Scratch sat down looking pleased, I opened my mouth to pull a big roar from the back of my throat, and just before I blew air into it, one of the two male Smellies turned around and looked at me and screamed, pointing. The other Smellies around him began screaming too. Then the pungent odor of a Smelly hit me from behind and I spun around. Standing there, near the back door of my cage, was Mr. P, and he didn’t look none too friendly. His hand didn’t look none too friendly neither, since he was holding one of them magic killing spears in it that goes kaplooey.
“You oughta knock before you come in here,” I said in Thought Speak. “Where you been? We been worried about you. What’s the magic spear for?”
“It’s a gun,” he said. His Thought Speak was thin and shrill. “Man uses it to kill.”
“Myself, I use my teeth,” I said. “You need me to kill somebody for you?”
“I want to come back as a lion,” he said.
“I can’t help you there.”
“Kill me, Get Along.”
“What?”
“What I did to Rubs, I can’t bear it. Kill me. Please . . .”
Quick as flash lightning, the Thought Speak wires was hopping from one end of the zoo to the other. I could hear everybody shouting at once, not to mention the Smelly Ones who was screaming outside.
I sat down real slow. “I’m sorry, Mr. P,” I said, “but I don’t eat Smelly Ones.”
“Then I’ll kill you first.”
“Please do. I need an out. Wreck my head afterwards please, so nobody can stuff it and hang it on their wall.”
“I knew you wouldn’t help. For God’s sake. You don’t understand. None of you. Rubs’s gone. The guilt . . . I can’t bear it . . . Kill me. Please . . .”
“Mr. P, let’s talk—”
“No!” And he suddenly aimed the gun over my head, pointed it straight at Scratch, who was staring from her cage across the hall, and fired. She was struck right between the eyes, and bless me, she was dead before she hit the ground.
Now I will tell you how the zoo will change a Higher Order. If this was the old days and me and Scratch was in the jungle and she got it between the eyes, even in my newfound feelings for her, I would say, “It’s a good day to die,” and go on about my business, hoping she’d come back higher up in the Order if she lived a clean life. But I spent many moons looking across the aisle at that panther, and while I always didn’t agree with her lying ways and never did look at her eight holes where she claimed they shot her eight times, she was a friend and had just become a special friend. And it ain’t fun to watch a friend leave, even if you know she’s free. I got a little bit of Smelly One disease inside me, I think, for I got truly mad.
I turned to Mr. P again. “You just put the ninth hole in Scratch,” I said, and before I knew it I’d leaped on him and put him out. Tore out his throat, ripped off his arm, then tossed his head around the cage.
It happened so fast you couldn’t really tell it all. The Smellies was screaming outside my cage and the Animals was howling in Thought Speak. I heard Step the cheetah hollering a warning that a bunch of Smellies was heading my way with more kaplooey spears and that it was war now and let’s fight, and somebody else hollered that Trot and the rest of the elephants and Urge Me the polar bear had broke out of their cages and was coming my way, and Blows More Oil was screaming in the whale tank trying to bust out the side and the war was on.
I didn’t have two seconds to think before a couple of Smellies stood in front of my cage with big, long kaplooey spears. I roared a warning at ’em once, and then I seen the spears blinking fire at me and heard them go kaplooey. Then I fell into the Big Sleep.
When I woke up, I could feel air blowing through my body, but I couldn’t see.
“Darn,” I said. “Just my luck. I came back as a small fish.” Even though I knew I was just born and my eyes wasn’t open yet, I started trying to kick my little fins, automatically dodging and scrambling to keep from being swallowed up right away by some big fish. Hard as I kicked, though, I wasn’t going nowhere, and I couldn’t see, so I said, “This is worse. I can’t see. I’m a bat.”
Then I heard a voice say, “Just poke your head up as high as you can, and breathe as hard as you can, and you’ll see everything.”
“Holy smoke. Is that you, Scratch?”
“Yep.”
“Well, that’s some affair! How I know you not lying? Where you at?”
“Do as I tell you for a change,” she said. So I poked my head up as high as I could and breathed as hard as I could, and my eyes opened and I looked down on home. Real home. Africa. The place Where the Waters Meet, the lair where I’d slept and made my first catch. The big tree where my mother taught me to hunt, the mountain ranges and plains I used to run. All there. All unchanged.
“Why, I’m a bird,” I said. “A bird in Africa. That ain’t so bad.”
“You ain’t no bird.”
“Is that you, Rubs?”
“It ain’t no bumblebee, honey, that’s for sure.”
“I’ll be damned. Where you at? Where’s Scratch?”
“Over here.”
And I seen Scratch’s Thought Shape and Rubs’s Thought Shape and said, “Jeez, your Thought Speak’s awful strange.”
“No stranger than yours,” Scratch said.
“Stop back-talking. You know who you talking to, panther?”
“Be quiet. You ain’t King of the Jungle no more,” she said.
“Listen to you,” I snorted. “Don’t you know I put Mr. P to Sleep for you? And he was a fine Smelly. He should’ve been an Animal.”
“Why, thank you,” said another voice behind me. I turned around to see Mr. P, grinning to beat the band. I was glad to see him.
“I thought you wanted to be a lion,” I said.
“I’ll take this,” he replied.
Then I remembered something. Something real important.
“I got it now!” I said. “Let’s go back to the zoo and see if we can’t raise some hell. Let’s make us a hurricane and get the rest of the gang up here.” And I breathed real deep and we was off.
It’s nice being the Wind. You can do anything you damn well please.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In 1986 I took my two nephews, Dennis and Nash McBride, who were little boys back then, to visit a major zoo in one of America’s big cities. They were so horrified by what they saw, I wrote Mr. P and the Wind for them. The rest of the stories came as they came, over the years, as I traveled over hill and dale and dusty trail, moving through life. As for the particular ache or longing that brought them on . . . well, if I shared every Twitter feed and eye blink and snort and nose pick with every Tom, Dick, and Mary in the world every five seconds, I wouldn’t have a thing left for me.
James McBride
Brooklyn, NY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© Chia Messina
James McBride is an accomplished musician and author of the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, the bestselling American classic The Color of Water, and the bestsellers Song Yet Sung, Miracle at St. Anna, and Kill ’Em and Leave, a biography of James Brown. The recipient of a National Humanities Medal, McBride is also a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University.
Jamesmcbride.com
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