Belly Up Read online

  The parents who didn’t look squeamish were growing annoyed. Many turned to Marge, expecting that, as the only person in the vicinity wearing a FunJungle uniform, she should be doing something to address the Henry situation. But Marge just kept staring, slack-jawed, at Henry’s corpse. Marge wasn’t the best decision-maker on normal days; I’d seen her take ten minutes to decide whether to have the fried chicken bucket or the triple nachos grande for lunch. (For the record, she’d ultimately opted for both.) Faced with an actual crisis, her brain had apparently overloaded and shut down.

  Nearby, a teenager dressed in a Henry Hippo costume paced nervously, unsure what to do. His job usually didn’t require much thinking; he was essentially supposed to stand still, wave hello, and let tourists take his picture. Mbuko Overlook had been selected as the best place for this because it offered the most shade. The Henry costume was thick and heavy and had poor ventilation; in the direct Texas sun, it could quickly get to over a hundred and twenty degrees inside. On the first few days the park was open, the Henry portrayers had mistakenly been stationed at unshaded Mulumbo Point. Two had passed out from dehydration, collapsing on small children.

  The actors only had hour-long shifts, because they had to drink a ton of water to survive in the suit and would inevitably have to pee. However, their job orders stated that during that hour, they were never to leave their posts, no matter what. The Henry on duty now obviously felt he shouldn’t be there, lurking around the dead hippo like his ghost, but he didn’t want to get in trouble, either.

  An excited family came along, unaware that the real Henry lay dead just around the corner, and positioned their children at the fake Henry’s feet for a photo. The worried actor fidgeted so nervously that the mother had to steady his hands twice.

  It seemed someone should take care of this, but since Marge was a basket case, that left me. Once the family had taken their pictures, I approached the actor and told him, “You should probably get out of here.”

  “Are you from Administration?” Henry asked, contorting to get a look at me. The costume had been designed so the actor inside could only see through some gauze in Henry’s open mouth, which was angled downward. It was well suited to prevent the actors from stepping on children, but not for looking people in the face or, as had been proved on several occasions, avoiding low-hanging tree branches. Since I was standing outside his range of sight, the actor had no way to tell I was only twelve.

  “Yes,” I said. “Now move it before you freak anyone else out.”

  “Yes, sir!” The actor hurried away so quickly he forgot to watch his feet, stumbled over a bench, and face-planted in the landscaping.

  I shook my head in disgust. Some people have way too much respect for authority.

  Henry staggered to his feet and reeled away drunkenly, scaring a few guests.

  A hand clamped on my shoulder. I spun around to find Martin del Gato glaring at me.

  Martin was the director of operations at FunJungle, which was an odd choice, because he hated children and animals. Dad said he was supposed to be some hotshot business genius, though. I could usually spot him coming from a mile away, because in a park crowded with T-shirt–clad tourists, he was always the only person wearing a three-piece suit. Martin was perpetually overworked and constantly appeared to be five seconds from a heart attack, but he somehow still found time every day to chastise me for doing something wrong. “Who gave you permission to dismiss my employees?” he demanded.

  “I figured someone needed to do something,” I replied. “Seeing as Marge has gone brain-dead.”

  Martin gave me a glare so hot I could imagine eggs frying on his bald head. “Why would anyone need to dismiss the actors?” He scowled.

  “Because of what happened to Henry,” I said.

  Martin looked at me blankly—and I realized, to my surprise, that he didn’t know about Henry yet. He turned toward Mbuko Overlook and took in the stunned crowd. I guess, in his haste to reprimand me, he hadn’t noticed them. His anger was quickly replaced by concern. “What’s wrong with Henry?” he asked.

  I’d been reading about Ancient Rome the night before; apparently, they used to kill messengers who brought bad news. “You should probably see for yourself,” I told him.

  Keeping his hand locked on my shoulder, Martin shoved through the crowd. When Marge saw him, she finally snapped out of her comatose state and pretended she was doing something important. Martin blew right past her—and caught his first glimpse of Henry.

  He said something in Spanish. I didn’t know what it meant, but I’ll bet a hundred dollars it was something for which I’d have been sent to my room for saying in English.

  For maybe half a second, Martin seemed truly saddened by Henry’s death—and then his inner administrator kicked in. He immediately went into Damage Control Mode. “Go find Doc,” he told me. “Wherever he is. Tell him to get over here ASAP.”

  I considered pointing out it was a bit too late for the head vet to help Henry, but decided against it. Martin probably wanted to get rid of me as much as he wanted to locate Doc. Meanwhile, his attention was already on other things. He instructed Marge to get all the tourists out of there, then started barking orders into his radio.

  I knew better than to stick around after Martin had essentially told me to scram, but I felt compelled to take one last look at Henry. I’d seen plenty of deaths in Africa, so I wasn’t that freaked out by animal corpses, but something really bothered me about this one. I’d been at Hippo River the day before and Henry had been in a rare good mood, prancing about on the river bottom, putting on a great show for the tourists. He was only twenty, which was young for a hippo, and he’d certainly looked healthy. It didn’t make sense for him to be dead.

  Suddenly, Marge grabbed me by the collar, yanking me away from the overlook. “What are you still doing here?” she growled.

  “Trying to guess who’s bigger: Henry or you.”

  Marge’s eyes narrowed in anger, but I wrenched free of her grasp before she could do anything. Then I raced off into FunJungle, leaving the corpse of the world’s most famous hippopotamus behind.

  I found Doc out in SafariLand, trying to lance a boil on a warthog.

  This would have been a pretty easy procedure if his patient had been human. A boil’s really just a big pus-filled sac on the skin, sort of like a giant zit, only a lot more painful. Lancing it means popping it with a sterile needle so the pus can run out and the swelling can go down. It takes only a few seconds. But you can’t explain that to a warthog. You can’t say, “If you hold still for a moment, I’ll make you feel better.” All the warthog knew was it was in pain, it was angry, and the last thing it wanted to see was some guy coming at it with a giant needle.

  For this reason, a lot of zoo vets would have just darted the warthog with sedative, waited for it to fall asleep, and then done the job nice and easy. But Doc wasn’t like that. Mom and Dad both said he was one of the top vets in the country, maybe even the best; he’d run the veterinary hospital at the prestigious Bronx Zoo before FunJungle had lured him away. Doc hated using sedatives, because it was tricky to get the dosage exactly right. If you gave the animal too little, it might wake up in the middle of the procedure and attack you—so most people tried to err on the side of caution. The problem there was, if you gave the animal too much sedative, it might fall asleep and never wake up again. Doc didn’t like people a whole lot, but he really cared about animals. He hated the thought of one of them dying for no good reason. So rather than take that chance, he and two of the biggest zookeepers he could find were out in the broiling sun, trying to pin down the pissed-off warthog and lance it without being gored by its tusks.

  It didn’t look like the best time to inform Doc that Henry was dead. The men had been trying to subdue the warthog for a while with no success, and Doc was in a nasty mood. But then, Doc tended to be in a nasty mood most of the time anyhow, so I figured maybe he’d be too distracted by the warthog to get angry with me for bringi
ng bad news.

  Doc had just backed the warthog into a corner of its paddock when I arrived. He was a tall man, well-muscled from years of overpowering animals and baked brown from long days in the sun, with a mustache so thick it looked like a wooly bear caterpillar had fallen asleep on his upper lip. He groaned when he saw me, though I didn’t take it personally. Doc pretty much groaned in response to anyone approaching him. The only person he actually seemed to like was my mom. (They’d met fifteen years earlier when she’d done a gorilla-research apprenticeship at the Bronx Zoo.) “Beat it, Teddy,” he snapped. “I’m busy.”

  I’m not sure what I’d ever done to earn Doc’s distaste. I think merely being human was enough.

  “Martin told me to come get you,” I said.

  Doc’s reaction proved he liked Martin even less than me. “Go tell Martin to go jump in a lake.”

  “Henry’s dead,” I told him.

  Doc and the keepers were surprised enough to take their eyes off the angry warthog. They all glanced at me for a moment to confirm I wasn’t making a bad joke, then quickly returned their attention to their patient before he could make a run for it.

  “For how long?” Doc asked.

  “I don’t know. . . .”

  “Well, guess.”

  I checked my watch. It had taken me almost twenty minutes to track Doc down. First I’d been told he was in The Swamp, then Amazon Adventure, and finally SafariLand. I’d run myself ragged looking for him. “Forty-five minutes. An hour, maybe.”

  “Any idea why the old bastard croaked?”

  “I think that’s what Martin wanted to talk to you about. He wants to see you ASAP.”

  “Why? Henry’s dead. It’s not like he can get worse.”

  “I don’t know why. He just said to find you. . . .”

  “Tell Martin to find a place for an autopsy and I’ll be along when I can.”

  “An autopsy? For Henry? Martin’s not going to like that.”

  Doc smiled for what was probably the first time that day. “No, I suspect he won’t like it at all.”

  If it seems surprising that Doc wasn’t upset by Henry’s death, there was a perfectly good reason for this: Henry was the meanest zoo animal of all time. Hippos already have a reputation for being among the most foul-tempered members of the animal kingdom, but even keepers who had worked with hippos for years thought Henry was the nastiest one they’d ever come across. You couldn’t have picked a worse animal to be the mascot of a multi-billion-dollar family theme park. His selection had been a colossal screw-up. To understand how it happened, though, you need to know how FunJungle came to be.

  FunJungle had been built by the Texas billionaire J.J. McCracken. J.J. always admitted he didn’t know much about animals, but he knew a heck of a lot about making money. He’d been born dirt-poor in a small town not far from where FunJungle now sat—and somehow managed to parlay a couple hundred dollars he’d won in a poker game into enough money to make him the third-richest man in America. The way J.J. spoke about this, it sounded like anyone could do it—but the fact was, he had a gift. Whatever he invested in always made money. Dad often said that if J.J. McCracken set his money on fire, the next day, burned dollars would be worth more than gold.

  Despite being so rich, J.J. had a reputation as a friendly, folksy guy who’d never let having money go to his head. Instead of wearing fancy suits, he preferred blue jeans and sneakers. Rather than live in some Beverly Hills mansion, he had a ranch in Texas Hill Country near his hometown. He drove a pickup truck instead of riding in a limo and preferred BBQ to sushi. And whenever he was interviewed about how he’d thought up FunJungle, he inevitably gave all the credit to his thirteen-year-old daughter, Summer.

  Summer had been only six when she’d given J.J. the idea. (“Planted the seed” was how he always put it.) Like most children, she’d loved animals, so when her dad had given her the choice of going anywhere in the world for vacation, she’d asked to go on safari in Africa. J.J. had agreed, but then learned no safari company would take anyone under age seven—no matter how much he was willing to pay. When he broke this news to Summer, she was devastated. Why wasn’t there anyplace for children to go on safari in America? she’d asked. “Good question,” her father had replied, and decided to build one.

  Of course, J.J. McCracken wouldn’t have built FunJungle merely to please his daughter. No, he smelled profit. His research staff quickly discovered that zoos and aquariums attracted more than five hundred million visitors in America each year—more than all sporting events combined. So then, J.J. reasoned, if he built a zoo impressive enough to siphon off only a fraction of those people, he’d make a mint.

  To lure all those tourists, however, FunJungle had to be more than just a zoo. It had to be a theme park as well: a place people would be willing to cross the country to see; a place they’d visit for days on end; a place they’d want to come back to every year. J.J. declared that FunJungle should be a combination of the San Diego Wild Animal Park and Disney World—and then proceeded to steal ideas from each.

  SafariLand, for example, was directly copied from San Diego: Several massive enclosures—each more than a square mile in size—held hundreds of animals living together in a facsimile of the wild. There were two ways to see it: You could take a thirty-minute monorail ride around the perimeter—or for an extra hundred dollars per person, you could take a personal safari inside the enclosures. You’d travel in a Land Rover with a guide and only a few other people. I’d gotten to do this for free with my parents before the park opened, and I have to admit, it was darn close to going on safari in Africa. Maybe even better, because at FunJungle, they let you feed the rhinos apples by hand.

  FunJungle had all sorts of other attractions that other zoos didn’t. There were souped-up animal exhibits like the Polar Pavilion—an indoor polar bear and penguin exhibit where it really snowed—or Blue Planet, the world’s largest saltwater aquarium, featuring a man-made coral reef you could snorkel over and several pools where you could pay to swim with dolphins. There were shows where animals performed tricks, a sky ride, a carnival midway, water slides, two huge play areas for kids—Mom called them “jungle gyms on steroids”—and even a few vaguely educational thrill rides. My favorite was “Life of a Bee,” which used a motion simulator to put riders through a harrowing five minutes of being attacked by everything from birds to flyswatters. It was awesome.

  In addition to the park, J.J. also planned to make money from the hotels around it, which he owned. There were only two so far—although others were slated for construction—and they were unlike any other hotels in America. One was a safari lodge on the edge of SafariLand; the other was a “Caribbean resort” next to the Blue Planet snorkeling area. They were extremely well-designed; visiting each felt like going to a whole different country. Neither place was cheap, but both were booked solid more than a year in advance.

  Finally, there was the merchandising.

  To be really profitable, J.J. knew FunJungle had to keep making money long after people had visited it. To do this, he stole an idea from Disney: The park shouldn’t just have animals. It should have characters . To most people, one hippo was exactly like any other. But if you created a personality—à la Henry the Hippo—people wouldn’t simply want to see him: They’d buy anything with his picture on it.

  Now, even if you didn’t know Henry was a jerk, it still might have seemed like a bad idea to make a hippopotamus the cornerstone of a merchandising empire. After all, as mammals went, hippos were fat, dangerous, and not particularly attractive. But merchandising wasn’t about selling reality. As J.J. often pointed out (incorrectly): “Mickey Mouse is just a rat in suspenders.”

  The real reason for selecting Henry as the mascot had far more to do with television than biology. J.J. knew all along that it would take years to build FunJungle, so he decided to create excitement about its inhabitants well ahead of time. He already owned a cable TV network, so he ordered the employees to develop an animate
d series called “FunJungle Friends.” (Here, he was stealing another idea from Disney, which had used The Wonderful World of Disney to blatantly market Disneyland well before it opened. It was a good idea to steal, though; not only could J.J. plug his own theme park—but he got advertisers to pay him to do it.)

  FunJungle Friends was originally about a bunch of zoo animals who’d slip out of their cages after the keepers went home and have all sorts of wacky adventures. Eleanor Elephant, Zelda Zebra, Larry the Lizard, and Uncle O-Rang were the stars. Henry Hippo was supposed to be only a minor character at first; he didn’t even appear until the fourth episode. But for some reason, people loved him. Even the animators couldn’t quite figure out why. Maybe children found Henry nonthreatening. Maybe he was just a particularly attractive shade of purple. Whatever the case, he was a hit. Henry Hippo merchandise began outselling that of all the other characters by a huge margin, and his cry of excitement—“Jinkies McPinkies!”—quickly became a national catchphrase.

  J.J. was thrilled. FunJungle Friends quickly became The Henry Hippo Show , a series of Henry Hippo movies was greenlit—and Henry was named the FunJungle spokesperson. (Or rather, “spokesanimal.”) The park was reconfigured to place Hippo River right by the front gates. The marketing department began slapping Henry’s face on every piece of merchandise you could think of. On his show, Henry started imploring kids to visit him at FunJungle years before the park even opened. The effect was immediate; children across the country clamored for FunJungle vacations. Families came to Texas just to see the construction site. Henry was a phenomenon—and he made FunJungle a phenomenon along with him. Throughout it all, however, no one ever stopped to consider what a real hippopotamus was like. (Of course, anyone who knew a whit about hippos would have—but no animal specialists were hired at FunJungle until long after the decision to revere Henry had been made.)