Today he was pacing back and forth, dragging his fingers in the dirt and glancing at the people.
Last year, he'd sat there like a stuffed trophy.
Jim, John and I yelled and threw peanuts, a handful of which sold for a nickel from a glass dispenser by the guardrails. When some of the nuts hit him, he picked them up one by one with a hand way too big for the job, but then he delicately picked off the shell with his fingertips, popped the nuts in his mouth, and ate them. Just like we'd do. John, Jim and I laughed real loud.
The gorilla looked at us, stood straight up, roared, and beat his chest with his hands, Whap! Whap! Whap!
It scared me and all three of us jumped back. A man in a blue uniform with 'Cincinnati Zoo' embossed on a white badge came over. "Don't tease him, boys. He's an old man like me, a silverback.Have a little respect."
King Tut snorted and opened his mouth so his gums showed. His teeth were yellowish and worn except for four big fang-like canines.
Jim said, "I'm glad he can't get out."
My brother John and I stared down into the gulf that separated us from the gorillas. A moat they called it, but it didn't seem nearly deep enough to me. I glanced at the ape again, but he was ambling away, showing his rear end to us.
"Let's go somewhere else," I said, still shaking.
Mom said like a joke, "He's your cousin. So are all the monkeys. You're related to them."
Although I'd heard that before, it stuck in my mind this time.
The rest of the visit was just entertaining, like we were watching cartoons on TV: the animals brought up close enough to see clearly. The floppy proboscis drooped over the muzzle. The huge claws of the aardvark. The big-eyed nocturnals, tricked into feeding by some kind of special light in a dark room. Animals so enormous they were hard to believe. Roar, hiss and howl of their calls. They were odd and interesting, but they seemed very different from us. They lacked something King Tut had.
He looked so much like us, he bothered me. Our hair was like his thick fur. His long fingernails were like ours only bigger and stronger. His roar had seemed like a human scream of protest or complaint. All he could do was howl and act up. We could use words. Knowing he was kept in a cage made me think that a wildness like his was locked up inside of ourselves, and we were just as afraid to let it out as the zoo keepers were to let King Tut run loose.
Bill Vernon served in the United States Marine Corps, studied English literature, then taught it. Writing is his therapy, along with exercising outdoors and doing international folkdances. His poems, stories and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, and Five Star Mysteries published his novel Old Town in 2005.
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