The Cowboy and his Elephant (16 page)

Amy shares a secret with Bob.

Bob plants a big one on Amy.

Bob, Amy, and America the Beautiful.

Randall Moore with his elephant in Botswana.

LEET Buck deVries

BELOW: Bob, Jane, and Buckles with Amy in the back.

With a tear running down from her eye, a very sad Amy is loaded onto a van heading to Florida from Bobby’s ranch in Texas.

He accommodated her size in an effort to ignore it. He removed the horses from her trailer on the trips from Colorado. That worked until the trailer started to wobble and strain at the hitch with her increasing weight. Bob now had to grasp the steering wheel with tight fists just to keep the truck and trailer on the road.

“When she moves, sometimes the whole damn truck shifts,” he told T. J.

“I can see that,” replied T. J., who often followed the trailer in a car.

“I can compensate with the steering wheel and the brakes. I can get used to the movement and the sway. It’s a weird sensation, though, knowing you can’t stop fast or you’ll whack her up. You have to think ahead about all the things that could happen.”

T. J. nodded, doubting that Bob was even capable of thinking ahead where Amy was concerned. He was simply blind to everything about her except his affection for her.

A
t the Arizona port of entry she finally became impossible to hide anymore. She was simply too big to take across without the complications of explaining why, the endless paperwork, and the prohibitions. On one trip an inspector looked up from the forms on the counter.

“You state here that you got two horses with you,” he said to Bob. “What the hell you need two rigs for to haul two of ’em?”

“Well, we need the extra trailer for the stock,” Bob stretched the truth.

The inspector looked out the window at Amy’s trunk waving in the air—outside her trailer. Her head bumped up against the ceiling. Even a numbskull could have seen that she was an elephant.

He looked startled. “What the hell’s that?”

“What?” asked Bob with feigned surprise.

The inspector pointed out the window. “That!”

Bob said, “A cow.”

The inspector looked at him real hard.

“A horse,” Bob said, changing his mind.

“A horse with a damned trunk?”

Bob grinned slyly. “It takes all kinds.”

“Well, cowboy, whatever it is you got in there, get it out of here before I impound it.”

J
ane watched all this with growing dismay, until one day, despite herself, she had to ask Bob, “What are we going to do?”

“About what?” He knew what. “Something will turn up to fix it,” he told her.

“Nothing is going to fix her size. She’s an elephant, Bob.”

Yes, of course, but Amy was also his
friend.

“Can’t we leave her at T Cross when we go to Arizona?” Jane asked.

“And who would take care of her there? Who would be responsible for her?”

After a long silence, Bob stopped on the shoulder of the road. He got out of the truck and got into Amy’s trailer. He sat with his back to the wall. He talked to her as a friend. He felt sad and did not hide his feelings behind a cheerful voice. The time was fast approaching for some decision that would change their lives. Amy was growing up, and Bob had choices to make. Damn, he thought. I don’t even want to
think
about what to do.

T
he Arizona “snowbird” life mirrored on a smaller scale what Bob and Jane had built for themselves in Colorado. They owned a nice house in the Paradise Valley suburb of Scottsdale, and Bob maintained a miniranch for Amy and his horses and a few cows on the outskirts of Phoenix, by the canal.

With Bob’s constant presence and encouragement, Amy adapted to Arizona during her months there each year. Her stall and paddock were about the same size and shape as they were in Colorado. She ate the same foods and had the company of Michelle and the cowdogs. Best of all, now that he was away from the big Colorado ranch, Bob spent the whole day with her, every day. They walked the ranch’s fences, and they wandered over to the canal and watched
the water flow by. The skies were a sulfurous yellow and the air was hot; gray rabbits and sometimes an armadillo wandered in from the desert; the nights were cool and the stars bright.

In the 1990s, few places in the United States were growing faster than Phoenix and Scottsdale. It was the same story over much of the Old West. Bob could see and even smell and hear how the empty land was filling up with new construction, people, noise, traffic, and pollution. Housing developments were built right next to his Phoenix ranch, so close that Bob could have waved to his new neighbors. The ranch was already hemmed in by the canal on the north and a road on the south; the road, which so few cars once had traveled that rabbits hopped across at their leisure, now thundered with traffic. But as time went by, new construction blocked both the other ranch boundaries. This squeezing of the property served also to emphasize Amy’s growth and size. Bob’s world, and not just the trailer, was getting too small for her. She had outgrown her stall, her paddock, the barn gallery, her trailer, and the ranch itself.

One evening at a dinner party in Scottsdale, Bob was sitting next to a woman visitor from St. Louis. He took out his billfold as usual and showed her photographs of Amy, and told her how he had come to adopt her. He rhapsodized about their lives together, and the woman, an animal lover who raised horses, was enthralled. In passing, Bob mentioned his concerns over how big Amy was growing.

“Why don’t you let me find her a home at the St. Louis
Zoo?” the woman asked him; as a member of the zoo’s board of directors she could have arranged the adoption with a single telephone call.

“No,” Bob said, and thanked her politely. But before leaving the party that night, he went up to her and said, “I may be in touch,” and they exchanged business cards.

On the way home he brooded over what he had said to the woman; he felt as if he had betrayed Amy with his words.

“What’s the matter, Bob?” Jane asked.

“Nothing,” he told her. But it wasn’t nothing. It was one of the biggest decisions he would ever have to make.

A
subtle change in Bob began after that night. It took the form of a gradual withdrawal, a slight avoidance, and emotional separation. He was being left behind, again—he, the Marlboro Man and a lifelong cowboy who was supposed to be forever young.
He had to let go.
Out of the blue he would say things to Amy like, “I sure would miss you.”