The Folk Of The Air by Peter S. Beagle

Author:Peter S. Beagle [Beagle, Peter S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf_fantasy
Published: 1986-09-10T20:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

If you’ll look over on your left now, ladies and gentlemen,” Farrell said into the dashboard microphone, “we’re now passing the South American maned wolf.” In his rearview mirror, a dozen faces turned dutifully as directed; two or three others stared straight ahead, meeting his eyes with the wary contempt that certain children always show to magicians. What are you hiding from me while you let me see this? Farrell smiled encouragingly into the mirror, but it only confirmed their suspicions, and he sympathized, having a touch of their complaint himself.

“Despite the name,” he went on, slowing the alligator train as it waddled past the yard where the two shaggy, cinnamon-toast-colored creatures trotted up and down on deer legs, “the maned wolf is actually a large fox—sort of a fox on stilts, as you can see.” He had tried several times to leave the official jokes out of his recitation, but management spies always reported him. “In the wild they live on rodents and insects, but here we feed them chicken and bananas. They’ll eat five pounds of bananas a day, just wolf ‘em right down.” Somebody laughed at that one, and Farrell daydreamed about stopping the train and demanding to know who it was.

The day was windy and warm, and children tumbled like bits of burning paper across the path of the alligator train. The sea lions were coughing croupily away behind the aviary, ringing bells and biting their bicycle horn. A young woman, wearing Army fatigues and a purple cartwheel hat, lifted a small boy out of the way and held him easily in her arms while she waved his hand to the train. Farrell waved back. The implacable faces in the mirror followed his gesture that time, to see if that was it.

“On our right,” he said, “of course, the elephants. This pair of old scroungers, Winston and Daisy, are Indian elephants—born in Sri Lanka, actually—and the big fellow in the next yard is Mr. Ngugi, and he’s from Kenya in East Africa.” Winston and Daisy, who had been circus performers, went into their routine on cue, twining their trunks and rearing, yearning with perfect comic precision toward a world made up entirely of cooing, snack-flinging suckers. But Mr. Ngugi had ragged ears and a broken tusk, and Farrell cringed before the darkly brilliant squint six times a day as he slid by in his green and baby-blue train, repeating in the same words the joke about elephants’ memories. He made the joke this time, too; but an unaccountable impulse led him to go on, not into his usual thirty-three-second closing speech as the alligator train neared its terminus, but straight into the first lines of his favorite D. H. Lawrence poem:

“The elephant, the huge old beast,

is slow to mate;

he finds a female, they show no haste,

they wait

for the sympathy in their vast, shy hearts

slowly, slowly to rouse…“

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