by Taylor Brown
“You’re perfect.”
Lope looked at the blade, still edged in the old man’s blood. He reached out and took the knife, his dark fist closing around the handle.
“Why is that, exactly?”
Anse grinned, watching him wipe the blade on the cuff of his turnout pants.
“Because she likes anything with fight.”
* * *
It was nearly midnight when she came. Lope had been lying for hours on the porch planks, the double rifle stuck between a pair of white balusters. He’d been trying to stay awake, his lids fluttering, his eyes rolling back in his head. The womb of sleep seemed safe, so safe, no matter that he was in lion country.
When he first saw her, he was not sure if he was dreaming. He could see only her furred back sifting through the weeds, the muscular slink of her shoulders. She was moving like a lover might, her ribs clicking through the grass, her tail poised.
“Anse,” whispered Lope. “Anse!”
The old jockey lay on the other side of the porch. Lope realized he was snoring. He looked back and Henrietta was much closer now, as if she’d bounded toward him when he wasn’t looking. She stepped from a patch of weeds, and he watched the spheres of her eyes float through the night, incandescent. She crossed the paved road and he could almost hear the pad of her feet beneath the old man’s snores, the thump of her blood.
She entered the yard on the near side of the road. She seemed to be moving in tempo to the old man’s breaths, moving only when he inhaled. As if she were drawn by his very lungs, the beat of his heart. By whatever dreams were alive in his skull. She moved like a flame in the grass, flickering in and out of sight. A creature of pure instinct, mindless and true. Seeing her, Lope knew how firebugs longed to release flames from darkness, to stand glazed before their creations like worshippers, and how his own hand twitched on the throttle, itching to pour fuel into the hot heart of his sport bike. To make the world burn. He knew how the old man must long to uncage this killer, to let her rove his property in the night.
He turned and saw that Anse had risen on the other side of the porch. He was hardly taller than a child, and he moved in a sort of trance, bandy-legged and slow, his eyes open and unseeing as he passed before the dusty windows, making for the front steps. His bush hat was pushed back, haloing his head.
“Anse!”
The old man did not seem to hear him. His face shone with sweat and he’d left the pistol hanging from the post behind him. He turned a right face at the stairs, as if on a parade ground, and started down them, his cowboy heels banging on the wooden steps. The driveway was long and white-paved, and the old man stood motionless at its head. Slowly he opened his arms.
“Henri,” he said. “Baby.”
She emerged onto the driveway some ten yards in front of him, her forepaws so close they touched, her tail flicking flies from her back. Lope saw no recognition in her eyes, colored a desert gold.
“Come home,” said Anse. “Come to Papa.”
Lope was breathing hard now. He had her under the barrel of the rifle.
“Anse, get back on the steps.”
The old man ignored him, standing there with arms spread wide, as if he would embrace her when she came.
“Anse!”
Lope watched the lioness flatten herself low to the pavement, her haunches swelling, her body compressing into a fistlike knot before she exploded up the drive, leaping for the old man, her paws stretched out for him—for blood or embrace—and Lope felt the rifle slam back against his shoulder, the night illuminated for an instant in the stark daguerreotype of man and beast clenched upright in each other’s arms, the man’s head buried in the wreckage of the lion’s chest, the two of them toppling into the returning darkness.
Lope found them at the foot of the stairs, still clutched, the old man sobbing into the blown ruin of the animal’s heart. She was dead, her claws hooked inch-deep into the meat of his shoulder blades, her bone-colored nails curved like a second set of ribs. Anse looked up, his face painted with strange red designs, his eyes round with faith.
“She won’t let me go,” he sang. “She won’t let me go.”
CHAPTER 3
LITTLE EDEN
Tyler had heard them whispering in bars and on beaches, even on the campus quadrangles of Cornell, where she’d studied zoology. She was nearly six feet tall, with long-muscled limbs and angular hip bones. She’d rowed crew as an undergraduate, those long dawns of pain on the steaming water. Her back could still spread winglike with power from a backless dress.
Whoa, they whispered. Damn.
It was her size that made them whisper, she knew, and the muscles that shaped her arms. Her square unpolished nails and wide, hard shoulders. She was all angle and tendon, tanned leathery from the sun. She’d never worn makeup or sunscreen in all her years of subtropical living, and her smile lines were many. Her long hair was the color of wheat, the same as her face. Only her breasts were white.
Tyler watched her reflection in the mirror across the room, a pool of light mounted in a battered vanity. The wooden frame was nicked and scarred, the bulbs mostly blown, the little shelf lined with nail clippers and cologne bottles and talcum powder. In the glass she saw herself riding the small man beneath her at a canter, rolling in the saddle of his pelvis. Sweat shone between her breasts and her mouth was slightly parted, sucking air. Beneath her, Anse was small and square, his body blistered with hard little muscles built in barns and paddocks and corrals.
He was the old jockey, but in bed their roles were reversed. Here she spurred and heeled the fury from him, and he was close now, the flat tiles of his belly converging toward his navel, his eyes mashed shut, his blood rising, flushing his skin. Matilda, the former circus elephant, trumpeted over the grounds.
“God,” said Anse.
Tyler popped free of him. He jerked and pumped beneath her, sprouting a white tree of jelly over his stomach.
“God,” he said. “God.”
He lay there slack-mouthed. Tyler smiled, watching him. She wished he would stay that way awhile. Emptied out, calmed.
Instead he coughed and rose and walked his bowlegged walk to the bathroom, the trailer rattling slightly beneath him. The monkeys screeched in the distance, fighting over their daily ration of fruit. Anse wet a hand towel under the faucet and swiped his belly clean, digging at his shallow navel. When he turned to the toilet, she saw the white chevron of scars clawed into his back. The marks of the lioness.
A green burn in her gut, like swallowed absinthe.
How could she compete with that?
* * *
Henrietta was dead, killed in Anse’s arms. But even veterinarian Tyler, who believed in love as a mainly physiochemical phenomenon—the product of certain doses of certain neurotransmitters flaring between synapses—knew that no creature died completely. Reflections of them were carried in the very cells of their loved ones, in clusters of neurons in their brains. There was the way the light of a golden lioness imprinted itself on the retina on a Sunday evening at feeding time, when she lifted her face to the falling sun and licked her teeth, or when, on a Christmas morning, she pawed a new twenty-inch Boomer Ball tossed into her enclosure. The way she rolled in the grass to scratch her back, or came bounding to the fence, chuffing like a tiger. These images burned like chemical fires in the dark of a man’s brain, and they were a long time in burning out.
That was okay. Tyler could wait. She’d waited so long already.
* * *
Little Eden. The place had been built in the 1950s, a roadside zoo that attracted passing families in their overloaded station wagons as they sped down the coastal highway for the beaches of Florida. Coming through Georgia, southbound vacationers crossed salt marshes and passed rickety stands selling PEECHES and P-NUTS—some hosting Razzle-Dazzle and other illegal games of chance in windowless sheds out back. They blasted through tunnels of slash pine and passed motor inns nestled beneath heavy oaks and crossed rivers that bristled wit
h the outriggers of trawling fleets. They passed Little Eden, which advertised 100 SPECIES OF WILD ANIMAL. Here the children bawled to stop, if only to walk beneath the white fangs of the roaring lion whose throat held the entrance door.
Tyler had been one of these children. In 1970, five years old, she’d stood beneath the ribbed red mouth of the lion, waiting, bobbing with anticipation. When her father opened the door, the blast of hay and dung and animal sweat was her kind of heaven. Inside, monkeys swung from a steel jungle gym and parrots cawed. An ostrich pecked corn thrown by children and peacocks roamed freely, fanning their iridescent trains. An elephant bathed itself from a green plastic pool and a maneless lion paced back and forth, his body striped with the shadows of iron bars.
When the interstate was completed a few years later, the river of station wagons was diverted inland, along the new superhighway, and too few people walked through the lion’s jaws. It starved. The animals were sold to zoos or private collectors; kudzu covered the cages and enclosures. The roof of the giraffe hangar caved. Storm-felled oaks crushed sections of the corrugated tin walls. Snakes rattled the grass and squirrels skated along the monkey bars in nervy commerce. Roaches scuttled about, the native hordes.
Then came Anderson Caulfield—Anse—who bought the place to turn into an exotic wildlife rescue. A sanctuary. He rebuilt the walls and enclosures and cut back the vines and man-tall weeds. He donned climbing spurs and ascended trees to trim dangerous overhangs, his chainsaw dangling from a length of rope. He pressure-washed the algal film from the lion’s fangs and cleaned and stocked the gift shop and got his permits in order. He saved a six-thousand-pound elephant from a bankrupt carnival circus, her body scarred from trainers’ bullhooks, and an arthritic white tiger from a defunct Las Vegas magic show who’d leapt through a thousand rings of fire, circus hoops wrapped in kerosene-soaked rags. He brought in animals from failed private zoos or police seizures or illegal backyard pens. The aged and orphaned and neglected.
People had a lot of reasons for why Anse bought the sanctuary. Some said a quarter horse had died between his knees, gigged by his heels, the animal’s heart exploding like an overinflated balloon. They said the trampling hooves of the other horses missed him—a miracle—and he believed there must be a reason why. Others said it was his service in Vietnam, when he watched a tiger run from a napalm strike, trailing long tongues of flame. No, said others, it was his time in the Selous Scouts, in the Rhodesian Bush War, when he wore a steely osprey pinned to his black beret and hunted men like game.
A few, in whisper, said Anse knew the end of man was coming, and he wanted Little Eden to re-seed the continent. He wanted lone tigers to slink narrow-ribbed through the green explosion of old rest stops and lion prides to sun themselves in the weedy craters of Walmart parking lots. He wanted leopards to leap from highway overpasses onto trains of cattle grown long-horned and feral as the ancient aurochs of Eurasia, and ocelots to play dead on the graveled roofs of gas stations, poked by monkeys with sticks until the bravest of them got too close.
Tyler, of course, knew it was simpler than that.
His heart was broken.
* * *
“Who wants to pet a tiger today?” she asked them.
A number of them, the boys mainly, raised their hands. The little girls had more sense.
“Okay,” she said. “Now we know who the crazies are.” The schoolchildren giggled while the boys blushed and lowered their hands. She couldn’t remember how old they were. Eight, nine? Their school bus was sitting out in the parking lot, the Plexiglas windows scratched with elementary cave art, curses and crosses and arrow-pinned hearts.
“We have a no-touch policy here at Little Eden,” she told them. “These animals are not pets. They’re wild animals, and should be treated as such. As a nonprofit wildlife sanctuary, we follow certain guidelines that private zoos do not. We never breed or sell our animals, nor do we allow direct contact with the public. The animals’ welfare is paramount.”
One of the boys raised his hand—or did he never lower it? He was shorter than the others, squarer. He had the face of an old man. Churchill, maybe, lumped and concentrated. Tyler looked at him.
“Yes?”
“Where do you buy the animals?”
“We don’t. They’re rescues.”
“Rescues from where?”
“Some come from people who try to keep them as pets. Some from breeders in the exotic animal trade or cub-petting parks, where they euthanize or sell off the cubs once they’re too big to handle. Some we get from roadside zoos or sanctuaries forced to close due to financial hardship.” She knew she needed to simplify her language for these field trips, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. “Two of our tigers were found crossing the highway outside of Atlanta.”
“So you’re like the pound?”
“We’re better than the pound.”
“Do the animals ever get out?”
Tyler stopped herself. She thought of Henrietta.
“Yes,” she said.
* * *
Sometimes, when they were making love, Tyler would forget and touch the scars that ribbed Anse’s back. They were keloid tissue, thick and fibrous as worms. Anse would shudder, squirming under her touch. Sometimes he even softened between her legs. Then his brow would darken with shame and the jigsaw lines of his face no longer fit. Sometimes Tyler imagined a war inside him. She imagined his lungs as airships, floating in a red-dark sky, his blood shunting trains to the front, the small explosions rumbling in his temples and jaws. At these times, she wished she could reach inside him, like Henrietta did, her hands cool and white, and calm the storm of his heart.
When Henrietta got loose, search parties formed all across the county, small knots of men and women in uniform, clutching their shotguns and rifles with both hands. They roved the tall grasses of empty lots, the treed edges of baseball diamonds. They peeked inside the barrel slides of playgrounds. They stayed as close to their trucks as they could.
Tyler was one of the first on the scene when Henrietta was killed. It was one of the zombie neighborhoods along the river, a scrollwork of curbed streets studded with fire hydrants and street signs and a single model home built the year before the housing market collapsed. The lots were waist-high with weeds and grasses, and Henrietta lay dead in the driveway of the empty house. Red roots of blood had bloomed from the hole in her chest, inching their way across the white pavement, sliding sideways through the joints. Anse lay embraced in her forelegs, her claws set in the meat of his back like grappling hooks. His face was smeared with blood, silvered with tears.
The ambulance lights whirled across the scene, red and white. The emergency workers had just rolled up. They stood stunned, unsure how to proceed. The man who’d shot her—a firefighter searching with Anse—was standing by the porch steps. A rifle hung from his hands.
“He wouldn’t get back on the porch,” he said. “She charged him.”
Later, Anse would maintain that Henrietta was only running into his arms.
“But her claws were protracted,” said Tyler.
Anse frowned and spat.
“You never did trust her.”
It wasn’t that. He’d been too close to her. He would go inside her enclosure. Play with her, feed her by hand. Direct breaches of sanctuary policy. This wasn’t some cub hand-raised from birth. Henrietta had been wild once, a young lion bounding and tumbling amid the yellow grasslands of Africa, eating from the bloody hulls of wildebeests or zebras her pride had felled. Maybe that was why he loved her so much. She was fiercer than the others. Wilder. Her eyes had not always been fenced, their orbits defined by men. You could see it in the way she moved, the arrogant slink. How to love a creature of such majesty, and not want to feel its power beneath your hand?
They lifted Anse onto a stretcher, belly-down, and the wheels snapped flat as they loaded him into the ambulance. One of the EMS workers cut down the back of his safari shirt with a pair of trauma shears and peeled back
the fabric, revealing Anse’s slashed shoulder blades. The workers produced their swabs and antiseptics, and Tyler turned away, enlisting a group of idle firefighters to lift Henrietta’s body into the bed of her truck. Afterward, she looked at the scene. A frantic brushwork on the white pavement, scraped and smeared by the boots of emergency workers.
A heart undone.
“He wouldn’t listen,” said the fireman with the rifle. “He wouldn’t listen.”
* * *
Tyler showed the kids Snow and Fire, the tiger siblings found crossing the highway outside of Atlanta. A placard on their enclosure stated various “Tiger Facts”:
A tiger’s roar can be heard more than two miles away.
A tiger’s night vision is six times better than a human’s.
Wild tigers have been known to swim distances of 18 miles …
Snow Tiger was lying beside her water trough, licking the inside of her paw like an enormous housecat, while Fire Tiger paced back and forth along the fence, watching the troop of young, nose-picking monkeys who might or might not be destined for his belly. Tyler stood before them, hands wide, as if showing the size of a fish.
“Today there are more captive tigers in the state of Texas alone than in the wild in the whole rest of the world,” she told them. Their eyes widened. “America is full of them. Thousands. They’re bred for the exotic pet trade. For the entertainment industry and pay-to-play parks.” The words came by rote almost, a homily said a thousand times. She had to fight this, summoning the power they deserved. “They’re kept in cages built for dogs a quarter their size, fed spoiled meat and kibble. Often, their fangs and claws are extracted—taken out.”
“What kind are they?” asked the little boy with the old man’s face.
“Crossbreeds. Mongrels. The breeders don’t care about their species. Some of them, their parents are brother and sister. Many are killed when they get too big, or sold to China for their parts.”