Dirk wanted to see Eula, too, but there were so many stops on the way. And yet he got it: The tourists couldn’t help pining for the big game. To see a living thing so strong it could kill accidentally, with one clumsy step. The hippos, the elephants, the rhinos, the tiger, and, the pinnacle, the massive lone gorilla at the northern peak of the tour’s circle.

“Imagine,” Don the ticket taker once said to Dirk, “if we had a Great Owl in here.”

The smaller, less endangered birds would have to do. But as remarkable as it was to see fifty species of bird crowding a sixty-foot-high wire dome, and as beautiful as it was to hear them speak to one another in cosmic song, a bird was, after all, something you could find in your backyard. The Hardy Carroll Goblin Zoo knew the importance of the buildup. Start with something common. Work your way to the majestic. The reptiles came next. Dirk led the troupe along the green scaly footprints painted on the concrete. More than one parent felt compelled to ask, Will they be in cages?

Many of the younger kids wouldn’t even look at the cobra at all and some of the boys, in order to impress the girls, would smush their own faces against the glass. One night Dirk had been in the reptile house when a drunk zookeeper accidentally knocked over a turtle cage. It shattered against the cement floor and Dirk realized the glass cages weren’t as unbreakable as most zoo-goers thought they were. Often, directing a tour, he’d imagine the cobra breaking the glass, attaching itself to a young boy’s face. Later, when the nightmares began, he did nothing to stop little boys and girls from being sucked out of line, taken in the jaws of a snake.

In his nightmares the tours continued above all things.

Just as they must in reality.

Alice, the big crocodile wading beneath the rickety wooden bridge, always got their attention. Often Dirk was tasked with tossing a duck carcass over the kids’ heads, then plugging his ears for the screams as Alice’s huge jaw snapped shut, severing the fowl in half.