BY AIMEE BENDER
Miracle Mile
When we arrived at the tar pits that afternoon for our daily walk, the front gates were blocked by a measure of silver fencing, and a handwritten sign slung over the top read, Maintenance. A number of orange cones stood haphazardly by the entrance as if someone had shoved them there in a rush. The grass hills that we could see through the fences were empty, the museum closed.
Ana went over by the side to see if the elephant family—“the woolly mammoth family,” she corrected me—was fine, the family we often talked about, especially after her own mother left last year. Almost immediately after that leaving, Ana had initiated the daily walks, and we would come to the grassy area near the museum and just stand side by side and look at them for a while, the mother mammoth in the water with her trunk up high, the father and child trumpeting at her. The child’s trunk straight out, trumpeting the loudest, maybe. There it was, our family tableau. It was the one time of day during those early months of adjustment that she seemed comforted, calmed.
For those who have not seen this place, it is a real tar pit from the beginning of time, or at least fifty-five thousand years back, and this particular “lake” is leftover from asphalt mining of the late 1800s, used to patch roofs and roads, the very roads cars were driving by on every day, maybe even Wilshire itself right next to the exhibit. You can see bubbling tar in it on a daily basis from an underground oil field. No one is allowed in. Inside the pit is the statue of what Ana and I had gleaned to be the mother mammoth, halfway submerged in the tar, and she is trumpeting in terror, her tusks huge, and useless. To the side, on the banks, are the small child mammoth and the larger father mammoth, but they are just watching at the edge. They can’t possibly rescue her. The tar has a thick and deadly pull, and once in, a creature cannot get out, which is one reason why there are so many fossils. Far across the tar lake, there’s another adult mammoth, also trumpeting. Ana and I call that one Uncle.
Anyway, due to her own circumstances, Ana seemed to understand earlier than other children, or even other adults, how it was tragic, how it was an image of such terrible helplessness and loss, that I often wondered how the sculptor had convinced the tar pit art association or the museum board or whoever had it put up there fifty years ago to include it as the central image of the park. Had they realized what they were paying for? There’s a photo of him on one of the plaques, Howard Ball, the artist himself, driving the first giant thirteen-foot-tall fiberglass beast through the streets of LA on a flatbed attached to his VW Beetle. There’s no hint of who’s coming next, and what the mammoth will be seeing for the rest of his sculptural life. Ball was a Hollywood special effects designer. I can’t find much more about him. I’ve definitely looked, at Ana’s urging.
Ana, on tiptoes at the green gate, said she couldn’t quite see, but from her angle it seemed like maybe the statues weren’t in their usual spots. I laughed. “Oh, those aren’t going anywhere,” I told her. “Those are some heavy sculptures. Plus, one of them is in the tar.”
She had already scrambled up and over the makeshift fence that was draped between the green gates.
“Ana,” I said, with fatigue.
“Dad,” she said. “Wait.”
She ran ahead to look closer. I could see the back of her head, her flapping braid, but I could not get an adequate angle to see for myself. She was gone awhile. I wondered if I should climb in as well. Ana is nine now, and extremely trustworthy as a child, but the tar pits are inherently unsafe, and the child has already had half her world stripped from her. Somewhere, across the country, her mother sits in a bar, and tells the bartender her sad story with those eyes that carry the most powerful concoction of yearning and distance.
I was trying to find a foothold in the wobbly fence, which was proving impossible, when Ana returned. Her cheeks ruddy from running.
“They’re gone,” she said, breathlessly.
“Who’s gone?”
She went to the fence and tugged it open enough so I could squeeze through and together we walked over to the gated pit, where the father and child mammoths usually stood. More cones dotted the grass, laced with black tracings of tar from areas where it had gurgled up as a surprise.
She was right, my daughter: the sculptures were all gone, except the uncle, who remained, like a deranged person all by himself, alone at the other end of the lake. The father, whose giant feet had left huge holes in the grassy dirt: gone; the child, whose feet left similar but smaller holes: gone; and, most shocking of all, the mother, who had been in tar for half a century, and who would’ve required a mighty crane to pull out of that grip. Gone. The museum even shows us how strong it is, tar—as part of the internal exhibit, a person can tug on a pulley and feel how intensely the tar pulls back. It is difficult to manage the pulley, and imagine a two-thousand-ton sculpture inside?
“Maintenance?” I asked Ana, and she looked at me slow-lidded, with a deep world-weary skepticism that had no settled target.
We walked around the grounds to find the stone sloths, check, and the giant orange stone bear, check, which was not really a surprise, as they were obviously replicas that just stood there and told no stories at all. It was midday and felt so empty without anyone around. This was usually a crowded park, with strollers, and kids playing soccer, and a bitter man sometimes drawing bitter caricatures for a minimal fee. And the musical man, Charlie, who’d played tunes on his banjo for years by the museum entrance. He was skilled, and merry. One day, he had disappeared too.
“If not maintenance, then what?” I asked her, as we circled through the scrubby oak grove. She balanced on the white stones that rimmed the art museum, the tar’s neighbor.
She shook her head. “You saw how fast the gate was blocked,” she said. “They must’ve turned alive and walked off.”
“I think,” I said, taking her hand, which she still allowed me to do sometimes when there weren’t peers observing, “we would have heard some news if woolly mammoths were walking around the city.”
“They’d still do damage.”
“Well, something surprised the people,” said Ana. “That note was not done with care. I just don’t know what surprised them.”
We returned to the internally gated area, and stood facing the lake. It was potent with emptiness. Ana didn’t seem too distressed about the change, which was a great relief to me, and I wondered aloud, a little hopefully, if the mother mammoth had finally sunk to her depths. Really, I said, had they needed to depict the worst moment in the lives of these mammoths?
Ana nodded, solemn. “They did.” She said she thought Howard Ball had made it just for people like her.
She had told me parts of this before: How the mothers came to pick up the children at school, so many of the children she knew, how she would watch the mothers, how others mostly could not conceive of or understand how to talk to her about a missing mother, a mother who had left because she had to leave, a mother who was not able to function. A mother she had watched, afternoon after afternoon, struggle to get out of bed, sometimes rolling her out of bed when I had to go early to work.
“He’s the baby mammoth,” she said, as we walked to the gate.
“Who?”
“Howard Ball.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, I don’t for sure,” she said, skipping a little. “But it’s a good hunch.”
We were back at the green front gate then, and I do remember feeling an urge to look back. As if the grasses were beckoning. As if the wind had a message for us. The landscape of the park looked the same, and I searched it for a moment with my eyes but didn’t glimpse anything new or notable, just almost a kind of whisper of acknowledgment in the grasses and trees themselves. I couldn’t understand what it meant, or what I had heard, but when I read, a few days later, that the baby mammoth was back in its spot, trumpeting to the uncle like they were yelling at each other across the lake, I found I was not entirely surprised. I remembered that whisper, a hint of a message I could not in any way decipher. No one had any information about how the baby had arrived, or where it had been, though as I was reading the news on my phone, waiting to pick up Ana from school, I found myself wondering, for a flash of a second, if Ball himself haunted the tar pits, with some kind of surprising muscular capacities, as if he had floated above that sculpture drama for years because it was the unfinished grief of his living life and perhaps he was finally ready and able to let it go. It had taken him a long time, that was for sure.
Kids hopped out of the school gate, and Ana saw my car and hurried over, her backpack jumping on her shoulders.
I couldn’t say any of this aloud to Ana, because it is my job, and has always been my job, to be the manifestation of reliability, and I could not bear to risk her looking at me with any worry on her face. As she strapped herself in, I told her the news, which she listened to intently, and we drove home, and after she had a snack, we walked over to the museum to look at the returned baby mammoth. There it was, back in its spot. As if it had never left. A small crowd had gathered; a few people were eating popcorn from an entrepreneurial cart. Earlier in the day, it seemed, the museum had rummaged around and found one of their old saber-toothed cat sculptures, and to complete the picture, and perhaps provide a distraction from the fact that they had no idea what had happened, they had dropped it in the center of the lake, clawing at the air, newly stuck in the tar, so that there was some drama again in the scene. The baby mammoth at one end, Uncle on the other, cat in the middle. It really changed the gestalt—a predator caught in the tar? Suddenly it was a triumph, like the mammoths had defeated their enemy, and the uncle and the baby were close comrades in the struggle. Ana and I looked at it for a little while, but she shook her head dismissively, and asked if we could share some popcorn, and then we went and did a little painting in the free art room with the thick, appealing brushes.
The father and mother mammoths never returned. Some asked the museum to drag the lake, just for the information, but that was expensive, and the museum preferred to spend its extra money on Project 23, the paleontology brushing of fossils that had revealed an entire functioning ecosystem in something like 2006. They’d found some tree branches, and a camel, and dire wolves, and baby mastodons and saber-toothed kittens, and no kidding, the semi-articulated, mostly complete skeleton of an adult Columbian mammoth. Who knew what was underneath the ground in this city. They found it all in the parking lot, of all places, because nothing could be more appropriate to the land’s current identity. Anyway, it was impossible to imagine where the grown-up woolly mammoth sculptures themselves had gone, but a few weeks later the newspaper reported the arrival of a giant sculpture of a male mammoth in Torrance, and it seemed likely it was the same sculpture from the tar pits, though of course as before, no one had any idea how it had gotten there. It had just arrived there one morning, seemingly on its own. Once again, I was reading on my phone at pickup when the news about this sculpture came in. I had rearranged my work schedule so that I could pick up Ana on Tuesdays and Thursdays at three, which had been her mother’s pickup days, even though Ana really likes the after-school programming; I just couldn’t seem to change the schedule yet. Anyway, the car was hot, and I was scrolling along, and my heart skipped a beat as I was reading, because guess who had his art studio in Torrance? For all his special effects materials? Could this even be possible? What, was I thinking he was moving these statues around in the middle of the night unseen with his ghost abilities? Invisibly? I couldn’t guess. The world was far more unknowable than I had ever realized, that was for sure. I just kept picturing Ball in his VW Beetle, cheerfully driving the father to the site of his own tragedy, shaking hands with the museum board, toasting, perhaps, with champagne. The father was the first one he’d made, and maybe he wanted him close to home now. I could not find any information about where Ball was buried. As I enlarged the photograph in the article, I could, however, confirm that it was in fact the same male mammoth from the tar pits; I’d recognize his helpless devastated head anywhere. Someone had hung a set of rope monkey bars from his trunk.
I showed Ana again when she came into the car and settled into her seat. She was singing some song from music class. She said she was happy to see it. She did miss the original tableau, she said, but she liked that they were showing up in unexpected places, like they were having some kind of conversation with the city.
The mother, the one stranded inside the tar, never showed up anywhere. One night, at bedtime, when we were talking about it again, as we so often did, I asked Ana if she had done it, if she had hired a crane, and a truck, and some workers, and if she had directed the whole thing in the middle of the night to give the child mammoth a new chance, a new story to proclaim. I was sitting at the edge of her bed, and she was sleepy and bore up under my hand on her hairline, the way she had as a four-year-old, when her mother was around, and she said now why would she do such a thing? “It helped me a lot at the beginning,” she said, sleepy. “It’s all lame and forgettable now. I liked it much better before, with its secret message.”
“And what message was that?” I asked, again, because I can’t help asking, over and over again, dipping myself in it, and she said, “You had a mother who was okay, Daddy. You can’t feel it like I can. But it’s good to see the truth so clear. It feels right, like a puzzle piece that fits.”
That weekend, we drove to Torrance to visit the father in the playground, There he was, my old friend. She climbed up it and patted its back, and flung herself around on the monkey bars, but we had gotten lost on the way and it was past lunchtime and we were both more interested in finding some food, so after a few quick pets to his fiberglass head, we ate lunch together, and then drove home in silence. As we headed north, the green freeway signs about the size of those mammoths—the freeways one of our million contributions to the landscape that might one day be in a museum led by another species considering us—I thought about how it hadn’t even been accurate, Ball’s tableau. From what I understood, female mammoths stuck together in herds, and the male mammoths went off by themselves. A trio family would’ve been a rare grouping, and more male mammoths got stuck in the tar anyway, because they were solo creatures, unable to get help. It was rare, even odd, to have a mother stuck like that. But the artist made his point, and I like to think Ana is right, that maybe he made it for her. It took a long time for her to see it, but in the scope of years we are talking about, it was like they were having a conversation in real time. She said, as a voice from the future, thank you for sneaking that in for me, Howard, and maybe he was at the celebration opening, holding his champagne, getting jovial, ill-fitting compliments from donors, and maybe he heard her in a whisper through the grasses, just as I had. I like to think of him nodding, maybe bowing a little, and raising his champagne glass, or doing whatever kind of gesture special effects designers did, and then, when the party was over, driving his VW Beetle back to his studio in Torrance, flatbed unhitched, to all the edges of lakes he had stood upon, or drowned inside, and the otherwise private nature of his sorrows.