Elephant Winter by Kim Echlin Read Free Book Online Page A

mute.
    I stared at him. And then I said, “You’re not allowed up here. You’ll have to leave. I’m going to call the police. Can you hear?”
    He slipped a blue plastic board out of the front pouch of his knapsack. Attached to it was a plastic cover and a writing stick. He wrote on the board and passed it to me, “I play music don’t I?”
    He took back the board, snapped up the plastic cover and the words disappeared.
    “I’m sorry. But you’ll have to leave. We have dangerous animals here.”
    He smiled and wrote, “I am a friend of Jo’s.”
    I leaned in closer to read in the dim upstairs light. As soon as I’d finished, he lifted the screen to erase his words. He smelled of warm leather.
    “Does he know you’re here?”
    The stranger shook his head, turned around the board and wrote, “I didn’t tell him I was coming.”
    He showed me the board, erased and wrote upside down, as quickly as he wrote right side up, “You are very pretty.”
    I laughed, embarrassed.
    He paused and wrote again, “What is the little one’s name?”
    We both looked down into the barn below where the elephants waited in the hay.
    “Saba.”
    He pursed his lips, frowned and wrote, “That’s what you get when you let school kids name your
loxodonta
.”
    I couldn’t help but laugh. I’d heard about the elephant-naming contest. It was a way of getting people to the Safari.
    “These elephants are
indicus.
My name’s Sophie.”
    “I know,” he wrote.
    I waited for him to introduce himself but he didn’t.
    “What were you playing?”
    He smiled, pulled out his harmonica and played a strain of melody. I felt a familiar and welcome shiver inside my stomach. He wrote as quickly right to left as he did forwards.
    “Jo told me you liked music.”
    I made a move to go back down and he wrote quickly and thrust the board at me, “My great-grandmother used to sing it. I don’t know the words. Doesn’t matter anyway,” then he opened his mouth and his head rocked up and down silently as if he were laughing. I thought I could hear air squeezed out between his vocal cords.
    I backed down the ladder. He followed me and the elephants turned to us, trunks raised. When Saba came forward, trunk extended in curiosity, he stepped back nervously, arms tight to his ribs, his body arched away from the little elephant. I moved between them and Kezia lifted her trunk innocently to scent him but he ducked backwards and to one side out of her way. None of the others tried to touch him. Lear shifted in his stall and Kezia was fretting, wagging her head back and forth. I could see she was rumbling to the others, the skin on her forehead vibrating. A rough chaos disturbed the barn and I kept myself betweenthe stranger and the elephants. He wandered to the side stalls and craned over the great elephant lying on his side. “What’s wrong with Lear?”
    “We don’t know. He just lay down a few days ago and won’t get up. Maybe we should go out front . . . how do you know his name?”
    He looked grave and didn’t acknowledge me but kept staring down at Lear.
    “I’ll help you find Jo,” I said.
    “Don’t bother, he’ll find me.”
    The awkwardness of talking to him was that I couldn’t move very far away because I had to read his board. He sauntered along the wall to Jo’s corner, familiar with the barn. His back to me, he wrote on his board, “My name’s Alecto,” and held it up.
    He picked up the flashlight beside Jo’s cot, flicked it on and off, tested the pillow with the palm of his hand and lifted back the coarse blanket Jo and I had left crumpled there earlier that afternoon. He sank into the sagging mattress, twisted against the wall, pushed his hat away from his eyes, put his boots up on the bed and crossed his ankles. Then he stuck his hand into his pocket, pulled out his harmonica and played that music again, his eyes resting on me, his mouth obscured. I could not tell if he was looking at me or if his gaze was absorbed