Pride of Eden

by Taylor Brown

  “How long are they like this?” asks the woman.

  “About six months.”

  “And then what happens?”

  “Then they want meat.”

  Jud’s wife looks around the lion park, sees only cubs tumbling behind the chain link of the playpens.

  “I mean what happens to the cubs?”

  “Oh. We sell them to parks and zoos around the world.”

  Jud’s wife looks across the hillocks of fur, so many of them. Too many.

  Her eyes narrow.

  That night, they eat heavy kudu steaks on ceramic plates while the torchfires lick across the woven trunks of the dining boma, built like a giant nest behind the lodge. They hardly talk. Jud’s wife is distant, chewing on more than her food. In their room, she sits on the edge of the bed, removing her earrings. Jud slides his hand up the oiled trophy of her calf.

  “I can’t quit thinking of all those cubs,” she says, setting her earrings on the side table. “Surely there isn’t enough demand for the grown ones from zoos and parks. Where do they go?”

  Jud parts her knees slightly, dips his head to kiss the skin that caps them.

  “Forget it,” he says, speaking to her knees. “There are laws about such things.”

  “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It’s our last night, honey.” He’s moving up her thighs, his face halved by the hem of her skirt. “Forget it.”

  She leans back on the pillow, closes her eyes.

  She forgets.

  * * *

  Mosi isn’t like the other cubs. He grows faster than the others, stronger, and he sees things they do not. They come to play-fight with him, often in pairs and threes, their tiny throats rattling. He lets them climb over his back, paw at his throat and haunches and ears. He lies like a statue, tolerant, watching the tumble and pounce of the other cubs. Every so often he swats one of his playmates so hard they yelp or else pins them screeching to the turf with his teeth. Soon he will kill. He knows he was born to this, to swallow the fire of life in his throat.

  He tolerates the petting hands that feed him his milk. The visitors coo and gabble, their fingers knuckled with bands and stones. Mosi misses the rough scrape of his mother’s tongue. In the evenings, he patrols the metal thicket that keeps him caged, looking for slits or tears. If he walks fast enough, the diamonds of fence wire blur, vanishing before his eyes, as if he roams free through the veld.

  Mosi grows larger, stronger. Soon he can feel the first spikes of a mane, rising dark from the field of his fur, and he wants meat. The keepers cut him from the litter and lead him into the belly of a great, wheeled beast that rumbles across the earth. He watches the country bleed yellow and green through the iron ribs of the cage.

  * * *

  Mosi turns two years old, three, in this new place. His mane grows full, ringing him with authority. He lies on a wooden platform raised over the burnt grass of the enclosure, watching the lesser lions flick the flies from their rumps. Their meals arrive through metal chutes, headless chickens rimed in ice. Only then do they rise, like stoked flames.

  In this place, no one comes to pet them. Men come to rub their chins and cock their heads and point at this lion or that, and sometimes Mosi can see a shadow clinging to a certain member of the pride. In the morning, that lion will be gone, cut from the others and hauled away. To where, Mosi doesn’t know. Loosed, perhaps, into the yellow kingdom beyond the fence wire. Then he’ll hear a single crack of thunder, though there is no storm.

  One day three men stand at the fence. They squint and point. Mosi feels their nervy, glittering eyes, which rove him. His high haunches and sharp spine, his black mane.

  “Perfect specimen,” says one. “Not a scratch or scar. And you know what they say. Darker the mane, stronger the lion.”

  The others nod.

  “Of course, there is a price for such perfection.”

  “Of course.”

  They throw numbers back and forth—amounts that could buy a car.

  Later, Mosi is led out of his enclosure, into the belly of the ribbed beast that delivered him here. He’s been chosen, he thinks. His freedom is near.

  * * *

  He wakes groggy, slowed by some alien weight in the blood. There’s a stinging pain in his rump, as from a thorn, and the world is strange. He sees a fence but no other lions. The bush is alive around him, throaty and thick. He can hear adders whispering through the dry grass, their tongues forking, scenting the air for shrews or rats, and terrapins dragging their hard domes through the brambles. The trees are abuzz with termites and wasp nests. Little bee-eaters swirl overhead, clipping insects from the air. Mosi feels a tickle and swings his head to look. A skink leaps from his belly, where it’s been sifting his pale belly-fur for parasites. Mosi tries to swat the lizard, but his movements are slow, drunken. The skink is gone, rattling into the weeds.

  Mosi stands, swaying on his four wobbly legs. The acacia trees purr above him, sun-shot, and he’s dappled with light. His stomach is a resounding hollow; his mouth is dry. He moves slowly, as if his blood were the sticky red sap of a rain tree. Still, he is unafraid, his pride unshaken. There is confusion, but no fear. He is born of a ten-thousand-millennia bloodline. His ancestors outlasted the saber- and scimitar- and dirk-toothed cats. His whole life has led to this. He weaves through the veld, his massive paws pancaking beneath his weight. His claws are hooked like the beaks of fish eagles, his mighty bone-house clad in muscle.

  A troop of baboons squats in the snaggled crown of a leadwood tree, chattering among themselves, and a mongoose spears through the brush, pursuing the green luster of a longhorn beetle. A pair of blaze-bucks raise their heads from a clearing, their horns twinned high and sharp over their white-painted faces. They wheel and flee, bounding high through the grass. Desire rises in Mosi’s throat. He would tear the saddle-fur from those narrow, bouncing rumps and lap the red tang of blood from their flesh. He lurches, giving chase, only to trip over the shed limb of an acacia tree, tumbling through a thorny bush. He rises red-torn and bleeding, breathing through his jaws, his ribs swelling against the torn flesh of his hide.

  Mosi is descended of the savannah kings. He knows this, certain as the wheeling fire of the sun. And yet here he stands, his tongue dry, his lungs burning like trees of fire. His kingdom shaky now beneath his paws.

  * * *

  Winter Melton sits on a high bench in the bed of an open-air safari truck, surrounded by a protective frame of two-inch pipe. Between his knees stands a Ruger No. 1 rifle, a hammerless brute chambered in .458 Winchester Mag. His two South African guides sit in the front of the truck, clad in camouflage. Their rifles stand in special mounts bolted between the front seats. They wear walkie-talkies on their belts, large revolvers under their arms. The Rover creaks to a halt before the twenty-foot hurricane fence of the enclosure while one of the guides steps down from the open cab and ambles to the gate. His boots are swollen and warped, his belly large. He squints a long moment into the bush, then unlatches the gate. They rumble inside the multi-acre pen, where the black-maned lion has been loosed.

  Winter rides high in the bucking truck, as if on a royal litter, conveyed on the sweating backs of men. He’s a man of means after all. He owns fifty-seven truck stops across the South. Their signs soar over the sleepless highways day and night, advertising cheap gas, clean restrooms, free Wi-Fi. Some of the stops are paired with fast-food franchises; others offer dog parks, car washes, overnight parking for RVs and semi-trucks. Winter has read Hemingway. He thinks of his truck stops as clean, well-lighted places. There is the steam of coffee, the crunch of corn nuts, the gleaming haloes of toilet seats swiped clean every hour.

  He lives with his dog, an arthritic Labrador retriever named Sadie. His house echoes loudly whenever he removes his shoes at the door. He shuffles sock-footed through his home, an ice cream–eating haunt, and there is only the stilted click of Sadie’s nails on the varnished floors. The false eyes of his trophies, black and gleaming, w
atch him from the walls. The 202-inch mule deer from Colorado, the sharp-tusked javelina from West Texas, the blondish grizzly sow from the Klondike. He loves these creatures he has killed, their skulls full of foam and wire. Each is a story, telling him he has lived.

  He’s come to Africa to kill a lion, to mount its roaring head over the fieldstone hearth of his great room. His hands are greasy on the foregrip of his rifle. Every now and again he catches a whiff of himself, a nervous odor crawling from his armpits. He thinks of poor Francis Macomber, Hemingway’s American boy-man who shows himself a coward before his wife and guide and gun-bearers when he flees the charge of a wounded lion.

  Winter, too, is afraid, but not of the lion.

  An American dentist shot a famous lion in Zimbabwe and the world bared its teeth. The man’s practice was boycotted, his family threatened. Animal rights activists called for him to hang. Winter had already booked his flight, his trophy hunt, and his accommodations. He’d put down his deposit. Now he thinks of protesters strung in front of his truck stops, blocking the pumps, their hand-painted signs calling for his blood. He thinks of the clucks of his employees, ready for any reason to hate him, and the glass eyes of his trophies turned against him, bright with malice. He thinks of everything he has built, his empire, crumbled by a single shot.

  He lifts an arm, swabbing the sweat from his brow, and smells himself again. He prays that he is strong enough to face the roaring pink mouth of his fear, to put a 500-grain bullet through its heart.

  * * *

  Mosi smells blood on the wind. His bones feel willow-soft and his tongue is dry, scaly as snakeskin. He’s been rumbling all day through the bush, his belly growling with hunger. Now his meal must have arrived. He turns upwind, tracking the red string of scent. Drool hangs in tassels from his bottom jaw. His heart blares, driving him on.

  In the distance, a flock of starlings explodes to flight, shrilling in alarm. Their cries chase after him, hounding his nerves, but Mosi is no creature of doubt. He presses on. His ancestors tore gladiators limb from limb, spilling them beneath the red throats of the crowds. His form has emblazoned the shields of kings, rampant, his tongue bared bright as a flame. No beast has a blacker mane than he.

  The blood is close.

  Mosi breaks from the trees on a low bluff over a green jag of creek water. The bloody hull of a skinned impala hangs from an acacia tree, dizzied by flies, while vultures wheel slowly against the sky. Mosi doesn’t wonder who has left him such a boon—his meals have always appeared this way, dropped as if from the sky. Surely this is how kings are fed.

  First he descends the bluff to lap from the stream. He can taste distant green mountains on his tongue, thunderheads big as nations. He can taste his old enemy the crocodile, who lies yellow-eyed and grinning in the darkness, watching the world from below, and he can taste the many tongues of the land, those of the impala and the zebra and the Cape buffalo, whose multitudes long sustained his kind. His pride swells against his ribs, his heart huge and ripe. He is where he was born to be.

  Eden.

  He looks down at the water. The tongued surface slowly calms, smoothing into a mirror. There stands a great lion reflected, a wavy ghost-king, and Mosi sees, with the vision of his birth, that the great black mane is not his halo but his shroud. His doom. Death wreathes him, heavy as a cloak, ready to snuff his fire.

  Mosi lifts his great head in defiance.

  He roars.

  * * *

  Winter descends to one knee, as if genuflecting, and brings the heavy rifle to his shoulder. The lion’s mane is angular and black, broad as a shield. Winter floats the crosshairs just back of the beast’s shoulder, seeking the hidden red apple of the heart, when the lion lifts his head from the stream. Silver blades of water flash from his jaws. He rocks heavenward, poised proud and rampant upon the shore, and his throat booms like a cannon across the veld.

  Winter lowers his gun. He is awed, outdone.

  He doesn’t wish to kill a creature of such majesty.

  He wishes to own it.

  “You want to what?” says the guide.

  * * *

  Jud and his wife take the next off-ramp from the interstate. They need to gas up and pee, to grab a fresh pair of coffees and a new roll of Life Savers for the road. They’re stopping just outside of Savannah, Georgia, on their way down to a five-hundred-room beach resort in Palm Beach.

  The summer sky is full of swift, dark clouds that shudder and pulse, threatening storm. Jud, driving, squints at the emblems of gas stations and truck stops thrust high against the darkening heavens, a glowing medley of shells and chevrons and hearts. So many to choose from …

  “That one,” says his wife. “Look what it says!”

  She’s pointing to the yellow paw of Lion Gas, erected slightly higher than the rest. Beneath the emblem, a display with the price for each fuel grade, and a small billboard:

  COME SEE OUR

  RESCUED AFRICAN

  LION!

  Jud swings the white Cadillac SUV beneath the fluorescent canopy that shelters the pumps. Next to the main building is an enclosure the size of a batting cage, steel-barred with a corrugated-tin roof. A lion lies on a wooden platform, his head collared in a heavy black mane. The ground beneath him is littered with child-thrown sundries. Gumballs and Popsicle sticks and dirty pennies—anything to court his attention. A half-eaten lollipop hangs matted in his mane, a pink knot of chewing gum.

  There’s a large information plaque mounted on the side of the enclosure, a story of the lion’s rescue from a canned hunt in Africa. Jud’s wife can’t read the details from where she stands. She starts toward the cage but a thunderclap splits the sky and the rain comes hissing down in slanted silver spears. It rattles marble-hard against the canopy, the pavement, the tin roof of the enclosure. Jud’s wife stands at the edge of the concrete apron, sheltered beneath the floodlights, and squints through the assault. She calls back over her shoulder.

  “Judson, do you remember that time on our safari trip, when we got to feed that lion cub from a baby bottle?”

  Jud is rattling the fuel nozzle into the gas tank. He cracks a Life Saver between his teeth.

  “Vaguely.”

  “What was the cub’s name, do you remember?”

  Jud sighs. The trigger catch on the pump is broken—he’ll have to hold the pump for all twenty-six gallons.

  “What?”

  “I think it started with an M,” says his wife.

  She runs names through her head—Musa, Musi, Mosul?—trying to remember.

  She can’t.

  * * *

  Mosi watches the endless herds that slash back and forth through the gathering dark. Some of them peel off from the rest, stopping at his watering hole to drink. Here comes another one, hulking like a rhino. A woman emerges, standing before the shiny grimace of the beast, and there is something in the shape of her, the scent. Something from his cubhood. The bright eyes and plummy cheeks, the hat perched stork-large atop her head. Her nipples stand knobbed against her shirt, like his mother’s teats, and a warmth begins to pervade Mosi’s belly, like swallowed milk.

  Now comes a blast of thunder and rain slurs his vision. Mosi looks to the heavens, the dark kingdom that hovers over this little oasis of light, ready to douse it hissing from the earth.

  He wonders, like always, if it is only a storm.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE WHITE WOLF

  “What if they all got out?” asked Malaya.

  Anse was chewing sunflower seeds. He spat a pair of hulls in the dirt.

  “Who?”

  “Tyler says there are more tigers in captivity in the state of Texas alone than left in the wild in the rest of the world. What if they all got out?”

  Anse shrugged. “Fucking mess.”

  “You think any would survive?”

  Anse bounced his eyeglasses on the bridge of his nose. He thought of three thousand tigers bobbing through the darkness, knifing between rows of tract houses
and pausing to stare through kitchen windows, watching families like roasts in the oven. They would flash across the highways of West Texas, passing through the lights of minivans and semi-trucks, then disappear again into the desert night, pursued by the manic sabers of helicopter searchlights. A red wreckage left in their wake, the remains of coyotes and stray dogs and children on trampolines. Nature’s serial killers, single-minded and remorseless, released into the night.

  “Why,” he asked, “you got a ticket to Texas booked?”

  “I’m serious, Anse. Whenever she says that, it’s all I can think.”

  Anse looked at Snow and Fire, standing in echelon behind the fence, waiting to be fed.

  “They would be hunted down, every one. Shot from helicopters and armored cars, deer blinds and kitchen windows.” Anse stepped closer to the fence. “People get riled about zoos, say that caging any wild animal is an injustice. Those fences are there as much to keep people out as to keep animals in. Men’ll kill anything, bigger the better.”

  “You don’t think even one would survive? One tiger?”

  Anse moved a sunflower seed from one side of his mouth to the other, propping it on the deathbed of his lower molar. What he really wanted now was a Marlboro, the hard burn in his lungs. He was trying to cut down. He needed to be fit for what was coming.

  “One might go unaccounted for, I reckon. Disappear. People would report seeing it all over, of course. Far states away, even. A tiger in the night. A ghost. We kill a thing, then can’t believe it’s dead.”

  “Like Elvis.”

  Anse cracked the shell in his back teeth, smiled.

  “Like Elvis,” he said.

  He looked at Snow and Fire, their huge faces and yellow eyes. He thought of the saber cat that roamed his dreams, roaring chip-toothed over the dark tides of wolves and men.