Literary analysis guaranteed to be marginally better than primates slinging poo: "Baboons" by Susan Shepherd (Best American Short Stories)

If animals could fix what was wrong with Piper and Guy, they would have, because there are a lot of animals in "Baboons" by Susan Shepherd. There's a dog that first is noticeable for not being where it should be, and then for the rest of the story for being in a place where it probably shouldn't. Then there are all the various fauna in Kenya when Piper and Guy bring their kids-from-other-relationships Ivy and Ellie to visit Guy's family. Let's see, just a very quick from-my-brain count of animals gives us, in addition to the baboons that give the story its name: lions and leopards and galagos/bush babies and snakes and zebras and buffalo and dik-diks and bats and a monitor lizard and jackals and I'm sure there were others. 

Structurally, the story has three parts of about equal length. There's the opening sequence in which Guy has relapsed. He's gone off to Boston's skid row for drug addicts and taken the dog, McCoy, with him. Piper spends most of this part of the story looking for him and coordinating with his Narcotics Anonymous sponsor. In the second act, they go on their trip to Kenya they had planned and already paid for, even though Guy's sponsor strenuously objects and Guy hardly seems well enough to go. She's already paid for it, there's apparently no refunds, so they're going. Guy, it turns out, is from there. He grew up on the fringe of the Kenyan wilderness. The second act is the family on an extravagant safari Piper can't really afford but which she paid for so the kids didn't totally hate the trip. On the third part of the trip, the family goes to the campground Guy grew up in, which isn't quite as safe for humans as the carefully chaperoned safari was.

Piper complains early in the story that humans treat animals better than humans. When speaking to the police about McCoy, she got sympathy, but not so when calling about Guy: "She did not get a friendly officer this time, because she was talking not about a dog but about a man." She notes that it's probably better to be a dog. "Piper noted that the police and fire department will show up to save a dog, for which she was grateful, of course, but...there were people sleeping on the street, overdosing, getting mugged, beaten, stabbed, just a block away. So, better to be a dog."

Humans raise animals to kill for food, of course, but it's also true that we will sometimes go to great lengths to protect them. It's also true that we seem to love observing them and being near them. We go to zoos and aquariums and even spend money we don't have to go on safaris. 

This is a "bush baby," a.k.a. a galago

Two different ways of appreciating animals

There are two different ways to appreciate animals, and while they're complete opposites, I don't know that either is really the right way or the wrong way. Piper adopts one of them and Guy the other. One way, Piper's way, is to read animals through human lenses. Piper constantly thinks of the animals she sees anthropomorphically. Very often, those human terms are her own. When she sees a jackal heading off to throw up its food for its offspring, she thinks, "She can’t even keep her own goddamned food without having to share." Obviously, this thought isn't so much about the jackal as it is about Piper's own life, where she feels put upon to carry the load for everyone. When she sees two males connive to get into the territory of four female lions and then get aggressive as soon as they are there, she thinks, "How fucking surprising, after allowing the males into their space." She's more venting there about Guy than she is observing nature on its own terms. And when she hears hippos in the river, she admires them for being good mothers: "They were a harem of mothers guarding their little ones. No one dared fuck with these ladies." Piper is worried about her own inability to keep her daughter from giving blow jobs to pimply-faced 8th graders, so her admiration is more about wishing she could be like them than about the hippos themselves. 

Guy, on the other hand, seems to enjoy animals for themselves and on their own terms. When Piper was bitten by Guy's pet snake, Guy got angry at Piper, assuming, from the snake's point of view, that Piper must have done something to make the snake bite her. At the end of the story, Guy chases a snake into a tree and then into the water for no other reason than to be able to hold it, to show it to others. After having Guy muck around in the filth of the first third of the story, the narrator ends with giving Guy his moment of glory, now back in his own element: "And Guy, the golden boy, was standing in his own round pool of sunlight, there just to shine on him. Surely everyone could see that. To Piper it was perfectly clear." We learn that being in this natural environment at the family camp was the high he was chasing with drugs: "How smoking crack, as Guy described it, made him feel like he was being held in love’s warm arms. The same way he described feeling here in the sun in the bush." Piper starts to think that Kenya, even with the possible lion attacks and buffalo crushing, is a safer high for him than crack, and she wants him to stay for a while. 

Hiding

Guy says that all animals are good at hiding. The beginning of the story is mostly about him being impossible to find, but he's not the only one. When Piper goes to the drug camp on Melnea Cass Boulevard, she feels threatened. Her reaction is to hide: "She tried to blend in, wore an old wool hat pulled way down over her ears, a pair of sweatpants, and Guy’s rattiest oversized coat." The difference is that Guy is good at hiding and she isn't, because she stands out at the drug camp. Again, Guy is a lot closer to nature and animals than she is, so his animal instincts are better.  

Alright, fine, let's deal with sex in this story real quick

Piper is really worried about her daughter getting into bad teenage sex experiences, but she also wants to give her daughter freedom to enjoy coming of age as a sexual person. It's a fine needle to thread, which is almost exactly the image the story chooses to show what it's like to be a parent to a headstrong teenage girl and to try to guide her into making sexual choices that will be good for her. The image "Baboons" gives us is that of trying to put an earing through a nose piercing, and if trying to jam a post into the hole of a young girl--a hole you never wanted her to get but which now you hope doesn't close up--isn't something quasi-sexual, I don't know what it. Piercings and sex are both things that parents often fight in their children, and they're both somewhat coming-of-age symbols. It was the same way for Piper when she was young. Piercings and sex both highlight how it can be hard to balance being protective and giving children freedom. 

Will Piper and Guy stay together?

Piper finds herself rooting for the dik-dik whose tracks she sees fleeing a leopard. She hopes this one got away because "dik-diks mate for life." She's obviously wanting to save things with Guy and to stay with him for life, but this last relapse has got her thinking. Although the last line of the story says that it's "perfectly clear" to Piper what Guy looks like in the sun, it's much less clear to the reader what she intends to do about her relationship. She thinks he ought to stay in Kenya a while to get himself together, but she isn't sure. The reader isn't sure, either. Piper had been building herself up to telling Guy she needed a break from him, but when it comes time to say something, a baboon screeches and then "she couldn't say it; she wasn't sure." 

Does the title of the story give us any clues what their fate might be? Especially when the moment she is about to tell him the bad news is interrupted by a baboon? The baboons in the story are the closest animals to humans, but the ones whose behavior is so aberrant, even Piper doesn't try to force a human understanding of it. Their main action in the story is to rain shit down on Piper's family when they get too close. There's a second story, too, one Guy tells in flashback, that involves baboons. This one is about how he was camping once and saw a lion appear more or less out of nowhere. 

The shitting episode ends with the baboons quieting down once they establish dominance. They are so quiet that "you'd never know they were there." In the lion story, the baboons were awake when the lion first appeared, but quiet. Only once Guy starts banging on a pot with a metal spoon to scare away the lion do the baboons start to make noise. 

And then a large male baboon began yelling from his perch in the tree. A huge, guttural, rhythmic rhaw, rhaw, deep and echoing. And others in different trees chimed in, and even babies started screaming. Soon the whole forest was screaming and shaking trees as he banged his metal drum. Finally the baboons started coming back down from the trees, resuming their lives. The lion was gone.

The baboons are like Guy's drug addiction. It's a force of nature that doesn't make sense. Sometimes it goes crazy and acts up because it needs to, and then it calms down again. When it flares up, Guy sometimes needs to hide. Piper can't control it and she can't reason with it. But I do think the end of the story has her coming to some kind of terms with it. They're not the terms she'd have wanted, because her understanding of nature in Boston only extends to domesticated dogs she can hold after her daughter no longer lets her. But they're the only terms Guy can offer her, and in a certain light, they're not so bad.