by Taylor Brown
This revelation sent tiny hands clapping over tiny mouths and the children’s eyes crowded with tears. Tyler always felt guilty at this, but they must know.
“We believe these two were trained as circus tigers, then sold as pets when the circus folded. They were found half starved, chain collars embedded in their necks.”
The children were starting to sniffle and hum, mere seconds from open crying.
“Who’s that for?” asked the same little boy, pointing to a small, square cage directly across from the tigers’ enclosure. Similar ones, empty, were scattered about the sanctuary grounds.
Safety cages.
“Us,” said Tyler. “In case one of the cats gets out.”
A wail broke from the rank of children.
Just then, Anse’s big dually truck appeared on the path, rounding the bend between enclosures. It came grumbling toward them, crunching rocks and dirt clods beneath its six tires, then squeaked to a halt alongside the pen. The children looked up wide-eyed, their tears forgotten. In the truck bed, a plastic bucket bristled with tawny shoots of deer legs, each capped with a polished black hoof. Anse jumped down from the cab—hardly taller than the schoolchildren—and walked to the back of the truck, his square jaw jutting beneath his bush hat. He dropped the tailgate and pulled the bucket to the edge, the hooves rocking like the blooms of some evil houseplant.
“Tiger food,” he said.
The kids stood open-mouthed before the sight, forgetting their tears. Anse had them in thrall. Tyler realized she was still talking, telling them about the weekly enrichment they did with the tigers. How they would give them perfumed phone books to shred or Boomer Balls to paw. How they would dress up in costumes or blow bubbles through the fence. Anything to stimulate the tigers, to curb the neuroses of captivity. Otherwise they would rub the fur from their coats, sliding their ribs back and forth along the chain link, back and forth, like inmates rattling their cups.
But the children weren’t listening. They were watching Anse, who drew a pair of shanks from the bucket and walked his bandy-legged walk to the fence, his big howdah pistol wiggling under one arm. A large-diameter PVC pipe dropped like a playground slide through the chain link. Snow and Fire were prancing with anticipation, twisting and turning, waiting for their supper to slide through the chute. Anse watched them, jaw muscles rippling like tiny explosions beneath the skin. Tyler opened her mouth. This man, how she longed to be between his ribs, where the thunder lived. How she longed to be there, close to his heart—or else spill him like Henrietta did.
Her words came fast, without thought, springing through her teeth.
“People say the lion is king of the jungle,” she said. “They are wrong.”
The children swung their heads toward her, round-eyed, and Anse looked up.
Tyler inhaled, swelling her chest.
“Lions don’t live in the jungle,” she said. “They live on the savannah, the vast grasslands of Africa.”
The children looked stunned. Here was a break in testament, in all they were taught.
“But tigers,” said Tyler, “tigers are ambush predators, built for the thickest jungles in the world.”
Anse was watching her. His face hard, showing nothing.
Tyler straightened her spine. She was long and powerful. She could feel the hard muscles that corded her arms, the sharpness of her teeth. She pointed at the tigers. “Look at them. Look how slim they are, how narrow their ribs and hips.” The children looked. “Built narrow,” she said, “so they can cut through the jungle like machetes.”
Anse had lowered the deer leg. It hung dripping from his hand. His mouth was half open now, watching her. Tyler slid her tongue across her teeth.
“See their foreheads,” she said. She touched the fence, lightly, and the tigers turned to look, their heads hovering over the grass. The children squinted at them. Even Anse. The animals bore similar black markings over their eyes, like calligraphy done with brush and ink.
“All tigers have similar patterns on their foreheads, three horizontal stripes and a single vertical one. This marking closely resembles the Chinese character Wang, where the horizontal strokes symbolize earth, man, and heaven, and the vertical stroke unites them.” Her shadow danced over the faces of the children. “Do you know what this character means?”
They shook their heads. Their mouths were hanging open, as if waiting to be filled.
“In Chinese, the mark of Wang means king.”
Twenty little eyes widened beneath her, and Tyler licked her lips. Her words were like hot stones on her tongue now burning with power.
“So the tiger has king emblazoned on its forehead, embedded in its skin. Shave a tiger’s coat, and the mark will remain, as if tattooed on its head.” She looked across her gathered flock. “So tell me, who’s king of the jungle now?”
The group hummed with awe, and Tyler looked to Anse. His bush hat was pushed back on his forehead, his battled cheeks zigzagged with tears. Now he blinked hard, as if remembering something, and dropped the clubs of meat through the chute. The tigers pounced on the meal with their heavy paws and teeth. The children watched. Their mouths hung slack and round, filled already with the words they would repeat again and again, like the verses of some new faith. Tyler looked again to Anse. The old jockey had pulled his hat brim low. His tears weren’t for her, she knew. They were for these wild old kings, caged like the broken meat of his heart.
CHAPTER 4
PHANTOM CAT
Malaya was at the store, buying milk. The jugs stood like white artillery shells behind the glass, uniform and inspected, ready to boom whistling into enemy country. Her thumb kneaded the door handle—lately, her mind turned everything into a bomb. The avocados had the rough green skin of grenades. The soda cans had the heft of flashbangs. The bricks of ground meat, shrink-wrapped and pliable, could be blocks of plastic explosive.
She opened the cold case, a cool hiss, and grabbed a half-gallon jug of skim milk. At the register, she sorted through crimped, linty bills, flattening them beneath the joyless smack of the cashier’s gum. Malaya’s nails were chipped and the purple streak of dye in her hair was twisted, frayed. The register sang open, slammed closed, and the cashier dropped the change into Malaya’s palm, careful their hands didn’t touch.
The AC units rattled overhead, blasting cold air through the ducts, fogging the store windows against the midday sun. Through them, the parking lot looked bleary, water-colored. Malaya jammed the change into her pocket and took the jug under one arm and walked through the sliding doors. It was like walking into a mouth, the wet heat of June. Like walking down the throat of that lion, long-fanged, which roared over the door of the old roadside zoo off the highway.
In her car was a plastic bottle of Aristocrat vodka. One hundred–proof, like a punishment. She mixed equal parts vodka and milk in the thermos, which went nearly everywhere with her now, the insides sticky like old glue, and she glugged and glugged. She must stay like that store, she thought, fogged against the hell of the world. She must stay cold.
* * *
She was there again, in the dark country of dream, and the rhino came sliding through the purple waves of grass like a destroyer. The river divided them, the moon puddled on its surface, and Malaya’s rifle was chambered, trained on the line of bobbing human heads that pursued the creature through the grass.
Poachers.
She blinked. Now they were on the riverbank, arrayed like pieces cut from onyx and stone. There was the rhino, armored and gentle, bending his head to drink, blades of grass fuzzing his chin, and the poachers kneeling before him, raising their weapons. She could feel her unit fanned behind her, silent in the trees. Then the White Wolf, his breath tickling the back of her neck.
“Don’t. They must be first to engage.”
Malaya watched the lead poacher level his rifle.
She’d found so many of these creatures blood-blasted in the veld, like wrecked semi-trucks, highway accidents where someone died.
Their faces mutilated, their calves nosing them again and again, squealing, trying to make them rise. She’d found too many, too late. She must be the leopard badged over her heart. The killer. She must deliver her teeth at the steely point of a scream.
“Stand down,” said Jaager. “That is an order.”
Malaya’s index finger moved to the fire selector, snapping off the safety. The lead poacher steadied his barrel, threading his finger over the trigger. Malaya held her breath.
“Please—” said Jaager.
Her bullet shrieked across the river.
A spurt of sand at the man’s feet.
The poachers turned to run, like Malaya knew they would. All but one. The lead poacher dropped to one knee and turned his rifle across the river, bravely, to cover his comrades’ retreat. His weapon flashed in the night, a starry fire, and Malaya waited for a white bolt of power to burn through her skull, to open her mind into the night. Instead she felt a round snap past her ear, the hot pulse against her cheek, and the poacher’s head jerked, his body dropping limp on the sand. Now other shots, a staccato burst from the woods, and the rest of the poachers were crumpling in place, as by her own trigger or command. Malaya opened her mouth, wishing to call back the muzzle fire spitting from the trees, but her dream-tongue was silent, as if someone had hold of her throat.
* * *
Malaya woke boiling in her own sweat, her chest heaving. She pulled the door latch and spilled from her car, landing on the bank of the Satilla River—a secluded place where she came sometimes to sit and drink, watching the dark water slide past, listening to the whoosh of log trucks passing through the pines and over the bridge downstream.
Now she lay on the bank. Her eyes itched and her face was webbed in slime. Her calf burned, still raw from two nights ago when she’d tried to scrub the black leopard spots from her skin, as if that would absolve her guilt. Her thermos lay there beside her, bubbling like a baby’s mouth. She leaned and vomited, her stomach laddering with muscle beneath her rumpled T-shirt.
This is your fault.
That’s what Jaager had said, surveying the bodies of the poachers on the riverbank. Men stricken, crumpled in knots of limbs. Some countries had adopted controversial shoot-to-kill policies for poachers. Green militarization. Not here.
Jaager had taken her by the back of the neck.
“You were not cleared to engage.”
Malaya thought of a lone bull rhino, bobbing alone through the bush. Unhurt.
“They were going to kill him,” she said.
Jaager’s hand tightened on her neck.
“You were not cleared—”
“You do nothing,” she said. “But watch. Your country watches while others shoot.”
Jaager bent closer, so close his lips brushed her ear.
“Ja,” he said. “My country, which you will be lucky now to escape.”
Malaya jerked against him.
“You didn’t have to kill the rest of them.”
Jaager pressed his thumb into the base of her skull, same as when she was flat beneath him in his hut, her face driven into the pillow.
“They could have been caught at the border,” he said. “And spoken against you.” His thumb pressed harder, as if seeking the space between vertebrae. His voice quivered with faith.
“Don’t you see? I saved you.”
* * *
Now Malaya crawled for the Satilla River, the blackwater slink where, as a child, she’d set trotlines with her grandfather. The old man had spent his summers at the veterans lodge in nearby Kingsland—home of the Kings Bay submarine base. When his granddaughter came to visit, he would sit in the back of the johnboat, smoking cigarettes and pointing out ospreys and eagles and swallow-tailed kites that wheeled and soared over the river. They would catch trophy-sized redbreast and channel cats with the wide, whiskery mouths of old men. Though they rarely saw them, her grandfather told of armored hulks that roamed the darker fathoms of the river, sturgeon and alligator gar, like living relics from another age.
Malaya kept crawling for the river. The surface was sun-scaled, shimmering with heat, but she knew it was slow and dark and cool in the depths. She thought of those early life-forms that had come belly-crawling from the waters of creation and branched a hundred million times over the millennia, forming the Tree of Life. Her species—man—had scrambled to the very top of the crown, from which point he could look down upon the rest of the animal kingdom. He was lord and master, he thought. The world belonged to him. Meanwhile, his history read like a catalogue of waste, devastation, and war. Malaya felt no better, spotted with sin. Perhaps she should no longer climb, she thought. Perhaps she should crawl back into the primordial waters, turning balloonish and blue, gentle as a whale, innocent as something that could be caught on a hook.
She was nearly there, dragging her aching body the last few feet, ready to slide into the cooling depths, when her hand found a strange depression in the bank. When she looked down, her heart jumped hard against her ribs.
A watery paw print, big as her palm, gleamed under the sun. Could it be? Surely not.
A big cat.
Malaya blinked. She was in South Georgia, where no such creature still roamed. But here was the evidence, glaring in the muck. She wondered what it could be. A big Florida panther, perhaps, said to be nearly extinct, or an escaped lion or tiger. Even an oversized leopard, like the one inked on her chest.
She’d heard of big cats sighted far beyond their ancestral lands, surviving in the shadows of modern cities and towns and parks. Fugitives from zoos or circuses, stalking the thin wilds of the Americas, living by stealth and wile. Phantom cats. Shadowy prowlers reported across the nation, crossing rural highways or suburban backyards, stealing pets or livestock. Mystery cats caught on motion-triggered trail cams in the country darkness, their eyes flaring bright.
Malaya looked out at the river, the angry shimmer of sunlight. Now back at the print.
A sign.
Some phantom afoot.
Some ghost.
Before she knew it, she was up off her belly, moving on hands and knees, crawling from one pugmark to the next, following the narrow slink of the cat, a string of silvery crowns left along the riverbank. Then she was on her feet, crouched low to the ground, moving like Big John had taught her on the reserve. At the tree line, she slipped through a narrow crease in the understory, following the trail of the cat. The world darkened, cooled, and the canopy glowed yellow-green above her, diffusing the sun. The light fell slanted through the pines, puzzling the shade, and her gaze leapt from sign to sign. Sheared fronds, creased leaves, faint marks in the dirt.
Malaya followed, moving through slim corridors in the forest, her steps soft on the downy floor of leaves and straw. She was not afraid. There was even a kind of joy rising in her chest as she strung together sign after sign, following the very steps of the creature, tracing its history. She wondered if a rare Florida panther could have veered this far north—a lone male, perhaps, seeking a mate. He would move mainly at night, crossing golf courses and quiet city streets. A creature whose ancestors stalked the Everglades long before the Seminole, before the superhighways and casinos and patio homes.
But no, she thought—these paws were too large, and this cat walked a straighter line than any wild panther would, shouldering unafraid through the bush. She thought of the old roadside zoo, Little Eden, now a sanctuary for exotic wildlife. There had been stories of beasts escaping, their eyes burning through the lowcountry nights, trailing stray dogs or pond ducks or little girls who should have been home at nine.
Malaya had seen her first leopard there as a child. Her grandfather took her, pointing through the iron bars of the cage, telling her of the Visayan leopard cat—a species known only in the Philippine islands of his birth. The mothers bore their young in sugarcane fields, under the hacking machetes of the workers, and hunted the rodents and other pests from the farms. After boot camp, Malaya had the face of a leopard tattooed over her
heart. A tribute to her grandfather, who’d hunted Japanese officers like rats.
She squinted now, as if she might see the phantom cat slinking through the green fans of palmetto before her. A killer with lean hips and swaying tail, prowling sharp-shouldered through the bush. He would be a god in his mind, a beast without rival. But his brain was too ancient, Malaya knew. It hadn’t evolved as quickly as man’s. It couldn’t comprehend the gleaming hulks that raced back and forth through the old glades, crushing his kind under their wheels, nor the steely hornets that men sent screaming through the pines. It would be like her grandfather in his last days of senility, when he still carried his commando knife under his shirt. A man deadlier than ever, because he no longer understood his world.
Malaya quickened her pace. She must find this creature. She must save him.
She tracked and tracked, her arms latticed with burning scratches and cuts. The light slanted deeper through the trees, the air thick in her lungs. Her car was far behind her now, the door ajar, the spilled milk souring in the sun. Somewhere, far across the ocean, a lone bull rhino was rumbling under the moon.
She’d thought of applying for work at the sanctuary, but couldn’t bring herself to walk through the lion’s mouth of the entrance door. She felt tainted, unworthy even to shovel shit or butcher deer. But there was no sin here in the wild, she thought. No guilt. There was only hunger and lust and the love of mothers for their young. There was the way a yellow leopard slunk proud-spotted through the ticking green bomb of summer, his form truer than any word, or the way a southern white rhino dipped his head to drink, his tufted tail flicking his rump. The way her grandfather, gone wild himself, had drawn his commando knife in the middle of a Southern heritage parade in the town square. He must have thought the cavalry riders were the Japanese officers of old, who cut the heads from his comrades during the forced march out of Bataan in ’42.