Lauren AcamporaDominion
From New England Review
ROY FOUND A stack of letters on the counter. He lifted the first one, heavy with crayon, and studied its clumsy drawing of a blue-striped tiger with ears like a rabbit.
“They’re from Piper’s school,” Marilyn said, clipping across the kitchen in a spangled white skirt-suit. Another woman might look tawdry in such an ensemble, but his wife carried it off like a duchess.
“Where are you going? I forget.”
“Luncheon for the hospital. We’re asking Lucinda Bette-Gilman to join the board.”
“Ah.”
Roy rifled through the letters, some two dozen, each with an inept artistic rendering of Molly. Only one differed, clearly typed by a parent: While we appreciate your good intention in visiting our child’s school with an animal ambassador as impressive as Molly, we’re concerned by the practice of keeping wild creatures captive—
“Marilyn!” Roy called out, but she was already gone. He wanted to write back immediately, tell these crabs that Molly was a rescue from a circus in Peru, thank you very much, where she’d been subjected to cramped and squalid conditions before Roy squired her to a three-acre habitat of her own—a tiger’s paradise, more savannah than enclosure. He took out paper and pencil but was too indignant to form words.
What mattered, he reminded himself, was that the school visit had been an unmitigated success, and not just in his opinion, but as corroborated by the teachers’ and children’s obvious glee. Some of the students had been ill-behaved, of course, pushing ahead of the others, reaching to touch Molly without permission. The class, as Roy had feared, had been a motley little crew, a microcosm of the wider district’s demographic makeup. Roy remained perplexed by Shannon’s decision to send Piper to public school when there was a panoply of private and Christian academies at her disposal. It was doubtful that his granddaughter would gain any special benefit from “diversity” in this rawest sense of the word, this bestiary of scrappily dressed, minimally groomed children. Roy had been struck by one girl in particular whose hair looked like it had never been combed. And the boy, whom the teacher addressed as Chance, with his eggy, buzz-cut head, had flailed toward Molly with motions so spastic he thought the child might be mentally challenged. Amidst these classmates, Piper had stood out, highbred and luminous in her blue smocked dress and hair bow, serenely awaiting instruction.
And Molly had been the politest of guests, a perfect doll. Roy had crouched beside her while Luis held her chain, and she had patiently allowed the kindergartners to stroke her flank. There was no need for the school staff to know that they’d put a low dosage of sedative in her food that morning, just to be on the safe side. Molly didn’t really need it, but Marilyn had thought it was a good idea, and he hadn’t argued.
Roy had lunch with the flamingos, on the bench near the lagoon. After so many years of eating at his desk, it was a sweet reward to relax with his steak sandwich and his flamboyance of birds. He watched Diego scatter pigment-enhancing food pellets as they paced in their weird way, back and forth in unison like distracted women. Roy hadn’t wanted birds at first, but when the opportunity for Caribbean flamingos came up—this most striking subtype with deep coral feathers—he couldn’t resist. Up close, they were gawky and beady-eyed,
honking obnoxiously, but at a distance they were art.
After his sandwich, Roy stopped at the serval enclosure, where Vanessa and Sienna lounged under a wooden table. Vanessa approached with her slow, fluid gait and extended her neck for a chin rub. When Hobo emerged from his den box, Roy threw a rubber mouse to him. He never tired of these cats, their long lines and breathtaking speed, their astounding vertical springs. He loved their oversized bat ears and their cloudy gray eyes like agate marbles, glamorously outlined in black.
Throwing the muddy mouse, Roy felt the pleasant emptiness he experienced only with his animals. It must be akin to Zen bliss, the way the yogis thought of it. After leaving the corporate world, he’d finally found a role he could joyfully fulfill, and which he’d wholly earned. Finally, he was making up all those hours of lost daylight: four decades of bureaucracy and conflict. He’d never really warmed to management, even though he’d excelled at it. He’d always found personnel too slippery and hard to pin down. But management was a necessary evil that came with any position of power. And power was something he’d pursued instinctively, adopted easily, worn like a calfskin glove.
It was amusing to think that so much hustle had ultimately led to spending his days like a farmer. When he and Marilyn attended black-tie galas, when they were photographed for the society pages, it tickled Roy to know that just hours earlier he’d been hand-feeding a beef shank to a tiger or helping to midwife a camel birth.
Salvador joined him in the serval enclosure with a bucket of chicken legs. The cats pounced on the meat before it hit the ground.
“Yes, sir. Yes, ma’am,” Salvador chuckled to the cats. “That’s good food.”
Roy found himself laughing, too. The truth was that he enjoyed his property staff more than his peers in black tie. The people he hired to maintain the property and care for the animals were fine people, steered by other desires. The concept of ambition—of success for success’s sake—was foreign to them. Satisfied by the simple things the natural world provided, they were unaware of or indifferent to the higher calibers of human pleasures. Roy might have envied this plain contentment, but he understood he was designed differently. His enjoyment of these animals, this life, was necessarily contingent on all that had come before, the challenges he’d met with his own brain power. He enjoyed the animals because he’d worked to obtain them. But unequal as they were, he and his staff were happy together in this Eden. Roy was pleased
to share the humor of watching a capybara waddle into the lagoon. Marilyn took delight in the animals, too—especially the camels, whose faces she loved, full of comedy and tragedy. She divined profound feeling in their soft, long-lashed eyes. She was, ironically, the keeper of the household ledger. In a funny swap, she was the manager now, and Roy the irresponsible one in need of reining in. When he’d wanted to build a dolphinarium, Marilyn had unequivocally told him no.
When she came home, Roy was on the hammock near the kudus. She’d changed out of her luncheon armor into jeans and boots, a loose white blouse. She’d kept her earrings in and still looked like a glamour queen as she perched on the neighboring hammock.
“I was thinking,” Roy said, “that since Piper’s class enjoyed meeting Molly so much at school, maybe we should invite them to come visit the property. Maybe they could take a field trip here, to see where the animals live and how well we take care of them.”
He wouldn’t tell her about the disparaging letter, which he’d already shredded and stuffed in the trash. Its logic was so misguided, so asinine, that he’d decided to withhold the satisfaction that a response might give the author.
Marilyn raised a brow. “That’s a lot of children, Roy.”
“Yes, and we have a lot of land. I’ve been thinking we should make our property more accessible to the public. I mean, what’s it all for, if not to share? We should be proud of what we’re doing for these animals. People should know. We should be taking the lead in the community, helping to grow awareness about conservation.”
“You sound like a CEO.”
Roy laughed and swung in the hammock, waiting for more. Marilyn would have an opinion; she always did. He’d learned, the hard way, to heed it.
“Well,” Marilyn finally said, opening the folds of her hammock and rolling herself in. “I think it’s a very nice thought. Why don’t we go ahead and talk to the school.”
Roy smiled up to the sky above, a jolly blue canopy sheltering everything he loved.
The school was, in fact, amenable to the idea, and plans were made for a field trip in April. When they spoke to Shannon, she confessed that Piper was already crowing to her friends about it.
oo.”
Sadly, the visit would only be for half a day. It would be challenging to wedge a guided tour into such a short window. The acreage alone was impossible for six-year-old legs. Roy would have to omit entire sections of the property and consider the proximity of enclosures. A visit to the red pandas, which he considered mandatory, would preclude seeing the binturongs. He’d have to choose between the mongooses and the anteaters, the bandicoots and wombats.
But whatever the children saw would be more than they’d have seen otherwise. He’d introduce them to Honey the kinkajou, and maybe let one of them hold her. That alone would be worth the bus trip. If this visit went well, maybe they could offer it to other grades, other schools. It could be a merging of their passions, for children and animals. Perhaps they could even open the property to the general public, at least on occasion. They might hire extra staff to serve as docents. ...
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