so many fucking laws that we—”

“No f , please.”

“Sorry, but it’s true. You’d think we were trying to make nuclear weapons. We’re allowed to keep both twins alive until we’ve filmed the episode, so we can use each one on camera. But then we have to get rid of one. Samantha is the person who has to euthanize them. It’s awful.”

Tommy scrapes the grits into a small pile and takes another bite.

“Why are you telling me this?” Mawmaw asks.

“Because,” Tommy says, “we had two dwarf mammoths. Twins. Only, this time Samantha couldn’t bring herself to do it. She took Shirley home instead. Not the smartest move, but it’s not like she could just set a mammoth loose in the woods, you know? Anyway, the show suspected something was up. She needed it out of her house for a few days in case they came snooping around, and I told her I would help.”

Mawmaw goes to the window. Shirley Temple Three is using its tusks to root up the dirt. She wonders what it eats. If it would eat eggs. Shirley Temple the dog used to eat eggs.

• • •

Tommy plans to be in town for less than a week, but his friends want to see him. One night his high school buddy Mitch Mitchells comes over to take him out like old times. Mitch is recently divorced, and Tommy says he thinks he’s lonely, which is enough to make Mawmaw laugh. What does Mitch Mitchells know about loneliness? But, standing in the foyer, Mitch gives Mawmaw a long, sad hug. She hasn’t seen him in probably a decade. Unlike her son, he hasn’t aged well. He has an extra chin, thinner hair. He’s clearly in awe of Tommy, a real celebrity, and is full of questions. Has Tommy met many movie stars? Is he dating anybody special? Have any of the animals bitten him or stung him or stabbed him or done him any sort of bodily harm as yet unimaginable? And how do the scientists bring back all those animals, anyway?

First of all, Tommy says, he hasn’t met many movie stars, since he lives in Atlanta, not Hollywood. And he’s not dating anyone special, certainly not anyone famous, and thus far, knock on fossil, he hasn’t suffered even a single scratch from the animals, and as for the science, well, to be perfectly honest, he doesn’t have a clue how they do it. He’s just the talent. He reads the cue cards. He doesn’t have to handle any pipettes, let’s put it that way. Mitch Mitchells thinks that’s just hysterical.

“You’ll look after the dog?” Tommy asks on his way out, a glint in his eye. Mawmaw nods, but once he’s gone she wonders what she’s supposed to do. Walk it? Give it a treat? Earlier that week, on the computer, she learned that prehistoric mammoths ate grasses, fruits, twigs, berries, and nuts. In the pantry Mawmaw has a tub of mixed nuts. She pours some cashews and almonds and pecans into a metal bowl and takes it outside, to where the mammoth has stuck its trunk through one of the squares of the metal gate. The trunk recoils when she places the bowl in front of it. It doesn’t seem very interested in the nuts.

“Take it or leave it,” Mawmaw says, and abandons the mammoth for her nighttime ablutions: her face cream, her electric toothbrush, and, just before sliding into the faded red nightgown, her sleeping pill. She sleeps hard until midnight, when a car in the driveway pulls her awake. She realizes she’s not in bed anymore but at her desk in the office, half her toenails painted dark red, the computer printing a ninety-two-page document about the dangers of lead-based paint. Her pills can have that effect sometimes. They turn her into a zombie. She goes to the window, but it’s not Mitch’s Bronco outside in the driveway. It’s a taxicab. Tommy shoves a wad of cash through the driver’s window and stumbles toward the house. Mawmaw creeps back into her room and shuts her door. She considers taking another pill but turns on the television instead.

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.