Belly Up

by Stuart Gibbs

  The tiger turned around and slunk toward the ladder with its tail between its legs.

  The man chanced a look our way, and the light from the exhibit illuminated his face.

  It was my father.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  I’d never been so happy to see anyone in my life. I leapt to my feet and hugged him as hard as I could.

  “We are now,” said Mom. I could hear the emotion in her voice. She was as thrilled by Dad’s arrival as I was.

  Dad gave me a comforting squeeze, then looked back at the tiger, which had returned to the ladder. It placed a paw on the rail, considering the climb back down into its enclosure.

  Then it gave Dad a mischievous glance and bounded down the walkway toward the party.

  “Oops,” Dad said.

  In retrospect, it seems crazy that I ran after a tiger that had just tried to attack me, but that’s how safe I felt with Dad around. He went after the tiger and before I knew it, Mom and I were following. Maybe it was that, within a second, Dad had established his dominance and reduced the tiger from a wild animal to an overgrown housecat. Much of an animal’s behavior involves its position in the dominance hierarchy. An animal that doesn’t know its place will be confused and agitated. However, one that knows its place—even if it’s on the bottom—will be far more relaxed.

  The tiger, Kashmir, was only two years old. Although fully grown, he was still a kitten at heart. Now that he’d calmed down, he wanted to play. Only, no one at the party knew that. The moment Kashmir gamboled out of the exhibit, chaos erupted.

  The screams of terror echoed back into the canyon as we ran down the walkway. Mom paused, holding me back, though not out of fear; she’d already fully recovered from our scare. She was looking at the ladder that extended from the tiger exhibit. It was about thirty feet tall, fully extended, and it leaned against the walkway rail at a gentle angle that would have been easy for the tiger to scale. Thankfully, there were no other tigers on their way up, though one was prodding it curiously with a paw, as if considering the climb.

  “Help me get this out,” Mom said. “The last thing we need are two tigers crashing the party.”

  I helped her heave the ladder up over the railing. It was only aluminum, so it didn’t weigh too much. There was an inch-thick piece of rope tied to one of the top rungs. It was only a foot long, having been cut clean through. I looked across the exhibit and saw the other end of the rope dangling on the far side, where it was tied to a rock at the top of the cliff.

  I realized how whoever had rigged the ladder to free the tigers had done it, but before I could say anything, we heard a roar from Kashmir, followed by a renewed round of screams from the party guests.

  “Wait here,” Mom said. She dropped the ladder to the walkway, then ran toward the party.

  Despite her warning, I followed her. Whoever had rigged the ladder might have still been around. I felt safer near my parents, even with a tiger loose.

  By the time we exited Carnivore Canyon, any semblance of the genteel gala event had evaporated. Guests were shrieking at the top of their lungs, stampeding in every direction, shoving and clawing at one another to get away. There was no sense of dignity or chivalry; I saw a security guard flatten three old ladies in his dash for safety. (No one else from security was anywhere to be seen; every one of them had fled their posts.) Many people had run straight out of their shoes; the lawn was strewn with high heels, as well as thousands of champagne glasses, plates of food, and purses everyone had quickly cast aside. There were also quite a few guests strewn on the lawn as well; whether they’d been shoved over or had simply tripped and face-planted into the grass was unclear.

  Rather than chase any of them, Kashmir had settled on far tastier and easier prey: a massive roast in the midst of an abandoned buffet table. The tiger happily bounded onto the buffet, which promptly collapsed under its weight, catapulting a tray full of sushi into the bobcat exhibit.

  Doc came running up the walkway from Carnivore Canyon. He took one look at the pandemonium and burst into laughter. “Now that’s what I call a party,” he said.

  Two of the carnivore keepers rushed over. Both seemed less worried about Kashmir than they did about their jobs. “Oh, boy,” the first said. “McCracken’s gonna have our heads for this.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Mom said. “Not unless one of you left a ladder in the tiger pit.”

  The keepers looked at her, incredulous. “Why would there be a ladder in the tiger pit?” the second asked.

  “To help the tigers escape,” Dad explained.

  “Why would anyone want to do that?” said both keepers at once.

  Mom and Dad both turned to me, the same thing occurring to them at once. “To make FunJungle look bad,” Mom said. It was a lie, an attempt to hide the truth from me, but it didn’t fool me for a second. I was thinking the same thing Mom and Dad were: Once again, the escape of a deadly animal had been engineered when I was close by.

  Dad took my hand and squeezed it tightly.

  “I thought you were in China,” I said.

  “Your mother called me and said you were in trouble. So I jumped on the first plane back.”

  I knew that wasn’t as easy as he made it sound. Flying halfway around the world on the spur of the moment was never simple, especially when you were starting from rural China. Later, I found out Dad had spent the last thirty-six hours traveling, most of it uncomfortably, in the backs of trucks and on cargo planes, just to get back to help me. He’d also forfeited a high-profile assignment and the chance to see giant pandas in the wild. But Dad acted like it was no big deal; he didn’t want me to think I’d caused him any trouble, even though I had.

  Mom gave both of us a huge hug. She was crying a little, though I wasn’t sure if that was because she was happy to see Dad, worried about me, or relieved to be alive. Everyone who was left was now staring at us. Most times, I might have Mom’s public affection embarrassing . . . but I didn’t that night. Even if we were on live television, I could have hugged both my parents for an hour straight.

  There was a whine from Kashmir. The tiger had licked an ice sculpture and got its tongue stuck to it.

  Dad reluctantly pulled away from Mom and me; there were other things to take care of. “Can you get this guy back home?” he asked the keepers.

  “Yeah,” they sighed. One took the broom from Dad and they both approached the tiger so nonchalantly, it might as well have been a baby duck.

  “Bad Kashmir,” one said. “Bad tiger. Time to go home.”

  Mom was still clutching Dad’s hand. “Thank God you got here in time,” she said. “How’d you know what to do?”

  “I shot some publicity stills of the tigers a few weeks ago. I had to go in the pit with the keepers, so they showed me all their training techniques. They use the broom a lot. It sends the right message, but it doesn’t hurt the tiger.”

  “Where’d you get the broom?” I asked.

  Dad looked at me blankly. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “It all happened so fast. When I got here, someone told me you were in the Canyon, so I came around through the exit, thinking I’d catching you coming out. Then I heard the tiger and I saw you, so I ran to help and . . . I guess the broom was just there.”

  “On the walkway?” Mom asked suspiciously.

  “Yes. Maybe someone from the cleaning crew left it there.”

  “Or, more likely, someone who knew the tiger was going to be out. Did you see anyone else on the walkway as you came in?”

  Dad shrugged. “A few people. But I didn’t pay any attention to them. The only people I recognized were J.J. and his daughter. They were running like hell.”

  “Hey,” Doc said. “What did happen to Moneybags?”

  “Guess he’s still hiding somewhere,” Mom said.

  At that moment, my phone buzzed. I pulled it out and found a text from Summer. R U OK?

  I wrote back, Yes, where R U?

  Meanwhile, Kashmir had m
anaged to pull his tongue free from the ice sculpture. Now he’d returned his attention to the roast, which he tore to shreds, ignoring his keepers as they shouted at him and prodded him with the broom.

  “Is it okay to come down now?” Pete Thwacker’s voice startled all of us, as it was coming from directly above. We looked up and found him eight feet up a light post. He was clinging to it so hard his fingers had turned white.

  “I’d stay up there another half hour, just to be sure,” Dad said.

  As usual, it took Pete a few seconds too long to realize someone was joking. “Ha-ha,” he sneered, then shimmied down. “I suppose this is all one big joke to you, but people’s lives were endangered tonight.”

  “Is that so?” Mom asked sarcastically.

  “I was nearly killed!” Pete insisted.

  Dad studied the distance from Pete to the tiger. It was a good fifty yards. “Yeah. Looks like that was a real close call there.”

  “Tell me about it. If it weren’t for my lightning reflexes, I’d be tiger chow.” Pete surveyed the lawn mournfully. “This is terrible. The mother of all PR disasters.”

  The guests who’d been sprawled on the grass were slowly getting to their feet. While many seemed relieved to be alive, an equal number seemed distressed by the damage done to their clothes. One woman screamed in such horror, I thought perhaps a second tiger had attacked, but it turned out she was only reacting to a grass stain on her dress. “My Vera Wang!” she cried. “It’s ruined!”

  My phone buzzed with a new text from Summer. Long story. Will call soon. Promise.

  “I’m cursed,” Pete said. His voice trembled, as though he was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. “I knew I shouldn’t have taken this job. I should have stayed in the soap division. There’s no PR emergencies with soap. Soap never tries to kill anyone. The problem with animals is, they don’t know how to behave themselves. They escape. They die. They try to make baby animals in front of church groups. Every day, another crisis. It’s driving me crazy. I’m losing my hair! Look!” He ran his fingers through his hair, then displayed a few follicles that had come out in the process.

  The keepers had resorted to gently swatting Kashmir with the broom to get him off the buffet. The tiger picked the entire roast up in his mouth and dragged it down the walkway toward his home.

  “How on earth did someone get a ladder into the tiger pit?” Doc asked. “It had to be twenty feet tall to reach the walk-way. We’d have seen someone carrying it in, wouldn’t we?”

  “It was set up before the party,” I said.

  Everyone looked at me curiously.

  “It was tied to the far side of the exhibit with a rope,” I continued. “All they had to do was cut the rope and the ladder dropped to the walkway.”

  “How’d you figure that?” Dad asked.

  “The rope’s still tied to the ladder.” I thought back to the metal clank I’d heard right before the tiger got out. “They cut it while we were talking to J.J.”

  Mom, Dad, and Doc all frowned.

  “Must’ve been someone who works in Carnivore Canyon,” said Mom. “The broom, the access to the exhibit . . .”

  “Not necessarily,” Doc said. “I’ve been in and out of the Canyon all afternoon. Until right before the party, I hadn’t seen a security guard all day. I did see that ladder, though. It was lying on the walkway. I figured some construction guys had left it behind. Practically anyone could have rigged it. . . .”

  “Oh great,” Pete sighed. “Another murder attempt with a thousand suspects. That’s all I need.”

  Normally, I might have been annoyed at Pete. The murder attempt had been made on me —and yet there he was, acting like he was the one with problems. But I realized his behavior was significant: He looked so frazzled, so at his wits’ end, it was impossible to imagine him as the criminal mastermind of everything that had happened. He didn’t have the stomach for it. And no matter how much he might have hated Henry when he was alive, it was now evident that Henry’s sudden death had been a tremendous amount of work for him.

  “I’ve spent three days planning a funeral for a damn hippopotamus,” he whined, “And all the news is going to care about is that we’ve got some screwball setting the tigers loose.” His cell phone rang. He stared at it balefully, then reluctantly wandered off to answer it.

  “No,” I heard him say. “No one was injured. The tiger has been contained without incident.”

  I took in the aftermath of the party. Most of the guests were long gone, having hightailed it for the exit, though a few were trickling back, probably to collect things or family members they’d left behind. The woman with the big grass stain on her dress was now having a conniption over a broken strand of pearls. Other people who’d fallen were dusting themselves off and assessing the damage. The janitorial staff sat on the periphery, unsure whether they were supposed to start cleaning up or not.

  A helicopter zoomed overhead, a spotlight scanning the grounds.

  “It’s the news,” Doc grumbled. “Someone already tipped them off.”

  “Go away, you vultures!” Pete screamed.

  Three golf carts emblazoned with the official seal of the FunJungle Security department pulled up. Buck Grassley and five security guards leapt out, sedation rifles at the ready. Each of Buck’s men had run in terror when Kashmir had showed up, but now that their boss was here and they had guns, they made a big show of looking tough.

  “Right on time,” Doc said sarcastically.

  “Where’s the tiger?” Buck asked.

  “Back in its exhibit,” Mom said.

  Buck appeared annoyed to have missed his hero moment; the rest of his men pretended to be equally upset. “You were at the scene of the crime?” Buck asked Mom.

  “That’s where I called you from. Fifteen minutes ago .”

  Buck either didn’t recognize Mom’s anger at how long it had taken for him to show up—or he ignored it. “I’m gonna need statements from all of you.”

  “The tiger got out because someone propped a ladder in its exhibit,” Dad said. “That’s it. We’re going home.”

  He took Mom and me by the hand and led us toward our trailer.

  “You can’t leave!” Buck shouted. “This is a crime scene!”

  “I just flew halfway around the world to see my family,” Dad replied. “If I’d been one minute later, they’d have been mauled thanks to your security failures. So I’m taking them home now. Feel free to investigate, and if you have any questions, you can ask us in the morning.”

  Buck simmered angrily, but there wasn’t much else he could say. He stared after us as we walked away, then turned on his deputies and barked, “Someone get that damn news copter out of here!”

  Mom was beaming at Dad. It looked like she’d fallen in love with him all over again. “Thanks for coming home.”

  Dad beamed back at her, then at me. “I think you better tell me everything ,” he said.

  So I did. Mom helped. It took the whole walk home, plus the time Mom spent cooking us dinner. (We’d planned to eat at the party, but the tiger had put an end to that.) Dad took everything in, then sat thoughtfully while we ate. We’d almost made it to dessert before he finally spoke up. “Obviously, there’s a lot of questions that still need answers, but two things really bother me in your story. The first is the dead jaguar. . . .”

  “Why?” I asked. “We know why it died. Doc said it was toxoplasmosis. . . .”

  “It’s not why it died so much as that the death seems to have been covered up. Did you know the jaguars were even here yet?” Dad turned to Mom, who shook her head.

  “Most zoos keep a detailed log of which animals have arrived and which have died,” Mom explained. “It should be accessible to all the employees. In the Bronx, before e-mail, they’d just tack the lists up in the keepers’ building every week. With computers, it’s gotten even easier to keep everyone informed.”

  “But I’ve never seen any such list here,” Dad said. “Which makes me
wonder how many other animals have died.”

  “We should find out,” Mom said.

  “Absolutely,” said Dad.

  “What’s the second thing that bothers you?” I asked.

  “The metal track at the bottom of Hippo River.”

  “Really?” It seemed odd to me that, out of everything that I’d told him, my father had focused on that. But Mom always said Dad had a gift for seeing the big picture. “What do you think it’s for?”

  “I have no idea,” Dad admitted. “But tomorrow, we’re going to find out.”

  Pete Thwacker was right. The next morning, the news was all about the escaped tiger. And not just the local news. Even though it seemed to me there were far more important things going on in the world, Kashmir was the lead story on every channel. You might have thought Iran had strapped nuclear weapons to the tiger’s back for all the coverage. Every show had plenty of footage of Kashmir wreaking havoc: Several park employees had used their phones to film him, then uploaded their videos to YouTube. I even caught a glimpse of myself and Mom in one shot, standing to the side and watching, although there was no mention of us by name—or that fact that we’d been in direct danger.

  My family wasn’t really surprised we’d been left out of the story. What did surprise us was the revelation that FunJungle knew who had let the tiger out. At some point in the night, they’d even issued a press release to that effect: The event had been an act of sabotage perpetrated by the Animal Liberation Front.

  Pete himself appeared on all the major morning news shows via satellite. He was surprisingly well-kempt and confident, given the state of mind he’d been in the night before. “The ALF has a history of sending threatening letters to FunJungle and other zoos, despite our commitments to conservation and quality animal care,” Pete stated. “Now they have attacked. Setting Kashmir free was a blatant terrorist attack designed to both make FunJungle look bad and hurt our bottom line without any consideration for the safety of our guests last night. Thankfully, our keepers handled the situation professionally and no one was hurt. The sad thing is, that while the ALF claims to be looking out for the animals’ best interest, it is they, in fact, who are doing harm to the animals in their desperate bid to discredit us.”