Ishmael

I considered hiring a private investigator. Then I rehearsed in my head the kind of conversation it would take to get started, and decided to skip it. But because I couldn’t just up and quit on it, I made a phone call to the local zoo and asked if they happened to have a lowland gorilla in stock. They didn’t. I said I happened to have one I needed to get rid of and did they want it, and they said no. I asked if they could suggest someone who might want it, and they said no, not really. I asked them what they’d do if they absolutely had to get rid of a gorilla. They said there might be a laboratory or two that would take it as a specimen, but I could tell they weren’t really concentrating.

One thing was obvious: Ishmael had some friends I didn’t know about—perhaps former pupils. The only way I could think of to reach them was the way he had probably reached them—through an ad in the personals:

FRIENDS OF ISHMAEL: Another friend has lost

contact. Please call and tell me where he is.

The ad was a mistake, because it gave me an excuse to turn my brain off. I waited for it to appear, then I waited for it to run for a week, then I waited a few more days for a call that didn’t come, and in that way two weeks passed during which I didn’t lift a finger.

When I finally faced the fact that I wasn’t going to get any response to the ad, I had to look for a new heading, and it took me about three minutes to come up with it. I called city hall and was soon talking to the person who would issue a permit to a traveling show if one turned up and wanted to squat on a vacant lot for a week.

Was there one in town at the moment?

No.

Had there been any in the past month?

Yes, the Darryl Hicks Carnival, with nineteen rides, twenty–four games, and a sideshow, had been here and was gone now for a couple weeks or thereabouts.

Anything like a menagerie?

Don’t recollect anything like that being listed.

Maybe an animal or two in the sideshow?

Dunno. Possible.

Next stop on its route?

No idea at all.

It didn’t matter. A dozen calls tracked it to a town forty miles north, where it had stayed a week and moved on. Assuming it would keep on moving north, I located its next stop and present location with a single call. And yes, it now boasted of having “Gargantua, the world’s most famous gorilla”—a critter that I personally knew had been dead for something like forty years.

For you or anyone with reasonably modern equipment, the Darryl Hicks Carnival would have been ninety minutes away, but for me, in a Plymouth that came out the same year as Dallas, it was two hours. When I got there, it was a carnival. You know. Carnivals are like bus stations: Some are bigger than others, but they’re all alike. The Darryl Hicks was two acres of the usual sleaze masquerading as merriment, full of ugly people, noise, and the stink of beer, cotton candy, and popcorn. I waded through it in search of the sideshow.

I have the impression that sideshows as I remember them from boyhood (or maybe from movies in boyhood) are nearly extinct in the modern carnival world; if so, the Darryl Hicks has elected to ignore the trend. When I arrived, a barker was putting a fire–eater through his paces, but I didn’t stay to watch. There was plenty to see inside—the usual collection of monsters, freaks, and geeks, a bottle–biter, a pincushion, a tattooed fat lady, all the rest, which I ignored.

Ishmael was in a dim corner as far from the entrance as it was possible to be, with two ten–year–olds in attendance.

“I’ll bet he could tear those bars right out if he wanted to,” one observed.

“Yeah,” said the other. “But he doesn’t know that.”

I stood there giving him a smoldering look, and he sat there placidly paying no attention to anything until the boys moved off.

As a couple minutes passed, I went on staring and he went on pretending I wasn’t there. Then I gave up and said, “Tell me this. Why didn’t you ask for help? I know you could have. They don’t evict people overnight.”

He gave no sign that he’d heard me.

“How the hell do we go about getting you out of here?”

He went on looking through me as if I were just another volume of air.

I said, “Look, Ishmael, are you sore at me or something?”

At last he gave me an eye, but it wasn’t a very friendly one. “I didn’t invite you to make yourself my patron,” he said, “so kindly refrain from patronizing me.”

“You want me to mind my own business.”

“In a word, yes.”

I looked around helplessly. “You mean you actually want to stay here?”

Once again Ishmael’s eye turned icy.

“All right, all right,” I told him. “But what about me?”

“What about you?”

“Well, we weren’t finished, were we.”

“No, we weren’t finished.”

“So what are you going to do? Do I just become failure number five, or what?”

He sat blinking at me sullenly for a minute or two. Then he said, “There is no need for you to become failure number five. We can go on as before.”

At this point a family of five strolled up to have a look at the most famous gorilla in the world: mom, dad, two girls, and a toddler comatose in his mother’s arms.

“So we can just go on as before, can we?” I said, and not in a whisper. “That strikes you as feasible, does it?”

The family of visitors suddenly found me much more interesting than “Gargantua,” who, after all, was just sitting there looking morose.

I said, “Well, where shall we begin? Do you remember where we left off?”

Intrigued, the visitors turned to see what response this would evoke from Ishmael. When it came, of course, only I could hear it: “Shut up.”

“Shut up? But I thought we were going to go on just as before.”

With a grunt, he shuffled to the rear of the cage and gave us all a look at his back. After a minute or so the visitors decided I deserved a dirty look; they gave it to me and ambled off to view the mummified body of a man shot to death in the Mojave around the end of the Civil War.

“Let me take you back,” I said.

“No thanks,” he replied, turning around but not coming back up to the front of the cage. “Incredible as it may seem to you, I would rather live this way than on anyone’s largess, even yours.”

“It would only be largess until we worked out something else.”

“Something else being what? Doing stunts on the Tonight show? A nightclub act?”

“Listen. If I can get in touch with the others, maybe we can work out some kind of joint effort.”

“What the devil are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the people who helped you get this far. You didn’t do it by yourself, did you?”

He stared at me balefully from the shadows. “Go away,” he snarled. “Just go away and leave me alone.” I went away and left him alone.

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