The Zoo

"Did you hear? It was the bats, man. Again! It's always the bats! If you ask me, they should get those things out of here!"

George, rocking gently in his sling, leisurely picked up a banana with his foot and began to peel it. "Sometimes it's the pigs, Frank."

Frank began to jump up and down and wave his arms over his head. "It's the bats, it's the bats! The pigs get it from the bats!" Still waving his arms over his head, he ran over to the window and began to pound on it with his fists. "Let me outta here! Let me out!"

"They can't hear you," George reminded him. "Remember, you have to use your signs with humans."

"Oh, that's right," Frank said. He pressed himself against the window and began to rapidly make the sign for "Bats!' 'Bats!'

"While you're at it," George said, "can you put in an order for another hand of Cavendish's?"

In the next exhibit over, Frank heard the macaws and parrots and other jungle birds erupt in squawking, chattering laughter. Oh great, he thought, I'm a big joke now. May the Lawgiver save us! I'm surrounded, literally, he thought, by bird brains. He smiled wide at this thought, baring his large canines.

"Better make that a few hands of Cavendish's," George said. "We need to keep our strength up."

Frank grunted, but George was right. They did need to keep their strength up. Swiftly he signed, "Frank want banana.' 'Banana good for Frank.'

He saw the human zookeeper in the lab coat smile and nod at him, then depart into the storeroom. "Ok, she's gone to get them. Anything else while we're at it?"

"Ask if they have cheesecake." Again, the jungle birds began to laugh.

Those stupid birds! Frank thought. They're just like the bats! They spread disease, too! "Shut your bills!" he shouted at them, waving his fist. "Or I'll come over there and shut them for you!"

The squawking laughter intensified.

"Birds have no sense of responsibility," he remarked to George as he waited at the window, shoulders slumped.

"Now, that's not true," George said. "Some species of bird mate for life. They're very responsible, loving parents. Remember when that keeper set up the television and played Planet Earth for us? Remember the penguins?"

"Penguins are alright," Frank conceded. "But they're not really birds. Birds are things that fly, penguins are more like fish, really."

"What do you have against flying things?" George asked. "Perhaps you wish to become a pilot, and are jealous of their ability."

For a moment, Frank imagined himself in a leather flight jacket, with aviator goggles strapped against his forehead and a white scarf billowing in the wind.

"Here she is," George said.

Frank was picturing himself at the controls of a Sopwith Dragon, headed into a cloud bank at ten-thousand feet, somewhere off the Portuguese coast.

Shaking his head, he cleared the image from his mind, and ambled over to service door. He took the paper bag of bananas from the zookeeper, signed thank you, and climbed up his tree and settled in to his own sling.

He opened the bag, tossing George a hand of Cavendish's with his left foot. "Hey!" he exclaimed.

"What is it?" asked George.

"Look!" He held up a plastic tub, filled with something white and light yellow and fluffy. "Whipped cream!"

"It's a bonanza!" George said. "The Lawgiver be praised!"

After he had split the cream with George, Frank leaned back in his sling, gazed up at the blue sky and resumed his daydreaming. This time he was at the yoke of a Martinsyde Buzzard, somewhere over the south of France.