Thomas Pierce - Hall of Small Mammals - Stories

With everyone in line for the Pippins at the Hall of Small Mammals, I was alone with the bigger apes. In the first room, behind a wall of glass, five well-mannered chimpanzees played sluggishly in stooped fake trees. They regarded me coolly. In the next room, I discovered the Gibbon Monkeys, white and shiny coats, all of them silent and unblinking. In the final room were the Orangutans. Three sat in some straw on the concrete floor, shoulders hunched, a semicircle. Had one of them thrown down an Ace of Spades and said, “Read ’em and weep,” I wouldn’t have been much surprised. From a shaft at the top of the enclosure, a fourth orangutan descended on a network of metal crossbars. He was the one I’d seen outside, and sure enough, he sat apart from the others, chin jutting out, eyes recessed in his wrinkled face, cheek pads gray, cracked, and bulging. He wasn’t staring right at me. It was more unsettling than that. He was more like someone you see out at dinner one night whom you almost recognize, the person who keeps sneaking glances at you over the wine menu, a don’t-I-know-you-from-somewhere expression on his face. One solitary creature regarding another, I guess you could call it.

I didn’t linger. I couldn’t. Val was not in the Hall of Great Apes. My detour had been another bad decision. I was beginning to panic. I imagined the boy in the trunk of a kidnapper’s car, red brake lights across his helpless, tear-streaked face. I imagined him convulsing on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance, the oxygen mask over his mouth. I walked faster. Maybe the zoo was going to have to make one of those announcements over the loudspeaker that has shamed so many parents over the years, but in the end, Val was the one who found me.

“What are you doing?” he asked. He’d run up behind me, his glasses slightly skewed, hair wet in front.

“I was looking for you ,” I said. I was relieved but also a little irritated to see him again.

“Just great,” he said. “Wonderful. I leave you alone for ten minutes. Was I not clear enough? Didn’t I tell you not to get out of line?”

I admitted that yes, those had been his instructions, but I’d had my reasons for disobeying. He was only twelve after all and as his guardian for the day, my first responsibility was his safety and not holding his place in line. Hearing this sent Val into a rage. He called me useless. He called me hopeless and worse. He spoke with such authority that I almost believed he was right. When he grabbed his backpack from me and started back toward the Hall of Small Mammals, I fell into step behind him.

“Actually,” I called up to him when I remembered it, “someone is holding our place.” If Val heard me, he gave no indication. His blue backpack was flush against his neatly pressed short-sleeve checkered shirt. He stomped ahead, resolute, tight pink corpuscle fists at his side, thumbs jammed through his belt loops. When we got to the Hall, the couple holding our place had already gone inside. Val was two seconds behind me in putting it together. I had no idea what to do next, and Val despaired.

“You do realize this is a limited-time exhibit?” he said.

Not for the first time Val’s obsession with these creatures was beginning to bother me. What was so fascinating about them? Even if they all died out one day, we still had plenty of other monkeys to admire — Spider Monkeys, Squirrel Monkeys, Marmosets, and Howlers. I found it difficult to care much about an animal with so little regard for itself and for the survival of its own species that scientists had been forced to extract semen from unwilling males for insemination in the unwilling females. I wasn’t going to miss the Pippins when they disappeared from the earth. But I suggested to Val that we get back in line. Maybe the zoo would stay open late to accommodate all the extra people. He was doubtful but agreed that we should at least try. We turned to walk, and just when I thought I’d finally brought him around to my side again, a zoo official in khaki duds came out of the Hall of Small Mammals. He was a short, plump man with messy dark hair. He counted off twenty people—“One, two, three,” his finger pointing — and then announced that everyone else was out of luck.

“I’m sorry,” he said over the groans and complaints, “but that’s the way it is.”

The crowd began to disperse, grumbling. Val was not dissuaded. He got in line behind the twentieth person.

“Sorry, buddy,” the official said to him. “Only these twenty. Line has to end somewhere.”

“Right,” Val said, “and it ends behind me.”

Perhaps assuming I was the one in charge here, the zoo official appealed to me for help. Do something about your kid, his face said. But I had no intention of getting involved. I didn’t budge or say a word.

“Listen,” the zoo official said. “I get it, kid, I really do, but you have to understand that I just turned away a hundred people. If I break the rules for you, then where does it end?”

“With me,” Val said, arms crossed, mouth so tight and dense it exerted a gravitational pull on the rest of his face. He was even bold enough to meet the man’s gaze. They locked eyes and stood there, two angry mannequins.

The official was the first to look away. He turned sideways and scratched behind his red ear. I thought maybe he’d given up, but he hadn’t. “No,” he said, and stepped into line ahead of Val. “The line ends here.”

“Get out the way,” Val said, and tugged at the man’s arm, and for the first time in this exchange, he gazed over at me. I could see how upset and desperate Val was. He seemed to be on the verge of tears, though whether or not those tears were strategic, I wasn’t entirely sure. Anything was possible with this kid. But I sensed an opportunity. Maybe the tribal chieftain wouldn’t have to die at the end of Val’s movie after all. Maybe he wouldn’t even have to be the bad guy.

If you’d asked me then why I cared so much about what happened with Val and why I wanted him on my side, I probably would have lied and said I didn’t care one iota. It wasn’t as though I was in love, and I certainly didn’t have plans to stick around for the long haul. Val’s mother was beautiful though a bit uptight and officious. I recall one night, especially, when she insisted on super-gluing back together an entire stained-glass lamp we had accidentally rocked off the nightstand, a project that required hours of Zen-like concentration on her part and bored me enough to turn on the television. Plus, I’d never dated a woman with a kid, and she was reluctant to leave Val with a babysitter for more than a night or two a week, which seems more admirable to me now than it did at the time. I was suspicious of Val’s complete lack of interest in me. I worried he was bad-mouthing me when I wasn’t there. That’s why I’d volunteered for the zoo trip, of course.

I’ve long been something of a serial dater, I’m the first to admit that, and I do have a bad habit of giving up at the first hint of difficulty or complication, but I don’t believe in regret. I believe it’s important to face forward. And yet, sometimes I do find myself thinking about Val and his mother, curious about the course of their lives after I moved on. What are the chances that Val, wherever he is, still thinks about our day together at the zoo?

“Now, wait a minute,” I said to the official. “Wait. Can we talk for a minute?”

He pretended not to hear me, but a few other people ahead of him in line turned to see what all the commotion was about. I slipped my hand into my back pocket and felt for my wallet but didn’t take it out yet. “We’ll follow the rules,” I told the official, “but first just talk to me. Okay? Just hear me out.”