John Davis - Fear No Evil

‘I’m sorry, Sally … I’m sorry, old lady … You’d be fine in the summer but not in the winter …’

Big fat Sally, the only hippopotamus in the zoo, was huffing and grunting, her huge mouth slopping as she shoved herself into his embrace.

He gave her one last hug, then turned and scrambled tearfully through the bars. Sally lumbered after him, and floundered into the bars, her flanks quivering; he strode across the hall and wiped his wrist roughly across his eyes. The old hippopotamus stood there, squeezed against the bars, and she gave a big heartbreaking snort. The young man did not look back.

He hurried back to Jamba’s cage, pulling out his flashlight and a wrench. He flicked the light on the locking mechanism, and set to work to open the elephant’s door. All the time the hippopotamus stood rammed against her bars, grunting at him, her intestines half-clogged with the coins, lipsticks, and marbles the public had tossed down her cavernous mouth over the years.

The young man was running out of time. He unlocked the door of the Ape House and ducked inside. In the keeper’s office he snapped on the switch for simulated jungle daylight.

The big silver-back male gorilla, the females and a baby blinked, scattered under their concrete tree. The male scrambled up onto all fours, staring intently; he bobbed excitedly and shook his head to show nonaggression, then came lumbering. He shoved his black hands against the glass panel, bobbing and shaking his head, and the young man grinned and bobbed and shook his head too.

He dashed back into the keeper’s office, inserted a key, swung open the cage door—and the gorillas crowded around.

‘Hello, King!’

He dropped to his haunches, his eyes moist. He could only take two. There was no more room in the trucks.

It was two o’clock in the morning.

The circus gear lay abandoned on the grounds of the Bronx Zoo, a mess of barrels and seesaws and hoops and ladders.

Fifty miles away, on Highway 22, the two big circus trucks were hammering through New Jersey. The Western-style letters, The World’s Greatest Show , had been hastily spray-painted out.

In the back of the first truck the three elephants from the zoo were squeezed in with the three elephants from The World’s Greatest Show. The compartments of the other truck held all the lions and the tiger from the circus, the tiger from the zoo, the circus bears, the chimpanzees and the gorillas. Most of them were lying down to steady themselves, wide-eyed in the darkness, their adrenalin pumping.

In the cabs, the engines were loud, the radios playing. The driver of the second truck was a big strong man with a big gut, a wide face and straight black hair. Until an hour ago he had worked for The World’s Greatest Show as an animal keeper and driver. He was tense, but sometimes a little smile played on his wide mouth, sometimes he whistled distractedly along with the radio. His name was Charles Buffalohorn and he was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian. On the sleeping bunk behind his seat was a knapsack, stuffed full, a sleeping bag strapped to it. These, plus maybe a few hundred dollars in the bank, were all he owned in the whole wide world.

Four hundred yards ahead were the taillights of the other truck. David Jordan’s face was gaunt, his eyes frequently darting to the wing mirror, watching the truck behind. Every time the music stopped on the radio he tensed for a newsflash. Now and again he changed stations, listening hard.

Up on his bunk there was also a knapsack and a plastic bag containing a pig’s carcass, bought that day from a wholesale butcher. On the seat beside him was Champ, the male circus chimpanzee, fast asleep. Champ was supposed to live with the other chimpanzees, but he liked to sleep in the cab with the young man, whenever he could get away with it.

On the floor of the cab slept a big furry dog. He looked like a husky, or maybe a German shepherd, but his face was almost pure wolf.

The elephants were crammed tight, great gray flanks pressing. Sometimes a trunk found its way out of the congestion and groped around, sniffing and feeling, and then it was a difficult business to recurl it, squeezing and shoving. The three circus elephants were dismayed by the strangers suddenly in their midst, for instead of the enormous territory an elephant needs, they had this piece of truck, their only permanent place on this earth.

But Jamba, the old cow elephant from the zoo, stood quietly, forehead jammed between two massive rumps, eyes blinking in the dark, but her heart thumping in excitement. Because the man she loved had come back, had taken her out of her cage amid the electric excitement of the Elephant House and out through the big double doors into the starry night. Suddenly she had been in the open, fresh night air and the smell of the earth all about her, and she was running beside him, his hand holding her trunk tip, running away from the Elephant House into the wide open world, and with each lumbering footfall her incredulous excitement had thumped harder and higher.

And squeezed into the back of the truck, squashed between elephants’ legs and bellies, wide-eyed and wheezing, was the big, fat, old hippopotamus called Sally.

For, back in the gloom of the Elephant House, with the sounds of the young man heaving open the cages and then leading the elephants out one by one—excited silhouettes lumbering into the wonderful starry night, all that animal eagerness in the air—in those long, tense minutes the old hippopotamus had sensed what was going to happen, that the man was taking them away with him forever. Each time old Sally had thought that her turn would be next, and she had stood there massively quivering, nostrils dilated, lumbering around her cage in agitation and anticipation. Then he had come up to her cage, and looked at her standing there huffing and trembling with excitement, and he had said hoarsely:

‘I’m sorry, Sally … I’m terribly sorry, my old hippo …’

Then he had turned and walked quickly back through the big double door, and he was gone.

And suddenly she had understood: that she was being left behind, he was not taking her with him after all; and up her old chest there swelled an incredulous rumble-cry of anguish, and her square mouth gaped and her eyes rolled and then out broke her hippopotamus bark of heartbreak and appeal, a croak that erupted in long staccato grunts from the bottom of her old belly, and David Jordan had stopped.

He had reopened the door, and the starlight had shone in again, and Sally had lunged against her bars in incredulous joy, snorting and blundering, her eyes rolling wide.

‘All right, Sally … we’ll do the best we can …’

Every time he saw headlights in the wing mirrors his heart thumped; he would give Big Charlie a warning flash of his taillights, and they would slow down to the speed limit, waiting for the police siren.

The two trucks drove on through the night. They were in Pennsylvania now, on Highway 81 south, two hundred miles from New York. The road signs flashed by, towns, gas stations, connecting routes. Homesteads, barns, silos, belts of trees, the distant glow of town lights. Five miles away, on their left, was the dark silhouette of the Appalachian Mountains, undulating almost the whole length of the United States, from Maine in the north down to the Great Smoky Mountains in the south, and beyond into Georgia.

He looked at his watch. Three A.M. Another four hours at the most before the zoo would discover the animals were missing and the alarm would sound.

He glanced at his fuel gauge. It was half full. Above the music he feverishly calculated they would have to refuel about sunrise—near Roanoke, Virginia. He wanted to stop only once to refuel, so he had to wait as long as possible.