The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (113 page)

“And you can’t keep from buying shit,” he thought aloud, driving home.

He popped over the curb into the Lil’ Red Barn parking lot.

They weren’t going to spend anything this week, Bell and Lin had agreed. They didn’t need to. Food in the fridge, gas in both cars. This week they wouldn’t spend.

That morning, they’d run out of toilet paper.

“It’s not an insurmountable problem,” he’d told Lin. “We have paper towels.”

“You’re not,” said Lin, “supposed to put anything besides toilet paper in the toilet.”

“But you can,” argued Bell, “if you need to.”

Bell thought it was a spending problem. They knew how much money was coming in. If they controlled what went out, their money would be orderly, would increase. Lin disagreed.

“It’s a matter of supply,” she had pointed out. “Your job needs to supply more money.”

“So does yours.” Lin worked in the mall.

She glared ice. Splinters and crystals.

In Lin’s world, it was okay for her to criticize Bell. It was not okay for Bell to criticize Lin. Not if things were to be orderly. In every mating pair, Bell knew, one animal always bit harder than the other.

Lin was the biter.

And in their two-mammal world where daily life was defined by constant, grinding poverty, it seemed she bit constantly.

It was important, they had once agreed, to do what they loved. To love their work.

“I love my work,” Bell had told Lin a thousand times. Last month, in bed, he had told her how he loved his work, and they’d argued, and she’d scratched him with her fingernails. Drew blood. Made him want to hit her, and he almost did.

But he didn’t. There were light years between wanting to hit a woman and actually doing it. Bell wasn’t that kind of man. Wasn’t that kind of animal. What kind of animal was he?

He wondered if she knew. Wondered if she’d seen it in his eyes, the almost-hitting. The wanting to.

He quit saying how much he loved his job.

Most zookeepers, he knew, were women whose husbands made better money. They could afford the love.

Lin knew this, too.

“Shelly Capriatti’s husband sells guitars,” she had told him, just the night before. Shelly Capriatti was someone she worked with or worked out with, he couldn’t recall. “High end stuff, like for professionals. Like if Eric Clapton needed a new guitar. There’s no reason you couldn’t do something like that. He makes a ton of money.”

And he was on the edge, as he often was, of admitting to himself that he wished he hadn’t gotten married, when she stretched herself across his lap in front of their eleven-year-old TV and was nice for a while. Long enough for him to sweep some hard truth under the rug. Again. It was easier that way.

He focused on that – the niceness – while he paid the cashier at the Lil’ Red Barn.

She could be nice. Things in general, sometimes, were nice.

Sometimes she was predictable, which was easier, but you had to be ready for both. Driving into the trailer park, he thought about that.

The baboon had never attacked anyone. Then, today, it did.

There’s a first time for everything.

“You’re cute the way a dog is cute,” Lin had told him, in front of the TV.

You run out of toilet paper.

Things fall apart.

Not having money was a theme in Bell’s life. Even the zoo was a poor zoo, poorly funded.

Sometimes people complained. Once, a woman had come in, and when she’d seen the conditions in which the lions were housed, she’d been angry. People loved the lions.

“It’s a cage,” she said.

Bell had agreed with her.

“Zoos are supposed to be . . . natural,” she continued. “They’re supposed to be habitats, and the animals aren’t even supposed to reahze they’re confined.”

Bell understood. He sympathized. He’d been to zoos like that, too, in towns that weren’t dying.

“Do you think they don’t know?” he asked.

She only stared at him.

“Do you think, in these other zoos, that the animals don’t know they’re locked in?”

“A disgrace,” she said, walking away.

Low funding required management get creative when provisioning the animals. In addition to supplies bought on the open market, there were arrangements with local grocery stores, and butchers, and meat processors. A truck was taken around each day to be filled with heaps of food – loaves of bread that had passed their freshness dates, meat that had begun to turn, gallons of milk that had expired. Occasionally there was carrion brought in – deer which had been struck on the highway and then picked up by the county. All of it fed into the bottomless maw of the zoo.

The trucks would drive around back and unload their cargo into the kitchen. It was called the kitchen, but it was not a kitchen. It was a room with several huge stainless steel tables on which food was piled and sorted and divided.

Bell was on his way to the castle when a voice on his walkie-talkie stopped him. “Bell, there’s something you need to see.”

Lucy, one of the kitchen workers, out of breath.

He got there fast. Came in through the back door.

“It’s a bug,” said Lucy, hands at her collar.

“What kind?” he asked.

She shrugged. “It’s a bug.” She pointed at a bowl turned upside-down on the counter.

Bell lifted the bowl. Put it down again.

He stood perfectly still.

He lifted the bowl and stole another quick glance.

“Hmm,” he said and lowered the bowl.

The kitchen workers stared. “What is it?”

“I’m working on it,” he said. He looked into the distance. “I think it’s a grub of some kind.”

“I didn’t think grubs got that big,” Lucy said.

“No,” Bell said. “Neither did I.”

Bell looked again. The grub was large, fleshy and blood red. 5 inches long.

“Where did it come from?” he asked.

She shrugged again. “The table.”

Bell looked at the table. There were watermelons, and apples, and bread, and the partially disarticulated hock of a deer. Several bunches of blackened bananas made a mountain in the center, along with a smaller mound of more exotic fruit shipped in from Lord-knew-where.

“It could have come in with anything,” she said. “I found it crawling along the edge of the table there.” She shuddered. “It was moving pretty fast.”

Bell retrieved a glass jar from the cabinet, opened the lid, then dragged the bowl across the edge of the table so the strange grub dropped into the jar. He stepped outside and plucked some grass, put the grass inside, and closed the lid. Poked holes.

He took the jar across the zoo to the castle and placed it on a shelf in the back room.

“The castle” was the name used for the entomology building. Bell could only imagine what the structure’s original use had been, with its block construction and odd turrets; but whatever that long ago intent, it now housed all manner of creepy crawlers – hissing cockroaches, and ant farms, and snakes, and lizards and frogs. Anything that required darkness or careful temperature control.

The building was a box within a box. There was an open, central area ringed on three sides by walls and exhibits – and just behind these walls was a space called the back room, closed to the public, which was actually a single narrow hall that conformed to the outside perimeter of the building, a gap space where you could access the back side of the cages. At the far end of this hall, in a dead-end spot furthest from the entry door was a table and chairs, a TV, a desk and several terrariums. These extra terrariums were where the sick were boarded, those unfit for public examination.

Bell did the rest of his chores for the day. In the evening he checked on the grub. It was still there, happily curling up the sides of the glass jar. Bell had studied entomology in college, and he’d never seen anything like it; the insect’s sheer bulk seemed to push the cubed-square law to its limit. Perhaps beyond its limit. He hadn’t thought insects could be that big. When he opened the lid, the grub reared up at him, strange mouth-parts writhing.

Bell was in charge of the castle, the petting zoo and the convicts. This had not always been the case. He was in charge of the castle because he was the only zookeeper who’d taken college-level entomology. The petting zoo was meant as an insult. And the convicts were punishment.

The convicts came in most weekdays. You could point them out in the parking lot – men and women who were there too early, hours before the gates opened. Bell would feed the insects, drink a cup of coffee and then walk to open the front gates.

“Here for community service?” he’d ask.

“Yeah,” they’d say.

Sometimes there were two or three. Sometimes none. They handed Bell their paperwork, and Bell passed it to the zoo superintendent at the end of the day.

The number of hours worked was the all-important statistic. Because they all had a number they were working down from. 150 hours, 200 hours, 100 hours.

Sometimes they talked about their crimes, and sometimes they didn’t.

Bell never asked. Not his business.

Bell often talked to himself in the bathroom mirror.

“In this world,” he said, “you are not an apex predator. Humans are, as a species, but you, yourself, are not.”

You do not always win. Problems are not always solved.

There are defeats and surrenderings. Small but important.

Last winter, they gave up heating the bedroom. They sealed off the back of the trailer and slept on the sofa. They learned the science of climbing into the bathtub. The bathtub was metal and descended a few inches through the floor, arctic air right beneath. No matter how hot the water got, your butt and legs would start to freeze if you sat still too long. You had to lift yourself up now and then, let the hot water get under there. Lower yourself Wait. Repeat.

“It’s like not even being part of the food chain,” Bell said aloud one cold night, eating burritos in the kitchen.

They hadn’t spoken to one another that morning. His remark about the food chain was one of two things they said to each other all day long.

Sometimes he opened up the bedroom door and exhaled just to see his breath cloud the room.

He wanted her to ask about his food chain remark. Wanted to explain it. Wanted her to understand.

“The food chain – ” he began.

“I get it,” she said.

That was the second thing that got said. Her breath made a cloud even though they were in the kitchen.

Bell didn’t dare tell Lin how much he loved his job, not anymore. He told the mirror, instead.

“I love my job,” he said. His reflection said it, too, it seemed.

Like the zoo, their life at home had been built on various pretendings. Pretending there might be gas money. Pretending they could afford to eat better, but chose not to. Pretending that Lin still thought it was important to have a job you liked. Loved. What ever.

She had quit pretending. Somewhere behind her mask was the Lin who thought If you loved me you’d do what it took for me to live a better life,’ and that Lin had surfaced. Unmasked. Through fucking around.

Classified ads appeared, taped to the fridge.

Sales. Landscaping. Power-washing trucks. All kinds of things you could do with a degree in biology.

“It’s easy,” Bell told her, “to lose track of what’s really important.”

She didn’t have to say that having heat and electricity were important, too. Instead, never breaking eye contact, she grabbed her coat and her vibrator and locked herself in the bathroom.

Library clerk. Barista. All things that paid more than working at a zoo. Mexican cook. Skycap for a Mexican airline. Didn’t matter if you weren’t Mexican.

It was amazing, thought Bell, how much pretending went on in a zoo.

The public pretended the cages were jungles, savannah, desert, or snow.

The animals pretended that they were not interested in the public. The public and the zookeepers worked together at pretending that the zoo was not, when you got right down to it, just carefully-engineered cruelty.

Sometimes the animals forgot to pretend. Like when babies were born and wouldn’t eat. Because they knew captivity when they saw it. Felt it. Forgot to pretend life was worth living.

Like when the llama attacked Bria Vagades.

Bell was there when it happened.

It wasn’t like an animal attack in the movies, all snarling and snorting, blood and fur. It looked almost comical. One second Bria was lifting the rock-shaped hatch which concealed the garden hose, and suddenly here came Nunez the llama, ridiculous and splendid with his two-tone black-and-gray coat, rearing on his hind legs, waving his front hooves like a boxer. He was on her before she saw him, and she screamed.

“Ow!” she screamed, and “Fuck you, Nunez!” before she got a grip on herself. The zoo was closed, but there were strict rules about losing your cool where the public might see, might panic.