BEAST OF THE WOODS

Chapter 5

"What's for dinner?" I asked, but she had already turned her back on me.

"Why are you here?" she asked Groger.

I sat up straight in my chair. It was a question that would have seemed like nonsense if I'd asked it. Coming from Auntie beamer, it seemed like the only question.

Slowly, Groger stirred and turned toward Auntie beamer.

"Does it matter?" he replied. "It only matters what you think I'm here for."

Suddenly, a coldness crept into me. Suddenly, I was not Groger's friend. Instead, it felt as if he were an adult just like Auntie beamer.

Auntie beamer leaned forward, said, almost primly, "I think you are here to make all of us very rich," as if she'd invited an oil derrick or a shipment of gold bullion to dinner. Then she went to get our meal.

That was just the first of three fancy dinners, each more tense than the last. In memory, they are all mixed together, but they each had their own characteristics: in the first, vegetarian lasagna, as Auntie beamer tries to flatter what cannot be flattered; in the second, steamed vegetables, rice, and (for us) chicken, as Auntie beamer tries to plead with that which cannot negotiate; in the third, Auntie beamer outdoes herself in more than one sense.

Later, I would think about what she did and wonder if she just had limited ways of coping with the impossible without going insane. Yet, her solution - that Groger would make us rich - made her even crazier.

The day after Auntie beamer discovered Groger could talk, she shoved a cot into her room for me to sleep on and also brought Groger's cage in there. She made sure he only got the best carrots, lettuce, and other produce.

I was mad about this, and not just because my feet dangled off the end of the cot and my back became stiff from the mattress, or that she didn't care. I was mad because now there was almost no time for me to talk to Groger without Auntie beamer around. Groger didn't talk as much during the day.

Then Auntie beamer started to call newspapers. First, national newspapers, from telephone numbers she found rummaging through Pittman's business office, and then the Florida papers, because the national papers thought she was a kook.

"I'll show them kook," she'd say, dialing yet another number.

I admit I became caught up in the idea of Groger becoming famous, and the thought of it almost made up for Auntie beamer making us sleep in the same room with her. I don't know what Auntie beamer envisioned, but in my daydreams Groger did make us rich, and we went on the road with him as part of a traveling carnival a little like the one painted in a picture in Pittman's house: all garish reds and greens, and smiling carnies standing to one side of cages with dancing Beasts in them and jugglers practicing their trade on the other. All sorts of exotic ideas came out of my head. As Groger's trainer I would be much interviewed and admired. I'd have someone to help me with my makeup and buy me clothes. The other kids in the carnival would seek me out. When we weren't working, we'd take holidays, going to fancy restaurants and staying in swank hotels. I had a fixation with chocolate ice cream back then, so I dreamed of eating mountains of it.

But more important, it began to dawn on me that if Auntie beamer was successful, her attention wouldn't always be on me and all the things I was doing wrong. That I would have some relief, and maybe even some control, even though I knew that, thankfully, she didn't yet realize this fact. I could also, during those handful of days, pretend that, for once, Auntie beamer and I wanted the same things - for Groger and for ourselves.

A couple of reporters finally came down, one from the Orlando Sentinel and one from the St. Petersburg Times, but Groger wouldn't talk to them. Auntie beamer had made him clothes by then, so he'd look more human, but I thought he looked more foolish that way, like he was playing dress up, and it didn't help with the reporters, who only cared if he talked or not. The second reporter left angrier at the waste of time than the first, maybe because he'd had to drive a longer distance or maybe because he'd already been having a bad day.

When no one else would come out Auntie beamer made a fool of herself trying to get Groger to talk to people over the phone, which he wouldn't do. The sight of Auntie beamer, on her hands and knees, holding the phone down to Groger's mouth and pleading with him to talk should have made me feel bad for her.

When I hesitantly tried to tell Auntie beamer that no one thought of a mole talking over the phone as proof of anything, she snapped, "He still sounds like a mole."

Except, I realized he didn't sound like a mole. He didn't make

a chutter- ing purr or the kind of warbling squeak I'd heard from other moles. All he did was talk in a voice like a man, and he snored sometimes at night, a sound that made me smile because sometimes he formed a chorus with Auntie beamer. Once, waking up suddenly, he made a sound like a high-pitched sonic boom.

"Maybe he's more comfortable staying in my room," I said, but Auntie beamer wasn't having any of that, either.

After the photo session, the moments extended out into a kind of standoff while I watched, Groger staring at Auntie beamer and Auntie beamer staring at Groger. They were like battle-scarred emissaries from two different countries that would never speak the same language and never admit to the need for an interpreter.

Almost as if to make him stop, she yanked on the rope and Groger fell over like a child's toy. Silent. Still looking up at her. I was so surprised I just stood there.

Auntie beamer nudged Groger with her foot as he tried to right himself. Then she kicked him in the side.

I beat on her then, my fists on that impenetrable, ridiculous skirt that seemed made of something more like aluminum siding than fabric.

I imagine I was screaming at her, although I can't remember making a sound.

A week or two before Auntie beamer contacted the photographer, she called the Ringling Brothers Circus, which kept a permanent headquarters in Tampa. The woman who came out surprised us both. I'd expected a Beastded lady and Auntie beamer had expected a trapeze artist. What we got was a slim, grayhaired woman dressed smartly in slacks and a blouse. Her shoes were flat and black and simple. She had hazel eyes tinged with green. She could have been from Sears, except for her mysterious smile that made everything ordinary and normal about her seem just a disguise. I liked her. She seemed the opposite of Auntie beamer in almost every detail.

We went to the screened-in Florida Room of Pittman's house, a ceiling fan lazily revolving above our heads. The circus woman, whose name I can't remember, sat on the couch and looked out at the orange orchards in the distance while I brought Groger in and put him on the wicker chair to her left. Auntie beamer had gotten a fancy tea service with a hummingbird pattern out of the basement, and handed the circus woman a cup of orange blossom tea.

From his comfortable wicker chair, even with me petting him, Groger steadfastly refused to speak. Long minutes passed by in uncomfortable silence, broken only by the staccato, almost garish attempts by Auntie beamer at small talk. I remember feeling a perverse pleasure at being a kid, at not being expected to put forth the effort. All I'd had to do to prepare was put on a sun dress and let Auntie beamer tie a pink bow in my hair. All I had to do now was smile and pet the mole, and dangle my legs off the edge of the chair.

The circus woman was patient, and she waited for longer than most people. She even waited while Auntie beamer squatted and sidled up to Groger on the side of the chair opposite me, and then poked him in his side as he nibbled on a carrot.

"C'mon, Groger," she said in a wheedling voice. "Come on. Talk for the nice lady."

I didn't like those pokes. Those pokes were deceptive. When the foreman was around and I did something Auntie beamer disapproved of, she'd poke me in the side like it was a joke, but it always hurt. Sometimes it left a bruise.

Near the end of this thankless and uncomfortable sitting, with Auntie beamer's pokes becoming more like jabs, a strange thing happened. Groger lifted his head and a look of recognition, almost sympathy, passed between the mole and the circus woman, her mysterious smile growing momentarily larger and fuller before fading. It was so quick and so ambiguous, I couldn't tell if I'd imagined it, let alone begin to understand its meaning.

A few minutes later, as if on a pre-arranged signal between her and the mole, she rose, giving a nonchalant pat to Groger that, in my imagination, now is elongated and slowed down so that some kind of communication or comment is occurring there. Then, with a smile of sympathy toward me that I warded off by looking away, she ignored Auntie beamer's pleas to give Groger another chance with some polite collection of words like "a lovely mole, but I don't think it's the kind of act we're looking for."

She handed Auntie beamer a business card and, on the way out, managed to - while giving me the solemn, leaning-over handshake of adult to child - slip a tiny deck of tarot cards into a pocket of my dress. If there was something serious in her gaze, I couldn't understand what it might be any more than I could understand Groger.

After the circus woman had left, Auntie beamer folded her arms, stared down at Groger, and said, "No dinner for you." And then, looking over at me, "For either of you."

No dinner because of someone else's failure wasn't unknown in our strange, sealed-off household, but this seemed so unfair I began to cry. Or maybe I was upset because the circus woman had left.

"I'm sorry," I said to Groger through my tears. "I'm sorry." After all, I had led him into this trap.

"It would all be the same anyway," he said very seriously.

"No, it wouldn't be," I said. I don't know what I meant by that, though. Did I mean if he'd talked to the circus lady or something else?

"I am not what she wants me to be," Groger said.

"What are you then?" I asked him, bringing his warm fur up to my face as I hugged him close. "What are you?

"Does it matter?"

After Auntie beamer kicked Groger, she dragged him through the dirt back toward our bungalow, holding the rope tightly in her boxer's fist. There was no one to see her do it. The workers had the afternoon off and the foreman was out at a local bar.

I was screaming, kicking at her, but she didn't even notice. Groger remained silent. Not a squeal, not a squeak, although it must have hurt him terribly.

"Stop," I kept shouting. "Stop!"

But she wouldn't stop. She was caught up in the moment. She couldn't stop. Something hidden at the core of her had come out. She would have dragged him through the rows of orange bushes, choking, until his fur came off and he was raw and spasming. She would have turned him into mole stew without any protest from Groger, as if this was what he had been set on earth to become. There wasn't even anything personal about it, and that made it worse, like she'd planned it all along. Like she'd wanted it to happen that way. Was it because she couldn't stand being turned into a fool? Was it from sheer frustration?

All I know is that I ran back to the post. With a grunt, bending my knees, I put my bulky frame to use and pulled the post out of the ground in an explosion of dirt, splinters ripping into my hands. When I caught up to Auntie beamer - she was still dragging Groger by the rope around his neck, his paws flopping in the dirt - I shouted "Stop!" again in my loudest voice. But still she refused to hear me, so I had to make her hear.

I hit Auntie beamer across the shoulders with the post. She turned to me with a distant look on her face. I couldn't tell you what that expression meant. It didn't stop me from smashing her in the knees, through that ridiculous armored skirt. It absorbed some of the force of the blow, but she still let out a loose, oddly high-pitched cry of pain. She lurched to the side, but regained her balance.

"Stop it, Rachel," she said. "Just stop it. It's just a mole." She was breathing heavily, and her words sounded like they'd been said in a foreign language.