by Mary Walker
Damnation. Well, it was gone. Nothing she could do about it now.
As she rose from her knees, she smacked her head smartly on the sharp corner of the exhibit door. Ow. Shit! Still open. She thrust the gloved hand up and slammed it shut. That’s all I need on my first try feeding them alone—a mass escape. She stayed hunkered down in front of the cage feeling the tears fill her eyes as they did regularly these days. Her hatred for the reptile house was unspeakable. This had been the worst thirteen days of her life. All she wanted was to go home, but in another week there wouldn’t be any home to go to, and she was no closer to solving her problems than she had been when she started here.
A deep voice above her head said, “How’s it going, Katherine? Need any help?”
She looked up and was comforted to see Wayne Zapalac, one of her fellow reptile keepers. He had gone out of his way to be kind and helpful to her since her first day on the job—so kind that she was beginning to overcome her initial bias against his appearance.
“I just lost one of the live mice,” she said. “It must be right around here.”
With a quick knee-bend, Wayne squatted on thick, powerful thighs and surveyed the floor. He held a hand up to Katherine to keep her from speaking as he inched his way across the floor toward the incubator with the baby tree boas. His work boots made no sound at all. With a graceful lunge, he flew forward, shot out a hand under the incubator and came up with the spotted mouse in his fist.
“Wow,” Katherine said, truly impressed with the capture. She opened the door a crack. “It goes in there,” she said.
Wayne flicked it in easily, then opened the door all the way as he stood up. Resting his thick, hairy arms on top of the exhibit, he leaned over and gazed down into it, watching one of the vipers begin to stir and flick its tongue out. From wrist to bulging biceps his arms were covered with crude tattoos. She wasn’t sure what the pictures were because she had felt embarrassed to look directly at them before. But now she could stare without his noticing. One was a scroll saying, “Semper fidelis,” and another was a serpent coiled around a branch. Underneath it said, “Don’t tread on me.”
He looked up at her. “The feeding’s a little rough first time, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she confessed. “I like the mice. Sometimes I feel like I’m feeding a higher life form—these bright-eyed mammals—to sustain a lower one.”
He chuckled a low, from-the-belly sound. His neck was so thick that his head appeared to rest right on his sloping shoulders. “I know. Reptiles weren’t my first choice either. I had my heart set on working with the big cats when I came here. Actually, it was your father who decided I really wasn’t cut out for it. He thought my presence stirred the cats up—something about my energy. I was disappointed then, but he may have done me a favor. I’ve come to love some of these snakes.”
The question erupted from her. “Why?”
“Why do I love them?” he repeated with a note of surprise in his voice. “Well”—he looked back into the exhibit, where both vipers were heading toward the piebald mouse trembling in the corner—“these guys because they’re so beautiful. Haven’t you noticed?” He gestured with his hand for her to join him. All his motions were graceful and gentle, she noticed, in spite of the bulk of his thick, muscled body.
She took a step forward so she could see in, too. He shook his head in wonder. “The pattern looks like an oriental rug, doesn’t it? One that’s very old and faded. The green and the violet are so soft and pastel they look like a watercolor painting, when the paint’s all diluted and washy so you can see the paper through it.” Katherine looked in at the big female and saw that it was true. Then she turned her gaze to Wayne, astonished at the sensibility couched in that loutish body. He was transfixed, staring at the vipers. It gave her a chance to study him. In profile, his blunt nose and heavy jaw had a simian look. A tiny diamond stud earring twinkled in his left ear. She estimated his age to be mid-thirties, or maybe older.
“And the head,” Wayne continued, “broad and flat like a leaf, and those black triangles that point at that silvery eye. It’s something you could never invent.” He looked over at her to see her response.
Katherine smiled and looked again at the snakes. It would be very nice to be able to perceive them that way. She wondered if it was possible for her to alter her vision.
Wayne said, “I’m surprised Stokes is letting you do this so soon. I mean he has you working with his favorites when you’ve been here such a short time. He must have big plans for you.”
“Probably wants to get rid of me in record time,” she said with a smile.
“Oh, no, you’ve already outlasted several folks who’ve been and gone in a flash. One guy only lasted two hours, walked out and slammed the door when Alonzo told him to do a sex check on a mamba that had just been wild caught. You should have seen him run.”
She laughed. It felt good to be relaxed enough to laugh, even for a moment.
Then she glanced back to the open door. The male viper had the piebald mouse cornered and was beginning the process of stretching his mouth around it. Katherine closed the door and secured the lock.
She pointed back at the bushmaster exhibit. “How about these? Can you work up any affection for them?”
“The bushmasters?” Wayne asked. “Oh, sure. They’re magnificent.” He used his key to unlock the door and opened it wide so they both could look in. The mice had disappeared into the snakes and were now visible only as bulges just behind the heads. “They don’t have the subtle coloring of the Gaboons, but the raised beaded texture of the scales is nice and the size of them is awesome. They’re the largest of all the pit vipers, the longest venomous snake in this hemisphere. This female is only about a seven-footer, but some grow to twelve feet.
“Did you know,” he asked, “those little holes the pit vipers have in the sides of their heads are for receiving infrared heat rays? They can find a mouse and strike it accurately in total darkness. I think this was the species involved in that accident where the guy was killed. Stokes was here back then. That may be the reason he’s such a stickler about safety and emergency procedures.”
“He’s a stickler about everything,” Katherine said.
“Yeah, but on the subject of safety he outdoes himself. Didn’t you have to study the bible and have a test on it?”
“The Emergency Procedures Handbook? Yes, all twenty pages. He gave it to me the first day and tested me on it the second. I have the steps memorized: number one, secure the snake; number two, push the emergency buzzer; number three, call 911 for an ambulance to Brackenridge Hospital; number four, check the cage door for the appropriate antivenin; number five, get said antivenin from the refrigerator; number six, lie still until the ambulance arrives. That’s all there is to it.”
“Unfortunately,” Wayne said, “with these really venomous guys, if they nail you good enough it doesn’t matter what you do; you die anyway. The head keeper at a zoo in the East died a couple of weeks ago from a saw-scaled viper bite. Forty years of experience and the best emergency procedures in the country and he died within twenty minutes. The venom just acts too fast if they get it deep.”
Katherine felt her stomach undulate. “That makes me feel better,” she said.
He looked up at her with a smile. “Sorry. I guess it’s the kid in me. Maybe I still want to chase pretty girls with a snake and make them cry.”
* * *
Katherine had been counting the minutes to her lunch break. At exactly one o’clock she threw her glove into her locker in the keepers’ dressing room, washed her hands twice, and rubbed on a perfumed hand cream. On her way out the back door, she waved through the glass of the service area to Iris Renaldo, the only other woman working in the reptile house, to indicate she was leaving. Iris saluted her in acknowledgment and went back to her job of harvesting fruit flies to feed the poison arrow frogs.
Outside, Katherine sucked the fresh October air into her lungs, trying to banish th
e reptile odor that seemed to cling to her nostrils even after work hours. Alonzo claimed that reptiles had no odor; there was odor only when keepers did not clean adequately. She scratched her head vigorously and headed toward the Phase II building. It would make her a little late to meet Sophie, but she had developed the habit of dropping in every day during her lunch break to see Brum for a minute. She wasn’t sure why she did it, but it was the one thing that seemed to make her feel better.
Her general exhaustion these past thirteen days had been debilitating. After work each day she had collapsed into bed without any dinner and slept as if drugged until the alarm rang at six the next morning. Her desultory attempts to learn more about her father’s photographs had uncovered nothing. She was no closer to understanding what he wanted her to do than she had been the night she found them. And Sharb was no closer to solving his murder.
She shuffled along the walk, her head down. For God’s sake. Here I am, inside, in great position to learn things, and I get so exhausted every day, I can barely remember to ask questions.
She found herself walking past the dusty paddock that held the white rhinoceros, Teddy. She looked up briefly to watch him standing with his massive horned head over the stockade fence separating him from the female that had been brought in—Ursula, she was called, the great hope for some breeding action. All the keepers were making bets on whether Teddy would get it up when the time came. He certainly seemed interested, the way he was peering over the fence at her. Katherine stopped for a moment to look at the two prehistoric beasts, as monumental and low to the ground as tanks, their hanging folds of thick dried skin caked with mud and dust. But they were clearly eyeing one another with interest. What a mystery sexual attraction is, she thought, not for the first time.
It had been almost a year since she broke off with John Rehnquist and in all that time she hadn’t felt even a flicker of interest in any man. Her capacity for it had probably atrophied. She was drying up, like Teddy’s hide.
When she came to the now familiar gray metal door, she knocked loudly. “Coming, coming,” the nervous voice said through the door as Danny unfastened the multiple locks.
“How’s it going?” she asked, smiling at his tense face as he opened the door for her.
“Okay, I guess.” He ran his fingers through his limp blond hair, slicking it back over the balding area. “But it’s so dumb for me to just sit here all this time when I know how understaffed we are. I really think Sam is overreacting on this. No one’s tried to get at these cats. Just keeping them inside for a while is enough. Maybe if you told him that, he’d listen, Katherine.”
Katherine headed toward Brum’s cage, annoyed by the whine that often crept into Danny’s voice. It reminded her too much of her own tendency toward self-pity these days. “Why would it matter what I said? I’m junior to you here, Danny. Why don’t you tell Sam yourself?”
He hurried to keep up with her. “Well, I did, kind of. But he’s not going to listen to me. You’re … you know, you’ve got connections.” He lowered his eyes. Behind the thick glasses, his eyes were magnified, the lashless lids large and fleshy.
“I’m just another zoo employee,” Katherine said. “Believe me, I have no influence on anyone here.”
With small fussy movements, Danny picked up a hose that was in her path and coiled it up hurriedly. He hung it on a hook on the wall and adjusted it so it made a perfect circle. “I’ve scrubbed every tile and drain and bar in this place. There’s nothing left to do. I need to get back to work. I don’t think I can stand being cooped up here much longer. Would you at least ask Alonzo if he’ll request me in reptiles? I know you guys are understaffed over there and I’d really like to get some more experience with the herps.”
He was right that they were understaffed and she had the aching muscles to prove it, but Katherine ignored him and turned her attention to Brum, who was lying on his side in the corner of his cage.
Danny persisted. “That guy with all the tattoos and the earring—Wayne Zapalac. He looks like the kind of guy who’d like to loaf around over here. Maybe he’d like to switch with me. You could ask him.”
Katherine looked at Danny’s earnest face. “The grass is always greener,” she said. “He just told me he used to want to work with cats. But I think he’s happy where he is now. And I don’t think he’s lazy at all.”
She looked back at Brum and studied him as she did every day. His beauty was irresistible. “Hey, Brumble,” she said, trying to catch his attention by moving into his line of vision. But he continued to stare listlessly into space.
“He’s depressed,” Danny said. “He needs to get outside for some fresh air and exercise. It’s cruel keeping him confined like this. He’s not used to it. This is how zoos used to be and how the bad ones still are. Animals cooped up in tiny cages, getting more and more crazy from the inaction.” Danny leaned over and retied his tennis shoe, nervously jerking the laces tight, as if he were the one going crazy from the inaction.
Brum remained so still he could have been a stuffed tiger.
Katherine glanced up and noticed something she hadn’t seen before. It was a metal plaque above the cage. It said,
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility.
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
She read it over twice and said, “I never noticed that before. I like it.” She looked at Danny. “That’s advice we could all three benefit from.” She turned to Brum and said, “Imitate the action of the tiger, Brum. Stiffen those sinews, summon up the blood.”
“Katherine,” Danny blurted, “this Lieutenant Sharb came to see me again to ask me questions. I wondered if they’d come up with anything new?”
“Not that I know of.”
“They kept asking about whether Lester acted different the last few weeks and I didn’t know what to tell them.”
Katherine shifted her attention away from Brum. “Did he act different?” she asked.
“Oh, yes. And I told the police this. I didn’t want to because I don’t want to speak ill of the dead or make them think he was doing anything wrong, but he was a different man the last two months, excited and nervous most of the time. I felt sure something was going on in his life.”
“You didn’t tell me this. What did he do that was different, Danny?”
“Oh, he would leave me in charge here while he went off on some business of his own. Often. He’d even leave the zoo for long stretches on several afternoons. That was not like him at all, not telling me where he could be reached and leaving during work hours, not like him at all. And he took some days off, too, after years of never even taking his vacation time. Now don’t get me wrong, it was okay with me; I like being alone with the cats, but it just wasn’t like him.
“I even wondered if maybe he…” Danny looked up at Katherine from under thick lids. “This is why I didn’t say anything to you, I wondered if maybe he had a girlfriend he was going to see or something.”
Or maybe he had to take his camera and check out shipments of animals coming in, Katherine thought. “Maybe that was it,” she said. “That wouldn’t be so unusual.”
“No. I was real shocked to read in the paper that the police suspect murder. But even though it’s hard to think of anyone who would want to kill him, it’s easier for me to imagine that than to imagine him doing something careless like going into the anteroom before securing Brum in his cage. That would just never happen. He was so careful.”
“As fussy as Alonzo Stokes, do you think?”
Danny frowned, “He’s pretty fussy, Alonzo, but I really don’t know him all that well. When I first came to work here I was rotated into reptiles for two weeks once, so I know he runs a tight ship.”
“Yeah. He
sure does. Well, I’m late for lunch with Sophie. See you tomorrow, Danny.” She smiled and gave him a little punch on the arm. “Hey. Stiffen the sinew, summon up the blood, okay?”
He tried to smile, but kept his teeth covered as if they were shy in the presence of company.
He went through the usual rigmarole of all the locks before she could get out into the fresh air again.
* * *
As soon as Katherine walked in the door of the little cafeteria, Sophie waved to her from a table against the far wall. Katherine smiled and waved back. She got a tray and went quickly through the line, grabbing a roast beef sandwich, a bag of potato chips, a chocolate brownie, and a Diet Coke. If she was going to imitate the action of the tiger, she needed a little protein.
Sophie sat with a blueberry Danish and a cup of coffee in front of her. She eyed Katherine’s laden try as Katherine unloaded it. “Good,” she said. “I was beginning to think you never eat. How’s it going?”
Something about Sophie gave Katherine the freedom to be honest. “Well, my feet feel bruised on the bottom, my home is a week away from being foreclosed, and I feel like screaming every time I see a snake, which is approximately a hundred thousand times a day, but other than that I feel great. How about you?”
“Oh, another day without a drink. Got all the mailers out for the koala opening. Had coffee with Vic Jamail, a short, romantic tryst at the African Plains snack bar. Unfortunately, all he wanted to talk about was you.”
“Me?” Katherine felt a flush moving up her neck.
“Uh-huh. Wants to know why you aren’t married, why you decided to stay in Austin, whether you like working the reptiles, what you’re really like. The man is smitten, I think. And, Katherine, he cleans up nicely. You should see him in a suit.”