Practicing to Walk Like a Heron

Suzie

94 Suzie “She’s kept me off drugs,” her handler says, standing beside Suzie, waiting to lead her under the half-risen big top. She will pull the center pole into place, lifting the patched and restitched stretch of sky-blue canvas streaked with stars toward the clouds hanging over the lot. Every morning after the roustabouts, staggering from bad wine, heat, and three hours’ sleep in the sweat-drenched bunks stacked five high in the semi that hauls them from job to job, have driven the stakes, looped the guy ropes over the side poles, and unfolded the unrolled midway and main tent, after the great hum of the power generator has been hooked into the lights that tonight will glow across the cornfields, Suzie hears the elephant boy holler, “Hunh, Suzie, hunh,” and feels the quick, dull thwack of his hook against her side. She, swaying like a great gray ship docked in the daylight, lifts her accustomed trunk and, dust flying off her back, trots as she has every workday for forty years in through the main entrance 95 and stands where the roustabouts will later piece together each fading arc of the red center ring. The handler hooks the enormous clank of chain to her leathered harness, again shouts, “Hunh, Suzie, hunh,” and she, with a slow wave of her crusty ears, caked and sore from a thousand bites, walks with the indifference of sovereignty to the far end of the tent, pulling the great pole up and into place, the pole itself carrying the sky and all its stars from the dust. ...