The Dragon Keeper (3 page)

“Are you kidding? Who do you think finds out if we’re being naughty or nice?”

“Santa Claus.”

He chuckled, a tired, rumbling laugh without a beginning or an end. “I didn’t know anyone was still here.”

“It’s a good thing I was. Look what I found.” She couldn’t take her eyes off him. Every detail was so perfect, from the yellow streaks shot through his markings to the incubator dirt clinging to his tail.

Together they weighed and measured him and put him in the second tank, next to his brother’s. He wobbled a little and took a few steps before plopping down next to a tree branch and closing his eyes. She’d set up three newborn incubators in a row that pumped heat through at a warm twenty-nine degrees Celsius, and she’d outfitted each with individual water troughs, foliage, and just enough room to recover from being born.

“I can’t believe management’s going to let you put them together in the exhibit. They’ll tear each other apart.” Antonio rested his forearms on the table, staring into the last empty incubator.

“I don’t think we’ll see any grudge matches.”

“A little idealistic, aren’t you? It’s only a matter of time before they try to eat each other.”

“Let them freaking socialize.” She rubbed her eyes, trying to clear sleep and frustration. It was unbelievable, every time she turned around. “They’ll be auctioned off in a few months and spend the rest of their lives in isolation. Then you’ll all be happy.”

They both shut up for a minute. There were a hundred good reasons to group the hatchlings together, but she was too tired to think of a smart way to say them. Yawning, she stretched out the cramping muscles of her back.

“Why don’t you go home and get some sleep?” Antonio asked.

“Why don’t you?” There was still one egg left and hell if she was going to let him get the first look at her hatchling.

Another minute passed. Finally he took a breath and pushed away from the table.

“Okay, I’m going to run home and grab a change of clothes, and then when I get back you can go.”

She glanced over at him, and he smiled hopefully. Why didn’t he just leave? He wasn’t their keeper; he was just a hotshot vet who wanted … something. She wished she knew what. Another yawn bubbled up, but she bit down on it.

“Fine, but you’re bringing back coffee, too.”

~

Ben was watching the news when she got home. His notebooks were spread out on the coffee table around a jumble of beer cans, reptile studies,
National Geographic
magazines, and empty plates crusted over with grease spots and petrified crumbs. He hunched forward in the middle of the sagging couch, legs splayed, thighs almost straddling the coffee table. At six foot two, Ben was often mistaken for an ex–college footballer going to fat, at least until he started talking. Even now, he had that puffy look of faded glory as the neon shadows from the tube flickered over his face, igniting his eyes with that for-the-win concentration.

Ben didn’t watch the news the way other people watched the news. He studied it and charted it as meticulously as Meg watched her animals. Filling notebook after notebook with major world events, he measured how each network presented coverage, looking for differences. If an earthquake hit Southeast Asia, how many variations were there in the body count? Which stations concentrated on how many Americans were killed, and which ones sent a correspondent to the wreckage rather than regurgitate the twenty-second summary wired down from the AP? It used to be surprising to look over his shoulder at what he uncovered: There’s something here, she’d thought, something important that lurked just under the surface of society, like a prejudice everyone had half-acknowledged but never looked at straight on. That was seven years ago, when they’d first met, and nothing had changed. Ben liked to talk about his manifesto—the paper he would someday publish to expose all the media injustices—but over the years Meg had accepted that he would never write it. This was just Ben’s hobby, like the guys who collected stamps or space dolls. Each discrepancy he found was a little triumph for him, but all he ever did was reach for the next blank notebook and crack another beer.

Tonight he flipped back and forth between different recordings from the prime-time news while scratching notes with a gnawed ballpoint pen. Glancing up, he saluted her with a beer.

“The second one just hatched.” She’d called earlier, high on the celebration of the first birth, but his phone had gone straight to voice mail, and he hadn’t called back all day.

She was shoving clothes into her backpack in the bedroom when Ben appeared in the doorway, lounging against the door frame and scratching his belly through a black T-shirt. His floppy brown hair was uncombed, and his skin had the rumpled, waxy sheen of someone who’d sat in a dark place for a long time.

“I just got your message. Sorry I didn’t call, but I figured you were all out partying like animals.” He waited. He always dragged it out two beats too long, waiting for the expected laughter. She didn’t oblige.

“How’s it going?”

“Fine.” She swiped some deodorant under her arms and chucked it into the backpack.

“Babies are healthy? Breathing fire and fighting knights?”

“What?” When she finally looked at him, he was grinning. Grins always scooped the bulk of Ben’s cheeks up and stretched them wide, like pears turning into apples. Once, that grin had been contagious. It promised some kind of childhood she’d heard about in books and TV shows. She’d opened to it, warmed underneath it, forgave things because of it—but it was funny how all the years’ worth of crap had piled into that grin and eventually flipped everything inside out. Now he grinned and she wanted to slap it off his face; it closed her, made her cold.

“Oh. Sure.” She zipped up the bag.

The floor squeaked as Ben lumbered up behind her and laid a meaty hand on her shoulder. He squeezed her tendons and bones together, kneading the knots farther up her spine and piling them, one on top of the other, into her skull. The looser his fingers got, the tighter her neck.

“I found another story for you. This one’s coming from Omaha. Hammerhead sharks.”

One night right after Jata had laid her eggs and the two of them were chilling on the couch—Ben watching the news, taking his notes and mumbling, while she read up on virgin births—she’d told him about the genetics behind parthenogenesis. It was more thinking out loud than anything, trying to get the whole concept straight in her mind. She hadn’t even thought he’d been listening, but something must have hooked him in. He’d started mining the news for virgin births, tracking them down on TV, on the Internet, and in newspapers, and handing them to her like gifts she didn’t know how to unwrap. He’d found a succession of tree frogs from Mexico and, of course, the three preceding Komodo cases in Europe, all within the last few years.

She shrugged away from his hand. “Not now, Ben. I have to get back to the zoo.”

“It’s almost midnight. Babies can take care of themselves for a few hours, can’t they?”

“What the hell do you know about it?” It was out before she could stop it.

He sighed. “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t call you back, okay?”

Shaking her head, she slung the backpack over her shoulder and left the house, but it was a long time before she felt the weight of his hand lift off her neck. The guilt of it burned her skin all the way back to the zoo. They didn’t fight. It took too much energy to fight, just as it took too much energy to return a phone call or to understand why now, two years after that night in Minneapolis, he was suddenly fascinated by birth.

~

Coffee and champagne had two things in common. They were both wet, and they were both drugs. It was almost impossible to mistake one for the other, unless maybe you were a blind, taste-impaired mammal with a careless keeper.

“We need to celebrate” was Antonio’s only explanation when he pulled out the plastic cups and blew the cork across the nursery. They’d grabbed a couple of folding chairs and set up camp in front of the incubator, surrounded by bags of potato chips, backpacks, and … champagne.

“We need to stay awake,” Meg objected. The coffee vending machine came to mind but with a shudder. No matter what button you pushed, it produced the same weak lattes, half-cold and topped with rubbery, chocolate skins.

“You can’t sleep and drink champagne at the same time, can you?” Antonio poured two glasses and jiggled one of the cups in front of her face. Despite her knee-jerk temptation to dump the contents on him, the cup actually looked appealing; she wanted to toast Jata’s babies into the world—not for what they represented scientifically or religiously, not for their commercial value—just for the dragons they were. She took the cup and grudgingly tapped it against his.

He grabbed her arm when she tried to take a drink. “You can’t just chug-a-lug, Yancy. You have to say something. Haven’t you ever celebrated anything before?”

She frowned. Everything she felt about the hatchlings would sound like a greeting card when it hit the air. She had nothing—nothing she was willing to share with him, anyway. “I don’t do speeches.”

“What about what you said earlier—you can’t put evolution in a cage? That sounded like a speech, or at least a fortune cookie.”

“I don’t even know what that meant,” she lied.

“Yeah, well, I do.” He swirled his cup and walked over to the last intact egg. “If you could control evolution, I would have timed things a lot better. My sister had twins the week you found the eggs. I was supposed to be in Puerto Vallarta playing the good
americano
uncle, not to mention deep-sea fishing with my dad and napping on the beach. And I had a chance to go to the World Series this year, did you know that? These dragons have destroyed my social life, with all the conference calls and logs and research. Miracles are a lot of paperwork, which you might realize if you ever actually did any of it. I used to have a life outside of here, with women and hobbies and … women. Not that you understand anything about having a life.”

“I don’t date a lot of women, no.”

“That’s actually somewhat surprising. I think I just lost some money to one of the fish keepers.”

“If it’s Doug, he already knew I was straight because he tried to set me up with his sister three years ago.”

Antonio burst out laughing, and Meg grinned at the memory. Doug hadn’t known about Ben, of course, but he steered clear of her for months out of embarrassment after she’d filled him in. She wasn’t surprised Antonio had taken the bet. Not many people at the zoo did know about Ben. It wasn’t as if he came to see her at work or anything, and what was the point of talking about him? Ben was just Ben. Besides, bringing up a relationship always made people want to talk about marriage, mortgages, and children. She didn’t need to jump on that conversation train.

“That’s another thing,” Antonio said after his chuckles subsided. “Who would’ve thought we could ever actually work together? These eggs completely destroyed my dislike for you. Remember when we hated each other?” He rubbed his chin and gazed off to some faraway, beloved place. “That was great.”

“Speak for yourself. I don’t recall getting past that feeling.”

“You hate me about as much as you hate Gemma. Admit it.”

“Maybe if you ever shut up you’d start to grow on me. Like a wart, you know?”

“All right, all right.” He held out his cup again and waited. The corners of his lips quirked up as the silence drew out.

Man, he was annoying. “Fine,” she said. “But if we have to toast, then at least get it right.”

“What do you mean?”

She sat up straight and tried to figure out how to phrase it. “We think these animals are captive, right? They live in artificial environments, the deprived captive state and all that shit?”

He nodded.

“But it’s not like that. The walls only hold so much. It’s like …” She waved her cup in a circle, pulling the thought down. “That old bat who lives on the cul-de-sac behind the Mammal Kingdom. Every month, she complains to the city about the wolf exhibit and the howling. The walls can’t hold in their howls. The fences can’t keep them from smelling the deer in the river valley or the bonfires in people’s backyards. When I drive by that old bat’s house on my way home and I blast the metal station at her, do you think she can’t hear me just because she’s in her little box of a house and I’m in my little box of a car?”

“You need help, you know that?” he said.

“Some things can never be contained, that’s what I’m saying, no matter how hard you try or what kind of technology you have. We didn’t find Jata a mate, and she went ahead and reproduced anyway. There it is.” She pointed to the last egg. “You can’t put evolution in a cage.”

Without waiting for Antonio to say anything, she thumped her cup against his and drank. The bubbles fizzed down her throat like Alka-Seltzer with a dry pucker at the end. It was too sweet.

She slouched down in her chair in front of the incubator and stared at the last egg until its edges blurred into the surrounding dirt. One last boy curled up tight in his hot, little bed. She could hold it in her cupped palms now—an egg that shouldn’t even exist, like some dark magic conjured it here from nothing—and in a few short years, the dragon inside would be two hundred pounds with a tail that could swim channels and jaws of bone-crunching, poison-coated teeth. He would be the king of all lizards, but there wouldn’t be any other lizards where he was going. And what was royalty without a kingdom? Maybe evolution couldn’t be caged up, but a Komodo sure could. In the last hundred years humans had gotten pretty good at that.