McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [16]
When he next raised his head—plainface or not—it was Squonk the Clown who looked up, light and limber as a dishrag. He did a mild leap, from foot to foot, and then back again, then once forward, once back, and then he pointed back at Mary. Understanding passed through her, and she, too, put her feet outward, then back. Then she stepped to the left, then the right, then turned around in a full circle. The audience let out a lusty cheer—Mary was doing her ballet!
The pas de deux was based on Plastikoff’s La Chauvre-Souris Dorée, a rare work in that it celebrated not courtship, but daily love, the often-pale and unnoticed emotions that pass between a man and wife. When Squonk performed a saut de l’ange, Mary, who could not of course jump with all four feet in the air, nevertheless responded by extending one leg behind her, and her opposite forward leg straight ahead, in a perfect arabesque.
She did not notice that, far overhead, the crane was swinging into position.
Finally, Squonk performed a series of assembles sur la point, jumping with his legs together, turning in midair, going up on his toes, springing again, with a kind of grace that would seem unrepeatable until Mary followed him, shuffling in a circle like a trolley on a turntable. For her big finish, she did exactly what she’d done a thousand times before—rear legs slightly crossed, lowering herself until she was almost belly to the ground, and dropping her head as if in supplication: a perfect curtsy.
And that was when Squonk stepped forward and slipped the hook into the chain around her neck.
She startled backward, but it was too late. Gears far away, deep in the power plant, began to grind. Mary stood up herself, shaking her head like a dog shedding water. And then her forelegs were lifted off the dusty ground. She walked on her two legs, balancing, and the turbine whined awfully as something seemed to slip, and she started to return to the earth—briefly, though—as the crane applied inexorable force, she was pulled upward again, and her rear legs were removed from the earth, too.
All around, on the tops of dead scrap, of passenger cars stripped bare, of tankers gone to rust, the men and women and children lost their ability to cheer. An elephant is not meant to leave the ground, and the sight is sickening, a kind of rebuke to the natural order—fossils found in a churchyard, a rainfall of salt cod in the desert. There was a hush under the smoldering pan lights. Mary’s stubby legs kicked in the air, and then, just once, after long moments, the eye startled wide in recognition of what was happening. The trunk sprang straight, a quick and disappointed half-strangling trumpet, and then she went limp.
No one knows for certain how long the elephant hung over Wildwood Hill. A man schooled in night photography offered to let people pose with the corpse, but there were no takers. There was a general call toward Squonk, and then confusion, then realization: He was gone. He had probably turned away the moment the crane began its work. He was never seen again.
A year passed. Then another. The Nash Family soldiered on, barely, sending in cash to cover a good portion of Mary and Squonk’s contract, and then making small monthly payments. There was no longer a big finish to the Colonel’s circus. Instead, Nash added a trained chimpanzee who, dressed in a toga, rode in a chariot pulled by two basset hounds. He also added a castaway from the Sparks circus, Captain Tiebor, who had a team of sea lions he claimed were college graduates. Nash dutifully wrote that into his new broadsides, and if that absurdity troubled him, he said nothing about it. He still claimed to offer a moral entertainment, though there was no longer a chronological measure of his dealing squarely with the American public.
In winter, 1918, the family went off the road for a season. Nash went alone to a rented ranch-style hacienda in an unincorporated valley not far from Los Angeles, California. His idea, expressed vaguely to the family he left behind, was to find new