Fierce Kingdom

by Gin Phillips

  We are fine. Totally safe, she tells him, and then her thumbs pause, thinking of what can come next.

  Lincoln’s hair tickles her arm. He is beginning to shift and wriggle. Under her breath she hums “Edelweiss,” the lullaby she and Paul sing him every night. She is humming too fast, too high, the song on fast-forward.

  She needs to type something else. Her fingers tap slightly against the air, twitchy.

  “Why are you on your phone?” Lincoln asks, his voice muffled against her shoulder.

  “Daddy,” she says, just as Paul sends another message.

  read this. am calling you now. love.

  There is a link below the message. She glances at the blue string of underlined letters and numbers, and then the phone rings, trilling far too loudly—it has not occurred to her to silence it—and she immediately answers.

  “I can’t talk,” she says, sounding somehow professional. Like she is in the middle of a meeting. She is not sure where this voice has come from. “We have to be quiet. I don’t know where they are.”

  Maybe it was more than habit that had her texting earlier. Maybe some part of her already knew what the rest of her has just realized: the phone is a risk. It makes noise. When she talks on it, she makes noise. Noise will bring the men.

  It is simple, almost. If she thinks of it a certain way, it all makes perfect sense.

  She starts again. “We’re okay, but—”

  Her husband starts speaking before she has finished, and his voice is too loud.

  “What’s going on?” he says. “Is anyone with you? Have you seen the police? Is Lincoln okay? What do you mean that you’re safe? Can they get to you? God, I’m sorry I’m not there, honey—I’m so sorry—”

  She lets him talk. She understands his need to hear her, and she thought she had the same need, but his voice does not make her feel like he’s with her—it makes him feel farther away, or, no, it makes her feel farther away. Like a part of her is floating toward him, out of the zoo, into life as she knows it, and she does not want to float anywhere. She cannot. She must be here, completely here. She cannot console him at the moment.

  “We’re fine,” she whispers, still talking in some lawyer’s voice. Some CEO’s voice. If those kinds of people ever whispered. “We’re hiding.”

  “What did you see?” he asks.

  “I love you,” she says, “and we’re okay, but I can’t do this. I need to pay attention. I saw a guy from a distance. There were”—she glances down at the top of Lincoln’s head—“there had been some shooting by the entrance, and I was walking by after it happened. Then we ran and hid. That’s all I know. Don’t call back, though. I’ll call you when we’re safe.”

  “I’ll call 9-1-1 and tell the police you’re in the porcupine exhibit,” he says, his words coming out in a rush of breath. The way he sounds when he is walking up the steep hill to his office, calling to serenade her with whatever song is stuck in his head—he is always singing—and he knows she will laugh and hang up on him. “I love you. Tell him for me. Be safe.”

  She silences the phone, turning to Lincoln. He is fidgeting uncomfortably against her, kicking out with his legs, digging at her sides with his tennis shoes. She slides her hands under his armpits and helps him spin around and get his feet under him. He stands up, and she keeps a hand around his waist.

  “So that was Daddy,” she whispers.

  He leans back against the rock behind them. “I know.”

  “Whisper,” she says. “He says he loves you.”

  “I know he does.”

  “A little quieter,” she says.

  “Okay,” he whispers.

  He is bouncing his knees again, his feet steady but his whole body sproinging. His shoulders inch up and down, and it is a strange, loose-limbed dance.

  The sky is starting to pinken, long swathes of lavender stretching across the tops of the trees.

  “You’re being really big,” she says.

  “Is the bad man chasing us now?” he asks.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “But if he is, he’s not going to find us here.”

  Still bouncing, he turns his head left and right, taking in the new scenery. As always, he is both curious and cautious. She watches the struggle play out. His eyes darting everywhere. His feet planted.

  Curiosity wins out. He takes a step toward the brick wall of the building, pointing.

  “There’s a water bowl,” he says. “Like Muddles’ bowl.”

  “Yeah,” she agrees.

  She scans the grass around them again, and, in addition to the cracked, dried-up plastic bowl that he’s noticed, there are other odd bits and pieces scattered around the enclosure. An ink pen off to their right and, closer to the railing, a glittery hair band. She thinks she sees a white sock by the chain-link fence.

  “Do porcupines use water bowls?” he asks.

  “I guess they do.”

  “They drink water?”

  She can imagine clamping a hand over his mouth, holding him tight, ordering him to be perfectly still and perfectly quiet. She desperately wants that, but she cannot imagine a scenario where it is possible. If she scared him badly enough for him to stop talking, he would probably start sobbing.

  “Shhh,” she says again. “Talk a little quieter. Everything drinks water.”

  “Everything?” he whispers.

  “Everything,” she repeats.

  “So the porcupine drank out of that bowl?” he says, stepping closer, pressing against her right side. “And he sat by this rock, just like we’re doing? Do you think it was a boy? Or was it a she?”

  She cannot see any signs of terror in him. His blue eyes are big and wide, but they are always big and wide. He is slumped comfortably against her and, if anything, he seems vaguely excited to be in a porcupine’s home. Of course, he has no sense of what is truly frightening—he is terrified of mascots, of Chuck E. Cheese and the Chick-fil-A cows. Last week they stumbled across one of the Batman movies on television, the one with Heath Ledger, disturbing as hell, and Lincoln insisted that the old 1960s version—he is a connoisseur of all things Batman—had a scarier Joker.

  He sometimes cries at an unexpected voice over a loudspeaker, and he thinks ringmasters are horrifying, and now he is picking at the wart on his right hand, singing softly, “Glory, glory to old Georgia! / Glory, glory—”

  Still. There is no telling what is going on behind his calm, round face. She should give him some kind of explanation. Some sort of plan. He has always liked predictable schedules—likes to know that Tuesday is music day at school and Wednesday will be Spanish day and Thursday will be drawing class, and that she will pick him up every day but Wednesday, when Paul picks him up, and that Sunday night they will order Chinese food for supper and that on Saturday morning he can watch an entire hour of cartoons.

  He likes to know what will happen.

  “So,” she whispers, and his fingers brush her jaw, where there is a freckle that he likes to reaffirm, “everything is going to be fine. We’re safe here. It’s like in a story where there’s a battle and then the bad guys get taken off to jail. We just have to sit here and be quiet for a little while until the bad guy is gone.”

  He nods.

  “What’s the bad guy’s name?” he asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  “Sure. Everybody has a name. I just don’t know it.”

  He nods again, looking back toward his wart. She presses against the rock, pulling her legs tighter, keeping one hand against his leg. She glances behind her—the rock formation completely shields them from anyone approaching them from the Primate Zone. She tilts her head up—nothing but treetops and sky. There is no way they can be seen.

  Then she examines the fence around the exhibit, scanning left to right. She has not paid atten
tion to what lies beyond their enclosure, but now she thinks that the vines along the chain-link fence are not as thick as she might like. Through them she has a partial view of the backs of other exhibits. She tries to imagine the map of the zoo and thinks she must be looking at part of the Africa exhibit, most likely the rhinos, although it could be some closed-off pen that’s no longer in use. Bamboo grows dense and tall along the other exhibit’s fence, and she can’t see anything beyond it. Through another gap in the vines she sees a few rails of the train track and, beside it, an asphalt path that curves away so she can’t see where it leads. It might be part of the regular walking path, although she doesn’t remember ever seeing the porcupine exhibit from any outside path. It might be some back way that only the handlers would use. And, really, all that matters is that if someone does walk up the path, would he be able to see them?

  She does not think the gaps in the ivy are big enough.

  She cannot hear anything disturbing now—no footsteps, no gunshots. No sirens. She wonders why there are no more sirens.

  She realizes she never checked the link Paul sent her—she cannot afford such scattered thinking—and she grabs her phone and runs a thumb over her screen. She clicks to a local news site with two brief paragraphs slashing across the home page, racing through the phrases: “shots fired” and “single male” and “multiple injuries suspected.” The final sentence of the short piece is “Police are currently at the scene.”

  The emptiness of that last sentence is infuriating. It tells her nothing. Are the police in the parking lot or a few feet away? Are they dropping down from the sky in helicopters? Is it a dozen policemen or a hundred?

  Lincoln pushes free of her again, and she lets him go, assuming he needs to stretch his legs. When he takes a few steps, she grabs at his shirt and tugs him back.

  “Stay close,” she says. “We need to be still and quiet until the police come.”

  “The police are coming for us?”

  She has forgotten to mention that part.

  “Yes,” she says. “We’re waiting until the police get here and catch the guy with the gun, and then the police will come and tell us that we can go home. But we have to be very quiet, because we don’t want the bad guy to see us. It’s like hide-and-seek.”

  “I don’t like hide-and-seek.”

  “Whisper,” she says again.

  “I don’t like hide-and-seek,” he says, in something that might be called a whisper.

  “You don’t like it when you have to hide by yourself,” she reminds him. “This time I’m hiding with you.”

  He shuffles in the dirt and grass, scuffing the toes of his shoes and sending up small puffs of dust. For a while he says nothing, only watches his own feet shuffling. He runs a hand down the rock.

  “Namba namba namba namba namba,” he begins to sing, and after the first five notes she recognizes the tune to the Michigan State fight song. His singing is sometimes wordless. He is packed to the brim with sound and movement, and one or the other is always spilling over the edges, and that is normally not a bad thing but now it makes her terror bubble to the surface.

  She unclenches her teeth. She only realizes she has been clenching them because her jaw has begun to throb.

  “Namba namba namba namba,” he is still repeating, perfectly on key.

  “Too loud,” she says, and she is too loud as well.

  He nods as if he has been expecting that reaction. He is already staring at something over her shoulder. He stands on one foot, balancing.

  “Let me tell you something,” he whispers, tilting his head toward the building. “That’s a biney.”

  “A biney?” she repeats.

  He raises an arm, pointing to a water spigot sticking out of the wall. “Yes.”

  “That thing that looks like a faucet?”

  “Yes. It’s not a faucet. Bineys look like faucets.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  “About bineys?” he says.

  “Yes.”

  She is not clenching her teeth. She is not breathing too hard. She thinks she sounds completely normal. She almost surely does not sound like a lawyer anymore. She is working at it every time she speaks—making sure every word is calm, relaxed, making sure she still sounds like his mother and not some crazy woman about to scream and wail and tear her hair.

  He comes closer to her, but he does not sit down. Maybe he can sense the crazy woman hovering.

  “Well,” he says, “bineys have a head, a trunk, and tusks. They have a long body and hairs for legs.”

  “What else?” she whispers.

  “They have no mouths. They eat with their noses and smell with their eyes. They can’t have tongues.”

  “And they live in zoos?”

  “Yes,” he says. “Only in zoos. I’ve never heard of a wild biney.”

  “Are they dangerous?” she asks, and then wishes that she hadn’t. She is trying to distract him, and he does not need any reminders that bad things lurk.

  He does not seem bothered.

  “Some of them,” he says.

  “Is that one of the dangerous ones?” she asks, looking toward the spigot.

  “No,” he says. “That’s a climbing one. They like to climb from tree to tree, but if they can’t climb, they’ll crawl. Some bineys are made out of grass. Some are made out of plants or underwear. Or meat.”

  She considers that. She makes herself smile, because normally that is what she would do.

  She loves him like this, inventing. There was the time when he looked up at her in a hotel lobby and announced, I have two little girls in my pocket. Tiny girls. One is named Lucy and one is named Fireman. There was the time when he told her that all his stuffed animals went to a church where no one wore pants.

  This is good, she thinks. This is an alternative to the panic.

  “But they look like faucets?” she prompts him, so quietly. She did not know she could talk this softly.

  “It’s a predator,” he whispers, as if that is an answer to her question. “Also a reptile. But they’re like hippos—they can be aggressive.”

  She tries to remember which of their books has the word “aggressive” in it—the one about alligators? Or about the ancient Greeks?—when her phone shakes against her thigh. She shades it with her palm as she reads her husband’s text.

  Can’t stand it. Have to check. Talk to me.

  She tightens her grip on the phone. Paul is imagining terrible things, of course. If you always expect the worst to happen, you can only be pleasantly surprised, he said to her when they started dating, and she told him, That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Sometimes it is a joke between them, his determined pessimism, but not now. Now he is justified.

  We’re okay, she types. We’re in a really safe spot. I’ll keep us safe. Are the police inside the zoo yet?

  Don’t know. No one will tell me anything on the phone. Driving to the zoo.

  “That biney can’t move, Mommy,” Lincoln whispers. “That biney over there is not moving at all.”

  “But I thought it was a climbing one,” she says, typing at the same time.

  One man, she thinks. And an entire police force. Shouldn’t there be armored trucks and night vision goggles and gas or FBI agents? It’s been at least half an hour since she heard those first gunshots.

  Why is it taking so long? she types.

  No idea. Going to find out. Love.

  Lincoln is talking. She thinks he has repeated himself more than once.

  “What, sweet?” she asks.

  “It used to climb,” he says. “That biney used to climb, Mommy. It used to—”

  If you ignore him, it only makes him repeat things.

  “Okay,” she says quickly. “Right. That biney used to climb.”

  He is chewing on his collar, staring at
the spigot.

  “I think it’s dead,” he says.

  She looks at him, her phone still glowing in her hand.

  “I think it’s probably asleep,” she says.

  “Nope,” he says. “Dead. Bineys die very easily.”

  She looks down at her screen again, and she tells Paul that she will check in with him later. She reassures herself for the fifth or sixth time that the phone is definitely silenced. She forces herself to set it on the ground beside her and once again she is alone with her son, with no one to help them. No one but a dead biney.

  “I think it’s sleeping,” she repeats.

  He is chewing on his shirt, gnawing away at the collar. Normally she tells him to stop, but this time she ignores it.

  “I’m thirsty,” he whispers.

  She is glad for the change of subject. She reaches into her purse, glad that this was not one of the days when she insisted that he could drink from water fountains.

  “Here are your sips,” she says, handing him his plastic water bottle.

  “Mmm,” he says after a long swallow. He has a shiny wet mustache along his upper lip. “Still cold.”

  He drinks more, water dribbling down his jaw, and finally he lowers the bottle and wipes his mouth with his shirt.

  A time or two she has used the word “sips” instead of “drink” when speaking to adults. It is as real and accepted a word around their house as anything in the dictionary, one of the many words that were not words before he came along. A bib is a “neat dog,” because they had a book where a sloppy dog spilled his food and a neat dog wore his bib. Can I have a neat dog? he’ll ask if he sees his shirt getting dirty. He calls his knuckles his finger knees. And he had a whole vocabulary of nonwords when he was small, so small that he was not yet him. For a while he called balls “dahs” and raisins “zuh-zahs.” His sign for painting was a sniff of his nose, because they once tried nose painting instead of finger painting and apparently that made an impression.

  He stuck one arm in the air, his wrist bent, and that was the sign for “flamingo.”

  He made a hissing sound when he was asking for more eggs. Sssssssss, like the sound they made when they hit the frying pan. He brought his own language into existence.