“Evelyn,” he growls, “I need some help down here.”
As he slams the receiver back into its cradle, he pictures Mrs. McGinn on the other end of the line, flying out of bed with her hair still in rollers, padding down the hall to her daughter’s room. The girl will be sleeping half on and half off the bed as she always does, her arms and legs at odd angles and her strawberry blond hair flung across the pillow. The zookeeper wonders if she will realize that this is exactly the kind of emergency that he has been waiting for. Will she finally understand that this is why they couldn’t leave?
Mrs. McGinn will know that he would only call for help if it were a last resort. She will already be on the phone again, initiating the chain that she established many years ago in case of situations just like this one—a chain that she insists her neighbors practice every few months, despite their most strident objections. Right now, telephones will be ringing in kitchens and bedrooms all over town. The townspeople will be rubbing sleep out of their eyes as they pick up the receivers, will mutter curses at the zookeeper and at the rain as they stumble out of bed. They will struggle blearily into their clothing and their raincoats, pausing on the doorstep before moving toward their cars. They have grown accustomed to the rain, but not to rain like this. They will not like the look of this weather, or the feeling of the drops that the wind whips sidewise against their skin, reaching them even where they stand beneath the overhang.
And yet they will come. The zookeeper knows that they will come, knows that even those of them who have not set foot in the zoo for years still cling to the idea of the place as if it could yet provide the means of their salvation, as if it still holds the power to raise this town from the dead. If they hear that it is going under, they will come down here to drag it up again.
He spends the next half hour sprinting from one end of the zoo to the other—not to calm the animals (there is no time for that), but to determine where they are and how he can get them out. When the first headlights appear in the zoo parking lot on the far side of the river, the zookeeper dashes to the entrance. Traditionally visitors park their cars and cross the wooden bridge on foot, but the zookeeper waves a discarded yellow raincoat like a flag and shouts at the townspeople to drive all the way over. They can barely understand him over the pounding of the rain and they are still dazed with sleep and shock, but they keep their engines running and they file two by two over the bridge, their headlights beaming several feeble feet forward. Once they are on the other side they can hear the birds, the chimps, the high-pitched wails of wild cats. They shiver and rub clammy hands over their goose bumps, shifting on their feet and waiting docilely as cows for the zookeeper to break them into groups and call out their assignments.
“You!” he shouts to Noah and his wife, a red panda shivering in the crook of his left arm. “To the aviary! The cages are in the storage room around back. You three—any experience with horses? We’ve got to drive the hoofstock from the barns to the gate. Most of them should be out of the pastures by now. Careful! Watch that picnic table!”
The water has lifted park benches and overturned empty popcorn kiosks. Plastic furniture and old toys from the animal enclosures are floating on the surface. Noah watches the wooden cutout of an elephant tumble into the river, where the current sweeps it out of sight. He starts to go after it, but the zookeeper stops him.
“Too much to do,” he barks, grabbing Noah’s arm and propelling him in the opposite direction. “Trust me. That isn’t the only animal we’ll lose tonight.”
The next four hours are as disjointed and as terrifying as a nightmare. The zookeeper works alongside his neighbors until the night begins to fall back, all of them knee-deep in sludge and chilled to the bone. They bail the water from enclosures and try to herd the mountain goats to higher ground. For half an hour the zookeeper holds the head of an injured tortoise above water, unable to lift her four-hundred-pound shell out of the muck on his own. Sometime later he follows the sound of screams from the feline house and joins a group attempting to coax a loose tiger from the deep end of the corridor. He shouts and waves broken tree branches, going as close to the tiger as he dares, but the task is impossible in a building that has lost all power and is slowly filling up with rain. The cat shows its teeth, snarls low in its throat, and stays put. Two hours later, when the zookeeper sees the striped and matted carcass bobbing up against a fence, he reddens in the dark and turns hastily away. He fears that he has lost the hippopotami as well, but he doesn’t have the energy or the manpower to sound an alarm. Let them drift downstream; he only has two hands, after all.
With every step through the flooded enclosures, with every animal cry and every townsperson’s complaint, the zookeeper’s fury surges higher. He is as cold and tired as they are. He knows he should feel grateful that they are here, grateful for the fact that most of them have remained until now and that he is not trying to manage this impossible task alone. But instead he feels only anger: anger at the handful of his neighbors who snuck back across the bridge and returned home when they felt they had done enough; anger at the rest of them who stayed but whose efforts have been aggravatingly incompetent; anger at Mrs. McGinn’s daughter for the resentful gaze she has been turning on him all night; anger even at the animals for still being here, for existing at all in the first place, for placing their deaths on his shoulders and making him feel as though this crisis is somehow his fault. How the hell could it be his fault? he demands of himself as he closes in on an armadillo. What could he possibly have done differently?
The reason why he took this job in the first place, in fact, was to escape the burden of responsibility. He grew up the oldest of four children, son to parents who loved him dearly and who desired nothing more than his success. But he was not interested in science or medicine, nor in history or law. He was smart and capable, but he hated the weight of all their expectations and the pressure of their stares. He left home as a surly adolescent, determined to avoid situations where people wanted more of him than he could give. That’s why the zookeeping came so easily to him: because the animals expected nothing more from him except the routine of their daily feeding. This was something he knew he could provide. It was satisfying; it was safe.
And now? With the rain pouring into the grasslands and the penguins swimming over their tank and the monkeys screaming as the water rises in their cages—whose problem is this if not his own?
“Hey,” says a voice from behind him. “Have you seen my husband?”
He turns. There in the rain is the slender figure of Noah’s wife, her pointed face half obscured by her hood. “He said he wanted to round up the wolves, but I haven’t seen him since,” she says. “He isn’t very good with animals, and I’m beginning to worry.”
The zookeeper shakes his head impatiently. “I don’t have time to go looking for lost ministers,” he retorts. “Do you see that armadillo over there? I’ve got to get her into this crate before the whole damn field is flooded.”
His tone is deliberately sharp, but to his surprise the woman refuses to be deterred. “If I got her for you,” she presses him, “then would you have a minute to help me find Noah?”
The zookeeper narrows his eyes and considers her. Rain mingles with beads of sweat along her forehead. Her lips are drained of color, but her chin is set and her gray gaze is steady. In truth, he has not paid much attention to her since her arrival; in general he prefers people who are fiercer, brighter. But she is here now, and so he might as well make use of her.
“Be my guest,” he grunts. He hands her his pair of canvas gloves, and swings the crate into her arms. She takes it and thanks him and then jogs toward the far end of the enclosure. The zookeeper loses sight of her in the dark. A minute later he sees the flash of silver armadillo hide, and a moment after that Noah’s wife appears once again before him with the crate held out before her and Maisy hunkered down against the wooden slats. The zookeeper widens his eyes, impressed despite himself. Anyone else would be triumphant,
but Noah’s wife is only expectant.
“Nice work,” he mutters. “Do you have another minute?”
She has all night, of course. Although the zookeeper knows that she would prefer to leave him and find her husband, she seems unable to refuse when he asks her directly for her help. As the darkness begins to peel away from the sky, she trots alongside him to the picnic grounds and helps him corral the rest of the elk. The task goes twice as fast as it would have gone without her, and since she shows no signs of tiring once it is completed, the zookeeper pushes her on in the direction of the primate house to collect the chimpanzees. For the first half hour, she follows his commands in some distraction, her gaze always roving the grounds for Noah. But halfway through the aviary, she begins to show more animation. She enjoys working with the animals—he can see that right away—and she is good at it. When the minister’s wife talks to the wolves, they lie down in her presence. The toucan swoops to her shoulder and goes meekly into his cage. And after she sweet-talks the notoriously cantankerous zebra into his pen using nothing but an apple and a song—that was when the zookeeper could tell she had a gift. When he tells her so, she laughs at him. The sound carries in the rain and the townspeople look up from their tasks with some surprise. Mrs. McGinn glowers at the two of them as they dash past the penguin tank.
While waiting for the bats in the plaster nocturnal cave, the zookeeper asks Noah’s wife how she came to be so good with animals. Briefly, unemotionally, she describes a solitary childhood. The zookeeper tries to picture her as a little girl, her dark hair uncombed and the bones in her pale face as delicate and as hollow as a dove’s. He sees her kneeling on a chair at the kitchen table in the long afternoon hours before her family returned home, spreading peanut butter with great care into pinecones and building birdhouses out of shoeboxes. When she was older, she made a little money by walking her neighbors’ dogs and feeding their cats while they were away.
“But it’s not a gift,” she corrects him, shrugging off the compliment. The zookeeper doesn’t try to argue with her. Instead he watches the bats swoop in the shadows, listens to the dry rustle of their wings and thinks about his family for the first time in years.
Outside the nocturnal cave, the fish from the creek in the savannah float past with their dead bellies turned up, their silver scales reflecting the sky. The water has washed out yards and yards of fencing, and the animals are roaming the grounds, followed by exhausted townspeople bearing umbrellas or branches or brooms—anything they might use to herd the beasts toward the cars. A few feet away from the exit, the zookeeper leans down and scoops up an otter. The otter chirps indignantly and struggles to get free.
The townspeople are carrying out sheep and goats on their shoulders, holding the hooves clasped together as the zookeeper showed them. The tiger is gone but the other big cats and canines are safely tranquilized, rolled heavily onto tarps and then lifted into the back of the closest open van. Mauro tucks the tortoises into trunks; the last of the birds are coaxed into cages and draped in towels before being carried out into the rain. Leesl is wrapping the primates into blankets and buckling them into passenger seats while Mrs. McGinn uses an oversized metal rake to drive the barnyard animals toward the headlights. When the zookeeper sees Noah struggling under several bales of wet hay, he turns around to point him out to Noah’s wife—but she is all the way across the yard leading a small band of townspeople out of the reptile house, all of them lugging glass aquariums. Under her direction, they load the tanks into the cushioned backseat of an open car and then turn around and trudge back to collect the rest.
“What the hell are you staring at, Adam?” demands Mrs. McGinn’s daughter, her high-pitched voice slicing right through his reflection. “I thought I’d made myself clear.”
“Angie,” he growls, without turning around. “Don’t be so stupid. I’m yours.”
That is the trouble with love, reflects the zookeeper, pulling the otter more tightly to his chest and remembering the hard embraces of his father. The anger is draining out of him, leaving behind only exhaustion and the faint, insistent tugging of despair. That is why he has made a career out of avoiding people. Their expectations are too high. When they love someone, they demand that he be more than what he is; they forget that when all is said and done, he is just another animal—just as bewildered and beleaguered as the rest.
fourteen
Umbrellas bloom across the square in a field of colored canopies.
Noah’s wife admires them as she approaches, following three or four steps behind Noah. Although she is soaked to the bone and more tired than she’s ever been before, every muscle aching as she forces her legs forward, she is buoyed by the sight of the colors. The rain is less torrential now—it is lighter, more rhythmic—and in the delicate, gray light of morning, she finds that she feels better than she has since they arrived here. The long night is finished, the crisis has passed. The rain is letting up, and perhaps the worst of it will finally be over.
Noah, as he walks, shows more sign of purpose than he has in four or five days. Ever since the service, he has eaten little and slept fitfully. Several nights she awoke in the dark to find that he was not in bed beside her, and in the morning she stumbled up the hill to bring him breakfast in his office at the church. Even when he was in the house, warmly and bodily present, his eyes and mind returned insistently, incessantly to the window. The sky behind the steeple softened from black to gray at dawn, and the light slunk in through the blinds to fall across his head and shoulders. Yesterday morning he stood looking out, his clear, broad face reflecting the rain, and when his wife opened her eyes she felt as she always feels these days when she sees him standing at the window with the light streaming through him: that if she doesn’t keep her gaze fixed upon him, he will disappear. What would become of her then?
The townspeople’s cars are parked and double-parked around the square, all of them splattered with mud, their metal frames eaten away by rust. As Noah passes by a decrepit sedan he hears a shriek from inside the car and leaps back, instinctively, when a scarlet-feathered bird throws itself against the window. Most of the vehicles are shuddering from the wild movements of their occupants, and Noah’s wife finds herself falling behind as she slows to gaze at the matted fur and feathers of the animals boxed up in backseats, their button-eyes gleaming at her from the other side of foggy windows. Noah turns around to call to her and she trots to catch up as a tinny voice resounds among the low brick buildings. The meeting has already begun.
“Good morning!” Mrs. McGinn shouts through her megaphone in the center of the town square. “Thank you all for being here! I know this isn’t how most of you expected to be spending your Saturday morning. Well, Lord knows that no one expected the zoo to flood, either. But who can prepare for every crisis? Who can foresee every outcome? When plans change, we have to change along with them!”
“Come the high hell and water!” shouts Mauro from somewhere near the back.
Someone chuckles, and Noah’s wife turns to see the weatherman standing two feet behind her. He flashes a sardonic smile and jabs his thumb in Mauro’s direction.
“That guy is hilarious,” he says.
“What are you doing here?” she whispers, her tone fierce.
“Town meeting.” He shrugs. “I figured it would be entertaining.”
Noah’s wife looks away from him. The weatherman is by far the driest, calmest person in the square. The rest of the townspeople are huddled together, their ponchos rustling as they shiver. They are anxious to get home, but they cannot leave without unloading the animals and no one has told them where to put them. When they begin to mutter among themselves, Mrs. McGinn hoists her orange umbrella, luminous against the smudge of charcoal sky behind her. She has always been fond of rhetorical flourishes.
“Furthermore, we have a responsibility,” she continues, “as the inhabitants and stewards of this town. Some of you might say that this town isn’t what it used to be. Some of you might say that
the rain has been falling forever and the zoo has been downsizing for years and what’s the point of concerning ourselves with it now? Why should we care?”
The townspeople’s gazes are foggy from lack of sleep. Some of them are reeling from side to side with dazed expressions, tightening their hoods over hair that is already drenched. The rain taps teasingly against their shoulders. A few people gaze longingly at the single highway in the gray distance, the only way out of here. Is it too late to make a run for it?
“Well, I’ll tell you why!” declares Mrs. McGinn, really hitting her stride now. “It’s not because this zoo is what put us on the map in the first place. It’s not because we used to be famous once or because if we do this right, maybe we could be famous again. Although that might be true!”
“Evelyn!” snaps one of her neighbors. Noah’s wife turns to see a man with a black umbrella and a face covered in claw marks. “Enough of your goddamn speeches already. We’ve done what you asked us to do. Just tell us where you’re sending the animals so that we can get them out of our cars and go home to bed!”
“Yes!” shout the townspeople from various corners of the square. “What are we doing? Let’s get out of here!” Noah’s wife turns around again to see who is speaking, and finds the weatherman looking pleased.
Mrs. McGinn lowers her megaphone, her expression losing some of its luster. She turns to the zookeeper, and the two of them exchange a series of urgent whispers.
Noah’s wife shakes her head. “They don’t have a plan,” she says, leaning closer to Noah. “They’ve got all the animals out, and now there isn’t anywhere to put them.”
The crowd is beginning to get restless. Their muttered conversations are increasing in volume, their rain-streaked faces growing red beneath the dirt. The optimism Noah’s wife was feeling has already faded, and she reaches for Noah’s elbow with some trepidation.
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