The Dragon Keeper (30 page)

She swept her hand back and forth over the bars, absently petting them, scratching the metal with fingernails that were broken and still crusted over with dried blood from yesterday.

“When I first read about Bubchen, I felt like I was waking up. I thought I knew what I had to do. I had to make sure that Jata was never scared of anything, that she accepted us and enjoyed her life, because just the least little thing could kill her. As soon as she spooked, as soon as the environment couldn’t soothe her anymore, I knew it was all over. Every captive life is a deprived life, I know that, but I wanted to give her the best captive state she could have. And now she’s given us the most precious, impossible gift”—her throat closed and she fought against it, shoving the words into the room—“and we’re still killing her. So maybe it doesn’t matter anyway. Scared or not, the planes still kill you in the end.”

Chuck’s head was lowered. The building creaked above them as people walked; they were circling closer, preparing the injection. Time was running out.

He cleared his throat, a low, wet noise. “I’ve always believed in progress, you know. That we can build on the past, learn from our mistakes, and reach higher. Do better. That’s why I made you her keeper, Megan. I knew you would do better for her, better for all your animals, than some of the people we had working here when you started. You could teach your coworkers how to care for their exhibits, and they could teach you how to relate to people without getting the zoo in a lawsuit.”

She smiled, her face heavy against the bars.

“But Jata”—he shook his head—“she’s just gone beyond anything I understand as progress. She’s part of a—a larger order now … and I just don’t think we were equipped to handle it. I don’t think we were able to evolve with her.”

He paused, shoulders stooped and his face in shadows. “You can’t blame the men inside the planes, Megan. You have to blame the war.”

The noise above them grew louder, the feet on the floor pounding harder. The cafeteria must be opening. That meant it was ten o’clock. It was time.

“Give me the dosed gun. I want to do it.”

“That’s not what Gerald—”

She stood up and laid a hand on his arm, silencing him. She had to do this.

“I want to be the last thing she sees. I don’t want her to be scared. Please, Chuck. It’s the only thing I’ll ever ask you.”

It didn’t take him long, but she’d dried her face on her uniform by the time he got back. This time when she raised the gun, there was no panic or overwhelming fear. Her hand was steady, and a horrible calm stole over her body.

“Jata.” At her name, Jata looked up, and her eyes were black trusting pools, focused on her keeper. Meg fired, and the dart with the euthanizing dose sank into her right shoulder. She watched her dragon—the only thing in the world she had truly loved—until Jata’s head lowered slowly and gracefully to the ground, and only when her jaw was resting on the floor did her eyes close for the last time.

34 Days
after
Hatching

M
eg sat at the last computer terminal of the keeper’s cage, in the far corner of the room. Her coworkers kept their voices low and moved in wide circles around her, keeping a quarantine distance, a mourning distance. Everyone knew that today was the autopsy.

She’d been here for the last three hours, even though Chuck told her to take the rest of the week off.
Take a vacation, and don’t talk to any reporters
, he’d said after she’d shot Jata.
Relax. Spend some time with your family
. She’d even tried to follow his advice, which showed how far gone she really was. She went to the cemetery and stood by her mother’s grave, but Jata stared up at her from under the budding grass. When she called her father, he tried to convince her to come see him again, but all she heard was Jata’s hiss snaking through the static on the line. When she went to the hospital to visit Antonio in the intensive care ward, the nurse stopped her and asked if she was family.
Sister-in-law
, she’d almost said—the words were on the tip of her tongue—but she shook her head instead, too cowardly to go in to face him. The nurse filled her in on the surgery schedule, saying he was still dangerously close to losing his leg. The infection wasn’t under control yet. Meg nodded and went home, threw up her breakfast, and cried for most of the day. She came to work this morning because it would have been torture to spend any more days “relaxing” like that, but when she found out that Dr. Reading had scheduled the autopsy for today, even bringing in some hotshot university veterinarians for assistance, it became pointless to try to work. She had to be nearby.

They rarely did autopsies at the zoo, unless one of the charismatic mega-vertebrates died mysteriously, and that had only happened once as far back as anyone could remember. This autopsy, though, had nothing to do with Jata’s death; they were taking a corpse apart to dissect a life. To pretend to distract herself, Meg searched through the website of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, looking at the zoos that had placed bids on the hatchlings. Chuck came in and out of the vet hallway periodically after they started the procedure, and each time he passed through he nodded to her corner of the room, as if to say,
Yes, they’re still working. I’ll keep checking back
.

Gemma walked into the cage. The last time Meg had seen her had been the day of the attack, running down the corridor alongside Antonio’s stretcher, her uniform covered in blood. She walked straight to the computer opposite from Meg and sat down. Clicking and typing, Meg concentrated on ignoring her. It was almost comforting to have something else to focus on.

An e-mail popped up in her in-box from Channel 12; they wanted her to comment on the death of Jata. She deleted it.

After a while, Gemma remarked offhandedly to her computer screen, “Didn’t expect you to be here in the thick of things.”

“I’m looking for something. Ben took his computer with him when he left.”

Gemma let that pass, typing for another quiet stretch of time. “Funny how they keep logs on our logs, tabs on everything we do in these computers. Really is a cage, isn’t it?”

“Are you trying to be on my side now?”

“I’ve always been on your side.” Gemma gave up the pretense of typing and leaned across the station toward Meg. There was something like guilt creeping around the edges of her eyes. “They were wrong to kill Jata, but she was dangerous, Meg. She couldn’t be controlled anymore.”

“And you made damn sure that they knew that.”

“That’s our job. I did what the policies tell us to do. There was no way I could have known Jata would attack Antonio.”

As she leaned in to meet Gemma’s pleading stare, the shreds of grief curled in Meg’s stomach, clawing to get out. “Well, you still have your job. Congratulations. Now you can go home and tell Allison that you helped kill her.”

Gemma’s expression shriveled into hurt, giving Meg a sour kind of satisfaction to see Gemma wearing the same thing that was tearing her up inside. Gemma Perkins, who was never bothered by anything—and what a horrible reach
anything
turned out to have—was finally touched, finally shit-splattered by this mess. Gemma leaned even farther over the computer and worked her mouth over the pain, tasting it, spitting it back.

“It’s so easy for you, isn’t it? You can be a bitch, shut everyone out, ignore the rules, screw your coworkers, and what does it matter? If they fire you, it’s just you. You’ll just pack up and move on to the next zoo. I can’t do that. I have a daughter. She wants to go to summer camp at the science museum this year. Did I tell you that? Four hundred and fifty dollars without meals. And then there’s college. Do you know how much I’ve saved for Allison’s college? Two thousand dollars. Two grand in eight years. I have to keep this job. I can’t afford to lose my paycheck or my benefits. And if Chuck has a heart attack or retires, you’d better believe I’m going to get in line for his job. So if they say jump, I’m going to jump. If they say shoot the animals, I’m going to shoot the animals. And if they say log the aggression, log every behavior you observe, guess what else I’m going to do.”

It was as if the autopsy was happening right here in front of her, as if the Gemma she’d known was ripping into pieces, breaking irreversibly apart.

“How can you be so spineless? Don’t you believe in anything?”

Gemma nodded, then laughed once, a humorless, empty laugh. “I believe in the way things are. Here we are sitting in the cage, and if everything goes well, we’ll get to come back tomorrow. But you—you’re just better than everyone, aren’t you? Meg Yancy, the perfect fucking keeper, right?”

Meg dropped her face into a hand, trying to hold it together, but the words followed her. It all closed in on her—the other keepers pretending not to eavesdrop, Gemma’s hurt and disgust, the pretty and sterile images of the AZA on the computer screen—they all crowded in like the autopsy vets, cutting deep into her bones, severing her into little pieces, and every slice was flawed. Nicole Roberts, the reception, lying to Ben, sleeping with Antonio, Antonio in the exhibit, Antonio screaming, failing Jata, shooting Jata, killing Jata.

She jerked to her feet.

“Meg—”

“No.” She left the cage, stumbled down the veterinary hallway to the operating room window, and leaned into the glass. Three masked people in blue gowns stood around the table holding Jata’s body. She lay awkwardly on her side with her head tilted back, throat gaping open as if she were ready to feed. Meg couldn’t see her eyes. Hands fisted, salt choking her throat, she was paralyzed as they hacked into Jata, taking out pieces of stomach, heart, and bowels like glistening trophies. The perfect fucking keeper. She held back a sob as one of the doctors glanced at her, indecision clouding the unmasked part of his face. After a minute he bent back down, and she watched him flay the base of Jata’s tail, dissecting her genitals. They were looking for a penis or some other deformity, something that could explain Jata’s daughters in neat, black-and-white diagrams and win them all grants and fellowships. They sliced and sectioned tissues and put them into containers. An intern stood in one corner of the operating room, labeling everything.

As Meg stood there, the water buffalo from her nightmares appeared behind the glass, staring at her with glassy, dead eyes, except this time it was Jata, shaking and helpless in the mud pit as the humans burrowed their way into her in a wet dance of blood, knives, and intertwining hands. Jata was the water buffalo and she—the perfect fucking keeper—she was the dragon.

36 Days
after
Hatching

S
omeone from the Mammal Kingdom stole her hose again.

“Leprechauns,” Michael said as he returned it, piling it around her shoulders. “They love moving stuff around and playing tricks on you. Must’ve been the leprechauns.”

Meg pointed to the howling freeway that cut through the river. “Next time it happens, I’m going to throw you off that bridge so you can go meet the troll.”

He didn’t point out the fact that he had a good ten inches and nearly two hundred pounds on her, but then he didn’t ask about her red-rimmed eyes either, or hound her for the results of the autopsy, which she still didn’t know. He just clapped her on the shoulder, let out his big, rumbling laugh, and sent her down the south walkway toward the Reptile Kingdom.

It was warm today, already in the sixties and not even lunchtime. Spring was here. The river valley hit her in an unreal, distant way with its transformation. The trees on the far bank created a horizon of lush, rippling green, and the only bare branches in sight were the driftwood bones rising from the runoff ponds that swelled along the base of the bluffs. Everything on the water breathed life, from the waving marsh grasses and darting songbirds, all the way up to the raptors circling overhead and the perfume of the first purple wildflowers drifting past her as she walked. She’d missed it completely. The budding plants, the long, rainy days—she couldn’t remember a single moment of it.

She started to veer left on the fork in the path that separated the main grounds from the Bird Kingdom but stopped when she glanced over and saw Dr. Reading sitting alone on one of the benches halfway down the path to the towering, golden wing. Her back was to Meg, but the neatly coiled gray bun and the slight, stooped shoulders were hers—no question. Without knowing exactly why, Meg veered toward the doctor, trying to fold her arms over the coils of hose and make use of her suddenly useless hands.

Dr. Reading’s gaze hovered over the river, her hands folded in her lap as if they were squeezing something tightly against her abdomen. She looked older when she wasn’t moving. Maybe it was because they were here on death row, the path to the ill-fated birds, but Dr. Reading had that unfocused twitch in her eyes—that knowledge that haunts the elderly when someone dies and they know there is nothing left to be done. There were a thousand things Meg wanted to say to the doctor, but that blank look stopped them all. She shuffled up to the railing and kicked it, scuffing one boot and then the other, wondering how to begin.

“I’ve always had a hard time with places like this,” Dr. Reading commented, as detached as if she were talking to the empty bench. “Tight spaces and imposed environments. When I was a girl, I hated classrooms—all those walls and the teachers standing in front of them with their rules, trying to keep us contained. I spent most of those years staring out windows, wishing for the day to end so I could escape to the creek and my woods. I wasn’t made for classrooms or zoos; I belong out there, with the animals in our natural habitat.”