Strange Currents

It’s April, and the last hints of winter are just now lifting from Rochester. Dirty piles of snow still linger in the zoo parking lot, where it’s collected from daily plowings. Spring won’t really start in this part of New York for a few weeks, will be interrupted by more snow and lots of cold rain, will never seem to have arrived until the end of May when the snow has finally melted, though one suspects it still lies low to the ground deep in the woods where the sun hasn’t reached it.

Pony’s ’91 Ford Tempo is parked in the woods behind the zoo. Him and his brother, Adien, and their friends packed into his car because Pony has the only working car, is everyone’s way in or out of this place. Though everyone hates his car, which does not have heat, because the windows frost over and everyone is cold. Pony carries multiple ice scrapers, one for the rear and one for the front. The cloth lining for the roof is gone so people use the scrappers to write things in the foam ceiling. Aiden scraped the windows every few minutes because he is Pony’s little brother and so Pony could see the road. Someone read one of the carvings out loud: “Pony loves dick!” They packed the car with ten bodies, two in the trunk. “God this car is a pile,” someone said. People make fun of Pony’s car because it is almost fifteen years old, because the back windows don’t roll down, and it lacks heat. Sometimes, even in the coldest weather, they ride with the windows down so no scraping is required. They left the car and walked along the railroad tracks, snuck into the zoo through an old railway access that was never completely or properly sealed off.

Aiden licks his hand, his body sprawled out on the concrete, his flashlight—six feet in front of him— pointed towards his face. He’s fallen; his hand is bleeding. His friends run by him, laughing. He can hear the sounds of the zoo, which they’ve broken into, can smell the elephants whose cage he’s fallen in front of. Aiden and his friends are here to jump into the polar bear exhibit, to swim in their large pool.

“Security Guard,” someone yells.

And then, “Don’t joke like that, dick.”

Aiden picks himself off the pavement. He moves forward, reaches down for his flashlight and yells out, “Wait for me, you fuckers.” He runs to catch up with them. This is a spring ritual, a sort of New Years tradition, started by Pony. All ten of them are carrying backpacks filled with cigarettes and beer or bottles of liquor, but also they have each brought one item, a sort of offering to the polar bears.

Reaching into his backpack, Aiden checks to make sure his bottle of Steel Reserve hasn’t broken. It is strange in the zoo at night, Aiden thinks, with the sounds of the animals pent up in their interior cages and off display, the pathways lit up by dim, humming streetlights. They’ve entered at the side of the zoo, next to the elephants and other safari animals and are headed for the back. There is no guard on full time duty, just a few city cops who roll by every few hours and aimlessly make a once over. Everyone is loud, spread out, or stopped at different cages hoping to see an animal, to feed it some beer, or watch it do something it might not do during the official zoo showing.

“Check this out,” Aiden hears someone say as he approaches the polar bear exhibit. He makes out, as he gets closer, Big Bear standing in front of the display and then, as he gets closer still, the only two girls who’ve come with them. He’s showing them his bear tattoo, again.

“Looks just like him, don’t it?” pointing toward the bear cage, though the bears are indoors, out of sight.

Bear thinks it impresses the girls. He shows every woman he meets. The girls smile when he says, “see, a bear, because I’m Big Bear,” and he makes a growling noise. It’s never really been cute, scares most women because of his height and weight, and just the way he does it with a kind of desperation. Aiden looks over at his brother, who stands picking the lock to the viewing area where the day crowd watches through the thick double plated glass, beneath the water, the bears swimming.

“Come on you idiots,” Pony shouts, hoping everyone will come.

The tattoo and Bear’s showing it seem funny to Aiden, seems sort of appropriate in this place, if not for the reasons Bear hopes.

The last stragglers come running toward the exhibit, their breath blowing out in front of them. They move into the viewing area, loud and bumping into one another, and a few of them jump when they enter and see the huge stuffed polar bear looming in the dark observatory.

“Calm down,” Pony says, “it’s stuffed.”

They all laugh and start opening their backpacks, fanning out around the oval room. The bear reminds Aiden of stories about little kids who’ve fallen into cages and been eaten, of the horrific ending which is the animals being put down. This in turn reminds him of Big Bear’s father, who just died of a brain tumor, who Bear only knew for those last few weeks while he was dying. Aiden remembers the way Bear described it: “they put him down today,” meaning they removed the equipment helping him breath.

And Aiden thinks about his father’s death. And then his mother, not dead but heartbroken, who looked so desperately alone until she found her new husband, who left Pony and Aiden to carry on the mourning.

Pony ushers everyone toward the glass. Aiden stands just behind them, the nine of them with their hands pressed to it, feeling it and looking out into the water, like a pack of school kids on a field trip. They are quiet for a second, and it makes the place, Aiden thinks, though he knows it’s cheesy, magical. It doesn’t last though. They get loud again, making jokes, fanning out; nothing can be too sacred. Aiden feels the urge to pee, is nervous about the guards and swimming in the bear cage. He pulls out his Steel Reserve and takes a few large gulps.

“We wait here,” Pony says, “until we see the guards’ flashlights and then hear them pass.” He has laid down a blanket in the center of the room behind the benches people sit on to watch the bears. “Put what you’re throwing in, here,” he says pointing to the blanket.

“Look at this shit,” Joey says, from behind the merchandise counter, playing with the plastic bears and seals and penguins.

“Toss me some of those,” Ralph says. A group of them, the girls and Bear and Ralph, sit on the floor making the animals talk as if they’re in a porno.

They wait here killing time like this. Once they know they’re safe, they’ll take what they’ve brought and throw it in, two at a time, while the others watch from the safety of the glass room. They will race one another to retrieve what they’ve thrown in. The loser will be forced to stand watch or drink some of the Canadian Whiskey they’ve stolen from Bear’s mother, which “tastes like warm piss and fire and dick.” Then later, after more rounds of racing, they’ll all swim. And finally, just before morning, they’ll leave their offerings in the pool to be found, hopefully by the bears and then the first visitors before they’re removed from the tank for good.

Pony surveys what the rest of them have brought while they sit on the ground with their plastic zoo. “Who brought a dildo?” He says.

And then they all stop playing, come over to look, are laughing and making jokes about it.

“It’s mine,” Ralph’s girlfriend, Janeen, says. “I’m retiring it because Ralph got me a new one.” All the guys are laughing. They make jokes about Ralph being impotent, go back to playing with the stuff from the gift shop, drink from what they’ve brought. Ralph smacks people with the dildo, laughing the same feverish laugh every time.

Aiden sits on one of the benches looking into the tank. It’s calming, looking into the dark water from the inside. Everything seems frozen in the motion of the water, its slight movement back and forth. Aiden can see the flashlights of the guards moving over the surface of the water from the platform above. He whispers for everyone to quiet down. For a second he thinks he sees the light get caught in a strange current, like the water is trying to suck it in and keep it there, like the water is alive. He feels like he is trapped in the huge underbelly of a giant fish, not a whale, but one of the river fish, a walleye or trout. Like one of the ones mounted on Ralph’s uncle’s wall. “The Marvelous Room of Murder,” his aunt calls it, with all those fish and the heads of the different animals he’s killed.

The flashlights pass, meaning the guards are headed toward the front of the zoo and back into the city. Everyone gets up, moves to the glass again. Ralph keeps slapping the dildo against it, saying, “Here fishy, fishy, fishy.”

“Put that thing away,” Janeen says.

Pony walks over to Janeen. “Since you’ve brought the most festive offering, why don’t you pick the first two names from the hat?”

Janeen reaches into Pony’s hat and grabs two pieces of cardboard, torn from a KFC box and stuck together with barbecue sauce, raises them into the air. “Looks like these two were destined for one another,” she says.

Pony reaches out and takes them from her, looking at the names as he separates them. He smiles, looks over at Aiden. “You and me, little brother.”

The brothers each retrieve their items from the blanket and show them to the room so everyone knows what they’re fishing for. Pony has brought a Forzieri watch. “Made in Italy,” he says, “Four-Hundred and Fifty dollars.”

“Where’d you get that?” Bear asks.

“Stole it from Mark,” and everyone knows he means his stepfather.

“Are you really going to throw that in?” Janeen asks.

“You bet your ass he is,” Ralph replies, the dildo pointed at Janeen like a kid’s toy.

Everyone laughs but Aiden.

“He won’t miss it,” Pony says when he notices the look on Aiden’s face. “I’ve had it for a few weeks now.”

Aiden resigns himself to it, isn’t bothered by it the way his brother thinks, because Pony doesn’t even live with them anymore, their mother and stepfather. But Aiden wonders if this isn’t a sign, this thievery, about the future. He worries about his older brother, who lives in his car, who drinks too much and does things like this, this stolen watch, to get drugs or booze. Perhaps, even worse than a sign about the future, Adien thinks, this is a sign about now.

The laughter dies down.

“Well, what’d you bring, you fuck?” Pony asks.

Aiden reaches down toward the blanket. There is no use worrying now he tells himself. He stands up, a hockey puck in his hand, which he’s written on in silver marker. He smiles.

“An old puck,” someone says, “Should be easy to find that in the dark.”

Everyone laughs.

“Not just a puck,” Aiden replies and proudly shows it off to the room. It reads “Ball Play” on one side, and “Is Overrated,” on the other.

“Ain’t that the God-honest truth?” Ralph says.

Aiden laughs.

“Well let’s have a race,” Janeen says.

Aiden and Pony head out the door, round the corner, and make their way to the top of the viewing platform, fifteen feet above the water and even higher from their friends who are watching from inside. Pony puts one foot on the chain link fence and hops it with the other in one swift move. The bears are inside, but Aiden still feels a tinge of fear as his brother hops it and lands in the grass looking down into the water below.

“Let’s go, pussy,” Pony says, turning back to look at Aiden.

“Who’s a pussy, you fag?” Aiden replies, hopping the fence in the same motion as his brother. He’s barely on the ground when Pony grabs him, puts him in a headlock.

“Who you calling a fag?” Pony says.

They wrestle there for a minute, their feet on the edge. Pony goes to his knees trying to drag Aiden down into the grass. Aiden drops the puck, can see it just as it breaks over the edge, before it disappears and then splashes below.

“Let go, dick,” Aiden says.

Aiden braces himself against the fence, trying to keep Pony from tossing him in or dragging him down. Aiden wonders if the guys can see them from below, the two of them wrestling. He swipes at Pony’s hands, knocking the watch out and sending it into the pool below.

“Shit,” Pony says, “I hadn’t committed to tossing it yet.” He laughs.

Aiden leans away from the fence, pulling at the ass of Pony’s jeans, and lifts him—Pony, who’s always been the runt despite the two-year difference— onto his shoulder. Aiden thinks about his mother, about Pony, about himself, and tries to picture them with their real father but cannot.

“I’m still your big brother,” Pony says, giggling and flailing his arms like a kid being dragged around by a parent.

“Whatever,” Aiden says. And he steps to the edge, no longer resisting their movement towards the water. They are, in this instant, in this sort of awkward embrace, frozen. Then fall. A flash. A tangle of limbs, fusing. The flashlights of their friends below, beaming through the glass. The sound of the bears growing louder as they dive. The air swirling through their shirts and hair. Above them the sky turns and turns away, falling and falling and falling.