It’s time to wash the elephant. Joseph has dragged out the hoses and I’m trying to prod Marysue out the door to the place we do it. Hup, I say, and poke her with a broom. I need to be careful— there is a part of me that steps into traffic—she eased her weight onto the last keeper’s foot and the bones were crushed to pieces. I imagine my ex-wife lifting that giant ear and whispering, Step there.

When I started, the staff treated me to a beer and showed me their scars. They said it would happen sooner or later. They said watch out. Everyone who works with animals has a mark somewhere.

Joseph says big animals are like big problems. He should know, he’s had his share—eighteen years old when the army shipped him to Cambodia. He came back okay, he says, only to get his arm chomped off by a Senegalese lion in a traveling circus. He’s got a little stump coming from the end of his elbow that bends up and down. Like me, Joseph used to have a wife who isn’t in the picture anymore. She left him for a soldier who’d also been in Cambodia. Joseph says it was his fault. He doesn’t blame the lion.

It’s a warm day and I’m sweating in my coveralls. We scrub Marysue’s legs and Joseph tells me another story, this one about his friend Al he met in the service (not the one who drove off into the sunset with his wife). I listen to him describe the jungle and turn my hose on the ground to make some mud. Marysue likes to roll in it. She scoops some up, throws it across her back, and I take a long-handled brush and rub it in. She looks at me with her mouth open and I think she is saying thanks.

Joseph’s friend Al was stationed near Phnom Penh and had a pet cockatoo he’d bought off the street for a buck. It would sit on his shoulder and squawk, feathers rippling, but mostly it just looked around and moved its feet back and forth. Al taught it to shit on command. He’d make it go on his friends as a joke, or on people he didn’t like, for a different kind of joke.