These carefully selected articles, poems, interviews and essays — all written exclusively for this publication — appeal to readers with wide-ranging interests and a love for the literary.&nbsp;
<blockquote>ESSAYS: by Rebecca Chace, Ellen Collett, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Liska Jacobs, Max Nelson, Jeremy N. Smith, and Angela Woodward.
POETRY: Josh Bell, Traci Brimhall, Willa Carroll, Nathalie Handal, Morgan Parker, and Diane Seuss.
SHORTS: Sally Ashton, Karen E. Bender, Sven Birkerts, Dionisia Morales, Ben Pack, Robert Anthony Siegel, Ira Sukrungruang, and Kim Young.
ARTIST PORTFOLIOS: Miljohn Ruperto and Rini Yun Keagy.</blockquote>

J.C. AND O.J. by Kannan Mahadevan

The following is a feature article from the LARB Quarterly Journal: Winter 2016 edition. To pick up your copy of the Journal, <a href="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/membership/">become a member of the Los Angeles Review of Books</a> or order a copy at <a href="http://www.amazon.com/LARB-Quarterly-Journal-Winter-2016/dp/1940660262/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1456269289&amp;sr=1-2&amp;keywords=larb+quarterly+journal">amazon.com</a>.
¤
To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior. 
— Joan Didion, “Los Angeles Notebook”
The hot afternoon wore on.
— Maritta Wolff, Sudden Rain
 
I RIDE THE EXPO LINE into downtown from Crenshaw, where our apartment is — with its bedroom window overlooking Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. The heat is worse here than anywhere in the city, the wind incessant. At night the helicopters and sirens shriek like kettles. There are searchlights on our floors — pale, suspicious ghosts. Then a bus rattling the one window so we think it might break. The guy beneath us, who everyone calls Guy, works on the oil derricks out in the middle of the bay — he’s gone for weeks at a time. When he comes home, sending the cockroaches scurrying, he tells us even the sea is boiling.
On the train the AC pumps so loud we have to turn our music way up just to hear it. It’s a relief though — if we breathe through our mouths and close our eyes we could be in a museum or some cold library. Also don’t touch anything. Everyone is sweating, bare limbed. When the train lurches I rub against scratchy thighs — a bit oily. This would be unacceptable if I weren’t headed downtown to the bookstore, where uglier, nastier things will brush up against me. Downtown will be the human stench — their burnt leathery smell, sometimes sharp and smelling of patchouli, sometimes unmasked, the bare earthy sourness between belly folds and underarms — the backs of legs, the unwashed hair, the acrid stench of human roasting.
When the doors open at 7th and Metro, I climb the stairs with everyone else. The air in the tunnels is already breathy — like being in the belly of some slumbering beast — but outside the sidewalks are blistery. It’s the kind of heat that socks you right in the face. The wind would almost be a relief if it didn’t drive everyone half-mad. The women on street corners, breasts spilling out of their tops, fight with anyone who looks at them sideways — I’ve seen them push people in front of cars. And then there are the men who lie on the sidewalks, shoeless, feet dark and crusty, pulled up almost to their stomachs like a baby in utero. They look at you, really eye you, faces pockmarked and dogged — these are the broken faces of those who sleep, eat, live here, down in the dirt — weary of change because change never brought them anything good.
My job at the bookstore is to buy books. It’s a new and used store, and we get most of our used books from the public. We wear gloves because when it’s hot like this the bugs come out — and because books are never stored anywhere pleasant. It’s always the garage or shed with rats and mold. The silverfish are first, and we squash them with a stapler. Then, spiders small like ants or sometimes so large we see hair on their backs. For some reason the big spiders — some the size of a silver dollar — are not very quick, only moving when the shadow of the stapler comes down and splat. It’s the baby cockroaches we watch out for; they are quick — quick enough to run up a gloved hand, onto a bare arm.
After work my husband and I don’t go home. We wait until it’s cooled down. We are expert waiters. First while working on bachelor degrees — two community colleges — then it was off to San Luis Obispo for him while I continued at UCLA. When he took a year off, got a job at a fancy pizza restaurant, we waited while paying down credit card debt one month at a time. Then it was waiting through CSUN, the three years he spent driving the impossible 405 — up and down, back and forth. He waits now for a raise, a better job. And me, waiting for my writing to take off, for that one publication where something might change.
So we’re good at waiting, and we wait as long as possible before going home. We don’t want the hot chicken skin smell coming from Ralphs, how it rides the thin wind easier than anything. We don’t want to open the door to the stale air, the cheap paint and carpet smells. To find American cockroaches — bigger than their German counterparts, they crawl out from the pipes to die under the furniture. We don’t want to see the ring of Ajax around the bed, or where our couch used to be. Once, after a long day, we came home to find them hiding between the cushions — only hiding isn’t the right word. They were reigning, lording, over the couch. That couch is in the alley now.
Instead, we drive to Pasadena or out to Santa Monica, to the groomed lawns, the immaculate properties that come with privilege. In these neighborhoods we close our eyes, listen to sprinklers. When was the last rain? Look at this picture of Lake Shasta, look how the boats sit clustered in the center of what appears to be a dry salt bed. All of California is bright red on the weather maps — it looks painfully chapped. Maybe there will be rain in the spring.
We go to a happy hour — any happy hour, as long as it’s air-conditioned, with cheap strong drinks. At Islands, we drink tropical cocktails and eat what the bar menu calls “street tacos.” A fight breaks out in the parking lot between a man and a woman. The woman pushes her flat open palm in the man’s face. She curls her fingers a little, scraping at the skin. The wind scatters leaf litter and debris around their tousled legs. This feels surreal to us, like it’s happened before. Pinch me, I tell my husband. I’m having déjà vu.
We toss and turn at the apartment, one or both of us taking a sleeping pill. Then we wake and my husband heads west on the Expo Line to his design job and I head east to downtown. We ride the trains with their roaring AC and bare limbs and smells of sweet yeast — too much human flesh. One day there will be more than this, we tell ourselves, Just wait …
At the bookstore again, the fans are switched to high. We keep the windows closed. Sometimes we hear the wind whistle against them. We take our lunch breaks indoors because outside nerves flash. There have been two suicides downtown this week. They go into the tunnels, jump in front of the Red Line train as it pulls into Pershing Square. We see paramedics and police lights from the store. The customers get skittish and stay away. The regulars who come up from Skid Row smell worse on days like these. We check the weather forecast on our phones 12 days at a time. Winds again, record digits.
Just after lunch I see a woman in her 40s crossing Spring Street with her mother. They’ve braved the heat and wind and borrowed a dolly, and as I look the wind picks up, sending the mother’s skirt twisting. The mother says her daughter’s husband has died suddenly, would we like to look at the books? And then they come, 10, 12 boxes, and we go through every box. Here is his Boy Scout manual, his books on space and rocks, annotated in the margin in a careful hand. There are army and philosophy books, big coffee-table books on movies and Monet, travel books on Southeast Asia and Europe with tickets and receipts stuffed between the pages. A collection of encyclopedias, made worthless by water damage and age — Czechoslovakia still on the world map. And relationship books, too — How to Satisfy Her, How to Be a Better Husband. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Kama Sutra. Books on Photoshop and how to build a web page, Twitter and the stock market. We are sweating and when we reach the bottom and silverfish crawl out we do not jump. We step on them casually.
There are the usual classics: Hemingway and Nabokov and a few slim volumes of Rilke, which we put aside to buy. All in all we can’t offer much, I think it’s less than 60 dollars. The widow starts crying immediately. She too has sweated through her blouse; I can see the beige Maidenform bra with its tiny bows at the shoulders. It’s the wind, the damn wind, her mother tells us over and over. We offer water, find a chair. The widow sits and cries while we pay the mother, who folds the receipt to fit as if her wallet were a tiny coffin with a zipper. They donate the rest of the books and we throw most of them away. Some go up to the dollar room. It’s a sad thing, when you can survey a life — its systematic orbit — in one afternoon. Will this happen to us I wonder? It must — but what will we have if we wait too long, letting weeks slip into months. Has it been a year already? Where did 2015 go?
I take the Boy Scout notebook home with me. In a young unsure hand the dead man has charted the stars. I ride the train thinking that tonight there will be a brief reprieve from the wind. My husband and I will sit on our deck, facing eucalyptus trees where feral green parrots have gathered, chased out of San Diego by the fires. We won’t mind their noise; it will drown out the buses and music and brake sounds that rise up from the boulevard. We’ll drink iced cranberry juice with vodka, tense at anything that crawls or flies. Guy will have come home from the derricks; we’ll hear Sade from his apartment below. Every once in a while he’ll croon along, When am I gonna make a living, Ohhh …
We’ll point out Andromeda, Ursa Minor to each other, guess at Jupiter — the sky clear and large and infinite. We’ll talk about starlight, how it travels millions of years to reach us — how short and long time can be. Then the neighbor’s dog will begin to bark, and a whole chorus of dogs will soon join in. We’ll feel it in our sinuses, a slight tickle. A rustling high up in the treetops, a hot thin swell that slides over and under, round and round, another Santa Ana on its way.
¤
<a title="Liska Jacobs" href="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/liska-jacobs/">Liska Jacobs has been nominated for the Kirkwood Literary Prize in Fiction twice, selected for the New Short Fiction series, and is a recipient of a Squaw Valley Community of Writers’ scholarship. She is currently pursuing an MFA through the University of California, Riverside.</a>

Santa Anas

PANIC by Karen E. Bender

The following is a feature article from the LARB Quarterly Journal: Winter 2016 edition. To pick up your copy of the Journal, <a href="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/membership/">become a member of the Los Angeles Review of Books</a>.
1.
THIS MORNING I killed the family dog. Precious had become incontinent, her days spent on a damp doggie bed emitting horrible, keening noises unthinkable in a healthy golden retriever. The vet thought she might have a few good months left, and recommended a canine neurologist who, I found out, would have charged $1,500 for an initial consult and tests. The neurologist’s office was an hour away by freeway (two in rush hour), and with no appointment I’d wait, meaning nobody to pick up the kids from school. Weighing the options, I discovered (actually, I’d known for weeks) that a mobile euthanasia service, Down Dog (not their real name), would drive to my house and kill Precious on the spot. I disclose this so you can know the worst of me now. For the record, the pet in question was not a retriever, and what kind of idiot names a dog Precious?

Admitting I killed the family dog will cause problems that even layers of manufactured anonymity might not avert. Two of my oldest friends will certainly drop me without question. “Franny” owns rescues — one three-legged; two of them blind — and volunteers every weekend at an animal shelter in Philly. There, she bathes and walks the most vicious pit bulls and Rottweilers, animals living on the equivalent of Doggie Death Row. (Her name isn’t actually Franny, and she lives in a completely different city, maybe not even on the East Coast. She has way more than three dogs, but it’s true that most of them are maimed, making Franny a saint for dogs, but sort of a trial where people are concerned.) My other dog-loving friend, “Jen,” lives in upstate New York with only two, a Jack Russell terrier and a labradoodle, but sends me regular emails from each of them, like “Dizzy sends kisses!” or “Thelonius hearts you!” Dizzy and Thelonius have their own Facebook pages where they post clever comments beneath photos of themselves napping. Since neither of them can type or use a camera, they’ve pimped my friend “Jen” — an otherwise brilliant writer — into someone who pens first-person inanities about the joys of licking her privates.

I love dogs, but like Shakespeare wrote, “according to their station / nor more nor less.” Meaning, they are not my children, my substitute best friends, or my social crusade. I grew up in rural farm country where dogs were traditionally accorded an independent, outdoor life, less domestic “pets” than free-ranging members of the local fauna. I loved all of them, but never viewed them as members of the family. However, in this day and age, being unsentimental about dogs is not something you admit to publicly without repercussions. The prevailing wisdom says, if you can’t love a dog unconditionally there’s something really wrong with you.

About Precious: we raised her from babyhood — she and my youngest were born two weeks apart. They were toddlers together. According to dog-year math, Precious entered adolescence while my daughter was just mastering small motor skills, but “Terrible Two” is not so different from “Terrible Teen,” and they continued to mirror each other in ways that accentuated their affinities over their differences. Though a dog is not a child. Precious was an exceptionally fine dog. Good-natured, funny, and, toward the end, stoic in her suffering. If she never had a Facebook page, that fault is mine alone.
2.
I recently asked an acquaintance who conducts test screenings for Hollywood movie studios whether there was a single villain “archetype” universally despised by audiences, a character considered completely unredeemable. The answer I expected was the pedophile, the soulless corporate raider, or the ISIL terrorist with a suitcase dirty bomb and a hard-on for America. But she said that audiences are willing to show glimmers of sympathy and understanding for almost anyone onscreen except a character who is mean to animals. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Sexual attraction to children? Maybe the perpetrator was abused himself. But kick a dog, and be cinematically damned. And the poor actor required to kick (okay, mime kicking) a dog on-screen will statistically have limited luck getting cast afterward in “good guy” parts. I’d list some of these luckless big-screen dog-kickers, but you wouldn’t recognize their names. Unlike people who have sex with underage children (remember Roman Polanski?), committing animal cruelty on-screen is a career-killer.

“Kick the dog” as a character trope was first institutionalized in the early Hollywood westerns. Three bad guys ride into town. The first guns down the sheriff, the second kills his deputy, the third kicks a dog. Guess which one the hero shoots first? The cinematic corollary to “Kick the dog” is “Pat the dog,” an action deployed to make audiences warm to characters of dubious moral fiber. (“Pat the kitty,” by the way, sends the opposite message — think Mike Myers’s Dr. Evil or James Bond’s Blofeld — kitty-patters are straight-up freaks.) The idea being, a bad guy who pauses in his villainy to pat a dog can’t be all bad. “Pat the dog” signals his potential for redemption. And though he’s seldom redeemed, the hint of dog-loving adds depth and nuance to his character, and ensures our regret when he dies.

“Shoot the dog,” ironically, is a trope reserved for heroes. “Shoot the dog” happens when a beloved canine (think Old Yeller) contracts a horrific disease, and dog-killing can be framed as human sacrifice of the highest order. However, unlike Old Yeller, my Precious wasn’t conclusively facing an imminent and excruciating death. She hadn’t lost her mind, or reverted to the mouth-foaming savagery that made her a danger to herself and others. She was covered with lesions and had a presumptive tumor on her brain, which might not have killed her for months. Her frequent seizures were somewhat controlled by a massive daily dose of phenobarbital. Basically, she was old, incontinent, smelled bad, whined incessantly, and had become aggravatingly and expensively needy. My killing Precious was a choice.

A callous person does the math. Weighs the difficulty of daily caretaking against years of tail-wagging, front-door greetings; a urine-scented home against the opprobrium of friends; the cumulative cost of expensive drugs and tests against a hypothetical family vacation. Even now I’m justifying, offering excuses for calling Down Dog. Does it count that I deliberated for 24 hours before deciding? Or how untroubled I was about the choice until I contemplated how I’d be judged?
3.
My defining characteristic has always been a tendency to run headlong toward things that scare me. I suspect this is a mis-wiring of my primal fight-or-flight response: if something’s unknown or can hurt me, I move toward it rather than away. Friends choose to perceive this as “fearlessness,” (a flattering notion) but in truth, the way I manage fear is to hurl myself at the scary situation and see if I can survive. This ability to override the most basic of instincts comes down to the completely irrational notion that risk=reward. Go toward the burning building, the sound of gunfire, the thing that might unmake you! What possesses a person to follow such illogic?

A recent brain study at Caltech suggests the culprit is curiosity. Apparently our desire for abstract information stimulates the caudate, a region of the brain directly linked to the dopamine “rewards” pathway. Curiosity begins as a dopaminergic craving, something only satisfied via a neurologic brain trip that mentally chases what we don’t know. We get a “rush” (dopamine release) when curiosity transports us from ignorance to enlightenment.

In some of us, though, this curiosity outweighs caution. Or perhaps we are dopamine junkies. I attribute my counterintuitive flight-toward-fight to an overwhelming need to know, at any cost. Not a charming trait.

For several years I taught writing in a maximum security prison where I got to know a 19-year-old “thrill killer” (let’s call him “Daniel”) who’d murdered a stranger when they were both 15. Four years after the fact, “Daniel” was still bemused by his own actions. He confessed he hadn’t been angry, threatened, or sexually stimulated, he’d simply wanted to know what it felt like to end a life. “Curiosity,” he told me, “that’s why you kill the cat.”

&nbsp;
4.
In daily life, women are offered few opportunities to kill. Despite the existence of female combat troops and police officers, our overall biological business has always been to bring forth life. Women sit our share of deathbeds and witness the passing of those we love, but how often do we deliberately end a life? (I should confess I don’t consider abortion to be “killing” because I’ve had one. The procedure took place at a free clinic with protesters massed on the sidewalks. A man wearing a US Marine Corps “Death from Above” sweatshirt spit at me and angry women shouted “Killer!” Running that gauntlet was infinitely more traumatic than the D&amp;C that followed. We can argue endlessly about the point at which cells are sufficiently mature to constitute “life,” but if abortion is killing, let’s call it suicide rather than murder.)

Before Precious, I’d taken a life only once — while snowed in on a remote West Virginia mountaintop with my college boyfriend. We’d survived three days on a few cans of beans found in a cupboard, but on the fourth day, both cranky from hunger, my boyfriend shot a wild turkey in the clearing outside the cabin. Plucked and roasted, it was indescribably delicious, and because we needed food, killing it was justifiable. A day later, with plenty of bird left till the snow should thaw, we shot a deer. I say “we,” but there is only one finger on a trigger, and the shot was mine.

A good deer hunter aims for the heart and never takes a shot he’s unlikely to make. The heart-shot promises a clean and instant kill, the animal dead before its body hits the ground. I’d never hunted before. We’d brought along the rifle purely for protection after seeing bear tracks outside the cabin that morning. I was only carrying it because my boyfriend had knelt to tie a bootlace when the deer appeared between some trees.

He was huge. A white-tailed buck with a six-point rack and haunches freckled with spots the color of the snow. The air was so sharp and cold I saw a tiny puff of smoke exit his nostrils. Spotting us he froze, perhaps equating stillness with invisibility. The moment he exhaled again I fired. It was an unthinking action, born from adrenalin and something less defensible. The bullet winged the buck in the shoulder. He wobbled, pivoted, and made a sprint for the cover of a thicket.

Shooting is uncomplicated; killing something is not. A trigger-pull is different on a gun range when the target is a paper silhouette. No matter how good that shot, there is no frisson of exhilaration at the realization of having done something existentially wrong. Even if you’re an atheist, the choice to end another life is a fundamental usurpation of powers beyond our purview. I’ve always found it inexplicable that Adam and Eve paid a greater price for eating an apple than Cain did for killing a brother. Is curiosity really a greater crime than murder?

I will tell you this: taking life is a heady thing. Blasphemous and seductive. Only childbirth can compare, but it can’t unmake you in the same way. Life slipping from you is not a choice you make, but a surrender.

We tracked the deer’s blood and prints for what seemed like hours. After repossessing the rifle, my boyfriend stalked ahead in silence. I sensed disapproval, whether for the sloppiness of the shot or the impulsive taking of meat we didn’t need. Eventually we found the buck collapsed in a snowbank, chest heaving, legs scrabbling, neck muscles corded as he tried to lift his antlered head from the ground. My boyfriend shot him in the heart. Together we dragged the carcass back to the cabin, where we trussed and hung it head-down from a tree. What I remember most is the warmth of the body and how death had rendered it boneless. The clean smell of the skin and its softness. The long, feminine eyelashes, its perfect teeth and strangely delicate hooves. No, that’s not true. What I remember most is observing myself very clinically in the wake of killing something and discovering I’d become new in my own eyes.

The protocol among hunters is that the person who kills an animal must also field-dress it. My boyfriend handed me his buck knife and showed where I should slice from anus to sternum. Cutting into a body is both harder and easier than you’d imagine. Easier, because the initial piercing of flesh requires little force until you hit bone. Harder, because it takes a strong downward sawing to open the chest, and then the fluids and entrails spill out. Organs must be carved out individually to prevent the meat from spoiling, requiring your arms be thrust up inside the cavity to the elbows. The deconstruction of a body is time-consuming and bloody.

Fresh blood has an intoxicating smell — of cold metal and geraniums — and a shimmery viscosity. Its color exists in nothing else on the planet, at once vibrantly red and densely black — like garnets melted in lava — with an added sheen of buttery fat.

Statistically, women are less likely than men to faint at the sight of blood. I attribute this to monthly periods and our comfort with the fact we bleed. Blood is not a thing, but a thing we do. A harbinger of procreation rather than death. In this sense, we are perhaps less fascinated by blood than men, who get glimpses mainly when violence summons it forth. Or maybe I’m hiding behind generalities and statistics to avoid telling you how killing feels. Wrong, certainly. Having done something intrinsically forbidden, your entire body thrums with anticipation of the lightning bolt that will surely strike. You’d like to label this an adrenalin rush, but you know how those feel; you’ve slammed on your brakes in traffic and come within seconds of death. This is different. It shares that physical acceleration of heartbeat and respiration and the tingling of nerve endings, but lurking underneath is something else. Not adrenalin but dopamine; a rush of pure pleasure. So this is what it feels like, you think. Curiosity assuaged.

&nbsp;
5.
It appears that I’m avoiding the subject of Precious, the family dog, our Rhodesian ridgeback, whose real name might have been — was — Ginger. At this point, there’s no gain in insisting on anonymity, or denying it was I who chose to end her life. Arguably, the quality of that life was nonexistent. She couldn’t move freely, was old, in pain, and only going to get worse. Or maybe she wanted to stay tethered to the world and us for as long as possible; would’ve lingered on contentedly and died in her own time. Who can say? I can only tell you what happened.

The Down Dog van pulled into the driveway. The vet stepped out, wearing a white lab coat and bright green Crocs. He handed me paperwork to sign, along with his card — magnetized — to stick on the fridge. In the kitchen he washed his hands and prepared two syringes, one to sedate and one to euthanize her. He pulled on latex gloves. Ginger and I sat on the floor with her head in my lap. Clumps of reddish fur came away in my hands as I stroked her belly. Always a sucker for the belly rub, her tail thumped the floor as delightedly as it had done since she was a pup. (I offer you this picture despite knowing that, outside cinema, “pat the dog” never makes us pardon those we’ve found wanting.)
The vet injected the sedative and Ginger grew drowsy. I’d originally asked permission to administer the second shot, the one that would kill her. My thinking was, having chosen this course of action, I should also bear direct responsibility for ending her life. But I couldn’t. Maybe it was the sprinkle of white age spots along her flank that recalled my dappled buck. Or a tingle that someone else might have mistaken for nausea. Instead, I lifted her sleep-heavy body off my lap, and, before curiosity could rouse and gorge itself, I left the man in white to “shoot the dog.”
¤
<a title="Ellen Collett" href="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/ellen-collett/">Ellen Collett is an LA–based writer with an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars who truthfully likes animals.</a>

Down Dog by Anonymous

DOWN DOG BY ANONYMOUS by Ellen Collett

EVEN IN LOVE by Nathalie Handal

THE ORANGES by Nathalie Handal

DEATH by Dionisia Morales

UNICORN DREAMS by Jeremy N. Smith

THE GIRL, THE MAN, AND THE WOMAN by John Rechy

ARTIST PORTFOLIOS: Miljohn Ruperto and Rini Yun Keagy

POSTCARD by Robert Anthony Siegel

A PLAY BY MAC WELLMAN by Angela Woodward

BROKEN KOAN #9 by Willa Carroll

1ST LETTER TO SAINT PAUL by Josh Bell

2 BOGEYS by Josh Bell

The following is a feature article from the LARB Quarterly Journal: Winter 2016 edition. To pick up your copy of the Journal, <a href="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/membership/">become a member of the Los Angeles Review of Books</a>.
¤
IN THE ARCHIVE LIBRARY at Tufts University a bearded young man opens a cardboard box to show me a relic; about six inches long, wrinkled, gray (too gray, it’s been painted) with hairs like iron filings and a metal spike down the middle — it’s a little frightening and more than a little obscene. This is the tail of Jumbo the elephant, who died 130 years ago. Circus elephants have always been symbols of gentle majesty, but Jumbo was the first to become a celebrity.
Jumbo was born in Ethiopia, but he died in show business at age 24. It was his fourth season with The Greatest Show on Earth, and he was out for his daily exercise along the train tracks when an unscheduled freight train came around the bend. Jumbo couldn’t scramble away fast enough. The cowcatcher at the front of the train was destroyed, the engine derailed, and “The Giant Monarch of His Mighty Race” was killed. Jumbo had once led a herd of 20 elephants across the Brooklyn Bridge to prove to a wary public that the newly constructed bridge was safe. Now he was dead on the tracks in Canada.
By then P. T. Barnum had spent what amounted to a fortune on Jumbo, who was brought over from the London Zoological Gardens in 1882 amidst a storm of publicity — the children had loved riding the elephant at the zoo (even Queen Victoria wanted him to stay) — but a buck is a buck and Jumbo came to New York. A crowd of 10,000, the largest the city had ever seen, turned out for his arrival. His traveling crate was pulled by eight horses and a pair of elephants from the ship’s landing in Battery Park to the newly opened Madison Square Garden. (The horses could have done the job — but Barnum had a genius for publicity.) Jumbomania ensued: there were Jumbo mugs, Jumbo playing cards, Jumbo neckties, Jumbo earrings, Jumbo canes; there was Jumbo candy, Jumbo peanut butter, even Jumbo perfume — the “Jumbo” size treats that Americans still guzzle and gobble are our last remnants of the craze. Jumbo had been the star of the three-ring show — though his kingly duties were limited to leading the parade — until his untimely end. At which point Barnum still had a business to run: just because the elephant was dead didn’t mean he couldn’t go on tour.
¤
Jumbo was not the first circus performer to be displayed after death as long as the public was willing to fork over a nickel. The Mexican “Ape Woman,” Julia Pastrana, was mummified for the public by her own showman husband after she died in Moscow in 1860, five days after giving birth to their hirsute son, who lived only three days. The dead infant was presented alongside his mother. (The showman ended up in a Russian mental asylum, where he, too, eventually died. Justice can be cruel in circus stories.)
In Canada in 1885, Barnum knew an opportunity when he saw one — according to his press release, Jumbo had died in the act of saving a baby elephant from an oncoming locomotive. Two days later, Barnum cabled Henry Ward, the most famous taxidermist in the country. The news was making headlines with photographs and drawings of the heroic and violent death of “The Lord of the Beasts,” and Barnum wanted Jumbo stuffed before he rotted on the embankment. Ward arrived with his brightest apprentice, Carl Akeley, who had grown up poor on a farm in upstate New York. A loner with a talent for drawing and a fascination for animals, Carl wasn’t cut out for the family business. Taxidermy was a common hobby at the time; magazines like The Youth’s Companion and The Boone and Crockett Club gave instructions, and the arsenic powder needed for preservation was easily available at local pharmacies. As a teenager, Carl would spend hours at his taxidermy bench, preparing mounts of small animals and birds. To supplement his new hobby, he also took painting lessons. One relative wrote, “Was he not far more than queer?”
Akeley’s older brother had gone to the University of Rochester to escape the farm, but Carl hated school as much as his hometown, and besides, there was no money. When he was hired as a taxidermist at Ward’s Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York, it was his dream come true; Ward’s was the cream of the crop, an exotic charnel house where animals were prepared for display at natural history museums around the country. Its entrance was framed by the jawbones of a whale.
In Canada, Ward and Akeley had to work quickly; the stench from Jumbo’s putrefying carcass could have gagged a maggot, Akeley later said. Once salted and packed (six local butchers were hired to help), the elephant’s skin alone weighed 1,500 pounds; his bones came to 2,400. Inside Jumbo’s stomach hundreds of coins and small toys were found, souvenirs of a life in captivity. Once back in Rochester, Ward received further instructions from Barnum. He wanted two Jumbos for display — the mounted skeleton and the taxidermied hide — and here was the kicker: the taxidermied animal should be made to look even larger than the real one.
Akeley was a man of science, not the circus. Eventually he’d develop a new technique to pose dead animals in lifelike positions, but it would be many years before he changed the art of taxidermy forever, and a decade would pass before he was hired to work inside that chateau to Natural History rising up on Central Park West. For now, it was 1885, and this bright young man had his first big assignment, the one that would make his name: to recreate Jumbo the elephant, twice.
He couldn’t, however, use Jumbo’s bones, and anyway the whole scale of the beast was flimflam. Akeley turned to bent wood and iron to support the hide, and a touch of paint completed the illusion. He then structured the skeleton so that it could travel easily; the skull was detachable and the rib cage and spinal column could be removed and replaced by any roustabout. For three years, Barnum dragged Jumbo around the country, finally donating the beast to Tufts University in 1889, which displayed him as the centerpiece to the “Barnum Museum of Natural History,” a building dedicated to science and funded by Barnum, who was a college trustee. Jumbo is still Tuft’s mascot, though the carcass itself, monument to Barnum’s humbuggery and Akeley’s skill, burned in a fire that destroyed the museum in 1975. By then the tail had been yanked off by generations of undergraduates who liked to wag it for luck before their exams. On the morning after the fire, someone from the athletics department gathered up some of the ashes and put them into a Peter Pan Crunchy Peanut Butter jar. That very jar is still brought out to inspire college athletes before a game; but like the shriveled foot of the last Dodo on display in Oxford, England, this tail, tucked away in a white cardboard box in Medford, Massachusetts, is all that remains of “the King of the Elephants.”
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Carl Akeley never worked for a circus again, but he was nearly killed by an elephant on a hunting expedition for the American Museum of Natural History in what was then called “British East Africa,” now Kenya. Akeley’s biographer, Penelope Bodry-Sanders, calls this elephant his “white whale.” The cover of her book shows Akeley dressed like an aging undergraduate circa 1910 in a three-piece suit complete with watch chain and tie, posed next to a huge elephant skull suspended by a thick rope. He rests a hand near the top of one long veined tusk as tall as himself. By this time, Akeley had come a long way from Clarendon, New York. He was now recognized as a visionary by the ruling elite, who were developing the American Museum of Natural History in close competition with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Six months before he was mauled, in fact, Akeley hunted elephants with President Teddy Roosevelt, who was, himself, on an expedition for the Smithsonian. Like so many great white hunters, Akeley had come to consider himself a conservationist and a scientific collector of specimens.
On this particular morning, he was hunting alone (well, not really alone; he was just the only white man on the scene), unaware that the large male elephant he stalked was apparently similarly interested in him. He’d put down his gun to rub his chilled fingers together when the elephant burst out of the bamboo. With presence of mind that is hard to imagine, Akeley grabbed the tusks and swung himself between them so that he wouldn’t be gored. The elephant pressed Akeley to the ground with his forehead and curled trunk, until Akeley heard his ribs crack and passed out. The elephant then pulled away, a tusk ripping Akeley’s face apart as the animal stepped back and ran into the jungle. The Kikuyu and Swahili porters scattered, and when they eventually returned they assumed that Akeley was dead. They kept watch over the body so that wild animals wouldn’t eat it, and sent a message to Akeley’s wife Mickie, back at the base camp, that her husband had been killed. Hours later, Akeley regained consciousness, having been left as a corpse out in the rain. He called for Mickie and whiskey, and when the safari workers realized that he was alive, they brought him closer to the fire. More than 24 hours later, Mickie (Starbuck to his Ahab) arrived and began to clean his wounds as he slipped in and out of consciousness. According to her description, as later told to their mutual friend Roy Chapman Andrews (the real-life model for the film icon Indiana Jones, and author of “Akeley of Africa”),
Carl was a dreadful sight. The elephant’s trunk had scalped his forehead, closed one eye, smashed his nose and torn open one cheek so that it hung down and exposed the teeth in a horrible grin. Many of his ribs were broken. Several had punctured his lung and blood was running out of the corners of his mouth.
It took three days to get Akeley off the mountain and months for him to recover; but after being mauled he was more determined than ever to bring back a large bull of his own. While he lay in his cot, refusing to leave Africa until he bagged the great male tusker he desired, he conceived of what is now the Akeley Hall of African Mammals almost exactly as seen today at the Natural History Museum.
Months later, in spite of fever, and illness, and hardship, he finally shot an acceptably large bull. At the end of the 1909 expedition Akeley brought four elephants back to the museum, and this time he was able to recreate them as exactly as possible — he even incorporated actual bones from the animals to support the taxidermied hides. The elephant herd took him six years to complete, and in the process he created his new method of taxidermy. It was Akeley the sculptor (a true artist, if inclined to the grisly) who first created a clay model of the elephant, and eventually used a thin layer of clay to reproduce every fold of skin on the actual hide. The clay was then scraped away from the inside and layered with papier-mâché and burlap. The crucial difference this time was that the mold was made to fit the hide from inside out, rather than the hide being stretched over an armature that only approximated — or in Jumbo’s case, exaggerated — the animal. Each elephant therefore retained its own specific dimensions and musculature. The animals were no longer ideas of elephants, they had characters as different as they’d had in life. This small invented herd shot by Akeley, Roosevelt’s son Kermit, and Mickie (uncredited, the public was told that her elephant was shot by the president, himself) strides through the middle of the African Hall, an eerie sight for tourists when they get lost between the dinosaurs and the butterflies. Children still reach up to stroke their hides.
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In the 1980s, Flora, a baby African elephant, was adopted by circus impresario David Balding. Flora had been orphaned by poachers, and at the time, groups concerned about the survival of baby elephants looked for homes for them with circuses and zoos. Flora came to Missouri, and for 20 years she performed in the ring as the namesake of Circus Flora out of St. Louis, well cared for and beloved by her circus family. Balding was practically Flora’s father, husband, and brother, but unlike dogs and cats, elephants are more than likely to outlive us. When Balding was in his 60s and Flora was in her early 20s, he knew that it was time to plan for her retirement. As she’d aged, she’d had episodes of unpredictable and violent behavior, perhaps a result of hormonal changes. She no longer belonged in the circus, and he rightly understood that he couldn’t take care of her himself. A documentary, One Lucky Elephant, was made about Balding’s search for the right home, and Flora eventually ended up at an elephant sanctuary in Tennessee, which seemed the perfect solution; the woman who ran the sanctuary had her own performing elephant, now retired. However, once Flora was there, Balding was barred from visiting, and for a time Flora became even more antisocial. Her caretakers clearly believed that Flora had to break her attachment to Balding; to adapt to being a member of a herd rather than continue as a species of human child in an elephant’s body. But it was too late — Flora had become a changeling.
It may be easy to say that Flora never should have been adopted, but 30 years ago, this wasn’t the way people thought about orphaned elephants. Watching the documentary, it’s hard not to empathize with Flora’s anger and confusion after she was separated from her human family. Today animal rights activists would probably say that it is better for an orphaned elephant to die in the wild than to become dependent upon human companionship. They’d insist, too (and who could argue?), that it’s unnatural for any animal to become a circus performer.
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There is a famous Indian parable meant to explain the manifold nature of truth: Six blind men are led into a room with an elephant to learn what the animal looks like. Each of them touches a different part of the body. The man who feels the leg says that an elephant is a pillar. The one who feels the tail says an elephant is a rope. The one who feels the trunk says the elephant is a tree branch. The one who feels the ear says the elephant is a fan. The one who feels the belly says the elephant is a wall. The one who feels the tusk says the elephant is a pipe.
We know that elephants have sophisticated intelligence: they live in matriarchal societies, they are loyal to family members, and they grieve. But it is their eyes, seen close up in so many photographs, that undo us — the dark pupil set into the wrinkled skin can communicate whatever wisdom we decide. This is the gaze that holds us, even when that pupil is made of glass. The dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History almost always have one animal in the group staring out at the humans staring in. This is the impossible moment, held much longer than if one were to actually encounter an animal in the wild. Our own longing to be seen by wild animals is revealed through the way we have captured, killed, and posed them. We force them to look at us longer than they would like.
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At the dinner at Ward’s Natural Science Establishment following the successful taxidermy of Jumbo, Henry Ward held a banquet for the press. There was a small, colorful booklet published by the circus, describing Ward’s great achievement, titled The Life and Death of Jumbo: An Illustrated History of the Greatest, Gentlest and Most Famous and Heroic Beast That Ever Lived. Slices of Jumbo’s tusk were inscribed for the circus owners with a rampant lion and elephant in the style of the British royal arms above the inscription “Jumbo et mon droit.” The crowning dish of the evening was a jelly dessert made with finely ground powder from one of Jumbo’s tusks.
Do I believe the whole of the story of Jumbo the elephant? Mostly, yes. I only wonder about the ashes in the peanut butter jar. But this I know for sure: Jumbo’s tail is in Medford, and his skeleton is still with the American Museum of Natural History. My repeated requests to see it, evoking the commitment of the museum to the arts, have so far resulted in polite refusals from the Department of Mammalogy. It could be that it is simply too much trouble for the museum to allow a novelist to accompany a conservator to their warehouse in Brooklyn. Or perhaps the museum is uneasy with its complicated colonialist history, and even with the great dioramas that display dead animals for a fee — just as Barnum did in 1866. For the herd of elephants walking through the African Hall is not only evidence of science — it is art and it is theater. The elephants in the Akeley herd are heading toward the front entrance of the museum as if they could pass beneath the skeletons of dinosaurs and march down the steps past the mounted statue of Teddy Roosevelt, flanked by a bare-chested African American and a Native American wearing a ceremonial headdress.
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This year, for the first time in its history, Ringling Bros. and Barnum &amp; Bailey Circus announced that it will stop using elephants. They are developing an elephant sanctuary of their own in Florida, where retired performers will still be on view — for a fee.
Although African elephant populations have rebounded slightly from the slaughter that reduced them from some 4 million in the 1930s to 600,000 in the 1980s, they are still being poached and killed at the rate of one elephant about every 20 minutes. Their numbers are on the rise, thanks almost entirely to wildlife preserves managed like enormous, free-range zoos. But it’s too late for Flora — David Balding’s first choice had been to send her to a sanctuary in Botswana, but when a civil war broke out in the region, he decided that Africa was unsafe. He died in 2014, without ever seeing her again. Flora still lives in the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, but whether or not she misses him, nobody knows.
A friend who worked as a clown in Circus Flora tells me that Flora’s trunk once brushed his face during a performance, taking out his contact lens — her touch was so delicate that she left the tiny disc on his eyelashes.
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In addition to the books cited, I am indebted to Jumbo: Marvel, Myth, and Mascot by Andrew McClellan, African Obsession: The Life and Legacy of Carl Akeley by Penelope Bodry-Sandres, and Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History by Stephen Christopher Quinn.
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<a href="https://v2.lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/rebecca-chace">Rebecca Chace is the author of Leaving Rock Harbor (novel), Capture the Flag (novel), and Chautauqua Summer (memoir).</a>

Quarterly Journal: Winter 2016, No. 9

January 2016144 pages