Fox Tooth Heart Read online

  “My husband met your dad in prison.”

  “My dad?”

  “Same name?”

  “Who’s this husband?” I asked, startled into another memory. It vanished when Haley’s phone rang yet again.

  This time she answered. I heard a man’s dull monotone but none of his words.

  “Okay,” she said, gesturing toward my guitar.

  I shook my head. She signaled again. I said no a third time.

  “I won’t be long,” she told the phone then, as if my choice determined hers.

  She hung up, got dressed. “Wish I could play,” I said.

  “Call me when you’ve learned how.”

  I followed her out to where a blue Corvette was parked by my father’s truck. I didn’t remember that car at all. She kissed me bye. As she drove away, I wanted to chase her down and shout the truth, so she would leave her husband and come write songs with me in another country, but I stood there watching her disappear.

  I found Ike Senior asleep on a chaise longue. Clara wasn’t around. Absurd to feel lonely after just two minutes. I sat down at a desk, where I came up with some lies that I put down in a letter to my bandmates. Then I burned the letter. By now I was in a sorry state. Bile was swimming in my stomach from the hangover, and I wasn’t cut out for being disliked. Maybe my guitar would cheer me up. I carried it to the porch. Sitting in the bentwood rocker, I played Barnacle, song by song, until Gracie the elephant came shuffling up to the fence.

  She didn’t stop there. She waltzed right on into my head to tell me my songs were ugly.

  “What?” I replied, although I’d heard her: the songs that comprised Barnacle were chintzy and fake. They were overwrought and shrill and tasteless, she said, using words that once again belonged to no human language. Those are just the ones she’d have used if she’d been human.

  Which parts? I asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  Gracie, say which parts.

  All the parts.

  Thinking we could understand each other better if I came closer, I carried my guitar downhill and sat on a log in her shade.

  “Why are you here?”

  I seek peace, Gracie replied in my mind.

  With her trunk she lifted some grass into her mouth. “This is peaceful,” I said.

  It was until you arrived, she told me. You keep screaming for questions.

  The last person I wanted those questions from was a feeble, abused old-woman elephant. “Hey, I’m good now. Let’s talk about you.”

  Okay, let’s, she said, still speaking in feelings rather than words.

  She began to tell me about a two-bit circus that assembled in Kmart parking lots around the South. The brute Melungeon who ran it, Scoopy Bunn, had beat her daily with a prod. I’d never heard of Melungeons, so I knew Gracie was the one conveying Scoopy to me, but I hadn’t brought a pen. The only way to remember was to put her story to a melody, and convert her nonwords into lyrics.

  My anxiety over Aisling subsided as I sat there rhyming about the Florida midway where Gracie had longed for Lake Malawi. She spoke in hints and thoughts that became my lyrics. Playing guitar, I sang about her déjà vu and her dead brothers and the malarial swamp at the water’s edge where she’d fallen in love. No wonder Clara grew maudlin, I thought, shepherding Gracie’s inklings together in paired melodies. Already I could see her as the nucleus of a new song cycle. I wondered how I would record the songs. Elephants held captive in an alien land whose dullards still mourned the Civil War. Elephants who never blacked out drunk, a thought that before I knew it had me reliving the car wreck.

  Suddenly the ground was trembling. I broke off from playing guitar to see that Gracie was turning from me.

  “Wait, she was dead already,” I said, “I didn’t leave her to die,” but it was too late, she was waddling away.

  I climbed the hill to the porch. I felt pretty awful, but after a few shots of whiskey I told myself fuck it, and scribbled what I recalled of the new songs. I heard you thumping for me in another country, went the first line of a mournful number about Gracie’s homeland fifty years ago. Then I thought, Five hundred years ago. Five thousand. What if you lived forever but never forgot?

  I gave Gracie a depraved vampire mother who in the year 3000 BC rendered her undead. The heartbreak and terror were overwhelming. Over the millennia, she lost hope that she would ever forget. One day in the Middle Ages, her brain reached capacity. From then on, forming memories caused her pain. I plucked an ugly tune about it, shouting its words until my throat was raw.

  Ike Senior came outside. “You’ll shred your vocal cords,” he said, sitting down next to me.

  “Least of my worries,” I said, baiting him to inquire about others.

  “You were speaking to Gracie.”

  “I was sort of meditating.”

  “Hear of that family in Siberia, only learned yesterday about World War Two?”

  “I guess you’ll study their technique?”

  “Well, it’s harder these days. Used to be, you just crossed the state line.”

  “I need a new passport,” I said, thinking he would be curious to hear why.

  “Under the bed you slept in, there’s a shoebox.”

  When I stood up to go fetch it, he laughed. “What’s funny?”

  “You are. Think we’re in a spy movie?”

  “Screw you,” I said, but went to look anyway. I really did need a passport. And there really was a shoebox, but it held only slide photographs from decades ago.

  Holding them up to the light, I saw no Shadwell sisters, no people either, only calico cats. Dozens were sunbathing on the porch of that house where we were hiding. Thirty in one picture. I couldn’t help feeling some calamity had wiped them out, or they’d fled en masse from the same energy feeding my new songs.

  I lay down to write. Drinking, I puzzled out a refrain, a sort of theme. It’s good Ike Senior doesn’t care about me, I thought; this way I can focus. I jotted down titles. Elegy, about elephants mourning. Logic Train, about acumen. Hannibal, about vampire elephants still haunted by trauma from the Punic Wars. The lyrics came as fast as I could write them down. I’d tapped a vein, I could feel the songs surging with a voltage I’d never harnessed. The yearning was pitched not toward gauzy maudlin people but toward real people. If I could record and mix these somehow, I thought, and send the CD off in a predated package, I could die in a disaster of my own.

  Night had fallen by the time I heard through the wall a familiar rhythm that I couldn’t quite place. There was muffled talk, too, so I laid down my guitar and went to the kitchen. I found my father and Clara playing poker with three strangers.

  “You’re in time to buy in,” said Ike Senior.

  “James’s kid,” said Clara, as it struck me: they were listening to the trumpet solo of my latest single, “Empty Harbor.”

  “Fifty bucks, James’s kid,” said the beefy redhead to my father’s left, who looked familiar.

  My pulse at cocaine tempo, I sat down between the other two men and laid down fifty dollars. My father gave me a set of chips. The song’s climax about lying drunk girls crescendoed into my vow to drown in Pacific water, and then damned if “Denouement” didn’t come on, final track of the album.

  “Who put this on?” I asked.

  “Mack,” said Ike Senior, pointing to the bearded professor-type to my right.

  “My girlfriend downloads stuff,” said Mack.

  “Porn,” said the black guy to my left, and the redhead guffawed as if that was funny. I had met the redhead at the bar. Frank was his name. And the table had expanded—the sort of unreal detail that jars you awake from nightmares, except there was only a leaf in the table.

  “Singer sounds cute,” Clara said.

  “Something less gay would be nice,” said Ike Senior, reaching back to the dial of what I saw was a satellite radio.

  My dirge about the feral child Kaspar Hauser gave way to Merle Haggard. I calmed down. Mack dealt me a pa
ir of kings.

  “Dollar,” my father said.

  Everyone pushed a white chip into the pot but Clara, who stood and turned the dial back to my song. “I folded so I could put this back on,” she explained.

  It occurred to me they would think it a tell, how my thumping heart made my shirt flutter as in a breeze, but I didn’t care about my kings. Not even with a flop of king-five-four. Sirius XM won’t play you twice in a row without a reason to. Newsworthiness, for instance. This is the end, I thought, placing a bet only in order to look normal. It got raised and matched until the pot held seventy-five dollars. For the turn Mack produced another five, giving me a full house. Meanwhile “Denouement” had reached its unsubtle pinnacle. I squeezed the table leg and kept matching the outrageous bets.

  The river came: another five.

  “All in,” Ike Senior said.

  “See you,” I replied, pushing my chips in. The song was about to end, and with it my freedom. You didn’t have to know Ike Senior well to see he would bluff his fortune away, swindle his lover, give up his son all in a day’s work. But then the music stopped and no deejay said anything, and he laid down a nine-five off-suit.

  “You know how a Dolly Parton works,” he said, raking in his winnings.

  Clara unplugged a phone from the stereo. Merle Haggard came back on.

  It goes without saying that I’d been drinking all day. In my relief I drank more. I bought back in for fifty dollars. No one knows what I’ve been thinking, I told myself, not even Gracie. The wall had blocked her, and she wasn’t real. None of this seemed real. Aisling had never been alive.

  I’m rich, I can afford lawyers, I was thinking when I heard the word ivory, and turned to hear Mack whisper to Frank, “A million, in dollars.”

  “As opposed to what?” said Frank, which was when I recalled Haley referring to a husband by that name.

  “Yen, retard,” said Mack.

  The ivory markets, I thought with alarm.

  I tried to meet Clara’s eyes, but somehow she wasn’t at the table.

  “Is there something to eat?” I said, because I needed to sober up.

  “Tired of eating my friend’s wife?” said Mack.

  “In my home, my son eats who he wants,” said Ike Senior.

  “Give me a second,” I told them, standing up.

  “Take all the time in the world.”

  I walked to the refrigerator, found it empty. Behind me the men were laughing. The game had stopped; they were just sitting there scheming. I needed to figure this out. Was it for the smooth running of a con that Frank had let me borrow his wife? Protect Gracie, I thought, but I’d known her only two days. Look at the girl I’d loved for years.

  Truth was, I’d have struck Gracie dead along with every elephant if it would have brought Aisling back.

  It occurred to me to put this in one of my songs, specify in the liner notes that a fraction of profits would go to the sanctuary.

  I went looking for my notepad. Along the way, I got lost, because I awoke in daylight with the words 1st blackout written on my hand. First blackout, I lay thinking, awaiting the headache. This latest one might have been my seven hundredth or two thousandth, but I recalled one thing, the tusks. Frank and Mack had mentioned ivory. What I didn’t recall was who Frank and Mack were or why they knew my songs. If they’d seen the Jaguar. If I’d forged any plan.

  In hope of dredging up useful memories, I thought back to my first blackout, on New Year’s Day, 2000.

  On New Year’s Eve, 1999, Ike Senior had arrived in Port Arthur after some years absent and announced he was kidnapping me. “If I’ve been praying for it, that’s not the verb,” my mother replied, so it came to pass that my namesake drove me across cypress swamps and oil fields to New Orleans where he said, “A whiskey before the end of the world?”

  To shake my head no set bargaining in motion: you choose the label, you keep the change, we’ll sit by the river—except my long-lost father gestured not to a river but to a steep, grassy hill that rose twice my height above our dry position. As if it took no effort to fool a twelve-year-old. As if you could do it in your sleep. So I couldn’t help retorting, “That’s a hill, you sorry bastard, there’s no river.”

  Ike Senior looked older to me then than he did twelve years later on the elephant farm. He aged years before my eyes, this man I self-consciously believed had broken my heart. “I’ve lied a few times, but give a sorry bastard a last chance.”

  Chanting fuck fuck fuck fuck to staunch my hemorrhage of sympathy, I followed my father upslope. Let’s get this chance over with, I was thinking as we crested the grassy hill to behold a sea lapping at a shore higher than the city.

  “Gasp away,” he said, earning several more years of my trust. Forever after, if I saw the French Quarter in photographs, my shame rose to that hundred-year floodplain where I’d apologized for hours on end. “Don’t dwell on it,” he kept telling me that night, which didn’t reassure me until my first sip of Jim Beam. Suddenly it felt like the sun was bursting into the night to pour energy into me. It made Ike Senior happy, I saw as much, because we were feeling it together. Years later I would tell Spin I’d found my tribe at 11:59 that night, when a beautiful song I’d never heard beckoned from a bar and he said, “Neil Young.”

  Fireworks exploded above us. “Who’ll be the first chick to suck my cock in the year 2000?” shouted a man in the crowd.

  “Tawdry ending to the century,” remarked Ike Senior, a statement around which I would build an EP a decade later. We began the new century on a terrace of the Margaritaville Café. “If this were a film,” he said, “I’d take you to meet the whores.”

  “Huh?” I asked, as he poured bourbon into our Cokes.

  “One of those flicks where the old man calls his kid ‘Kid.’”

  I felt a thrill at this open maw of uncharted country, but I was afraid.

  “The father wants to help his son come of age, but the son starts hating him. Father shown to be a failure.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t the whores worry it’s a sting?”

  “Oh,” I said, imagining myself drunk the next day, drunk through high school. If the whores didn’t worry, it was because they were drunk.

  “Has your mother said what I do?”

  “You’re a con man,” I whispered.

  “Folks can’t hear you.”

  “You’re a con man,” I said a little louder, still afraid of him, trying to lock eyes with any wasted stranger.

  “No one but you knows it.”

  “Mom knows.”

  “She guessed it. To you, I’m admitting it.” And just like that, he drew me in. “Who else can I trust? No one, that’s who else. And I’ll tell you what, Junior, not an hour goes by when I don’t miss you so much.”

  Tears sprang to his eyes. How could I have judged them to be false, when after years of absence he sat before me weeping from both eyes?

  “I want to live with you,” I said.

  “There’s stuff to learn.”

  “I’ll learn it.”

  “I don’t want you becoming a mark.”

  “Teach me,” I said, and he began to. As he instructed me in spotting marks, I buzzed with pride. My vision was tilting to one side. Although I didn’t know it, my brain had ceased making new memories. Did I like girls? Did I like penthouse suites and poker? Yes, yes, and yes, but before we could enjoy those things, I awoke at sunrise on the levee slope, with trash strewn around me.

  My father stood over me with a brown paper bag. “Feel like a doughnut?”

  I took one. I could smell bilgewater, and feel shadow memories lurking in my pounding head as I leaned to puke.

  He tossed the bag down. “It’s been fun,” he said, “but we’d best head home.”

  “Yeah, I’ve had fun,” I replied, standing up, and out of shame or stubbornness I’d been saying similar things ever since. If someone had been around to tell it to that morning after the poker game, I’d ha
ve said it again.

  Licking a finger to scrub 1st blackout off my hand, I went and found my father snoring in a trundle bed. It was a relief that he was alone. After all, what would I have said to Clara? Hide your elephants?

  I would have broken her heart, I thought, wandering out into a windy, cold day. Gracie stood by the fence, eating some clover. I walked down to her.

  “We need to get you out of here,” I said.

  What’s it to you? she seemed to ask, raising her head.

  “You’re in a lot of danger.”

  So are all elephants, she said.

  My dad cheats people and lies.

  Maybe I cheat and lie too.

  For a moment I was shaken by déjà vu. My next album’s about you, I told her, at which point the tenor shifted in our exchange.

  All along she had communicated without words, but now she conveyed no feelings either. She just put up a shield so my feelings would bounce back at me, like my concern that was driven only by my new songs, and my desire to cancel out bad deeds with good ones. “No, it’s not like that,” I said, fiddling nervously in my pockets. I felt a cell phone, not my own.

  I looked in its music library. Both my albums were there.

  “Listen,” I said, cuing “Four-Leaf Cover,” because I needed Gracie to perceive the sadness I felt about other people’s pain. Ugly or no, the song will demonstrate it, I thought until a calliope horn sounded, redolent of circus sleaze.

  Who was worse to an elephant: a killer of young women or a child who begged to see the circus? I skipped to the next track, “Mom.” “She killed herself,” I said to explain the ugliness of “Mom.” Gracie was still plucking weeds. Who fucking cares? she seemed to ask, until I recalled that she’d heard me play it already, on the porch.

  Then it hit me: she recalled it today because she would recall it forever.

  By playing the song, I wasn’t just making Gracie like me, I was stashing my catalogue in elephant memory.

  I’ve always believed life has no value if no one will remember you in a hundred years. Until now, though, I’d been thinking only in terms of people. Now I saw that Gracie was my portal into eternity: if elephants survived, elephants would remember me. So I knew I had to level with her, if I wanted to get on top of my story.