Ishmael

Ishmael shrugged. “As always, you’re a pessimist. Perhaps you’re right. I hope you’re wrong.”

“I hope so too, believe me.”

12

Even though we’d only been talking an hour or so, Ishmael seemed limp with exhaustion. I made tentative noises about leaving, but he evidently had something more on his mind.

At last he looked up and said: “You understand that I’m finished with you.”

I think it would have felt about the same if he’d plunged a knife into my stomach.

He closed his eyes for a moment. “Pardon me. I’m tired and not expressing myself well. I didn’t mean that the way it came out.”

I couldn’t answer him, but I managed a nod.

“I mean only that I’ve finished what I set out to do. As a teacher, I have nothing more to give you. Even so, I would be pleased to count you as a friend.”

Again, I couldn’t manage more than a nod.

Ishmael shrugged and looked around bleary–eyed, as if he’d momentarily forgotten where he was. Then he reared back and exploded in a magnificently juicy sneeze.

“Look,” I said, getting up, “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

He gave me a long, dark stare; he was wondering what the devil more I expected of him but was too weary to ask. He sent me on my way with a grunt and a valedictory nod.

THIRTEEN

1

That night, before falling asleep in my motel bed, I finalized my plan. It was a bad plan and I knew it, but I couldn’t think of anything better. Whether he liked it or not (and I knew he wouldn’t), I had to rescue Ishmael from that goddamned carnival.

It was a bad plan in another sense, in that it depended entirely on me and my meager resources. I had only one hole–card, and if I had to turn it, I figured it would probably be a deuce.

At nine the next morning I was in a small town about halfway home, driving around in hopes of finding someplace to have breakfast, when a “too hot” warning lit up on my dashboard, forcing me to pull over. I popped the hood and checked the oil: oil okay. Checked the water reservoir: dry. No problem—a canny traveler, I carry extra water. I topped off the reservoir, got going again, and two minutes later watched the warning light blink back on. I made it to a filling station where the sign said “Mechanic on Duty” but where no mechanic was on duty. Even so, the guy who was on duty knew thirty times as much as I do about cars and was willing to poke around a little.

“The radiator fan isn’t working,” he told me after about fifteen seconds. He showed it to me and explained that ordinarily it only comes on when start–and–stop city driving makes the engine overheat.

“Could it be a blown fuse?”

“Could be,” he said. But he ruled that out by trying a new one, which did no better than the old one. He said, “Hold on,” and fetched a pen–type probe, which he used to test the plug that connected the fan to the electrical system. “You got fire to the fan,” he told me, “so it looks like it’s the fan itself that’s shot.”

“Where can I get a new one?”

“Here in town, nowhere,” he told me. “Not on a Saturday.”

I asked him if I could get home with it as it was.

“I think so,” he said, “if you don’t have to do a lot of city driving to get there. Or if you stop and let it cool down whenever it starts to overheat.”

I made it back and got the car into a dealership service garage well before noon and left it there, even though they assured me that nothing at all would happen to it before Monday morning. I had only one errand to run, and that was to visit one of those dear little money machines, where I proceeded to plunder all my cash resources—checking, savings, credit cards. When I walked into my apartment, I was carrying twenty–four hundred dollars—and was otherwise a pauper.

I didn’t intend to think about the problems ahead, because they were just too tough. How do you get a half– ton gorilla out of a cage that he doesn’t care to vacate? How do you get a half–ton gorilla into the back seat of a car that he doesn’t care to ride in? Would a car with a half–ton gorilla in the back seat even function?

As this indicates, I’m a one–step–at–a–time kind of guy. An improvisor. Somehow or another, I would get Ishmael stashed in the back seat of my car, then I’d figure out what to do next. Presumably I’d bring him back to my apartment—and then again figure out what to do next. In my experience, you never really know how you’re going to handle a problem until you actually have it.

2

They called at nine on Monday morning to tell me what was what with the car. The fan had gone out because it had been overtaxed; it had been overtaxed because the whole damn cooling system was shot. A lot of work was needed, about six hundred dollars’ worth. I groaned and told them to carry on. They said it’d probably be ready around two o’clock, they’d call. I said, skip the call, I’d pick the car up when I could; the fact is, I’d already abandoned the car. I couldn’t afford the repairs, and the damn thing probably wouldn’t be up to carrying Ishmael anyway.

I rented a van.

You will doubtless wonder why in hell I didn’t do that in the first place. The answer is, I just didn’t think of it. I’m limited, okay? I get used to doing things in a certain way, and that doesn’t include taking trips in rented vans.

Two hours later I pulled up at the carnival lot and said, “Damn.”

The carnival had moved on.

Something—maybe a premonition—prompted me to get out and poke around. The lot seemed much too small to have held nineteen rides, twenty–four games, and a sideshow. I wondered if I could find the site of Ishmael’s cage without any landmarks to guide me. My feet remembered enough to get me to the vicinity, and my eyes did the rest, for there was a visible trace: the blankets I’d bought for him had been left behind, had been dumped in a messy pile along with other things I recognized: a few of his books, a pad of drawing paper, still showing the maps and diagrams he’d made to illustrate the stories of Cain and Abel, Leavers and Takers, and the poster from his office, now rolled up and secured by a rubber band.

I was stirring it up and sorting it out in a bewildered way when my aged bribee turned up. He grinned and held up a big black plastic bag to show me what he was doing there: clearing away some of the hundreds of pounds of trash that had been left behind. Then, when he saw the pile of stuff at my feet, he looked up at me and said, “It was the pneumonia.”

“What?”

“It was the pneumonia that got him—your friend the ape.”

I stood there blinking at him, unable to fathom what he was getting at.

“Vet came Saturday night and shot him full of stuff, but it was too late. Passed off this morning around seven