Early mornings the birds were hungry and bold. The ibises landed on the netting above the flamingo pond and dipped their curved beaks through the gaps to snatch minnows from the water below. The flamingos had been moved to the gift shop, cleaned out, and temporarily retrofitted at the behest of a wealthy donor who had sent the Foundation a six-page letter (attached to a substantial check) calling them the ‘scurge [sic] of the earth’ and ‘shit-dirt-sucking snobs’ for effectively condemning the flamingos to a sentence of death by bird flu. There was no space to move them before, but now, thanks to the generosity of one big-hearted donor, the flamingos were unhappily pacing their makeshift habitat looking for a way out.
On her drive to work, with a half-piece of toast in a dog’s soft hold in her mouth, Luisa’s filling had suddenly come apart. She was left with a black crater in her molar but no pain, at first. She made it to work in time to start morning rounds of food and medicine while the owner, Mike, was still there to witness her punctuality. It was only her second week on duty with the birds, and she hated it. She took the job because she thought she’d get to work with the alligators, and she had, until the flu. The alligators had been sent off to Tampa, the manatee to Kissimmee, the turtles to Orlando and tortoise to the Keys. The butterfly collection was held back at the Center, not because there was any credible risk posed by the virus, but because so many members tweeted their concerns it was just easier to keep them with the birds. Everything was temporary, until the birds could be allowed back outside, but it was hard to remember that when she was standing in the echo chamber of the Old Reptile House with 107 of them squawking for vitamin pellets. Luisa had begun plotting her escape before she knew what she was doing, skipping lunches so she could transfer a few extra dollars into savings at the end of each week. There was a gator camp in Louisiana that hired a fresh crop every August before the eggs started hatching, if she could get out there in time.
Some birds, it was obvious why they were chosen for inside or outside. The bald eagles were inside, and so were the litter of endangered Hoffs warblers they planned to release to the wild, whose sweet, aerated song was often the only pleasant sound Luisa could find among the din. The peacocks were outside, though the real reason for this went unspoken: no one was brave enough to wrangle them.
The Center was closed to visitors but they still walked over from the beach and peered through the fence most days. As Luisa made a minor repair to the netting around the stork habitat where more ibises had torn at the weak spots looking for an easy meal, a family walked up and watched her work. The mother explained to her daughter that the Canadian geese in the park at home were, like all off-season geese, stranded after having become too heavy eating off the American food chain to fly back north. Luisa didn’t know if this was true but it sounded true enough. “We’re closed,” she offered through the fence. “Bird flu.” She didn’t tell them they couldn’t stand around outside but she hoped that’s what they heard. She winced at a sharp twinge in her jaw and felt a sudden desire to be as alone as possible.
On her way to the Reptile House, Luisa got a text from Mike. Warblers have to be segregated. Put them in travel cages in auditorium mens room. Something perm later. Can you let Biscuit out thanks.
Luisa wrote back, ???
Report in email
It turned out that the first generation of Hoffs warblers released back to their native islands were doing terribly. In the Center, surrounded as they were, their songs had taken on the wrong inflections, and in the wild they couldn’t find mates. Luisa coaxed each of the tiny birds into a cage and walked them two by two down through the sunken auditorium to the abandoned men’s room behind the stage. The bathroom tile amplified their cries so that the sweet cacophony of duress followed Luisa all the way back up the theater steps until she closed the auditorium door behind her.
Before continuing her rounds, Luisa headed toward the office for the dog. The only upside to the flu situation was, now that the park was closed and they could let Biscuit out, he was an entirely different dog than the nightmare Luisa had met on her first day.
Apparently, when Mike adopted the chihuahua he’d imagined the dog would roam free, greeting guests and comforting the kids scared of the toothier, scalier creatures behind the glass. Biscuit had proven too stupid for this job. Biscuit knew no enemies, nor danger, and was small enough to squeeze beneath the fence around the alligator exhibit, which he did several times before being sequestered to a small round bed in the office. All that time cooped up inside made him irritable and nervous, prone to keen at every sound with wet goldfish eyes that looked ready to burst, and Luisa had once overheard Mike fretting on the phone about whether it would be better to give up the dog, which he treated like a child, to a happier home. Now that Biscuit got several hours of outside time each day, he was all peace and love, and Mike had seemed to gain some inner sense of equilibrium that made him a little easier to work for.
Biscuit greeted Luisa at the door and waited patiently by his leash, smiling serenely at the wall, while Luisa went to the back of the office, retrieved the first aid kit from beneath the sink, and dug through the little packets until she found the Orajel. The packet contained enough numbing gel for at least three or four uses, so she opened it carefully and squeezed a pea-sized glob onto her fingertip. In front of the mirror, she found the bad tooth and gasped as her finger made contact. Within seconds she felt some relief. Her jaw relaxed. The tension had been spreading through her whole face, and she hadn’t realized how much pain she’d been in until it started to dissipate.
Now that she finally had a close-up view, she started to worry. She tucked the Orajel into her shirt pocket, crossed over to the other side of the office, and pulled down the Benefits binder from the HR shelf. Her dental was finally active, but she’d had no intention of using it so soon and didn’t know if her coverage was good or bad or what. She thumbed through the binder until she found the dental plan documents and did some math on her phone. With coverage, a root canal and crown would eat up three months of savings. Having the tooth pulled would set her back eight weeks, and she assumed under present conditions she would never be able to afford an implant to close the gap.
Luisa slammed the binder shut. Biscuit turned away from the wall and trotted over to her. He sat at her feet and gazed lovingly at the carpet. “Okay Biscuit,” she said. “Let’s go.” She put on his leash just in case and headed back out to finish rounds at the Reptile House.
Biscuit sprang out ahead and beelined towards the alligator enclosure, but lost interest when he found it still empty. Luisa dawdled behind, thinking of the time her Uncle Tim babysat over a long weekend her parents were away for a wedding. She’d been six and a half, and her front tooth had been loose for what seemed like an eternity. When Uncle Tim noticed, he told her he’d give her $10 if she’d let him help. He tied a string around her tooth, attached the other end to the heavy oak door, and that was all Luisa remembered. Her parents had been furious. She kept the bloody string for months and would stay up past her bedtime to suck on it in the closet, willing it to take her back to that moment of oblivion.
“It’s a daaaaaawwwg!”
As soon as Luisa heard the child’s high-pitched voice she turned around. “We’re CLOSED. WE’RE CLOSED. Haven’t you heard of the bird flu? WE’RE. CLOSED.”
The kid started to cry, and the sound was a hot nail in Luisa’s jaw. She turned away from the fence to pull the Orajel out in privacy and squirted it directly into her mouth. As soon as her pain faded she was mortified that she’d yelled. She sat on a bench by the picnic lawn and checked her phone. Mike wouldn’t be back until lunchtime and the cleaning crew never arrived before three. Nearly all the staff had been furloughed when they closed to visitors, so Luisa spent most of her shifts alone with the birds and Biscuit.
The chihuahua came running out from under the bench, something silver flashing in his mouth. “Biscuit?“ Luisa called, her sudden interest confirming the dog’s hunch that it had found something valuable. It picked up speed and hummed off like a tiny beetle across the grass. Luisa slowed her approach and tried to adopt a posture of nonchalance and total indifference to the dog, which had stopped at the edge of the lawn to inspect its spoils. She tried his name again, this time raising her pitch and softening her voice like she held something sweet and warm in her hand just for him. “Biscuit!”
As stupid as he was, he wouldn’t be fooled by a change of tone. He ran a few feet to the left and settled back down to resume licking the Orajel packet. His leash had come to rest behind him, where Luisa couldn’t grab it. If she could come at him from the other side, she could pin the leash with her foot and stop him from running, but Biscuit had closed in on the fence. This edge of the park bordered the grim, brackish estuary Luisa grew up calling Colon Firth for its persistent resemblance to toilet runoff. When the facility was built, the fence had been six feet from the bank of mangroves that stood high above the water; sixty years later the mangroves have grown into the fencing and each quarter the landscapers chop off buckets of new growth pushing in through the gaps. Biscuit had found a puddle of shade beneath the towering trees and was completely engaged with the packet of sweet numbing gel. His trembling eyes narrowed to ecstatic filaments and his little pink tongue grew looser and sloppier by the second.
A hard-to-place sound sent Luisa’s head spinning. Everything was still in the moment it took to scan her surroundings. It wasn’t until her gaze returned to Biscuit that the knot of plastic scraps wafted down from the treetops and landed a few feet from the dog, dislodging two tiny pink eggs. Biscuit stood and took two halting steps towards the scavenger’s nest, forgetting the packet of Orajel and entirely missing the growing shadow closing in on him from above. Luisa had never seen a heron that large. Instinctively, she stepped toward the dog, but she balked as the heron’s dead blue eye crossed her gaze. Biscuit had just enough time to whimper and start to the left before the heron made purchase on his leash and, pulling it taut, silenced the little dog and hoisted it into the trees. Now, Luisa could see the spot where the bird had been biding its time.
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