by Taylor Brown
Malaya shook her head, thinking of the birds swirling around her grandfather’s bench.
“All those damn pigeons, they never shat on him. Not once.”
* * *
They slipped into the water upstream of the boat, their fins cycling beneath the surface. Their gear trailed them in a floating dry bag leashed to Anse’s wrist. When they reached the vessel, they held themselves against the current, finning, while Anse lifted a boarding pole from the water, securing the double-pronged hook over the gunwale.
Malaya went first. She removed her fins and clipped them to her belt, then ascended the side of the hull, the ladder twisting and swaying beneath her. At the top she hooked her heel over the edge and hauled herself aboard. Stray cats darted from her, taking up defensive positions behind old winches and coils of line. Anse followed. They squatted on the deck and opened the gear-bag, rifling through the contents, removing gloves and wire cutters and surgical masks. They were breathing hard from the swim, the climb, the sense of being inside enemy walls. The wire fortress loomed over them, squawking and rattling.
Malaya donned a mask and gloves and began climbing the crude scaffolding that attended the traps. The birds watched her strangely as she climbed, cocking their bodies sideways and swiveling their heads. Their movements were jerky, animatronic. Some opened their beaks and Malaya half expected them to speak, to shout expletives or biblical pronouncements. Instead they screeched. Several lay dead beneath their perches, their feathers fading to dusty hues. The smell from the traps reached right through the mask, gagging Malaya’s throat.
The topmost row of cages held scarlet macaws from the jungles of South America. Giant rainforest birds, long-feathered and vibrant, sized like the war plumes of medieval knights. They clutched the wire in their claws and cocked their heads sideways, holding Malaya in the tiny yellow sunflowers of their eyes. Their scaly dark tongues wiggled at her, bone-pronged for jabbing into the fleshy innards of palm and jocote fruit. Some screamed.
Little Eden had no aviary. Anse had called the avian rescues up and down the coast—none had capacity for such a flock. Wildlife officers, if notified, would be forced to destroy the birds, most likely. Malaya looked down at Anse, who nodded from the deck. She held her breath and released the catch on the nearest cage and pulled open the top. A scarlet macaw burst forth from the trap, stretching its wings blood-red against the blue sky, then turned wheeling and cawing for the trees. Now the others, loosed, lifted from their cages, blistering the sky with color, with flames of blue and lime and bloodiest red, bright as chemical fires, as the weather of rapture.
* * *
Malaya was in third grade the day the boys from Fort Benning came to the park. They were teenagers fresh out of the Army Infantry School, their hair cut high and tight, their cheeks hardened by hunger and fatigue and the incessant insults of drill sergeants. Their fists held grease-spotted bags of fast food and they sucked Cokes through straws, their necks pulsing. One of them kept spinning a small blue box between his hands, catching it against his chest.
Alka-Seltzer.
They sat in a half circle in the grass. Soon the pigeons were hopping and flapping about them, greedy for scraps. Malaya was sitting a little ways from her grandfather’s bench, cross-legged, arranging a green company of plastic army soldiers, copying the formations diagrammed in the pocket-sized Ranger Handbook she’d found on her father’s bookshelf. She looked at her grandfather but could not tell if he paid the young grunts any mind. His eyes were hidden beneath the sea-green lenses of his Ray-Bans, his face masklike, set rigid beneath the gray flapping of pigeon wings.
The grunts had taken off their shirts. Their bodies were hard, hammered into shape by thousands of push-ups and ruck marches, their stomachs scaled like snake bellies. The boy with the Alka-Seltzer, who seemed their leader, didn’t eat. Instead he watched the pigeons hopping about his legs. His head was swiveling back and forth, tracking them like a weapons system.
“Rats with wings,” he said.
One of the others spoke through a mouth of burger.
“You think it’ll explode ’em, Mackey? Like with seagulls?”
Mackey rattled the box.
“One way to find out.”
He tore open the top and flicked a white tablet of antacid into the grass. A trio of pigeons descended, pecking it apart.
Malaya’s grandfather rose from the bench and straightened his shirt, his palms sliding over his flat belly. He began walking toward the trio of grunts, a straight-backed old man heralded by a dirty cloud of pigeons. Malaya scooped up her army men, hurriedly, shoveling them into the pockets of her plaid school skirt, and followed after him.
The old man stood before the boys. The one named Mackey squinted up at him.
“Need something, grandpa?”
“Your Alka-Seltzer.”
“Indigestion?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you got some herbs or something for that?”
Mackey’s eyes flicked to his buddies, eliciting chuckles.
“Please.”
“Don’t you mean p-wease?”
At this, Malaya’s grandfather made a come-here motion with his hand—a gesture reserved only for dogs in the nation of his birth. When the young infantryman looked confused, the old man hawked and spat a long worm of phlegm across the boy’s face.
An international gesture.
Malaya could never really decipher what happened next. It was too fast, a flash and a roar. When it was over, three pigeons lay bloated in the grass, dead, and an army infantryman was curled in a ball, holding his groin and mouth, while his friends stared wide-eyed. A former Philippine Scout, seventy-some years old, was leading his granddaughter back to the car, holding her hand. A commando knife rode under his shirt, untouched. A box of antacid tablets rattled in his pocket.
* * *
Malaya stood high atop the emptied fortress of wire, watching the sky burn with color. The birds were alighting in the trees, bright-bellied among the branches. She thought of odd equatorial birds being reported along the coast, as if the Tropic of Cancer were moving northward, the torrid zone fattening around the equator. It seemed hot and steamy enough here. No wonder the army had prepared soldiers for Vietnam in the Deep South, in places called Tigerland and Fayettenam. She could imagine tigers or leopards stalking the banks of this very river, weaving in and out of the trees, while parrots cawed.
Malaya looked down to see if Anse was watching the birds. Instead, the old man was kneeling over a line of crab traps on the deck, snipping holes in their galvanized wire. He lifted one he’d finished and tossed it overboard.
“What you doing down there?”
Anse cocked his jaw over his shoulder.
“Don’t want ghost traps,” he said.
Malaya climbed down, squatting next to him.
“Ghost traps?”
Anse nodded. “An unchecked crab trap. It can trap crab after crab after crab—hundreds over time, each one attracted to the starved corpse of the one before it. Ghost trap.”
The old jockey knelt before another trap, shoulders hunched, straining both-handed to cut holes in the rusty wire. Malaya could almost see the claw scars that ribbed his back, striping beneath the black neoprene of the wetsuit. She lifted her hand, as if to touch his shoulder, but didn’t. She reached into the bag for the second pair of cutters.
CHAPTER 7
AURORA
“What do you mean you won’t see him?”
Anse growled through his teeth.
“Just what I said. I won’t.”
“He’s come to apologize,” said Tyler.
“He doesn’t owe me an apology. He did what he thought was right.”
“Look at him, Anse.”
Anse leaned slightly forward, glancing down the hall to the glass doors of the sanctuary. Larell Pope, the firefighter who’d shot Henrietta, was sitting on his motorcycle before the lion fangs of the entrance. His head was down, his hands crossed over his h
elmet. His shoulders were sloped.
“You aren’t doing this for yourself, Anse. You’re doing it for him.”
Anse was standing over a glass display case of prehistoric sharks’ teeth, big as arrowheads. He growled.
“All right, goddammit. Send him in.”
Tyler leaned against the wall, sipping her tea.
“I’m not your fucking secretary, Anse.”
Anse came around the display case and clopped his way down the hall, his legs bowed like someone who’d spent too much time on a horse. His bootheels rang like rifle shots. He banged open the glass door.
“What?”
Lope looked up, startled.
“Mr. Anse,” he said.
“What do you want?”
“I want to talk.”
“Fine,” said Anse. “But I have to feed the tigers. You’ll have to come along.”
Lope swung his long legs from the saddle of the superbike, which resembled a diving bird of prey, long and furrowed and beaked.
“What do you feed them?” he asked.
Anse was already turning, walking back through the door.
“You, if you get in my way.”
* * *
Lope followed Anse down the short hallway, the walls painted like the throat of a lion. It opened into what seemed an exhibit from a museum of natural history. The skulls of extinct beasts stared from banks of glass cases, each fanged or tusked. Placards described their range and habitat, their diet and social behavior, their geologic era and the time of their extinction—obituaries for entire species that once roamed the earth. The skull of a mammoth, big as a boulder, sat on a pedestal on one side, bearing wide snarls of tusk. On the other, a cash register and gift shop, replete with hats and koozies and bumper stickers. There was a rack of T-shirts, each bearing the roaring mouth of a lion, along with the name of the place:
LITTLE EDEN WILDLIFE RESCUE
SATILLA, GEORGIA
SANCTUARY FOR EXOTICS OF ALL BREEDS
Anse crossed the room without slowing, his bootheels ringing in the hollows of the skulls. Lope passed the tall woman, Tyler, who’d invited him to come. They’d met at the scene of the shooting, after he’d killed the charging lioness. He’d been standing there, the heavy rifle hanging across the tops of his thighs like a barbell, his chest rising and falling without his control. There had been so much blood on the pavement, slashed like characters in a language he didn’t know.
The woman had stood beside him, her wheaty hair spilling from beneath a rumpled ballcap that read LITTLE EDEN. Her face was hard, unbroken by the scene. A moon-colored pendant hung from her throat. She’d set her hand on the bony knob of his shoulder and squeezed.
“Thank you,” she’d said.
The words had entered his blood like a drug, soothing him.
Now, as Lope followed Anse through the gift shop, Tyler winked at him over the top of her mug, as if to say: Don’t worry about that old son-of-a-bitch, you’re doing right.
Anse pushed through the rear doors, dropping the three steps into his domain. It was, to Lope, like entering a whole other world—some land older, more exotic than the one he knew. The fences of enclosures rose through pines that seemed taller than any beyond the high metal walls of the place. The crowns of giant palms stood like green explosions against the sky, their trunks all spiked. Dragonflies zipped past him, glassy-winged, and several peacocks roamed freely over the grounds, fanning their eye-spotted trains.
They climbed into Anse’s big dually truck—the same one he’d driven to the firehouse the day the lion escaped, when they’d gone on their strange safari through the zombie neighborhoods along the river, searching for the lioness among the high weeds of empty lots. The bed was full of five-gallon plastic buckets, each sprung with shorn deer legs. Lope stared.
“Tiger food,” said Anse, seeing his face.
He cranked the big diesel engine and they went rumbling along the dirt drive between enclosures, the truck swaying and rocking over the ruts. Lope’s window was down. He spied a spotted cat—a small leopard, perhaps—standing on the crossbeam of a giant cat tree, a jumble of platforms and stepladders and balance beams built among the ferns and bushes of the enclosure. She seemed female to him, her giant, amber eyes tracking him through the diamond mesh of her cage.
Lope thought Anse might explain the story of this animal or the others he saw darting through the understory or eyeing him from perches or hides, but the old man said nothing. Even when they passed the enclosure of an elephant that moved in a stilted, rocking fashion—more like a Disney animatron than a live animal—he remained silent.
Lope cleared his throat.
“I wanted to tell you I was sorry about Henrietta. About what I did.”
Anse’s hands twisted on the wheel, as if revving a throttle.
“You only done what you thought was right.”
“I can’t quit thinking about it,” said Lope. “I gone over it in my head a thousand times. The way she stood there, swishing her tail. The look in her eyes. How her muscles jumped when she charged. I don’t know if it was right.”
Anse ground his teeth.
“Thinking it over and over won’t help. Trust me. That’ll eat you down to the bone, ruin your life. It don’t matter if it was right or not. You thought it was right at the time.” Anse’s fists swelled hard on the wheel, his knuckles knobby and scarred. “I done some things I knew they were evil and I done them anyway. That’s worth burning up over. Not this.”
Lope drove his thumb inside his fist, squeezing.
“You really think she was just coming to your call? She wasn’t gonna attack?”
Anse spat out the window.
“I don’t know, Lope. I think I just wanted to know either way, even if it meant her claws. I wanted to save her. But there’s no telling. She was a wild thing—”
“If I hadn’t shot—”
“If you hadn’t shot, I might be dead.” Anse looked at him. “Don’t hate yourself over this, okay? If anything, hate me for letting her out.”
“You let her out?”
Anse cut his eyes out the window.
“You know what I mean.”
* * *
The tigers stalked back and forth on their side of the fence, crisscrossing, their striped coats flickering through the brush. Crackling. They seemed dangerous even here, like flames waiting to be loosed over the land, sparking wildfires. Anse had slid the bucket of deer legs to the edge of the tailgate. He took one dripping in each hand and approached the feeding chute. Across from the tiger enclosure lay a man-made pond covered in a green carpet of algae, encircled with a high chain-link fence. An elevated viewing platform stood on the bank, perched on heavy posts.
“What you got over there?” asked Lope.
Anse stopped, the clubs of meat dripping at his sides.
“Old gator pit,” he said. “From the zoo era. They tossed live chickens in the pond at chowtime for people to watch. Big hit in the old days.”
“What’s in there now?”
“Nothing,” said Anse. “That I know of.” He lifted the meat to the lip of the chute. “But I’d double-check my life insurance policy before going for a swim.”
Lope looked at the pond. The thin layer of scum looked firm enough to walk on—a trap that could suck you into waters thick and black as tar. He wondered what monsters could be living down there, waiting.
* * *
“Drones?” Anse’s face was twisted, as if the word offended him.
They were sitting on the tailgate of Anse’s truck, their foreheads shiny with sweat, drinking Coca-Cola from the can. For the past two weeks, Lope had been coming on his days off to help around the sanctuary. It was late afternoon now, the sunlight spreading whiskey-gold over the grounds.
“Drones,” said Lope. “That’s right. They’re becoming a problem for air traffic controllers and law enforcement. Government is hiring falconers to take them down.”
“What do you know about falco
nry?”
“My uncle Delk, he’s a master falconer, flies raptors at a couple of the beach resorts, keeps the gulls from pooping in the piña coladas. I worked for him every summer growing up. I still have my license, just haven’t kept a bird since I started with the fire department. But I’m qualified, Mr. Anse. I can do this.”
“What is it you want from me?”
“For now, I’m still at the firehouse ten shifts a month. I need somewhere to build a better outdoor perch and mews—raptor barn—and someone to feed her the days I’m at work. I could train Malaya to do it, if you don’t want to. I’d give you ten percent of the business in return. It’s a good deal, Anse.”
Anse rubbed the stubbly brick of his chin.
“You sure there’s enough business in nuisance drones?”
“Yes, sir. They got issues with them flying over government facilities, restricted sites. European police started the trend, using eagles to take them down. The Kings Bay sub base is looking for a falconer—they already reached out to my uncle. It’s a lucrative contract. And I’d train her for bird control, too. Uncle Delk is retiring soon. He wants to pass on the resort contracts, the one at the local airport, too. He wants somebody to take over the business. I got that little one at home. I got to think about the future now.”
Anse nodded, squinting across the sanctuary grounds.
“You already got the bird?”
“My uncle has one for me. A golden eagle, Aurora.”
“You flown her before?”
“Many times.”
“And you think she’ll attack drones?”
Lope leaned back, crossed his arms.
“Like God’s own hammer, sir.”