by Paul Kmiotek
Gathering of Imbeciles
Book One
An Indefensible History of the Corona Park Zoo
By Paul E Kmiotek
Cover Art and Illustrations by Paul E Kmiotek
Copyright 2012 by Paul E Kmiotek
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental . . . no, seriously.
Dedicated to my lovely wife Megan, who
has endured more permutations of this
abomination than any one person deserves.
Also to Donald and Guenther – they
know who they are – who made it
all so easy.
CONTENTS:
1. Kudos, Muffy
2. Pablo, Dexter, and Golda Meir
3. A Day at the Races
4. April Showers
1
Kudos, Muffy
I
Donald O’Reilly-Guttenberg-Chen-Kavoulopolis (his parents had hyphenated their family names and his wife insisted that she too deserved the same consideration (he wasn’t quite sure where the ‘Chen’ fit in)) and management were on the same page. Management respected Donald. They knew that he was the only competent keeper at the zoo . . . even without his incessant reminders. They were, in fact, fully aware of their own plentiful faults and shortcomings . . . even without his incessant reminders. They even agreed with Donald that the zoo was in dire need of a complete and radical overhaul, all the way from the pinnacles of management right down to the lowliest shit-picker, and fully concurred with his frequent criticisms and suggestions. They just didn’t have the balls to actually implement them. But if he were in charge . . .
Donald picked up his cup of luke-warm coffee, checked to make sure “the patch” was still intact, and lit another Virginia Slim. It was still ten minutes until break time, but having finished prepping all the animal diets an hour ago, he deserved this time much more than the lazy mopes who were still working out in the field.
He was sitting in his “office” with the Daily News, open to the racing page, lying across his naked, hairy knees, his pants in a rumpled pile around his ankles. Donald’s “office” was the furthest stall to the left in the Administration Building’s men’s room. He preferred this stall for two reasons. First, it was the handicapped stall, so it was much roomier than the other two, plus it had its own sink. Second, being a corner stall, it was impossible to be “surrounded” should there be unusually heavy traffic in the facility.
He was studying the day’s races and simultaneously trying to ignore the two pairs of eyes warily peering at him from behind the bowl and from under the sink. The eyes belonged to two of the three 4 ft long spectacled caiman, Marsha, Greg, and Bobby, who shared the space - at least from October through May, when it was too cold to be outside on exhibit - with the keeper. The third crocodilian lay along the wall beneath the non-handicapped sinks. This probably accounted for the disproportionate number of men walking around the zoo with dirty hands.
There was a toilet brush underneath the newspaper, lying across his bony knees, in case one of the reptiles got frisky, but it was a wasted gesture. The animals rarely moved, and if they did, Donald’s little fuzzy plastic utensil would probably prove to be dangerously inadequate as far as protection. But it made him feel better, regardless.
He dug his phone from out of his shirt pocket, speed-dialed number 1, and waited impatiently for somebody at the other end to pick up. He rattled off a series of improbable names, a bunch of numbers, threw in a ‘thanks, beb’, and hung up. Now he had time to think. That’s what he did best. Some people could sing or draw or balance broomsticks on their nose. He was a schemer, a planner, a deeeep thinker.
He had to compose, very carefully, what he would tell management about the events of yesterday. He was sure they’d confer with him at some point; after all, he’d played a pivotal role in averting certain disaster. And when they did, he’d have plenty to say about how the situation was handled, how to avoid a repeat performance, and, most importantly, whom to blame and how to handle the disciplining.
II
Twenty-four hours before:
“Hola Muffy,” one of the attendants called from outside of the American elk exhibit, while deftly spearing a candy bar wrapper. “Hi,” she responded and smiled blandly. Although she had seen him almost daily for over five years, she didn’t know his name. She waved distractedly from the center of the fenced in meadow.
Trees lined the field, each wearing a metal chain-link skirt, meant to dissuade the perpetually hungry beasts from nibbling at the bark. Scattered around the field were, incongruously enough, several large piles of “Milk Duds”, one of which Muffy had been busily transferring onto a wide aluminum coal shovel. The attendant moved along, in search of his next scrap of garbage, and the keeper’s attention returned to her tedious task; scraping at the ground with the two remaining tines of an old toy rake. But her vacuous smile remained.
Muffy smiled often and at everybody but the sentiment rarely found its way to her eyes – dull, blank and soulless, and sunken into unnaturally deep sockets. Of course, she had plenty to smile about. Everybody loved her. Management loved her. She suspected some of them, male and female alike, even had a thing for her. The other keepers loved her. Even the anonymous attendants and maintainers loved her. But nobody loved her more than Antonio, the wonderfully ethnic head of the domestic area, who had proposed to her a couple of months earlier.
But now Muffy was troubled. How was she going to tell Antonio that she didn’t want to invite most of his friends and family to the wedding? She wasn’t sure he understood how uncultured, how. . . unsophisticated they were. And their taste in gifts was abysmal. If she and Antonio received one more plaster statue of the Virgin Mary, she didn’t know what she was going to do. Why couldn’t they just stick to the registry like her side of the family? Well, at least most of them were still in the Dominican Republic and probably couldn’t afford the airfare to Connecticut. She shoveled one last massive pile of elk dung into the rusted metal wheel barrow and headed for the exhibit door. Well, he’d just have to understand (and he’d always indulged her before) that this was her big day. She’d just have to make him see how important it was to her.
She swung the door shut behind her and headed up the dirt path to the elk house. She didn’t notice the door she’d just exited through remained slightly ajar, and the Master Lock used to secure the exhibit was still hanging from the door handle where she’d hooked it upon entering the area. She unclipped her radio from her belt and pressed a button on the side. The radio squealed, she jumped, pressed the other button on the side, and held the gadget a few inches from her face.
“Keeper Muffy to animal supervisor.”
“Go ahead,” Ron replied.
“Six bisons are ready for exhibit.”
“I thought you were working elk today.”
“Oops. Six elks are ready for exhibit.”
“You wanna try that one more time.”
“Huh? Um . . . Oh yeah!” She squealed simple-mindedly. “Five elks are ready for exhibit.”
“Thank you, Muffy.” He laid down his radio, picked up his fork, and resumed eating the grease-soaked egg, sausage and home fries breakfast from the Aristotle Diner that the keeper had so inconsiderately interrupted.
She yanked on the pull chain, opening the chute door, and a moment later, the elk came thundering into the exhibit to find the piles of hay Muffy had carefully laid out for them.
III
; Tootie felt good. He had just mated with his daughter, scratched his huge white butt on the bark of a majestic elm, and was now chewing contentedly on a mouthful of alfalfa and timothy hay, drooling and foaming at the mouth. Amber jewels of testosterone-laden urine dripped from his penis, glinting briefly in the sun, before finally splattering in the pool of malodorous mud beneath him. To celebrate his recent copulation and to warn off any potential usurpers, Tootie lifted his head and bugled at the clouds (a needless gesture, it turns out, as his nearest competitor was a hundred miles away in some zoo in New Jersey). He lunged at the fence, hitting it hard, and startled one of the spindly, weak-kneed little hay-bitches who was passing by, causing it to yelp and drop its load of rakes and shovels. Aaah . . . it was a good day.
Tootie, who had had the misfortune of being named by Muffy upon his birth three years earlier, was the half-ton, uncontested monarch of a small herd of does. His entire world consisted of the blacktopped, walled in holding area where he spent his nights, and the grassy, fenced-in, half-acre, where he wiled away his days. He was born here and he would probably die here. A long, drawn out, and miserable death reserved solely for those “ambassadors of the wild”, zoo animals. He knew, intimately, every square centimeter of his world: every blade of grass, every dandelion, every tree and every link of the protective fencing around every tree. He knew every post, and every millimeter of every strand of electrified wire stretched between every post, that surrounded his world. And now, as he chewed on a large piece of recently regurgitated cud, he sensed something was different. A couple of hours of masticating and scanning the fence line finally revealed a gap that had never been there before. Tootie’s world was about to become terrifyingly bigger.
IV
It was almost 12:30 when Muffy returned to the elk holding area. She’d finished cleaning the coyote and bear cages and had come to this relatively secluded area of the zoo to smoke a pre-lunch joint, which she’d just purchased from Mike, the zoo horticulturist. Mike liked to talk and would always go on and on about how he grew his own weed “hydrofoilically” or whatever. It was good weed but Muffy wished she could just get the stuff without the big, long, boring lectures. She didn’t know, or care, what he was talking about most of the time anyway.
Several minutes, and half the joint, passed before she noticed that something seemed to be wrong. Tootie was munching happily on some mulberry leaves that, theoretically, he shouldn’t have been able to reach. He also seemed to be a lot closer to her than should have been possible. It took a few moments more for Muffy’s smoke addled brain to realize the significance of this. Tootie was on the wrong side of the fence. He was, in fact, just a few short yards, an effortless leap for an animal of his size, from putting an antler tine through Muffy’s palpitating chest. She dropped the joint and picked up her radio.
“Ah . . . ah . . . the elk! He’s right there! Omigod, he got out!”
Ron, the only supervisor working that day, cursed under his breath, closed the Hot, Young Asian Girl website he was perusing, and picked up his radio.
“Could you please clarify that transmission, Muffy?”
“Keeper Muffy to all animal staff,” she gasped, panic edging her voice. “Brown-out at elk, I repeat, brown-out at elk.” “Brown out” was radio code for an escaped animal. It was one of many phrases, such as “package,” meaning a dead animal, or “item,” meaning a birth (or maybe it was the other way around, nobody was really certain), used in case a member of the public should overhear a radio transmission. Morty, one of Donald and Muffy’s co-workers, liked to joke that, if he ever ran into the mountain lion on the wrong side of the fence, there’d probably be a “brown-out” in his pants. The general consensus among the girls at the zoo was that Morty was disgusting.
“Do you have the animal in sight?”
“It’s in the woods between the exhibit and the elk building.” Her voice, transmitted over the radio, sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard.
“All animal personnel proceed to elk. Do not approach the animal and make sure you have something in your hand. Don’t do anything until I get there.” With Herculean effort, he hefted his 300+ pound frame from his desk chair and headed toward the scene as fast as his already damaged, fifty-nine year old oversized heart would allow. He had hoped to pass his last few months at the zoo, before retirement, quietly. That now seemed unlikely. He arrived several minutes later, tailed at a discreet distance by his faithful companions, Boris and Bela, the zoo’s pair of turkey vultures. His head was a huge, balding, sweaty cherry. He bent over, chest heaving from the magnificent effort to supply sufficient amounts of oxygen to his pounding kettle drum of a heart, supported himself with one hand on his knee, pointed with the other, opened his mouth, and was promptly darted in the ass.
V
Lori was sitting at her desk, perusing the Hot, Young Asian Girl site on the web, when she heard the call. She leaped up, unlocked the gun cabinet, grabbed the dart rifle and related paraphernalia, and raced to the scene. As the zoo vet it was her responsibility to tranquilize any animals should the necessity arise. Like, for instance, now.
Lori Mengele was a runner. Between her petite build and her “buzz” haircut, she could easily have been mistaken for a twelve-year-old boy. In fact, a day rarely passed without some toddler at the zoo calling her “mister” or “sir.” She ran five miles every day at lunchtime and, along with her life partner Sheila, ran in the New York and Boston marathons every year. She arrived at the elk woods several minutes before Ron and started setting up to dart the bull elk.
Several more keepers began to arrive, one by one, holding various implements - nets, catch poles, shovels, brooms, etc - and joined Muffy and Lori at the edge of the woods. The area was roughly triangular shaped, with the elk exhibit forming the left side, the elk building and coyote exhibit forming the right, and a public path, where the staff were now gathering, formed the base. The keeper door, through which Tootie had exited the exhibit, was near the pinnacle of the triangle and now he grazed, oblivious to the crowd of crudely armed zoo personnel, between it and them.
Lori gathered the crew around her and started the standard darting speech they’d all heard before:
“This stuff is lethal. It’s a thousand times more powerful than morphine. A drop of it on your skin will kill you within thirty seconds. Anybody handling the sedated animal is to wear a double set of latex gloves. Stay away from the darted area and never, I repeat, never touch the dart.”
The keepers gloved up while Lori loaded the dart into the rifle and took aim. Just as she pulled the trigger the coyotes started to howl, Tootie jumped, Muffy screamed, and Lori twitched, sending the dart careening off of a birch tree ten feet away and straight into Ron’s left butt cheek.
The crowd stood and stared in stunned silence. The coyotes stopped howling and Tootie stopped chewing. Staff and animal alike watched and waited in reverential awe for Ron to die. To everybody’s relief (and Boris and Bela’s disappointment), Ron reached behind himself and plucked the dart from his overstuffed wallet. The only thing it had managed to kill was his Visa card, several one dollar bills, his Pathmark discount card, and his Lucky Sun shiatsu massage v.i.p. card.
VI
Boris and Bela began following the supervisor around the zoo the day he returned to work, following his first heart attack. That was nearly three years ago. Apparently, the raptors, utilizing their ultra-sensitive carrion detecting organs, could sense what Ron, through shear ornery stubbornness, refused to admit. But someday his will to live would falter, stumble ever so slightly, and the ghoulish carrion birds would be right there to reap the bountiful benefits. To wallow in a flesh-eater’s version of the mega-millions lottery. And so they followed him. From the moment he stepped from his car in the morning, a greasy bottomed brown paper bag under each arm, until he stuffed his gargantuan frame behind the wheel of his grossly undersized compact car at day’s end. They trailed him like a cou
ple of red-headed, ugly, black puppy dogs. When he entered the administration building, they would loiter around the door like a pair of leather-clad 50’s hoodlums, and when, finally he emerged again, they would hop along behind, patiently waiting for their day to come. And now, three years later, the unlikely trio stood at the edge of the woods pondering their next move.
VII
The days were starting to cool, the leaves were starting to turn, and Tootie was as horny as a catholic priest. At this time of year there’s no room in a bull elk’s simple little brain for caution or fear. Just sex. Sex, and destroying anything that came between him and sex. That’s why a bull elk in rut is generally considered to be one of the most dangerous animals in the zoo. The mountain lions, the wolves, and even the bears would rather run than fight, given the opportunity. A rutting bull elk, and Tootie was a prime example, just wants to fuck whatever he can fuck, and fight what he can’t (and neither option appealed to the average zoo-keeper). And, like Don Quixote, he wasn’t very choosy about who, or what, his opponent was. A tree, a rubber water tub, a metal hayrack - they all became the hapless victims of Tootie’s wanton rage.
But now Tootie was confused and a little frightened. He had crossed beyond the boundaries of his world and now his senses were being assaulted by new sights, sounds, and scents. True, he was only yards from the fence, but for Tootie it might as well have been another planet. He did the only thing he could think of to do in times of great duress. He curled his upper lip and hissed, sending a spray of spittle flying through the air, then reached down and took a mouthful of purple wildflowers to chew on while he mulled over his situation.
But any decision-making abilities that may have remained in his already dangerously overtaxed little brain were totally annihilated when he smelled the smoke. Controlled entirely by instinct and terror, Tootie charged the first thing that moved. Donald looked up just in time to see one thousand pounds of mindless chaos bearing down on him. The door to the building was between him and rapidly approaching death. The door to the exhibit was behind him. His only option was to chance it with the does. He dove through the exhibit door and ran for his life.
VIII
Ron dropped the dart and started spouting orders. His plan was simple. While the rest of the staff tried to divert the elk’s attention, Donald would go around through the elk building, behind Tootie, and re-open the exhibit door, which had apparently blown shut at some point after the elk had exited through it. He would then re-enter the building, hopefully without drawing the animal’s attention to himself, and the rest of the staff, banging shovels, yelling, and generally just making a racket, would try to drive the animal back through the door. It seemed like a plausible plan and it looked as if it might actually work . . . until somebody yelled “FIRE!”
Muffy’s discarded “relaxant” had lain smoldering for several minutes in a pile of dry autumn leaves before finally erupting into a miniature forest fire. Fortunately for the zoo, and for that matter the entire neighborhood, among the implements brought for animal control were several fire extinguishers, and the blaze was quickly squelched. Unfortunately for Donald, the flames were not extinguished before Tootie noticed them, then him, in rapid sequence, and charged.
Being smaller and lighter, Donald had maneuverability on his side, as the elk had difficulty making the turn through the door without crashing headlong into the adjacent fence. His antlers became momentarily entangled in the fence mesh, giving Donald another precious second. But the moment the elk was through the door it was a flat out foot race, through the mud, between a hundred-eighty pound man with over-sized work boots and tar encrusted lungs, and a half ton raging bull elk, built for speed, and out for blood. The does lifted their heads for only a second before returning their attention to the delicious yellow dandelions, as though Tootie chasing a screaming keeper through the exhibit was a daily occurrence. Donald reached the opposite fence with only a fraction of a second to spare, and clambered up the side. Tootie hit the fence hard, his antler stabbing through the crotch of Donald’s trousers, and through the area where his testicles normally would have hung, had they not been, due to sheer terror, sucked up into his lower abdomen. The force of the hit sent Donald flying over the top of the fence and into the relative safety of the small algae covered pond on the other side. While Donald extracted himself, covered in foul-smelling muck, from the water, Ron secured the exhibit door, and disaster was narrowly averted.
IX
It was the next day and Donald was anxiously awaiting the call he knew would come. He busied himself weighing out five-pound portions of previously frozen lab rats and stuffing them into plastic bags, making two weeks worth of mountain lion treats. But his mind was not on his work. When the phone finally rang he leapt to answer it, slipped in a pool of fish blood, and nearly broke his neck.
“Kitchen.”
“Hi, Donald, it’s Ron.” This was it. He’d probably called to arrange a meeting with the curator and the director of the zoo.
“Hey Ron, What’s up.”
“Lucy just called. She didn’t get her mealworms this morning. You want to take care of that?”
“Mealworms!? . . . Fuck the mealworms! . . . What about the elk?” Donald wanted to say, but Ron had already hung up. No mention was ever made of the incident.
Three weeks later Donald was sitting in the keeper lounge when he noticed a new memo on the bulletin board. It read:
To: All staff
Re: Muffy Chambers promotion
The Director, the Curator and I are pleased to announce the promotion of Muffy Chambers to the position of Head Keeper. We feel that her performance and dedication to the job more than justify this action and we look forward to many more years of the same. We know that the keeper staff will join us in saying ‘Kudos Muffy, keep up the good work.’
It was signed at the bottom by Ron.