Night Kill (8 page)

“Good morning, Raj, good-by, Raj,” I told him. “No hard feelings, not toward you.”

I left by the service door and walked toward the Penguinarium. With every step, my identity as a cat keeper faded. Did I have the fortitude and energy to adapt, to become a first-rate bird keeper? No choice but to try.

Calvin was already busy in the Penguinarium kitchen, injecting liquid vitamins into small dead fish with a big syringe. Square-built with thinning gray hair and blunt fingers, he looked like an old farmer despite the brown uniform. He’d started wearing glasses not long ago and been kidded about it. I’d never spent much time in his company aside from lunch breaks.

The kitchen had a doorway open to the African penguin exhibit, a wooden baby gate jammed across it to keep the birds where they belonged. The room smelled to high heaven of penguin poop. The little waddlers were braying and squalling at the gate. There seemed to be a lot of them for the size of the exhibit. Calvin grunted at me in a neutral way and showed me the diet charts. He demonstrated how to vitamin-enrich their breakfast and soon I was coated in fish gunk up to my yellow-gloved elbows. I finished shooting up the fish—smelt and capelin and mackerel—while he pretended to tidy up and not watch to be sure I was doing it right. He climbed over the gate to the exhibit side and hand-fed the penguins clustered around. Each bird got a little conversation. “Dotty, pay attention. Bandit, knock it off; you’ll get your share. Neal, there’s a good boy.”

That done, Calvin stepped back over the baby gate and started washing up at the sink. “Can you carry a bag of duck feed?” he asked over his shoulder, out of the blue. “Or should I get a hand truck?”

I considered the question. I could be a weenie who couldn’t handle an ordinary bag of feed or I could eventually pull a muscle in my back and make a chiropractor rich. I stalled for time. “How big are the bags?”

“Fifty pounds.”

I could handle fifty pounds if necessary, but it wasn’t my idea of fun. “Can you stack two on a hand truck?” Right, we should use a hand truck for efficiency, not because I didn’t want to struggle on slippery footing with heavy bags.

“Yes, but we don’t feed two bags. Just the one.”

Rats. “I can lift fifty pounds, but I guess I’d have to know the routine better to decide whether we need a hand truck. I could let you know.”

“I’ll go ahead and get one. Don’t need no worker’s comp reports to fill out.”

He smiled to make it a joke. It wasn’t funny.

The rest of the morning I followed him around, trying to remember everything and not hurt myself or let anything escape. Under close supervision, I picked up mealworms, captured crickets in a Styrofoam cup, and created evil-looking glop in a blender, all for outdoor aviary birds.

I lugged a bag of duck food to the outdoor pond and poured it into a trough without hurting or embarrassing myself. The open-air pond was a winter resort for half-wild uninvited guests. A huge crowd of freeloading mallards swarmed over the trough and my boots and each other to get at the mash, a seething mass of avian avarice. Each duck grabbed a bill-f and fought its way back to the water to dabble and swallow.

Calvin identified the zoo ducks for me: wood ducks, redheads, Australian shelducks. The last were handsome birds in black, white, and chestnut. The zoo waterfowl swam around impatiently, waiting for the mallard bullies to clear out. I hadn’t realized birds could get so aggressive. Only the big swans, “mute swans” according to Calvin, waded through the duck riot. I made a mental note to look up “mute swans” to see if it was a species or a defect.

Calvin warned that a parrot bite could require stitches, that owls attack with their talons, and that cranes would peck my eyes out. I hit my head on branches, slipped on mud, cut myself on wire mesh, and got whacked in the shins by a nene, an assertive Hawaiian goose. I walked miles carrying food pans, climbed ladders, and crawled through underbrush on hands and knees to retrieve food bowls.

Calvin left at lunchtime to eat with Kip; I ate my peanut butter and banana sandwiches alone in the Penguinarium kitchen, tired in body and mind from the strain of learning a new routine.

The hasty lunch restored me a little and left time to pursue yesterday’s resolution, starting with a look in Rick’s locker. Perhaps he’d left something there that would shed light on his last night.

I detoured past the new exhibit area on my way to Reptiles. The price for “Asian Experience” was passage of a big bond measure and destruction of the last patch of natural forest in the zoo. A scraggly ridge of topsoil and mashed understory plants fringed a wide area of mud now sculpted into hills and depressions, replacing the hills and depressions there originally. Mangled second-growth firs, maples, and alders lay in a heap to the side. The bulldozer was still mired in mud. Revenge of the landscape? I paused for a moment’s memorial to summer lunches in the woods, the occasional woodpecker jackhammering on a snag, white trilliums in the spring. The new exhibit would be great, but the woods had been fine the way they were. I mourned things that would never be the same again.

In front of the Reptile area service door, I gathered myself, preparing to enter Rick’s old territory. Denny emerged before I was quite ready, with his little canvas lunch sack in hand.

“Hey, Ire. What’s up?” he asked.

“Don’t call me that,” I said, instantly irked. “You know I hate that.” I stepped inside, keeping a wary eye on the floor and elsewhere. “I’m going to clean out Rick’s locker.”

Denny followed me inside, put his lunch down, and turned toward the two padlocked cabinets at the back of the service area that served as personal lockers for keepers assigned to Reptiles.

I stood inside the door. “Denny, I don’t need help. You go on to lunch.”

He stopped. “What’s the problem?”

“I’d rather do this alone.”

Denny looked unsettled. “Why? What do you think is in there?”

“Spare socks.” Denny deserved better, but I couldn’t find what it took to be nice. He’d done his erratic best to help at the memorial service and, at times, I felt a lingering loyalty toward him. He was a disaster as a boyfriend, feral and unreliable, but he’d never been devious or dishonest. I simply wanted to do this alone.

He didn’t leave, but he stayed near the door, watching as I edged past him and through the narrow corridor between two curving rows of wood and glass boxes, their clear faces turned toward the public area. Each contained something reptilian—I hoped. Once when I was there with Rick, I’d nearly stepped on a small boa. By some miracle, my heart had restarted itself and Rick never noticed how close I was to screaming or bolting, the archaic primate response to an unexpected snake. He had scooped the snake up with his hands and plunked it back where it belonged, adjusting the lid so it couldn’t go roaming again, no big deal.

I got to Rick’s cabinet, the one left of the sink, without any unplanned encounters, but was stymied by the padlock. It was the kind that requires turning a dial first one way, then the other to hit each of three numbers. I had no idea what the combination was. Denny might know, but I didn’t feel like asking him and giving him an excuse to watch over my shoulder. Frustrated, I gave the padlock a yank, and it opened. Rick had used the zookeepers’ trick of leaving a padlock so it looked locked but wasn’t, saving time. His hand had been the last to touch that lock, I realized as the ache reawoke in my chest.

Inside were an old fleece jacket, wadded up on the top shelf, and an empty yogurt container with fuzz from an ancient lunch brought from home. Rubber clogs to the rear of the bottom shelf. A tiny snake skin in a little plastic jar, frail translucent scales the reptile had left behind. Also in the jar were two small leathery eggshells, each split open and empty. No socks, but Rick was present, vivid and whole for an instant. I stood paralyzed.

I pulled myself together, hauled everything out, and set it on the counter, standing on tiptoe to be sure the top shelf was emptied. Denny couldn’t tolerate not seeing and came up behind me. I handed him the yogurt container to throw in the trash.

“Why do you think the padlock was open?” he asked. “Did Rick leave it that way or did someone else go through the locker already?”

“Why would anybody care? The lock was open because Rick couldn’t be bothered to protect some crummy clothing. You want this jacket and the clogs?”

“Yeah, sure.”

I went through the jacket pockets—empty—and gave it to him with the clogs. Denny peered over my shoulder into Rick’s cabinet, then opened the one to the right of the sink and stuffed the items inside.

I closed the door, wanting to be gone, then opened it again. “There’s a lot of dirt inside. Where’s some paper towels or a rag?” Clean, it would be ready for someone else to use, resolving one of the many messes Rick had left behind.

Denny handed over a wad of paper towels. I swept mud cookies and grit over the bottom edge of the cabinet and caught them in my hand. I was about to release it all into a wastebasket when a small bit of light-colored rock caught my eye. I picked it out and threw away the dirt. The “rock” turned out to be a small, stained tooth. I dropped it in the jar.

Denny plucked the jar from my hand and held it face-height to examine.

“Give that back,” I snapped.

“Box turtle eggshells,” he said. “Rick hatched them out a year or so ago and one survived. I don’t know what the snake skin is.”

“It’s mine, is what it is.” I grabbed his wrist. “Give me that.”

Denny recoiled. “Hey, chill! Oh—do you think this is why Rick was at the zoo? Maybe he was investigating poaching or smuggled animal parts for Asian medicine. Or maybe—”

“Give me a break. It’s stuff he found.” I took it from his fingers. “You’ve got a nerve.” I put the lid on the jar and stuck it in my pocket.

“Man, you are harshing everyone these days.” He rubbed his wrist and looked at me, speculative. “You expected to find something else?”

“No, not really. I gotta go.” I started to edge past him toward the door.

He didn’t move out of my way. “You eat already? I’m headed to the café.”

“I ate.”

“Catch a look at the baby garter snakes before you go. Cute.”

Cute snakes weren’t quite enough of a concept to hook me, but Denny blocked my path and waved me down the aisle. I gave in, wondering what was really on his mind, and walked to an off-exhibit box with a suspended lightbulb and newspaper on the floor. Little stripy snakes each the size of a pencil oozed around a jar lid confining red earthworms. Perfect little scales covered their shiny, big-eyed snakey heads; tiny pink and black tongues flicked in and out, except for the ones that had their mouths full as they slowly ingested their worms. “Cute” was stretching it, but I could see the appeal, like slithery jewelry.

“Shit!” Denny yelped in my ear, and galloped back to the cabinets. He flung first one drawer open, then another, emerging with a pair of scissors. “They can’t let go,” he said, hustling back to the baby snakes and leaning over two wee reptiles that each had an end of the same earthworm. They’d swallowed toward each other until they were close to touching. He snipped the worm in two between their noses and straightened up, relieved. “If they meet head to head, one of them has to try to swallow the other, like corporate takeovers. Mutual assured destruction.” He checked that everyone had a worm without any sharing and pulled the jar lid out.

Denny was positively parental, a side of him I’d never suspected. Reptiles did that to some people. No wonder he and Rick had been friends.

Staring down at the little snakelets, he said, “I wish Rick were here to teach me how to run this section. He knew so damn much and I have to figure everything out a piece at a time.”

“Denny, do you know what Rick was doing here at Finley that last night?”

“No.”

Just “no.” I waited, but he was focused on putting the earthworms away in the refrigerator. “Would he come to check on the snake eggs that were incubating?”

“The blood pythons? If he did, he would have written something in the log. I was going to ask you why he was here.”

This was like pulling teeth. “I have no idea or I wouldn’t be asking. So was there anything in the incubator log?”

“Nothing.”

“I’d like to see it.” I was careful to keep my voice neutral.

But Denny heard some hint of doubt. “I checked it. You think I wouldn’t bother? He was my friend.” He closed the fridge door and walked back to stand too close to me. “I’d like to know what came down that night.”

You could get skin damage from Denny’s full intensity. “I want to see it myself.”

“It’s got zip, Ire.”

“Let me see the goddamned thing.”

Denny recoiled, then led me to a tattered spiral notebook next to a large box of clear plastic with fancy equipment on top. The box contained a tray of kitty litter, or perhaps vermiculite, with a dozen or so white eggs nestled in it. The eggs were shaped like kiwi fruit, lacking the taper to one end that a hen’s egg has. I’d seen the incubator before with Rick, when we first started dating. He’d explained that the faintly penciled X on top of each egg was to help keep the orientation consistent. I was a novice bird keeper, but I knew bird eggs need regular turning and that reptile eggs won’t tolerate it.

The notebook was a record of temperature and humidity for incubations dating back years. The blood python section was the most recent, with notes every few hours back three weeks. The last entry with Rick’s initials was 3:00 PM the day before he died. I studied the page carefully. It had nothing to tell me. I set it down.

“See?” Denny said.

I took a deep breath. Why did he always get to me? “Don’t knock yourself out, but if you think of anything useful, you might mention it to me.”

“Sure. Does that go both ways?”

I looked at him and shrugged, uncertain what he was getting at but prepared to be annoyed. That was how it went with Denny and me.

I pulled the plastic jar out of my pocket as I walked back to the Penguinarium and took another look at the contents. The little snake shed was appealing, a perfect translucent sketch of a snake, and I’d never seen turtle eggs before. The tooth was probably unidentifiable and it wasn’t even interesting. Maybe Rick had found it in the woods before the construction started. We all had our collections of zoo bits. My tokens of the wild world included a bird’s nest made of lion and tiger whiskers, a red-shafted flicker feather, and a nice squirrel skull from a roadside rest.