Pride of Eden

by Taylor Brown

  THUNDER BOY

  “How do you afford it?” asked Malaya.

  They were working in the butcher shed, quartering chickens for the smaller cats. A few of the birds they set aside whole, reserved for the mighty jaws of the sanctuary’s new crocodile.

  Anse didn’t take his eyes from the cutting board. He positioned his chicken with the breast side up, pulling one leg away from the body.

  “Afford what?”

  “All of it,” said Malaya. “The tigers each eat ten pounds of meat a day. I did the math. Even at two bucks a pound, that’s over seven grand a year apiece just in meat. Multiply that by all the other animals you got here.”

  Anse sliced the web of skin at the animal’s hip to reveal the socket, then cut through the ball of joint, freeing the leg.

  “The others don’t eat as much.”

  “The hell they don’t. It adds up. Plus the vet bills, the mortgage.”

  “There’s no mortgage. I bought the place outright.”

  “Still,” said Malaya.

  “There’s tours, merchandise sales. Tyler runs fund-raising campaigns.”

  “Don’t give me that shit, Anse. Nobody ever comes for the tours, and you never charge for the field trips. I don’t think anybody’s bought a T-shirt since I’ve been here. If there were big donors, they’d be coming around to visit.”

  Anse felt for the knot of cartilage at the center of the chicken’s breast, then positioned the blade slightly to the side.

  “I have money,” he said.

  He cut through the ribs on either side of the knot, freeing each assembly of muscle and wing. Tiny engines of flesh, so neat they could be factory-made.

  Malaya watched him.

  “Money from what?”

  Anse thought of the day he rode Thunder Boy, a miracle of a horse, and he could not die.

  “I don’t like to talk about it,” he said. He used the flat side of the cleaver to scrape the four pieces of chicken into the cooler at the end of the table. “Besides, it’s rude to ask people about their finances.”

  “It’s rude to trespass on private property and steal somebody’s pet crocodile, too.”

  “Rescue,” said Anse.

  Malaya leaned forward.

  “Tell me.”

  * * *

  That night Anse drove the backroads, his headlights igniting starry pairs of wild eyes. He knew people saw his big truck cruising the roads and whispered that he was collecting strays to feed his pride of cats. Truth was, he never knew what he was searching for out here, not exactly. Now less than ever. Since Henrietta’s death, his heart felt fissured, shattered into a hundred bloody nomads, each fled fugitive from the cage of his chest. He was driven out of bed, into the night-lands, the dark wilds of slash pine and swamp. Searching, searching. Perhaps he was trying to find them, those lost fragments. To round them up before they were lost.

  He thought of the story he’d told Malaya that afternoon. The same story he’d told Tyler, years ago, and no one else. It was the truth, as best as he could remember it. But like so much of his past, it seemed more akin to some painful dream.

  “I was a jockey in my teens,” he told her. “Went back to racing after I came home from overseas.”

  “From Vietnam?”

  “Africa.”

  In 1981, he’d gone to Ruidoso Downs for the All American Futurity—the richest quarter-horse race in the world. He was there to ride a string of lesser horses, the small-money races of a journeyman jockey. After a race, in the locker room, he was approached to ride a horse called Thunder Boy. A horse known to win. A favorite.

  “I took the ride, even though it smelled. You don’t turn down a ride like that.”

  The night before the race, he was intercepted at his motel. There were two of them, hired thugs in white shirts and black gambler hats and flashy silver bolo ties. They had the asymmetric faces of cavemen, shaped as if by club and stone. Their muscles bucked beneath the starch of their shirts. Seeing them, he knew why the original jockey had taken “sick.” Why he, a mere journeyman, had been given a ride so good.

  They cornered him in the vending room, where he’d come for ice. They knew he would suck on the cubes instead of eating that night, dipping them in a tumbler of bourbon, savoring the burn. In the quarter mile, every ounce could count.

  “You will not win this race,” said one. The snack machine buzzed in the small room. Their boots were sharp-toed and black, polished like knives. “You will not.”

  “The fuck I won’t,” said Anse. He muscled between them, scooping his brass bucket full of ice. The hired guns turned to watch him. Their hands were crossed over their belt buckles, like men at church.

  “Thunder Boy wins this race, you will be gelded,” said one, snipping his fingers.

  “Then shot,” said the other.

  Anse looked at them over the ice bucket hugged full against his chest.

  “Clip me, I’ll still have more balls than you two mariachis.”

  He made to push between them, out of the room, when his knees buckled beneath him, stomped in. Blades appeared at his chin, his groin.

  “You no listen,” said one of the men.

  Anse glanced down at the knives. Stilettos. One blade rubbed up and down his zipper. The other scratched the stubble at his throat.

  “How much?” he asked.

  * * *

  Thunder Boy was a wonder of a horse, a storm-gray stallion, bouldered with power. His shoulders and haunches pulsed like thunderclouds. His hooves gleamed as if shoeshined. His black eyes, long-lashed, looked Anse up and down, taking in his racing silks, his visored helmet, his five-ounce cheater boots. Anse touched the horse’s neck, fingering the veins there, the great rivers of blood. The horse nuzzled him in the crook of his neck, telling him he would run. He would run as hard and long as necessary. He would run his heart out.

  Soon Anse was crouched in the stirrups, waiting for the gates to open. He felt like a god, poised on a horse made of cloud and fire, when the gates slammed open and Thunder Boy exploded from the chute, striking to the head of the field. The horse detonated between his heels, again and again, and Anse cared for nothing but the surge of blood, the storm of hooves. He was thundering high over the Mekong Delta again, riding in the door of a helicopter gunship. He was galloping over the silver sage of Little Bighorn, charging into the singing arrows and rifles of the Lakota, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho. He could hear the war-cries of Crazy Horse, rearing his painted stallion, a yellow lightning bolt flashing on his cheek.

  “Hóka-héy! Hóka-héy!”

  Today is a good day to die.

  Anse forgot about the men from the hotel, the deal. His past was dead, his tomorrows unborn. There was only the thundering of blood, the crashing of the hooves.

  Now, now, now.

  He would ride this thunder into the earth.

  He would win.

  He whipped the horse for speed, merciless. The animal charged and charged, as if into battle, his black blinkers bearing the white blaze of a thunderbolt. The lesser horses fell away and Thunder Boy’s hooves struck the earth like cannon fire, again and again, hard enough he might break from the ground and roar into the sky.

  They were ahead by two lengths, an unbeatable margin. The terraced screams of the grandstands whipped past them and the high windows of the Billy the Kid Casino and Anse lashed the horse’s rump for power, drinking the wind in his mouth.

  The thunder was everything. There was nothing else.

  To this day, he thought he could feel the animal’s heart break beneath him, like the crack of split stone. Thunder Boy’s legs folded and his chest plowed into the dirt and Anse was thrown from the stirrups, sent cartwheeling down the track. He felt ribs snapping inside him, joints wrecked, and then the ten-horse field was upon him, a barrage of iron-hoofed cannons firing on every side of his head, staving the earth at his temples, at his arms and hands and legs and feet. He would be stove-in, ridden down like Custer’s men, riddled like the boy
s in Vietnam, in Rhodesia and Mozambique. Like the baboons, the lions, the elephants.

  He would have what he deserved.

  Then they were gone, a passed storm. Anse lay sprawled on the track, his body wreathed in hoofprints, a cloud of crescent moons stamped in the dirt. One lay in the pocket of his armpit, another between his legs. A pair crowned his head. Any might have killed him.

  There must be a reason why.

  Thunder Boy lay behind him, a little to one side, the track torn and pocked in the wake of his fall. His neck was broken, his head curled strangely beneath the gray heap of his body, as if he were hiding in embarrassment. The thunderbolt on his blinkers was dirt-smeared, extinguished.

  Anse was discharged from the hospital three days later, arrayed in plaster casts and slings. He opened the door of his motel room to find a gray leather duffel bag set neatly on the center of the bed. Inside were columns of stacked bills, sealed in cellophane.

  “They thought I’d done it on purpose,” said Anse. “Gone over and above. Maybe that’s why they left the note.”

  “Note?” asked Malaya.

  “Yellow Post-it note, stuck on the bills. Said a little oil company to invest in.” Anse twitched his nose. “Ain’t so little no more.”

  * * *

  “You two have been spending a lot of time together,” said Tyler.

  They were lying in bed in Anse’s trailer, spent.

  “She’s learning the ropes,” said Anse. “Nobody to teach her but me.”

  Outside, his truck was still ticking, cooling from his long drive through the country midnight, the black sea of pines. He’d been thinking of how he was cruising along the ancient seabed. Sixty million years ago, there were no glaciers at the poles and the lower half of the state was covered in a vast sea, warm and shallow, rife with corals and arthropods, megasharks and thirty-foot crocodilians whose tooth-marks had been found in the bones of tyrannosaurs. Sometimes he would park his truck and lie in the bed and imagine their silhouettes swimming through the skies overhead—creatures the size of attack helicopters and business jets.

  “You all were a long time picking up that croc from the DNR last week,” said Tyler. “All day. It’s not like you had to wrangle it yourself.”

  Anse squinted up at the ceiling fan, so much like the spinning propeller of an airboat. His hands were laced across his chest.

  “I told you there was complications.”

  Tyler rolled up on her elbow.

  “If you fuck her, just tell me, okay?”

  “Hell, she ain’t half my age.”

  “As if that ever stopped anyone.”

  “You like her so much, why don’t you fuck her?”

  Tyler flinched, her eyes sudden-wet. She turned onto her back, staring through the ceiling.

  “You know what your problem is, Anse? You only love the wild ones, the ones that don’t love you back.”

  Anse mashed shut his eyes. He wanted to argue but couldn’t find the words. Instead he growled and rolled onto his side, welcoming the world of his old saber cat. Smilodon, a winter king facing down his last rout of wolves.

  A creature savage, untamed.

  * * *

  Malaya strode down the aisles of the store, her grocery basket hanging from one arm. She wore a tank top to let her new tattoo breathe. A flaming tropical bird, still puffy, lifting from the perch of her shoulder blade. She tested avocados with her thumb, placing three in a bag, and selected a green bunch of bananas. She walked through the dairy section, enjoying the cool hum of the shelves, the eggs cradled in their paper or Styrofoam cartons. The milk jugs stood in their rows, innocent, no longer screaming to be weaponized with 100-proof vodka.

  She turned up the baking aisle, then quickly doubled back—she’d forgotten the Greek yogurt she liked. Rounding the corner of the aisle, she nearly bumped into the cart of another shopper. The man’s face was hard and lean, as if stone-chipped, and a black spray of hair stood high from his head, banded into a ponytail. Tattoos sped down his forearms, rooted in the oversized knuckles of his hands. She wondered if he might be a rescue swimmer or frogman stationed at the submarine base, but he looked too wild for government service, too feral.

  “Excuse me,” she said, casting her eyes at his cart. She saw carton after carton of Grade A jumbo eggs, neatly stacked, along with trays of chicken necks and ground beef and a fifty-pound sack of dog food on the bottom shelf.

  She looked up. “Paleo diet?”

  The man grinned, revealing large white canine teeth.

  “Something like that.”

  Malaya felt a warmth rise in her cheeks. When she opened her mouth, she found a rare hollow where her words should be. She cleared her throat.

  “Well, don’t let me stand in your way.” She edged aside.

  The man nodded, politely, and Malaya walked on with her grocery basket, trying to remember why she’d doubled back in the first place.

  * * *

  “I’m ready for a big cat,” she said.

  Malaya was riding in the bed of Anse’s pickup, one elbow on the toolbox, talking to him through the rear window of the cab. Buckets of quartered chicken and deer legs flanked her, the upturned hooves swaying in the breeze.

  “I know you’ve been scouting one, those nights people see you out cruising the roads.”

  It was true. He’d found something just over the state line.

  He leaned his head out the window, spat.

  “You ain’t ready yet.”

  “The fuck I’m not, old man. I was born ready.”

  Anse glanced at her in the rearview mirror. In the past two months, the bruiselike bags had vanished from the girl’s eyes. Her black hair was combed now, washed. The once-bitten squares of her nails had lengthened, sharpened, painted black or charcoal or chocolate-brown depending on the week. Her breath no longer smelled like sour milk.

  Anse kept his eyes on the rearview mirror, watching her from beneath his hat brim.

  “I got a question,” he said.

  “What?”

  “That rhino poacher, the one you missed. You wish you’d hit him?”

  She turned her head. Her eyes went narrow, sighting far beyond the trees.

  “Somebody did.”

  “That ain’t what I asked.”

  Now she crossed her arms atop the toolbox and stared back at him in the mirror.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Anse nodded, looking back to the road.

  She was ready.

  * * *

  That night it stormed. Anse sat on the stoop of his trailer in his skivvies, protected by the tin awning that covered the door, and smoked a cigarette. The rain rattled the awning above his head, hard and metallic, like brass shell casings raining from a gunship. A bolt of lightning fissured the night, followed by a sharp crack of thunder, as if the sky were breaking, busting at the seams.

  He thought of all the broken hearts. Malaya, Tyler, Lope. Henrietta and Thunder Boy and a scout dog named Huey, from his days in Vietnam. Anse had his bare feet curled one atop the other, his bush hat pushed far back on his head. He put the cigarette to his lips and sucked deep. Sometimes he longed for the lands of prehistory—a world before cages or bombs, when titans roamed. A world before sin. Sometimes he wished the rain would fall and fall, drowning the histories of men, letting the world begin anew.

  Anse shook his head, blowing smoke.

  Too easy, he knew.

  CHAPTER 11

  PANTHERESS

  They crossed the Savannah River at noon, high over the city’s port and riverfront, then dropped into the lowcountry of South Carolina. It had rained that morning and the pavement was still slick, blued like a gun barrel. Their tires hissed along the old coastal highway, the world steaming from the roadsides. They passed the strip clubs and fruit stands set in the marshy no-man’s-land between states, then entered the shady tunnels of oak and pine where Pentecostal churches and cinderblock nightclubs squatted beneath the moss. Hand-painted street sign
s loomed from the trees and they passed a junkyard with a Dumpster of used tires out front, the cars hunkered like beetles in the weeds.

  They drove north on the backroads, turning onto smaller highways where broad tracts of slash pine grew spindly and frayed, destined for the sawmills. Anse wheeled onto an old two-lane, cracked and scarred, covered in tar-snakes that gleamed like hatchlings beneath their wheels. Malaya watched his jaw muscles flicker and pulse, as if chewing on curses or fighting words. A wonder he had any teeth left.

  The house was set far back from the road, the rickety mansion of a turn-of-the-century timber baron. A man who’d made his money in virgin pine and naval stores, whose workers had lived in canvas tents, wielding axes and crosscut saws. The white facade had turned greenish, as if left underwater, the windows filmy and opaque. The surrounding acres had been sold off to the state. Anse drove past the house and turned down the dirt road of the wildlife management area that now adjoined the property.

  They parked at an old turnout littered with ancient beer cans and busted glass and the black ruin of a torched car. They were dressed as hog hunters—camouflage overalls and ballcaps and heavy boots. Malaya dropped the trailer gate for Anse, who backed the sanctuary’s buggy down the ramp. It was a gas-powered 4 × 4 with off-road tires and side-by-side seats, like an oversize golf cart. He’d taped over the Little Eden decals and fitted an exhaust silencer designed for hunters who didn’t want to spook their trophy bucks. The bed was scrubbed clean and cushioned with foam mats. They started down a trail through the woods, the wheel springs creaking over the roots.

  * * *

  Malaya rode with a jabstick propped at her heel. It was long as a lance, designed to inject a dose of tranquilizer from a safe distance. Anse had taught her to use the pole-length syringe on a sack of feed, plunging the hypodermic needle through the burlap. At the time, she couldn’t help but think of the swamp boy’s bangstick, which injected a Magnum-sized slug instead.