Pride of Eden

by Taylor Brown

  The wolves swirled beneath him, their ribs rattling against the clapboard of the shed. He had not given them the command to rise. They rumbled slink-shouldered, slack-tongued, a vortex of desire. Before him lay the red flesh of the tiger, hauled onto the flat altar of the roof with a block and tackle. As he’d heaved the thick rope of the pulley, sweat spilled and veins lurched from his skin, making the words on one forearm gleam.

  THY DESIRES ARE WOLFISH, BLOODY, STARV’D AND RAVENOUS

  Now Horn descended the steps and loosed the wolves with an upward slash of his arm. They bounded straight up the vertical walls of the shed and fell upon the carcass. In the morning, the meat would be gone, heavy in the bellies of wolves, and Horn would sit cross-legged in place of the beast. He strode out of the enclosure, locking the gates behind him, and up the path to the tiny house at the front of the property. There he would sleep, curled in a room hardly bigger than a dog box, dreaming of running wild and dark beneath the moon.

  CHAPTER 9

  TREMBLING EARTH

  The pair of them lay hidden high in a grove of saw palmetto, shoulder to shoulder. Sweat crawled beneath their shirts and pants, tickling like ants, beading at the points of their noses and earlobes and chins. Mosquitos whined in their ears and beetles trundled over the folds of their camouflage fatigues. Red bugs the size of freckles burrowed under their skin, leaving hives of irritation in their wake.

  Malaya felt better than she had in weeks.

  She lifted the binoculars to her eyes, scanning the property. They were on the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp—“Land of the Trembling Earth”—where isolated pockets of swampers had used words like ere and oft and yon well into the 1900s. A land peaty and old, slashed with black creeks and abandoned rail lines, rumored to harbor the Georgia Pig Man and the Florida Skunk Ape—Southern bigfoots, muddy and foul-smelling, said to haunt the swamps and glades, ever fleeing the sight of men.

  Through the binoculars, Malaya spotted a wire corncrib. It resembled an enormous birdcage—round with wire walls and a conical tin roof, set on the floating platform of an old barge. Inside were stacks of cages and crates, which contained a whole menagerie of swampland fauna, both furred and scaled. Otters, raccoons, tortoises, even water moccasins.

  The smell reached them from fifty yards. It reminded Malaya of Baghdad, the back alleys where people had lived like animals, driven from the bombed ruins of their homes. She breathed in, out, telling herself she was in South Georgia, lying on the raw edge of the swamp. She was not passing the backstreets of Baghdad, perched high in a Humvee, her turret gun charged.

  She licked her lips.

  “Why?”

  Anse ground his teeth beneath his bush hat.

  “I ain’t for sure on that. They’ve got some end-time notions, I think.”

  Malaya glassed the main house, a porched cabin perched on skinny stilts. The roof was rusty tin, the windows cracked. An airboat sat moored on a dark creek behind the house, powered by a giant propeller. Alligator skins were pegged against the porch walls, star-shaped, like the kill marks stamped on old fighter planes.

  In front of the house, inside a shallow pit of bricks, lay the lone exotic: a giant Nile crocodile in a thick leather collar, chained to an iron post driven in the ground. Unlike the blunt nose of an American alligator, its snout formed a daggerlike point.

  “Crocodylus niloticus,” said Anse. “Nile croc, same’s the ones that take antelope and Cape buffalo in Africa, even lions.”

  A wooden sign had been wired to the post: MIGHTY MO.

  The reptile’s hide was grayish-green, striped with camouflage, and he was missing one of his hind legs, a yellowish bulb of stump. Rumor said the owners pitted the creature against native alligators for sport, saurian wars fought in backyard mudholes to the screaming glee of men in green and white rubber boots, waving twenties like pennants at a ballgame.

  Malaya had balked at first, looking at a photograph of the croc.

  “I thought we were mainly a big-cat rescue.”

  “You got something against cold-bloods?”

  “Hell, look at the fucker.”

  Anse sucked on his cigarette.

  “What, only the pretty ones matter?”

  “That isn’t what I said, Anse.”

  The old jockey shrugged.

  “He might surprise you yet.”

  She remembered a fight she’d seen once in the reserve, a Nile croc defending an elephant carcass from a trio of lionesses. That crocodile had been more than fourteen feet long, with the camouflaged hide of a Panzer tank. It wheeled and hissed, brandishing its eighty-odd teeth, but the lions were too quick. They pounced from three angles at once.

  Now, looking at Mighty Mo, Malaya felt something akin to awe for the old battler—a creature largely unchanged since the time of the dinosaur, built like a prehistoric warship. She remembered the Sunday school stories of her Catholic upbringing, when Moses commanded his brother, Aaron, to cast down his staff before Pharaoh, who wished to see a miracle, some evidence of the power of the Hebrew God. Aaron’s rod had transformed into a giant serpent—some said a crocodile—and devoured a knot of snakes born from the staffs of Pharaoh’s court sorcerers.

  “You heard about the Battle of Ramree Island?” asked Anse.

  “Should I have?”

  “Ramree is in the Bay of Bengal, off the coast of Burma. In 1945, British Royal Marines flushed a thousand Japanese troops from their base there. Tried to get them to surrender, but instead the Japanese decided to make a break across the island, crossing the interior swamps to join up with a battalion on the far side. Middle of the night, all these terrible screams started coming from the swamp. Hundreds of them, and gunfire, the crack of bones. British troops on patrol said it was like standing at the edge of hell, listening to the agonies of the damned.”

  “Crocodiles?”

  Anse nodded. “They moved in with the ebb tide. Hundreds, crushing men in their jaws, death-rolling them down into the black, ripping limbs from sockets. Come morning, the sky stayed dark, so clouded was it with carrion birds. They say only twenty of the one thousand lived.”

  “Goddamn.”

  “Worst human massacre by animals in history. Worse even than the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, that inspired Jaws.”

  “That supposed to make me want to save the son-of-a-bitch?”

  Anse shrugged. “Drop in the bucket compared to what men done to men in a single day, in a single second. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Somme. Then there’s the American bison, the Barbary lion, the northern white rhino.”

  “Fair enough,” said Malaya.

  “Some say we killed off the saber-tooth and the mastodon, too, at the end of the Pleistocene era. Human hunting pressure.”

  “Hell, maybe we all ought to just shoot ourselves, let the lions and crocs run the world.”

  Anse spat and grinned.

  “It’s a thought.”

  The sun was noon-high, an angry boil in the sky, when a pair of swampers in white rubber boots came tromping down the porch steps into the yard. They wore tatty tank tops and canvas trousers tucked into their boots. One was older, with a chinstrap beard and the stud of a diamond earring. He yawned and scratched his armpits, then lit a cigarette between cupped hands. His knuckles were tattooed, the letters illegible as bruises from this range. Malaya zoomed in with the spotting scope, squinting at his cupped fists.

  BORN FREE

  The younger swamper’s skin was unblemished. He carried a bangstick, a long spearlike device for dispatching alligators and other dangerous game at close range. At contact, it could fire a Magnum slug into the base of an animal’s skull.

  “Is it gator season?” asked Malaya.

  “Started August first,” said Anse.

  The boy with the bangstick was maybe seventeen. He had pale pink lips, an angel face. His hair, white-blond, was pulled back from his face, tied in a long sliver of ponytail. He’d begun twirling the silver bangstick around his body, whirling it like a m
ace, displaying a mastery of drum-major flourishes. The finger roll and prop spin, where the staff whirred propellerlike through his hands, and the palm spin, where it thundered flat over his head like the rotors of a helicopter like it could lift him out of this place. Now he was whipping the staff around his wrists and elbows, passing it hand to hand, behind his back and around his neck, slashing silver arcs from the fast-spinning stick. The boy lifted his boots high from the ground, marching in place, twirling the staff this way and that. Then the older man—his brother—wheeled and kicked the bangstick hard from the boy’s hands. It clattered to the ground a few feet away.

  “Sissy,” said the man. He spat at the boy’s feet.

  Malaya tensed. She felt an urge to pounce from this hide, to fall upon the older man and give him a dose of his own medicine.

  The boy stood there a moment, hands empty, then bent down to recover the bangstick. The older man was already walking the zigzag of duckboards that led to the airboat, his belt-knife clapping against his thigh. The boy took a brass shell from his pocket and loaded the firing mechanism at the end of the spear, then followed his brother to the dock, using the long bangstick like a hiking staff. They unmoored the boat and mounted the side-by-side seats, raised high as bar stools from the deck. The boy set the bangstick in a holder between them and donned a heavy pair of earmuffs as his brother fired the engine. The big propeller kicked over amid a cloud of smoke, spooling up. Soon they were roaring away from the dock, tearing a ragged chevron in the creek, the trees shivering as they passed.

  Malaya looked at Anse. His eyeglasses were slightly fogged, the lenses perched small and round on his nose like the pince-nez of Teddy Roosevelt. He might be a miniature version of the man they called “the Lion,” his battered bush hat perched on his head like a Rough Rider’s. He lay next to a long catchpole tipped with a noose of steel cable. He pulled the instrument close as the sound of the airboat faded.

  “Showtime.”

  They rose from their hide and approached the brick pit. The killing mouth of the reptile turned toward them, crowded with crooked teeth. Anse held the catchpole before him. The steel loop of the snare floated through the scattered sunlight, halo or noose. Thunder rumbled from the crocodile’s belly, making the ground tremble beneath their bootsoles. Malaya looked at the yellowy knob of the missing foot. She’d asked Anse why they couldn’t just cut the creature loose into the swamp.

  “Any alligator fed by humans becomes a danger,” he’d told her. “State policy is for it to be harvested.”

  “But it’s a crocodile, not an alligator.”

  “Same problem.”

  “What if these swampers hear about a three-footed alligator at a sanctuary up in Georgia and decide to come after you?”

  Anse had squinted out the window of the butcher shed a long moment, as if waiting, watching them come.

  “Let them.”

  * * *

  “Whoa boy,” said Anse.

  The crocodile was straining against the end of his chain, hissing and bellowing. Yellowish scars covered his hide, each a mark of some previous battle.

  “Watch it,” said Anse.

  The tail swept across the ground, dull-spiked like a heavy war club. Malaya knew the reptile could wheel in a flash, whipping that long tail far beyond the outer limit of the chain, snapping femurs and buckling joints, blasting shards of bone through arteries. The yellow knob of foot scraped the earth for traction, pocking the dirt. The reptile’s eyes, turning their way, looked like a pair of alien planets, swampy and primeval. Malaya thought of the vast histories eyes like those must have witnessed, ages when flying lizards screamed through the heavens or saber-tooth cats prowled the riverbanks, ambushing three-toed horses or mastodons. No wonder the Old Testament God would transform Aaron’s rod into a saurian destroyer, showing what he thought of Pharaoh’s small-time court sorcery.

  The noose of the catchpole floated before the creature’s snout. The inhabitants of the corncrib squeaked and scratched at their cages, hearing the war-bellows of the croc. Anse lunged, snaring Mighty Mo in the noose. The creature thundered and shook, as if shot or speared, slapping the earth with his tail, hissing and death-rolling. Anse held fast. His muscles blistered beneath his shirt, his forearms strung with effort. Malaya swooped in and set the chain in the iron beak of the bolt cutters, snapping the links.

  When the crocodile had drained itself of fight, they cinched its jaws with duct tape and bound its legs behind its back with flexi-cuffs. Malaya stared at the binds. Her heart beat hotter, faster. The words came before she could stop them.

  “Let’s just let him go, Anse. Nobody will know.”

  “He’ll come back here to be fed. They’ll just catch him again.”

  “We’re taking him off a chain and putting him in a cage.”

  “Enclosure,” said Anse. “He’ll have a whole pond to himself. He won’t have to fight.”

  Malaya looked at the battle-scarred hulk, so like some battered warship of old.

  “Maybe he likes to fight,” she said.

  Anse unhinged his jaw to reply, but the roar of an engine filled his mouth.

  * * *

  They stood two against two, the crocodile bound between them. Anse held the catchpole in both hands, slightly canted, while the angel-faced boy slowly twirled the bangstick, letting it flash about the axle of his wrist. Behind him, the airboat floated at the end of the dock. The boy seemed strangely undisturbed at their presence, even as his tattooed brother shook with fury, palming the end of his belt-knife.

  “The fuck you think you’re doing?”

  “Fish and Wildlife called us in,” said Anse. “Said there was a nuisance crocodile for removal here.”

  “Nuisance? He was on a fucking chain.”

  “Somebody must of called the state hotline,” said Anse. “Anything over four feet could be deemed a nuisance if it’s believed to pose a threat to people, pets, or property.”

  “You got a warrant?”

  “Permit,” said Anse. “It’s up in the truck.”

  “Ain’t that convenient.”

  Anse’s hands knuckled slightly on the handle of the snare. The curled grip of the howdah pistol hung against his side ribs.

  “Complainant must of granted legal access to the property,” he said. “Else the state wouldn’t of issued the permit.”

  The swamper turned, glaring at the angel-faced boy.

  “You done this?”

  The boy didn’t look back at him. He was staring at Malaya. His eyes were bright blue, as if filled with sky. Somehow he seemed older than before, harder.

  “Sissy-boy,” said the older brother. “You listening to me?”

  Still the boy said nothing. Malaya thought the older man might lunge for him, throttle him, but he didn’t. The man seemed terror-struck, paralyzed by the strangers in his midst. His knife stayed glued inside the sheath even as his hand flexed on the handle. He appeared shorter than before, cowed. His eyes kept flicking to the bound crocodile. The power dynamic had shifted, realized Malaya. The man was afraid of the strangers—of what they could do—but the boy was not. He seemed taller now, surer, as if he were drawing power up from the ground, absorbing what bled from his brother. His hand snapped closed, catching the bangstick vertical in his fist—a rod designed to smite monsters, turning rivers to blood.

  “Take him,” he said.

  “What?” said his brother.

  “Take him,” said the boy. “He wasn’t ever meant for the ark. Too big.”

  “Ark?” said Malaya.

  The boy tipped his staff toward the barge.

  “We’ll save them when the waters rise.”

  “Hang on,” said the older swamper. “They can’t just take him.”

  “Watch them, brother.”

  The man was sweating profusely now; it blistered his face like a plague.

  “I won’t have it. I’m the one bought Mo from that gator park. He’s mine.”

  “He’s fought well for y
ou,” said the boy. “It’s time.”

  The man was shaking visibly now. His voice was a strangled whisper.

  “Don’t let them take him,” he said. “Please.”

  The boy stood with the long rod of the bangstick held upright in his hand, his eyes calm and blue. He was in charge now. Unafraid of the strangers, or the world that sent them.

  “Take him,” he said.

  Malaya and Anse looked at each other, then bent toward the bound reptile. The older swamper quivered in place, as if bound by some paralyzing spell. He was staring at Mighty Mo, this three-footed lizard king, and Malaya saw a wild love in his eyes. The spell broke and his body flooded into action. He lunged at them, drawing his knife.

  “No!”

  The bangstick flashed in the boy’s hand, wheeling outward to strike the man’s wrist with a crack. The knife was knocked from his hand, flashing into the dirt, and then the staff reversed direction, slung around the boy’s body at a diagonal, striking the older swamper behind the knees. He buckled to the dirt, as if receiving grace, his injured hand clutched to his chest. Again the staff whipped about the boy’s body and drove the man into the ground, the powerhead placed against his heart. A little pressure and a round of .357 Magnum would discharge into his chest.

  “I told you about calling me sissy,” said the boy.

  The man’s whole body was clenched, as if skewered. His eyes were wide.

  “Please,” he croaked.

  The boy spoke to Malaya and Anse, not turning his head.

  “Take the crocodile,” he said. “And don’t ever come back.”

  They bent and took a rope hitched under the croc’s forelegs. The knot veed outward, giving them each a length of towline. They slung the lines over their shoulders and began hauling the reptile from the clearing, heavy as a beached boat. Their heads were bent, their chins low. Each listening for the sound of a shot, like the first crack of a coming storm.

  CHAPTER 10