Amy actually seemed to smile and bask in the approving screams of the children. With their noise in her ears, all on her own, without prompting from Buckles, she acted silly, spreading her ears and letting her trunk go floppy, just like when she played hide-and-seek with Bob.
Her mind was too quick for the repeated routines of an act that changed only once in a circus season. Once she snatched a woman’s pocketbook off an empty seat during a performance. She reached out to frisk the audience for treats while Ned and Anna May performed their dramatic “stands.” When Amy lay down in the ring, she blew on people, as if the audience were there for her amusement. She once held a trunk of water through several minutes of the performance. Then when Buckles turned his back, she showered the audience with a blast of elephant spray.
One day Buckles lined up Amy, Ned, and Anna May for an inspection outside the tent before they entered the ring to perform. Again he turned away for an instant, and that was long enough for Amy to escape. She walked out of the elephant line, over to a circus guest who was pushing his child in a stroller along a path. Amy smelled the man and the baby and searched their clothing for treats. The child laughed. The man reached up and petted her trunk. Amy reached gently down and snatched an ice cream bar out of the child’s hand. A moment later she walked through the gate back to her tent to “retire” for the rest of the day.
Buckles was flabbergasted.
“It’s all Bob,” he told Barbara soon after the incident. “She thinks she’s a queen because that was how he treated her.”
“But you can’t allow her to just wander off,” Barbara said.
“I can’t? What choice do I have? She has her own mind, and nothing will change it. That’s how she is; that’s how Bob raised her.”
As if to confirm that fact, that same afternoon during rehearsals, when Buckles was working with Ned and Anna May and Amy was supposed to be standing in a corner by herself, she searched around her feet for tidbits of popcorn and candy. Finally, bored with herself, she set off skipping around the ring, first on one front foot, then the other. Buckles and the other performers stopped what they were doing and just stared, as if to say, There she goes again!
Buckles again called Bob to report to him the changes that he had seen. “She has all the things we look for in an elephant,” he told him. “She’s like a thoroughbred racehorse, but she marches to a different drummer.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Bob.
“What, that she’s like a racehorse or she marches to a different drummer?”
“Both,” said Bob proudly. “I could have told you, Buckles, that if you expected Amy to be right on the dime you’d be disappointed.”
“She is unflappable. I’ll say that much for her. But she just doesn’t seem to know she’s in showbiz.”
“She always just did things on her own. You have to let her be. She just figures she’d rather do something different sometimes. You can’t blame her, either.”
She had performed with the Big Apple Circus less than a year before Buckles awarded her a starring role. The act was billed as “The Magic Carpet” and featured Amy and the Big Apple’s top clown, Bello Nock, whose “signature” was a shocking palisade of yellow hair. Bello clowned continuously in and out of the ring and quickly recognized Amy as a kindred spirit.
He told Buckles one day, “I mean, she is clownish all by herself without makeup and costumes and an act.”
“You mean she likes to get away with murder.”
That was partly it. “She likes to see what she can get away with, it’s true, but that’s what we clowns do. She likes to get the better of you, like you were her father. That’s why the kids laugh with her. She is always trying to get away with something, like they do at home. She does simple funny things that she isn’t asked to do. And she has good ideas.”
As part of “The Magic Carpet,” Amy routinely dragged Bello out of the ring on the “magic” carpet at the finale. She was soon bored with this routine, though, and, Buckles was convinced, was looking for mischief. One day at the end of the performance, she seemed to notice a large pile of elephant dung that Ned had deposited on his way out moments before. Now Amy was pulling Bello on the carpet as usual, when at the last instant, as she was leaving the ring, she swerved off-line and dragged him through the manure. The audience screamed louder than Bello had ever heard them. Amy stopped outside the tent and looked at Bello, and he could have sworn that she was smiling.
In feigned anger, he grabbed her trunk in both his hands, speaking sternly into its end as if it were a telephone, then smacking it over his ear, as if he were listening to her reply. “You did that on purpose,” he told her. He fanned the seat of his dirty pants, and he thought he saw her mouth curve upward.
With every indication that he thought his hair actually looked handsome, Bello sometimes was seen turning away to primp his pompadour. Amy apparently decided that she could make fun of this vanity. In their act together, Bello pretended to be a waiter in a restaurant. Amy sat on a chair at a table and “read” a menu, while Bello stood by waiting to take her order. Bello walked away, then returned with bread on a tray and was looking at the audience when Amy snatched the bread away. Bello feigned not knowing where the bread had disappeared to. The kids screamed at him: “Amy!”
In the meantime Amy had sucked up a trunkful of water out of a wooden bucket that was placed on the table. And as Bello scolded her for stealing the bread, she sprayed him all over with water. His proud blond cascade of hair wilted and fell in his eyes. The audience screamed its approval. Again Bello was convinced that Amy’s mouth curved upward in an elephant’s smile.
Slowly, 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.
During 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. Som
etimes 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.
Other 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.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Bob 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.
The Cowboy and his Elephant Page 15