by Tim Sandlin
“Oudry,” he said. “Do you very much mind stepping outside and buying us some time. Wave the weapon about. You may frighten the boys into breaking off their massacre.”
“I’ll step,” Oudry said. He had regained his Britishness — a positive sign when Mary needed one most. “However, the goon gentlemen are drunk on Motubo whiskey. They are not likely to break off.”
“Do what you can.”
Oudry removed his cap and, with ceremony and whispered words to the baby, placed it in the crib beside Franklin. As he turned to go, Mary had the irresistible urge to kiss him on both cheeks and the forehead. Due to his girth, the forehead kiss required a stretch.
“Goodbye,” she said.
Oudry smiled. “You are a blessing to your race and gender.”
“You too.”
Then, with a nod to Dale, he was gone.
Mary locked the double doors behind him. She braced herself, then turned to face Dale. “We had so much more we wanted to do.”
“At least, it was perfect while it lasted.”
“That is true. We shall never grow tired of one another.”
“Darling, if I’d lived to a hundred and four, I would never have grown tired of you.”
A scream came from the other side of the doors. Oudry.
Mary winced. “Dale, my husband, I can’t for the life of me decide if you are hopelessly romantic or just full of shit.”
Dale did his utmost to appear enigmatic.
°
Three minutes passed before the front and back doors crashed open and machete-wielding madmen flooded the room. Crazy-eyed, froth lipped, spattered in blood and entrails — your basic nightmare of lust in the rain forest. Howling and cursing, the men moved with the random purpose of a force of nature. A tidal wave of hatred.
But then, the murdering mass froze. From the record player rose the tinny sound of Bing Crosby singing “Sweet Leilani.”
Sweet Leilani, Heavenly Flower
I dreamed of paradise for two
You are my paradise completed
You are my dream come true
In that space between the empty hammock and the shuttered crate Dale and Mary danced. Her hands locked behind his neck, her thumbs in his curly black hair. His arms around her waist with the fingers alongside her spine. Their eyes held each other in a gaze both infinite and final. Beyond love. Beyond death.
Neither Mary nor Dale blinked when the doors crashed in. Not so much as a glance did they bestow on their killers. No one, no time, existed beyond the love that held them to one another.
The machete goons stood, slack mouthed and speechless, frozen in the moment as the song drifted to a close.
You are my paradise completed
You are my dream come true.
Mary and Dale danced.
Then, silence — a needle scratching in the groove at the end of the record. The littlest goon who had never been loved howled his fury. The wave surged.
FEBRUARY 2010
1
We — you and I — are observers. On a blue morning in late winter, we observe a young man lounging among the upper leaves of an acacia tree overhanging the savannah habitat in the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. He sits wedged in a fork of the acacia, astride a dappled limb, legs dangling, back braced against one of the forks, hands lazily crossed at the wrists several inches above the shock of blond straw that is his hair. The young man would appear representative of his age and time — Padres t-shirt, Dockers cargo shorts, — except for these facts: he is barefoot with his toes splayed against the bark, the arms that drape over his head hang in an awkward position, and as he keeps track of the comings and goings below, the young man emits a soft, panting, mechanical sound in his throat punctuated by the wisp of sucking air through his teeth.
Along with his physical oddities, his hovering in a tree on the habitat side of the zebra moat would make the young man worth a second look, had any of the visitors on a slow February weekday peered up through the screen of flat leaves on the acacia. But, of course, no one sees him. Not the visitors nor the zoo employees nor the zebras and the bearded lizards in the savannah environment know of the young man in the tree. We are the only ones to see him there.
He is a young man different from other young men in that he is not intrigued by what he cannot see. He sees his bed in his mother’s nest. He sees the endlessly circling shuttles filled with pointing Outies. He sees the mammals and the birds and the amphibians that mostly come from Africa but so far as the young man knows, are commonplace. Men and women in khaki uniforms feed the animals and shovel their scat. Men in dark green uniforms pick up trash and clean the restrooms. Light green shirts save lost children. Red shirts pass out maps. Sky blue shirts lecture on lore. Outies flow in through the huge gate with its turnstiles and kiosks and, so far as the young man knows or cares, they have no being outside the gate. He has never considered the likelihood of life beyond the Park. He assumes the entire world exists within his view.
Perhaps this isn’t different from others his age after all. Who knows? The young man knows the odors of animals in captivity, and the sounds of wild creatures in anger, lust, and boredom. The permanent aspects of his world are well known, and, therefore, not as interesting as the beings who come in and go away.
The young man in his tree shows a keen interest in the types and shapes of people who haunt zoos. Mothers with toddlers in umbrella strollers and nowhere else to go. Foreign tourists with cameras and checklists. February is a month of disproportionate numbers of Asians, lured to San Diego by the promise of warmth and group rates, off-season prices. Children on school trips group and regroup with a swarm intelligence the young man sees in flocks of birds.
The young man is quite good at spotting loneliness by the posture of those who have it as they stand before the animals. Their hands are rarely visible, either kept in pockets or clutched to one another in supplication. Lonely people don’t see what they are looking at. Their eyes have the inertness of an animal beaned with a club.
Most of all, the young man is interested in lovers. From adolescents through to those much too old to reproduce, he watches lovers wander aimlessly from exhibit to exhibit, as if partially blinded to external stimuli. They strike the young man as moving in a bubble — no contact from outside passing into the bubble, but neither can the lovers recognize anything outside of each other. They often touch — not rubbing scrotums like the bonobo — but hands and shoulders, sometimes wrapping arms across one another’s upper body in an exchange of bacteria.
Not that the young man knows these dazed people he observes are lovers. He has never heard the word love. Dr. Lori calls the smitten pairs couplers.
“Couplers are the most pitiful of Outer Ones,” she says. “They’ve forfeited self-realization for a vapor lock.”
“They do not appear pitiful. They seem pleased.”
Dr. Lori snorts, a sound not unlike a duiker defecating on dust. “Hypnosis. Outer Ones are forced to feel in direct contrast to their condition.”
“Does not thinking they are happy define them as happy?”
Dr. Lori takes off her spectacles and leaves them dangling by the thin, gold chain around her neck. She stares at the young man. “Bing,” she says, for that is his name — Bing. “Bing. Thinking you are above water when you are underneath won’t save you from drowning.” She pauses to watch his reaction, which consists of pursing his lips and baring his incisors. “Am I correct?”
He inhales quickly, twice, with a whistle noise. “Yes, Dr. Lori, you are my elder and you know truth from lies.”
Dr. Lori replaces her glasses to the bridge of her nose. “Keep that in mind.”
2
On this specific February day we find Bing lolling in his crook of the acacia, studying Outies as they scuttle from exhibit to exhibit, seeing their world through a view finder. Bing is toying with a blue and brick red spotted caterpillar that hunches, slowly, methodically, its way up and down Bing’s knuckles, from thumb, do
wn the dip and over onto the pointer finger, down the dip and up over onto the middle finger. Bing sniffs the caterpillar. He likes the feel of tiny legs on the soft web between his fingers. It makes him happy. The caterpillar has black eye liners, like a panda. Ear tuffs. A spray of prickly fuzz halos its body. The fuzz feels like tiny slivers against Bing’s skin.
When the caterpillar accordions itself onto Bing’s little finger, he turns his hand, palm side up, then watches as the caterpillar works its way back thumbward. Bing knows that so long as he turns his hand, the caterpillar will go on forever, round and round in a never ending loop. This means something important, although Bing isn’t sure what.
Bing’s nostrils flare. He snorts, for he has spotted a young woman who doesn’t fit categories. She sits, weight forward, on a prefabricated concrete bench with curlicues stamped in the armrests. The bench is positioned on the far side of the sidewalk, so passersby obscure her view of the savannah, but she doesn’t seem to care. She isn’t looking at the savannah. She isn’t looking at anything or away from anything. She isn’t aware of vision, and this makes Bing observe her more closely. In his narrow experience, the girl-woman below him appears unique.
The female strikes Bing as long — long wavy to curly hair, long tapered fingers like a sloth, long legs that keep going from the long feet up and up until they disappear beneath her lemon yellow sundress that isn’t long. She looks like a girl who belongs in a magazine, only she isn’t. Bing can see the girl is real and Dr. Lori has promised him that magazine girls are not real. She says photographers have a trick to erase flaws on the magazine girls. This girl is without flaws.
The main thing that draws Bing to her is the clean hair. Or it starts with the clean hair. Later it moves to her hands, particularly her index fingers that are longer than her middle fingers. Then his interest goes to her long neck with its delicate tendons and soft planes, but this is much later and we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
That first morning when Bing sees the girl from on high, looking down at her as she reads what must be a letter, Bing hangs mesmerized by the wavy, almost curly iced-tea brown waterfall of hair. It is hair to go into and become lost. It glitters. It flows over her shoulder when she flicks it away from the letter.
Besides the yellow sundress with its plunging V neckline molded to her white, white cleavage and held to her shoulders by the thinnest of straps, the girl wears brown sandals. Her toenails are painted light purple.
She holds the pale blue sheet of stationery in her left hand and twirls a lock of hair with her right index finger, next to the ear that holds two silver posts in the upper cartilage and a golden ellipse hanging from the lobe. Bing, who has never touched a person from outside the park, in all his twenty years, feels an ache to run his fingertips along the female’s ear, lobe first, then working his way up to the studs and on into her hairline.
As Bing edges forward in his tree to watch, the girl closes her eyes. She holds them closed for a long time, several of Bing’s breaths. He thinks perhaps she sleeps, although her chest doesn’t rise and fall like a person sleeping, and her head doesn’t loll. If she is asleep, she has amazing control of her body.
Her eyes open. She stares into the acacia, and, for a moment, Bing thinks she is looking at him, which alarms the young man. No one ever sees Bing. Invisibility is his task and gift, literal invisibility when he is on the exhibit side of fences and a salamander-like invisibility when he walks the asphalt walks. No one notices Bing. He reflects no light.
The girl stares into the acacia, then she reaches into her leather bag and withdraws a turquoise blue cigarette lighter. Bing knows what it is. Even though smoking is against park policy a group of reptile keepers and an elephant vet often meet in a small enclosure behind the snake staging area where they smoke cigarettes and disparage women. The elephant vet uses a cigarette lighter much like the girl’s, only his is silver.
The girl flicks at the top of the lighter twice before a blue to red flame shoots an inch over the turquoise tube. She stares into the flame, her breath causing it to flicker both forward and back, then she places it under the upper right hand corner of the stationery page and sets the paper on fire. She watches it burn. A couple of little boys who had been throwing sticks at the zebras turn to marvel at the audacity of this grownup firebug. They tell her she is breaking a rule. She ignores them. As the page burns down she turns it over so the flames are flowing up the page instead of down, toward her fingers. Just as it appears she will be scorched, she drops the paper on the asphalt where it burns a few more seconds until she steps on it. Then the girl with the wavy to curly hair makes her right hand into a fist and punches air. After that, she walks away.
By now our young man Bing is utterly smitten. The girl has done something he’s never seen. She has acted with directness and purpose, without question. That is a rare and wondrous quality to behold and Bing either knows this and is properly flabbergasted, or he has no idea what he has seen but he doesn’t want to go forward in his life without seeing more of it. Whatever his reasons, any male or female in the position of spying from a tree on this particular girl burning a sheet of paper would be equally smitten. That’s how life is.
3
Bing eats the caterpillar. Imagine a worm with prickles. Then he shimmies down from the tree and knuckle walks alongside the steep hill dividing the savannah from the fence and public. By sticking close under the ridge he is out of sight from almost but not all the Outies. A person on the far side of the field with a spotting scope might have seen him, but Bing has developed confidence in his invisibility.
“You don’t emit any sign of being,” Dr. Lori said once when he was younger and she found him keeping watch over a dead shoebill, in plain sight of gawkers. “They see you as a stone.”
“Is that positive?” Bing asked.
“It means you’ll be safe. But you still must stay on guard every instant. Some people see stones better than others.”
Bing comes to a wire gate covering a drainage pipe under the berm. He lifts the gate out, slides in backwards, then replaces the gate. It was made for animals with hooves. Any chimp could have broken through.
The pipe comes out in the storage closet of the employee bathrooms next to the flight landing. Bing hears someone coming and ducks into a stall for a drink of water. While there, a man he knows to be an electrician on the zip line goes pee at the urinal. From the stall, Bing listens to the man mutter to himself, something about stinking tourists and then he goes to the sink to wash his hands. Bing cannot understand what that is for — the washing of hands — but he does not worry over his lack of understanding. There are things he knows the cause of and purpose for and things he doesn’t. The things he doesn’t are not a concern.
Bing emerges onto the sidewalk as an Asian tour group passes. Mostly female, they cluster around a skinny gentleman carrying a paper flag of South Korea on a narrow pole. Dr. Lori has taught Bing his tour group flags, so he knows South Korea from Denmark. What he doesn’t know is what a country is. The Asian Outies take no notice of Bing. They fuss with camera equipment. A child drops his ice cream on the dirt. A Twittering man ignores the zoo completely.
Bing walks upright — no more knuckle dragging — back down the sidewalk to the stone bench with the curlicue armrests where the unique woman read and burned the letter. Bing drops to all fours and sniffs the bench where her bottom had been only minutes before. He smells sweetness, like a tangerine. And salt. He licks the bench seat, tasting her. She tastes like leaves soon after they fall off a tree. She tastes like the yellow butterflies he finds from time to time outside the bee-eater aviary. Bing has enough experience spying on them to know human females do not as a rule smell or taste like yellow butterflies. They mostly smell damp and their residue is mushroomy. Only this one is not like others.
The ashes from the light blue paper are still on the sidewalk, at least some are. He can make out where her sandal crushed them into the asphalt. They are grey to white. The lar
ger flakes have crinkled edges. Bing wets the tip of his finger to picks up the ashes because Dr. Lori told him not to lick the ground in front of Outies. He tastes the ash on his finger.
It isn’t enough of the girl. Bing wants more.
4
Rain doesn’t fall so much as permeates. Warm mist, like precipitation sprayed on vegetable bins at Trader Joe’s complete with artificial thunder to make shoppers believe the vegetables are outside even when the lighting resembles nothing found in nature. Rosemary Faith thinks it is late afternoon, near closing, but she isn’t certain because low clouds block the sun. No others loiter on the observation platform at the tiger overlook. This isn’t unusual during rain. The out-of-towners who are at the zoo because today is their scheduled day and they can’t wait for a better afternoon cluster together under the safari barn or in the butterfly habitat. Not many have the energy to climb to the tigers.
Rosemary of the shiny hair and long fingers is one of those people who find respite in a zoo, even more so than a city park. Much more so than a city park. She likes the quiet and the timelessness of the animals. They calm her nerves, as opposed to parks full of loud kids and competitive grownups.
This specific afternoon — the first week of March, ten days after the burning letter incident — Rosemary is distracted by her personal problems. She is so distracted she forgets to open the black umbrella she rented at Jambo Outfitters before starting her climb. She has no hat. The rain flattens her wavy hair so it sticks to the sides of her neck. Water trickles into her eyes.
Surreptitiously, Rosemary smokes a Kent 100 cigarette. Not all 100 millimeters. She takes five or six puffs, carefully making sure no one is near, then drops the cigarette to the deck where she grinds it under the toe of her trainer, then she bends to pick the butt up and she tucks it into a plastic pouch inside her bag. Rosemary tries to be thoughtful smoker.
Had Rosemary been asked to describe herself she would have used the term heavy laden. Spiritual oppressiveness shows in the droop of her shoulders. Her lips are not animated. Her eyes do not sparkle. As happens quite often at the tiger overlook, she sees no tigers. She thinks they are asleep across the ravine, behind a barkless fallen log. Or maybe the tigers have a cave to retreat to when it rains. Rosemary supposes the zoo provides an artificial den tucked into the hillside back in the grass.