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they were not the kind of creatures you ever raised for eggs or meat.
    The whole place was built from scrounged boards, all painted a peeling, bubbly green that flaked off and ran to black in places. I stopped in the road, tasting metal in my throat. I knew the color and the burned, blistered paint.
    The Heintz zoo was made from pieces of my ruined house.
    I climbed down through the ditch and came all the way up to the chain-link fence. On the other side, the animals crouched in their cages, staring back at me. There were doves and quail and a scraggly possum, some baby raccoons and a white peacock, but those were nothing—they were almost normal—compared to the weasels and the foxes. There was a speckled bobcat in a wire run, and a coyote, and there in the back corner of the yard, a bony-ribbed creature too big to be anything but an actual cougar. It crouched in the dirt, glaring out from under a tin-roofed lean-to like it wanted to tear me down.
    Up close to the fence was a badger in an ugly little hutch that had been hammered together with pieces of my own front door. I’d never seen a badger anywhere but in books, and its face was broader and shrewder than I’d pictured. It peered out at me with small, bright eyes. Not pitiful, but patient, like it was just waiting for the right moment to break out and get going.
    I stared over the mismatched roofs of the zoo and toward the house. With a start, I realized that a girl was watching us from the porch, slumped on the bench swing with her pale hair in her face. She raised her head and even from the ditch, I could tell that it was Davenport, as see-through and wispy as ever.
    Behind me, Shiny made an ugly noise. “The weird-as-shit apple does not fall far from the crazy-tree.”
    “It’s not her fault,” I said, because the way Davenport sat huddled on the swing was as sad as any of the animals in their cages, and I could think of nothing worse than having to live in the middle of it.
    Shiny just shrugged and turned away. “Her dad is plain out of his mind. Shit like this should be illegal.”
    “
Isn’t
it? Illegal?”
    “I don’t know. I guess maybe, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not like anyone ever comes out here and does anything about it.”
    “Why not?”
    “Well, it’s his business, wanting to own every kind of creature around. And anyway, to do something, they’d have to go up on his property, and no one’s going to risk that. He
will
shoot you.”
    I knew that was probably true—folks in the Willows could be very particular about their land—but still, it seemed to me that some things were ugly enough that fixing them was worth trespassing. I didn’t tell Shiny that if I had my way, something was going to be done about it.
    We turned our backs on the house and started walking. The county road that led into town was number 5, but everyone called it the Crooked Mile, though it was more wiggly than crooked and quite a bit more than a mile. We walked along the gravel shoulder, because even though it was faster to take a straight line through the woods, I’d had it hammered into me from birth not to step in other people’s pastures.
    The way into town was marked by bridges. The Blue Jack Creek wound down through the hills and hollows, snaking back and forth across the lowlands and the road, all the way down to the county line. The land around the creek was mostly pasture, marked by nothing and nothing, with one rickety water tower rising in the distance.
    As we got closer to town, the road got paved and the woods got thin. We crossed the last bridge, past a faded tin sign that said WELCOME TO NEW SOUTH BEN D : HOME OF GOOD PEOPL E AND GOOD WATER .
    Town itself was ten blocks long, low and slow and sleepy. You could walk from one end to the other in less than a heartbeat. As we went, I tried to see the place as it had been, but it was older and deader than the town in my mind. Everything was smaller than I remembered.
    I read off the names of the