McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [12]
That morning, Squonk—in his dunce’s cap and bloated single-piece checked suit with three yellow pom-poms down the front— seemed to be everywhere at once, miming the trombonist’s slide and puffed-out cheeks, then threatening to topple the human pyramid. In what warmed the crowd as a rib-tickling lampoon (though it lacked the same effect on his peers, who glared daggers at him), Squonk became stern with the other clowns, tutting their performances. He showed them the proper way to toss a child into the sky, lofting and catching a small girl and handing her a daisy all in one motion as smooth and delicate and transparent as glass.
But this was just the warm-up for the big finish. At the head of the parade, two front-door men began to wave their arms, standing as if to block the side streets. They cried out, “Hold your horses! Here comes the elephant!”
The crowd fell to a respectful hush, as there was something glorious and humbling about seeing, once a year at most, such an impossible beast. Some regarded the bizarre mix of parts—trunk, tusks, huge ears—as evidence of the existence of a bounteous and clever God. Nash, who was swayed by the God argument, also spent stray moments here and there staring Mary in the eye, sensing within her a wonderful intelligence. Squonk wrote out a quotation for him to use during his pitch: “Comte Georges Leclerc de Buffon, famed naturalist from France, tells us the elephant ‘by his intelligence makes as near an approach to man, as matter can approach spirit.’”
Hence the warning about horses. Elephants would tolerate being chained to a freight car and stuck with a hooked pole, and forced to stand on their hind legs and trumpet. But they would not tolerate horses. The mere fact of horses drove them into an atavistic frenzy. The eye clouded over, almost as if musth, the elephant madness, had invaded the brain.
When the street was thought to be secure, Squonk loped forward, dropping all of his humorous antics. His years of European training rushed to the forefront. His rigid posture, his head tilted upward, arms flourishing gracefully, indicated that behind him stood a magnificent work of art known as an elephant. The crowd produced a kind of applause that was at once awed and hesitant.
Mary walked slowly, trunk held forth in a question mark that tilted left and right as she marched through the muck. She wore a sequined headdress, and a long cape with a Shakespearean ruff. There was a kind of knife-scarring on her ear, an M, made to indicate her name (elephant theft was rare, but costly). The more educated patrons of the circus, upon seeing the outfit, and the M, understood at once how fitting her name was. They would murmur, Queen Mary, as the ground trembled with each step.
Bales had trained Mary in a unique manner—she was never humiliated into squirting water at the crowd, or balancing a ball with her trunk. He was more demanding, more of a martinet than that. Mary performed ballet.
Thus the Nash broadside included mention of Mary’s dynamic performances for the crowned heads of Europe (citing, as per Bales’s résumé, Carlos II of Spain and Sophia of Greece, since Nash was aware that “crowned heads” was an unacceptably vague term that invited suspicion). The crowd at the parade was there to see ballet, and, had the show at Olson gone as had every other performance that season, Mary would have