Belly Up

by Stuart Gibbs

  Neither was Doc, I discovered. I heard him groan in response to Pete’s arrival too.

  “Have any idea what killed him yet?” Pete yelled from the door. He wasn’t interested in getting any closer to the dead hippo than Martin was.

  “I think so,” Doc said.

  “Really? What?”

  “Cigarettes. Did you know Henry was smoking six packs a day?”

  It took Pete a little too long to realize this was a joke. “Ha-ha.” He sneered. “I’d have hoped that you, of all people, would realize how serious this is. Every TV station in the country is calling me to find out what happened to Henry. CNN says they’re breaking the story at the top of the hour. That’s twenty minutes from now. If I don’t have an answer by then, they’ll think we’re hiding something. For all I know, they’ll report Henry committed suicide.”

  “How on earth would a hippo commit suicide?” Doc snorted.

  Pete paused to think about that. “He could hang himself. . . .”

  “How? Hippos don’t have rope. Or opposable thumbs to tie it with.”

  “Then he could throw himself into the crocodile pit. I don’t know. Point is, I need a cause of death ASAP.”

  “I might not be able to give you one. This is going to take time to do right.”

  “Please. It’s an autopsy .” Pete sighed. “Just get it done. I mean, so what if you make a mistake? The hippo’s already dead.”

  “If you want this to go faster, you’re welcome to come up here and help.”

  Pete turned green at the thought of this. He was saved by the ring of his cell phone and headed to the farthest corner of the auditorium to answer it.

  Doc returned to his work. He’d finally cut through the fat and reached Henry’s internal organs. I leaned out a bit from the catwalk, angling for a better view. I’d seen plenty of dead bodies in Africa—even a couple dead hippos—but they were never exactly pristine. Nothing was dead in the wild for more than a minute before the scavengers descended on it. That was how you usually found a dead animal in the first place; there’d be a cloud of vultures hovering above it. By the time you got there—even if it was shortly after death—the carcass would be torn apart. First the lions would eat their fill, then the hyenas, and finally the vultures and jackals would move in. Within a day, even an elephant could be picked clean down to the bones. So I’d never had the chance to see what a dead animal looked like with all its organs still on the inside.

  It was less disgusting than I’d expected. In fact, it wasn’t really disgusting at all. There wasn’t much blood and the organs didn’t appear all that slimy. Inside his abdomen, Henry seemed to be mostly stomach. This wasn’t a surprise; Henry had an insatiable appetite, even for a hippo. When he hadn’t been sleeping, he’d usually been eating. Normal hippos ate about forty pounds of food each day. Henry ate sixty —and even that hadn’t been enough for him. The one way he’d actually interacted with park guests was keeping his mouth wide open and letting people throw food into it. On several occasions, zookeepers had caught people tossing trash or pennies into his mouth as a joke.

  Henry’s lungs were huge as well. This made sense, as Henry could hold his breath for more than ten minutes. The heart was tough to find amidst the other organs and when it did show up, it looked tiny in comparison, even though it was the size of Doc’s head.

  Doc examined the heart carefully, feeling along the arteries and veins. “No sign of cardiac arrest,” he reported, then turned his attention to the stomach.

  The moment he sliced it open, a wave of putrid gas blew out. I had to fight to keep from retching again. This smell was the worst so far. Even Martin and Pete, all the way across the auditorium, looked like they might be sick.

  “Whoa!” Doc gasped. “You never get used to that!”

  He applied more of the smell-killing goo to his upper lip, then examined the contents of the stomach. It was mostly hay, along with some vegetables that had been swallowed whole—and a few assorted pieces of trash, mostly wrappers from Henry Hippo Happy Meals. Doc glanced over it all quickly—even he found rooting through partially digested hippo food nauseating—and moved on to the small intestine. This was as thick as a fire hose, purplish, and coiled in on itself like a rattlesnake ready to strike. Doc had barely begun examining it when he noticed something. “Hmm,” he said.

  Martin and Pete snapped to attention. I leaned out a bit farther on the catwalk, trying to peek over Doc’s shoulder and see what had caught his eye.

  “What’ve you got?” Martin asked.

  “Peritonitis,” Doc answered.

  “What’s that?” Pete asked.

  Doc sighed, purposefully loud enough for Pete to hear. “It’s an inflammation of the abdominal wall. In this case, it appears to have been caused by perforation of the duodenum.”

  “Could you repeat that in English?”

  “That was English.”

  “I mean English that people who aren’t doctors can understand.”

  “There are holes in Henry’s small intestine. They’re tiny, but they didn’t have to be big to cause damage. Intestinal juices leaked out of them, which caused Henry to get sick. Want to see one?”

  “Not really,” Pete said, provoking another sigh from Doc.

  Martin approached the stage, however. “What made these holes?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know.” Doc pointed to his little tub of goo. “Rub some of that under your nose and put on some goggles.”

  Martin did so, then tentatively peered into the hippo’s body, as though he was afraid something might jump out of it and bite him.

  “Watch,” Doc said. Then he squeezed the intestine.

  A thin stream of fluid squirted out through a tiny hole.

  “That’s what killed him?” Martin asked. “That tiny little thing?”

  “There’s more than one. See . . . ?”

  He reached for more intestine. Martin stepped back, blocking my view. So I grabbed a wire and leaned out as far as I could.

  The catwalk shifted beneath me with a loud creak.

  Doc and Martin immediately stopped what they were doing and looked around the auditorium.

  I should’ve probably just held still, but before I could think it through, I reflexively ducked out of sight. The catwalk shifted and creaked again.

  This time, Doc and Martin realized the sound had come from above. They shaded their eyes and stared up into the lighting grid. “Is someone up there?” Martin yelled.

  I didn’t dare answer. I didn’t even dare breathe. I just stood as still as I could, hoping the catwalk and the bright lights were enough to shield me from their view.

  The seconds crept by like hours. Finally, Doc said, “I don’t see anything” and turned his eyes from the lights.

  Martin stared up into the lighting grid a little longer before turning away. “Definitely sounded like something was up there,” he said suspiciously.

  “Has Bung gotten out again?” Doc asked.

  “Not this week.”

  Bung was FunJungle’s three-year-old orangutan. In zoos, orangs were notorious for getting out of their enclosures, and Bung had been no exception. He’d already escaped twice—though never during visitor hours. Luckily, he’d been quite easy to find both times, as he had a terrible sweet tooth and had gone directly to the ice cream stand near Monkey Mountain. The second time, he’d broken into the freezer and consumed five gallons of rocky road before the keepers could pry him away.

  “Probably just a raccoon then,” Doc said. “They’ve been getting into the vents at the hospital, too.” He returned his attention to Henry.

  I wanted to see what was going on, but was afraid to take any more chances. I stayed put on the catwalk, scared to move a muscle, which meant I couldn’t see the autopsy worth a darn anymore. I could still hear everyone loud and clear, though.

  “Look,” Doc said, examining the intestine. “There’s another hole. And another. And another!”

  “And another over there,�
�� Martin added.

  “It’s getting close to time for the news,” Pete called out. “Do we have an official cause of death? This perry-whatever?”

  “Peritonitis,” Martin corrected.

  “Maybe not,” Doc said.

  “What are you talking about?” Martin sounded annoyed. “It’s obviously peritonitis. You said so yourself. . . .”

  “I mean there might be something else going on here. There were five holes in only two inches of intestine. That’s not normal. And look, here’s two more.”

  “So the hippo’s got a crummy intestine,” Pete said. “What’s the big deal?”

  “The big deal is, I don’t think anything natural could have perforated his intestine like this.”

  A moment passed. Then Martin grasped what Doc was saying. “You mean, you think somebody did this to Henry?”

  “Maybe,” Doc replied.

  “How?”

  “It’d be easy. You’d just have to take something small with a lot of sharp points—sharp enough to pierce Henry’s intestine—then wad it up in some food and throw it into his mouth. In fact, given the number of holes—here’s three more—someone probably tossed in a lot of these things.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Pete. “Are you suggesting Henry was murdered?”

  Doc hesitated a moment before answering. “Yes.”

  Despite the heat from the lamps all around me, I felt a chill go up my spine. The possibility that Henry had been murdered alarmed me—though I have to admit, there was something exciting about it too.

  Martin wasn’t nearly as shocked by the idea. Instead, he seemed annoyed by it. “That’s ridiculous,” he huffed. “Why would anyone want to murder Henry?”

  “I’m not saying it was done maliciously,” Doc replied. “Quite likely, it was an accident. You’ve seen what our guests throw in Henry’s mouth. They think it’s funny. Maybe someone threw in this sharp thing—whatever it was—as a joke, not realizing it would kill him.”

  “So that’s what you think I should tell the news?” Pete asked, incredulous. “That our beloved mascot was killed by one of our guests?”

  “He wasn’t exactly beloved. . . .”

  Pete didn’t even wait for Doc to finish the thought. “Forget about it. If I go out there and tell the press Henry was murdered, they’ll think I’m insane.”

  “So don’t use the word ‘murdered.’ If a guest did this to him, the public should know. They should understand that when they throw garbage into an animal’s mouth, that animal could die. . . .”

  “I think it’s a bad idea,” Martin said.

  “Why?” Doc sounded incredulous.

  “It makes us sound like we’re running a shoddy zoo. It’s bad enough Henry died so soon after our grand opening. If we say one of our own guests killed him, the animal-rights activists will go ballistic. They’ll ask why we allowed people to throw things in his mouth. Why didn’t we put up barriers to keep it from happening? We’ll get accused of animal abuse. Or cutting corners to get the park open on time. . . .”

  “You don’t know that for sure.”

  “We can’t take any chances.” Martin turned to Pete. “Tell the press Henry died of natural causes. He’d had a rough life in the circus. We knew that when we brought him here, but we’d hoped he still had more years left in him. At least his final months were happy ones, though.”

  “You got it.” Pete was out the door before Doc could protest.

  After he was gone, there was a heavy silence. I stood as still as I could, astonished by everything I’d witnessed. It was shocking enough to hear that Henry had been killed. But Martin’s desire to keep it a secret really stunned me. It was the first time I’d realized that FunJungle was being run like a corporation, rather than a zoo.

  Finally, Doc said, “There’s also the possibility that someone killed Henry on purpose.”

  “Why would someone want to do that?” Martin snapped.

  “I think you know.”

  There was a long silence, as though Martin was carefully weighing what to say next. Meanwhile, I could barely contain myself. I wanted to shout at the top of my lungs, to ask who they thought killed Henry and why.

  But I didn’t. And to my disappointment, Martin didn’t take the bait. Instead, he snapped off his goggles and headed for the door. “That’s preposterous. No one would be crazy enough to murder a hippo.”

  “People do lots of crazy things.”

  Martin tapped his foot rapidly, something I’d noticed he did when he got nervous. “Henry died of natural causes,” he said finally. “That’s what I want to see in your report. No accusations of murder. No crackpot conspiracy theories. ‘Natural causes.’ End of story.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  Neither could Doc. “Let me get this straight,” he said. I could hear the aggravation in his voice. “Someone may have killed our mascot—the most famous animal in the entire country—and you want me to cover it up?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I want,” said Martin.

  “But that’s—”

  “A direct order. Do it—or there’ll be consequences.”

  It was a long time before Doc said anything. Even though I couldn’t see him, I could feel the tension in the room. I wasn’t sure what consequences Martin had in mind, but Doc seemed troubled by them. When he finally spoke again, he sounded very tired.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll bury it.”

  It took Doc a lot longer to finish with Henry than I’d expected. Even though Martin remained in the auditorium, interrupting his phone calls now and then to prod Doc or complain about how much time he was taking, Doc still insisted upon doing his autopsy properly. He went through Henry’s intestines inch by inch—and a full-grown hippo has more than sixty feet of intestine.

  The whole time he was doing it, I had to stay up in the catwalk, trying to stay silent. My legs began to cramp terribly, although that was nothing compared to the pain I felt in my bladder. I’d drunk a lot of water before the autopsy and now it all wanted to get back out again. Of course, the more I tried to not think about it, the more I thought about it—until I ultimately felt like I was going to explode. It was torture.

  Meanwhile, Doc just kept poking along, like examining hippo intestines was the greatest fun you could ever have. I couldn’t tell for sure how many holes Doc found, but I knew from his occasional comments to himself that it was more than a hundred. To his annoyance, however, he never found what he was really looking for: the objects that made the holes. “C’mon, where are you?” he’d asked repeatedly, and ultimately grumbled, “Dang things must’ve gotten pooped back out.”

  By nine thirty, I’d been hiding for nearly three hours. I was just about to cry uncle and blow my cover when, to my incredible relief, Martin finally goaded Doc out of the auditorium. Doc still wanted to sift through the contents of Henry’s stomach, but Martin convinced him it could wait until the next day—and I think even Doc was getting nauseous after rooting through Henry’s innards for so long. The moment they were out the door, I scrambled down and booked for the exit. I’d really wanted to look into Henry’s belly and see some of the perforated intestines up close, but I couldn’t spare another second. The auditorium door automatically locked behind me as I dashed out.

  I don’t think a cheetah could have run to the nearest bathroom as fast as I did.

  Once I’d taken care of my business, however, I still had some things to deal with. I was starving and my mother was surely ready to kill me for coming home late.

  Mom always expected me home by eight for dinner. She didn’t much care what I did before then; the park was so far from civilization she figured I couldn’t get into a whole lot of trouble. Usually, I was home well before dinnertime. In fact, I’d never been late before.

  So I ran back as fast as I could. At night, I could make much better time through the park because the crowds were gone. I had the wide promenades all to myself; it was like running through the str
eets of a ghost town. It wasn’t quiet, though. Many animals are most active at dusk and early evening. In fact, normal zoo hours—right in the heat of the day—are practically the worst time to see animals in action; that’s when they prefer to nap. Now, as I ran, I could hear animals all around. Calling, growling, roaring, chirping, croaking, trumpeting. The night was alive with noise.

  There were still a few park employees about, mostly cleaning staff and groundskeepers. J.J. McCracken wanted his park spotless when the gates opened every morning. At night, every piece of trash got picked up, every railing polished, every hedge trimmed. I’d been around FunJungle long enough that all the cleaners knew me, so no one called security to report that a family had forgotten one of their children.

  The trailer park where we lived was behind the back fence, right next to the employee parking lot. In the daytime, it was hideously ugly. Rather than being organized in any sensible fashion, all the trailers had been placed where the land was flattest; it looked like they’d been scattered by a passing tornado. At one time, some landscaping had been attempted and quickly forgotten; now only patches of crabgrass grew among prickly pear cactus and a few stubby cedar trees. The single amenity J.J. McCracken had provided us all with was a hot tub, which was totally useless, seeing as the temperature outside was often more than a hundred degrees.

  At night, however, the trailer park was far more welcoming. Since the closest town was so far away, the mobile homes looked kind of like a tight frontier community in the midst of a vast wilderness. There was something comforting about the warm glow of light from their windows. The sky above was one of the few places left in the United States that was free of light pollution; on that moonless night, I could see millions of stars and the Milky Way was a bright slash across the sky.