by Taylor Brown
Below him, Anse was swimming across the creek, froglike, a knife between his teeth.
Lope breathed in, out, trying to steady the barrel. He thought of his raptor perched on his arm. He imagined her calming, her wings sheathed against her sides. Her head swiveling slowly, her eyes piercing long miles of woods and fields and sky. The barrel steadied at the end of his arms. On the far side of the creek, Malaya stood and turned to one of the head-high crates. To his amazement, she slipped the latch.
* * *
The mink shot from the cage, unfurling like a black whip in the night, striking Malaya’s shoulder before leaping to the ground. She hardly noticed, bending to unlatch another crate, then another and another. Raccoons leapt bandit-eyed from their cages, swirling on the floor, followed by opossums and rabbits and squirrels. An armadillo came rumbling from his pen. A black racer sped across the floor. A weasel. At her feet, a roiling of bodies, tumbling and wheeling, unsure where to go. They hit the limits of the place and turned back, crawling over themselves. Some, by instinct, started to climb. They hugged the trunks of her legs, her calves and thighs. She could feel them scrambling up her body, their hearts tapping away.
The boy was standing now, his eyes wide and round and blue, beholding the strange creation rising before him. A woman crawling with living beasts, bejeweled with the hot beads of their eyes, flashing with their claws and teeth. She came toward the locked door of the cage, swaying in her armor of scales and fur, a creature risen godlike in the darkness. The boy stepped forward, slack-mouthed, as if caught in a spell. His silver staff, dragged, cut a line in the mildewed planks. He reached out with his free hand and unlocked the door.
* * *
Lope watched the girl step from the cage, whelmed with furs and skins. She fell to one knee and the animals burst free of her, skating and slithering from the barge, hurrying back into the creek or swamp. She knelt there, lean and dark, her body cut by claws, blistering with blood. Behind her, Anse rose slimy from the creek, his bare back spreading like a shield. Water streamed from his body. He drew the knife from his teeth.
The boy wheeled, his staff flashing in the night. The pair circled each other, the girl between them.
“Skunk ape,” said the boy.
“Meaner,” said Anse.
Malaya rose and held out her hands between them. She looked at Anse.
“No,” she said. “The boy let me go.”
The old jockey’s jaw muscles flickered, his teeth grinding, but he slowly nodded, lowering the knife. Now Malaya turned to the boy. She leaned forward and lightly tapped his chest. The boy jolted at her touch, as if freed from a spell. He lowered the bangstick. Malaya nodded, touching his chest again.
“Mama would be proud.”
Now she turned and staggered past Anse, to the end of the dock. Her black shirt was ripped, her skin striped with blood. She eased into the black glass of the creek, as if into healing waters, and disappeared.
CHAPTER 22
KING BULL
They rode home three abreast in Anse’s truck, the dark trees tumbling past their windows. Malaya kept nodding off, her head rolling onto one of their shoulders or the other. Leaves stuck to her wounds and wisps of gray-green moss hung in her hair. She might have sprung from the black muck of the swamp itself, rising through the deep roots of mangroves and cypress knees, seeking light. She smelled of the cage. An animal musk, sour and wild and old. Where she touched the men, their shoulders and collarbones glowed.
The big diesel rumbled under the hood, a lulling thunder, and the cabin was dim, lit only by the tiny lights of the dashboard, the steady needles. The old highway speared into the darkness, leading them out of the swamp. A jetliner blinked slowly across the sky. A whitetail doe floated at the roadside, pale as a specter in the headlights.
Malaya began to snore.
The two men looked at each other. Neither spoke.
They emerged onto the old coastal highway, turning for home. Traffic was scarce. The odd sedan or pulpwood truck flared twin-eyed from the darkness and bleared across the windshield, then vanished red-tailed into the night. They drove past the old zombie neighborhoods, drowning in weeds, and passed Little Eden itself, where the entrance yawned red-mouthed in the night. Now came the bridge over the Satilla River and the highway descended through rows of storefronts, brick-built with dusty windows and sagging awnings. The mural on the side of one building flared in the headlights. A riverboat smoking at the dock, surrounded by horse-drawn coaches and ladies in white. Now they passed the barbecue joint and biker bar. Now the rows of disused logwood trucks, hoodless with rusting engines.
Soon they were in Kingsland, adjacent to the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base, home of the Atlantic Fleet’s nuclear missile subs. As a girl, Malaya had come here with her grandfather, staying at the veterans lodge. She’d told them of long days on the water with the old man, setting trotlines and casting bread for gulls. Tea-colored creeks and white riverbanks and swallow-tailed kites—rare raptors, black and white, which wheeled and darted over the water like acrobats.
No wonder she would come here after returning from overseas.
They turned in to the King’s Suites, a faded motor inn offering weekly rates. The few cars that dotted the place looked desperate, rife with balding tires and plastic bags taped over broken windows. The hollow-core door to Malaya’s room was slightly warped, clad in a damp sheen. They found her keys in the fanny pack she wore, wrapped in grip tape to prevent them from jingling. Anse had to use his shoulder to open the swollen door, which caved slightly before popping wide. They yoked Malaya between them, each taking an arm, carrying her sideways across the threshold into the musty room. She seemed heavy beyond her weight.
The bedspreads were beige, a quilted synthetic that felt damp. The whole room felt wet, as if coated in a cold sweat, sickly and nervous. The wall unit was rattling away, set on sixty-five, the windows clouded with condensation.
They laid her on the bed farthest from the stripes of amber-orange light that blasted through the blinds—shot from the all-night security lamp in the parking lot. They looked around, squinting in the dimness. The room was neatly squared, as if for inspection. No mark of dust, nothing out of place. Clothes hung in the doorless closet, neatly spaced, over a row of shoes set in ascending order of height, flats to wedges to boots. The beds had been planed flat by practiced hands, the bedside books stacked just so. No toothbrush or mouthwash or hair iron beside the sink—only a single canvas Dopp kit, OD green, the last name ANGON stenciled on the side. A roach crawled along the baseboard.
Malaya lay on her back on the bed, breathing heavily through her nose.
Lope rubbed his chin with two fingers and a thumb, looking at the room.
“Can we leave her here?”
Anse chewed his bottom lip.
“It ain’t killed her yet.”
“Those scratches she got, they could infect. Maybe we should call Tyler, have her look at them?”
Anse shook his head.
“She don’t know anything about this.”
Lope frowned.
“What is this, exactly? It about what you got hid in that old enclosure along the river?”
Anse’s collarbones lifted, fell. A man readying himself, finding the air for his confession. But when he opened his mouth, Malaya’s hand shot from the bed and clapped his wrist.
Both men froze, eyes wide.
“Please,” she said. “Find them.”
* * *
They sat in a pair of white plastic chairs outside her room, watching the erratic orbit of moths around the security light. The bugs were pale in the night, frantic, swirling about the amber bulb. The old jockey got out his pack of cigarettes and offered one up. Lope hadn’t smoked since the day he entered the fire academy.
“Fuck it.” He took one.
Anse lit his cigarette and passed the lighter. An old Zippo, nicked and scarred, like the kind Lope once kept in the box beneath his bed.
The old jock
ey’s nostrils flared, puffing smoke.
“These drones you got, can you mount cameras on them?”
Lope lit the cigarette, feeling the tickling blue burn in his throat. There was the urge to cough, but he quelled his twitchy lungs—easy compared to the nervous wings of an eagle.
Autonomic control.
“Cameras,” he said. “Sure.”
“Live feed?”
“No problem.”
“What about thermal?”
“Sure. Hog-hunters use them all the time. All it takes is money.”
The older man leaned to one side, scrunching an eye, and extracted an ancient trifold wallet from his back pocket. It was thick as a textbook, the leather ravaged and chewed. He spread it across his lap and hunted through the credit cards, finally sliding one free and holding it out to Lope.
“Billing address is the same as the sanctuary,” he said.
“Could get expensive, Anse.”
“Whatever it takes.”
Lope took the card, then looked seaward. Out there, not too distant, lay a fleet of American submarines, each more than five hundred feet long, skinned in black steel and carrying enough nuclear warheads to end the age of man. He looked back to Anse.
“What are we looking for?” he asked.
“Wolves.”
* * *
A week later, they parked beneath a causeway bridge outside of Savannah. An ancient dock, storm-shredded, was toppling back into the water and a pair of aboveground gasoline tanks sat rusting in the trees, empty for decades. Upriver stood the varicolored shipping containers of the Port of Savannah, stacked like Lego ramparts along the shoreline, craned day and night from transoceanic ships.
They launched the drone from the bed of the pickup, watching the tiny rotorcraft disappear into the night. Lope hunched over the controller in his lap, thumbing the joysticks, squinting into the tablet mounted on top. The screen displayed a bird’s-eye view of the world, delivered in the gray scale of thermal energy. Heat burned white, the hotter the brighter. Anse and Malaya leaned in from either side, watching the screen.
The place was a quarter mile away, located on a tiny speck of land called Tadpole Spit. Malaya had come out of the swamp with the name of the place. Her intention all along, she said. Actionable intelligence. According to the boy-swamper, the coast’s king breeder of fighting dogs lived here.
They could see the dark creeks that squiggled and branched through the marsh, feeding the tide. A bird seared across the screen, wings spread. Now a spit of land slid into view, just big enough for a house and yard. It was built from the spoil of a dredging operation, a roundish plot of high ground connected to the mainland by the thinnest string of a road, forming a tadpole shape. They could see the dark rectangle of a doublewide house, elevated on concrete blocks, and a narrow dock that led to a nearby creek and twin-engine boat. A large pickup truck sat in the drive. Now they saw the dogs, a ragged pack of them chained behind the house, their bodies glowing white-hot beneath the eye of the drone. Each was staked just out of reach of his neighbor, with a 55-gallon oil drum for a doghouse.
“Can you bring us down to one?” asked Anse.
Lope nodded and the drone descended toward the dog at the center of the pack, a heavy brute with a beer-keg chest and lean hips. At his widest, he was nearly the size of the steel oil drum behind him. His name was torch-cut into the top of the barrel: KING BULL.
The quadcopter descended closer, closer. The dog’s ears were battle-cropped, shorn to tiny spikes against his skull. They snapped erect, quivering like antennae, and the animal began turning in place, puffing his chest this way and that, expecting his enemy to come from the dirt. The drone was nearly on top of him before he looked straight up. His head was heavy and square, wide as a cinderblock, his shoulders rocky as a weightlifter’s. He cocked his head, his face crisscrossed with dark scars. Perhaps he saw a strange dragonfly hovering over him. His monstrous mouth fell into a wide, sloppy grin. His tongue flopped out.
Anse leaned over Lope’s shoulder, squinting at the dog. He thumbed the chest pocket of his shirt.
“Bingo, motherfucker.”
Lope looked up from the screen.
“What should we do?”
Anse chewed his bottom lip.
“It’s too damn many to take them all in. Reckon we’ll have to call the police.”
“Hold on,” said Malaya. “Owner might could tell us something.”
“Like what?”
“Like where he got that wolf he baited, for starters.”
Anse nodded, pressing his thumb against his chest pocket.
“True.”
* * *
Lope ascended to two hundred feet, watching the pair of them scurry up the narrow causeway toward the house. They moved in echelon, white ghosts of heat in the night. They were wearing masks and gloves and carrying shotguns from the truck’s toolbox. They’d cut through the marsh to slip the security cameras at the main road and stepped over the pneumatic tube detectors stretched across the drive, intended to alert the house of approaching vehicles.
Now they approached the gate at the front of the property. Lope’s heart banged hard in his chest, as if keeping him airborne. He watched them cut the padlock and slip through the gate, one after the next, then scamper toward the truck in the front yard, crouching behind the rear fender. Here they were squatted, making hand signals to each other, when a red thunderbolt began to blink in the corner of Lope’s display.
“Damn.”
The drone had only twenty minutes of flight time. He hovered overhead as long as he could. They were creeping toward the house, crouched low, when he hit the HOME button, calling the drone back to the truck.
* * *
Lope waited, staring across the marsh and pines. He had the windows down and the marsh bellowed and barked around him. The night seemed louder than normal. Closer. Malaya and Anse had been gone nearly thirty minutes now. He was worried what might happen. He was not accustomed to sitting in the truck. He was used to breaching doors and hauling in hoses.
He leaned his head back on the seat, thinking of the hunters of the Kazakh steppes—bird lords—men who rode aback stout winter ponies with eagles on their fists. They climbed mountain cliffs to capture their eaglets and hand-raised them to adulthood, raptors so large they could blot the sun from a man’s shoulders. They flew their eagles against hares and foxes, even wolves. Lope pictured himself clad in the fur of a Tibetan wolf, saddled on a horse whose breath smoked in the night, an eagle on his fist. Bird lord. He pictured his raptor beaming down from the darkness, laserlike, cutting loose the dogs. He could see King Bull trotting through the country midnight, slop-tongued and jaunty, following his scarred nose.
But that was only a dream, he knew. Such a dog would be a trespasser wherever he went. He would always be stopping at the edges of fields and roads and yards, raising his head, ears spiked, alert for barks, screams, shots. Listening, listening, as Lope was now.
* * *
They returned after forty-five minutes, jogging out of the darkness, their guns angled high across their chests. They were breathing hard as they climbed into the cab. When they pulled their masks to their foreheads, their faces were bright with sweat, like firefighters just emerged from a burning house. Lope looked from one to the other, waiting.
“Well, how’d it go?”
Anse tucked his mask into his pocket.
“Better for us than him.”
“You find out anything?”
“There’s some ex-cage-fighter, apparently, raises wolf dogs.”
“Where at?”
Anse shook his head, showing his teeth.
“Some island. Couldn’t get it straight.”
“You called the police yet?”
“Waiting till we got back here.”
When the old jockey reached for the ignition, Lope saw the cuff of his shirt.
“Is that blood?”
Anse cranked the truck.
“Bet
ter call from a pay phone.”
* * *
They parked beneath the shot-out light of a gas station several miles down the road. The place had iron grilles over the windows and neon beer signs. Through the windshield, Lope watched the old jockey lean against the side of a battered pay phone, the receiver wedged between ear and shoulder, his face shadowed beneath the brim of his bush hat.
“What happened back there?” he asked.
Malaya leaned her head back on the seat.
“We didn’t feed him to the dogs, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
“You sure you want to know?”
“Don’t I?”
“It’s … awkward.”
“Awkward?”
Malaya crossed her arms.
“You asked for it,” she said. “So, we come up on the house and check through the windows first, right? See what we can see. Den is the only room with a light on. Dude is sitting there in his La-Z-Boy, kicked back, eyes mashed shut. And he’s just going to town.”
“Town?”
“Pants down,” said Malaya. “Like he was gonna rub a genie out the damn thing.”
“Oh, Jesus,” said Lope.
Malaya shook her head.
“Right? I don’t reckon he thought the genie would look like us.”
“No,” said Lope. “I reckon not.”
“’Least we knew he didn’t expect us. We come through the door and he jumps about five feet from the chair. I thought his head would go through the ceiling. He lands, trips in his own pants, goes flat-face on the floor. We cuff him. Anse goes to clear the rest of the house while I watch the guy, and that’s when I recognize him. He’s got this long-ass beard, like ZZ Top or somebody. Waist-length, nearly. I realize I saw him in the grocery parking lot a few weeks back, he was buying something in a dog crate.”