Pride of Eden

by Taylor Brown

  Later she used the jabstick to sedate one of the sanctuary’s tigers for his annual medical examination. Anse and Tyler first lured the animal into a narrow chute attached to the enclosure, coaxing him with hunks of store-bought beef. Meanwhile, Malaya crouched alongside the fence. She slid the lance through a diamond of chain link, aiming for the high, angular plane of the tiger’s rump.

  She was kneeling there, about to plunge the syringe, when her hair stood on end, like someone had breathed on the back of her neck. She looked back over her shoulder, as if a pair of eyes might hang there, watching. A wolf or other predator. There was nothing, only the pines swaying on the other side of the sanctuary fence.

  She turned back to the tiger and steadied her aim.

  * * *

  They parked the buggy and crawled into a hide of holly shrubs, pausing to scope the old mansion. There had been a fancy garden behind the house, but weeds had sprung through the place, strangling flowerpots and slithering across walking paths. The concrete statuary was drowning. Gargoyles ensnared in weeds, angels garroted by creeper vines. The whole place lay beneath a twilight of heavy oaks, their branches spread in strange, gnarled rafters.

  Malaya’s elbows were propped on the ground, steadying her binoculars. The house itself was tall and narrow, weathered greenish-gray, the chimney pocked with missing bricks. The roof over the upper porch was steeply gabled, the pediment window broken. Anse said bats roosted in the attic—he’d seen them come pouring out at dusk. She swept the binoculars to the base of the house, where an ancient cattle trailer sat on dry-rotted tires. Behind the iron bars lay a large black cat, poised sphinxlike beneath a metallic cloud of flies. Malaya could see hotspots on the animal’s elbows, puffy with infection. A pale crisscross of scars on her nose.

  The animal seemed incognizant of these miseries. She was watching the minute workings of the garden. Her green eyes flicked here and there, tracking the dart and hover of dragonflies, the tick of beetles through the grass. The fireflies would be out soon, sparking from the weeds.

  Malaya shook her head, her mouth slightly parted.

  “You never said she was a black panther.”

  Anse growled. “I said she was a leopord, which she is. No such thing as a black panther. There’s melanistic jaguars and melanistic leopards. Cats born with extra black pigment, melanin. Advantageous trait in dense, lowlight jungles. Black panthers don’t exist.”

  “Well, melanistic leopard doesn’t have quite the same ring, now does it?”

  The old jockey grunted beneath his bush hat.

  “Truth rarely does.”

  Malaya rocked on her elbows, trying not to grin.

  “What about the Beast of Bladenboro—you heard of that one? In the fifties, a large black cat laid waste to a string of dogs and goats and hogs in eastern North Carolina. Multiple witnesses, including police, reported a black cat at least five feet in length.”

  Anse sniffed.

  “I heard they never caught it. Probably a rabid black dog or some such.”

  “What about the Carrabelle Cat—black panther said to roam Tate’s Hell State Forest down in Florida. Phantom cat. So many sightings the city commissioners sent down a team of biologists to investigate.”

  “And I bet they ain’t found a damn thing,” said Anse. “Whatever name you want to give it—panther, painter, cougar, mountain lion, catamount—they’re all the same. Puma concolor. And there’s never been a single documented case of a black one caught or killed in this country. Until I see a body, I ain’t believing.”

  But sightings of black panthers were still rampant, Malaya knew—especially in the Deep South. Reports of such prowlers stretched from deep swamps to suburban shopping malls. Witnesses told of shadowy panthers skulking through backyards or darting across expressways, stalking the Croatan of North Carolina or the Great Smokies of Tennessee, the North Georgia foothills or the swamp pine of the Florida Panhandle. Some said they were the escapees of private owners. Others, apex predators living in the shadows of civilization, perfectly camouflaged. Skeptics claimed they were outsized housecats or mere delusions.

  Shadow populations, in which people had little faith.

  Malaya licked her lips, gazing at the cat.

  “She’s all panther to me.”

  * * *

  The sun hovered in the topmost branches of the trees, shotgunning the garden with slanted rays of light. Malaya looked at Anse. His shirt was plastered against his back, a dark Rorschach of sweat.

  “How much longer?” she asked.

  “Not long.”

  The owners were a middle-aged couple who’d bought the place as a foreclosure. They’d intended to restore the house themselves, but the husband, a successful long-haul trucker, had injured his back in an accident, which changed their financial situation drastically. They’d been forced to sell the rig and collect disability. Now they spent most of their time watching television from their La-Z-Boys in the great room, which gave a view onto the cattle trailer and garden. According to Anse, the man visited the cat each summer evening around dark, feeding her leftovers before bed.

  “Pot roast, country-fried steak. Wonder she don’t look like a damn wrecking ball.”

  The pantheress had remained svelte, though her overlarge paws, which hung through the bars of the trailer, shone like weighted boxing gloves. Zooming in, Malaya could see the animal was not solid black. Her spots were just visible—a pattern of darker rosettes clouded her coat. Ghost spots, only visible in certain lights.

  Anse nudged her with his elbow.

  “Here we go.”

  A man stepped out of the house. He was shirtless, wearing only sweatpants and rubber sandals, with a large belly and scraggly gray beard. A dark mole on his cheek. He waddled carefully across the yard, carrying a casserole dish. Grimaces slipped through the fog of his pain medication. When he turned, Malaya saw the long white zipper of scar that ran the length of his spine, crosshatched with suture marks. He stood before the cattle trailer and began hand-feeding the panther. He held chunks of meat through the bars, which she snapped hungrily from his fingers. Meanwhile, he talked to her, lips puckered, speaking in coos and clucks.

  Malaya shook her head.

  “She could strike through those bars, dump his intestines right between his feet.”

  “Reckon he trusts her,” said Anse.

  Malaya narrowed her eyes at the old jockey.

  “Trusts her? It’s like somebody said when that Siegfried and Roy tiger attacked his trainer on stage. That tiger didn’t go crazy—that tiger went tiger. It’s their nature, born killers. What else could you expect from them?”

  Anse had not taken his gaze from the man and panther. Now he blinked, quickly, and Malaya thought she saw a teary light behind his glasses. A wet sting, like she’d just jabbed him in the side. She knew he was thinking of Henrietta—a story that ended nearly so bad.

  The old jockey gasped a deep lungful of breath, as if surfacing for air.

  “Nothing, I reckon. Can’t expect nothing but blood.”

  * * *

  It was nearly nine when the lights went out in the house. They shimmied from their hide and approached the garden on foot. The summer dusk lay heavy over the land, the first few stars pricking the violet sky. They passed the statue of a three-headed hound that guarded the garden gate and their boots crackled lightly on the shell paths of the place. Concrete statuary reared from the weeds on every side of them, pale against the falling dark. Sphinxes, centaurs, gargoyles. Fire-tongued dragons and winged lion-birds, their beaks screaming from snarled manes of creeper vines. A whole gauntlet of talons and teeth and wings and claws, lunging for them. Malaya looked into the face of a chimera, a lion-headed beast with a scaly tail that terminated in the fanged mouth of a viper. She nodded to the creature, then moved on.

  They squatted before the cattle trailer. The pantheress seemed unconcerned. Her green-glowing eyes scalped the shadows from them, cutting their shapes from the dusk, their every detail
, so that Malaya felt jacklit, exposed. She swallowed the sensation and looked at Anse, who nodded. Slowly, so as not to spook the animal, she unslung the jabstick from her back. The syringe was loaded with a premixed dose of ketamine, a preferred tranquilizer for big cats.

  Malaya had come across “Special K” in the army, when ex-junkie recruits whispered of euphoria, out-of-body experiences, even astral travel from the drug. She’d seen it once at an off-base party—a nineteen-year-old rifleman struck comatose in a clawfoot bathtub, bliss-eyed and vacant, his friends slapping his cheeks to return him to this galaxy or dimension or eon.

  Malaya flicked the reservoir, then set the jabstick over one knee and threaded the shaft through her fingers like a pool cue, aiming for the thick muscle of the animal’s rump. A bead of fluid formed at the very tip of the needle. She wondered whether the panther would harbor some inborn dread of spears, some fear long buried in her genes. After all, the bones of her ancestors had been found in the trash heaps of Paleolithic clans—animals surely trapped and speared. But the cat betrayed no anxiety until the needle pierced her skin. Then she leapt, hissing, twisting her body to lick at the injection site.

  Anse tapped his watch and flashed the number five with his hand.

  Five minutes for the tranquilizer to take effect.

  The hardest part, Malaya knew. Waiting. Fear rose in the void of action. It was the worst in Iraq, when her supply convoy would stop in the middle of a city block already pocked and black-blasted from previous firefights, waiting while an ordnance team was called in to investigate a suspected IED. A suspicious trash can or animal carcass, which could hide a command-wired artillery shell or improvised land mine. Waiting, waiting, while insurgents could be creeping across roofs or slinking through alleyways with rockets on their backs. The heat fuming like spilled gasoline across the dirty streets and sidewalks—one spark from going boom.

  Malaya looked at her watch: four minutes.

  In Africa, it seemed they were always too late. They would discover the sunken carcasses of poached elephants littering the bush like wrecked hot-air balloons, their tusks sawed from their heads, or else they would find only the animals’ bones, the meat stripped by hungry villagers, the tusks shipped abroad. With the rhinos, it was worse. Organized gangs and heliborne poachers, choppering the still-bloody horns straight to ships anchored in the Indian Ocean, ready to make steam for China or Vietnam. She and the rest of the rangers were always waiting for that call on the radio, waiting—another animal killed.

  Three minutes.

  Malaya breathed in through her nose, out through her mouth. Slow the breath, slow the heart. She looked to the old house. This close, the signs of disrepair were even more evident. Torn window screens and unpruned creeper vines. Dead leaves gathered in doorframes, loose shingles curling from the roof. Overburdened gutters, sprouting their own ferns. A yellow-green film of pollen and mildew over the whole facade.

  She wanted to be angry at the owners of the place but couldn’t summon the spark—even as she saw the condition of the animal, the raw patches and scars. Their dreams had run aground here in the woods, grown filmy and opaque, foggy with pain and age. Perhaps their own pain normalized them to the pain of others—perhaps they were doing the best they could. Perhaps the panther gave them purpose or hope. Perhaps a sense of power like a Mustang or Firebird kept in the garage. Perhaps, perhaps.

  Two minutes.

  Malaya’s gaze went to the busted window under the eave. She wondered if the bats were coming awake in there, chittering and shifting their wings, making ready to rise from the attic, to pour like smoke into the night. Beside her, the pantheress began to lie down. Her legs were melting beneath her, curling under her belly. The drug was going to work. She had calmed, settled. Her breath had slowed, her pupils gone round, as if sighting distant worlds. Her mouth hung slightly agape now, a pink glimpse of tongue. Almost like a panting dog.

  One minute.

  Surely the panther’s heart was drumming loud and slow inside her now. Surely she could feel her form growing strange, vague, her body lengthening into the shadows, her coat bleeding into the shades. Her tongue dry, her eyelids heavy. Soon she would be weightless, airy as smoke. She would be the dusk, falling across the land. She would be the shadows, slinking through the iron bars. She would be the bats, tattering the moon.

  * * *

  “Her name is Midnight,” said Anse.

  They watched the pantheress slink through a patch of wiregrass, exploring her new enclosure. It had been the home of the white tiger, Polara, dead of kidney failure years ago. Tyler—who believed the panther had come from Animal Control—had placed her under a thirty-day quarantine, during which time she would be checked for signs of infection, parasites, lameness. Tyler had given her an antibiotic shot for her skin infections and prescribed antifungal tablets to combat ringworm. She found the cat had hind-limb paresis from a substandard diet and showed signs of neurotic behavior—tail-chewing and toe-biting, common to caged big cats.

  “Midnight?” said Malaya. “It said Noira on her collar.”

  Anse hawked and spat, as if to rid himself of the name.

  Malaya walked to the fence, hooking her fingers in the diamonds of link.

  Her voice was soft: “Midnight.”

  The pantheress paused and looked in their direction. Malaya felt the leopard over her heart purr, as if seeing its shadow. She leaned into the fence, letting the links waffle her belly. She glanced over her shoulder at Anse.

  “How come you didn’t put her in Henrietta’s old enclosure? Heaven for a panther.”

  Anse looked toward the lion enclosure at the heart of the sanctuary—so huge and vacant. Then he looked back at her, his face strangely boyish. His eyes were silvery, wet.

  “Her name is Midnight,” he said. “She’s a leopard.”

  BOOK III

  CHAPTER 12

  MOSI

  Mosi is born in caul, a cub curled in a ghostly white veil. He doesn’t know he has entered the world of light, of men. His eyes are closed. He believes he swims yet in the warm sea of his mother’s womb, and he might stay here, never waking, passing from birth to death within the same shroud, but the birth of his sister wakes him. She comes curling from his mother’s vent, slick with blood and afterbirth, and her furred haunches bump him to life. Tiny white splinters of claw emerge from his paws and he cuts through the thin membrane that binds him against the world, emerging into air and light.

  He is blind at first, like all cubs. He lives in the warm, furry tumble of his siblings. He feels the rough, possessive tongue of his mother, cleaning him, and unravels the sweet white string of her milk. His world is hillocks of fur and the gravel of tiny throats, and hunger. Already he knows it, this ringing hollow in his belly for milk and blood. He cannot be sated, but he tries and tries, sucking at the teat. His mother carries him by the scruff of his neck, a trophy dangling from the protective cage of her teeth.

  He is her firstborn, after all, born in his gossamer bubble. In other parts of the world, in other species, the midwives might find his birth significant. They say a caul-child will love water and never drown. They say he will see the world beyond the world, past the veil of our unknowing, and see death hover like a black shroud over those whose time is near.

  But Mosi is still blind when the pair of hands descend to tear him from his mother. He’s placed in a pen among cubs of many other litters. Here is the heady sting of urine, the pervasive reek of shit. The odor of coughed-up milk souring in the sun. He knows the scent of his three sisters, though he cannot see them. In the morning, he finds one of them gone cold. He nudges her in the ribs with his nose. She is useless. The ghost that warmed her has vanished. To where, he doesn’t wonder. Who wonders where a single fire has gone?

  * * *

  “He’s so cute,” she says. “Look at the size of his paws!”

  She isn’t heavy, this woman, but her cheeks are round as plums beneath the floppy brim of her straw hat. Her eyes are t
iny, bird-bright. She’s running her lacquered nails through Mosi’s coat, scratching him between the ears. Surely she has cats at home, fat tabbies that slink along molded baseboards, doze on the backs of white couches, curl themselves in warm bars of sunlight. Surely she loves them.

  “His fur is so soft,” she says. “It’s like flour in your fingers.”

  Her hat is broad and white, big as a wading bird.

  “Feel him, Jud.”

  Jud indulges her, roughing Mosi’s head, tugging the scruff of his neck. He’s a dog man, it’s clear. He has square, whiskey-browned teeth and a hard potbelly. His safari pants, outfitted with various zippers and cargo pockets, were purchased just for this trip. It was his wife’s idea to come to Africa. Two weeks of game drives and bush lodges, drinking chipped-ice cocktails in the beds of tour trucks and eating dinner beneath the torchlight of open-air bomas, where they chat with Texans and Germans on safari. The women are giddy, recalling the nearness of the beasts that approached the truck that afternoon—lions or elephants or Cape buffalo—while the men sit sipping their scotch or bourbon, as if unfazed by the day’s events.

  Now, at the lion park, they have the opportunity to play with a cub.

  “Don’t you just want one?” asks the woman.

  Jud only grunts.

  “Judson has never been a cat person,” she tells the park-keeper. “What’s his name?”

  The keeper is clad in khaki, top to bottom. A block-faced woman, with fine threads of green under her fingernails.

  “Mosi,” she says. “Means firstborn in Swahili. Would you like to feed him?”

  “Can we?”

  The keeper retrieves a baby bottle from her pack.

  Mosi holds the soft white flesh of the woman’s arm in his overlarge paws, sucking at the amber nipple. The milk is slightly alien. Too cool and bland, missing the warm glow of his mother’s teats. Still he bites and sucks, for here is life, drawn greedily into his belly.