“Bald eagle’s a lot of bird,” Arnie added, with a hint of condescension that made me want to yank the mustache off his face. “Those things got strength in their feet like you wouldn’t believe. They bite, too. It’s better not to have people crowding around when you’re working with them.”
Calvin seemed to accept that as summarizing the situation. He handed Arnie one of the pairs of gloves and a net with a four-foot aluminum handle. He carried the other gloves, a hammer, and some nails. The senior male and his favored subordinate set off to conquer the eagle, leaving me in the kitchen.
I said a lot of bad words about macho exclusionism and cursed myself for not knowing how to nip it in the bud. After banging food pans around for a couple of minutes, I swore at myself again for letting them shut me out and headed down to the birds of prey area.
By the time I got there, they had the bald eagle on the ground tangled up in the net. Both men were jammed into the exhibit. The door, wire mesh on a pipe frame, was wide open. The eagle was not going gently; the net heaved as she tried to flap her wings and strike with her feet. One long dark wing feather was broken and sticking out of the net at an angle. Calvin was bent over maneuvering to grab her legs while Arnie held the net. Calvin grabbed one yellow leg that ended in talons with two-inch claws. The eagle slashed at his glove with the other foot, whickering shrilly. Finally he grasped the second leg and stood up, a leg in each hand, the eagle bashing her wings against his face. The net was still draped over her with wing tips poking through. Arnie tugged at it, trying to disentangle net and bird.
It was not an elegant performance.
“Arnie, get that net off and grab her wings. She’s going to bust every feather,” Calvin barked. Damaging a bird’s feathers was a significant misdemeanor since they wouldn’t be replaced until the next molt.
Arnie fumbled around with the eagle’s wings, finally disentangling the net. The bird turned her attention to Calvin. His voice got louder. “Get her behind the head, Arnie, she’s going to bite. Get in there and grab her. Do it, Arnie.”
Calvin couldn’t do anything besides hold the legs. The bird was excited, flapping vigorously, and her yellow beak was huge. Arnie reached cautiously for the back of her white head and pulled back when she bit at him. That was not the right move; she struck at his thumb and hung on like a feathered bulldog. Arnie yelled and did a little dance. Perhaps the gloves weren’t quite thick enough. Finally he yanked his hand away, out of the glove. The glove dangled from the eagle’s beak for a few seconds, which kept the beak occupied, but Arnie didn’t move to grab her head. Instead, he had a few words to share with the bird. I found them educational and was glad no visitors were within earshot.
Calvin was getting angrier and not at the bird. Arnie picked his glove up off the ground and tried to grab her head again, with more success.
I might not know much about birds, but I knew chaos when I saw it. If the bird hadn’t been so upset, I would have savored watching the skilled professionals in action. Clearly there was no role for me in the situation; another person would only make it worse.
Calvin got both legs under control and the bird’s wings tucked under his arm. Arnie finally slipped a dark cloth hood over the blazing yellow eyes and fastened it around her neck. Her cries shut off and both men relaxed. The eagle no longer struggling, Calvin muttered apologies and carried her out of the exhibit. “Get going,” he barked at Arnie, who went to work with the hammer.
The fun was over and I was discouraged. I thought rodeo-style animal handling wasn’t supposed to happen anymore. The other areas at the zoo had succeeded pretty well in training the animals to shift to a holding area. I couldn’t see any way to do that with the eagle, given the cage construction. Still, there should have been a better way, something a lot less stressful for the eagle and the keepers. My enthusiasm for learning how Calvin managed eagle restraint was gone. I should have stayed in the kitchen.
Calvin was snapping instructions at Arnie about the repairs when he noticed me as I turned to leave. I didn’t say anything and neither did he. His face reddened. I expected him to yell at me for not staying in the kitchen as ordered, but he didn’t. Walking back to the Penguinarium, it came to me that he was embarrassed, not mad. Prospects for a relationship based on mutual respect were looking poor.
I hustled through the kitchen chores and lugged feed down to the waterfowl pond, strategies that kept me out of his sight. When the ducks and swans had finished bolting their food, it was time for my own lunch.
I grabbed a hamburger at the café. Everyone else had eaten and left so I lacked an audience for my dramatic episode of burglary and arson. On the plus side, Calvin wasn’t there either.
I drifted to the office to share my disasters with Jackie and found Dr. Dawson emerging from the Administration building.
“Ah, Iris. We’re moving forward with the clouded leopard introduction in a few days.” He led me a little away from the building, out in the open.
“Linda said you were about ready to give it a try.”
“Yes, somewhat against my better judgment. Waiting at least another two weeks would be better, but Mr. Crandall is anxious to report progress to the zoo board. This process is too subjective for me to marshal good arguments in favor of delay, so we go ahead. Don’t take me wrong—the protocol you developed is working well. You did a nice job on the research.”
He really didn’t think I was a hopeless bungler. I felt like a desiccated houseplant plunged into a big tub of water.
Dr. Dawson glanced back at the Administration building. “I’m not optimistic, but we’ll take all reasonable precautions. I trust things are going better at Birds?”
“Not too bad.”
I watched him stride long-legged and erect toward the Commissary, unsettled that I was so pleased by his comments. What word would Marcie use? “Needy” perhaps? That did not fit Iris Oakley at all. Still, his words were balm that fortified me to face the rest of the day. I decided to pass on a chat with Jackie and headed back to work.
Arnie was gone from the Penguinarium and Calvin was no more or less talkative than usual. He sat at the kitchen table with a stack of rumpled daily logs in front of him.
“You do the afternoon feed at the aviary,” he said. “I’ve got to get these report summaries caught up.”
This was the first time he’d trusted me to do this alone. Or maybe he didn’t want to be around me right now. I moved around the kitchen fixing the afternoon pellets, fruit, and bugs while his head stayed bent over the paperwork, ballpoint pen in hand. I piled the food pans into a green two-wheeled garden cart. Maybe I should ask him where we stood, let him yell at me, yell back that he wasn’t such a hot-shit bird keeper either. But words didn’t come, and I left with the silence still intact.
It was a weekday and cool; visitors were few. I had the World of Birds to myself, people-wise. The big aviary was heavily planted with shrubs and a mix of live and artificial trees. A little stream ran through, with an arched bridge over it. You could wander the path and play “Where’s Waldo?” with birds above and below.
Entry was through a door into a little anteroom, then through another door. Laden with food pans, I pushed my way in. The nenes hissed at me from the ground. Little teals paddled in the stream like expensive toys while bright bits of green and red and blue flickered in and out of the foliage, clucking and trilling. I set out the duck chow and stood on the cement path beside the little stream and waterfall, watching. Small ducks in rounded shapes and subdued browns and grays; jays and starlings and tanagers gleaming in extravagant colors: they were all beautiful. I wondered if I’d ever learn the two dozen species that lived there and couldn’t imagine telling individuals of the same species apart. But Calvin could do it, so maybe someday…In the meantime, what a peaceful place to stand and watch and listen. Arsonists seemed remote and irrelevant.
After all the food pans were distributed, I made a careful tour, tidying up leaves, visitor trash
, and spilled food, the way Calvin did. I salvaged a couple of bright feathers and stuck them in my breast pocket.
On the bridge over the stream, I noticed that a heat lamp was burned out. The enclosure wasn’t heated, so warm spots were important. Multiple heat lamps provided options so weak or unpopular individuals couldn’t be shoved out in the cold. Each was tucked inconspicuously into foliage, with perches underneath.
Maybe the bulb was only loose. That would save a trip back to the kitchen for another one. It was easy enough to check. I put a hand on the iron guardrail and leaned over the stream, weaving the other hand up through twigs, around a food platform, and past the larger branch that served as a perch. My wrist brushed the rim of the metal reflector that housed the bulb.
The jolt knocked me flat on my back on the bridge.
Stunned, I lay there, mind and body both out of order, staring at palm fronds.
Nothing happened for a couple of minutes, except my heart lurched unevenly and body parts reported for duty by starting to hurt. A Mexican green jay landed on the railing and inspected me. A bird I couldn’t identify gave a loud, rattling call from the far corner.
When a nene waddled over and evaluated the possibility of pecking out my eyes, I tried sitting up, with some success. The jay flew off; the goose hissed at me without retreating.
What the hell?
My heart was still pounding and my breath came short. There was something familiar about this. Ah, yes, the same as when Raj almost nailed me. Raw terror.
I lurched to my feet, shaky but unwilling to touch the rail, and tried to figure out what had happened.
It wasn’t that hard.
The metal reflector was charged; I had touched it and the iron handrail at the same time.
I took a shuddering breath, then limped off the path. The goose sneered and hopped off the bridge into the water. I followed the electrical cord to the outlet hidden in a corner. My hand trembled as I yanked the plug out of the socket.
Now what? Take the time, think it through.
Having the daylights scared out of me didn’t count as damage. My ass was bruised, and I had a lump on the back of my head and a burn mark on my wrist. Nothing seemed to be broken and I hadn’t been actually unconscious. Was this a big enough deal to report to Wallace? Keepers banged themselves up all the time. Working Birds had already given me a new collection of bruises, cuts, and scrapes from unfamiliar obstacles.
If I reported it, Calvin might get in trouble for allowing a safety hazard, making my prospects as a bird keeper even dimmer.
If I kept quiet and Wallace found out, it might terminate my prospects as any keeper at all.
Then there was the “Iris the Idiot” factor.
This, too, was familiar.
My brain must have taken a bigger hit than I realized. Keeping quiet and avoiding a thorough investigation risked a repeat, possibly jolting Calvin or a visitor.
Sighing, I sucked it up—again—and trudged painfully to the Administration building. By the time I got there, I’d realized that telling Calvin first was a good idea. I pushed on the door to the Administration building and it flew open, yanked from the inside by a big middle-aged man whose pink polo shirt clashed with an unhealthy red face.
“No one talks to me like that. No one gets away with that,” he insisted over his shoulder as he shoved past me.
At my raised eyebrows, Jackie said only, “Denny.” She listened in as I called Calvin and delivered the short version of what had happened. I started toward Wallace’s closed door.
“No sunshine in there today,” Jackie warned.
I stopped. “What did Denny do this time?”
Jackie scanned the office for witnesses. “That jerk threw his popcorn bag on the ground next to the trash can. Denny asked him if he shits next to the toilet.”
A grin surprised me by burbling through the day’s traumas. I straightened out my face.
“And,” Jackie went on, “Wallace got the estimate for resurfacing the Children’s Zoo asphalt after it got wrecked by the flooding. It’s twice what it was last time. And two of the petting zoo goats are having a pecking order issue. They were slamming their heads together and one backed into a preschooler and tripped him and he knocked out a tooth. That was about an hour ago.”
Oh, boy.
Wallace glowered at my news and decided he had to make a personal inspection of the accident site. “When things are bad, I can always count on you to make them worse,” he snarled as we walked back to the World of Birds.
Calvin met us there. He’d called Maintenance, but no one was reachable. The three of us eyed the heat lamp and its reflector. Calvin first traced the cord to the outlet to be sure I really had unplugged it, then bapped the reflector with his finger a couple of times to confirm it really wasn’t charged. That knocked loose the cord, which had been draped over the reflector and hidden by foliage. He inspected the cord. Two inches of plastic covering were melted, bright copper showing. We all nodded thoughtfully. Cord fell over reflector, which was hot from the bulb. Insulation melted, wire touched reflector, reflector was charged.
“This could of killed you,” Calvin said.
“The bulb was burned out,” I said, not sure what my point was.
Wallace took the cord from Calvin and looked at the damaged section. “The bulb isn’t necessary—you completed the circuit. Did you get burned?”
“Nothing to bother with.” They both seemed to know about electricity.
Wallace turned to Calvin. “You aren’t using the right wire and you shouldn’t have this where visitors can get at it. This setup is an accident waiting to happen. We got a big surplus of accidents and don’t need any more.”
His voice wasn’t quite that of a foreman chiding an employee. There was a faint note of triumph, of evening a score.
Calvin’s face shifted from puzzled to truculent. “You hold on a minute. This don’t make sense. I never put a heat lamp that low—it should be three feet higher, the food platform too. And those cords don’t melt that easy. What was it doing draped over the reflector anyhow?”
He didn’t sound like an employee being chided.
I’d never seen them interact before except in keeper meetings. What was up with those two?
Wallace’s face was stony. “So you think Iris fooled with your setup?”
“I did not!”
“Coulda been a visitor.” Calvin didn’t sound convinced or convincing.
“Work with Maintenance to get something better. I want all of these replaced by tomorrow,” Wallace said and left, muttering about accident reports.
Calvin stayed in the aviary. He went to the tool shed hidden in a back corner and pulled out the stepladder. He inspected the World of Birds thoroughly. None of the other heat lamps was reachable without the ladder. Lacking any instructions, I stood and watched. Finally he removed the defective fixture and pushed the food platform higher up the pole that supported it. He examined the pole, and shook his head. Insisting I hadn’t messed with it was futile and possibly humiliating, so I kept quiet. On impulse, I took the damaged fixture from him, removed the bulb, and climbed the stepladder to try it in another fixture. It lit up. It had just been loose, not burned out.
“Teenage boys messing around,” Calvin finally diagnosed. “Pulled the food platform and heat lamp down, left the cord touching it. Seen visitors do a lot of strange things but not this one.”
I couldn’t tell if he was covering his own rear or if he really believed that.
I wondered if I had seriously underestimated how dissatisfied he was with me. Enough to set up a nasty practical joke, possibly a fatal one? Then I thought about the accident with Raj. Was something really malicious going on that had nothing to do with Calvin? If so, who and why? But it was possible I was at fault for Raj getting out. Maybe I was unbelievably accident prone. Someone had pawed through my clothing and set my house on fire…
We went back to finishing
up the daily routine, my head aching with bruises and questions.
Calvin usually said, “Time to head for the barn” at 4:00 PM. Today he hadn’t even that many words.
Wallace had left a note on my time card. Instead of punching out, I had to hobble to the Administration building again, plenty of time to consider the possibilities. Wallace thought I’d screwed up the light fixture myself and hadn’t admitted it. I was about to be fired or invited to resign. Calvin had complained about me and I was being transferred to Children’s Zoo or the gardening crew. Or maybe a thorough reaming out with threats of what would happen next time. That sounded like the best-case scenario. I gimped into Wallace’s office with my jaw clenched, vowing to keep my mouth shut and not make a bad scene worse.
Nothing good ever happened in that room. Wallace rummaged around on his desk, not looking at me, and pulled out a piece of paper. “L.A. Zoo’s looking for a keeper with carnivore experience. This is the ad. You got the qualifications.” He met my eye, apparently with some effort. “Now I don’t want you to think I’m trying to get rid of you or anything. None of you keepers ever believe I could be on your side, but the truth is, I’m thinking you might want to get back to the cats and start fresh at the same time. I’m thinking of what I might want in your position, and if it isn’t what you want, forget it.” That said, he squared his shoulders and waited.
Instead of responding to this little speech with a heartfelt “Huh?” I mumbled something about thinking it over and stumbled off. Wallace called me back to hand me the ad.
I was so flummoxed that I forgot to worry about another break-in until I was nearly home. But I found an undemolished house and unpoisoned dogs. After feeding the dogs and Bessie and eating my chicken potpie, I sat on the floor for some canine consolation. Range seemed less depressed about Rick’s disappearance and more resigned to getting his affection from me. Winnie wanted a walk, as always, but I didn’t feel like strolling around my neighborhood in the dark.
Buffered against near-death willies by loyal companions, I considered the incident in the aviary. Dr. Dawson said Wallace was concerned about accidents. No surprise the foreman had lit on the L.A. job as a way to ease me out. From his perspective, I was the straggler in the herd. “I can count on you to make things worse.” That hurt worse than the bruises.
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