John McManus: Fox Tooth Heart

There was more — climbing the hill, hitching a ride on Capital of Texas Highway — but I trailed off. Two of Gracie’s friends had appeared on the hilltop. The phone was playing the album’s closer, “Turgenev.” I imagined the other elephants were too far away to hear me croon a vow to commit Ike Senior’s same crimes if it earned his respect in heaven, but Gracie heard. She studied me like her own eye in the mirror.

“Like I told you, I didn’t leave her for dead,” I said, feeling sort of desperate now for Gracie’s forgiveness. Before she could give it or deny it, my song faded into a ring.

I answered. “James,” said a woman the device named as Franklin Pierce. It took me a minute to figure out why she sounded familiar.

“Yep,” I answered, meaning I was my father.

“Where are you?” Haley said.

“By the elephant fence.”

“And the others?”

She believed I was Ike Senior. “They’re on their way.”

“James, stay inside while this happens.”

“Sure, Franklin Pierce.”

“Wait until it’s all over.”

“I’ll sit playing solitaire.”

“I’ve enjoyed getting to know you,” she said, sounding on the verge of tears.

She hung up. When I called back, the phone gave a busy-circuits signal.

What Haley wanted, I realized, was for my father to stay in the house while she and Frank harvested ivory.

I’d been seeing evidence for days now: they would shoot the elephants, saw off their tusks, and sell them on the black market. It would happen in thirty minutes, I thought, as Gracie languished in the mud, reading my mind as indifferently as ever. It struck me what a tiny fraction of her mass her tusks comprised. It was the same with oysters and pearls, men and their gold teeth.

And then it came to me: I had it backward, this elephant hated all human beings equally. We were torturers who had chained her in a cage for almost a lifetime. Most elephants were dead because people had killed them. In fifty years they would all be gone. What did Gracie care if I had killed a girl?

She was glad I’d killed a girl. It was one less human.

I’d known something was wrong with Haley from the moment I saw her, I told myself as I hurried uphill. If I’d wished to live with Haley in another country, half of me was bad like her. It was time to let that half die, and save Gracie whether she wanted it or not.

Alone on the porch, a beat pounding in my head, I scrolled through the phone contacts looking for Elephant Sanctuary. I tried Sanctuary. No luck. Clara wasn’t listed either. I hit redial and got another busy-circuits signal. I paused for a drink. Pouring, I spotted a copy of the New York Times lying open to a picture of me, Ike Bright, Jr., in tuxedo and boutonnière.

In the picture I had fallen over backward in the sand in a beach chair. Beside me, Aisling, in a bikini and ball cap, was tying my shoelaces together.

I stared down at the caption until I could read a single word, gold . Then immediately I flung the paper out of sight so fast that a number of possibilities remained.

The lead investigator in my case was named Gold. My bounty was to be paid to Aisling’s father in gold. In the wake of my new notoriety, my records had gone gold. I had misread manslaughter and mistaken that word for gold .

“Catching up on the news?” said Ike Senior behind me, causing me to drop the bottle. It crashed with a thud on the porch floor and spilled.

“I’m telling Clara your elephant plan,” I said.

“My plan to give them my money?”

“To sell Gracie’s tusks.”

“That was a ruse, to test how evil you find me.”

“Then it’s a redundant ruse.”

“I was hoping we had a future.”

“You and me both, Dad.”

“But you believe I would hurt those elephants.”

“Fool me twice,” I said, pulling out the phone.

“Well, I’ve fooled you more than twice, Junior.”

I could hear an engine approaching. We both turned to see a police car pull up in the ditch. A tall black man in a fedora got out, the poker player from before.

“Am I interrupting?” he said as he strode toward us.

“What’s this about?” said Ike Senior.

“You’re harboring a murder suspect, old man.”

Here’s what I thought, just for a minute: that this cop would earn a bounty from Aisling’s father by betraying mine and giving me to the state of Texas. My dad had trusted everyone, even me. In a pinpoint storm’s eye I felt glad to know Ike Senior wasn’t betraying Clara. But then his inscrutable grin never diminished as the policeman climbed the stairs. It seemed to me that Ike Senior should stop grinning. Before I knew why he didn’t, the cop was handcuffing me to the porch railing.

“You can’t do this,” I said, still expecting my father’s smile to wane.

“Turn yourself in, file a complaint,” he said, taking the phone out of my other hand.

“How much money?” I said, still believing that the money was because of me.

“News will tell you a thousand per pound,” said Ike Senior, “as if there’s just one black market in the world. In Beijing you’ll fetch close to two thousand.”

It hit me, all of a sudden, how dimwitted I’d been to assume there was a bounty. In three days people haven’t survived their first stage of grief, let alone set bounties.

“You’re monsters,” I said.

“My buddy wanted to let you help,” Ike Senior said, “but I told him what you’re like. You’re as bad as that animal rights activist you brought home yesterday.”

“Gracie, charge,” I shouted, aloud and in my head, screeching like I did in the songs Gracie hated so much.

“He believes Gracie talks to him,” said my father.

“She does,” I said. “She’s smarter than we are.”

“That night in New Orleans? I taught you how not to be a mark.”

“I blacked it out. What you taught me is to be a drunk.”

“You drink too much, that’s for sure.”

“Why are you doing it?” I asked, but I knew. Because he was good at it. Because of adrenaline. Because of alcohol. He had a lot of nerve, telling me I drink too much.

“They’re old and sick,” he said. “If you never forgot things, wouldn’t you want to die?”

“You said they’re like people.”

“People, elephants, I roll the same way with all animals. Hey, it’s in the blood. You think I didn’t know all along why you’re here?”

“Why am I here?”

“I’ve done stuff in my day, Junior, but leaving her to die? That was low.”

As my father stepped down from the porch, I was speechless, but only in my voice. Not in my head. Flee , I shouted to Gracie in my head as Ike Senior led his buddy toward the garage. Charge the fence. Tell your friends . Except she wasn’t answering me anymore.

My father and his partner emerged with two automatic rifles apiece and crossed into the sanctuary. They disappeared over the rise. I was working my handcuffs down the railing. When they were low enough for me to kneel, I leaned forward and caught my breath. Now I could relax a little. It was during that spell of calm that I came up with my final song, which never made it onto the album. I didn’t get a chance to write it down. It’s about regular elephants, not vampires. It takes place fifty years from now, in the year 2062. In it, the computers of 2062 learn to decipher the part of elephant speech that’s too low for human ears. Although elephants are extinct by then, videos of them remain online. In my last song the citizens of my future play elephant videos one by one, as their computers translate, and it’s like finding ten thousand Anne Frank diaries; the people weep over those staggering words and say, “We wouldn’t have let that happen.” The African videos are bad enough, with their desperate cries while gunmen mow down elephants from helicopters, but the worst come from Arkansas, from the sanctuary, where every old lady brings her own history of exquisite torture to the watering hole and compares notes with the other cows there, puzzling out what’s next.