Читать книгу Fear No Evil - John Davis Gordon - Страница 10

It was two o’clock in the morning.

The circus gear lay abandoned on the grounds of the Bronx Zoo, a mess of barrels and seesaws and hoops and ladders.

Fifty miles away, on Highway 22, the two big circus trucks were hammering through New Jersey. The Western-style letters, The World’s Greatest Show, had been hastily spray-painted out.

In the back of the first truck the three elephants from the zoo were squeezed in with the three elephants from The World’s Greatest Show. The compartments of the other truck held all the lions and the tiger from the circus, the tiger from the zoo, the circus bears, the chimpanzees and the gorillas. Most of them were lying down to steady themselves, wide-eyed in the darkness, their adrenalin pumping.

In the cabs, the engines were loud, the radios playing. The driver of the second truck was a big strong man with a big gut, a wide face and straight black hair. Until an hour ago he had worked for The World’s Greatest Show as an animal keeper and driver. He was tense, but sometimes a little smile played on his wide mouth, sometimes he whistled distractedly along with the radio. His name was Charles Buffalohorn and he was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian. On the sleeping bunk behind his seat was a knapsack, stuffed full, a sleeping bag strapped to it. These, plus maybe a few hundred dollars in the bank, were all he owned in the whole wide world.

Four hundred yards ahead were the taillights of the other truck. David Jordan’s face was gaunt, his eyes frequently darting to the wing mirror, watching the truck behind. Every time the music stopped on the radio he tensed for a newsflash. Now and again he changed stations, listening hard.

Up on his bunk there was also a knapsack and a plastic bag containing a pig’s carcass, bought that day from a wholesale butcher. On the seat beside him was Champ, the male circus chimpanzee, fast asleep. Champ was supposed to live with the other chimpanzees, but he liked to sleep in the cab with the young man, whenever he could get away with it.

On the floor of the cab slept a big furry dog. He looked like a husky, or maybe a German shepherd, but his face was almost pure wolf.

The elephants were crammed tight, great gray flanks pressing. Sometimes a trunk found its way out of the congestion and groped around, sniffing and feeling, and then it was a difficult business to recurl it, squeezing and shoving. The three circus elephants were dismayed by the strangers suddenly in their midst, for instead of the enormous territory an elephant needs, they had this piece of truck, their only permanent place on this earth.

But Jamba, the old cow elephant from the zoo, stood quietly, forehead jammed between two massive rumps, eyes blinking in the dark, but her heart thumping in excitement. Because the man she loved had come back, had taken her out of her cage amid the electric excitement of the Elephant House and out through the big double doors into the starry night. Suddenly she had been in the open, fresh night air and the smell of the earth all about her, and she was running beside him, his hand holding her trunk tip, running away from the Elephant House into the wide open world, and with each lumbering footfall her incredulous excitement had thumped harder and higher.

And squeezed into the back of the truck, squashed between elephants’ legs and bellies, wide-eyed and wheezing, was the big, fat, old hippopotamus called Sally.

For, back in the gloom of the Elephant House, with the sounds of the young man heaving open the cages and then leading the elephants out one by one—excited silhouettes lumbering into the wonderful starry night, all that animal eagerness in the air—in those long, tense minutes the old hippopotamus had sensed what was going to happen, that the man was taking them away with him forever. Each time old Sally had thought that her turn would be next, and she had stood there massively quivering, nostrils dilated, lumbering around her cage in agitation and anticipation. Then he had come up to her cage, and looked at her standing there huffing and trembling with excitement, and he had said hoarsely:

‘I’m sorry, Sally … I’m terribly sorry, my old hippo …’

Then he had turned and walked quickly back through the big double door, and he was gone.

And suddenly she had understood: that she was being left behind, he was not taking her with him after all; and up her old chest there swelled an incredulous rumble-cry of anguish, and her square mouth gaped and her eyes rolled and then out broke her hippopotamus bark of heartbreak and appeal, a croak that erupted in long staccato grunts from the bottom of her old belly, and David Jordan had stopped.

He had reopened the door, and the starlight had shone in again, and Sally had lunged against her bars in incredulous joy, snorting and blundering, her eyes rolling wide.

‘All right, Sally … we’ll do the best we can …’