One day they were at a bar with the cockatoo flying around and it suddenly landed on Al’s shoulder and let loose some of its sparkling white fruit. It had never done this before—Joseph laughed—but Al just sat and stared at it spackling down the camouflage green of his army jacket. He said, I’m going to die, and he did—somebody had booby-trapped his bike and it blew when he turned the ignition. Joseph said he saw the cockatoo flying around after that, looking for its master, and finally Joseph got so mad he knocked it out of a tree and broke its neck. He still had both his arms then.

I watch Joseph to see how he’s feeling, but he doesn’t seem angry anymore. He slides a sponge across Marysue’s feet and says that manatees have the same kind of rounded nails on their flippers. He says they’re the closest thing elephants have to a relative. I try to imagine Marysue floating in the water, suddenly free of all that weight. Elephants can swim for miles, Joseph says. Somehow they know they’re not going to sink.

Sandy runs the monkey house. She is an attractive woman if you look at her from the left. When she turns, you can see the puckered skin and the crooked white line across her cheek into her chin where a gorilla took a bite out. The scar just touches the corner of her mouth, so when she smiles, the skin stretches and it looks like something’s still holding on to her.

She studied biology and zoology in college. After graduation she got hired by one of her professors as a research assistant and headed into the African jungle. She was thinking she had the touch, and it made her do things she shouldn’t, like get too close to a newborn gorilla and have the mother come charging out of the bushes and bury her teeth in Sandy’s face until the team they were traveling with shot her down. Sandy woke up in a hospital to doctors clicking their tongues as they sewed her skin back together over the bone.

We went out on a date once. I took her to dinner and a movie and we got a drink afterward. She told me her old boyfriend used to make her keep her head turned when they made love, so he wouldn’t have to look at it. Hearing all this made me uneasy, the way people can tell you secrets about themselves too soon and make you feel responsible. I took her home after that and left as soon as I could.