Hall of Small Mammals (23 page)

The crowd began to disperse, grumbling. Val was not dissuaded. He got in line behind the twentieth person.

“Sorry, buddy,” the official said to him. “Only these twenty. Line has to end somewhere.”

“Right,” Val said, “and it ends behind me.”

Perhaps assuming I was the one in charge here, the zoo official appealed to me for help.
Do something about your kid,
his face said. But I had no intention of getting involved. I didn't budge or say a word.

“Listen,” the zoo official said. “I get it, kid, I really do, but you have to understand that I just turned away a hundred people. If I break the rules for you, then where does it end?”

“With me,” Val said, arms crossed, mouth so tight and dense it exerted a gravitational pull on the rest of his face. He was even bold enough to meet the man's gaze. They locked eyes and stood there, two angry mannequins.

The official was the first to look away. He turned sideways and scratched behind his red ear. I thought maybe he'd given up, but he hadn't. “No,” he said, and stepped into line ahead of Val. “The line ends here.”

“Get out the way,” Val said, and tugged at the man's arm, and for the first time in this exchange, he gazed over at me. I could see how upset and desperate Val was. He seemed to be on the verge of tears, though whether or not those tears were strategic, I wasn't entirely sure. Anything was possible with this kid. But I sensed an opportunity. Maybe the tribal chieftain wouldn't have to die at the end of Val's movie after all. Maybe he wouldn't even have to be the bad guy.

If you'd asked me then why I cared so much about what happened with Val and why I wanted him on my side, I probably would have lied and said I didn't care one iota. It wasn't as though I was in love, and I certainly didn't have plans to stick around for the long haul. Val's mother was beautiful though a bit uptight and officious. I recall one night, especially, when she insisted on super-gluing back together an entire stained-glass lamp we had accidentally rocked off the nightstand, a project that required hours of Zen-like concentration on her part and bored me enough to turn on the television. Plus, I'd never dated a woman with a kid, and she was reluctant to leave Val with a babysitter for more than a night or two a week, which seems more admirable to me now than it did at the time. I was suspicious of Val's complete lack of
interest in me. I worried he was bad-mouthing me when I wasn't there. That's why I'd volunteered for the zoo trip, of course.

I've long been something of a serial dater, I'm the first to admit that, and I do have a bad habit of giving up at the first hint of difficulty or complication, but I don't believe in regret. I believe it's important to face forward. And yet, sometimes I do find myself thinking about Val and his mother, curious about the course of their lives after I moved on. What are the chances that Val, wherever he is, still thinks about our day together at the zoo?

“Now, wait a minute,” I said to the official. “Wait. Can we talk for a minute?”

He pretended not to hear me, but a few other people ahead of him in line turned to see what all the commotion was about. I slipped my hand into my back pocket and felt for my wallet but didn't take it out yet. “We'll follow the rules,” I told the official, “but first just talk to me. Okay? Just hear me out.”

“What do you want to talk about?” he asked.

“Talk to me over here,” I said. “Please.”

Reluctantly he stepped out of line and toward me, one hand in his pocket, the other scratching his red ear again. I wondered if it was infected. “You need to get a handle on your kid,” he said quietly.

“I know,” I said, wallet out of my pocket. “You're absolutely right. But listen, the thing is, he's not even mine. He's my girlfriend's kid, and I won't lie to you. He can be a real pain in the ass, okay? The other night I caught him spitting in my red wine. He hates me, okay? But listen, he's got to see these monkeys. If you don't let him—” I handed him two twenties. “If you don't, I'll never hear the end of it. Please, help me with this.”

The official shoved the money back at me. “No, no, that's not what this is about,” he said.

“Then what is it about?” I asked.

“It's about respect. He doesn't have any.”

While that was true, I wasn't going to say so to this guy.

I needed a different approach and quickly settled on pity. “This isn't his fault,” I said. “I'm the one who lost our place in line. No need to punish him, right?”

The official didn't say anything.

“The kid has problems, okay?” I continued. “He's a sick kid. Check his backpack. He has to carry around his medication. He has to give himself shots, all right? I'm pretty sure that's why he wants to see these baby monkeys. I think he relates to them on some level.”

The official's ear was so red I thought it would burst open. He stopped scratching it and considered this new information.

“What's wrong with him?” he asked.

As far as I was aware, diabetes was the extent of it, but I told him it was lots of things, that I couldn't say exactly what it was because his mother didn't like for me to talk about it, but it was bad.

The official shook his head back and forth, his mouth a rigid line. “Regardless, he needs to apologize,” he said.

“Yes, of course,” I said. “Definitely.”

We walked over to Val, who had never abandoned his place in line.

“Val, apologize to this gentleman,” I said.

Val was about to say something—something offensive, I was sure of it—so I made a face that I hoped he would understand, my
eyes wide, lips pursed. He fidgeted with his backpack straps, uncertain. “Okay,” he said, and looked up at the official. “Sorry. I am. I was just excited.”

The official nodded and said, “You can't just go around doing whatever you want to do. That's not how life works.”

Val didn't respond. This was a lesson that he probably needed to learn, and now, because of me, maybe he never would. He looked up at both of us with the same cool stare, waiting to see if he was going to get what he wanted, and of course he did.

“He can go in,” the zoo official said, then turned to me. “But just him. You'll have to wait outside.”

“Why?” I asked. “We're together.”

“Take it or leave it,” the man said. “I'm only letting in one more person. You or him. Up to you.”

Val looked up at me victoriously, apparently not doubting that he'd be the one to go inside. That's the way it is with kids, I suppose: they take it for granted that the last cookie on the tray is for them. I told the guard thank you, though I suspected this was all his way of clinging to the little bit of authority he had left. He was being petty, but I let it slide and took my place beside Val. A few people tried to join the line after that, but the official shooed them away. He brought over an orange cone and dropped it directly behind us. Val watched that procedure closely, happy of course to be on the right side of it. If the boy had any new respect for me, he certainly didn't show it.

“I'm glad it's working out,” I said, and raised my hand unconvincingly for a high five. But Val didn't want to meet my hand up high. He stuck his palm out low, and when I tried to slap it, he snatched it away at the last second.

“I'm still sensing some hostility,” I said, trying to be funny, and, in the absence of any laughter, mine or his, feeling more upset. “To be perfectly honest, I wouldn't mind a little more appreciation, pal. I just got you into this party.”

“Thanks for that,” he said. He was such an easy kid to dislike.

He got out his phone and double-checked that the flash was disabled. We were quiet until, finally, it was his turn to enter the Hall. Inside I could hear a movie presentation about the Pippins, the narrator's British accent. Cool air gushed out of the dark hall in powerful and pleasant waves. It felt wonderful and inviting. I still had no love for the poor baby Pippins, but I wouldn't have minded seeing what all the fuss was about.

The zoo official was holding open the door with his back, his hand on the horizontal bar, ready to swing it shut behind Val. Without exactly intending to, I'd come very close to the entrance. For a moment I wondered if he was actually going to let me pass as well, if maybe he had forgotten or no longer cared about this part of our agreement. But as I approached, he shot me a hard look, almost daring me to take another step, and I knew that if I pressed forward, he would stop me, or possibly even the both of us. Val shoved his backpack in my direction as though to prevent me from trying.

“Don't lose this,” he said. I watched him go forward, hands deep in his pockets, and then pass through the door alone. He didn't turn back to say
Thank you
or
I'll see you on the other side
or anything else. He acted like I wasn't even there, like he'd already forgotten me.

T
o prevent the newest discovery from winding up in yet another showman's dime exhibit, we decided to send one of our own to bring it back for safekeeping. Tall, cheerful Dr. Anders was the first to volunteer for the trip, though among the naturalists in our Academy interested in vertebrate fossils, he was by all accounts the least qualified. The young doctor had recently caused a stir by mistaking an adolescent mastodon jaw as proof of an entirely new genus and species. A laughable idea. But what Anders lacked in credentials, he made up for with his unwavering enthusiasm—and (it need be mentioned) with his political connections. By luck or by connivance he had become engaged to a woman from one of the city's wealthiest families, and that family, thanks to Anders, had made significant contributions to our esteemed Academy. Those kindnesses considered, we could find no reason why it shouldn't be Anders we sent to procure what was rumored to be the most complete specimen yet unearthed.

On the morning of Anders's departure we accompanied him
to the station, the trains steaming and hissing all around us as we clapped him on the shoulder and wished him well. “You won't be disappointed,” he said, confident. “Because when I return, I will come bearing gifts millions of years in the making.” Prepared remarks, no doubt. It was winter and we stomped our feet to keep out the cold. “Very well,” we told him, and watched his train crank away and disappear into a gauzy rain.

He traveled twenty hours south to a provincial town called Newton, where we had arranged for his transfer to a stagecoach. Unfortunately the promised coach did not manifest (its driver, we later learned, had fallen down drunk and been trampled by his own horses), and Anders was forced to finish the journey on the back of a mule cart that happened to be on its way to the town of Golly, his final destination. If not for this setback, perhaps history would have been quite different for Anders, for our Academy—and for science.

These events transpired many decades ago, before we had a name for many of the fossilized creatures that once populated our planet, before we even had a name for their particular field of study; in the days before we'd completely mapped the wilds between East and West; before Mr. Morse sent his first electrical message whipping across two miles of wire; when a young Mr. Darwin was still filching finches for his sketches in the belly of HMS
Beagle
. The world was on the verge of a great transformation, to be sure, a scientific awakening, and we were the agents of that coming and necessary change.

Before his journey south, Anders professed to share this belief. He was an ambitious and adventurous man. In the years before he received his formal medical training, he had worked as a
ship's surgeon aboard a vessel called the
Holy Wonder
. During one of its southern voyages, the
Holy Wonder
had been inundated by a powerful storm, and Anders had slipped on deck and broken his leg. Despite a months-long convalescence in a Buenos Aires hotel, the injury had not properly healed and was, all these years later, still easily inflamed. It was for this reason that his ride to Golly on the bumping and bouncing mule cart was such an unfortunate development. When he finally reached the town late that night, he could hardly walk at all. Two men had to carry him into the boardinghouse, where a special room was prepared for him on the first floor so that he could avoid the unnecessary punishment of the stairs.

Anders's recovery required two full days of bed rest, and it was during this time that a delegation working for Dabney Dubose slipped into town and purchased the bones for the showman's infamous traveling museum.

This was not the first time that our efforts had been thwarted by someone as nefarious as Dabney Dubose. All varieties of huckster, scoundrel, thief, and hype-man had been busy snatching up every new fossil find. Some of the bones were shipped to Europe for exhibits in London and Paris. Others were fashioned into parlor furniture and sold for small fortunes.

Mr. Dubose called his personal bone collection
Monsters from a Darker Age
, and it constituted one of the chief attractions in the Dubose Brothers Traveling Museum, a caravan of oddities and curiosities that rattled from town to town on creaking wooden wheels, charging poor dupes at every stop for the chance to see its Gander of Six-Headed Geese, Rumpkin the All-Seeing Seer, the Infinity Box, the World's Smallest Preacher, etc., etc., etc. To claim
his newest acquisition, his entire caravan now turned south for the town of Golly.

Workers had discovered the bones by accident while blasting for a new well on a farm on the western edge of town. For their protection, the bones had then been transported to a nearby barn and nested in bales of hay. Dr. Anders, unaware that he'd already failed in his mission, visited the farm on his third morning in Golly to make the acquaintance of the property owner, a knobby man with two buttons missing from his work shirt.

“You've come too late,” the man said.

Anders was shocked. That the sale had occurred only the previous afternoon, as he lay in bed recuperating, only worsened the blow. He had traveled so far and, it seemed now, for nothing. If he returned home empty-handed, what would we say? What would we think of him?

“Can I at least see them?” Anders asked. “Would you mind if I catalogued and sketched them?”

The farmer scratched at his bristled chin with a jagged dirty fingernail, perhaps looking for a reason to say no. They were standing in front of the man's miserable one-room house. A strange animal skull hung on a nail above the open door. “You want to draw them, is all?”

“If you don't mind, yes. I'll stay out of your way. I assure you.”

The man shifted from right foot to left. “All right, then,” he said at last. “But if you try and run off with—”

“I wouldn't dream of it,” Anders said.

He followed the farmer across a long frosted field that stretched behind the house. His leg still aching—a sharp stabbing pain that radiated from hip to toes—Anders hobbled along on an
ivory-handled walking stick obtained for him the previous evening by the town doctor. The cane left a trail of small divots in the hard soil. When they reached the barn, the farmer threw open its tremendous doors, and dusty sunlight spilled across the compacted straw floor. Both men's shadows stretched long and distinct ahead of them. Anders coughed, a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. The farmer motioned at the hay bales and said that so long as the bones didn't leave the barn, there wouldn't be any trouble. He gave Anders a final appraising look before spitting in the straw and leaving.

From his bag Anders removed his pen, ink, journals, caliper, and measuring rods. He was thrilled to find, among the bones across the bales, dorsal and caudal vertebrae, a partial pubis, distal ends of the right radius, the left femur, and the proximal end of the left tibia, ribs, and, best of all, the entire lower jaw. The farmer and his friends had done an adequate job of chiseling away the rock, though some pieces were still embedded. This was no mammoth or mastodon, of that Anders was quite certain. (Our museum already had in its possession a nearly intact mammoth skeleton.) It was not an ancient horse or deer or sloth or cat either. It was much larger, and very likely reptilian. He catalogued the bones in his journal. A truly remarkable find. That it now belonged to Dabney Dubose, of course, was a travesty.

By no means was Anders an accomplished illustrator, but with help from the Academy he had improved upon his shading, crosshatching, and stippling techniques. He endeavored to make his drawings as scientifically accurate as possible. One day, he hoped to include the figures with the papers he aimed to publish.

Anders was engrossed in his drawing of the jawbone when he
heard the squeak of wood overhead. He glanced up and saw that a wild-looking creature with long twisted hair and ruddy cheeks had climbed into the rafters. The creature—a boy, Anders decided—stared down with deep brown eyes, his toes hugging the splintery edges of the beam upon which he crouched.

Anders returned to his drawing and said, “You're welcome to join me. No need to hide.”

The boy didn't say anything.

“My name is Dr. Anders,” he added.

The boy thudded down into the straw, kicking up more dust. Anders stood to greet him with an outstretched hand. The child shook it uncertainly. His shirt was soiled with dirt and sweat and probably a thousand messy meals.

“You can sit with me if you'd like,” Anders said, making room. “I don't mind.”

The child, noiselessly, fell into a cross-legged jumble at the scientist's feet. He watched Anders's pen dance across the page, as if the transference of the ink was a minor miracle.

“How does it look?” he asked, and the child shrugged.

“Your name?” Anders asked.

“Temp.”

“Temp,” Anders repeated. “Short for what? Temperance? Or temperature? Or temporary?”

“Tempest.” The child's eyes darted from bone to bone. “I'm told it was my mother's family name.”

As Anders drew, he told Temp of his own childhood, about his mother's death in a fire, about his minister father, about their lonely years with a congregation in a town much like Golly, about his early fascination with the Creation story and, in particular,
with a tantalizing verse in the Book of Job that described a behemoth with a tail like a cedar and bones like bars of iron.

Temp gazed at the jawbone, fascinated. “So it's a monster from the Bible?”

“Well,” Anders said, “that depends on what you mean by
monster
. Certainly it was of a monstrous
size
. By my calculations, this creature stood at least ten feet tall. I believe it was bipedal. In other words, it walked like you and me. Upright. On two feet.” He stood to demonstrate, shifting his weight to his good leg. He snarled at the boy playfully and smiled. “But I don't care for that word,
monster
. Calling it a monster implies that it was a wholly unnatural creature. In its time, this was no more a monster than any other animal that currently walks the earth. Including you and me, by the way.”

“But,” the boy said, somewhat alarmed, “how'd it get
here
? On my daddy's farm?”

“Same way as you and me. The evidence suggests there were multiple Creations before our own. You've heard of Noah's Ark? The Flood? Well, before the Flood, there was a different set of creatures here on earth. And before them, there was an altogether
different
set of creatures that were wiped out by a different and earlier Flood. Each catastrophe makes way for the next Creation, you see, and each Creation is a little better than the last. We're the latest. And hopefully the last.”

The child ran his hand along the jaw, hard and gray as stone, bits of rock still clinging to it, and asked what the creature would have eaten and what it might have looked like with the skin attached, and Anders—though aware that to make such physiological inferences was well beyond his expertise—guessed that it
ate both plants and animals and that it might have had the smooth, scaly skin of a snake. “Yes,” he said, “I'm very sure that it did. It stood upright like us, ate plants and animals like us, and when it craned its long neck skyward it saw the same yellow sun as us.”

The child looked up into the rafters.

“Ink, please,” Anders said, and Temp scurried toward the satchel, already proving himself a useful assistant.

•   •   •

The morning that Mr. Dubose arrived in town to collect his prize, Anders was out on one of his early peregrinations. His walks were imperative. In addition to his leg injury, Anders suffered from poor circulation and a weak heart, and a strict routine of exercise was of vital importance. After his walk, he took a bath—always cold with two tablespoons of castor oil over his head. His delicate system demanded that he ingest only a simple breakfast of water and plain whole wheat bread. Butter was a gross injustice to the constitution.

Mrs. Lang, the owner of the boardinghouse, didn't care for his diet. “But wouldn't you like some fruit, Doctor? I have all these lovely apples. It's such a waste,” she said, eyeing his crusty bread. She was a beautiful if odd red-haired woman who insisted Anders take all his meals with her in the dining room.

“I'm afraid the fruit would upset my system,” he explained. “But thank you.”

She couldn't understand why he'd only munch on hard bread when her cook had prepared them such an elaborate breakfast. She ate the apple with a fork and knife and dabbed the corners of her thin lips with a fresh white linen napkin. Mrs. Lang had
traveled to London and Paris as a small girl, and Anders gathered that her childhood had been full of such luxuries—trips abroad, new dresses for every season, tutors. It seemed her father had played a minor role in brokering the Louisiana Purchase, a fact that somehow found its way into more than one conversation. (Mr. Jefferson, it should be noted, was an early member and supporter of our Academy. During Jefferson's administration, one room at the White House was dedicated entirely to the fossils collected by Mr. Clark on his famous western expedition!) But since those days, Mrs. Lang's family had come down in the world. Their fortune had been lost in poor investments, though she was hazy on the particulars. Her parents had all but arranged her marriage to a businessman with roots in Golly, but now, fifteen years later, both her parents and her husband were dead, and Mrs. Lang lived alone, childless and perhaps a bit lonely. She took in the occasional lodger, she said, for the company and not for the income.

“Forgive me,” she said, “we never even blessed the food.”

“I don't mind, really,” Dr. Anders admitted, but she grabbed his hands anyway and bowed her head, waiting for him to speak. After a considerable pause, he muttered a succinct but sufficient blessing. She released his hands slowly.