Pride of Eden

by Taylor Brown

  “That little cub survive?” asked Anse.

  They were sitting on the tailgate of Anse’s truck in the sanctuary’s parking lot, waiting for the UPS truck to arrive. A shipment of ADF-16 was scheduled for delivery, a pelleted herbivore diet made from wheat middlings, alfalfa, dehulled-soybean meal, and cane molasses. They would load the fifty-pound sacks straight into the bed of the pickup. Malaya watched a pulpwood truck rattle past on the highway, a quiver of pines.

  “He survived,” she said. “Thanks to Lawrence Anthony and the Iraqi zoo staff.”

  “And to the White Wolf,” said Anse.

  “Yes,” said Malaya. “And to him.” She could not keep the venom from her voice.

  Anse leaned over the side of the truck bed and spat a pair of seed hulls into the parking lot.

  “Is the White Wolf how you ended up in South Africa?”

  Malaya shook her head.

  “No. When I got out, I wasn’t ready for the States, I couldn’t adjust.” She spread her hands flat beneath her and leaned on them, pushing herself slightly from her seat. “There were things that … happened, in-country.”

  Anse nodded slowly, chewing his seeds.

  “So I called Lawrence, who’d become a friend. A mentor, really. He said one of the other game reserves had been hit hard by ivory poachers and was putting together an elephant protection team. He recommended me. Said there was nothing quite as healing as elephants in the bush.” She nodded. “I did three years with them and started contracting at some other reserves, helping train rangers. Then one day Jaager called out of the blue, said he’d been made head of security at one of the country’s biggest reserves. Said their rhinos were being decimated and he had a spot waiting for me on their anti-poaching unit.”

  Malaya leaned farther back on her hands and looked up at the sky. Lope’s eagle, Aurora, was orbiting high above, riding the wind. She liked to watch him work the bird in the late afternoons, swinging baits aloft for the creature’s talons. She found herself attracted to the quiet falconer. Not sexually. But there was a gentleness to the tall man, to the light touch he used with his raptor. So unlike the White Wolf.

  “Jaager,” she said. “Sometimes I thought he didn’t value the animals’ lives enough, the rhinos we were trying to protect. That he didn’t do enough. Other times, I thought it was human lives he didn’t respect. I still don’t know whether he sent me home because I fired on that poacher, or because I missed.”

  Anse nodded, listening, his eyes on the raptor, too. Another pulpwood truck throttled past, bringing them to earth. Malaya watched it go, then looked at the fanged lion that roared over the sanctuary’s entrance door.

  “I still think about those Baghdad Zoo lions a lot. The first time I saw them, they didn’t even look real. They were so thin, all hollows and bone. They could hardly lift their heads from their paws. Their walls were pocked with shrapnel. I thought of the ones that escaped, gone streaking through the park, over the bridges and down the avenues, hounded by tanks and helicopters. The guys that were there, they said the animals never seemed afraid. Alarmed, yes, and angry—but not afraid. And I remember wondering if it was worth it to them. That death. If those were the lucky ones, the ones that didn’t go gentle.”

  She shook her head and cracked her knuckles.

  “I mean, if I was going down, I’d rather go with a bang than a whimper, you know? Sometimes, when I’m falling asleep, I think of breaking the latches on every lion and tiger cage in the world. Those cats streaming like fire and lightning into the night. Maybe, if we were forced to feel like prey again, like animals, we’d have a little more respect for the rest of the creatures we share the world with.”

  Anse leaned over the side of the truck and spat.

  “Maybe that’s why the big man sent down Christ instead of another meteorite. See what it was to be flesh. Prey. See if the rest of us was worth saving.”

  “You believe that? Heaven and hell and all that?” she asked.

  Anse chewed his lip.

  “Personally, I never wanted part in a heaven without animals, without dogs or lions or elephants. My opinion, this planet is paradise enough, or should be. And hell? There’s nothing in the Bible matches a napalm strike. I believe we have all we need of hell.”

  Malaya looked out across the roadside pines, a thousand spires glowing in the afternoon sun.

  “Amen,” she said.

  * * *

  Malaya was in the grocery store checkout line when she saw the long-haired man with the tattoos the second time. He was in the parking lot, standing in front of a black cargo van with wide, meaty tires and smoked rear windows. He wore a thin sweatshirt with a stretched-out collar, like a yogi or surfer might wear, his black hair knotted high atop his head. Despite the overlarge shirt, Malaya could discern a hard precision in his movements, the slide and torque of interlocking muscles. There was something about the man that reminded her of the White Wolf—a jaggedness—but this man seemed darker, stranger. The edges of letters and words crept from his sleeves and collar, as if a whole story were written underneath his clothes.

  The cashier was smacking her gum, beeping through bar codes with a limp wrist, operating at the speed of someone underwater. Malaya tapped her foot, bobbing the shieldlike emblem of crocodile scutes inked newly over her kneecap. She already had her money out.

  When she looked out the window again, a white pickup truck had parked nose-to-nose with the van. The driver was a big man in tan overalls, high rubber boots, and a waist-length beard. He was squatting before a large perforated dog crate, inspecting whatever lay behind the wire screen of the door. Then he rose and took a fat wad of bills from his back pocket and began counting them off into the palm of the smaller man. By the time Malaya got her change, the buyer was driving off with the plastic crate in the bed of the truck and the tattooed man was squatting on one knee inside the cargo door of his van, locking the cash in a strongbox.

  Malaya walked fast across the parking lot, straight toward him.

  She wanted to know what words were etched across the hard planes of his chest, arced over the flat tiles of his stomach, trailing the veins down his arms. The desire to know rose like a howl inside her—a longing—but she didn’t want to call out, to seem desperate or crazed. Instead, she raised her hand to get his attention. The man looked up, straight in her direction. His eyes, so clear and sharp, nearly stopped her. She felt naked, exposed, as if those eyes knew her already. What mysteries pumped through her heart, under her skin.

  The man raised his own hand, as if in greeting, only to grasp the inside handle of the van door and slide it home with a long scrape. The black van growled to life, throaty and low, and crackled out of the parking lot.

  * * *

  Anse lay in bed, cradling Tyler’s head against his shoulder. She slept soundly, her brow smooth, unknit. Sometimes she seemed to him some more highly evolved form of the species—a creature from some hopeful future, perhaps, sent back in time to instruct these earlier, cruder forms of men. Sometimes he feared she was simply too good for him, too honest. That she would recoil at the sins lurking in the dark country of his heart. That she would leave him.

  Anse swallowed, staring up at the stained ceiling of the trailer. The fan blades wheeled and wheeled. The blood crashed in his chest, thunderlike. Memories were rising, booming under his skin. He blinked, trying to hear the jungle night of the sanctuary, the beasts of Little Eden. He listened for their rustle and chuff, straining his ears, as if he could hear the flicker of their very stripes through the bush, the heavy pump of their hearts.

  He feared their kind would be gone too soon, glimpsed only in the corners of man’s vision. Myths passing through the woods, spirits a-lurk at the edge of the field. Creatures once worshipped, no more alive than the black beasts of ash scrawled on cave walls.

  Anse closed his eyes, bravely, letting the dreams rise.

  CHAPTER 14

  SCOUT DOG

  Private Anderson Caulfield, nineteen
years old, watched the elephant grass race five hundred feet beneath his jungle boots. He was riding in the door of a slick, a cicada-green transport ship from the 1st Cavalry’s Air Assault Division. The land was dewy with dawn, lush and bright. Rubber plantations lay in vast green polygons, the trees planted in orderly rows, as if the earth had been combed. The waterways shone like hammered metalwork, flowing toward the wet expanse of the Mekong Delta. It looked too pretty a place for men to die.

  They had and they would.

  Beside Anse lay his partner, an eighty-pound German shepherd of the 34th Scout Dog platoon out of Biên Hòa. The dog’s identification number was tattooed on the inside of his left ear: HU421. Anse had named him Huey, same as the UH-1 helicopter gunship in whose open door the dog liked so much to ride, his tongue flapping in the wind. They had been together since handler training at Fort Benning, Georgia, and in-country for six months.

  Huey was more tan than black, more pet than wolf, with a white smile ever flashing through the black bandit’s mask of his face. Anse ran his hand through the dog’s coat, tugging on his ears. Four days ago, a man at the rear of their patrol had stepped on a land mine, a North Vietnamese MD-82, which obliterated his legs. His upper half lay screaming in agony, damning God and Mother and Christ. Since then, Huey hadn’t been able to sleep. The dispensary had provided tranquilizers—not uncommon for traumatized scout dogs, creatures strung as if with trip wire. Still, Huey jerked and bucked in his sleep, yelping, as if to warn the man again and again of the mine.

  A dirt road, crusted hard and brown, flashed beneath them, heading for the cloud-swirled peak of Nui Ba Den, the “Mountain of the Black Virgin.” There a Buddhist princess had cast herself on the rocks instead of marrying the son of a neighboring chieftain. They found one of her legs in a cavern, dragged there by some toothed thing. Her ghost was said to walk the mountain, passing a shrine erected high on the slope in her name.

  The 1,100-horsepower turbine whined over their heads, thumping them farther north. The other members of the eight-man patrol sat with their black rifles held between their knees. Their faces were painted black, their camos tiger-striped. They were 1st Cav Rangers, hardly more than boys, their upper lips fuzzed with thin wisps of mustache. Their heads bobbed, each man pumped full of rock and roll, ready to search and destroy. There was Dice, from Detroit, with biceps hard as eight balls, who could cut down trees from fifty yards with his M60 machine gun, and Whoa-Boy, from Texas, a virgin who masturbated into a lucky cheerleading sock his sweetheart sent him, striped blue and yellow.

  Their senior noncom, Master Sergeant Wilde, was from Tennessee, a veteran of the long-range reconnaissance patrols, the dreaded “Lurps.” He kept his head shaved slick as a cue ball beneath his boonie hat and wore a handlebar mustache and there was gold in his teeth. This was his third tour. He had operated out of small Special Forces bases high on the Laotian border, living behind palisades spiked with the heads of dead Viet Cong, fighting alongside highland tribes and American boys who wore necklaces of shorn human ears. In 1968, his patrol had climbed Dong Tri Mountain, outside Khe Sanh, and there been stalked by a lone Bengal tiger for five straight nights. Unable to break noise discipline, they’d listened to the slow crackle of the beast through the jungle—circling, circling, hour after hour.

  Telling the story in their hooch one night, Master Sergeant Wilde had set his beer between his thighs and rubbed his palms together, as if making fire.

  “I tell you, kid, I wished so bad right then for my Olde English bulls, Tinker and Ball. Both born out of King Generator, hardest mouth in the South. They would of torn the belly out that fucking tiger and ate her breakfast for dinner.”

  Days later his team fast-roped onto the peak of Dong Re Lao Mountain, site of a disused French airfield, and established a perimeter under heavy sniper fire, clearing a landing zone from virgin forest with chainsaws and Bangalore torpedoes. The peak, mile-high, was needed as a radio relay station, directing airstrikes to support an eleven-thousand-man air assault of the A Shau Valley.

  Wilde smoothed his mustache, the gold shining in his teeth.

  “You could see all the way to the South China Sea from up there, warships like toy boats. Skycranes all over the valley, hauling out crippled slicks, while the fast-movers laid napalm along the ridges. Afterwards, you could see the NVA balled up all black and smoking, small as ants. Crispy-crittered.”

  His eyes were wide and blue as he told this story, as if he were describing a vision of sweeping majesty. His Budweiser sat between his knees, undrunk.

  “Come night, the B-52 Arc Lights started rolling in. Three bombers at a time, flying in V formation at thirty thousand feet, running lights like little stars. You could hear them faint, like far-off thunder. I tell you, kid, you ain’t known power till you watched an Arc Light strike come down in the night. Sixty thousand pounds of ordnance ripping across the valley floor at five hundred miles per hour. It was like the skull of the world being split open, bleeding fire. I knew God in that moment, kid. The American God. You could feel him in your bones.”

  Wilde licked his lips, his eyes far-off.

  “Come morning, the valley was black, charred like the end of the world. Smoking. Nothing moving. Not a thing.” Master Sergeant Wilde rubbed the wet skin of the bottle, shaking his head. “But here’s the fuck of it. I’m glassing the valley, and what do I see but a Bengal fucking tiger come trotting along the valley floor, ducking under fallen trees and jumping over bodies.”

  “No shit,” said Anse.

  “No fucking shit. How she survived, I don’t know. Didn’t look to have a scratch on her, like she could live through fire. Like she was made of the stuff.”

  “What did you do?”

  Wilde jammed his thumb into the neck of his beer bottle.

  “What my bulls couldn’t. Called in the Phantoms, dropped a couple thousand pounds of ordnance on her head. Snake Eye bombs and napalm. Snake and nape, motherfucker. Revenge for all those sleepless nights.” Wilde sighed. “Turns out, she wasn’t so special after all.”

  * * *

  The elephant grass swirled and waved beneath the hovering slick. The Rangers leapt from the skids, coming up on their knees, scanning the tree line for movement. Anse watched Huey, the dog’s black ears risen sharp as daggers from the grass. The helicopter wheeled and slid off into the sky, and Anse felt the lonesomeness he always felt when the cavalry left them alone in the jungle.

  Huey walked point, zigzagging along the trail, sniffing, pausing every few seconds to listen, his ears swiveling for sound. It had been Wilde’s idea to attach a scout dog to the patrol. When Anse first showed up at the Rangers’ hooch, the sergeant had circled the dog, appraising his every inch.

  “Why’s his tongue so red? He sick?”

  “It’s sunburned, Sergeant, So much panting in the heat. They call it red tongue.”

  Wilde looked skeptical.

  “Tell me, Private, why we should have this dog on our team.”

  Anse straightened, starting his pitch.

  “A German shepherd’s sense of smell is forty times better than a human’s, his hearing twenty times better. He can sniff a gook fart from a thousand yards.”

  Wilde squatted in front of the dog, head weaving, trying to look the animal in the eyes.

  “No, Private. This dog, particularly. I want to know why this dog is the one.”

  Anse shifted in his jungle boots.

  “He cares, Sergeant.”

  “Cares?”

  “He’s a shepherd. Thinks we’re part of his flock. He’ll do anything to keep us alive.”

  The master sergeant nodded, showing the gold in his teeth. Grimace or grin, Anse couldn’t tell.

  “Will he fight?”

  Anse set his hand between the dog’s ears.

  “He’s not trained for that.”

  “I didn’t ask if he was trained to fight, Private. I asked if he would.”

  “If he has to, I think he would.”

  W
ilde caught Huey’s muzzle between his hands, stared into his face. The dog’s eyes darted up to Anse, unsure what to do. A growl started low in his throat, but Anse cut it short with a slight twitch of the head.

  Wilde was still looking into the dog’s eyes.

  “There’s no time to think out there, Private. We fight or die.”

  “He’ll fight,” said Anse.”

  “He fucking better, Private.”

  * * *

  They stopped on the trail at noon, chewing chocolate bars and swigging from canteens, watching the trees. Huey came bouncing down the line, sniffing each member of the patrol for wounds. Detroit ignored the dog, staring into the bush, his little biceps balling under his skin, while Whoa-Boy gave the shepherd a few mindless scratches between the ears. Only Wilde took real notice, squatting in the center of the trail, surrounded by men in striped fatigues—tiger suits.

  First he scratched Huey’s chin, then cradled the dog’s jaw muscles in his palms. His fingers burrowed outward to the animal’s shoulders, kneading them, then slid down the dog’s forelegs, squeezing here and there, as if testing their ripeness. Anse, watching him, felt the high burn of jealousy in his gut. This man touched his animal like he owned him.

  Wilde’s hands came back to Huey’s snout. His thumb lifted a black flap of jowl, revealing the white ranges of teeth. He shook his head.

  “Sheepdog,” he said. “No match for one of my bulls. Too soft of mouth.”