I SAW YOUR AD FOR A TRUMPETER by James Warner
Specialist Gared Drezdon’s iPad shows a cartoon of an elephant standing at a bar, while an Indian-looking bartender glances the other way. Drezdon is thinking up captions for the elephant.
“I’m having trouble getting the hang of this texting thing.”
“My father always wanted me to be a rhinoceros.”
“I lost my tusks in the divorce settlement.”
The elephant has in fact been drawn without tusks. But Drezdon finds this last gag too dark – he’s been going through a rough patch since his wife broke up with him, over the phone, two months after he arrived in Afghanistan – and looks for other ideas.
“African actually. How about you?”
“What kind of a watering hole is this?”
“Sounds like what you’re really looking for is a sycophant.”
“Tiger hunting again next weekend?”
“I lost my shirt in a stampede.”
The elephant is in fact not wearing a shirt, just pants and braces. This last line could refer to a stock-buying stampede. Drezdon thinks the bartender seems frightened by the elephant.
“You don’t want to mess with me once I go into musth.”
“Go right ahead. Tell me an elephant joke.”
“Remind me again why they call this ‘Indian country.’”
Drezdon knows elephant communication is rich in infrasound. They can communicate over many miles, but have poor vision – they’re like Americans in the Ghan. The deadline for the caption contest is close, since it’s nearly dawn and Afghan time is nine and a half hours ahead of EST. Drezdon unplugs his iPad and plugs back in the incoming radar system – which he shouldn’t have unplugged anyway since dawn is the most common time for RPG attacks – and sets off to solicit ideas from others on the Forward Operating Base. A soldier named Jones, back from a pre-dawn patrol, is leaving the communal shower. Jones studies the cartoon on Drezdon’s iPad – all base personnel know Drezdon enters the caption contest every week and has never won, and so tend to humor him – before making an inane but sincere suggestion.
“Want to nose wrestle?”
A contractor answering to the name of Polecat looks over Drezdon’s shoulder and chimes in.
“I also have a big penis.”
“Want to see me do twenty one-armed pushups?”
This last one is apparently not intended as a caption. While Jones watches Polecat do pushups – Polecat acts tougher than Jones, but it’s Jones who has his blood type written on his boots – the cute Filipina who runs the concession stand delivers her response completely deadpan.
“Tomorrow I wanna go bungee jumping.”
Because the Filipina is about the only woman on base, the Colonel contributes even though elephants can’t talk and cartoons belong only on PowerPoint slides.
“Why is nobody talking about me?”
While the Colonel explains his joke to the Filipina – a reference to the old saying that nobody talks about the elephant in the room, whatever that even means – Drezdon walks down the corridor. When he turns back and sees Polecat spitting tobacco into an empty Gatorade bottle, Jones staring into space, and the Filipina flirting with the Colonel, the one hundred and thirty six days remaining on Drezdon’s deployment clock seem an eternity. At the far end of the corridor, near the outskirts of the base, it’s the new Ugandan guard-slash-security-specialist whose caption proves most poignant.
“Have you seen Mr. Snuffleupagus?”
The Ugandan has been refining his English by watching Sesame Street. Drezdon contemplates going outside the wire, breaching the sandbag wall and outer perimeter blast protection barrier in quest of a native informant, but the Colonel grabs Drezdon and tells him he’s needed in the interrogation center. A Quick Reaction Force – the patrol Jones was out on – has brought in a prisoner. As Drezdon strides back down the corridor towards the center of the base, Polecat is working on his squat thrusts. A terp called Rohullah is waiting outside the interrogation room, and Drezdon asks him for a caption too. Rohullah is not just an interpreter but something of a poet.
“It helps to remember that hidden within every obstacle is a treasure to behold.”
For the first time this morning, Drezdon laughs. He and Rohullah enter the room where the prisoner is under guard, seated behind a desk. Rohullah puts on a black hood to preserve his anonymity. There is a burlap sack over the prisoner’s head, which Drezdon removes before offering him a blueberry Pop-Tart. The prisoner is silent. Drezdon habitually destabilizes interviewees with an unexpected first question – pressing for meaningful information too early only exposes one’s own intelligence gaps – so he puts the iPad on the desk and demands once again what the elephant is telling the bartender. Rohullah looks uncomfortable but appears to translate. The more guesses you can come up with the better, Drezdon says. The prisoner crosses his legs and puts his hands in his lap. He actually somewhat resembles the man in the cartoon – what if the bartender is not meant to be Indian at all, but Pashtun? Suppose the prisoner takes offense at the implication he would be willing to serve alcohol, and to an elephant? Rohullah says that the prisoner claims to be an itinerant religious scholar. Drezdon says that isn’t what he’s asking, and at last the itinerant religious scholar starts talking.
“Elephants rarely speak, so when one does, the wise man listens.”
“The Koran tells us that an army of elephants was defeated by swallows dropping stones.”
“America is like an elephant that doesn’t blink when a hundred men push on it, but once it decides to move, it lumbers forwards crushing everything in its path.”
Rohullah seems embarrassed, but Drezdon’s interest is piqued. The concept of a caption contest is hard to get across to most locals – some captives at this stage refuse to utter anything but Koranic suras – so Drezdon has already formed the impression of someone who’s traveled outside rural Afghanistan. Perhaps Rohullah is right and there’s a treasure to behold here. Drezdon used to be something of an itinerant religious scholar himself – he spent two years on an LDS mission to Norway – and envies anyone who still possesses their faith. He leaves the room followed by Rohullah, and opens the app that lets them watch the prisoner surreptitiously. Specialist Karl Gutierrez hands Drezdon a cell phone that was taken off the prisoner, a list of contacts that was on the phone, and some lines Gutierrez has just jotted down that focus on the elephant as emblem of the GOP.
“I still think Obama’s a socialist.”
“Unfortunately I have a pre-existing medical condition.”
“It’s time I went rogue.”
This one fits the mood of the picture, because the elephant looks like it’s on the verge of going rogue. Whoever drew this doesn’t know how it feels to wonder if you’ll ever walk into a bar again. Drezdon’s ideas flow quickly now.
“Sometimes I feel like an easy target.”
“I believe in leaving a light footprint.”
“Three blind men just felt me up . . . awkward!”
“This feels like a setup.”
“Incongruity gags are overdone these days, don’t you think?”
“I was playing rock, paper, scissors. That’s how I lost my tusks.”
“Who’s Mitt Romney again? I forget.”
“She told me I’m no longer the man she fell in love with.”
Polecat is playing a wargame on his Xbox. Growing up Mormon taught Drezdon little about bars, but elephants appear in the Book of Ether, at a time when archeologists believe elephants were extinct in America – this was one of the first contradictory findings Drezdon noticed in the Mormon scriptures, back when he was struggling to stay Mormon. He resented elephants then for failing to survive the few extra millennia necessary to corroborate the Book of Ether, chunks of which Drezdon still recalls. And they also had horses, and asses, and there were elephants and cureloms and cumoms, all of which were useful unto man, and more especially the elephants and cureloms and cumoms. (Ether 9.19) As a boy Drezdon asked his father what cureloms and cumons were useful for, and his father couldn’t say – prompting Drezdon’s final shot.
“Aw c’mon, I’m more useful than a curelom or a cumon any day.”
Drezdon submits this one and ccs everyone on the base. The closest elephant is nearer than the closest bar right now. There’s been no attack this morning, almost a pity as the punctuality of the attacks had begun to be comforting. But for now it’s as quiet as a Sunday in Oslo, the Colonel explaining to Jones that situational awareness is critical on the media front, Jones replying that he gets this loud and clear, just as an e-mail arrives from Drezdon’s soon-to-be-ex-wife – he sent her the link too last night – with her own smartass solution.
“You prefer to be called a mixologist? Then I wish to be termed a pachyderm.”
She always tries too hard, Drezdon thinks, turning up the lighting in the prisoner’s cell a little more, for added pressure. Gutierrez asks Drezdon what the fuck his caption even means, and why he never submits the funny ones. The Colonel asks if Drezdon is cognizant of the fact that a Forward Operating Base in disputed territory is a magnet for enemy action, and when exactly does he plan to stop fucking around, just as the day’s first RPG hits the outer perimeter blast protection barrier – and meanwhile the prisoner prays energetically, and Drezdon thinks that all an elephant can really do is trumpet, as the bartender counts the moments till closing time.
James Warner’s stories have appeared in Narrative, AGNI Online, and Ninth Letter.