Pride of Eden

by Taylor Brown

  Anse nodded faintly, his mouth crackling into a grin.

  Lope looked out toward the old alligator pond.

  “Maybe I could set up on the feeding platform of the pond?”

  Anse’s eyes cut that direction, iron-hard.

  “Not there,” he said. “I got plans for that.”

  “Another gator?”

  The old man sniffed.

  “Something like that.”

  * * *

  Anse set him up with the old giraffe enclosure on the edge of the sanctuary—another relic of the zoo days, when a giraffe named Hightower had leaned his long neck over gathered knots of Florida-bound vacationers, chewing his cud and eyeing them for handouts. The giraffe house still stood in one corner of the place, a corrugated-steel hangar built double-tall and narrow.

  Lope started coming whenever he could, transforming the structure into a raptor barn. He built perches and a two-door entry system and an outdoor weathering yard. He hammered iron hooks into one section, draping leather jesses and hoods and bells along the walls. The eagle, Aurora, would be free-lofted—allowed to roam untethered about the barn, picking her perches.

  She was the color of dark chocolate, with white epaulettes on her shoulders, and weighed nearly fifteen pounds, with a wingspan of seven feet. Lope could be seen long into the afternoon, flying her at baits he swung from the end of a leather leash. The bird would orbit high above, as if awaiting orders, then dive for the earth, popping her wings like a parachute, high-arched, to strike the bait from midair.

  * * *

  “You think we can trust him?” asked Malaya.

  They were sitting on the tailgate of Anse’s truck, watching.

  “He doesn’t know.”

  “Neither does Tyler, but we can trust her.”

  Anse looked at the firefighter standing in the ankle-high grass of the enclosure, the hooded raptor riding the fist of his leather gauntlet. He wore a SATILLA FIRE & RESCUE shirt, which bore a pair of crossed fire axes, and a green boonie hat to shade his face, the strap hanging against his chest. His Hayabusa sport bike was parked just outside the fence, with its fierce beak and oversized rear tire. Saddlebags hung from the tail of the machine, bulging with supplies.

  A quadcopter hovered over the enclosure. Anse squinted at the tiny flier, the rotors whispering against the sky, buzzing like insect wings. The landing skids, lean and black, made him think of other skies, older, when he rode in the open doors of helicopter gunships. When the tongue of his best friend—a dog—flapped in the wind.

  Sometimes he could feel the untethered wheel of the earth again, same as he’d felt that night in the Mozambican maize field. The seasons cycling on, and the world growing ever stranger, ever more overrun by machine facsimiles of the animals. Great herds of automobiles rumbling down the interstates, endless as the buffalo of old, and bearded men clad in leather chaps, riding horses of steel and chrome across the prairies. Migratory jet-birds, white-winged, cutting contrails through the heavens, and the oceans patrolled by black killer whales with atomic hearts, their blowholes capable of launching city-killing warheads. Robotic pack-mules that walked on all fours, hauling the gear of commando patrols high into the mountains, watched by predatory drones that could see from twenty thousand feet the ghost-heat of enemy bootprints on the black scar of a footpath.

  All this in a century. In less.

  This man-made dragonfly hovering before them, it would evolve. Its descendants would patrol fences or inspect power plants or spy on illicit lovers through bedroom windows. Drones would wash the windows of skyscrapers and herd cattle and deliver packages to doors. They might buzz about truck stops, washing windshields and checking tire pressures, or serve as first responders, hovering over accident scenes with red flashers, delivering medical aid or instructions before the paramedics could arrive. Whole swarms of robotic fliers, serving mankind.

  As they watched, the eagle lifted from her master’s fist, her wings thumping the air. Anse slurped from his can of Coke and thumbed back the brim of his bush hat.

  “Lope says the Mongols used them to hunt wolves.”

  “Eagles?”

  Anse nodded. “There were special grounds on the steppe where only the khans could hunt, marked out with stones. There’s still pictures of wolf skins draped from the houses of Kazakh hunters, wolves killed by golden eagles.”

  “How can an eagle take down a wolf?”

  “Diving strike to the back of the head, severing the brainstem. In the eighties some goldens went on a tear in New Mexico, injured or killed some fifty head of domestic cattle.”

  “Jesus.”

  They watched the eagle ascend, her form darkening against the white face of the sun. There she would hide, cloaked in fire, waiting to strike. She was descended from the feathered dinosaurs of prehistory, Anse knew, nothing left of the lesser iterations but skeletal impressions in bellies of rock, like the hidden art of God. Anse wondered how long until this raptor, too, would be outmoded, obsolete. A relic of blood and feather, preserved only in photographs, in the stories of men. He looked into the blind eye of the sun. Waiting, waiting, for the bird to strike.

  CHAPTER 8

  WOLFMAN

  Dawn, the pines etched like dog ears against an aluminum sky. Horn walked along the backyard path to the enclosure. He was barefoot, like always, his soles callused so hard and unfeeling he could walk on noontime asphalt and broken glass. His bare torso shone, sweat-wrung with the five hundred push-ups he did every morning, hardening his chest like an armor breastplate. His hair was pulled high from his head, sprouted black and bushy as a wolf’s tail, and he wore a bleached pair of canine teeth through the lobes of his ears. Black writing slithered beneath his skin, the words of poets and bards and madmen. Scrolled like a necklace beneath his collarbones, a line from Henry VI:

  THOU WOLF IN SHEEP’S ARRAY

  The wolf pack paced back and forth on their side of the fence, crisscrossing, waiting for him. They were pure-bloods, gray and timber wolves, their coats swimming black and silver through the dawn. The chain-link fence was ten feet high, angled inward at the top and strung with electric wire. A four-foot length of ground mesh extended into the enclosure, topped with rocks and logs and paving stones to keep the animals from digging out. The entrance was a double gate, latched and padlocked.

  Horn took the key from a thong on his neck and let himself through the first gate, locking it behind him, then opened the second. The wolves swarmed him, bounding to touch their noses to his, to lick the teeth of their alpha. He ignored them, striding into the enclosure as if unaware of their affections.

  Disregard, the ultimate mark of power.

  The wolves only worked harder for his attention, torqueing themselves high into the air, seeking his mouth. He carried on toward their shelter, a flat-topped shed on which they liked to stand perched in the afternoons, looking down on the world like cats. Their bodies whirled and smoked about him as he walked, a storm that enveloped him, conjured as if by the black words written beneath his skin. Their white teeth flashed.

  He climbed the steps of the shelter and sat cross-legged on the roof, limber as a yogi, his hands on his knees. The sun, streaking down through the pines, found the wolf pack paying tribute to their alpha, staring into his black eyes and nibbling his bottom lip, feathering his skin with their tails. All this until Horn made a diagonal slash of one arm, shoulder to hip, and the beasts fled the platform at once, leaving him sitting in lotus pose, his body glistening with the work of their tongues.

  * * *

  The pures were Horn’s retinue, the furred engines of his empire. They sired his kennel of wolf dogs, crossbreeds that sold for five hundred dollars a head to people who wanted them as pets. There were new age Vermont and Colorado spinsters who believed in the wolf as their power animal or spiritual totem, and there were lovers of the arctic breeds, the Siberian husky and malamute and Samoyed, who wished to own an animal of even higher, wilder blood. There were men who wanted to wield th
e beasts like weapons at the end of a chain, and owners who were exceedingly protective of their property and kept the hybrids as guard dogs. There were families with the time and money and dedication to care for such animals, and those without. Horn vetted the new owners as best he could. He ran their names through a background-check service and made them complete a questionnaire by mail, giving proof of address. Still, the lives of the animals beyond his care were largely unknown.

  Horn’s were high-content hybrids, more than three-quarter wolf. Unlike the pures, the wolf dogs lived in kennels, a series of four-by-eight boxes with six-by-ten runs. They ate kibble instead of raw meat and rarely tasted the roadkill that Horn purchased from a mainland contractor in charge of pickup and disposal, nor the whole bison shanks and shoulders bought from a bison ranch along the old coastal highway. He could only afford so much.

  A litter of three hybrid pups, pulled from their mother fourteen days after birth, tumbled over his knees while he fed them formula from a baby bottle. His refrigerator was loaded with neat rows of these bottles, each containing a whipped concoction of goat’s milk and egg yolks and Karo syrup spiked with the amino acid arginine to prevent cataracts. He warmed the milk in an electric bottle warmer before feeding time.

  The pups chewed on the plastic nipples, their throats pumping, their oversized paws trying to grip the bottle, as if they had thumbs. In two weeks, he would begin feeding them formula-soaked kibble. In another three, they would be on solid food. At four weeks, their brains would already be as big as those of the largest dogs, constantly analyzing the world for opportunity, weakness. The limp of an injured animal, the strained lungs of an aging pack mate. They would test every lock and vent. They would try to climb and dig. Some could chew through eleven-gauge fence. Still, they were harmless compared to the creatures that lurked elsewhere in the compound, hidden, crackling like secret fire through the brush.

  * * *

  The sun was hovering over the trees. The pups were fed. Horn stood in the medical shed with his hands on his hips. Mystic Tiger lay before him, dead. The tiger had passed in the night—surely as a consequence of the maltreatment he’d endured at the hands of his previous owner, which Horn had tried so hard to reverse.

  Horn had taken him from the backyard of a private owner who’d been posting ads in a trade magazine dedicated to exotic animal ownership. The house was a neat doublewide with a paved driveway and man-made trout pond. A giant pickup was parked slantwise in the yard, sky-jacked on mud tires, flying the flags of the local high school team, the Golden Tigers. A For Sale sign had been tucked beneath the windshield wipers.

  The owner had fallen on hard times since the mascot clawed a varsity cheerleader during a pep rally, which led to a lawsuit. Mystic lived in a ten-by-ten cage in the sideyard, fed on dog food and table scraps since the incident. No longer would the high school sponsor an annual hog-hunt to fill the county’s deep freezers with the four thousand pounds of meat the animal ate each year. No longer would the tiger be trotted out for halftime shows and pep rallies and homecoming parades. Soon the animal would be surrendered to the state, his fate unknown.

  Mystic Tiger was starving when Horn found him, thin as a knife. His cage reeked, uncleaned. When the wind was right, the odor could be smelled from the main road. Still, the big cat’s pride was unbroken. He was nearly lame from refusing to lie down in his own excrement, which carpeted the cage.

  Horn loved him for this.

  Under cover of night, he darted the tiger and cut the locks of the cage and loaded him into the back of his cargo van. Then, with the claw-shaped karambit he carried at the small of his back, he slashed the big truck’s mud tires and squeezed the contents of a glucose drip bag into the fuel tank. The next time the owner started the truck, the sugar solution would caramelize inside the cylinders, causing the engine to seize. When Horn returned to his van, Mystic Tiger was breathing softly on his litter, tranquilized.

  Horn spent weeks nursing the big cat back to health, rolling ball after ball of hand-warmed hamburger meat through his feeding chute, some of them loaded with capsules of glucosamine or fish oil or even Valium to help him rest. After two months, Mystic Tiger’s health appeared drastically improved. He no longer limped, and the fire had returned to his coat. He looked hard and angular and strong, ready to hunt, kill, mate. Then, this morning, he hadn’t woken up. His death had been painless, at least—a quiet passing in the night.

  * * *

  Horn washed the tiger’s body with moist towelettes, tracing the inky black blades of his stripes, making them gleam. The stripes broke up the creature’s silhouette in long grass or dense jungle, though this tiger, born captive, had never stalked such landscapes. Horn cleaned the webbed spaces between the tiger’s toes and the white tuft of his beard, kissing him on the broad bridge between the eyes.

  He could not help but think of his mother, dead when he was eight. She’d made crafts and jewelry, which she sold through the local gift shops. Necklaces of sharks’ teeth and abalone spike earrings and gun-barrel rings with points of crystal snared in copper wire—rose quartz or blue lapis or black tourmaline. She hadn’t cut her hair since her teens, so the dark waterfall of locks nearly touched the floor. Mainly she kept the black tresses wound up in large buns, perched high atop her head and pinned with wooden knitting needles. She had sharp little teeth, like a wolf pup, and she always smelled faintly of blood and milk, so that little Horn’s stomach would growl in her presence and he would long to eat.

  One morning just after his eighth birthday, she did not come from her room for breakfast. As always, his father had left for work before dawn, gone before anyone woke. Horn ate his cereal alone, slurping the milk from the bowl, then jumped down from the chair, his bare soles slapping the linoleum. He found his mother still in bed, buried in the dark nest of her own hair. Her cheek was cold. He crawled on top of her, shaking her, lifting one lid to find the white of her eye gone red, a world aswim in blood. Aneurysm, they would later say. Little Horn spent hours bawling into the crooks of her, her armpits and elbows, screaming for her to rise. He bit blue horseshoes in her cold skin, as if the pain might call her back. He straddled and hammered her chest with the heels of his fists, glazing her nightgown with snot and tears.

  Here his father found him when he came home from his shift on the road crew. Horn went wild when the man tried to pull him from his mother. He ripped her nightgown trying to cling to the cold country of her body, splaying her breasts flat and wide across her bony rib cage, and his father slapped him hard across the face. Horn attacked him, clawing and biting and kicking like a creature gone rabid, his eyes red-blazed with fury. He ripped antlers and driftwood and feathered dream catchers from the walls. He howled.

  That was the first night his father locked him in the dog box.

  * * *

  All day, Horn worked over the raised bier of the medical table with his karambit and skinning knife and a hand-chipped obsidian blade, dressing the animal, saving the bones and claws and tiger-striped hide, which he fleshed and salted and hung to dry. When he finished, the sun was low over the trees, the sky darkening. The hour between the dog and the wolf, when darkness whelmed and shapes shifted strangely into night. The tiger’s remains had lain upwind of the wolves all day, the red scent curling invisibly through the fence, entering the wet cages of their jaws. Now Horn loaded the meat and organs, near boneless, into a large washtub, which he set on a handcart and wheeled over the path toward the high fence of the enclosure. He entered the double gates for the second time today.

  The wolves circled, circled, whining with desire. Only his favorite, Onyx, refused to duck his head in submission. The black beta wolf strutted beyond the ring of beggars, flashing the white barbs of his smile. He would make a play for alpha soon. His yellow eyes never left his leader, the sharp black arrow of his mind hunting for any sign of weakness, any hitch or opportunity. Horn would be ready. He had ten years of experience training animals for the circus—wolves and tigers, mainly—
and more than twenty victories in the cage, applying the ancient arts of leverage and limb in which he was trained. This would not be the first wolf that challenged his power, that he would have to roll and stare blaze-eyed into submission, or else.

  When he was fifteen, his first love, Jessie-Ray Long, had cheated on him with an upperclassman football player, blowing the boy in the cab of his pickup truck in the school parking lot. Teenaged Horn could not quit crying. Sobs racked him for forty-eight hours, like all the hurt in the world was in her mouth, on the slick of her tongue. He lay curled in a ball on his bed, his cries muffled by his pillow. He could not let his father hear. He must not show weakness. But his pain pulsed through the sheetrock of the house. After two days, his father had had enough. He burst in and took Horn by the back of the neck and ran him down the hall and into the yard. He meant to force the boy into the dog box—the first time in two years.

  Unbeknownst to his father, Horn had been training at an underground gym after school since the age of twelve, learning jujitsu in return for mopping floors and cleaning lockers. Without thought, he wheeled and leapt high-kneed for his father’s head, locking his legs around the bigger man’s neck—a flying triangle choke. His thighs applied pressure to his father’s carotid artery, cutting off the blood supply to his brain. They stared into each other’s face for ten long seconds, Horn hanging like a monkey from the bigger man’s neck. He watched his father’s eyes soften, as with love. The man melted to his knees with a thump, then crumpled to the earth. Horn held the blood-choke for a long, quivering minute. Then he tied his father to the ten-foot lead of the dog run and broke his thumbs so that when he awoke, he could only paw blubbering at the knot.

  The cell at the juvenile detention center was ten times the size of a dog box. From then on, jail cells were always too big to bother him.