Hannah's Dream Read online

  After she’d brained him with the dried floral wreath and left, he’d been sitting glumly in the living room when Winslow approached to ask why he had bits of dried bachelor buttons in his hair. Truman said a wildflower fairy had swooped in unexpectedly and anointed his brow with blossoms, but Winslow hadn’t bought it. He was, indeed, Truman’s son, the sort of analytical boy who weighed the possibility of being struck by lightning while riding his bike; who wondered if you could create a robot that would dress you from head to toe while you were still in bed. He could sit perfectly still for an hour or more, roaming the galaxy inside his own mind. He kept his room spotless, his socks neatly paired in his designated sock drawer and his closet organized by color. He’d driven Rhonda to frenzy. She used to scream at him, You’re a child! You’re supposed to be messy! To Truman she said, My god, he’s like an accounting savant.

  Rhonda had left them just over a year ago, several weeks after the debacle of the flower arrangement. At no time since then had Winslow commented on her absence except factually and in passing. He did not require heart-to-heart, father-son conversations, nor had Truman heard him weeping when the boy thought he was alone. He didn’t have nightmares or act out either at home or at school. He seemed perfectly satisfied with the way things were, and for that, as much as for anything else, Truman loved him fiercely.

  Neva Wilson arrived at last, forty-two minutes late. She was slight and tensile, red-haired and freckled, with the thin, smart face of a fox. Truman winced as she stepped into the minefield that was Harriet’s office. Neva Wilson was, beyond the shadow of a doubt, screwed.

  “Am I late?” he heard Neva say.

  Dead silence. Harriet would be looking pointedly at her watch.

  “I’m sorry,” he heard Neva say, clearing her throat. “I made a wrong turn, and by the time I figured it out, I was ten miles out of town.”

  “Well,” Harriet said; and then, no doubt having made her point, her voice lightened beneficently. “When did you get to town? Are you all settled in?”

  “Yesterday. And settling in is never a problem. Everything I own fits in my car.”

  Truman quietly approached with a stack of Max L. Biedelman Zoo uniform shirts and paperwork, announcing himself by knocking on the wall outside Harriet’s doorway.

  “Excuse me,” he said. Harriet, sitting at her desk with her hands clasped, nodded that he might approach. He handed the clothes and papers to Neva, whose coloring was livid, and said, “You can fill these out anytime today. Just leave them with me before five. You’ll have a locker at the elephant barn where you can put your uniforms for now. Shall I take you down there? I’m sure you’re anxious to start.”

  “I can find my way.”

  “I don’t mind.” Ignoring a disapproving look from Harriet, he quickly stowed his work as they passed his cubicle. It was nothing more sensitive than employee timesheets—he’d been working up the payroll—but Harriet made a point of sitting at his desk when he was away from it, gathering intelligence. She was not beyond docking an employee fifteen minutes of pay, claiming she saw him or her malingering someplace on the grounds or in one of the outlying zookeeper workrooms.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t think we’ve met,” Neva said, holding out her hand once they’d emerged into the watery fall sunlight. Truman took it.

  “I was on your interview panel,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

  “God, I’m sorry.” Neva clapped her hand to her forehead.

  “Please don’t be. It happens all the time.” Truman smiled sadly.

  “No, it’s me. I do this. And here’s the weird thing: I can remember the face of every animal I’ve ever worked with. I don’t mean just general features, either—I remember the exact markings and the way their ears feel when you rub them between your fingers and what their favorite foods are and whether or not they like to be sung to. But I never remember people. Introduce me to a new person and within ten minutes it’s like I was never there. I think it’s some kind of learning disability.”

  Truman smiled as Neva gabbled a little at a passing peacock, a moth-eaten specimen fanning his ratty tail beside the path.

  “So tell me about Harriet Saul,” she said.

  “Ah,” Truman said. “She can be a bully, but her heart’s in the right place. She was brought in by the city to turn the zoo around. We have some financial challenges.”

  “You’ve got a charismatic mega-vertebrate, though. That always helps.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Charismatic mega-vertebrates,” Neva repeated. “Whales, dolphins, elephants. They’re the money animals. They’re what people come to see. Of course, you’ve only got one, and she has some problems.”

  “Her feet, you mean.”

  “For starters.”

  “Something about her toenails, I gather.” Neva looked at him and smiled. “I know, you’re probably thinking it’s no big deal, like a hangnail. But foot problems are one of the primary causes of death for a lot of elephants at older zoos like this one.”

  “Death?”

  Neva nodded. “Mother Nature didn’t take concrete into account when she designed the elephant. A three-or four-ton animal is going to break its feet down if there’s nothing soft to stand on.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Say you have a sore foot, right? What are you going to do?”

  “I suppose I’d try to stay off it.”

  “Exactly. But if an animal this heavy lies down for more than a few hours, it crushes its internal organs. So they have to stand up, bad feet or no. And if you’re kept indoors all night, which Hannah is, you’re standing in a toilet, which leads to intractable infections and blood poisoning. Which leads to death.”

  “Good Christ.”

  They completed the walk in silence. Truman thought that walking beside Neva Wilson was like walking beside a high-voltage electrical transformer. He could almost hear the hum, feel the heat.

  Just as he pulled open the door to the elephant barn, the wall phone rang. He saw Harriet’s extension flashing on the console, and picked up the receiver.

  “You need to come back,” she said.

  “Yes, I was just ready to.”

  “She could have found her own way, Truman.”

  Truman sighed. It was only two minutes after nine, and it was Monday.

  Sam was in the elephant yard, looking at Hannah’s bad foot in the sunlight. Even through the ointment he’d slathered on, he could see that the foot was worse. “Okay, baby girl,” he murmured, patting her foot down gently. “Guess Papa’s going to have to find something different to try.” He stood beside her, reaching up to stroke the back of her ear. She touched his face with her trunk, blowing lightly and smelling of guavas. Someone had sent a tropical care package, guavas and papayas. The zoo got gifts like that all the time. His girl had thousands of friends and well-wishers.

  “Good morning.” Neva Wilson came out of the barn and into the yard, wearing a zoo sweatshirt so new it still had fold marks.

  “Morning, miss. I didn’t hear you come in. Me and Hannah were catching up on the day.”

  She nodded at the foot. “That’s a pretty nasty abscess.”

  Sam remembered thinking the woman was a tad high-strung when he met her after her interview three weeks ago. Then again, that Harriet Saul had only let her stay in the barn a few minutes—big, bossy thing.

  “Hey, baby girl,” he said softly to Hannah. “Look who’s here. Hannah, this is Neva Wilson. Miss, meet Hannah.”

  “Please don’t call me miss,” Neva said, flushing. “I hate formality.”

  “All right, miss.”

  Neva sighed. “Is that getting worse?” She nodded at Hannah’s foot.

  “Yeah, a little bit. Nothing new about it, though. Seems like she always has some foot problem. Shug’s worse than an old woman with bunions.”

  “May I see?”

  “Foot, sugar.” Hannah lifted her bad foot again, looking nervous
ly at Neva. “It’s okay, sugar, she’s just going to take a look.”

  Neva looked at the shattered nails and underlying abscesses. “What medication’s she on for this?”

  To Hannah Sam said, “It’s okay, baby, you can put your foot down now.”

  Hannah put her foot down.

  “Right now, nothing. We tried everything the zoo doc recommended, but it seemed like none of it made any difference, plus it put the girl off her hay. So me and Mama—that’s my wife, Corinna—we’ve tried some homeopathic cures, you know? Looks like they haven’t helped much this time, though.”

  “Homeopathic cures? Like what?”

  “Well, Mama could tell you more about that than me, but let’s see.” Sam leaned against Hannah, thinking. The elephant wrapped her trunk around his head affectionately. “Ointments and creams, mostly. Baby doesn’t like to stand still for poultices. Right off the top of my head, there was witch hazel and ribwort, calendula, comfrey, and that’s about all I can remember. We’ll have to ask Mama. We were thinking about trying echinacea tincture, but I don’t think shug would take to that. Her stomach gets upset real easy.”

  “Did any of them help?”

  “The comfrey helped some. The witch hazel seemed like it was soothing, but I don’t know if it had any healing powers.”

  “Have you tried applying Copper-Tox over the top of them?” Neva said.

  “Don’t know that one, miss,” Sam frowned.

  “It acts as a sort of liquid Band-Aid, sticky so it stays on for a long time. Stuff smells to high heaven and it’ll give you one hell of a headache if you’re around it too long, but I’ve seen it make a difference at least in keeping medication in place so the abscess has a chance to heal.” Neva put her hands in her pockets.

  “I’ll ask Doc. Maybe he doesn’t know about that one.”

  “Who’s the vet here, again?”

  “Doc Richards.”

  Neva frowned. “I guess I don’t know him.”

  “’Bout my age, ready to retire soon. He worked for Miss Biedelman when she was still alive. He’s been around here longer than anyone but me and Hannah.”

  “Is he a good vet?”

  “He never killed anything, at least as far as I know. He usually comes to see Hannah every week or two.”

  “Has he ever had you give her footbaths of peroxide, beta-dyne, and chlorhexidine?”

  Sam frowned again, raking his fingernails up and down Hannah’s side. She made a low, contented rumble and put her trunk into the canvas treat bag Sam wore strapped around his waist, fetching up two chunks of apple and popping them in her mouth like candy. “Not those, miss, but we’ve tried Epsom salts,” Sam said as he pushed her trunk away. “Warm water and salts a couple times a day. She took it all right, but it didn’t seem to do anything besides make her sleepy. By the time the ten minutes was done, why she’d be sawing logs.” Sam chuckled gently. “Breaks my heart, seeing the girl in pain.”

  “Does she limp?”

  “Not much. I believe she has a touch of rheumatism in the joints, though—she takes after me that way. Seems like she stands still more than she used to. Except for our walks, of course.”

  “You walk her?”

  “Sure,” Sam said. “It does her good, gives her a chance to see some things, stretch out a little, let her poor feet touch some grass. Plus you meet people. Yesterday we met a real nice boy, lives with an aunt. Too many kids out there are bringing themselves up these days. My folks never did have a lot, but there was plenty of love to go around. My mama used to say to all us kids, You help yourself to a hug whenever you want one, sugar. They’re warm, and they’re free.”

  Neva smiled. “Do you ever put sand in her yard?”

  “Never have. Just hay.”

  “So how does she show pain?”

  Sam smiled. “She doesn’t show it, she just comes right out and says it. She’s a talky thing, talks all day long.” His smile faded. “I love my girl, miss. Me and Hannah, we’ve been together forty-one years. Miss Biedelman trusted me to take good care of her, and I’ve done the best job I could. It’s about time for me to be retiring, been time for a couple of years already, but I can’t do it unless I know my baby’s in good hands. You show me you’ve got those hands and I’ll do anything I can to make the rest easy on you. I will, and Mama will, too.”

  Neva folded her arms and regarded him for a minute. “If you could give Hannah anything in the world, what would it be?”

  Sam rubbed his cheek along Hannah’s leg absently. “That’s easy. I’d give her a good place to live and someone who’d never leave her.”

  “But she could easily live for another twenty years. No keeper’s going to commit to being in one place that long.”

  “Didn’t say anything about keepers, miss,” Sam said quietly.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I meant other elephants.”

  Neva sighed. “Well, given what I know about this zoo, that would take a miracle.”

  “I dream about it sometimes,” Sam said before he could think better of it.

  “Sure. We all dream about having more money and better living conditions for our animals.”

  Sam nodded, but it wasn’t what he’d meant.

  chapter 3

  Neva Wilson prided herself on both her nerve and durability. In fifteen years as a zookeeper she had worked with large, intractable animals from killer whales to polar bears. She seldom cried, never balked, and rarely wavered in her opinions. She had been married once, but that was a long time ago. She was a zookeeper’s zookeeper, fierce, tough, single-minded, and dedicated to the animals in her care.

  Unlike any of the dozens of backup keepers Sam Brown had been given over the years, Neva had not washed up on the unpromising shores of the Max L. Biedelman Zoo because of diminished circumstances. She had worked at some of the best zoos in the country, and trained under some of the finest senior elephant keepers in the world. But lately she’d begun to believe that she needed something more; some sort of purpose. She’d decided that she would become an elephant-care ambassador, bringing what she knew to one of the country’s many mediocre, backwater, needy facilities. The Max L. Biedelman Zoo had advertised for an elephant keeper less than three weeks later. It wasn’t accredited by the American Zoo Association, and neither Neva nor any of her colleagues had ever heard of the place before. A week later her interview with Harriet Saul and the zoo’s top management convinced her that the zoo’s leadership was clueless, arrogant, misguided, and blind. It sounded perfect. No missionary to the darkest heart of Africa brought along more zeal than Neva Wilson did. When she was offered the job at a salary that was not quite half what she had been earning, she accepted on the spot.

  At the end of her first day, she pulled into her driveway and climbed out of the beat-to-shit tin can that was her current car—the latest in a long line of beater vehicles reaching all the way back to her sixteenth birthday. She took perverse pride in the fact that not one of her cars had ever rated a Blue Book value of more than fifteen hundred dollars, and many had been worth significantly less. She was, by necessity, a fair mechanic.

  Instead of an apartment, she’d rented a detached, converted garage in Bladenham’s historic neighborhood. It was just her kind of place: carpeting laid directly over the concrete slab, tiny kitchenette, tinier bathroom, dirt-cheap rent. She wouldn’t be there much, anyway—she was used to spending up to twenty hours a day at work, coming home only to shower, sleep, and change clothes.

  She pulled into the driveway just as her landlord, Johnson Johnson, came out the back door of his house and approached her across the narrow lawn that separated her apartment from his house, a 1920s craftsman bungalow with a deep front porch and leaded windows. She guessed he was in his late thirties, tall, balding, and impossibly thin, with a sweet, vague air about him. Neva couldn’t decide whether he was afflicted or simply shy. He lifted his hand uncertainly and said, “Hi.”

  Neva pulled a stack of Biedelman Zoo unifo
rm shirts out of her car. “Would you mind?” she said, handing them to him so she could reach in and extract a second pile of sweatshirts. “Okay, you can just set those on top of these,” she told him. He did. “Thanks.” And then, because he was still just standing there with his mouth slightly open, she added, “That should do it.”

  “Okay,” he said, nevertheless failing to walk away. “You work at the zoo?”

  “My first day.”

  “I like the zoo.”

  “Really? What’s the best thing about it?”

  “They have animals.”

  She waited for more, but evidently he was done. “Well, it is a zoo,” she said. “What is it that you do?”

  Johnson Johnson looked at his feet. “I make things.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  He shrugged. Neva thought it was as though he had learned social discourse from a book.

  “Look,” she said, beginning to run out of patience, which had never been a strong quality of hers. “Is your real name Johnson Johnson?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t imagine anybody actually naming a baby Johnson Johnson.” She kicked her car door shut with her foot.

  Johnson Johnson flushed with pride.

  “Okay,” Neva explained. “I have to go in now.”

  “Okay,” he said, but it was as if she’d never spoken. “Have you seen my cat?”

  “You have a cat?”

  “Yes. He’s an orange tabby. He has six toes on each foot.”

  “A polydactyl,” Neva said, brightening.

  Johnson Johnson looked at her uncertainly. “Well, a cat.”

  “Yes—polydactyl is the term for six-toed cats.”

  “His name is Kitty.”

  “Of course it is.” It had been a long day; Neva felt hysterical giggles rising. Trying to outrun them, she said, “Look, I’m sorry, but I really have to go in now.”