The Cowboy and his Elephant (21 page)

S
lowly, over the months, Amy, Ned, and Anna May formed a family, with Anna May as their unquestioned leader. Amy and Ned were too different in temperament and character ever to get along. Anna May disciplined them both. She knocked them with her trunk and seized their ears with sharp, painful twists. Clearly at the limit of her patience, Anna May lowered her head, butted them, and nipped their tails.

Buckles scolded them. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, Amy!” he told her when she misbehaved. “A big girl like you and you don’t have any more sense than Ned! Well, what have you got to say for yourself?” Amy raised her trunk as if she were pleading with him until Buckles changed his tone. “Well, do you think you can be good now?” She bobbed her head in the affirmative.

On a hot, humid September afternoon during a stop in upstate New York, Amy and Anna May and Ned were being tormented by swarms of flies. Without enough dust and dirt on the ground to shoo them with, the elephants looked miserable. There was nothing Buckles could do. He was
resting in his trailer when he heard a loud bellowing noise, and he looked out the window onto a very strange sight.

Amy had found an empty gunnysack lying on the ground. She was swatting the flies off her back with it. She tossed the sack on her right side and the flies took off in a cloud, and then she tossed it on her left side and another cloud departed. She seemed delighted and draped the sack over her ear for future use.

Seeing this, Anna May and Ned wanted to swat the flies too. As Buckles watched, Ned snatched the sack off Amy’s ear. Amy whacked Ned with her trunk; he bellowed and dropped the sack. Anna May picked it up and started swatting herself. Now Amy was bellowing, Ned was bellowing, and Anna May was trumpeting with relief. She slung the sack against her sides and back while Ned and Amy waited for their turns.

Buckles decided to intervene before they started fighting all over again. He went to a storage barn on the grounds for two more gunnysacks, which he gave to Ned and Anna May. And from then on Anna May, Amy, and Ned swatted the flies with their own sacks, which they also hung over their ears like garlands.

D
uring that same stop, a prowler was thought to be stealing the personal belongings of the performers through the open windows of their trailers. An investigation was mounted and failed to find either the missing items or a culprit. Then one evening Buckles remembered something
his father had told him. Sometimes small objects appealed to elephants, and their playfulness often included theft. So on a hunch Buckles searched their barn. There, concealed under a layer of straw, was the missing loot: a silver-backed brush, change purses, a fringed bedcover, two mirrors, a few photographs in small frames, a beaten-up hat, a shoe, and several pencils!

Buckles scolded Amy, Ned, and Anna May, but he knew that he was in charge of highly intelligent creatures with a sense of mischief that was as much a part of them as their ears, trunks, and tails.

He certainly couldn’t do anything to dissuade Ned from smashing soft-drink cans with his foot. For a while flattening them was Ned’s whole raison d’être. Then one day he came across an empty gallon can that had been thrown out of the cookhouse door. He licked the residue of sauce from around the inside of the can with the end of his trunk. Then the sudden urge to smash it overpowered him, and he stomped down hard with his foot. The can collapsed with his trunk still inside. He bellowed, screamed out in pain, and tossed his trunk to throw the can off. Buckles came running to his rescue, and Ned walked away grumbling to himself, nursing his sore trunk.

Meanwhile Amy liked to keep a vigil at a hole in the baseboard of the elephant barn. Apparently, she had seen a rat come out of the hole and had flattened the rodent with her trunk. She waited patiently for other rats to emerge, and
even slid down on her stomach and poised her trunk over the hole, waiting.

“No cat was more faithful,” said Buckles, who felt sorry for her, with all that waiting and nothing to show for it. As a gesture of kindness he wrapped a furry piece of gray cloth with strong rubber bands and poked the “rat” through the hole from the other side of the barn wall. Amy slammed it again and again. She chirruped and trumpeted each time unaware (or unconcerned) that the “rat” she “killed” ten or fifteen times a day was fake.

O
ther Big Apple animals, such as camels, dogs, and horses, frightened Anna May and Ned. But Amy seemed comfortable with them. She put her trunk on the horses’ faces, and the trained dogs ran under her belly. The noise of the city bothered Anna May. But Amy rose above the horn-honking and sirens and claxons, and one day with utter calm, she followed Buckles up the sidewalk of Amsterdam Avenue from Lincoln Center to the Sixty-seventh Street studios of ABC Television. After a ride in ABC’s freight elevator, she walked down a hall, pausing to snag a muffin and quickly, an apple and orange, off the trolley outside the Green Room, where the other guests of the Kathy Lee Gifford and Regis Philbin show waited to appear.

The show’s hosts greeted her with aahs, but Amy seemed unimpressed. She went into her routine before the TV cameras and then exited left, like one who had done it a hundred
times before. In fact she
was
a celebrity, who had posed many times with movie stars such as Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Dustin Hoffman, Geena Davis, Susan Sarandon, and Harrison Ford. They smiled at her as if genuinely awed by her size and grandeur, without knowing anything at all about her amazing story.

She was the mellowest of elephants. Nothing, Buckles said, fazed her. Blind children visited her after special circus performances and laughed as they crawled under her and swept their hands over the rough skin of her trunk. She frisked them for treats and nudged them aside, one after another. Amy clearly liked all kinds of people. She did not seem to have a “privacy” zone around her like most elephants, and she never seemed to mind when people came up to her and petted her trunk. She was accepting and agreeable, and always gentle.

But—only to be expected—there were days when she was as miserable as everyone else in the circus. If the audience did not applaud enough, she gave a lackluster performance. But when they cheered to her level of expectation she rewarded them, Buckles believed, with a smile. In the circus business, as Buckles was fond of pointing out, everyone, even the elephants, “got the bitter with the sweet.”

B
ob buttonholed friends and acquaintances, business associates, new ranch hands, store cashiers, and sales assistants with tales of Amy’s success in the circus. He showed off her “publicity” photographs. But always, behind his pride, he missed her sorely. He had stayed away, intentionally not visiting, to give her time to adjust to the circus world. He wanted her to forget him for her own good. “I guess that’s what I was hoping for,” he told Buckles. “But it still hurts a little.”

“She seems pretty happy. I’ll say that.”

“It was a close call for a while, wasn’t it?”

“I still can’t tell you why she snapped out of it. Maybe it was a whole number of different things. Anna May was a big help. That’s all far behind her now.”

“When do you think I can come visiting?”

“Anytime,” Buckles replied enthusiastically. “You’ll be surprised how she’s changed.”

Yes, and that’s what Bob was afraid of. He went from wondering if she missed him to the fear that she wouldn’t remember him. He hadn’t seen her in more than a year, during which she had lived through a major depression and had found a new life as the center of attention in a circus. He had only himself to blame if she had forgotten him, but he still felt guilty for letting her go.

He and Jane lived differently now, with Amy gone. Bob was competing in cutting horse competitions all over the West. He attended horse and cattle sales. He was elected the thirty-second president of the
American Quarter Horse Association
in Amarillo, Texas, and was inducted into its Hall of Fame. He helped to create the
National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center
in Oklahoma City, and sat on its board of directors. He was a devoted father and grandfather. Most of these things he had postponed until now, because of Amy.

But the price he had not expected to pay for his freedom was that she would not know him anymore.

Before leaving home to take a flight back east, on the way to the airport Bob stopped at El Chorro’s to pick up a bag of fresh sticky buns to bring to Amy, along with carrots and fresh strawberries dipped in chocolate On the airplane he wore his finest cowboy hat, his tooled cowhide boots, and his gold-worked prize belt buckle.

“Why, Bob, you look nervous,” Jane observed wryly, as
they were leaving the motel in the town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where Amy was performing.

“I
am
—I’m goin’ to see my gal.”

Prepared for her not knowing him, he grew quiet and pensive as they drove within sight of the big top.

Buckles had seen to it that tickets were waiting at the booth. Bob looked around before entering the tent. The organization and size of the circus impressed him. He wondered where Buckles and the elephants were quartered. For a moment he listened, hoping to hear Amy’s trumpeting welcome. Yes, he thought sadly, she has forgotten me.

All around the tent, open-sided caravans sold candy, souvenirs, and hot dogs; the air smelled of cotton candy, candy apples, popcorn, and soda, as well as the odor of the circus animals in their corrals and barns. Inside the tent a brass band was tuning up. A voice over a public-address system announced that the show was about to begin, and the members of the audience quickly filed in in the dim light to find their seats.

The tent covered a single ring. From their reserved folding chairs in the front row, on an aisle at the knee-high barrier that formed the center ring, Bob could reach his arm out into the ring itself. He
was
nervous. He looked over at a heavy curtain, where the performers entered and exited. He glanced down at his souvenir program, looking for the order of the performances. In his lap he held the bag of sticky buns and the carrots.

He felt like a “stage mother” when her child is about to
perform before a glittering audience. He wondered how much Amy had grown and changed; he still thought of her as a baby, barely bigger than a grown-up dog. The first time he had laid eyes on her seemed lifetimes ago. He was curious to see what more she had learned as a skilled “performer”? When she left the ranch, she knew the basics, and she had thrilled the schoolkids, as an indication of her talents. He wanted her to do well now, whatever she did with the circus act. He expected greatness of her, and he hoped he was not going to be disappointed.

The band started to play; the lights went down. The curtain parted. The human performers paraded in, one by one in single file, and walked around the ring styling and bowing, blowing kisses, greeting the audience in typical circus fashion, the clowns clowning, the acrobats tumbling, and a ringmaster—a white-haired older man in a white tailcoat—waving a black top hat, his other arm glittering with pastel parakeets on his sleeve. Bello Nock, his hair standing straight up, tripped, fell, and brushed himself off. The children seated behind Bob and Jane screamed out loud as a woman in a costume of bright sequins brought out trained dogs that jumped and tumbled in the air.

Then the curtain opened wide: Anna May entered. The audience cheered more loudly than before; Ned came out next; he was holding onto Anna May’s tail. Then came Amy.

Bob sat up straight and stared. She
was
bigger. She
had
changed. She seemed mature. Poised. She had been so sad when they said good-bye. Her long eyelashes and brown
eyes looked beautiful. She had never flared her ears as proudly for him as she did for the audience now. Oh, how he wanted to stand up and call out her name! He looked at Jane, who smiled at him knowingly, and she held his hand in hers.

The band quickened its tempo, and Bob slid to the edge of his chair. He leaned forward, waiting for Amy to come around to his side of the ring.

“Do you think she’ll remember you?” Jane asked.

Bob was looking through the dark. “I guess probably not,” he replied. If she had remembered him she would already have given a sign.

At that moment Amy dropped Ned’s tail. She raised her trunk, as if she were searching the air. She trumpeted a sharp blast that startled the performers: Amy turned toward Bob. Through the dim light she stared across the ring. She held her trunk in the air like a question mark. Buckles, standing beside Anna May in his costume with the golden epaulets and the jodhpurs, scolded Amy under his breath. He had no idea what she was up to, but she was breaking the routine and that was not good.

“Amy! Move up!” he told her sternly.

She turned her head sideways, ignoring him, and then she broke ranks.

Buckles shouted, “Amy! Come here, Amy! Amy!”

She walked two, three steps to the center of the ring, and then she ran.

Buckles thought, Oh, God! She’s rampaging!

She was trumpeting loudly and stopped in front of where Bob was sitting in the dark. He stood up, and the bag of sticky buns fell to the floor. He called out softly, “Amy!” She stepped up onto the knee-high barrier.

The whole performance came to an abrupt standstill. Collectively, all the people under the big top held their breath. Amy stepped over the low barrier into the aisle. She sank on her knees and laid her head in Bob’s lap. She touched the tip of her trunk under his chin and all over his face. She made the chirrupping sound she had always made when she was happy.

“Good girl,” Bob told her, choking with emotion. “Good Amy.”

With her head still in his lap, she opened her mouth. He petted her tongue, as they used to do, and a soft purring sound came from deep in her throat.

The people in the audience recovered from their surprise. Still confused about what exactly they were witnessing, they sensed the presence of something special. Spontaneously they applauded.