Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk

ground around it is paved in cement. A sign in front of her display reads, LOIS, but that, she explained, was just her slave name. “I don’t go by anything, not now, not ever,” she told me. “It’s just not the hippo way.”

What struck me right off was her warmth and accessibility. You expect this with miniature goats, but hippos, I’d heard, were notoriously grumpy.

“Oh, I have my moments,” this one said, and she started talking about her teeth. They looked like pegs hammered at random into her gums, and it seemed that one of them had been giving her trouble-which is not to make her sound like a complainer, far from it. “It’s not all bad, living in the zoo,” she told me. “True, I don’t have much space, but at least it’s all mine. For a while last year they brought in a male, trucked him over from some wildlife center in the hopes we’d get it on and have a baby, but the pregnancy didn’t happen, which was fine by me. It’s not that I don’t want kids, I just don’t want them now, if you get what I’m saying?”

“Sure.”

“So anyway, how about you?”

I told her that great horned owls hook up for life, a rarity in the bird world. My mate passed away before our first clutch of eggs could hatch, but I learned a while ago that it’s best to keep this to myself. “A mood killer” is what the seagull diplomatically called it. And it’s true. Someone tells you his mate died, was struck by an ambulance, no less, and of course it casts a pall. That’s why I didn’t mention it to the hippo-I wanted to spare her the awkwardness.

What else did we talk about the night we first met? I remember she asked what the land surrounding the zoo was like. She thought it was all trees and winding paths; little wooden huts selling balloons and cotton candy-that everything looked like what she saw from the bars of her pen. The hippo didn’t know about muffler shops and office-supply superstores, about restaurants and motels and apartment complexes with pools lit by underwater lamps.

What does the world look like? “Well,” I told her, “that’s going to take a while.”

“That’s what I was hoping,” she said.

On my way home that night, I picked up a rabbit. It was on the small side, and no sooner had I started eating than my mother appeared. “I’ll wait until you’re finished,” she said in that particular way that means What kind of son can’t offer his mother so much as an appendage? Sighing, I ripped off an ear and passed it over.

“You shouldn’t have,” she said. Then, her mouth full, she brought up one of my cousins who’s single and will soon reach breeding age. Despite my opposition, my mother is determined to find me a new mate. “There’s been talk,” she keeps saying. But what talk? From who?

My former mate had been dead for all of three days when my mother set me up with the daughter of one of her neighbors. We met at dawn, in a big oak overlooking a pasture. Below us on the grass, a white calf took her mother’s teat in her mouth, and my date shouted, “Faggot!”

“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘lesbian,’ ” I said. “Though even that wouldn’t make sense. What they’re doing isn’t sexual-it’s called nursing. It’s the way mammals feed their young.”

She said, “Yeah, faggot mammals.”

When I told this to my mother, she looked at the bloody rabbit I was holding and said only “What about the other ear?” Then she swore that this new female, my cousin, was different. “I told her you’d meet her tomorrow night, on top of the cross in front of God Saint Christ Jesus Lord.” This is her name for the Catholic church, which is actually-I’ve told her a thousand times-called Saint Timothy’s. Not that it mattered in this case. At eleven o’clock the following evening, I was back at the zoo, talking to the hippo.

We started that night by discussing the pigeons and sparrows who come in the day and defecate on the concrete surrounding her pool. “Disgusting,” she said. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a goddamn bir-” She caught herself. “Bir… thday.”

“You can’t stand birthdays?”

“It’s the fuss,” she said. “I mean, who needs it?”

“Listen,” I told her, “don’t worry about hurting my feelings. With one or two exceptions, I’m not much for birds either.” Then I told her about the seagull I’d met, the one who taught me about French-fried potatoes. “A while after her I ran into a rat, who said, and correct me if I’m wrong, that there’s a certain type of leech that can only live in your, uh, rectum.”

“I don’t know if that’s the only place they can live, but I know I’ve had them back there for a good nine months,” the hippo said. “Little sons of bitches is what they are. I think I picked them up from that two-bit Romeo they sent from the wildlife center.”

“Do they hurt?”

“Not so much,” she said. “It’s more the principle, if you know what I mean. The idea that they can just live inside me, rent free, like they own the place.” She looked behind her as far as she could. “Then too, they’re loud.”

“You can hear them talking?”

“Not the exact words,” she said. “It’s more of a constant, low-level murmur. It’s even more noticeable when I’m under water.”

“What do you think they talk about?” I asked.

“Oh, regular asshole things,” the hippo said. “I don’t mean things about my asshole but the sorts of things that low-life assholes are interested in-incest, maybe, or cards.”

“Cards?”

She nodded her massive head. “The men who clean my pen like to play them on their breaks. Sometimes they sit on the bench beside the snack hut, and I watch.”

Off in the distance, the panther screamed. Then I heard a police siren. “If you wanted, I could maybe listen to what they’re saying,” I offered.

“I don’t know that I want to give them that much importance,” the hippo said.

“Fair enough,” I told her, and I tried to tamp down my disappointment. How can you not want to know what your parasites are talking about? I wondered.

“What if what they’re saying is cruel?” she continued. “It’s bad enough having them in there, but if they’re literally making fun of me behind my back, it would be too much to bear.”

“It’s equally possible they could be trying to thank you,” I said. “I mean, just because they’re leeches doesn’t mean they’re ungrateful.”

“Isn’t that sort of exactly what it means?” she asked.

I had just conceded her point when her curiosity got the better of her and she agreed to take me up on my offer. “If what they’re saying is awful, though, I don’t want to know the specifics.”

There was a short concrete platform near the front of her pen, and at her suggestion I stood upon it while she backed up. This brought her bottom level with my head, which I then cocked and brought as close as I could to her anus. “Raise your tail,” I said.

The hippo did, and I heard what sounded at first like a rabble, many voices talking over one another. Then I realized that they weren’t talking.

“Let me get this straight,” the hippo said when I explained what was going on. “Leeches are singing inside my asshole.”

“To the best of my knowledge, yes,” I told her.

“It’s so much fun in there that they’ve broken into song?”

“It could just be the way they communicate,” I offered. “Maybe this is what they do when they’re sad or angry.” It didn’t sound much like a dirge, though. More like a German drinking number.

“I want them out and I want them out now,” the hippo said, her voice so forceful the platform trembled.

“Look,” I told her, “there’s obviously nothing we can do right this minute, so let’s both sleep on it and see how things look tomorrow night.”

On my way home that evening, I swooped low over a suburban driveway and caught what turned out to be a gerbil. Funny-looking thing-slight, with a brushlike tail and a scrap of red fabric around her midsection. I had planned to grab a quick bite and go home to bed, but something this potentially interesting-it would be a shame to just kill it.