The Koala of Death

by Betty Webb

  Seconds later, Bill, all six feet four, two-hundred-and-twenty pounds of him, charged through the gate. “Rack off on your own bizzo, Teddy, and leave the walla to me.”

  Fortunately, due to once having an Australian stepfather, I could translate: Go mind your own business, Teddy, and leave the koala to me.

  “Hi, Bill. Zorah told you about Kate?”

  “That she carked it? Yeh.” Translation: That she died. Yeah.

  He flapped his hand in a go-away gesture and started toward the koalas, but not before I saw a haunted look in his eyes. Did he still care for Kate?

  Before I could ask, another cart pulled up. When the brakes didn’t squeal, I guessed it was Zorah, glorying in her recent promotion to zoo director by requisitioning the zoo’s newest cart.

  My guess proved right. A big woman, both in height and breadth, Zorah’s arms were covered with tattoos of the animals she’d cared for prior to her promotion: a Bengal tiger, a black-maned lion, a jaguar, and various and sundry great apes. Zorah was nothing if not colorful.

  “Teddy, I need to talk to Bill. Privately.”

  To offer him a full-time job, I hoped. God knows the man needed the work. Besides his three-nights-a-week stint as bartender at the Amiable Avocado, he was also bagging groceries at a Monterey supermarket. Strange, considering he’d resigned from a full-time job as marsupial keeper at the San Diego Zoo to move up here. Not to follow Kate, I hoped, because if that had been his motive he’d shown more heart than brains, since their relationship hadn’t survived the move.

  “Okay, I’m gone,” I said to Zorah. “If either of you need anything, call me on the radio.”

  She didn’t answer, just started talking to Bill in a low voice.

  I steered my cart out of the Down Under enclosure and headed toward Tropics Trail.

  The three hundred-acre Gunn Zoo is always beautiful, but in the early mornings it is pure magic. Surrounded by twenty-five hundred acres of blue gum eucalyptus forests and vineyards, the zoo is further buffered from the outside world by a ring of hills high enough to hold back most of the coast’s fog. No sound of civilization’s hubbub intrudes. Instead, we fortunate zookeepers are treated to the serenade of waking animals: the lilting music of larks and jays in the aviaries, the eerie calls of New Guinea singing dogs, and from the large animal sanctuary that encircles the entire zoo, elephants trumpeting their joy at just being alive.

  How anyone could work in an office was beyond me.

  By now visitors were trickling in, so I drove with care in order to keep from mowing them down. Most were headed toward the giant anteater enclosure. Thanks to recent publicity, much of it generated by Kate, who had also taken care of the zoo’s PR, Lucy and her baby had become celebrities.

  A few tendrils of morning fog had unexpectedly made their way over the surrounding hills, and wisps of it clung to the tall eucalyptus trees that ringed the grounds. I loved these rare mornings, when fog hushed the visitors’ chatter, thus encouraging the animals to venture away from their resting spots and get closer to the fence. As I passed through Tropics Trail, I noticed Willy, one of the Andean bears, waving a furry paw at an admiring crowd as he sat on his rump at the edge of his moat. He was looking one teenager in the eye, a most un-animal thing to do.

  “Look, he’s saying hello!” said one woman to another, as she nibbled on a bag labeled Poppy’s Kettle Korn. “Isn’t that sweet?”

  Willy was merely begging. Since visitors didn’t always obey the signs telling them not to feed the animals, the bear had developed a taste for popcorn.

  More begging was going on in the iguana exhibit. Lilliana, the female, flicked her tongue at the crowd in the hopes that they would toss her big fat bug. From time to time she’d attempt a wave but an iguana isn’t as agile as a bear, so the effort failed. Her elderly mate, Reynaldo, ignored Lilliana’s act and continued his snooze-fest by a rock.

  I felt privileged to work here, surrounded by friends both human and animal, spending my time outdoors under the California sky instead of some stuffy office. As I drove along, the scents of animals, popcorn, and salt air blended together in a pleasant potpourri and helped ease the sting of the morning’s tragedy.

  Monkey Mania was a quarter-acre open-air enclosure where twenty squirrel monkeys named after various movie stars mingled freely with zoo visitors. Such an arrangement could never have worked if it weren’t for the many volunteers who kept human hands away from monkey tails, and in turn, monkey teeth from nipping at human hands. Bernice Unser, one of those volunteers, met me at the exhibit’s entrance gate, her face creased in concern.

  “Why’s the zoo so weird this morning?” she asked. “I can’t get anyone to talk to me or even look me in the eye. On my way through the parking lot, I saw Aster Edwina’s limo pulling up, too. What’s going on?” The other volunteers crowded around her, eager to hear my answer.

  I had three choices: tell the truth, play dumb, or plead the Fifth. I chose the latter. “There’ll be an announcement later, but for the time being, sorry, I can’t say anything.”

  “Did somebody escape?” another volunteer asked, one of the high school seniors enrolled in our ZooTeen program. From his avid expression, he hoped somebody had. Somebody big, like a lion or a rhino. Oh, the thrills.

  “Nothing like that. You’re all perfectly safe. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to release the monkeys.”

  As the boy’s face fell in disappointment, I slipped past him and took the service road path down to the monkeys’ night house. Marlon, the troop’s alpha male, stood shrieking inside, with the females and adolescents providing an atonal chorus. Lana, a new mother whose baby clung to her back in a milk-induced stupor, plucked at the leg of my cargo pants as if to say, “Hurry up!” while I unlocked the door. As soon as it swung open, they scampered toward the red feeding buckets that swung from the enclosure’s trees. All except for Marlon, who stayed near the door until I fetched a bag of Purina monkey chow from my cart.

  “Is this what you’re waiting for, handsome?”

  He flashed his teeth, a gesture which people not familiar with primates often mistake for a smile. Experience had taught me better. “Bite me, Marlon, and I’ll visit First Aid before I feed you guys, which’ll take, oh, maybe a half hour.”

  While he didn’t understand the words, he did understand my warning tone, so he spun around and chased after his troop, complaining all the way.

  It doesn’t take long to feed squirrel monkeys. After I’d piled monkey chow pellets into the red buckets and topped off each with portions of fresh fruit, I waded through the monkey swarm and returned to their night house.

  A zookeeper’s job consists largely of sweeping up poop, poop, and more poop, but I didn’t mind. Especially not today, because concentrating on mundane tasks was preferable to remembering what had happened to Kate. She had barely reached her thirties, but now her family would be making her funeral arrangements. Come to think of it, where did her people live? In the few conversations we had shared, she’d never mentioned parents or siblings.

  As soon as I finished cleaning the night house, I set off toward Down Under again. When I arrived, I saw Wanchu perched in the crook of Bill’s arm, her forearms wrapped around his massive bicep.

  “Ooo’s my good sheila?” he cooed.

  Wanchu appeared more interested in searching for fleas in her coarse coat than conversing with Bill, but he didn’t seem to care, not even if a stray flea hopped over from Wanchu to visit. In that, he was much like Kate. A bit stand-offish with humans, she’d been a bleeding heart with her koalas.

  When I alit from the cart and started down to the enclosure fence, Bill looked my way. His eyes, usually a clear blue, now looked wary. “You, again.”

  Who had he been expecting, Godzilla? “How are things going?”

  “Bonzer.” Great.

  “How much did Zorah tell you?”

  He focused on Wanchu, who had doubled around on herself and was licking her behind. “Just that Kate dr
owned in Gunn Harbor and you fished her out. Yabber like that.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Yeh. She asked if I wanted to accept a full time position.”

  “And?”

  “Told her yeh on the animals, no on the telly thing. Not that she asked about that.”

  No, Bill wouldn’t have been asked. For various reasons, he was unsuited to the task. Kate had been a natural, which was why she’d been hired in the first place. On TV, her eyes sparkled and the words flowed. Her Tuesday Koala Kate’s Kuddly Kritters segment was one of the most watched portions on Good Morning, San Sebastian. So far, she had showcased no amphibians, no invertebrates, just the most cuddly and photogenic of mammals. The standard people-pleasers.

  “Too bad about the TV show,” I said. “It brought the zoo a lot of business.”

  “Not my prob. Ready for more tucker, sook?” Ready for more food? This last comment was addressed to Wanchu, not me.

  I kept waiting for Bill to ask me more about Kate: was I certain she’d been dead when I pulled her from the water: did I perform CPR; did I think she’d suffered; had the fish nibbled on her? But, no. Still cooing sweet nothings to the koala, he drifted away from the fence toward Wanchu’s favorite tree, where he’d replenished the eucalyptus browse I’d left earlier. He set her down on a limb and watched as she began busily stripping the leaves.

  Bill dealt with grief amazingly well, I thought.

  ***

  Later that morning Zorah put out a radio call for all keepers to assemble in the auditorium at noon, so at the appointed time I and around forty others sat hunched over our sandwiches, trying to gossip and eat at the same time as we waited for Zorah to show.

  “Kate got drunk and drowned, there’s nothing else to know,” sniped Myra Sebrowski, the darkly beautiful great apes keeper. She had never liked Kate, and the antipathy had appeared mutual.

  “She didn’t look drunk to me,” said Buster Daltry, a rhino and elephant keeper almost as bulky as his charges. He had been an early arrival at the Grimaldis’ party, and even before I’d left, he’d put away numerous beers. Today his eyes were bleary and his hands trembled, but I imagined he could still whip Hulk Hogan in a body-slam contest.

  “Oh, come on. Kate was lit.” This, from Robin Chase, the big cat keeper.

  Myra’s physical opposite, Robin was an unattractive, big-boned woman who abstained from anything she considered unhealthy, which included non-vegan foodstuffs. I’d often wondered how she could bear throwing raw beefsteaks to her beloved big cats.

  “I watched her chug at least three beers,” Robin continued. “And I’m sure she had more. That’s probably why she fell overboard.”

  “Three beers isn’t that much,” Buster said.

  “Not for you, maybe, but for someone Kate’s size, it was a lot. Like I said, there’s a good chance she had even more.”

  The conversation was interrupted when Zorah entered the room with Aster Edwina right behind her. The elderly president of the Gunn Trust looked sad, but she leaned calmly enough on her cane as Zorah walked up to the podium. The only other emotion she showed was the thin smile of recognition she threw in my direction. At least I think it was a smile. With Aster Edwina, it was hard to tell.

  In contrast to her boss, Zorah’s round face was red, and a tic marred the standard placidity of her brown eyes. The tiger tattoo on her muscular forearm twitched, too. After fussing with the podium mike for a moment, she bluntly announced, “Kate Nido died last night.”

  By now, most people had heard of Kate’s death through the zoo grapevine, so there were few utterances of actual shock, merely a few murmurs of regret. After all, Kate was a new employee and hadn’t yet made many friends. As Zorah led us in a moment of silence out of respect for her memory, I spotted Bill leaning against the back wall, his arms crossed over his chest. His face was so devoid of emotion that he could have been attending a used-car auction, not that he had the money to buy a car. His only form of transportation was the fourth-hand bicycle he pedaled to work from the nearby town of Castroville.

  When the moment of silence ended, Zorah began to describe the temporary staffing changes necessitated by Kate’s death. Aster Edwina had given her permission to offer Bill a full-time job as Head Marsupial Keeper. “This means there’s now an opening for a part-time keeper,” Zorah said. “Does anyone know someone who might be interested?”

  While people shouted out names, I cast my mind back to last night’s party and its deadly aftermath.

  Why hadn’t I heard Kate go into the water?

  She must have hit her head pretty hard, either against a mooring or the edge of the Grimaldis’ boat, but the second she started her fall, she should have had time to cry out even if she’d been under the influence. Come to think about it, I’d never heard of Kate getting drunk. If anything, she’d been more like Robin, so tightly-wrapped she never seemed to have any fun. No, that wasn’t quite accurate. Kate had enjoyed her TV appearances, and she’d certainly enjoyed writing ZooNews, the zoo’s newsletter.

  My musings were interrupted when Zorah said, “To close this sad meeting with one happy announcement, I’m pleased to inform you that Aster Edwina has chosen Teddy Bentley as the new presenter of Koala Kate’s Kuddly Kritters, the weekly Gunn Zoo segment on Good Morning, San Sebastian…”

  “What!?” Only my experience in working with easily startled animals kept me from shrieking the word. Zorah hadn’t said anything about the TV show to me, and I certainly hadn’t volunteered.

  “…as well as all of Kate’s PR work, so let’s give our Teddy a great big hand!”

  The ensuing applause sounded genuine, although Myra Sebrowski’s hands remained in her lap. The look she shot me wasn’t congratulatory, either.

  Zorah wasn’t finished. “Teddy, stop by my office so we can go over Kate’s notes for tomorrow’s program.”

  Before I could argue, she put down the mike and exited the auditorium four paces behind Aster Edwina.

  “How long have you been angling for this?” Myra said, stopping me at the door just as I was about to dash after Zorah.

  “C’mon, Myra. It’s as big a surprise to me as anyone else. You think I enjoy the prospect of making a fool of myself on live TV?”

  “I’m sure you’ll pull it off with your usual aristocratic aplomb.” With that parting shot, she stalked up the hill toward her apes, her back stiff with anger.

  Great. Now I had an enemy. Not only that, but an enemy who could handle a full-grown mountain gorilla easier than I could handle Miss Priss. But how to handle Aster Edwina’s command? Besides taking care of the koalas, Kate’s duties had included updating the zoo’s web site, posting to the zoo’s blog, writing the bimonthly newsletter, and appearing on the weekly television segment. A full workload. My own duties were already just as heavy. As a full-time zookeeper for several animals and a frequent fill-in for sick or vacationing keepers, there was no way I could handle extra work.

  I caught up with Zorah at the top of the hill leading to the administration building. Aster Edwina was no longer with her. The old woman had limoed back home to plot more mischief.

  Butting up against the real wall of the administration building was the large enclosure where we kept the squirrel monkeys considered to old or “nippy” to be turned loose in Monkey Mania. They kept up a raucous chorus as I pled my case. When I began listing the impossibility of longer work hours, Zorah nodded sympathetically.

  “A keeper’s life is a hard one, isn’t it, Teddy? Oh, how well I remember. Not that those days were all bad. Truth to tell, I miss them. But you’re not here to listen to my problems, are you? Let’s go inside and talk.”

  Confident that I’d stated my case successfully, I followed the zoo director to her paper-strewn office, where photographs of her former charges lined the wall. Zorah had once been the zoo’s head keeper, with a special love for great apes, so I briefly admired the pictures she’d taken of hairy heads and huge hands. Cuddliness arrived via close-ups of v
arious monkey, orangutan, and gorilla babies clinging to their mothers’ backs. From the room’s large, safety glass-plated window, I could see some of the photographs’ subjects staring in. They looked like they wanted to come in and play.

  “I’m jealous of Myra,” Zorah said, pushing aside a stack of papers.

  After my run-in with the snippy great apes keeper, Zorah’s comment startled me. “Why?”

  “Because she spends most of her time with her apes, not behind a desk. For that matter, I’m jealous of you, too.”

  “Then you understand why I can’t do the TV program. Speaking of Myra, she seems interested in the job. And she’s certainly more photogenic than I am.”

  “Wrong temperament.”

  Well, there was that. On Myra’s best days, she wasn’t exactly sunny, so perhaps Zorah was right. “Outback Bill, then. Given his long experience with animals, especially marsupials, he’s Kate’s obvious replacement.”

  “Mr. Sewer Mouth? Just the thought of that man discussing animals’ mating rituals on live TV gives me the shudders. Even if he could be trained to withhold the F–bomb, that thick Aussie accent of his would be indecipherable to most viewers. So, no, Teddy. Neither Myra nor Bill is the right person to take over for Kate. You are.”

  I shook my head. “Frankly, Zorah, the idea of going on camera makes me feel ill. I’ll blank out and look stupid.”

  “Don’t give me that,’ she chuckled. “I’ve seen you handle the school tours, and there’s not a question you can’t answer. Stop arguing about it, because Aster Edwina’s mind is made up, and you know how she is. Anyway, for tomorrow, here’s the plan. The station wants to do an animal-related tribute to Koala Kate, so here are the animals…”

  Maybe I hadn’t made my point clearly enough. “Call Aster Edwina and tell her I don’t have any television experience, that I’ll screw everything up and make the zoo look bad.”

  A sly look crossed Zora’s face. “Sorry, but I’m with Aster Edwina on this. What about last year, when that KTSS-TV reporter got the jump on you outside the giant anteater enclosure? You did a great job on something that could have turned into a disaster for the zoo. Before that, how about the time you and that bay mare of yours won the open jumping competition in Texas and you wound up on the national news? Who interviewed you then? Was it Katie Couric?”