Pride of Eden

by Taylor Brown

  There was a rickety watchtower built high over the fields. Anse, the best shot, chose himself and one other Scout for the job. There was no ladder so they scaled the latticework exterior board by board. The planks groaned beneath their hands, the whole structure rocking like a ship’s mast in the breeze. They crouched on the upper platform, their weapons steadied on the edge, and waited. The moon was high and fat, glaring down on the maize. The black cream bled from Anse’s forehead, burning his eyes.

  Sometime after midnight, the baboons appeared. Dozens of them, loose-limbed and silver-furred, bouncing through the cornrows. Infants rode on some of their backs. They began ripping the cobs from the stalks, huddling slope-shouldered over their prizes, their ridged heads pulsing as they chewed.

  “Pick your targets,” whispered Anse.

  The other Scout nodded. His barrel moved in a careful pendulum, target to target.

  “Ready,” he said.

  “On three,” whispered Anse.

  They walked the field at dawn. After the first shot, the whole unit had opened up, raking the maize with automatic fire. They had to give the chieftain a show. Several baboons lay dead in the cornstalks, curled into themselves, holding their wounds like secrets they were trying to hide. Anse stood amid the bloodied stalks, his breath coming fast and ragged from his throat. One of the Scouts appeared next to him.

  “Sergeant Major, you must come see.”

  He led Anse toward the center of the field.

  It was a lion, a lone male. He had the lean angularity of a nomad, with a broad black mane. A stray round had entered one eye. The blasted socket had wept down his face, and crusted, and his blackened head rested on his forepaws, as if arranged for viewing. He lay in a circle of flattened stalks, where he had whirled and thrashed in terror, blinded, before sinking to his belly, calmly, to die.

  “He was hunting the baboons,” said the Scout. “He might have done our job for us.”

  Anse spun on his heel, surveying the damage. The dead baboons, each the size of a child, and the shredded cornstalks. The sightless lion, jeweled with flies. The world seemed to spin on and on. He could feel the untethered roll of the earth through space. He wanted to sink to his knees, to grab fistfuls of stalks to keep from being hurled from the face of the world.

  “Sergeant Major,” said the Scout. “What should we do?”

  Anse looked up, blinking to focus. The others stood around him, waiting.

  He spat through his teeth.

  “Tell the chieftain we want Mr. X. Or, under this moon, we might mistake him for another baboon.”

  * * *

  The mammoth has tired. She is all but dead. Smilodon stands on her back, a woolly mound in the steaming lake of tar. He can feel the guttural rumble of her lungs, those great hollows mucked black. Her trunk strains to stand free of the surface. He watches its desperate dance, so much like one of the great, ribbed constrictors of the caves, which crush the bone-cages of lesser creatures.

  His claws clutch the cow’s hide. Hardly a quiver. His eyes rove her contours, the hills and swales, looking for the blood-river that keeps her warm. His ancestors tell him where the hidden blood pulses, deep through the meat of her neck. His jaws open wide, his great sabers gleaming. He is Smilodon, built to loose blood from flesh.

  His ears jerk upright—sounds, the thud of paws.

  Smilodon wheels on the spine of his prey.

  Dire wolves. A rout of them, they break dark-furred and snarling from the forest. These fearsome dogs, the bane of his kind. Smilodon is larger, stronger. His teeth dwarf their own. But there are so many of them. He crouches over his prey, belly low, paws wide, and shows them the double sabers he carries. The wolves whirl and growl, pacing the bank, flashing their white fangs. The first, the bravest, steps across the fleshy bridge of the mammoth’s rump.

  Smilodon will slash them, swat them yelping into the pit. He will fight them until he, too, enters the black, or else stands triumphant, bloodied on his mound of flesh.

  He lifts his head, swelling his chest.

  * * *

  A roar. Anse came fast awake from the dream, coated in sweat.

  The monkeys were squatting on their platforms, watching him, incurious as they munched their seeds. As if none of them had heard the sound.

  Had he?

  The sun was rising. Dawn light seeping along the grounds, crawling through the enclosures like glowing vines. Anse’s eyes were burning. Tears or sweat or camouflage cream. He wiped them, stood. He wanted to apologize to the monkeys, but he didn’t know the tongue. Instead, he cast an extra fistful of feed through the chute, as if that would help. All the while he was listening, listening, as if Henrietta’s death were but a dream. As if she would roar again.

  * * *

  “I let her out,” said Anse.

  The girl looked up. She was dusting a skull.

  “What?”

  “Henrietta. The lion. I let her out myself.”

  Malaya held up the feather duster she’d been using.

  “The hell would you do that for?”

  Anse bent, looking into the skull of Mammuthus columbi. A Columbian mammoth, the ten-ton ancestor of the Asian elephant. The skull stood on a display pedestal, the seven-foot tusks curved like a pair of giant sickles, the eyeless sockets staring back at him. Absently, he scratched the base of his throat with his thumb. Behind the mammoth, a display discussed the Pleistocene extinction event, ten thousand years ago, when the megafauna vanished. Placards for various hypotheses: climate change, disease, overhunting by prehistoric humans.

  “Just out of her enclosure,” he said. “I don’t know how she got out of the sanctuary.” He squinted into the empty eyes of the mammoth, as if they might tell him. “You’re the only one that knows.”

  “You haven’t told me why.”

  Anse blinked. His eyes burned. He thought of Henrietta, maneless and svelte, her high shoulders burling through the grass. He wiped his eyes with the back of his forearm.

  “I wanted to see her free.”

  * * *

  Anse lay facedown on the bed that evening, shirtless. His scabs were finally beginning to peel away, leaving pink stripes of scar that itched. Tyler straddled him, squeezing the anti-itch ointment from a tube.

  “All I’m saying is this. A lion—or any cat, for that matter—keeps her claws retracted until she’s ready to use them. Henrietta’s were out.”

  Anse squeezed shut his eyes. He thought of Henri dead in the driveway of that empty house. Her heart exploded, oozing over the pavement. Her claws buried in his back. He turned his head, speaking from the side of his mouth.

  “Automatic response when the bullet hit her,” he said. “Her claws coming out.”

  Tyler shook her head. “Couldn’t be, Anse. Primary flaccidity—an animal’s muscles relax instantly at the moment of death.”

  Anse turned his head, winding one eye up at her.

  “They teach you that up at Cornell?”

  Tyler leaned over him, her breasts brushing his back. Her lips grazed his ear.

  “No,” she said. “You did.”

  Anse mashed his forehead into the mattress, growled.

  Tyler bent closer.

  “It’s better this way, don’t you see?” Her lips chased his ear. “She died wild.”

  At the word, a tingle ran up Anse’s spine. A drove of tiny beasts uncaged by her voice, loosed under his skin. His blood flew. Anse turned over beneath her. He buried his thumbs in the hollows of her thighs, smiling.

  “Come here, you.”

  * * *

  “I know,” said Malaya.

  Anse had strung a whitetail doe from an iron gambrel in the butcher shed. He stood before it, scraping a stone across the blade of his knife.

  “You know what?”

  Malaya was leaning against the doorframe of the shed, arms crossed, watching him. He was supposed to be teaching her the art of making tiger food.

  “I found a report of an ocelot that killed a Ger
man shepherd outside Atlanta a few years ago. She was scheduled to be euthanized by the local Animal Control.”

  “So?”

  “So she disappeared from the facility three days before her euthanization date.”

  The butcher’s knife hung loosely from Anse’s hand. He didn’t say anything.

  Malaya scratched her elbow. Her nails were black, freshly painted.

  “You said you got Henrietta after the DEA raided some cocaine lord’s house, right? Somebody who kept her as a pet?”

  Anse’s knuckles shifted on the handle of the knife.

  “That’s right.”

  “Three years ago, the Miami police found this cartel bigwig passed out in his front yard. He had a tranquilizer dart in his ass, a kilo of Colombian white tucked under his head for a pillow. People said he kept a lioness in his backyard. Her chain was broken, like she’d escaped.”

  “There are thought to be more than two thousand captive lions in the United—”

  “I made a couple calls, Anse. In both cases, a playing card was found at the scene. It was an ace of spades, like the Air Cavalry used to leave for the Viet Cong. The back side was black, with a pair of white thunderbolts crossed under the skull of a saber-tooth tiger.”

  “Cat,” said Anse.

  “What?”

  “Saber-tooth cat. Separate evolutionary lineage from the tiger.”

  Malaya smiled. “Who else knows about this?”

  Anse looked at the gutted doe. He would shear her forelegs first, laying them in the deep freezer like the cached rifles of a rebel force. Remnant blood would patter about the steel drain on the floor, flecking his boots and pants.

  “No one,” he said.

  “Not even Tyler?”

  “Not even Tyler.” He kept looking at the doe, so tawny and lean. “What do you want?”

  Malaya stepped forward, uncrossing her arms. She held out her hand for the knife.

  “In.”

  * * *

  Smilodon is striped with blood, his hide torn ragged by wolf teeth. Still he crouches atop the mountain of flesh. His sabers gleam red, his claws; the tar squeals and boils beneath him, a black mania of paws and tails and gnashing teeth—wolves he has sent yelping into the pit, who will never escape.

  Still more of them come, these white-fanged beasts endless as the bald apes that wear the furs and skins of the creatures they kill, harrying him with the cold stone of their spears. He is Smilodon, the saber-toothed, and yet he is only a single creature, alone. It has been two winters since he has scented another of his kind, four since he thrust himself into the hot vent of that old single-sabered dam, caging her neck in his teeth.

  He is, perhaps, the last of his line.

  Now comes another snarling of wolves, three of them. They leap together onto the mammoth’s rump, the dark wedge of them arrayed before him like a single three-headed beast. Their black hackles are spiked, their red mouths slung with white ropes of saliva, and Smilodon sees his fate unfolding. Three dire wolves locked snarling to his neck, and he will rise roaring atop his woolly mountain, wearing their furred forms like a mane, and together they will fall toppling into the pit. He will drown, sink. His bones will be shed of his flesh, freed, his eyeless skull floating in the black night of tar.

  He is Smilodon, born to die.

  Let them come.

  BOOK II

  CHAPTER 6

  THE LITTLE AMAZON

  Malaya sat in the fork of a riverine oak, glassing the shrimp trawler with a pair of high-power binoculars. It was fifty feet long, the white hull scabbed with rust. The outriggers stood like folded wings, their green nets ragged and mossy, insufficient for flight. The whole boat listed slightly at the dock, surely sprung with leaks. The name of the vessel had been hand-painted along the bow, the letters faded, bleeding down the hull: THE CATBIRD SEAT.

  Malaya had been watching the boat after work for a week, by order of Anse. Long hours behind the binoculars or spotting scope, watching from various hides, recording the comings and goings of the crew. Each morning, in the sanctuary’s butcher shed, she provided Anse a full report of the previous day’s surveillance: movements, times, habits. Anse would frown, making notes or asking questions. Then she would consult the task board in the sanctuary office, completing her regular work for the day, which might include cleaning enclosures, butchering deer, or feeding various animals. After work, she would head back to the river, change into the camouflage clothes she kept in her trunk, and slither into a new blind or hide, surveilling the boat until well after dark.

  The first day, Anse had given her the location of the boat but no idea of what she would find. It was moored to a private dock on a backwater creek near the mouth of the Altamaha River—the “Little Amazon” of the South. Rigging, rust-brown, lay in the uncut grass of the bank, alongside winches and turnbuckles and coils of rotten line. A diesel marine engine, painted pea-green, sat keeled in a bed of sea oats. There was a utility shed that looked hammered together on a whim. The only mark of care was the iron-barred security door that stood in the middle of the dock, flanked by a wide shield of wooden planks and razor wire.

  She expected a vessel exporting farm-raised tigers or black bears to the Far East, where they could fetch handsome sums for their parts, or importing black-market ivory or game trophies. Instead, crab traps were stacked high on the deck, boxy and salt-rimed, squawking and flapping with parrots of every color and size. Macaws with cobalt wings and lemon bellies, their dusty beaks hooked like linoleum knives, or scarlet macaws with yellow coverts at their shoulders, worn like the epaulettes of a colonial army. Nanday parakeets, Patagonian conures, Brazilian aratingas. Yellow-headed amazons, some of them Magnas—magnum breeds sold in pairs, which could command two thousand dollars a head.

  Stray cats strode atop the makeshift birdcages like prison guards, now and again striking through the wire, while the birds screeched beneath them, outraged, their wings rattling the traps. Layers of molted feathers and droppings lay beneath their perches.

  “They smuggle them in from Central America,” Anse told her. “Feed them tequila to shut them up, tape their beaks. Been known to poke holes in their eyes, keep them from singing to the light. Hide them in thermoses, toilet paper rolls, spare-tire wells. Babies still got those pinfeathers, filled with blood. Bleed out from the rough handling. They say only one in four makes the trip.”

  Malaya had expected sexier assignments, but she hid her disappointment, her face a cold mask beneath Anse’s hard, iron-flecked eyes. She lifted her chin half an inch.

  “I can stake the place all day on my days off.”

  Now, as she watched, the triple deadbolts of the dock’s security door snapped open and the door swung wide. Out stepped the married couple who ran the operation. The woman’s face was the shape and texture of brick, flushed with sun or spite. The spaghetti strings of her halter top cut grooves in her fleshy shoulders. Her words carried on the breeze.

  “You put millet on the list? We need ’least five sprigs for the macaws. Like cotton candy to them greedy scarlets.”

  Her husband, half her size, nodded.

  “They on there,” he said.

  “What about extra sunflower seeds? You remember them this time? Them parrotlets need the extra fat. They don’t put on weight like their mamas do.”

  Her husband nodded again. His chin seemed superglued to his chest.

  “It’s on the list, Berta.”

  “Better be. Can’t have so many dying like last time.”

  “That wasn’t my fault.”

  “Hell it wasn’t. What about spirulina for their feathers? These people don’t want some dull-ass parrots. Color’s the reason they buy the things. Them last parakeets looked like damn bunches of old bananas.”

  She walked ahead of him, her pink sandals squashed beneath the white cows of her feet. The planks of the dock were warped and rickety, but Malaya knew they would hold.

  There was never enough justice in the world.

&nb
sp; The couple loaded themselves into a battered minivan for their weekly run down the coast, raiding the big pet stores over the state line. Malaya watched the vehicle grumble out of the drive, then raised the antenna of the ancient cellular phone Anse had given her.

  “We’re on,” she said.

  * * *

  The days spent watching the birds had put Malaya in mind of her grandfather. When she was five, her father had been killed in a helicopter crash at Fort Benning and her mother had gone to work double-time, managing the local dollar store. That’s when her grandfather had moved in with them, bringing only a single battered suitcase and a trunkful of Marlboro cartons, as if he’d robbed a cigarette truck. He drove a mile-long black Mercury coupe whose motor growled like a demon under the hood, and Malaya would ride shotgun around town, lifting herself with both hands to see out the window.

  “They used to call him the Pigeon Man,” she said.

  Anse was threading his arms through the sleeves of his wetsuit. His shoulders were small and hard as baseballs, stitched with old scars. Downstream, the shrimp boat thumped against the rubber tires of the dock.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “My grandfather.” She zipped up the back of her wetsuit, bought from a local thrift store for the occasion. “He’d pick up one of those three-foot loaves of French bread from the Winn-Dixie and take it down to the park. Find himself a bench. Plant himself there for hours, casting shreds for the birds.”

  She could remember him sitting there, his shoulders set so straight and square beneath one of the polyester bowling shirts he’d owned since the 1950s, an aged Filipino man chain-smoking Marlboro Reds behind a pair of green-lensed Ray-Bans, his hard brown hands tearing off crusts of bread. Soon whole blizzards of pigeons would cloud about him, squabbling and flapping. This man who’d seen his friends beheaded by the samurai swords of Japanese officers and hunted down several of those same officers after his escape, wielding the selfsame commando knife he still carried under his shirt. This man they called an aswang, a werebeast capable of shifting shape in the night, becoming a dog or bat, boar or bird or large black cat. Creatures fast and silent, said to steal their victims in the night and replace them with tree trunks.