Elephant Rock – Harper Lower

The Dog’s owners just had a baby, their first one. They named it Earl. I remembered this. I loved this. A baby named Earl. It seemed too blatant of an old man’s name. I had never seen baby Earl, only known of his coming into the world as the reason I walked The Dog, but I pictured him with little white hairs springing from his smooth baby head and a face so wrinkly you couldn’t determine if it was only pudge. A baby named Earl. Who the hell does that to a kid?

I thought of Earl as The Dog’s baby. A perfect companionship. A sidekickness you read about in books as being trusty. No John Goodman. I think that sort of thing softens a dog of any demeanor. Makes it more boyish in its protectiveness.

We hardly took the same route each day. I left it up to him to point us in whatever direction his nose desired. There weren’t many options. Two, really: up or down the hill. Today we went down to the playground.

The only people at the playground were an old couple and their caretaker. The one noticeable thing differentiating the occupational standing of the woman was her dense black hair. The three of them sat in a perfect statuesque row on the bench, like friends, which overlooked a sort of play structure that was supposed to be a ship. They looked out of place here, incredibly so. They dressed how old people dress; hunched how they hunch. The black haired woman wore a smock.

The bright blue rubberized playground surfacing, new from the recent revamp of the park that had lasted the first month of the summer, made this picture completely wrong. It might have been a nice thing to look at, an old couple and their caretaker enjoying a weekday park bench together, looking out at something, anything besides what was actually there. It really was hard to look at. It wasn’t serene at all. The ship hogged the view.

I guessed the neighborhood schools had started back up. That’s something you stop keeping track of until the signs start to show. I was glad. There would be no little girls or boys shrieking, padding across the rubber to pet the dog. Kids were always doing that. Shrieking. The dog wasn’t even mine, but I still didn’t like any of it. Their fathers eyed me, eyed the dog. He wouldn’t bite, look at his tail, I wanted to say. He has a baby at home, I wanted to say. But all I said was, don’t touch his belly, scratch his ears, he likes that. So it sounded like the dog was mine. That’s the kind of thing a dog can sense: the eyeing of the father. Maybe it carried up through the leash without my knowing, and that’s why it made me so uneasy. The stare, casual, while watchful and narrowed. I don’t have kids. I don’t even have a dog.

This realization made me feel better that I hadn’t been called by the two families I babysat for that summer in a while. Two weeks earlier, I’d taken all the girls, two from one family and one from the other, to the park when the renovations were finished. They climbed, swung, shrieked. They ran in circles like hamsters. One, the oldest, cried then, for whatever reason. Dirt on her dress. Skinned her knee, but it wasn’t bleeding. Whatever Reason. She cried without ever closing her eyes, and they got so bulged and pink I thought they might be permanently stuck that way. The worst part was she wouldn’t let me come near her. I made the other two sit on the park bench with me while we all stared at her crying. And then I started to cry too.

Old people, surely, didn’t cry, especially not in public parks. They were sitting on the same bench–the only bench–I had been sitting on with the two girls. It made me want to go sit on the ground in front of them and cry at how ugly the whole thing was. This blue rubberized playground surfacing. Just to complete the picture.

I walked The Dog around the park’s perimeter. I let him sniff whatever he wanted to, thinking this in some way made me special to him for allowing it.

“There used to be wood chips here,” I told The Dog as he chewed on some weeds, pointing to the blue rubberized playground surfacing. “I bet they won’t have wood chips anymore when your baby is old enough to even stand on his feet. They’ll be outlawed. Something Stupid.” I paused, The Dog was hawking up the weeds he’d just eaten. “Wood chips lodged in the skin of your knee. Now that’s cause for screaming, crying, whathaveyou. That used to be universal. I can feel it now just thinking about it. Your Little Old Man Earl is gonna grow up soft.”

I needed the money. The little girl, the one I’d watched cry in the park, it had gone on forever, and her mom felt horrible about the whole thing. She gave me a hundred dollar bill and a hug. I didn’t tell her I thought the blue rubberized playground surfacing was making kids soft nowadays.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend your baby.” The Dog looked up at me. I tossed him a treat from my pocket and we kept walking.

“This whole thing was a castle, actually,” I went on, meaning the ship structure. “A big wooden thing, full of splinters. There was a yellow plastic slide and a tin one. The tin slide was only good if you had on long pants, otherwise the back of your thighs skidded. Let Earl know that. Not that it’s any real use to him now.

“There was a beehive too. Under the castle–the wood platform–they burrowed all up in the wood and rotted it half to death. Or maybe the rot came before the bees. We used to hit that part with sticks.” The Dog’s ears perked up when I said this: sticks. “I don’t have one now,” I said, sorry. “We thought one time we would hit just the right spot and honey would come pouring out. I don’t think the bees were those kinds of bees, though.”

I felt like I was teaching The Dog something about his Little Old Man Earl. Something he, The Dog, would understand on a subconscious level, and convey back to his baby. There used to be wood chips, Earl, The Dog would tell him using the secret code all dogs and babies seem to share. And Earl would know what this meant. Even if I, myself, did not know exactly what I meant.

I was leaving soon, leaving The Dog, leaving Earl by association, and my final summer of neighborhood listserv jobs sent from my mother’s email. I hadn’t told The Dog’s owners I was leaving next week. I didn’t want them to find someone else to walk him so soon. He needed time to miss me. They wouldn’t get this. I would go back to school too, like all the little neighborhood girls. Except there were no playgrounds for me where I was going. The old couple and the caretaker would cease to exist. The blue rubberized playground surfacing would cease to exist. Wood chips already had.

There was one more thing I wanted to make sure The Dog saw. I waited while he peed on a log that was already wet. He didn’t lift a hind leg, he just stood with his front two feet on one side of the log and his back two on the other side. I felt good about this: the way The Dog peed so un-dog-like. It seemed all the more plausible he understood about the wood chips and the tin slide and the honey. I picked up a stick and waved it in front of his nose. He grinned, if you’d even believe it.

The old man had stood up and begun walking around the edge of the playground on the blue rubberized surfacing. He wasn’t making much progress. The tennis balls on his walker seemed like they’d been the objects of endless games of catch with a late dog of his, then repurposed. He grunted as he stepped, almost moaned. But here was something more orthopedic than wood chips. The caretaker clapped joyously. I bet that pays well.

Opposite the playground, there was a long stretch of field before you hit the road. The Dog didn’t get much of a kick out of it. I carried the stick over his head. I felt I had more to say for Earl’s sake or my own.

In the grassy area there are a few thin trees, planted new and fenced off at the trunk along with the remodeled playground. Beyond that there was a single large rock. The kind of rock that is good for sitting on. I knew this rock well. Famously, there is a photograph taped to my mother’s computer of me, at age 7, executing a wonky handstand on this rock.

This rock was perfect for make believe games. “This is Elephant Rock,” I told The Dog. I led him around to the side that faced the road and dropped the stick. He began chewing it immediately. “I named it that, I think. It’s not widely known as that. If you look at it from right here, it’s supposed to look like a baby elephant all curled up sleeping.” I didn’t want to tell The Dog I couldn’t see the elephant anymore.

“It’s rained here a lot these past few years.” I said it more to the rock than to The Dog. “That’s how sand is made. Comes about. More or less. Water wears down rocks and it becomes sand. Eventually.”

It didn’t matter if the dog believed this or not. If he was capable, if he peed without lifting a leg, I think he understood. I walked all the way around the rock, making sure I wasn’t just looking at it from the wrong angle. I wasn’t. “You should bring Earl here, instead.” I meant instead of the blue rubberized playground. “Before Elephant Rock is just a grain of sand.” The Dog seemed to hear this part. He looked up at me, little wood flakes surrounding him and the half eaten stick. I climbed up on top of the rock and sat facing the playground and the old couple and their caretaker. I pulled my knees up to my chin and lit a cigarette I’d stashed in my pocket, a habit these 20 dollar walks easily funded. It was the only thing I could think to do with myself, and, in some way I hoped it would scare off the old couple. I meant to help them by it, show them what a dump they chose to sit around at.

I smoked it down halfway. The Dog was making his stick last. The old man was still walking. He’d made only about a half lap around the ship. I held the smoke in my mouth for ten seconds, maybe longer, swishing it from cheek to cheek so that I could push out a thick smoke signal.

The last ember burned my finger tip. I’d been staring right at them long enough for the caretaker to notice. She waved. I began to get up, or rather, rise up. I was rising. The ground fell away from my reach smoothly, the trees fell away, The Dog fell away. I kept rising taller and higher up than everything. I sat calm and wise atop my elephant, feeling I had always been the Mahout. The animal’s wonderfully slow sway returned the serenity to the little park below us.

The old man raised a finger to us. He seemed rather amazed to me from down there. What a perfect thing to see from a park bench in the deep suburbs on a regular weekday. We walked toward them and my elephant’s trunk swept the ship clear from its spot, tearing up a chunk of blue rubberized playground surfacing. I felt gigantic. My whole body seemed to fill into itself, up there on my elephant, my chest swelled with an elation like landing a cartwheel for the first time. I was above the branches of the trees, above even the telephone wires. The couple and their caretaker were so small sitting there on the bench again, my elephant’s paw could have squashed them like the end of a cigarette butt.

The man had taken his seat back on the bench again to gaze up at me and my elephant in our momentous parade. His stare was not fatherly, in that it was not protective. It was giddy. Child-like. Not overexcitable. “He’s friendly,” I called down.

“He sure looks it,” the man said.

I knew The Dog was waiting for me down in the field with his stick. I hoped he’d tell it to Earl like this.