A few days after his seventeenth birthday, the Belfast Corporation relieved Simon Boone of his duties at the tramlines and transferred him to the zoo at the Bellevue Pleasure Gardens on Cave Hill. The zoo originated as a park located at the end of the line with gardens, paths and teahouses that featured views of the city. Ten years ago they added zoological specimens. Apes and elephants. Bears and birds. Simon cleans the cages. Once he heard some of the fellows call him Simon the Night Soil Man, Shite Shovelin’ Boone. Simon pretended he didn’t hear them, but he thinks about it all the time; sometimes it makes him mad enough to want to quit and go back to the trams, but only sometimes.

Simon makes his way down Great Victoria Street to The Bridge, a pub near the city centre in Shaftsbury Square. The gentlemen expecting him this afternoon--Alex Johnson and Dick Stepford--are already at the bar, making quick work of their healers, as nervous as a couple of birds.

--Hello, Simon. How’s the boxing coming along?
--Fine. Thanks for asking.
--Have one with us? Alex asks.
--I’ll have a milk.
--Milk? Dick makes no effort to hide his disgust.
--Aye. It’s grand for the bones.

Simon rolls up his shirtsleeve and gives the arm a flex.

--That’s yer muscles, you eejit, Dick says. Yer bones are all in yer head.
--Right then. Make it a pint.

That gets them all laughing, but it dries up quick. They didn’t come here for laughs. The bartender gets the Guinness going. Alex pays.

Alex is the Bellevue Pleasure Garden’s curator. Dick is the zookeeper. Alex is an old footballer with drooping mustaches and hair that curls around his ears. Middle age has been kind to him and he still looks like he could do some damage on the pitch. Alex has three children. Dick looks ten years Alex’s senior, though the two are nearly identical in age. He’s soft-spoken, but direct, just the sort of man one would expect to be good with animals. His features betray the long hours he spends outside.

Last week Alex called Simon into his office and asked him if he’d be up for a special, after-hours assignment. Simon said he would. The extra quid would go a long way.

No one speaks until Simon is squared up with a pint. He drains half the glass with his first swallow. By the look of things, he has some catching up to do.

--Dirty bit of business, Dick mutters.
--It is indeed, Alex replies.
--I don’t fancy it. Not in the least.
--None of us do, Dick. But it’s got to be done, and we’re the fellows for it.
--Bloody war, Dick says. He’s in a black mood, blacker than usual. Alex keeps shooting Simon looks as if to apologize for Dick’s poor humor. He needn’t bother. Simon’s a volunteer. He’ll do as he’s told.
--Another, gents? the bartender asks.
--Aye, they say as one.

Simon pays. The men mumble their thanks and retreat to their thoughts. Dick keeps looking at his watch. At five o’clock Alex orders whiskies.

--Courage, he says by way of a toast.

They make music with the glasses and take their medicine.

--Come. I’ll show you the works.

Alex has one of the Corporation’s panel trucks parked out back. He opens the passenger door and removes a rifle case from under the seat. He opens it up and shows them the well-oiled weapon sleeping in its case.

--.303? Dick asks.

--Aye. There’s two more just like it under the seat. Think that’ll do the job?

Dick goes quiet, calculating the equations.

--What about you? Alex says to Simon. If you want out, now’s the time to say so.
--I’m ready, Simon says. Ready for anything.

*

The thing is none of them want to shoot the animals.

A week ago the Germans bombed the city for the first time. The blitz killed eleven people. A deputation of citizens from the Antrim Road petitioned the Corporation to have the specimens removed or eliminated. That’s what they called them: specimens. An air raid, the committee argued, was one thing, dangerous animals unleashed on the streets of Belfast quite another. On Thursday the Corporation announced its decision: destroy the animals.

Alex was furious. He raged all day, slamming doors and kicking over trash bins. Dick went off to tend the animals and didn’t come back to the office until well past closing. They agreed to carry out the orders, but come Friday no one was up for the task.

--Let’s enjoy our weekend in peace, Alex had said.
--That go for the Germans, too? Simon asked.
--Feck the Germans, Dick spat.

Alex has a bottle in the truck. By the time they get to the zoo they are properly polluted. They leave the truck near the gates and stagger up the escarpment with the rifles slung clumsily over their shoulders. They look like gravediggers on a lark.

They start at the paddock where Billie the Asian elephant is kept. Billie is the zoo’s main attraction. The Belfast Corporation bought her from a traveling circus after she slipped her chains in Bombay. There are no chains at the Bellevue Pleasure Garden; Billie is free to roam her paddock as she pleases. She’s a natural talent. When the mood strikes her, she gets up on her hind legs and balances on one massive foot, trumpeting proudly. Sometimes Simon brings her droppings home for Ma’s garden, and her tomatoes are the pride of the Shankill.

Dick loves Billie. He says he can read her just by looking at her eyes. One look at Dick tells them he isn’t ready for this, so they move on to the tiger cages. Both the Bengal tigers, Jasmine and Fulaka, are out by the pool.

--Who wants to go first? Alex asks.

No one volunteers. Simon decided back at The Bridge to keep his gob shut. Once they put down the animals he’ll be out of a job, but if they put a good word in for him there’s a chance he can stay on with the Corporation without having to go back to the trams.

--Maybe we should all fire at once, Dick says.
--Aye, Simon agrees. Like a firing squad.

Alex nods at the soundness of the plan.

They unpack their rifles, load the weapons and throw the bolts home. Alex tests his sling. Dick holds the rifle like he’s considering pitching it into the pool. They smoke fags while they decide which cat to shoot first. Jasmine is the more ornery of the two. Fulaka is a layabout who on some days can scarcely be bothered to feed himself. Jasmine’s the one. Sorry Jasmine.

They aim and fire. The reports echo through the zoo. Over in the aviary, the birds make an awful row, rising up into the caged air with nowhere to go. Jasmine twitches her tail. Fulaka doesn’t wake up, the bastard.

--I wasn’t even close, Alex confesses. His face is red from anger and embarrassment.
--I didn’t see where mine went, says Dick. Did you?
Simon shakes his head. His shot went high, but he keeps it to himself.
--Let’s have another go, Alex says.

Simon’s aim is off and his shot goes high again, higher than before. Alex looks suspiciously at his rifle. Dick is disgusted with himself, the whole sad affair. He sets his rifle down and sits on the kerb.

--I can’t do this, he says. I can’t even feckin’ see straight. What if we wound but don’t kill? The people of Antrim Road with their bleedin’ deputations and committees can feck off as far I’m concerned.

Alex makes a study of the sky, squinting up at the places where the stars will soon peek through.

--It’s getting dark, he says. Maybe we should wait ‘til morning.

Dick and Simon agree without hesitation. They put the rifles back in their cases. It feels as if a terrible burden has been lifted, a heavy yoke cast off. Jasmine yawns, ignorant of her fate.

*

Simon, his younger brother Brian, and their Ma have been on their own for over a year now. They used to be four, but Father died a year ago March. He was a sailor, a seaman in the merchant fleet out of Liverpool. He served as a quartermaster on the Gregory Dunston, a tanker carrying rubber from Bermuda. The Germans hit her amidships with a torpedo that broke her in half. There were no survivors, but sometimes Simon wonders. His father had a survival belt equipped with matches, fishhooks, a knife, a compass--even a flask of rum to keep the spirits up. He knew the risks, he wrote in his letters. He was ready for anything.

Sometimes Simon thinks about that when he’s in the ring. He can be ready for a few things at a time: a quick jab with the left leads to a right, a dip in the shoulder means a hard one’s coming low. Right when he thinks he’s got his man beat is when he usually finds himself on his backside marveling at the brightness of the lights, the darkness of just about everything else.

His father was mad for maps and charts. He knew his business. He wouldn’t have needed much to get himself out of a tight spot. What if he’d found a spar, a hatch cover to cling to? What if he made it off the ship alive?

Ma doesn’t care much for Simon’s what-ifs. She took the news hard, went into a bit of shock. She stopped eating and her teeth fell out. Brian buried himself in his books. One of their father’s old shipmates fixed Simon up with a job with the Belfast Corporation, cleaning tram stations.

When Simon went to work hauling shite at Bellevue, Ma told him his father used to take her up there when they were courting. Simon doesn’t believe it. The past, to hear Ma tell it, was getting rosier by the day. His father had never been around much, but Simon wants to remember him the way he was: stern, blunt, sparse with the kind word, but fair. He never hit them out of turn and he always had gifts for them when he came back from sea.

After a few months on the job Simon started dreaming about Jasmine. It always started the same way: Simon was closing up for the night, coming down the cinder path toward the main gate with his shovel--and there she was. She always saw him before he saw her. He never knew if he should run or stand his ground, and the indecision paralyzed him. Jasmine chased him through dense jungles, down dark lanes reeking of coal smoke, through the trams until there was nowhere else to go--the proverbial end of the line. Then Simon would be jolted awake by a sharp kick from his brother.

--Quiet! You’ll wake Da!

But Da was dead. He couldn’t hear Simon no matter how loud he cried.

*

Simon wakes with a start, bright lights booming all around. Bloody hell, he thinks, I missed the job.

They’d been sitting on an old horse blanket in the Pleasure Gardens proper, nipping at a bottle of Powers. They must have dozed off. Now the city is lit up brighter than Christmas. Giant flares float down on parachutes, illuminating the bellies of the German Junkers emptying their payloads as they streak across the sky.

Dick is out cold on the blanket. Simon gives him a shove as another wave of planes comes screaming over the Black Mountains. Dick sits up. They scramble up the slope, their hangovers forgotten.

The next wave of Junkers drop bombs that detonate with such force they send massive geysers of earth and stone twenty meters into the air. Alex leads them to a concrete utility shed where the tractors are stored and they take cover under the stairs. Down in the city an air raid siren warbles like a great bird of mourning.

--Shite, Dick murmurs over and over again.

The bombing lasts all night. The night raiders come out of the north, down the Antrim Road and turn around at the lough to give it another go with their bombs and parachute mines. The Whitewell and Crumlin Roads are hit hardest. The shipyards at Harland & Wolf take a beating, as do Mackies and the Sirocco ventilator works. A pall of smoke from the many fires hangs over the city, making it difficult to see where the damage has been done.

It’s a hundred times worse than the raid last week, but no bombs fall on the zoo. They consider taking aim at the planes with their .303s, but they are hopelessly out of range. The only resistance comes from HMS Furious sitting in for repairs. The belching of her guns can be heard in the distance. All they can do is curse.

Throughout the night the lesser game bellow in their cages. Billie trumpets without respite. The desperation in it is a torment to poor Dick.

At five o’clock in the morning the all-clear siren sounds. The ghost of the sun limns the edge of the lough and is refracted through the smoke of a hundred fires.

*

They gather at the tiger cage. Jasmine has taken cover in a niche between boulders. She always was a right smart girl. Fulaka suns himself by the pool. Dick pops off two rounds before Alex and Simon are settled. The crack of the rifle startles them.

Jasmine and Fulaka lie perfectly still. Dick unlocks the cage and goes inside. He checks on Jasmine first, then Fulaka.

--That do it then? Alex calls out.
--Aye, Dick answers.

He exits the cage and locks it up again before starting up the path toward the savanna.

--I’m off to do some big game hunting, he says. He tries to make a joke of it, but there are tears in his eyes and something in his voice neither one of them has heard before. Simon watches a red peninsula of Fulaka’s blood ooze toward the tiger pool and he wonders if he’s going to have to clean it when the killing’s done.

--Dick has the right idea, Alex says.
--Divide and conquer, Simon agrees, a bit too cheerily.

Alex smiles, tosses Simon a ring of keys.

--I’ll head this way, he says, jerking his thumb at the curving path toward the cages that house the rest of the big cats--a leopard, a panther, Tiki, the old arthritic lion.

Simon nods. Alex doesn’t offer any instructions. Simon doesn’t ask for any.

The first animal he comes to is a tapir. What in bloody hell is a tapir? The plaque on the fence is no help. Ungulate. Nonruminant. Nocturnal. But is it dangerous? All Simon knows for certain is that it craps like a pig and looks like one too. A pig with a funny nose.

Simon can hear Alex and Dick going about their work. Pock. Pock. Pock.

Billie the elephant starts in with her trumpeting again, the poor girl. He blinks away the thought and fires. His hands are steady; his aim is true. The tapir collapses, but doesn’t die. Simon gets closer, noses the rifle between the bars and shoots again. The beast takes one final breath and is no more. That does it for the ungulate.

Simon puts down a trio of tree sloths, some pronghorn antelopes and a South African warthog for whom he bears a bit of a grudge; when he was the new man on the job the beast charged out of the brush and very nearly impaled him, the bastard.

Next stop, the aviary. He puts the rifle down and scratches his head. Surely they don’t mean for him to shoot the birds. The aviary is nothing more than a massive cage comprising a circular fence with wire netting to keep the birds from flying off. It houses an enormous number of cockatoos and tragopans, beautiful jungle birds. Simon can’t shoot them. He won’t.

He jogs to the utility shed to grab a pair of boltcutters. Each cage he passes has a dead animal in it. Bears, apes, giraffes--all dead. It’s a terrible sight, like something out of a bad dream. Billie underscores the awfulness with her ceaseless trumpeting.

Simon shimmies up the fence and cuts the netting loose. He makes several trips up and down. It’s slow going and after half an hour he’s still only halfway around. He unlocks the cage and goes inside. The birds chortle, cock their heads, wobble on their perches. His presence makes them nervous. He climbs up, snips another section and pulls it down. A huge flap tears loose. He jumps down, puts his hands on the tree trunk and gives it a fierce shake. One by one the birds drop down under the netting and rise up out of the cage. More come with each shake. They rush past him, great colorful bursts of motion. The rush of their beating wings is deafening, but it does him good to see them leave their talon-scarred perches behind and soar into the sky. It’s a symbol for Belfast, he thinks, a symbol of their determination.

But the birds don’t go very far. They alight on cages and tree limbs. Some even return to the aviary. They squawk and chortle and chatter at each other.

--We’re do we go now?
--Don’t know, mate. Haven’t a feckin’ clue.
--Let’s wait for the punter with the birdseed.

A feeling of dread overwhelms Simon. What has he done? He’s destroyed the aviary, forced the birds into a world that doesn’t want them. He fights back tears, keeps the feeling inside where it sits like an unexploded shell the sappers will never find.

*

Alex sits on the steps outside his office smoking a fag with a trembly hand. He puts it out when he sees Simon coming and pulls out two more.

--Where’s Dick?
--With Billie.

Alex has the bearing of a man looking ahead. He lives in East Belfast, not far from the shipyards, and he is eager to get back to his family.

--Let’s finish this, Alex says. You with me?
--Aye.

Alex smiles. It’s a grim smile, but it’s heartening all the same. Simon would want Alex in his corner any day and he hopes Alex feels the same way about him.

They set off for Billie’s paddock in the center of the zoo. It’s very quiet, very still, more so than any other time Simon can remember. The animals are dead; the birds have flown away. Even Billie maintains a respectful silence.

--You need me to help clean up tomorrow? Simon asks.
--Aye.

Alex halts, curses under his breath. Billie is down. Dick sits by her side, his arm thrown out to embrace her massive head. He’s been crying. Alex turns to Simon.

--Did you shoot her?
--No, Simon says. I didn’t come here.

Alex nods.

They go in through the gate and come out the back of the paddock where Billie is fed and gets her grooming. Dick looks wretched. Gaunt, hollowed out, eyes screaming red.

--She’s dead, he says.
--Are ye sure?
--Aye. I examined her from trunk to tail. No wounds, no bullet holes. Nothing. You can look for yourselves if you like.

Billie looks even more majestic in death than she did in life. Her powerful legs are broken columns, her trunk a curled-up question mark. The folds around the eyes are wet, as are her long, fragile lashes. Can elephants cry? Simon’s dying to know, but Father always said not to ask a question if you can’t stand up to the answer. For all her terrific size she was only a wee innocent thing who wasn’t looked after properly, and they are the ones to blame.

--There’s got to be an explanation, Alex says. Nothing dies without reason.
--That’s not true, Simon summons the courage to say. They can and they do.

______________

 

JIM RULAND is The God Particle's contributing editor and will serve as guest editor for the fall 2004 issue, to be published in September. This story won the 2002 Writers@Work Fiction Fellowship and appeared in Quarterly West.