by Abby Geni
“Oh no,” I breathed.
“Chicken Man didn’t care about animals. His birds were genetically engineered to have a lot of meat on them, so their chests were swollen and their legs were so skinny that they couldn’t even stand up.” Tucker frowned. “Chicken Man put them in tiny wire boxes. They never got a chance to fly. The females just laid and laid and laid some more. They got their food and water through a hole. Never set foot outside. Went their whole lives without seeing the sun.”
I gasped in dismay. The story held me in its thrall. I was getting used to the sensation: the known world transfigured and brightened by an overlay of pixie dust and words. My brother was both the creator of this realm and one of his own creations. He and I moved together through the story he made; I never knew what would happen next, but I felt safe in his hands.
“Chicken Man didn’t care about the roosters either,” Tucker said. “They were just food on legs. He murdered them by the thousands, and it wasn’t the surprise of an easy death. They saw it coming. It hurt. And the babies . . . No, I’m not going to tell you what happened to the chicks.”
In the distance, I saw a figure drifting across the graveyard. A mourner, probably. It looked like a woman’s frame, though she was too far away for me to make out any details. A slim, sad silhouette.
“Chicken Man was a monster,” Tucker said. “Do you see?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Everyone tried to shut him down, but Chicken Man was just too damn rich. I bet he wore a brand-new suit every day. I bet he wiped his ass with monogrammed towels. That kind of money.” Tucker made a grasping gesture. “He had the whole state of Texas in his pocket. He was guilty of more crimes against animals than anybody else in the whole corn belt.”
My brother’s jaw was clenched. The wind swept around me, gushing through the straps of my overalls and tickling my skin.
“It all came down to Corey and Tucker,” he said. “Nobody else could stop Chicken Man. Nobody else was brave enough to try.”
I felt a swell of pride. “That’s right.”
“You have to understand, Corey and Tucker valued life in all its forms.”
“Yeah,” I said. “They did.”
“They were heroes,” my brother said. “You know that, don’t you?”
I shrugged, momentarily unsure, remembering the fire.
As he so often did, Tucker seemed to respond to my unvoiced thought.
“Heroes,” he repeated. “They fought for the animals because the animals couldn’t fight for themselves.”
“Oh,” I whispered.
“Corey and Tucker were on a mission. They were trying to save the world.”
My brother reached for me, stroking my cheek with his knuckles.
“You’re with me, right?” he asked.
At that moment, there was a crackle from the bushes beside us. In a burst of color, a fox dashed away between the headstones. I saw lithe limbs and a bulbous tail. Its clever face was all tufts and points. The creature’s appearance felt like an omen, and the message could not have been clearer.
“Level One,” Tucker said. “A wild animal.”
The fox darted past a mausoleum, its delicate paws landing in the grass without sound. Its sleek fur and sharp ears flickered against the greenery. Then it vanished into a clump of bushes. Tucker chuckled, and I began to laugh too, great wrenching breaths that were almost sobs. Perhaps the fox had taken up residence in the graveyard, found a mate, and had a litter of pups. I wondered if it had dug a den between the coffins, dreaming among the bones.
“The animals sent a sign,” Tucker said. “A sly fox. A trickster. He showed Tucker and Corey that they were on the right path. That the animals were grateful.”
I reached for my brother’s hand, lacing my fingers through his.
“This is all true, you know,” he said. “This really happened.”
27
We spent the next day at the Amarillo Zoo. We wore baseball caps and sunglasses to obscure our faces. We synchronized the cheap digital watches we had bought at a dollar store, not for any particular reason except that spies often did this in the movies. In our denim shorts and tank tops, we were boys—scuffing our feet, spitting into the grass. Tucker told me to speak as little as possible. If other children came up to me, I was supposed to shrug and wander off. If an adult talked to me, I was supposed to act calm and say nothing. If we got separated, we would meet at the carved wooden sign by the front gate.
I had never been to a zoo before. Mercy was too small to offer one. There had occasionally been talk of mounting a family expedition to the Pacific Zoo in Southern California. Darlene would bring up the idea every so often. Maybe someday. Maybe when y’all are a little more grown. Maybe if our luck changes. She would talk about the Pacific Zoo with a faraway gaze and a lilt in her voice. It was one of the few subjects that could make my practical sister wistful. Daddy had been there as a child, it seemed, and he talked about it as a wonderland, stories that lingered in Darlene’s imagination. My sister passed our father’s dream on to me: tigers and rhinos and waterfalls and giraffes and cotton candy and panda bears and trolley rides and a petting zoo and monkeys of all sizes. But we never had the money to go. Our luck never did change.
Now I smelled manure and fur. I heard the roar of a cheetah, the screech of some exotic bird. I bounced with each step until Tucker laid a hand on my shoulder to remind me that I was supposed to seem like an Amarillo kid—someone who had been here so many times it was old hat. The first hour passed in a glaze of elation. My brother shepherded me from exhibit to exhibit, his hair curling in the late July heat. We shared sips from a water bottle. The place was sprawling and circuitous. There were signposts studded with dozens of arrows, each painted with an image of a different animal—emu, zebra, rhino. We turned a corner and saw three giraffes grouped together on a grassy hill. I climbed up on the bottom bar of the fence to get a better view.
Tucker leaned close and murmured, “When a giraffe dies in the zoo, they have to cut up the corpse with a chainsaw. Otherwise they’d never be able to shove it into the furnace.”
I ignored him. The giraffes twisted their long necks to mouth the upper branches of the trees. Purple tongues. Bristly lips. Pronged heads. They wore bemused expressions, as though they were not quite sure how they had ended up in Texas. The runt of the group lingered off to the side. His stance was rather odd, all four legs braced, his knees locked and hooves planted in the dirt. He kept arching his neck awkwardly to one side. It looked as though he was trying to eavesdrop on what the crowd was saying about him.
“That’s called zoochosis,” Tucker said. “That kind of repetitive, weird behavior.”
“Zoochosis,” I repeated, trying out the word.
“It’s a combination of zoo and psychosis. Some wild animals—Level One—go off the deep end in captivity. They start pacing or pulling out their fur or acting like that.” He indicated the giraffe again. “Vomiting. Eating feces. Licking walls. Sometimes they’ll even hurt themselves on purpose.”
All around the paddock, people were holding up their phones, snapping photos and taking videos.
“Captivity does funny things to the mind,” Tucker said. “In the wild, boredom is an unknown concept, but it’s pretty common in zoos. And among humans, of course.”
“Huh,” I said, considering this.
“The smartest animals have the worst time,” he went on. “Elephants, for instance. They’re probably sentient, nearly on par with humans. They’ve got no illusions about what it means to be in a cage. They’re prone to zoochosis, sometimes even catatonia. In the wild, elephants can live fifty or sixty years. In captivity, they never last more than twenty.” Tucker paused, his jaw tightening. “Octopuses are smart too. They’re famous escape artists. And they use their skin to send messages. Every octopus in an aquarium is always bright red, because red is the color of rage.”
I glanced around nervously. Tucker was gestu
ring as he spoke, and a few people had begun to glance in our direction.
“Let’s find the reptile house,” I said.
My brother did not appear to have heard me. He swept a hand over the scene, a violent movement, his fingers slicing through the air.
“This is everything that’s wrong with humanity,” he said. “Humans believe that they aren’t a part of nature. And zoos reinforce that idea. The animals are on that side of the bars and we’re over here. Of course we’re not the same thing.”
I waited for him to come back to himself. Every so often this would happen: Tucker would slip into speechifying, so caught up in the cause that his eyes would glaze over. Sometimes he would lecture for just a few minutes. Sometimes it was hours. My job was to agree and wait for the fit to pass through him like a seizure shaking loose from his brain.
“Zoos aren’t just bad for animals,” he said. “They’re bad for people too. They bring the wilderness into civilization instead of people into the wilderness. They’re a fast-food version of the great outdoors.” Tucker slammed a fist into his palm. “Zoos give us an illusion of nature, not the truth. They treat animals like paintings in a museum or images on a screen. Like symbols. Not independent creatures with instincts of their own.”
“You’re right,” I said quietly.
I took his hand and pulled him after me. Still frowning, he let himself be led.
“Zoochosis in apes is especially bad,” he said. “They show all the same symptoms as people in an asylum. Sitting in a corner rocking and holding their knees.”
“Let’s go this way,” I said, pointing down the hill.
We saw a hippo in a pool, its skin the same muddy hue as the water, its back and bottom as rounded as weathered granite. We observed the seals from an underground viewing area, a cool, gloomy tunnel where the pavement was damp, the air rank with the tang of seawater. The pathways were filled with people—an elderly man shuffling along with a cane, disaffected teenagers, everyone eating ice cream or soft pretzels or cotton candy.
“Let’s talk about the plan,” Tucker said at last.
“Okay.”
He sank onto a bench in the shade and patted the wooden slats beside him. I sat too, grateful to rest.
“Today we’re doing recon,” he said. “Look across the street.”
He pointed through the bars of the fence that separated the cityscape from the animals. I noticed that the top of each spar was armed with a spike. Tucker gestured to a gray, forbidding building across the road. The place appeared to be closed on Sundays, all the windows shuttered and dark.
“That’s Chicken Man’s office,” Tucker said.
I took a deep breath. The air had a unique odor—tilled earth, urine, and something murky and piquant that I assumed was the stench of the animals themselves. A corpulent man strolled in front of us, sweating and drinking soda from a straw. He was fat enough that each step cost him something. I watched him lumber down the hill, pink all over, wiping his brow.
“What about our farm?” I said.
“Excuse me?”
To my surprise, I realized I had an argument to make. The idea came into my brain fully formed, as though some part of me had been working on it for a while.
“You don’t like zoos,” I said. “But you loved the farm we had at the old house. I remember that.”
“Uh-huh,” Tucker said slowly.
“We kept animals there. Behind fences, in the barn. Did you ever try to set our animals free?”
Boldly, I met his gaze. Cora would never have been courageous enough to challenge Tucker. My brother was older, stronger, and a thousand times more articulate than she was. His words defeated hers every time, no matter how intense her underlying instincts might be.
Corey, however, wanted this matter resolved. He needed to verify that there was logical consistency in the new world order.
“That’s a good question,” Tucker said. “An excellent question.”
His expression was not what I expected. He seemed to like my audacity.
“I used to open the gates,” he said. “I did it every few months. I would unlatch the cow paddock. Leave the chicken coop open. Show the horses the way out of the barn.”
“Seriously?” I said.
“Hell yeah. I loved those animals, but I didn’t want to keep them there if they didn’t want to be kept. And sometimes they would go exploring a bit. Sweetie especially. He wasn’t all that attached to us, and he liked climbing around in the neighbor’s yard. But by nightfall, he always came back.”
“I never knew,” I said.
“Nobody did,” he said. “Mojo—our old stallion, remember?—he liked wandering too. He’d go down the lane every now and then, poking around, eating people’s flowers, but he usually came back after a couple hours. And the cows never even left their paddock. It was their home. They didn’t want anything different.” Tucker sighed. “They were Level Four. Totally domesticated.”
The crowd was growing denser by the minute. Some people appeared to have come right from church, still dressed in their fine clothes and uncomfortable shoes.
“Level Five,” Tucker said. “Human beings are in a class by ourselves. You know what sets us apart from the other animals?”
“What?”
“We’re incapable of living sustainably. Everything we touch, we change. A wild animal lives in balance with its environment. That’s what wild means. Humans do the opposite.”
I rested my temple against his shoulder. The wind was steamy, the trees whispering, the sky peppered with tiny white clouds.
“Where did you learn about the Classification of Wildness?” I asked.
“I made it up,” Tucker said.
I gazed at him in awe. The afternoon light came dreamily through the branches of the tree overhead, dappling his brow.
“One day I’ll write a paper,” he said. “Get famous like Darwin. It’s good, isn’t it? People like to organize things in fives. The Trophic Scale and the Fujita Scale have five levels. Hurricanes and tornadoes too.”
He held up his intact hand, palm spread, bending each finger in turn.
“Five is always the worst,” he said. “The strongest, the most destructive. The opposable thumb.”
28
At 9 a.m., I was in position. My shoes were laced with triple knots so they would not come undone when I ran. The street hummed with the Amarillo version of rush hour. Revolving doors cast rainbows on the sidewalk. Somewhere behind me, the zoo was in the process of opening for business. A taxi honked. I heard an ice cream truck. A row of children turned the corner, dressed in green T-shirts with the logo of a summer camp emblazoned on their chests.
A church bell began to toll. I counted the tones. The flock of children pushed past me, surrounding me. They were all the same age, a little older than I was—twelve or thirteen, maybe—and big enough that I was concealed for a moment in a forest of green T-shirts. Somewhere far off, the church bell stopped ringing, and the silence that fell in its wake was profound.
There was a screech of tires. A car pulled up in front of the stark, featureless office across the street. This was my cue. I took a moment to verify the details Tucker drummed into me: right address, black vehicle, a driver in a cap climbing out from behind the wheel. The other children left me behind, shuffling down the block toward the zoo entrance. On the opposite sidewalk, the driver went around to open the car door. I knew what to do next.
A figure appeared, facing away from me—thinning hair, a broad neck, sloping shoulders. Chicken Man. A normal businessman in a blue suit.
Then I saw Tucker. Everything else shifted and blurred. For an instant, my brother was the only thing in focus. He paced toward Chicken Man with deliberate indifference, his face shadowed by a baseball cap, his damaged fingers swinging loose at his side.
I screamed with all my strength, scraping my throat raw. This was my job: I was the distraction. I flung my arms outward and dropped
them down, deflating my lungs like a bellows. All along the sidewalk, adults turned to stare at me. A woman with a messy gray braid moved toward me, her arms outstretched, her expression maternal. Across the street, the driver frowned, squinting at me beneath his cap. I kept hollering, though I was running out of breath. Chicken Man glanced upward, as though he could not tell where the shouting was coming from. Perhaps he thought I was above him, falling to the ground.
Afterward, I was glad that he made this mistake. The sky was the last thing he saw.
A gun in Tucker’s hand. A wink of bright metal.
My brother lifted his arm. There was a crack.
For a moment, I did not understand. I had the sensation of doubling, as though each eye saw something different and the image would not cohere. I heard Cora’s voice in my mind, louder than ever, shouting instructions I could not parse, something about home, something about Darlene. Corey, on the other hand, was ready to do as he was told. Tucker had said there would be a signal. He said that I would know it when I saw it. He said that I should run.
Everything slowed down. Cars drifted along the road as lazily as autumn leaves on a river. Tucker was still standing with his arm raised, point-blank range. His face was contorted, flushed red with anger or triumph. I could not seem to gather my wits—two entities in a single space, disparate personalities overlapping. There was a chaotic moment in which every idea and impression was twinned.
Chicken Man fell. He did not make a sound. There was no blood. It was nothing like TV. His head did not explode like a ripe watermelon; he merely sagged to one side and slumped down behind the car, disappearing from my view.
With a deft motion, Tucker slipped the gun into the pocket of his cargo shorts. No one appeared to have witnessed the shot—except me. No one was sure yet what was happening—except me. A few people were still staring my way. Some were just now recognizing that the report had been a gunshot. One man ducked behind a mailbox. Tucker pivoted on his heel and walked away, moving languidly, as though he had nothing to hide and nowhere to be.