The Dragon Keeper (9 page)

“Antonio missed the biology part of veterinary school,” Meg said. “He was too busy trying to nail the prep squad.”

Antonio cocked his head to one side. “It’s hard to picture you as a little girl, Yancy. Did you have pigtails? Maybe a couple turtles in a bucket?”

“Whippets,” her father said, spitting it out like a cuss. He shook his head and flashed Meg a long, guilty look across the table. “Her mother bred show dogs and dragged Meg across the country with grooming brushes shoved in her little hands. I was too busy with work to save her from that circus.”

“Dad.” She tried to shut him up, but he waved her off with a hand.

“It’s true.” He glanced up at Antonio. “Meg was never too fond of people after putting up with those trophy-hungry freaks her entire childhood. Hard to blame her, believe me. You ever met any of those people?”

“No.” Antonio was still watching her; she could feel his stare as she sucked the last drops of her shake and stared blindly out into the river valley.

“They’ll drive you bat-shit crazy. I should know; I was married to one for fifteen years.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Antonio said. “Well, I don’t want to interrupt your lunch any further. It was a pleasure to meet you, Jim.”

They shook hands again.

“Meg, come see me when you get back on shift.”

“Why?”

“I need some clarification on your paperwork.” He tapped a paper on the medical chart he was holding. She tried to see what he was pointing at, but the chart was above her line of sight. He smiled, following her gaze, and then strode out of the cafeteria without saying another word.

“I like him,” her father said, watching Antonio leave.

“Yeah, he’s great till he shoves a chip in your head.”

“Hmm.” Her father piled his empty fry carton and drink container back on the tray and set it aside. “There’s something in the air between the two of you.”

“Like hate?”

“Like a spark, an attraction.”

Meg choked on her last fry. She coughed and shook her head dumbly. Maybe the Irish whiskey was frying his head instead of his gut. One sappy family reunion under his belt, and he was some Cupid with a psychology degree.

“Well, I should probably head off to the airport and let you get back to work.” He half stood and pulled a manila envelope out of his back pocket, sliding it across the table to her.

“What’s that?”

“It’s for you. I know you hate flying, so I thought this would be better.”

She opened the seal and unfolded the papers inside: Two tickets on a cruise line, departing from New York to Dublin.

“They’re flex vouchers. You can use them anytime in the next two years.” He closed a hand over hers and patted it gently. “Come visit your old man sometime, okay? You can bring anybody you like.”

She flinched away and dropped the tickets on the table between them. “You always did bring gifts after being away. I guess things don’t really change.”

For the first time all week, he looked old. The lines on his face tightened up, and his eyes went watery, then hard. Slowly, he nodded. “I always said we’d take a trip together, too. Do you remember? I planned a dozen, you know, but it never worked out with my schedule—or if it did, your mother refused to spare you from her dog shows.”

He tucked the tickets back into the envelope, pushed them toward her, and squeezed her hand.

“Come see me, Magpie, after you work out all this dragon stuff. We’ll finally have a proper vacation together.”

There were other days, saner days, when she’d have happily kicked the old man’s ass back to Ireland for trying to pull off the father-of-the-year act this late in the game, but right now he looked weathered and defeated, like one of the animals on a slow death watch, and she just didn’t have it in her.

“Think about it.” He pulled his jacket on and walked slowly out of the cafeteria, leaving the tickets and all the garbage from the food on the table in front of her. This was normal again, being alone; this was how she wanted her life to be. But still she sat in the empty room and looked out at the river valley, fighting the strangest urge to get up and follow him.

~

“What do you want, Rodríguez?”

She found him in one of the quarantine rooms on the safe side of the bars from a lioness lounging in a pile of hay. The animal was facing away from Antonio and flicking her tail once every few seconds, apparently pissed off at the accommodations.

“I want her to get up and walk around a bit, so I can see how the foot is healing.”

Meg pressed her forehead into the bars and spied a pink incision pointing down the pad of her back paw as Antonio made a note on the animal’s chart.

“Domestic dispute?” she asked. Sometimes lions got touchy about the feeding order, but the males usually started all that shit.

“Glass shard. Puncture wound went straight up, right between the toes.”

“Bottle?”

“Yep. One of the interns thinks Snapple.”

“Bastards.”

“Sometimes.” He flipped the chart closed and tossed it onto the chair. “We’ll have to keep her in isolation a week or so just to make sure she’s out of danger for infection. Poor girl.”

He patted the bars and went back into the hallway, handing Meg a leaflet of papers on his way past. It wasn’t her paperwork. It was an article titled “How SAMs Can Predict Ovulation and Birth in Animals,” by Antonio Rodríguez, DVM.

“What is this crap?”

“The future of zoology, among other things.” He flashed a grin at someone passing behind her in the hallway.

“Be delusional on your own time. Where’s my paperwork that you can’t understand?”

“That was just to get you to actually come down here.” He turned the grin back to her, that same flashy smile that he used on everyone from the cashiers to the director of the zoo—the Wheaties-box smile, the I’m-going-to-nail-your-daughter-and-then-take-you-golfing smile, the white-toothed, dimpled, gleaming smile that he thought he could use to get whatever the hell he wanted. And it usually worked.

“Piss off.” She tossed the papers and brushed by him, heading back to the keeper’s cage.

He appeared at her side before she’d gotten two steps down the hallway. “I’ve got data on twelve different chipped species that had offspring here in the last few years, and there’s some really interesting trends on blood-pressure patterns. During an ultrasound for the black bear, I even managed to pick up and sync the fetus’s heartbeat to the SAM so that the keeper could continue to monitor the fetus’s development and health between checkups.”

Grabbing her elbow, he pulled her up short before she could reach the exit. His hand was warm, and it sent a jolt of energy up her arm, as if she’d hit one of the electrified fences ringing the far half of the outdoor mammal exhibits. She jerked out of his grip and crossed her arms.

“There’s a section on Jata that I want you to proof for benchmarking against the general Komodo population. A lot of the other keepers have done the same for their animals’ sections, and I’m giving credit at the end of the article for everyone’s technical expertise.”

“Not sharing your precious byline?” She raised an eyebrow.

“Bylines are for people who write, Yancy, not ones that make caveman drawings with arrows and stick figures on their forms.”

“Thanks, but I’ll pass. You should know by now that I don’t support your brave new world.”

He snorted a short breath out his nose and bunched the paper in a fist. The veins on his neck started to pop out and then, after a second, sank back into his skin as he shook his head and sighed. “SAMs are the future of animal management. You’re so shortsighted. I’m not just talking about zoos here. Animal refuges, even wild fauna, can be microchipped and observed from any computer in the world without disturbing a single blade of grass in their natural habitat. We can monitor entire populations, track their migration patterns with 100 percent accuracy, which will allow us to study the vulnerability of their habitats and food supplies, even intervene and fight widespread diseases before they wipe out a species. The Zoo of America is providing the baseline measurements that all future research will build on for generations to come.”

He pointed back toward the enclosures. “That lioness in there? We wouldn’t have known about that puncture for at least another day without SAMs. The keeper saw a dip in her blood pressure combined with an adrenaline spike as her body reacted to the injury. The SAM helped us save her from any further blood loss and a thousand times greater risk of infection. So how can you stand there with your arms crossed and your mouth all sucked up like that and tell me that I’m not doing the right thing with this program? I’m saving animals’ lives. With increased monitoring, we could save entire species from extinction.”

She shook her head slowly, working her way from side to side throughout his whole little speech. An intern and a keeper wheeled a tank full of meerkats by them as he talked, but neither group stopped to acknowledge the other.

“I’m not shortsighted. I can see exactly how far your program will go. Microchipping the world, keeping every creature in it under your thumb? What gives you the right?”

“Said the zookeeper who controls every last detail of her animals’ worlds.”

“There’s no place left for some of these animals. It’s better for them to be here than in a circus or starving in the wild or being killed by poachers.”

“We can change that,” he broke in, really working the sale. He pulled her hand out of her crossed arms and put the papers back into her palm, closing his fingers down over hers so that she was forced to hold the article. It was the second time in as many hours that someone was trying to shove something into her hand. She tried to pull away, but he kept plowing through his pitch.

“With SAMs, we can track poachers as soon as a chipped animal dies. The GPS signal will take us straight to them.”

“And how long do you think it will take them to learn to cut out the microchip? Two poachers later? Maybe three?” She finally ripped her hand away from his, and they glared at each other for a second, toe to toe. “This isn’t even about poaching.”

“What is it about? Besides your clear lack of willingness to evolve.”

“That’s just it.” She drilled a finger into his chest. “You can’t decide how I’m going to evolve. You can’t control a species’ survival, and you can’t manage the planet’s ecology. Stop trying to play God.” She dropped the papers on the floor in front of him and walked away.

3 Days
after
Hatching

M
eg paced the length of the keeper’s room, trying to figure out the least humiliating way of doing what she had to do. The sign on the door read Z
OOKEEPING
A
DMINISTRATION
, but everyone knew this place as “the cage.” The long basement room, with its low ceilings and fluorescent lights, had a dungeon-like quality that someone once tried to lighten up by painting palm trees on one of the cement-block walls. Every zookeeper had a locker in here, and the lockers faced a row of computer kiosks where they wrote their daily logs, entered purchase reqs, and checked their SAMs. The cage and the veterinary wing were both underneath the cafeteria, and Meg could hear the last of the shuffling feet as they closed for the night upstairs. Finally, when she couldn’t put it off any longer, she punched out on the time clock, pushed through the double doors at the end of the room, passed the bathrooms, and headed straight down the vet hallway to the last office on the left.

Meg knocked on the open door of Antonio’s office. He swiveled his chair around and nodded her in, pointing at his earpiece.

“We’ll have to make it up before next week. Maybe Sunday?”

He looked at her as he said it, which confused her. When people talked on the phone, they should look at an unassuming wall or their dirty fingernails, not at someone else who was waiting her turn in the conversation line. Irritated, Meg bided her time perusing all the crap he’d hung in his office. Diplomas and certificates—no surprise. Covers of magazines in which he’d probably published articles. Everything was framed in black and aligned with anal, T-square geometry around the room. As she glanced around, one of the framed covers caught her eye; it showcased a two-headed profile against a smudgy backdrop of garbage, like a soft-focus landfill. The profile was black, and on the left side, the face was a bird—with the stubby, hollow beak of a parakeet—and on the right side, it was a human. In the center of the two faces, right where the bird brain and the man brain would touch, was a small, glowing microchip. The headline read “Can Technology Really Save the Planet?” but the words were skinny and pale. They faded back into the pile of garbage, and the longer she looked at it, the more everything else in the picture faded, too, until the microchip pulsed alone in the middle of the page, as if there were no point in bothering with the question mark at all, as if the editors had already given their answer because the chip was the only thing in focus. The only hope for the planet.

“All right, give me a shout if you can get us set up for Sunday. I’m free all afternoon. Later. Hi.”

She heard him shuffle some papers and stand up behind her. “I said hi, Yancy.”