HE USED TO PLAY there often as a child, especially on those summer days when the muggy heat drove others to the beach. Then, scorning their imagined friendships, he hurried over the hill to the grove of towering leafy trees that sheltered the single whitewashed building.
“Why would any boy want to play in an empty zoo?” his mother had asked once; but she never asked it again because she didn’t really care about the answer. She didn’t really care about him.
Once, of course, the zoo had not been empty. It had sheltered a score of various animals during the depression-ridden years, when the city could afford nothing better. Tommy had been so young he could hardly remember those years; hardly remember being pulled along screaming in between his father and mother to see the animals he feared and thus hated.
Perhaps that was why he started going there alone once the animals had been moved to the new, larger zoo across town. He soon learned that the fence was easy to scale, and that a watchman patrolled the grounds periodically at best. Thus he established himself easily as king of the place, walked unafraid between the rows of empty cages with their gradually rusting bars, and even occasionally swung from the bars themselves in an open gesture of defiance.
He was always careful not to vandalize the place openly, and he left as little evidence as possible of his comings and goings. If the city fathers ever suspected that the empty zoo was becoming a playground, they did nothing about it. A brief opposition flurry about the deserted building faded into growing years of forgotten neglect.
The grass grew taller where the occasional power mower from the city failed to cut, and the watchman’s job had been given over in time to routine checks by a police patrol car. Tommy grew with the grass, and sometimes with the coming of high school whole months would pass when he did not venture into the forbidden territory. But always, in the bleakness of a broken date or the tension of a tough examination, there was something to drive him back.
He didn’t need to climb the fence any more, because smaller children had discovered the place and trampled a path across the worn wire links. One night, long after the early autumn dark, he found that they’d imprisoned a cat in one of the ancient cages. He freed the frightened beast, though for a moment his own fear had almost stampeded him.
Grown, he no longer prowled and crept in the cages, no longer swung on the bars. But still there was that overwhelming, driving urge to visit the place. He still lived at home, though his father had died, and often on a night when his mother hounded him, he would leave the house to walk once more over the hill to the old building.
It was on such a night, with the moon full but obscured by breeze-driven clouds, that he encountered another trespasser for the first time. Her name, he learned later, was Janet Crown—and she was eleven years old.
The bars were like the zoo and they closed him in on all sides until he could no longer think or feel or breathe. And always under the glare of the unshaded overhead bulb there was the rasping voice of the detective, and the milder voice of the assistant district attorney, and later the mildest voice of all which belonged to the prison psychiatrist.
“The girl will live,” they told him first. “You’re lucky.”
Lucky.
His mother never came to see him in prison, but then he didn’t really care. He passed the time thinking of the zoo, imagining himself now as one of those caged animals he’d feared so much. It was easy to think of animals in general, but he found it sometimes more difficult to concentrate on a particular one. A lion, perhaps? Or a prowling jaguar? Or maybe only a feathered owl to fly by night.
It was a long time before he came back to the city that was home. A decade had passed and the very contours of the city had changed. He’d changed, too, because prison and the hospital were certain to change anyone. Toward the end, he hardly ever thought about the zoo, and they said that was good. But he wondered sometimes if it was, wondered if the hours of staring blankly out the window without a thought in his head really meant he was cured.
He was past thirty now, a grown man who was far from unattractive. He’d been in town only two weeks when he met Carol Joyce.
She was tall and blonde and very beautiful, and when she spoke, he listened. He’d met her one day in the toy department of the store where they both worked, and since then a noon-day friendship had gradually blossomed.
“Tommy Lambert,” she said, repeating his name one day in that soft velvet voice he’d come to love.
“That’s me.”
“I think you might have gone to school with my brother, Bob. Are you from the city?”
“Yes,” he admitted, “but I don’t remember your brother.”
“Of course he was lots older than me. And better looking.”
“I doubt that,” he offered honestly.
She flushed a bit at the compliment. “How do you like it at the store?”
“It’s a job,” he answered with a shrug. “What department have they got you in today?”
“Sportswear,” she said, making a face that was expressively “I wish I were in toys with you. I like working with children.”
“I hardly ever see them, Carol. All I do is move stock around. Stuffed animals, toy trains. All day long.”
Finally the daily chats blossomed into lunch, and that was really the beginning of it. He started seeing Carol Joyce one or two nights a week, on outings that were almost—but not quite—dates. When she celebrated her twenty-first birthday (only twenty-one?) a month later he sent her an orchid and took her out to dinner. She was making him feel young again, making him forget the past.
“Have you lived here all your life?” she asked him one night, over an after-theater drink.
“Most of it. All my childhood. I was away for ten years, almost.”
“In the army?”
“No. I was sick.”
Her face reflected concern, but it quickly passed. “You’re the healthiest sick man I ever saw.”
“I’m cured, I guess.”
In the week that followed, he was drawn to her by a feeling very much like love. He found himself watching the clock until their noontime meetings, planning little surprises that he knew would please her. But then something happened to bring back all the old doubts. She’d come up to the toy department to meet him after work one day, and when he returned from washing up he found her playing with a stuffed giraffe in the stockroom.
“Having fun?” he asked with a smile, always pleased to see her happy.
She nodded, turning her tanned, eternally expectant face toward him. “I love animals. Always have. We should go to the zoo some Saturday.”
“Zoo? I thought it was closed.” The words came tumbling out before he fully realized what he was saying. He was back there, among the empty cages.
“Closed? Whatever gave you that idea?” And then, after a moment, “Oh, you must be thinking of the old place. I keep forgetting you were away from here for ten years. Come to think of it, though, that old zoo’s been closed longer than that.”
“I used to go to the old place when I was a child. I still think of that as the real zoo.”
“Well, we can go there if you like. But there aren’t any animals.”
His blood seemed to freeze at the unexpected words. What was she saying? Was she actually suggesting a visit to that place? “Oh, I don’t know,” he mumbled.
“It would be a fun place for a picnic before they tear it down.”
“Tear it down?”
“They’ve been fighting about it in the city council for years. Now it’s going to be the site of a low-rent housing project. They’ll start tearing down the old zoo next month.”
“So soon?”
“It’s been empty for twenty years, Tommy.”
“Yes, I suppose so. I suppose I just hate to see the old things going.”
And that Saturday, after further urging from Carol, they packed a picnic lunch, and a few cans of cool beer, and went off to the place that had once been so important to him. They went off to the empty zoo.
It stood much as he remembered it, lonely in a field of summer weeds, with blue wildflowers growing about in clusters. Even from a distance, the whitewashed walls were spiderwebbed with cracks, and the bars of the outdoor cages had taken on a permanent reddish-rust color. Otherwise, the only change was in the disappearance of the wire fence, which had been replaced by a high board barricade bearing the elaborately painted announcement: Future Site of Spring Gardens Low-Rent Housing Development—Another Sign of Community Progress!
The general area, though, seemed even more remote and isolated than he remembered. From the top of the hill overlooking the zoo he could see for miles in every direction, and what he saw was a soiled spot on the suburban landscape. Preliminary work of clearing trees for the approaches to the development had already been completed; and on the city side, where shoddy rows of apartments had been creeping toward the zoo for years, there was now only a massive field of rubble.
“No one ever comes here any more,” Carol told him. “Not even the children to play. They don’t even bother with the guards since they put up the new fence.”
“How will we get in?” he asked a bit doubtfully.
“There’s always a way,” she reassured him. And there was. A door in the wooden fence stood partly ajar, its padlock broken loose by some vandal with a rock.
They picnicked on the side of a grassy slope, lolling away the afternoon with tales of half-remembered childhood adventures. It was a summer sort of day, perfect for reminiscing with the softness of uncut grass against their faces. “I used to play here a lot as a child,” he said.
She looked down at the crumpling building with distaste. “I think there’s nothing more horrible in the whole world than an empty zoo.”
“Unless it’s a full one.”
She looked up, startled. “You feared the animals?”
“I suppose I did. And the place itself, with its thick walls and iron bars and musty odor. I suppose that’s why I went there so often after the animals were gone. I was the king then, the king of the whole place. And I didn’t fear it anymore.”
She shifted slightly in the grass, and her bare legs beneath the shorts were firm and tanned. “But you still seemed almost afraid when I suggested this place the other day.”
Had he shown his feelings that openly? “I had a terrible experience here once. I don’t like to talk about it.”
“Not even to me, Tommy?”
“I’m afraid you’d understand least of all.” And yet, looking into her pale eyes just then, he felt as if he’d always known her. As if he could tell her anything. She leaned over to kiss him then, and he thought it was the happiest moment of his life.
She rarely wore jewelry, but this day he noticed a little-girl bracelet on her left wrist in place of her watch. “When I’m with you, time doesn’t matter,” she whispered in his ear. “Daddy gave me that bracelet a long time ago, when I was in school. See—the jeweler got my initials backwards. J.C. instead of C.J.”
“You’re a big girl now, Carol.”
“I’m a woman now.”
The sky darkened too soon with the coming of evening; he hadn’t realized it was so late. “Perhaps we should be going,” he volunteered.
“Before we’ve looked inside? One last time?”
“All right,” he consented. “It’ll be gone in another month.”
The door was trustingly unlocked, and as they stepped across the threshold he might have been stepping into the past. Suddenly, it was ten years ago, all too clearly, with the dimness of the outer twilight playing once more through the mesh-covered upper skylights, casting its uncertain illumination on the empty rows of open cages.
“A horrible place!” she said with distaste.
“Did you come here often, too?”
“Some,” she answered. “But for me the fear wasn’t the animals. I never knew the animals here.”
He led her along, brushing away cobwebs, squeezing her hand a bit too tightly. “Maybe we all have to come back to the thing we fear,” he said quietly.
The musty smell of long disuse was in the air, and when Carol bravely touched an open cage, the barred door screeched with protesting age. The sound sent a shiver through him.
“I’d forgotten how it was,” she said.
“Let’s get out of here.”
“Wait! Come here!” She’d climbed into one of the open cages, and now she beckoned him to join her. “Kiss me first, Tommy. In here!”
He followed her in and her lips closed on his. He felt himself pressed backward against the inner bars. In that moment it was if he’d known her all his life, and perhaps he had.
“Carol …”
Suddenly she shoved away from him and was out of the cage. The rusty bars swung shut in his face, and he saw her click a shiny new padlock into place. “Not Carol,” she whispered in a different voice, a voice he hardly recognized. “I’m Janet, Tommy. Remember? Janet Crown. I’ve waited ten years for you to come back.”
“Janet!” The word was a scream of sudden, blinding terror.
She was a little girl once more, and the zoo was the world, and life was death. “Perhaps they’ll hear your screams,” she said through the bars that separated them. “Perhaps you’ll still be alive in a month, when they come to tear the building down.”
“Janet!”
He screamed her name again, and kept screaming it until she was gone and he was alone in the empty zoo.