“It’s me,” Julie said hopelessly. “Micah, it’s me.” A tower door opened and closed, sounding very far away, but the courtyard was suddenly crowded with the laughter of people starting home from a party. For a moment, the black man’s immense eyes were upon Farrell, brown as old rivers, deepmuddy with decaying secrets, and streaked by thin, luminous currents and the slow backs of crocodiles. Then he kicked bare heels into his mount’s thick sides, and the horse lumbered through a judicious U-turn and trotted away past the fishpond, under the spiteful faces of the entryway, and on out into the expensively quiet streets beyond. The clopping echoes bounced back and forth between the condominiums long after the man and the horse were out of sight.

Farrell drew Julie back into the maze, for privacy’s sake, and let her cry. He was jealous at first—no one has ever cried for me that way, and no one ever will, I know this—but then Julie raised her face, gasping and hiccuping, and he saw clearly how she would look when she was old. “Baby,” he said, and began helplessly kissing lines and hollows and wounds that were not there yet, sick with tenderness and fear.

If you’ll look over on your left now, ladies and gentlemen,” Farrell said into the dashboard microphone, “we’re now passing the South American maned wolf.” In his rearview mirror, a dozen faces turned dutifully as directed; two or three others stared straight ahead, meeting his eyes with the wary contempt that certain children always show to magicians. What are you hiding from me while you let me see this? Farrell smiled encouragingly into the mirror, but it only confirmed their suspicions, and he sympathized, having a touch of their complaint himself.

“Despite the name,” he went on, slowing the alligator train as it waddled past the yard where the two shaggy, cinnamon-toast-colored creatures trotted up and down on deer legs, “the maned wolf is actually a large fox—sort of a fox on stilts, as you can see.” He had tried several times to leave the official jokes out of his recitation, but management spies always reported him. “In the wild they live on rodents and insects, but here we feed them chicken and bananas. They’ll eat five pounds of bananas a day, just wolf ‘em right down.” Somebody laughed at that one, and Farrell daydreamed about stopping the train and demanding to know who it was.

The day was windy and warm, and children tumbled like bits of burning paper across the path of the alligator train. The sea lions were coughing croupily away behind the aviary, ringing bells and biting their bicycle horn. A young woman, wearing Army fatigues and a purple cartwheel hat, lifted a small boy out of the way and held him easily in her arms while she waved his hand to the train. Farrell waved back. The implacable faces in the mirror followed his gesture that time, to see if that was it.

“On our right,” he said, “of course, the elephants. This pair of old scroungers, Winston and Daisy, are Indian elephants—born in Sri Lanka, actually—and the big fellow in the next yard is Mr. Ngugi, and he’s from Kenya in East Africa.” Winston and Daisy, who had been circus performers, went into their routine on cue, twining their trunks and rearing, yearning with perfect comic precision toward a world made up entirely of cooing, snack-flinging suckers. But Mr. Ngugi had ragged ears and a broken tusk, and Farrell cringed before the darkly brilliant squint six times a day as he slid by in his green and baby-blue train, repeating in the same words the joke about elephants’ memories. He made the joke this time, too; but an unaccountable impulse led him to go on, not into his usual thirty-three-second closing speech as the alligator train neared its terminus, but straight into the first lines of his favorite D. H. Lawrence poem:

He said the lines loudly enough for Mr. Ngugi to hear, and never noticed the sad-faced bald man who flushed and began very vigorously to button up his daughter’s jacket, nor the old woman who yanked her two small grandchildren to their feet, towed them to the door, and practically slung them off the train, which was still moving. He halted it between the proper yellow lines, trying to recall the part about the great beasts mating in secret, hiding their fire. None of his passengers looked at him as they scrambled down. Farrell sang the last verse softly into the microphone.

Pleased with himself, he leaned on his elbow in the round window that was the alligator’s left eye and waved to the young Chicano peanut vendor across the path. The peanut vendor grinned at him, shaking his head and drawing a forefinger cheerfully across his throat. “Abandon ship, chulo,” he called. “Better tell me now where you want your stuff shipped on to.”

“Jaime,” Farrell said, “you really must try to remember about not being in Yuba City anymore. There wasn’t so much as a phooey in that poem—it was educational and scientific in nature, and all those people got college credit just for listening to it. So did you, of course. Trade the experience in at any night school in the country.”

But the peanut vendor shook his head again. “I didn’t hear three words of it, didn’t even know it was a poem. All I know is you weren’t saying those good lines they wrote down for you to say. I hear you doing that thing every day, over and over, you think I can’t tell when the beat changes?” Abruptly he scaled a bag of peanuts sidearm through the window into Farrell’s lap. “You were doing it different,” Jaime said, “you think they couldn’t tell? Making stuff up on them, more than likely. They hate that, man. They paid for exactly the same show everyone else gets. So not only are you some kind of elephant pervert, you did them out of money. Oh, there will be cards and letters. There will be damn singing telegrams about you, man.”

“Next round, The Bastard King of England,” Farrell said. He stood up, stuffing the peanuts into a pocket of his forestgreen jumpsuit, which had been tailored for a larger man and hung on him like a parachute snagged on tree branches. He turned to check the seats for knife slashes, forgotten dolls, bombs, and fallen change. From the last seat in the rear row, with the Petting Zoo reflected in the window behind her, the dog Briseis looked at him.

After a long time, and from a long distance, Farrell heard himself say, “Get down, Briseis. They don’t let dogs on the zoo train.” The rear door’s open, she must have gotten on that way. I just didn’t see her. He started toward her, but Briseis growled once, so quietly that Farrell froze between steps, suddenly very uncertain of his ability to identify dogs. She stared boldly into his eyes, as he had never known her to do, then leaped to the floor and out of the train in two elegant bounds that were nothing like the movements of Sia’s clumping, apologetic old companion. Turning to look back at Farrell, she growled again, and this time it was unquestionably a command. Farrell was never mistaken about commands.

“Wal, Ah swan, Ah reckon the critter wants me to follow her,” he said aloud, just to keep the whole affair on the level of a Lassie movie as long as possible. Briseis was loping away, back past the elephants, then slanting off in the direction of the employees’ rest-room. She neither slowed for Farrell, nor looked around to be sure of him. He trailed after her, trying to keep her in sight without really running, feeling like the White Rabbit as he checked his watch to see that he had almost an hour of liberty before the alligator train’s next appointed round. His supervisor, who mistrusted him, called questioningly as he hurried by. Farrell waved, earnestly yelled back, “Till they touch in flood,” and kept moving. I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date, and I am not dressed for it, whatever it is.