Pride of Eden

by Taylor Brown

  Death from above.

  Delk watched the falcon rise.

  “Your daddy died doing a good thing. That’s rare, boy.”

  Lope licked his lips. He felt the guilt-pain rising inside his chest, licking his ribs like roof beams. His hands squirmed one into the other, his knuckles crackling.

  “I can’t quit thinking about it. Him burning like he done. I don’t want to go to sleep, because I know I’ll dream it again.”

  Delk nodded. The falcon spiraled higher and higher, riding an invisible column of heat.

  “We gonna put a raptor on your wrist,” he said. “She’ll make you aware of powers you never knew you had. Draw them up out of you, through your veins like tree sap. It’s biofeedback, boy. Autonomic control. Get you tapped in, wired into your own brainwaves, heartbeat, skin conductance. Your own pain. Give you the power to let go, give that pain up to God above.”

  Lope was skeptical. Uncle Delk had always been strange—unexpectedly sensitive for a man who’d played two seasons in the pros, sending running backs home on stretchers before he blew out a knee in a preseason game. Lope’s mother blamed it on his Geechee blood. After all, his father’s side of the family had sprung from one of the Georgia sea islands where descendants of freed slaves had lived in near isolation since the end of the Civil War.

  “Them Saltwater Geechee always been funny,” she’d say, wringing the suds from a dish towel. “They had their own world out there so long, they hardly at home in this one.”

  But Uncle Delk was right. It had worked. The falcon was like a mirror of his insides—Lope could read his own anxiety in her mood. She would step lightly on his arm, agitated, as if his flesh were too hot through the glove. Watching her, he could will himself to calm, to turn down the hissing flame in his blood. In time he learned to let go. Every summer, working the resorts with Delk, he would watch the raptors soar high over the beaches and cabanas and swimming pools, scattering the gulls. Lope would release the burdens of the previous year—grief, anxiety, heartbreak—letting them be carried off into the sky, burned up in the sun.

  Now, twenty years later, he needed help again. He was writhing in bed at night, slimy with sweat. He was replaying the shooting of the lioness, looking for his fault in the matter, his guilt. The same as he’d done over his father’s death, winding himself deeper and deeper. He worried he’d been too quick to shoot. That he should have trusted Anse’s instincts. That he’d broken an old man’s heart.

  He found himself itching for the firehouse alarm to sound so he could slide down the greasy brass of the fireman’s pole and race toward the burning torch of a trailer or bungalow or corner store, forgetting all, gone to a place where flames leapt from windows and rolled tumbling through doors—beasts tamed beneath his hose. He worried, sometimes, that there weren’t enough such fires. That he could light one himself.

  Aurora stood ready on his arm. She was flying well. A week ago, she had taken her first drone, descending high-winged on a cheap quadcopter and driving it into the ground. European police had started the trend, using eagles to take down unmanned flying vehicles. Suspicious drones had been reported over secure facilities, hovering over airports and radar installations. It took little to have the eagles target them; they seemed to attack the drones on mere principle.

  Aurora seemed slightly troubled, edging back and forth on his arm. Lope took a deep breath, thinking of the things that gave him peace. He thought of his wife at home, their baby throbbing against her chest, suckling, and he thought of his uncle Delk, steady as oak. He thought of the eagle calming on his arm. Settling. Both of them, together. Then he sucked another breath into his lungs, gathering a wind between his ribs.

  Lope opened his mouth and began to sing.

  * * *

  Malaya lay in the bed of the truck, staring up. The ribbed metal thudded over the roots and ruts between enclosures, rocking her insides. Five-gallon buckets rattled and slopped on along the bedrails—feeding time. A cast of turkey buzzards was already aloft, circling stiff-winged over the sanctuary, waiting for leftovers. They scrawled lazy-eights on the thermals, their wing feathers slightly translucent, like blackbirds in white dresses.

  A kettle of vultures, circling. A wake of buzzards.

  The bravest would descend into the tiger enclosures to pick clean the bones. The big cats would only watch, too sated to bother, their eyes full of a menacing tolerance. People hated the turkey vulture, a redheaded carrion bird that haunted the land, broadcasting the whereabouts of roadkilled dogs, calves strangled in barbwire, husbands fallen dead at the plow. A sort of black weather, come corkscrewing over any site of death. But they had their uses, Malaya knew. They’d found her father.

  She was five when his helicopter disappeared in the rolling hills surrounding Fort Benning, Georgia. It was a night exercise and no one saw the crash. No Mayday call from the pilots, no fire or smoke. For three days, search-and-rescue choppers flew day and night, combing the hills for signs. Malaya was only in kindergarten, but she knew something was wrong. Her mother and grandfather had become silent, still as the painted saints that stood in the corners of the Catholic church in town. Waiting, waiting. She curled up in the warm chair of her grandfather’s lap and he absently stroked her hair. He seemed so quiet he might be hearing something she could not. The distant thunder of searching helicopters, perhaps, or the slice of vulture wings.

  “It was the turkey buzzards that led them in,” said Malaya. She was leaning over the truck’s toolbox now, arms crossed, talking to Anse and Lope through the rear window of the cab. “A cyclone of them. Fifty or more. The helo had struck a big sandhill crane. They said it crashed through the windshield, activating the fire suppression handles, and the engines lost power at low altitude. They said men were spilled in pieces for a hundred yards.”

  She set her chin down on her arms. She could hardly believe how much she was telling them, Lope especially. She’d only known him for a few months, but somehow she felt safe around him, calm. At feeding time that afternoon, they’d found him crooning to his bird in the field, singing her lullabies, his long throat vibrating like an instrument. Someone like that, you could tell them anything.

  “It haunted me a long time,” she said. “Thinking of those birds hunched over my father, pecking at his eyes. I can barely remember him, but I can remember that. Just like I was there. I couldn’t shake them. It was like they were inside my head, peck, peck, pecking at my brain.”

  Lope nodded slowly. He seemed ill-made for the cabin of a truck, his long limbs knobbed and folded to fit into the shotgun seat. He turned his chin over his shoulder.

  “You know what they do over in the Himalayas?”

  Malaya shook her head.

  “When a person dies, they lay out their body on a mountaintop for the vultures to eat. Eurasian griffons, lammergeyers. Old World vultures. The priests club the body first, breaking all the bones, to make it easier for the scavengers. They say it’s good karma, the dead offering themselves for the living. They call it sky burial.”

  A tingle went up Malaya’s spine.

  “That’s beautiful,” she said.

  Lope nodded, scratching the tops of his knees.

  “You heard of Ebos Landing?” he asked. “The Flying Africans?”

  “No.”

  “My grandmother used to tell the story. She grew up out on one of the barrier islands—one of the last Geechee communities, founded by slaves’ descendants. She was full of tales, but this one was true. You can look it up. It happened on one of the other barrier islands. St. Simons, I think. The Igbo tribe, from West Africa, was known across the South for being rebellious. A shipload of them revolted at the landing, overthrew the crew. Then, instead of letting themselves get captured, they went marching into the river, chained together, chanting, drowning themselves. People say they transformed into vultures or buzzards, so they could fly back home to Africa. Myth of the Flying Africans. Then you got the Cherokee, they have a special name for the turkey vultur
e. They call it the ‘peace eagle’ because it doesn’t kill. In Latin, its name means cleanser or pacifier.”

  Tears swam into Malaya’s eyes. She blinked, trying to hold them back. Peace eagle. She lay back in the bed of the truck. Sky burial. She closed her eyes, imagining her father’s flesh risen in fragments from the earth, carried inside the ribs of wheeling eagles. His blood greasing their wing-joints, fueling their flight. His name translated, heard in the whisper of air beneath their wings. A man returned to the sky out of which he’d fallen.

  Her heart boomed. She opened her eyes, staring up. The cast of vultures was gone, scattered. A single raptor hung wing-blazed over the sanctuary, high as an archangel. Malaya squinted, trying to make out what species. She wondered whether it was a buzzard or bird of prey. An eagle of peace or war.

  * * *

  Lope rode shotgun as they rattled from enclosure to enclosure. They had fallen into a pattern these last weeks. About the time he finished with his eagle, Anse’s truck would come grumbling up the drive for feeding time. The old jockey would throw his head out the driver’s window and crow like a train conductor.

  “All aboard!”

  The words never ceased to scratch a spark of excitement in Lope’s belly. They would go rumbling around the sanctuary in the waning light, feeding the residents of Little Eden. At each enclosure, he and Anse would jump down from the cab while Malaya stood in the bed, handing down the meat or feed earmarked for each animal. The big cats loved the dusk, when the shadows grew long and they could slink like shades through the tall grass, stalking the keepers who delivered their meals.

  Last they came to the enclosure of the former circus tigers. Past here, the drive terminated at a padlocked gate overwhelmed with vines and kudzu. A breeze skated down the fence, bobbing the shield-shaped leaves. Thousands of them, endless as an army.

  Lope scratched his chin.

  “What’d you say is back there?” he asked.

  Anse stopped short of the tiger enclosure, a pair of deer legs held dripping at his sides.

  “I didn’t,” he said.

  The old jockey had seemed distant the last few days. His jaws were pulsing constantly, his eyes hard and squinty under his hat brim.

  Lope looked again at the fence. The leaves purred. He licked his lips.

  “You hear about that truck stop lion off the interstate?”

  “What about him?”

  “Got stolen a few days ago.”

  “I seen it on television.”

  “That Winter Melton is making a big fuss, acting like it’s some big tragedy. Put up a bounty. Fifty thousand dollars, no questions asked.” Lope shook his head. “Mercy mission, you ask me. A lion like that—like Henrietta—made to live in a cage, breathing exhaust fumes all day. It’s a crime.”

  Anse was staring at the tigers. They crisscrossed before him, ready to feed. The heavy shanks of meat hung dripping from his arms, like a pair of bloodied clubs. He cleared his throat.

  “It ain’t even the start,” he said.

  Lope waited.

  “The start of what?”

  The old man kept working his jaws, chewing on words, mincing or grinding them between his teeth.

  He didn’t say.

  CHAPTER 20

  PIT

  They stood at the edge of an empty swimming pool. The blue bottom, pale as a robin’s egg, had not been mopped or scrubbed. There were random streaks of blood across the floor, pocked with the muddy prints of boots and paws.

  Malaya shook her head.

  “Christ,” she whispered.

  “At the end of a whip,” said Anse.

  The house was a five-bedroom behemoth with a Spanish roof, embowered in a jungle of overgrown vines and palms and shrubs. A foreclosure, vacant for months, sitting on the edge of the St. Johns River outside Jacksonville, Florida. The subtropical flora had run rampant in the absence of weekly landscaping crews. No men in masks and neckerchiefs, wielding weed-whackers and shrub shears and motorized trimmers. The nearest house sat more than one hundred yards away, hidden behind a veil of ivy and honeysuckle—vacant, too.

  Malaya stared into the stained belly of the pool. An iron mount had been bolted into the deep end, trailing a ten-foot length of heavy chain. At the end of the lead lay an empty leather collar, chewed ragged.

  “Dogfight?” asked Malaya.

  Anse shook his head.

  “Looks more like a bait.”

  “What kind?”

  Anse squatted at the edge of the pool.

  “Don’t know. All I see is canine prints.”

  Malaya balled her hands at her sides. Her fists felt small, brittle. She thought of being chained and collared in the pit, facing the red jaws of dogs. She thought of Camp Liberty. Her heart wailed. She wished for some way to channel the pain, to transform her hurt into a roar.

  “We’ll find them,” said Anse.

  “Who?”

  “Whoever it was did this.”

  “Find them and what?”

  Anse turned his head and spat.

  “Whatever we have to.”

  * * *

  They descended into the pool, using the steps built into one corner. The walls rose high as the bottom sloped toward the deep end. The ghosts of dogs whirled and roared, their fury echoing inside the sky-blue belly of the pit. Malaya’s eyes burned, blurry with tears. She swiped them away, scanning for clues.

  The tip had been anonymous, left on the answering machine of an 800 number they’d started posting on telephone poles and gas station corkboards up and down the coast—hoping for a lead on any exotics that needed new homes. The caller gave no specifics—just an address.

  They policed the knee-high grass of the yard, cutting back and forth, back and forth, until they passed beneath the low-hanging moss of the oaks along the riverbank. Nothing. There they sat, staring across the noon glitter of the river.

  Here the early European explorers had sailed beneath the billowed canvas of their three-masted ships, erecting stone pillars of dominion among the tattooed tribes of the New World, who welcomed them as sons of god. Log-rafts and steamboats followed, hauling out the last virgin timber of the land. Dark veins of pollution slipped into the river, sprung from the pulp mills and chemical plants that lined the banks. Strange formations of algae bloomed in the water; lesions grew on the scales of fish. Manatees paddled just beneath the surface, their backs grouted with scars, while powerboats blasted along the river, heedless of caution signs.

  Malaya sat hugging her knees.

  “Sometimes I wonder if we don’t deserve it,” she said. “Some plague to wipe us from history. Some flood.”

  Anse took a soft pack of Marlboros from his pocket, lit one.

  “You been hanging around me too long.”

  “From the lion pits to the Coliseum to now. Nothing changes, except there’s more of us.”

  Anse blew smoke from his nostrils.

  “All we can do is try and be the good guys, best we can.”

  Malaya envisioned the rivers rising, swollen by the ire of God, and the works of man swamped, drowned under inland seas. People swept beneath the surface, wheeling like spirits in the darker currents. Some clinging to life in high apartments, perched just above the lapping flood, or throwing one another from listing cruise ships or freighters. She pictured men lording homemade arks, wielding bangsticks or assault rifles like the staffs of prophets. Men who’d said again and again that the time was nigh for fire and flood.

  Her fingers lay in the swales between her ribs, fingering her new tattoo. A spiral of peace eagles, raised tender from her side. She wanted to claw them from her skin.

  “I thought we’d find something today. Some clue.”

  Anse swallowed hard.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Malaya shook her head.

  “Nobody gets what they deserve.”

  Anse broke the back of the cigarette under his thumb.

  “Some do.”

  * * *

 
; Late that afternoon, Anse drove to the back of the sanctuary, alone, a bison shoulder riding in the bed of his truck. He parked and stepped down from the cab and bent his head to squint through a keyhole-sized opening in the kudzu. There was plenty of room along the river for the lion to roam. Pools of sunlight where he could laze, letting the lesser creatures peck the mites from his fur, and bowers of shade for the heat of the day. Larger prey could even be living inside the enclosure, left from the days before they closed the gate.

  Anse had rarely seen the lion since the night of the rescue, but he felt a drumming in his chest every time he looked through this fence. A heavy tattoo, low and proud, that seemed to call his heart back to itself, calling home the bloodied shreds, the blasted parts of himself. He felt a warmth in his chest, a healing. He thought of Henrietta, how she would like this maned lion prowling heavy-pawed along the river, crossing her burial bluff, telling her she was not alone.

  But there was something else now. Anse knew he would spend the night lying in bed beside Tyler, his eyes watching the whirl of the ceiling fan, his jaws flickering, grinding his molars to nubs. He would want to tell her about the beast on the other side of the fence, the kidnapped king. But he couldn’t—not yet.

  He took a folded bandanna from the chest pocket of his safari shirt. A clue he’d found at the edge of the pool, which he hadn’t told Malaya about.

  Slowly, he began to unwrap it.

  * * *

  Malaya lay in a damp snarl of sheets, unable to sleep. She kept thinking of the blue belly of the pit, streaked with blood. She kept thinking of the rhinos and elephants in the reserve, their carcasses discovered hours or days or weeks too late. How little she’d helped. She kept thinking of the house on the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp—the animals caged on their barge-ark, awaiting some storm or flood.

  She rose from bed.