Goblin’s prized gorilla was guaranteed to turn any woman’s heart to cotton.

Even his fantasies weren’t safe from the zoo. From the slaughterhouse. From work.

“Maybe I’d be better for quitting one or the other,” Dirk told Patrick that night. “Shake things up.”

“Mix things up,” Patrick said. “And yes. Cheers to that.”

Often, on his rare nights out with Patrick, Dirk would excuse himself and head to the bathroom where he’d lock the door, set his beer on the sink, and stand quietly against the wall, his eyes closed, breathing deep and slow.

There he’d think of that woman again. This time he’d captivate her with his ideas, his plans, his sense of drive. No mention of the zoo. Eula. The animals. And for one glorious half minute he would be free of the feelings that pounded his body by day and the images that confused him as he slept.

Your business can be anything you want it to be, Dirk thought. So long as it doesn’t boast any tours.

2

It was Patrick’s idea to swap jobs in the first place. He’d worked as the zoo’s custodian, picking up cigarette butts, maps, paper pizza plates, and empty soda-pop cans and carrying the animal shit from behind the cages to the great golden trash can at the park’s north end. He also discovered that he didn’t like the job very much. Half a year deep he could barely stand patrolling the grounds in the brown jumpsuit with its clever slogan across the back in white:

someone has to clean up after these guys!

And no matter how well he washed it, he couldn’t really shake that birdshit stench that followed him home. This, coupled with the daily carving of hippo apples out of the grooves of his shoes, brought him squarely to the edge. Being spotted in this state by Sheryl Connors, his high school crush who couldn’t believe he still lived in town and who seemed to plug her nose in defiance of his olfactory montage, pushed him over it.

“Let’s trade jobs,” he said to Dirk one night, also over beers. “You start cleaning up the zoo and I’ll start riding the back of that truck.” Dirk had been a Goblin garbageman for months. He’d cleaned Perish Park, washed the steel lids of the Goblin graves, picked up the trash along every thruway, washed the windows at the Woodruff, and once worked the same landscape crew as Goblin’s most celebrated citizen, Wayne Sherman, mastermind of The Hedges.

“I’ve walked dogs before—” Dirk said.

But Patrick cut him off. “You won’t actually be handling any animals. Just their shit.”