Zoo Story (18 page)

In the rush of the morning, the keepers also collected and saved Enshalla’s and Eric’s droppings on behalf of a guy in the horticulture department.

“Bob wants more tiger feces,” Carie said to another keeper.

“Bob does?”

“He claims that it chases the possums away.”

Before they shifted Enshalla and Eric from their dens into the exhibit, the keepers fed them so they wouldn’t be hungry and distracted when they were supposed to be mating. While both tigers ate breakfast inside their dens, Carie slipped into the exhibit and spritzed the rocks with tiny puffs of white gardenia body spray.

For Enshalla.

“Hey princess,” Carie called, making kissy sounds.

Once the keeper was safely away, she let Enshalla into the exhibit. Behind her, from his den, Eric roared.

Carie smiled.

“He wants her so bad, and she’s so mean.”

The dance began at precisely 9:54 a.m. On cue, the door from the night house opened again, and Eric stepped into the bright light of the new day. Enshalla, walking by the edge of the pool, went to him immediately and rubbed her body against his, almost purring. Then she walked away.

“Wow,” Carie said.

“Oh, God,” said another keeper.

The two of them were watching from the dusty crawl space beneath the boardwalk that wound above the exhibit. They were roughly twenty feet from the tigers, protected by the moat and a wall of thick netting. Inches above their hair, cobwebs dangled. In the dirt beside them, the fire hose gurgled. They didn’t want to use it, but they remembered all too well that Enshalla’s father had slain her mother in this same exhibit.

Across the moat, a pattern was forming. Enshalla rubbed against Eric again, then ran away again. Eric, looking confused, slumped to the ground.

“He’s still such a baby,” said Carie. “A more mature tiger, an experienced tiger, would already be trying to get her.”

Enshalla attempted to reclaim his attention, rolling on her back and raising her paws into the air. She crouched and crawled toward him. Somehow, she looked coquettish. Eric sniffed the nape of Enshalla’s neck. Enshalla lowered herself and raised her hindquarters.

The two keepers held their breath. This might be it. When tigers mate, the female typically raises her backside—she “presents,” is how the keepers put it—and then the male bites the back of the female’s neck and holds her down. Before Eric could even consider such a thing, Enshalla slipped away. Soon she was running around the exhibit, Eric following.

“Shalla, you’re such a brat,” said Carie. “Just let him get on top of you, do the thing, and then you’ll be done.”

A small bird, maybe a grackle, landed nearby. Normally the tigers would make a quick meal out of birds that entered their exhibit. But now the tigers were distracted. Still, Eric stopped his pursuit to consider whether he should pounce. Carie couldn’t believe it.

“You’ve got an inexperienced male and a bitchy woman who doesn’t know what she wants—and then there’s this bird!”

Carie blew her bangs out of her face with a tiny exhalation that sounded almost like a tiger’s chuff. She could hear the chattering of the lorikeets. From the next section of the zoo came the unmistakable sound of Cyrus and Nadir, the siamang couple, singing another thundering duet from on high to declare their bond.

The keeper beside Carie left for other duties, soon to be replaced by other staff members bending low as they made their way through the crawl space to check the tigers’ progress. Just that morning, Dustin had been asking Carie if she planned to light candles for the tigers to set a mood. Now he made his way through the cobwebs, approaching with an evil grin.

“Dustin’s coming?” said Carie. She scratched through the dirt, looking for a cockroach to throw.

“I hear you guys used to keep tortoises back here,” said Dustin, surveying the cramped possibilities of the crawl space. “I’m going to steal your area.”

Carie thought he was joking, but she wasn’t sure. She knew that his answer to every problem was to add more turtles. After he left, Carie shook her head in mock dismay. “Freak.”

Across the water, the dance spun on. Enshalla was no longer attacking Eric. Instead she resorted to more subtle resistance, leading him in circles, then stopping to present and invite him to climb on top of her. At the last second, every time, she fled. Carie called out advice to the tigers. She told them not to give up. She did everything but play Barry White.

“Sweetie,” she told Enshalla, “you just need to relax.”

“Eric,” she said, “you need to be forceful with her. She
wants
you to be forceful with her.”

Carie analyzed Enshalla’s and Eric’s every move, explaining what was happening in tiger terms and drawing comparisons to human mating rituals. As she spoke, the radio on her belt buzzed with other keepers in other departments reporting their location, asking for a favor, checking on their next work detail. On the boardwalk immediately above Carie’s head, children shrieked and roared. Apparently they did not realize any adults could hear them.

“Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!”

Carie sighed. “I don’t want kids.”

She was amazed at how some visitors acted, the way they pounded on the glass of Enshalla’s window and threw things at the tigers, unaware of how rudely they were behaving. She called it “the human exhibit.” Soon the children were gone, and it was quiet again. Sometimes, she said, she would go out somewhere—shopping at Target, playing with her dogs at the park—and people would chew her out for working at a zoo.

“I thought you cared about animals,” one woman told her.

She defended herself against these slights as best she could. She told them how hard she and the other keepers worked to be good to their animals. She tried to explain the purpose of zoos.

“These animals,” she would say, “are ambassadors for animals in the wild.”

By now it was past noon. Enshalla had been leading her suitor around for more than two hours. Finally, at 12:25, Eric decided he’d had enough. Directly in front of the viewing window, Enshalla had just presented yet again and was about to wriggle from underneath the male when Eric, obviously frustrated, growled, clamped his jaws onto her neck, and held her down as he mounted her.

Several young children stood wide-eyed at the window. Their mothers shook their heads.

Carie laughed. “Those kids, they learned something today.”

Only ten or fifteen seconds after he bit Enshalla’s neck, Eric jumped off her. This was to be expected. Tiger sex tends to be rapid-fire and frequent; in the wild, they can mate dozens of times a day. There was no way to know yet if Eric had reached his intended target. Still, Carie was pleased that Enshalla had let him try.

“She did it. She really did it.”

Enshalla appeared triumphant as well. After Eric walked away, she stretched her long body, her tail waving back and forth. A few minutes later, she was up and rubbing on Eric, ready for more.

Another morning with the chimps. Another sexual request from Herman. In his den, he stood tall and puffed his chest for one of his favorite keepers, Andrea Schuch. From long experience, Andrea recognized that look on his face and knew that it meant he wanted her to show him a little skin. Nothing too explicit. Just a glimpse of her shoulder. Andrea didn’t mind. She knew Herman had no control over his impulses. As far as she was concerned, it cost her nothing to make him happy.

“Then we go on with our lives,” she said.

How many human females expressed similar sentiments about their husbands? Just let him have what he wants, and everybody can continue with their day. Only, Herman was not human, and not all the female primate keepers were comfortable with a chimp asking them to flash their shoulders.

“It makes me crazy,” another keeper told Andrea one day. The other woman was blond. Andrea’s hair was long and straight and light brown, but Herman loved her anyway.

Andrea smiled. “It
is
a little crazy.”

The other keeper ignored Herman’s requests. She knew that if she gave in to him once, he would ask her to repeat the favor more times than she cared to think about.

“I don’t like to encourage that kind of behavior,” she said.

It was the nature of a keeper’s job to wind up almost every day in situations few other people could imagine. They whispered to falcons and flirted with rhinos and learned more than they ever wanted to know about the fetishes of barn owls. If they worked at the zoo long enough, they began to see what looked like human behavior in the animals, and what looked like animal behavior in the humans. It all began to overlap. When keepers were off duty, they would go to restaurants and casually survey the conversations at other tables and be able to tell, within seconds, which person in each group was the alpha. Walking through the mall, they would see adolescent girls strolling slowly in the sunlight, flipping their hair over and over like birds preening in the aviary. Turning the other way, they would see a group of adolescent boys puffing their chests and strutting just like Herman.

The difference was, the boys were still growing up and would soon be transformed into new iterations of themselves. They were going places. Their lives were commencing. But Herman had nothing beyond his exhibit and his den and the ceaseless urgency of his obsessions. He was stuck in every way.

Lee Ann believed Herman’s sexual fixation was getting worse as he grew older. She didn’t remember him being so relentlessly lustful when she’d first met him. Was it a sign of boredom? Did it mean he wanted something else he could not express? Though she knew Herman as well as any human could know a chimp, Lee Ann understood that there were limits to how much she could fathom of what was happening inside him. In many ways, he and the other chimps remained a mystery. She wished she could talk to them, explain things to them, have them translate their world to her.

She was convinced that Rukiya was easily the most intelligent of the zoo’s chimps, much smarter even than Herman. Rukiya’s temperament was different than Herman’s too. Herman was the patient leader, the one who looked out for all the others, watching out for Alex and even protecting Bamboo from the taunts of the females. Rukiya was more cunning and calculated.

Lee Ann liked to tell a story about Herman and Rukiya—a moment she had witnessed herself. The miracle of the stolen lettuce.

At mealtime in the night house, Rukiya liked to take Herman’s food. She waited until he wasn’t looking and then grabbed what she wanted. One day, Herman had some lettuce, Rukiya’s favorite. When she snatched it, Herman caught her and wrested it away. Then, to Lee Ann’s astonishment, he handed it back. Chimps are not known for their social graces. Sharing is not always their strength. Yet Herman, despite his alpha status and superior strength, had let Rukiya have the lettuce and forgiven her for stealing it.

“To me, that’s huge,” said Lee Ann.

Herman’s behavior was revealing, but so was Rukiya’s. Although chimps sometimes exhibit altruistic behavior, they also display what primatologists call Machiavellian intelligence. Many species of primates and monkeys have been observed engaging in deception and counter-deception as they compete for power, food, and mating privileges. Chimpanzees rely on numerous tactical ploys. They are capable of hiding, staging diversions, faking tantrums, faking a lack of interest, even feigning a limp. Chimps are particularly known for using such deception as they maneuver to form political alliances and to influence powerful individuals in their social groups.

Lee Ann recognized some of these traits in Rukiya—not just watching her sneak food from Herman, but seeing her manipulate his emotions as well. For instance, when Herman’s patience wore thin and he finally grew frustrated with Rukiya, the matriarch would often scream at Bamboo and chase him, acting as though the older male had done something wrong. Bamboo was always an easy scapegoat; Lee Ann had witnessed it many times. Jamie and Twiggy would join her in the chase, and together they would raise such a scene that Herman would forget he was angry with Rukiya. Instead, he would follow her lead and start tearing after Bamboo too. Rukiya and the other females, in other words, were clever enough to redirect Herman’s aggression.

“The girls are smart,” Lee Ann would say, shaking her head. “I love them, but they can be evil.”

Rukiya had a gift for transmitting her mood—contented, upset, playful—to the others. Lee Ann described her as a thermometer for the rest of the group. Rukiya was complex and multifaceted. Along with her cunning, she had a deeply nurturing side that she often displayed with Alex, her surrogate son. Rukiya was often too lenient with Alex when he threw dirt and stomped—like the other adult chimps, she tended to look the other way—but her indulgence did not change the fact that she had accepted Alex as hers and had faithfully protected and raised him for years, preparing the young male for that day when he would almost certainly take over as the alpha. Alex would probably not be mature enough to seize power for a few more years, but the transition was coming. The keepers could see it every day in his increasingly bratty behavior.

Lee Ann identified with the chimps so closely that at times, she almost forgot they were not human. If she was having a bad day, she would go into their night house and sit beside Herman and share her troubles. Through the mesh, across the divide between species, the chimp would listen.

From his perch,
Herman watched the approach of the tall man with the light hair and ruddy skin. Herman didn’t know the man’s name, but he recognized him. The chimp had been given plenty of chances to study this male and notice the easy confidence in his bearing and the way other humans attended to his every word, paying him deference and respect. If the tall man lingered in front of the chimp exhibit, Herman would rock back and forth and throw dirt. He wanted the human to know who was really in charge.

Maybe it would be best to move along, said Lex Salisbury. The CEO did not appear to take offense at Herman’s displays. He understood that Herman was attuned to status and power differentials. Besides, Lex hardly needed to prove himself to a chimp. Everyone at Lowry Park knew he was the true alpha. Herman might have been animal number 000001, but in the zoo’s hierarchy of walkie-talkie ID numbers, Lex was simply known as 1.

A natural showman, Lex gave the most entertaining and educational tours of Lowry Park. Leading a visitor around the grounds one afternoon, he pointed out the Sarus cranes and talked about how they mated for life. Moving past the river otter exhibit, he described them as aquatic weasels.

“Bloodthirsty little things.”

In every corner of the zoo, he could identify every bird and every gecko and charm his guests with details and observations about every species. He talked about the underwater tunnels favored by the moray eels, and how the green tree python hunted for birds by sensing the heat of their bodies. Stopping in front of the manatee pools, he explained how manatees sport vestigial nails on their fins: “Indicative of a terrestrial past.” The vestigial-nails observation led him to whales—of which there were none at Lowry Park—and how they happen to have vestigial pelvises.

“They do an eighty-percent air exchange,” he said casually.

He was forty-five, but carried himself with the energy of someone at least a decade younger. He lived an hour north of Tampa, on a ranch stocked with zebras and warthogs and other exotic species, and he seemed to constantly be driving them back and forth in his big truck between Lowry Park and his property. Sometimes it felt as though the ranch was merely an extension of the zoo, or as though the zoo was an annex of his ranch. Lex had a habit of blurring the lines, and it made some of the people around him nervous. Lex waved them off. He was always working for the zoo, he said. When was he not working?

Lex was good at drawing other kinds of lines. He would share stories about his upbringing—a childhood in Alaska; his university days in Sydney, Australia; his master’s thesis on heat-exchange rates in parrots from New Zealand. But when people asked about his current life outside Lowry Park or inquired about a visit to his ranch, he gently steered the conversation in other directions. His desire for privacy was understandable enough. What was striking was the velvet ease of his deflection. In the spring of 2004, as Lowry Park was gearing up for the grand opening of Safari Africa, he had just gotten married again. Almost no one at the zoo had heard a word. At this point in his career, Lex was as much a politician as anything else. As such he devoted himself to the habits and behavior of his fellow Homo sapiens, especially those with the money and connections to help him take Lowry Park into the future. His job relied on grace, discretion, politesse.

“It’s a different skill set,” he said.

He had to know how to woo mayors and governors. At cocktail parties he needed to be ready to talk about manatees and meerkats with wealthy matrons who could endow another addition to the zoo. From the Swazi court to the Hillsborough County Commission, Lex thrived as an alpha who had to win over other alphas without seeming to challenge their authority. His degree in social anthropology helped. So did his sense of mission and the encyclopedia of species inside his head. Lex understood that the animals were his best marketing tools. The creatures proved irresistible in the jaded halls of power. That was why Lex carried Ivan, the Eurasian eagle owl, on his gloved hand before the Florida Senate. It was why he made sure baby alligators and prehensile skinks and screech owls were on display every spring as bejeweled guests arrived at Karamu, the zoo’s annual black-tie fund-raiser.

Perhaps most crucial of all was Lex’s evangelism for what zoos can mean to the future of the planet. He was fervent about the promise of Lowry Park as a refuge for endangered species.

“A zoo can be a stationary ark,” he would say. “It can be more than entertainment.”

The analogy was a bit of a conceit, because it had long been established that zoos—not just Lowry Park, but all the zoos in the world—don’t have enough combined space or resources to save more than a fraction of the species that were disappearing. Even so, there was no question that the conservation efforts mattered. Every species given refuge was one fewer wiped out.

Lex’s sermons did not always play well among the staff. Some were tired of hearing him brag about Lowry Park’s fiscal self-sufficiency. Most U.S. zoos, he pointed out, receive about 40 percent of their funding from taxes. Lowry Park, he said, relied on public funds for only 3 percent. To make ends meet, the zoo had to squeeze the most out of every dollar.

The keepers valued self-reliance too. But a good portion of them worked for a couple of dollars an hour more than minimum wage, while Lex’s salary for the 2004 fiscal year would top $200,000—more than the city of Tampa paid its mayor. Why, the keepers wondered, should they get such a small slice of the pie when their CEO’s plate overflowed? These complaints were almost always whispered, and for good reason. Outside the zoo, Lex’s style was polished, understated, seductive. Inside, he was demanding and not to be crossed. If someone displeased him, he did not hesitate to say so. He punished. He exiled. Employees who differed with him had a way of leaving the zoo quietly under vaguely described circumstances.

Compared with Herman, Lex was a much more aggressive and savvy leader. Unlike the chimp, he understood that being nice was not necessarily part of an alpha’s job. He recognized that not everyone liked his style, and did not care. If staff members didn’t agree with the way he ran the zoo, then he advised them to look for a new job.

“Because I’m not going to leave,” he said. “It’s not a democracy. It’s a benevolent dictatorship.”

Lex accepted that his decision to bring the four elephants from Africa had plunged the zoo into an international controversy. He thought the furor was worth it if it moved Lowry Park forward. He despised inertia. Looking toward the future, he saw the zoo’s handful of elephants growing into a mighty breeding herd. They would need more room. He was mulling over the idea of a game park. Maybe in Pasco County, just north of Tampa, or Polk County, to the east.

“In five years, we’re going to need to have them on fifty acres or more,” he said. “You can’t have the biggest vertebrates in the world in a city park.”

Lex made this last statement on March 3, 2004, during a lengthy interview in his office that covered his childhood, his parents, his mentors over the decades, and his sixteen-year-old son, Alex. Throughout the conversation he appeared open and relaxed. But he never breathed a word that his wedding would be the very next day.

When he returned to work from his honeymoon, Lex would stand in another ceremony. This one would be as public as it gets. Safari Africa, the child of his hopes and energies and years of orchestration on two continents, was about to be unveiled. Lex had wagered everything to bring the elephants from the African savanna to the center stage of his zoo. This was his moment. The test.

A cool Saturday evening.
A fat moon lit the sky. Diamonds sparkled inside augmented cleavage.