Pride of Eden

by Taylor Brown

  The knife winked in his hand, flashing before the walleyed faces of the horses, and Malaya was running for him, her plaid school skirt chafing her thighs, when the shot boomed across the square and everyone fell flat to the ground save for her grandfather, who clung to the bridle of the nearest horse. After a moment, he fell to his knees with a crack, the bloody knife clanging to the pavement beside him. The rider, dressed as a colonel, held a smoking revolver in his hand, his thigh slashed through his trousers. The saddest look on his face, like Jesus on the cross. Her grandfather held his hands to the wound in his chest, as if to keep his heart from bubbling out.

  “‘And for this Yankee nation,’” he sang, “‘I do not give a damn.’”

  He died in the ambulance on the way to Satilla Regional. The paramedics said he sang rebel hymns until the moment his heart stopped. This man born in the Visayan Islands in 1923, who came to America only after the defeat of the Japanese Empire. A man from the South Pacific. The Southern Hemisphere. Who used to say that, in his South, toilets and typhoons turned clockwise, and the rebels won. This man whose mind went wild, spanning centuries and continents, and she could not save him.

  The sunlight lay long across the forest now, dimming, and her eyes were strained. The signs had grown murky, unreal. Sometimes she followed but hunches or stabs of inspiration. Dusk was welling up like dark puddles from the earth, tainting the fronds and leaves. The whole forest was purpling, shifting, and the smell of pine was sharp in her nose. Malaya worried she was losing him, her phantom cat. She imagined his spots growing liquid with the dusk, oozing, bleeding into the sleek black coat of a panther, a creature of night.

  Her breath was coming hard now, her cuts burning with vodka-sweat. She knew there must be men roving the alleys and empty lots, the quiet cul-de-sacs, small knots of them bristling with hunting rifles and shotguns, their knuckles bleached white. The doors of homes dead-bolted while patrol cars prowled the neighborhood streets, their spotlights glaring across neatly cropped hedges and lawns, searching for the fugitive, catching the eyeshine of ferals and strays.

  Malaya thought of the lions of the Baghdad Zoo, who’d escaped their enclosure during the fighting and gone streaking through the havoc, bolting between bomb craters and killed animals and the armored personnel carriers of the 3rd Infantry Division. A tiny pride, starving and lean and desperate. The soldiers in the sector tried to corral them, but four of the lions had to be shot. One of them, a lioness, was killed right in front of the tiger’s cage. He was her mate, they later learned—the pair had bonded after a breeding experiment.

  Malaya had felt the hurt of the incident ripple through the whole body of her company, causing men to suck down whole packs of Marlboros among the crushed battlements of thousand-year-old roofs, as if pain could be exhaled into the desert air. These were hardened veterans, some of them, bred to kill, and yet.

  When Jaager walked her to the gate at King Shaka International Airport, in Durban, he kept his hand clamped to the back of her neck, as on the riverbank. As if his hand were a collar, his arm a leash. This man who’d been her lover, who’d called her my luiperd—my leopard—the two of them twisted tight as rope in her platform tent, breathing into each other’s mouth. He sent her home on a commercial flight, the same way she’d returned from Iraq. To fly through the night, against the stars, and wake in a land of strangers, who know nothing of the beasts that beat themselves against the cage of your breast, the spots that burn like sins on your flesh.

  She had to quicken her pace. The search parties were out there, the men with guns. Her lungs were searing, her fingertips numb. There were white gobs of spit in the corners of her mouth. She tripped on a root and stumbled headlong into a palmetto thicket, falling bloody and gasping in the green bed of blades. The sky was the deepest purple, the trees bowed and black. She had to get up. She rose, reeled, fell. Her eyes closed.

  * * *

  She was perched in the black crown of an acacia tree, high over the country of dream, and she could hear the distant thunder of artillery. She could see a river winding under the moon, emptying its mouth into the sea. Out there, off the coast, floated a warship painted the brightest white, like some fairy-tale castle risen from the black depths of the sea. The big five-inch naval guns were booming, coughing fire into the night, their projectiles whistling through the sky.

  Now Malaya saw the beasts of the field below her, so many arrayed in their kind. She could see great herds of elephant, big as boulders in the night, and the stony hulks of rhinoceros. Leopards walked among them, their spots ticking through the reeds, and lions stalked the high grasses in their prides, watching herds of antelope bound across the night. All these creatures so long in the making, honed for ten thousand millennia to quivering perfection, the swell of their ribs purer than any poem. They would be burned up in the coming fire, in an instant.

  The first shell struck home, rocking Malaya’s tree, but there was no fire or scream of shrapnel. Instead, a pale column of spray roared upward from the earth, geyser-like, leaving a small, milky puddle in its wake. Now other shells landed, white-bursting in their salvos, leaving pale pools in the cratered ground, and the animals were gathering, bending their heads to drink. The milky pap steamed at their hooves and paws, as if bubbling up from the earth.

  The distant guns sounded almost sonorous now, thundering offshore, until a rifle cracked through the dream-dark, louder than any dream. Malaya was ripped awake, her vision shattered, and she knew then, sure as a slug in the chest, that the wild thing she sought was dead. The phantom cat. It had been killed, gunned down in some parking lot, some playground or ballfield or driveway.

  Her spots were cold as stone against her skin, as insignia. Malaya rose and began moving toward the distant shot, blindly, as if called.

  CHAPTER 5

  SABER-TOOTH

  When the girl first walked through the doors of the wildlife sanctuary, Anse Caulfield’s claw wounds were still raw and unscabbed. The bandages had to be removed twice a day, the lacerations seared clean with alcohol and swabbed.

  “I’d like to work here,” she said. “Or volunteer, if that’s all I can.”

  Anse was dusting the skull of a Smilodon, a saber-toothed cat, when she walked in. The skull was a replica, cast from polyurethane resin, based on a specimen found across the street from the La Brea Tar Pits in the 1930s, where a bank now stood. The canine teeth were more than ten inches long, curved like something worn in scabbards or sheaths. The eye sockets were wide and deep, like portholes into the creature’s mind. Sometimes such a beast stalked through Anse’s dreams at night—perhaps the spirit of this very cat.

  “Come again?” he said.

  The girl shifted her weight, foot to foot. She looked slightly Asian, he thought. Crow-black hair, almond-shaped eyes. He thought of the dark-eyed village girls of Vietnam—the ones he’d been ordered to train his rifle on in case they were strapped with hidden bombs or live grenades.

  She looked at the skull, the webbed hole of the nasal cavity.

  “I heard what happened here,” she said. “I want to work.”

  She wore cutoff jean shorts, her hard gold legs tattooed with spots and scales.

  “What did you hear?” asked Anse.

  “Lion got out. Attacked you before they put her down.”

  The wounds flared in Anse’s back, as if newly made. He looked at the ancient crania lining the shelves—three-toed horses, woolly mammoths, ground sloths—a catalog of what lay brainless in the earth. They seemed to be waiting, watching.

  “What do you want to do?” he asked.

  “Anything.”

  “What are your qualifications?”

  “Third Infantry, two tours in Iraq. Honorable discharge. Then I contracted in South Africa, tracking ivory and rhino poachers.”

  “You catch any of them?”

  She uncrossed her arms, buried her hands in the pockets of her shorts. Anse could see her knuckles ridged hard against the denim.

  �
�Yes,” she said.

  * * *

  That night, Anse lay facedown in his trailer, shirtless, while Tyler straddled his rump, dousing a cotton swab with alcohol. He could see her long, sun-weathered form reflected in the vanity across the room, the red dust of freckles across her shoulders and chest.

  “She didn’t attack me,” he said. “She was coming to my call.”

  Tyler said nothing. She ran the swab through the deepest of his wounds.

  Anse’s breath caught.

  She swabbed the next gash. The wounds were wet and bright, as if Anse breathed through them, some gilled prototype crawled newly from the waters of creation.

  “I heard we hired somebody new today,” she said.

  Anse spoke through his teeth.

  “That’s right.”

  “I heard she was pretty.”

  “She’s qualified,” said Anse.

  The girl was ex-army, Tyler knew. A veteran of the rhino and ivory wars. She swabbed the next wound in Anse’s back.

  “Qualified for what?”

  Anse gritted his teeth, pushing his forehead hard into the pillow.

  He didn’t say.

  Twenty minutes later, he was asleep, heavy-browed and jerking, as if creatures warred behind the wall of his chest.

  * * *

  Smilodon hears the trumpet blasts of a stricken mammoth. They pierce the wet fog of the forest, caroming off the red towers of cypress. Saliva rushes to the giant cat’s tongue. He turns in the direction of the sound, padding broad-shouldered through the fronds of understory. His saber-teeth hang huge and yellow from his mouth, sharp as the icicles that grow in the white time of year, hanging over the forest paths. His coat is pale-powdered from his ten winters, and his sabers are no longer twins, each chipped and scored by old combats. Still, they are long enough to mine the deep bloodlines of the mastodon, the ground sloth, the mammoth—to spring the red life from those bully throats.

  The mammoth is mired, writhing in tar, her great tusks tearing gouts from the morass. Her ribs swell, her body pulsing with effort, but she only sinks deeper into the muck. Smilodon watches from the bank, crouched beneath bluish shoots of juniper, waiting. Soon the cow will tire. He looks out across the tar pits, which bubble and steam. So many carcasses swim in the depths of this mire, those of the scrub-ox and the camelops and the long-horned bison, the tusked mammoth and mastodon. So much wasted flesh. He will plunge his sabers into the neck of this cow, then tear the red layers of power from her shoulders and haunches. He will feast on the tender meat that sheathes her ribs, leaving little but bones for the pit.

  He lifts his head, his old fang-nocked ears swiveling for sound. He must hope the dire wolf does not catch the mammoth’s dying trumpets on the wind.

  * * *

  “Where is it you’re from?” asked Anse.

  They were riding in his big dually truck, touring the grounds.

  “West Georgia,” said Malaya. “Outside Columbus.”

  Anse looked at her.

  “My grandparents were Filipino,” she said. “My grandfather was a Philippine Scout, came to America after the war.”

  Anse nodded. “Hard ones, them.”

  “He was,” she said.

  “And you wanted to be like him?”

  “Always.”

  Malaya meant freedom in Tagalog, she said. She rode shotgun in the big Ford—sunglasses on, elbow out the window—while Anse drove from enclosure to enclosure, introducing her to the denizens of Little Eden. There was Trooper, the three-toed sloth, hanging from a forked tree in the center of his pen, and Matilda, the six-thousand-pound elephant saved from a circus troupe. The trunked giant rocked straight-legged toward the fence, as if her joints were fused.

  “Arthritis,” said Anse. “They made her do handstands for the crowds.”

  “Handstands?”

  Anse nodded. “They used an ankus,” he said. “Elephant goad. Looks like a boathook. She’s got scars behind her ears, across the backs of her legs.”

  Malaya’s nostrils flared, as if venting smoke.

  There was the troop of vervet monkeys saved from a roadside zoo in Florida, where they’d lived on nothing but peanuts sold in overpriced bags to the visitors, who never tired of throwing them at their evolutionary inferiors, trying to peg them between the eyes. But the place was mainly for wild cats. There were the former circus tigers, Snow and Fire, and a motley string of tigers from breeders and menageries and police seizures, some of them bowlegged or cross-eyed from inbreeding. Some declawed, missing their final knuckles, so that their front paws flopped like clown shoes, or defanged, their canine teeth ground down to the gums. They prowled around their enclosures, pawing Boomer Balls or splashing in giant tubs of water, chuffing at Anse when he stepped down from the truck to greet them.

  There were smaller cats, too. Servals, caracals, ocelots. Chain-link fences were draped and folded over the tops of their enclosures like ragged circus tops in order to keep the agile cats from climbing out. Fast-growing kudzu and vines snarled through the wire walls, behind which stood custom-built arrays of platforms and catwalks and tunnels. The servals were leggy and yellow, spotted like pint-sized cheetahs.

  “Fastest paw strike of any cat,” said Anse, hands on his hips. “One-sixtieth of a second, they say. Faster than a king cobra.”

  One of them, a tomcat named Bowie, had been left on the sanctuary’s doorstep in a dog carrier with a note: This is Major Tom to Ground Control, I’m stepping through the door.

  There were a pair of tufted-eared caracals—“Little Lions”—that could leap more than ten feet in the air, catching birds on the wing. Anse said the ancient Egyptians had tamed them for hunting. Then there was Lady, the black-spotted ocelot, who looked like a thirty-pound miniature leopard.

  “God damn,” said Malaya. “She’s beautiful.”

  Anse nodded. “People used to call them dwarf leopards. Mainstay of the fur trade. Takes thirty-five pelts to make a single lady’s coat. Costs forty thousand dollars.”

  Malaya crossed her arms, as if to protect her chest.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “People try keeping them as pets. Can’t imagine why. Their scent-marks have to survive in the rainforest. Smell about like a skunk. But Salvador Dali had one. Gram Parsons, too.”

  “She was one?”

  Anse nodded. “Escaped from a makeshift pen in suburban Atlanta, killed a German shepherd that cornered her before Animal Control arrived.” Anse licked his lips. “Dog was eighty pounds, four times her size. He must of thought she was just another housecat.”

  Wetness in his eyes, as for a pair of star-crossed lovers.

  * * *

  They stood in front of the empty enclosure where Henrietta had lived. It was bigger than any of the others, the hurricane fence erected straight and true. There was a large wooden shelter, built doorless with a tarpaper roof, where she could take shelter from sun and rain. There were groves of saw palmetto and bamboo, which she’d used as cover to stalk sanctuary visitors, and logs where she’d lain in the sun. The enclosure was littered with old toys, Boomer Balls and perfumed phone books and shredded cardboard boxes once full of treats.

  Anse breathed through his teeth. His heart was punching his sternum, again and again, like a set of bloodied knuckles. The girl stared straight ahead, through the fence wire.

  “You loved her,” she said.

  Anse licked his lips.

  “I did.”

  “How’d she get out?”

  Anse looked at the gate latch. He scratched the back of his neck.

  “I don’t know.”

  The girl breathed in, out, steadying herself.

  “You know I got into some trouble in Africa.”

  “Figured as much, you end up here.”

  “It was over a rhino.” She interlaced her fingers, twisting her hands together. Her knuckles cracked. “I fired on a poacher I wasn’t supposed to.”

  “You hit him?”

  “No.”
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br />   Anse nodded, spat between his boots.

  “Too bad.”

  * * *

  That night, Anse couldn’t sleep. His wounds, beginning to scab, itched incessantly, and a feverish loop of memory played in his mind. The same scenes, again and again, like a movie he couldn’t stop. Tyler lay next to him, dead asleep. Anse slipped from bed and out the door of the trailer, padding barefoot down the steps. The night was black and strange. There were the native sounds, bullfrogs and cicada and the bellowing croak of an alligator. In the distance, the hoot of a barred owl. But other sounds, too. Exotic. The rumble of Matilda plodding about her enclosure, rumbling like a distant thunderhead. The drowsy slink of the tigers crisscrossing their enclosure, their stripes rattling the fronds.

  Anse headed for the monkeys.

  He kept thinking of a night in Africa, in the late seventies, when he served in the Selous Scouts—a soldier of fortune. He and a force of seven Scouts had crossed the border into Mozambique at dusk, stepping through the rusty strings of barbwire like men entering a prizefight. They were dressed in the uniforms of their enemy, FRELIMO—Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, the Mozambique Liberation Front. Anse was the only white. Since his skin would give them away, he was smeared with what the Scouts called “black-is-beautiful”—a foul-smelling camouflage cream that darkened his face and hands. The other Scouts grinned every time he had to reapply the cream, chuckling through reams of dagga smoke.

  They were looking for Mr. X, a Mozambican local who’d been helping enemy guerrillas cross the border into Rhodesia. Their cover was that they were freedom fighters seeking safe passage. Anse stood far away, laced in moon shadow, while two of the Scouts negotiated with a local chieftain. The man was savvy, skeptical of their claims. If they were true liberators, he said, they would save his village from the troop of baboons decimating their maize fields. Then, surely, he would remember the name of the man they sought.