ELEPHANT

(This story first appeared in the South Dakota Quarterly)

The day my father left for good, my sister Fran, who had just turned 14, sequestered herself in our backyard tree house and refused to come down. It was a typical tree house, just a tad lighter of a brown than the tree itself, a reliable and stubborn century old Oak. My father had built it a week before he ran away again, perhaps as a gesture of his alleged permanence. My mother, in her pink bathrobe, her hair wild and disheveled, stood in our backyard underneath the tree’s elaborate branches and called up to Fran.

“Don’t you do this to me, Francine. Not tonight.”

“Tell Neil to bring me a grilled cheese sandwich,” Fran called down. “No tomatoes.”

At the kitchen table, my baseball cards spread out before me, I could see out the open window, into the backyard, and I waited for my mother to come inside and tell me what to do. I was only 11, and my dad had already left twice.

“You’re ripping my guts out” my mother said to Fran. “Kevin might visit me up here,” Fran answered. “Francine Michelle Gluckman!” my mother said. She put a hand to her chest. “Is that why Dad left again?” Fran asked. “You wouldn’t let him grow?”

My mother stormed into the kitchen, her face bright red. “Mom,” I whispered. She went into her bedroom and slammed the door.

A few days earlier in school, they showed this documentary about fatherless elephants. Park rangers in South Africa had relocated all the adult male elephants from one national park to another park on the other side of the country. This left the younger elephants without their fathers and the adolescent males reacted to this sudden shift in Mother Nature’s plan by killing rhinoceroses, terrorizing tourist buses and impregnating the adolescent females. This one elephant, Jimmy, went so wild and killed so many rhinoceroses that the park rangers had to capture him and put him to sleep with a dart gun. I watched this scene with a mixture of suspense and bewilderment. And eventually I put my head down on my desk. The teacher let us ask questions after the documentary, and most of the questions were about Jimmy. Why had Jimmy gone so crazy after they took away his father? Did Jimmy’s father know Jimmy would go so crazy? Why did they have to shoot him?

Now, I retrieved my baseball bat from under my bed and brought it into the garage. Small and underweight, even for my age, I knew how to swing a bat, and excelled at little league. My father had taken me to Yankee stadium, and showed me how the players threw their hips into each swing. He took me to batting cages and offered feedback about my stance, the way I connected with the ball, and my swing in general. So, when I smacked the plastic garbage cans, again and again, they fell to the ground and crashed against my mother’s car, and one even became air borne and collided against the far wall where my father’s tools still hung. Afterwards, I gathered the cans up, placed them in their original positions, and dusted them off with an old towel. Back inside, at the kitchen table, my baseball cards awaited. As if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, I began to arrange them in team order.

Later, I brought Fran an apple and a candy bar. She sat cross-legged up in the tree house in front of several multi-colored burning candles. She had a little shower mirror hung on the wall and make-up paraphernalia spread out in front of her.

“Don’t tell Mom about the make-up, OK,” she said. “I’m putting my cards in team order,” I said. “You can stay up here with me if you shut up,” Fran said. She applied orange lipstick, and I wondered what I’d do if a player was traded to another team before next year’s baseball cards came out. Would I leave that player’s card with his original team or would I transfer it to the new team’s stack? If I did transfer it to the new team, would it look out of place?

Suddenly, my mother was in the tree house. I hadn’t heard her climb up. She had curlers in her hair. Her eyes looked red and swollen.

“What’s all this?” my mother asked Fran. “What’s wrong with wanting to look good?” Fran asked. “Neil,” my mother said. “Tell your sister she’s pretty so she doesn’t have to wear all this makeup and look like a you-know-what.” “I’m going to the mall tomorrow and getting a third hole pierced in each ear,” Fran said. “Neil, can’t you get your sister down?” my mother asked. “He’s not my father,” Fran said. I slipped away unnoticed, climbed down from the tree house, and retrieved my bat. Out in our front yard, with no witnesses but manicured shrubbery, long driveways, and darkened ranch style homes, I threw rocks from my mother’s flower garden up in the air and hit them as they came down. Earlier that day, my father had called from a hotel in Detroit, where he went, we thought, to attend a sales convention. He called to tell my mother that he was sorry but he wasn’t coming back. He’d fallen in love with Mrs. Goldberg, one of our neighbors, and she was with him now, and she wasn’t coming back either. He’d made all the financial arrangements weeks earlier. My father said he’d always wanted to drive away, see the country from behind the wheel of an automobile, and he was finally going to fulfill his dream. He said he’d contact us once he stopped driving and found a new home. My mother recounted this news to Fran and I when we arrived home from school. Now, I hit a rock so hard it shot across the street and went thump against a neighbor’s big, front window.

Inside, my baseball cards awaited. With a quick glance at a player’s homerun total, batting average, or fielding percentage, I would know for sure if he warranted my admiration.

An idea occurred to me: I could also place them in player order. This would provide easy reference, a clear and precise system of location. The pitchers would go first, and then the first-basemen, then the second-basemen, and I’d work my way around the diamond in this way. Again, a problem arose. It seemed like a huge problem. What if a player played more than one position? Or even more problematic, what if a player switched positions in mid-year?

With stacks of my two favorite teams stuck in the back pockets of my jeans, I climbed up into the tree house. Fran was lying on her back as if she was dead. Maybe my mother had killed her.

“Fran,” I whispered. “Don’t bug me,” she said. “I want to organize my cards and need your help.” “Get lost,” she said.

I explained that I wanted to put my cards in position order within each team, but didn’t know what to do if a player switched positions or was traded to another team.

“What if both happens?” she asked. She sat up. “Jesus,” I whispered.

The way her orange lipstick had become smudged around the corners of her mouth reminded me of clowns. She took a pile of cards from me and spread them on the floor.

“Why do they have to trade players anyway?” she asked. “Can’t they just leave people where they are?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

The way she handled the cards reminded me of the blackjack dealers I’d seen in late night movies. She put the manager’s cards first, which I’d forgotten all about. Then came pitchers, including relief pitches; then first-basemen, second basemen, and so on around the diamond.

“I knew I shouldn’t have tried to talk to Dad about all the girl growing up stuff,” she said. “I just knew it.”

She started to cry, which created a distorted, almost abstract mess out of her rouge and eyeliner. I decided that even if a player was traded or switched positions he would remain in the order Fran and I originally placed him in. That way we’d have a reference point, a way to look back at how the team was arranged before the changes were made.

Later that night, I jumped out of bed, and went into the kitchen and made Fran a grilled cheese sandwich without tomatoes, just the way she liked it. But as I climbed the ladder that led up to the tree house, with the sandwich on a plate balanced in one hand, I heard Fran say, “No, Kevin, no.” Then, I heard Kevin’s voice say, “Come on Franny, grow up.”

Kevin’s parents’ Volvo, off white, with a sunroof, sat parked in front of the house. I retrieved my bat and took it out to the car. I still had Fran’s sandwich with me, and I put it down on the grass. I stood still for a moment and remembered my last little league game, a game played just a few days earlier. I earned the game winning RBI by the odd circumstance of getting hit by a pitch with the bases loaded, thus moving in the final run. My teammates embraced me, and afterwards my father took us, the whole team and even the coach and a few other parents, out for pizza and soft drinks. My coach had instructed me to choke up on the bat, but that hadn’t mattered much in that situation. And my father, who came to most of my games with a Polaroid camera, had coincidentally borrowed a video camera that day, and so captured that freak RBI for all posterity. As he stood on the sidelines with the camera, he must have had his departure all planned out, must have realized that I would not remember this game for anything but his last. The video existed only as a testament to the confusion he wrought; I almost feared it in the same way I never wanted to see the part about Jimmy in the elephant documentary again.

Now, the street was dead quiet, except for the sound of a lawn sprinkler, which popped on and surprised me for a moment. And I looked up and down the street, very much alone, and hoped someone, anyone, would stop me before it became too late. No such person materialized, although until the split second before I struck Kevin’s car with the bat, I still half-believed my father would surface, perhaps just pop up on someone’s lawn, like an ornament. Was it indeed belief that he would materialize, or was it hope? I don’t know, the two seem so close, as interrelated as father and son.

I had to hit the passenger side window three times until it finally shattered, and glass flew at me like contaminated water. A light went on inside the house across the street, and a moment later – right after I’d smacked the front head lights into pieces – Fran and Kevin came running toward me, and my mother, her bathrobe open, emerged from our front door. I wanted to rip the car apart. Not just the windows and lights. I wanted to rip the seats apart and pound the engine, and if my bat broke in two, I wanted to claw away at everything possible. In fact, I never would have stopped had Fran not reached me and slapped me across the face. But even as she did, I knew the warm, painful sensation left on my face would fade away, recede into the past, and Kevin’s car would be fixed, made to look brand new, as if he’d never even stopped by our home in the first place.