“And you came to the zoo …”
“My mom …” I say, like it’s obvious what comes next. Then I realize that’s not a sentence that works without finishing the thought. “I’m one of those few, fortunate, proud New Yorkers who gets to spend the summer in Billings.”
“Well, today’s your lucky day. Want a tour?”
“You do tours?”
Her smile starts with her eyes. They open a bit wider, and then her face animates, as if her eyes are part of a pulley system that controls her upper lips, which rise, allowing me to see her perfect, glistening teeth. “Do I do tours? Five bucks will get you the best darn tootin’-est zoo tour you ever done dreamed of,” she says in a cowboy accent.
I grab my wallet, pull out a five, and hand it to her. “Did you just say ‘tootin’-est’?”
She slowly nods. “I sher did,” she says, her voice authoritative. She stuffs the five in her pocket and leads me outside. The sun is out and it’s warm, like bread just out of the oven at a bakery, and the trees are every shade of green possible. In my first walk, I hadn’t actually looked at a lot of the nature stuff. Just like how I was still hearing the noises of New York City, I think the sights were still inside my eyes too. Where I live, life is mostly concrete and brick. We have a park — two, actually, near our apartment — but even when you’re so deep in one of those parks that you can’t see out, it’s hard to forget that the world is skyscrapers and boutiques, bodegas and subway tracks. In a way, those things feel more real to me than this scenery.
We take a footbridge over a creek, and while we walk, she tells me the zoo’s history. Apparently it was built in 1922 as a refuge for wildlife dislocated by the 1921 caldera eruption in Washington State. Volunteers from all over the West hauled as many animals as they could to Billings.
“Wow,” I say. I’ve heard about calderas, which are like extreme volcanos, but I hadn’t realized there had actually been one in the U.S.
“If it seems empty, you have to understand,” she says. “The zoo has a policy of not taking in any other animals. So these are all the descendants of those first arrivals all those years ago. It keeps the place pure.”
At the red-tailed squirrel habitat, she explains that the squirrels used to live in the redwood forests of California. “They’re amazing creatures. Did you know they only mate during a full moon?”
“Really?”
“That’s right,” she says.
We pass a sign that reads WOLF WOODS, and she puts her hands on the mesh enclosure.
“There are four wolves left. There were many more at one time, but one of the wolves was a psychopath.”
I laugh, figuring she is making a joke. She doesn’t laugh back. I catch sight of one of the wolves. He’s white with steely eyes, and he’s staring at me. I feel a shiver run through my veins.
“A psychopath?”
“Well, what would you call it? Wolves were showing up dead. Disemboweled. They couldn’t figure out who had done it, so they brought in a wolf detective. She got right to solving the case. We only lost three more after that, and once she found the killer, they hung him.”
I look out at the area. A wolf detective! I’ve never heard of that. And then I look back at her. “Wait. They hung a wolf?”
She sucks her lips in, rolls her eyes up, and stares at the sky. “Too much?”
“You made that all up, didn’t you?” I ask.
She tilts her head. “I may have.”
“Cool,” I say.
“Is it?”
I think, Yeah. It’s the kind of thing that the improv comedy group at my high school does. I joined this year, because of a girl, of course, and that didn’t work out, of course. But I really like improv. I like coming up with stuff no one’s ever come up with before. “It’s totally cool,” I say.
It feels like she is exploring my face with her eyes. “Interesting,” she says.
I scratch my ear. “Do they know you make stuff up on your tours?”
“I have no idea.”
“Do you even work here?”
“I do not.”
I laugh. “Wow.”
“You want your money back?” She takes the crumpled five out of her pocket.
I wave her off. “Nah. It was totally worth it. More than worth it. Why do you do that?”
She shrugs and stuffs the money back into her pocket. “Why does anyone do anything? Why do red-tailed squirrels only mate during a full moon?”
“They don’t, do they?”
She shrugs again. “Beats the shit out of me.”
I grin. “I like that. That’s like something I would do.”
“Well, you know,” she says, demurely kicking up her back foot in a way that doesn’t match her personality at all. I can tell it’s meant to be funny, and it is.
“I’m Carson Smith,” I say.
“Aisha,” she says back. “Aisha Stinson.”
“You made all that shit up? The wolf detective?”
“Most definitely. Especially the part about the wolf detective.”
We start walking again. “So is that a detective who deals with wolf crimes, or a wolf who is a detective? And if it’s the latter, is it exclusively focused on wolf crimes?”
Aisha seems to ponder this. “It can be all of the above.”
AISHA KEEPS THE tour going, making up stories about all the different animals, which is challenging because we see almost none. I join in and tell her that the red panda (which we also do not see) is the actual daughter of the panda used as the model for the Panda Express logo. She tells me that the bighorn sheep got their name because they are the most well-hung of all the sheep, and I wonder how to get from a conversation about large sheep dicks to asking her if she wants to hang out sometime. Like not at the zoo, maybe.
When we reach the Siberian tiger’s cage (he is in therapy and on two antidepressants, she explains), I ask her why such a beautiful tiger is all alone.
“His father kicked him out of the house for being gay,” she says. “He did it in the name of the Jesus. The Jesus said, ‘You straighten out, mister, and go mack on the lady tigers, or you’ll be sleeping at the zoo.’ ”
“Ah yes. The Jesus,” I say. “He’s kind of a judgmental prick, isn’t he?”
She laughs. “That’s the one. Which is funny, ’cause those stories in that book his dad wrote make him sound maybe a little crazy at times, but not judgmental at all.”
I haven’t actually read the Bible, so I can’t say much about it. “Yeah, I always thought he was kind of a hippie guy, what with the Jesus sandals and the scraggly Jesus beard and the ‘love your neighbors’ thing.”
“ ’Round these parts,” Aisha says in that bad cowboy accent, “Jesus kills them hippies.”
I haven’t had a conversation this long with another person in about forever. My mom and I, for instance, just took a five-hour plane ride, and we said maybe twenty words to each other. I love her and all, but she just has weird … ways of showing love and support, maybe. Which is why I’ve been dropped off at a zoo, by myself. Things don’t surprise me anymore. I just go with it, because she pretty much lets me do whatever the hell I want.
So anyway, Mom and I don’t do a lot of talking. Most of my conversations happen in my own mind at school too. I’m not a freak or anything, but I don’t have a lot of friends with whom I can let my brain really hang out, pardon the disgusting image. Here at ZooMontana with Aisha, my brain is out, and so is hers, and I don’t want it to end.
So then, of course, we both go quiet and walk in silence, while I try frantically to find something to keep it all going.
“There are, like, no animals in this zoo,” I finally say.
“I know. Ain’t it the worst?”