Sarah Canary (35 page)

The gate to the garden grounds was adorned with sculptures of seals balancing stone balls on their snouts and monkeys holding real flags in their stone paws, flags that snapped in the wind. Chin ran inside, but Sarah Canary moved only at a stumble. Chin tried not to feel impatient with her. He had anticipated great difficulties and much lost time getting Sarah Canary into the carriage, but she had chosen to cooperate. She was quiet and ladylike. She went anywhere she was pushed. She just could not be pushed anywhere fast.

A large two-story building stood opposite the gate,
museum,
it said in large block letters just under the roof. And next to the museum was a building that was all windows, the conservatory, a collection of hothouses for orange trees, tropical plants, and animals. Rockeries of exotic ferns flourished just inside the doorway. The greenery could be seen through the glass. The air in the gardens was scented by flowers and trees.

In front of the museum, a bulletin board listed the times of animal feedings and suggested other exhibits of great interest. A young father, carrying one child and holding another by the hand, stood reading it. B.J. joined him.

‘They have a five-legged buffalo,’ B.J. told Chin. ‘Wouldn’t you love to see that?’ The baby in the father’s arms reached out and patted B.J.’s hair. It made B.J. jump. He looked at the baby. Then, cautiously, he gave the baby his thumb to hold.

‘Where are the large animal cages?’ Chin asked. The gardens were a great deal larger than he’d expected. He could not see to the back fence. They didn’t have time for any wrong turns.

‘There’s no map,’ B.J. said.

‘Ask the man,’ said Chin.

B.J. stood provokingly still, reading the board. ‘This is lucky,’ he said. ‘We should be just in time to see the tiger fed.’ The man left the bulletin board, ignoring them, dragging B.J. along by his thumb, but apparently unaware of this. The baby’s face reddened as if it were about to cry. B.J.’s thumb popped loose. He inspected it briefly. ‘Isn’t the five-legged buffalo a large animal? Won’t everyone want to see it? We can just follow everyone else,’ B.J. suggested.

‘Ask the man,’ said Chin, ‘please.’ But the man was already gone, taking his children down the path between the museum and the conservatory. Chin hurried after him, one hand on Sarah Canary’s arm. They passed a set of swings and rings. Before them was the rotary boat. It sat in the center of an artificial lake only slightly larger than the boat itself.

B.J. paused to stare at it longingly. It was propelled in its endless circle by sails and oars. Some twenty or so people were seated on it; it could easily have held a hundred. Small boys splashed with the oars and shouted. ‘Like the balloon cars,’ B.J. said. ‘San Francisco has a lot of ways to travel in a circle.’

‘Come on!’ Chin’s tone turned nasty. He couldn’t help it. He was losing patience with both Sarah Canary and B.J. They were so slow. Recreational boats were certainly no temptation to Chin. On their right, deer stood and watched them from a grassy hill. Among the deer, inexplicably, one large Australian emu went about its business.

Behind the boat and on Chin’s left, a brook ran down from the lake through the middle of the gardens. It shot into the air in a white fountain opposite the skating rink. Beside the fountain stood a woman made of marble, sheltering herself from the spray with her arms,
pandora,
her pedestal read. Soft music came from the rink, spread as thinly through the air as the fountain water.

‘I know how to skate,’ B.J. told Chin, running to catch up to him. ‘I learned at the asylum. I could teach you. I don’t know about Sarah Canary. Houston could probably teach Sarah Canary to skate. Houston could teach anybody to skate. But I wouldn’t do that. Not unless it was really important that Sarah Canary learn to skate. Not unless she might die otherwise.’

Chin didn’t respond. Where were the cages? He turned and hurried along a shady path at the back of the gardens. Almost hidden among the shrubbery, he saw the small entrance to a man-made cave. Live oaks had been planted in columns beside the path. What were five minutes in the long, slow lives of trees? How many minutes had ticked away since Chin had entered the gardens? Minutes that would never be retrieved, never come back to be done differently. Chin heard time passing in every sound. In the music from the skating rink. In the barking of seals at the distant whale pond. In the clicking sails of the rotary boat. He grew more desperate with every click. ‘Where are the large animal cages?’ he asked, seizing the arm of a white man.

The man shook loose of his hand. ‘Here now,’ he said sternly. He brushed his coat sleeve and cleared his throat. ‘There.’ He pointed along the back of the gardens. ‘Through the tunnel under Fourteenth Street. Then turn left.’

Chin held Sarah Canary’s hand and ran against her resistance. White people stared at them as they passed. They ran down into the dark tunnel under the street. Just as they came up into sunshine again, Chin heard a child scream.

The large animal cages stood in a line along the fence to Fourteenth Street. A crowd of people gathered in front of one of the cages. The crowd was growing. Harold detached himself from it and walked out to meet Chin.

The exaggerated expressions, the disarrangements of hair and clothing that Chin remembered from their last meeting were gone. Harold appeared relaxed and sane, a man in full possession of himself, a visitor like any other visitor to the gardens. Just a man who enjoyed a large animal now and then. This frightened Chin more than any visible manifestation of lunacy could have.

‘You’re a bit late,’ Harold said.

‘Where is Miss Dixon?’ Chin gripped Sarah Canary’s hand tightly. He was not giving her up.

Harold smiled, pointed back behind himself in the direction of the crowd. The child screamed again. Chin pulled Sarah Canary along, pushing through the people until he could see what everyone else saw. Miss Dixon stood inside Cage 6, backed against the bars on the left. A large Bengal tiger sniffed at her feet. She had a knife in one hand, but she was not using it. She was not moving at all. ‘Please don’t scream,’ she told the crowd. Her voice was stretched thin with fear. ‘You’re agitating him.’ There was a click as the cage door swung slightly. It had been pulled closed but was not latched.

‘Miss Dixon,’ said Chin, and at the sound of his voice, she began to tremble. Chin pushed his way to the opposite side of the cage. ‘Come here, tiger,’ he pleaded.

The tiger rotated its ears in his direction but did not take its eyes from Miss Dixon. It raised one paw, patted her dress. One large claw caught in the cloth. The tiger worked it free with its teeth. ‘Mr Chin,’ said Miss Dixon. ‘Please do something.’

The tiger’s tail whipped from side to side like a pendulum, striking the bars at the front of the cage with so much force that they rang. ‘Tiger,’ said Chin helplessly. The tiger growled without turning, licking its paw.

‘Has someone gone for its keeper?’ Chin asked. ‘Will someone go?’ He didn’t turn to see if anyone responded. Instead he searched the ground for something to throw. Nothing. This was a garden, not a forest; an exhibit, a model of what the world should be, but not the world. Nothing so untidy as rocks. Chin edged along the front of the cage. The tiger growled again and rotated a single ear to show that it knew where Chin was. Chin dropped to his knees. ‘Tiger,’ he said.

The tail lashed back and forth. The bars rang rhythmically as it hit. Time was passing. It was time for Chin to do something. The tiger reached with one paw toward Miss Dixon’s face. Chin reached through the bars.

‘Now!’ he called to Miss Dixon, grabbing the tiger’s tail. He pulled the end out of the cage, held it tightly with both hands. The tiger turned and lunged at him, hurling itself into the bars, its tail slipping easily through Chin’s palms. The tiger hissed and spat; its tail snaked about the cage. Chin had made one final grab as the tail slid back through the bars, but he was much too late. The tiger caught him by the sleeve of his coat instead. The fabric shredded. Shallow red tracks appeared down his arm. The tiger’s claws hooked in the material at his wrist.

The tiger began to reel him in. Its face came very close. Chin could smell dreams of blood on its breath. He saw the rings of its eyes, the lines of its narrow pupils. Somewhere inside those dark lines a tiny Chin stared out in horror.

But it was all right, everything was all right, because Miss Dixon was there, on the outside of the bars, stabbing into the cage with her knife. She circled the paw, slid the blade into Chin’s sleeve, and cut the cloth loose. Chin pulled his arm back, sitting and cradling it.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked Miss Dixon, just as she was saying the very same words to him. Some people in the crowd behind them clapped their hands. ‘Are you all right?’ a man asked Miss Dixon. ‘Are you all right?’ a woman said, and then she said it to Chin, too. ‘Are you all right?’ She laughed as she said it, because everyone was all right and everyone knew it, even the tiger, even the tiger’s keeper, who had arrived at last with slabs of ripe meat and was latching the cage, demanding explanations, tossing in bits of dead animal as a special treat through the bars.

‘There, there, love,’ he said. ‘Here’s a lovely steak for you.’ He whirled about to confront Miss Dixon. ‘Don’t get into a cage with a Bengal tiger,’ he told her angrily. ‘Such a stunt. I know you. You’re one of those suffragists.’ But Miss Dixon hardly noticed him. She was staring at Chin, her eyes so huge and bright he couldn’t look back at them.

‘Where is Sarah Canary?’ Miss Dixon asked.

Chin felt his stomach twist as suddenly as if he’d been punched. He scanned the crowd, but of course he didn’t recognize a single face. No Sarah Canary. No Harold, No B.J. ‘He must be taking her out of the gardens,’ Chin said.

‘I’m not through talking to you,’ the keeper told Miss Dixon. ‘Don’t you try to leave now.’ But she was already running with Chin back along the cages, back through the tunnel, turning to the right now, back along the opposite side of Fourteenth Street, past the polytechnic hall and the aquarium, past the whale pond, where the sea lions called out anxiously, past the glass walls of the conservatory. The gate was empty. Chin looked outside, down Mission Street in both directions. He could not see Harold.

A row of carriages lined the street at the entrance. Miss Dixon asked the nearest driver if he had seen a short man and a woman dressed in black leaving the gardens. ‘Just in the last ten minutes or so,’ she said. ‘They would have only just left.’

He shook his head.

‘Would you have seen them?’ she asked.

‘Coming out the gate? Oh, yes. No one’s come through the gate, madam, but you.’

Miss Dixon and Chin returned to the gardens. They walked slowly back along the path. Behind the conservatory, they peered through the glass into the tropical animal house. Copper pheasants from China ran about the ground, first this way, then that, pecking at nothing. In the shaded corners, blood-sucking vampire bats hung by their hooked toes, their wings wrapped about their bodies. Parrots called from the trees. There was no public door into the tropical animal house. This was a sealed world. There was no sign of Sarah Canary here.

They crossed a bridge over the brook behind the rotary boat. Couples with children and couples with skates draped over their shoulders walked by them. A little girl called for her mother to come quick and see the emu. ‘He’s being so funny,’ she said.

B.J. shouted for Chin.

He stood at the end of the path just about where Chin had last seen him, in front of the columns of oaks. ‘Chin! Chin!’ Chin and Miss Dixon ran past the fountain and the frightened statue of Pandora with her arms over her head. B.J. was gesturing wildly, pointing into the opening of the artificial cave. Nothing he said was intelligible.

The entrance was perfectly rounded, not the door to a real cave, but the door to someone’s dream of a cave. Chin saw something dark moving about inside. He entered. Miss Dixon came with him and she still had her knife. The cave was just deep enough to be dim. Chin could see to the back where Harold knelt on the cave floor. Beneath him lay a still, black form. Blood danced from Chin’s head to his feet and back again. He was dizzy and his eyes went even dimmer. The air became thin.

Harold had a knife, too. Chin could see its dull metallic glow in the gloom, an ugly, underground sunless shining. ‘What have you done?’ he asked Harold from some other part of himself, some part that could still think and talk. He walked slowly over the distance between them, dropped to his knees beside Harold. Sarah Canary’s dress lay on the ground, split open from collar to hem. It was empty.

‘She metamorphosed,’ Harold said in an airless whisper that was almost nothing more than breathing. The marked madness of Seabeck was back upon his face. ‘This was just her larval stage. She shed her cocoon.’

‘Where is she?’ Chin asked.

‘Gone,’ said Harold. ‘She overpowered me with her inhuman strength. She threatened me with her chopstick. This is all that’s left.’ He lifted the dress with the tip of his knife. ‘First, a mermaid. Half woman, half fish. Then, a wild woman. Half woman, half beast. Is there a pattern here, Chinaman? What comes next? Half woman, half—’ He stopped suddenly, cunningly. ‘Now, that would be telling,’ he said. ‘I will find her again. I will never stop looking. It is my destiny. I am not afraid.’

‘You’re crazy,’ Chin said. ‘I will find her, too. I will find her first.’

Harold laughed, a sound like air leaving a bellows. ‘You don’t even know what she looks like. You wouldn’t know her if you saw her now.’