Leaving Time(97)
Then I start reading bumper stickers. There are some I expect (AMERICAN BY BIRTH, SOUTHERN BY THE GRACE OF GOD) and some that make me feel sick to my stomach (SAVE A DEER, SHOOT A QUEER). But I am looking for hints, clues, the way Virgil might have looked. Something that will tell me more about the family who owns that vehicle.
Finally, on one pickup truck, I find a sticker that says PROUD OF MY COLUMBIA HONOR STUDENT! This is a jackpot on two counts: There is a flatbed I can hide in, and Columbia—according to the map at the Greyhound terminal—is en route to Hohenwald. I put my foot on the rear bumper, ready to hoist myself into the flatbed and lie down when no one is looking.
“What are you doing?”
I’ve been so busy canvassing the people on the street to see if they are paying attention, I don’t see the little boy sneak up behind me. He is probably about seven years old, and he is missing so many of his teeth that the remaining ones look like headstones in a graveyard.
I crouch down, thinking of all the babysitting I’ve done over the years. “I’m playing hide-and-seek. Wanna help?”
He nods.
“Cool. But that means you have to keep a secret. Can you do that? Can you not tell your mom or dad that I’m hiding here?”
The boy jerks his chin up and down, emphatic. “Then do I get to have a turn?”
“Totally,” I promise, and I hike myself into the flatbed.
“Brian!” a woman calls, huffing as she runs around the corner, a teenage girl sulking behind her with her arms crossed. “Get over here!”
The metal bed is as hot as the surface of the sun. I can literally feel the blisters forming on my palms and the backs of my legs. I poke my head up the tiniest bit, so that I can make eye contact with him, and I put my finger to my pursed lips, the universal sign for Ssssh.
His mother is closing in on us, so I lie down and cross my arms and hold my breath.
“My turn next,” Brian says.
“Who are you talking to?” his mother demands.
“My new friend.”
“I thought we talked about lying,” she says, and she unlocks the cab door.
I feel bad for Brian, not just because his mother doesn’t believe him, but because I have no plans to give him a turn at hide-and-seek. I’ll be long gone by then.
Someone inside slides open the back window of the truck cab for ventilation. Through it, I can hear the radio as Brian and his sister and his mom head down the interstate toward, I hope, Columbia, Tennessee. I close my eyes as the sun bakes me and pretend I am on a beach, not a slab of metal.
The songs that come on are about driving trucks like this one, or about girls with hearts of gold who’ve been done wrong. They all sound the same to me. My mother had an aversion to banjos so strong it bordered on allergy. I remember her turning off the radio every time a singer had the slightest twang in her voice. Could a woman who hated country-western music have chosen to make a new home within striking distance of the Grand Ole Opry? Or had she used that dislike as a smoke screen, figuring that anyone who knew her would never expect her to settle down in the heart of country-westernland?
As I bob along in the flatbed, I think:
1. Banjos actually are kind of cool.
2. Maybe people change.
ALICE
It’s really not a stretch to say that, for elephants, mating is a song and dance.
As in all communication for those animals, vocalizations are paired with gestures. On an ordinary day, for example, a matriarch might make a “let’s go” rumble, but at the same time she will position her body in the direction she wants to take the herd.
The sounds of mating are more complicated, however. In the wild we hear the pulsing, guttural musth rumbles of males—deep and low, puttering, what you might imagine if you drew a bow made of hormones against an instrument of anger. Males might produce a musth rumble when they are challenged by another male, when they’re surprised by an approaching vehicle, when they are searching for mates. The sounds differ from elephant to elephant and are accompanied by ear waves and frequent urine dribbling.
When a musth male is vocalizing, the whole herd of females will start to chorus. Those sounds attract not just the male who started the conversation but all the eligible bachelors, so that the females in estrus now have the chance to choose the most attractive mate—and by this I don’t mean the one with the best comb-over but rather the male who is most likely to survive—a healthy, older elephant. A female that doesn’t like a particular male might run away from him, even if he has already mounted her, to find someone better. But, of course, that presumes there’s someone better to be found.
For this reason, several days before she comes into estrus, a female gives an estrus roar—a powerful call that brings even more boys to the yard, and thus a greater range of mates from which to select. Finally, when she allows herself to be mated, she sings an estrus song. Unlike the musth rumbles of males, these songs are lyrical and repetitive, throaty purrs that rise quickly and then trail off. The female flaps her ears loudly and secretes from her temporal glands. After the mating, the other females in her family join in, a symphony of roars and rumbles and trumpets like those they’d make at any other socially exciting moment—a birth, or a reunion .