(from 'AVARICE'

by Charles Baxter)

We get back to the house, and that night the capitalism theme starts up again at the dinner table. We seem to be a household of revolutionaries. This time it comes from Jeremy, who, before dinner, walks into the kitchen barefoot, holding his iPhone. I am sitting, drinking tea. He’s sixteen or seventeen, I can’t remember which. Usually he and I talk about space aliens, and I pretend they exist to humor him and bring him around eventually to Jesus, but tonight he’s looking at something else. He’s wearing his Rage Against the Machine T-shirt, and I notice that he’s growing a mustache and succeeding with it this time.

“I can’t fucking believe it,” he says to me. I don’t mind his use of obscenity. Really, I don’t. It tickles me, I can’t say why. “Grandma Dee, do you like elephants?”

“I like them very much,” I say. “Though I’ve never known any one of them personally.” We’re seated at the kitchen table. Astrid is making dinner, Wesley is in the garage doing something or other, and Corinne is upstairs cooing in front of the TV set. I don’t know where Lucy is—reading somewhere in the house, I expect. “They are among the greatest of God’s creatures,” I say. “I understand that they mourn their dead.”

“So look at this fucking thing,” he says, pointing at the little phone screen.

“It’s too small. I can’t see it.”

“Want me to read it?” he asks. What a handsome young man he is. I enjoy his company. It’s so easy to love a grandchild, there’s no effort to it at all. Besides, his face reminds me of my late husband’s face just a little.

“Sure,” I say.

“Well, see, the thing is, it’s about elephants being killed and like that.”

“What about them?” Astrid asks, from over by the stove. “Killed how?”

“Okay, so in Zimbabwe, which I know where it is because we’ve studied it in geography, anyway what this says, this article, is, they’ve been, these people, these Zimbabweans, putting cyanide into the water holes in this, like, huge park, to kill the elephants. And these fuckers have access, I guess, to industrial cyanide that they use in gold mining—”

“Jeremy, please watch your language,” Astrid says demurely. She’s dicing tomatoes now.

“And they’ve been, I mean the poisoned water hole has been, like, killing the little animals, the cheetahs, and then the vultures, that eat the cheetahs once they’re dead, so it’s, like, this total outdoor death-palace eatery, but mostly the cyanide in the water holes has been killing the elephants.” He gazes at me as if I’m to blame. I’m old. I understand: Old people are responsible for everything. “Which are harmless?”

“Why’ve they been doing that?” I ask.

“Killing elephants? For the ivory. They have, like, tusks.”

“How many elephants,” I ask, “did they do this to?”

“It says here eighty,” Jeremy tells me. “Eighty dead elephants poisoned by cyanide lying in dead-elephant piles. Jesus, I hate people sometimes.”

“Yes,” I say. “That’s fair.”

“What do you suppose they do with all that ivory?” Astrid asks, stirring a sauce.

“For carvings,” I say. “They carve little Buddhas. They kill the elephants and carve the happy Buddha. Then they sell the happy Buddha to Americans. The little ivory Buddha goes in the lighted display case.”

“That is so wrong,” Jeremy says. “People are fucking sick. These elephants are more human, for fuck’s sake, than the humans.”

“It’s the avarice,” I say.

“It’s the what?” he asks.

“Another word for greed. Go ask Corinne,” I tell him. “She’s upstairs, watching TV. She doesn’t like it, either. She sounds like you.”

“I still hate her,” he says. “I can’t talk to her yet. It’s my policy. She just wasn’t—”

“I know, I know,” I say. “The policy is understandable. You’ll just have to give it up eventually, sweetie.”

“You can’t tell me that it’s no biggie because it was a biggie. If that wasn’t a biggie, leaving my dad and you to take care of me, then nothing is big, you know?”

“Yes,” I say. “I understand. For now.”