Foodchain (34 page)

Girdler whimpered something, but it was hard to tell what he was trying to say through a mouthful of broken teeth.

Sturm patted Girdler’s shoulder affectionately. “That’s right. Glad you see things my way now.” The fight didn’t seem to have taken anything out of Sturm; it just fired him up even more. He checked his watch. “Holy shit. Time’s up.” He gestured towards the cage. “He gonna be ready?”

Frank shrugged.

“We’re counting on you, son. That bear dies out there tonight, it’s on your head.”

* * * * *

Sturm’s voice came booming out of the loudspeakers. “Two minute warning, gentlemen! Get your bets in now!”

Pine was bored and idly spun Girdler in circles as he appraised the bear. “I dunno, Frank. I don’t think your pills did shit.”

Frank shook his head. “You think we can get Sturm to stall for a while?”

Pine just laughed.

Sturm’s voice came over the loudspeakers again. “Window is now closed! The fight is ON!” He thundered back down the stairs. “Them cats ready?”

Frank glanced over at the three cages and the pacing cats. “Yeah.”

Sturm stopped in front of the bear cage, stuck his hands in his pockets, and rocked back and forth for a few moments. “You think that bear’s ready?”

“No.”

“Me neither. But it’s showtime. You better figure something out.” Sturm started down the chute. “Soon as I shut that gate out there, you let this big boy out. Then you got thirty seconds and I want all three of them cats coming down this chute. Got it?” He locked eyes with Frank.

“Yeah.”

Sturm headed down the chute. Frank knew that he had no time, no time at all. He pulled the last pill and found a hammer in the locker. He put the baggie on the cement and rolled the head of the hammer over the pill, grinding it down until it was as fine and smooth as flour.

A roar made the walls shake. Sturm was out in the auction yard floor.

“You gonna feed that to him?” Pine asked. “I don’t think it’s gonna do much now, you know?”

Frank shook his head. After sifting the powder down into a corner, he twisted the plastic, creating a plump little triangle, and tore the rest of the baggie away. “Do what you got to do, but get that bear up and moving.”

Girdler made another noise, deep down, but Frank and Pine ignored him.

Pine pulled a pitchfork from under the stairs and plunged the tines into Bo-Bo’s back thigh. The bear jerked away, uttering a surprised yelp of pain. Pine stuck him again.

Frank swung the gate open and clicked it into place, sealing off the cage while simultaneously opening into the chute. He crouched and waited, the triangle of powder tight in his sweating fist.

Pine jabbed at Bo-Bo a third time, and rather than face the source of pain and swipe at the pitchfork, the bear retreated, just as Frank had feared. Bo-Bo was no fighter. The cats were going to rip him wide open. Panicked now, the bear slammed his massive shoulders through the narrow gap, and in the split second it took for him to squeeze through, Frank brought up the triangle, letting the plastic fall away, and blew the powder into Bo-Bo’s nose and brown eyes.

* * * * *

For a moment, the bear just flinched and blinked, his fear of the pitchfork overriding his confusion. Bo-Bo padded down the chute quickly, anxious to get away from Pine. But then that great shaggy head shook once, twice. He stopped. A spasming quiver worked it was along his spine as if he had just stepped on a live wire, shooting 110 volts through his bones.

The Kodiak howled, a sound that shook the dust from the cages and made Frank’s heart stop. Bo-Bo reared up, smashing through the top of the chute like he was breaking through the thin ice of a frozen lake. Paws bigger than hubcaps tore strips from the sides of the chute and the whole thing threatened to collapse. He twisted, and started coming back the other way and if anything, that awful, screaming roar got even louder.

Frank leapt onto the closest cage and scrambled up as fast as he could. Inside, the lionesses had curled into a corner, her hissing moan lost under the bear’s terrible bellow. He heard Pine blurt, “Oh fucking hell,” just as the grizzly sent the gate crashing into the dog cages across the aisle.

Pine needed a distraction, so he gave Girdler a kick that sent the duct taped, bleeding man spinning across the aisle in his office chair. The bear, drowning in a mindless, furious frenzy, swiped at Girdler and sent the man and his chair sliding sideways across the cement, leaving a trail of blood like the sheep back on Main Street. The bear followed and pounced, seizing Girdler’s skull between his teeth and clamped them together, working those jaws in a slobbering froth of saliva and blood.

When the grizzly finally looked up, there wasn’t enough left of Girdler’s head to put in the plastic baggie of pills. Bo-Bo’s shoulders spasmed again, and he whirled, swatting at unseen demons. Frank hooked one leg over the rafter and pulled himself even higher.

Gunfire exploded from inside the chute. Sturm, marching up to the where the shredded chicken wire blocked the chute, had both revolvers out, blasting away at the bear. Frank couldn’t tell if any bullets hit Bo-Bo, but it was enough to send the bear loping down the aisle.

The Kodiak, in this state, literally could not feel the bullets, but the noise of the gunfire echoed like a thousand dreadful storms through his mind, spiking agony through every cell. He ran back to his room, but the door was shut. He smacked the door with the top of his head and bellowed.

Sturm fired again and again, aiming for the knees. He didn’t want the Kodiak to go running out into the night. Men followed up the chute and everyone carried a gun. They filled the aisle behind Sturm.

Bo-Bo turned, and gunfire erupted, knocking the bear back against the door. Blood flew, spattering the walls and cement like an abstract painting. The bear shivered, falling on shattered knees, and finally died. The men kept shooting.

* * * * *

Frank reached out to knock on the Glouck’s front door before he could change his mind. He’d slipped away in the chaos after Bo-Bo’s escape attempt; he didn’t want to face Sturm. Frank had a feeling that things were starting to get out of control, just a little, as if he was back on the carnival ride, the Wheel of Screams, and it wouldn’t stop, it just kept going fast and faster and Frank could feel his grip starting to slip.

Frank knocked again. The light above the door flickered on and he felt like bait under the sudden glare.

The door opened and Gun squinted out. “What?” he demanded.

“I need to talk to your mom,” Frank said.

“Which one?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

Gun shut the door and left Frank standing in the pool of light. His night vision was gone and couldn’t see a damn thing beyond the concrete steps. Even the gas station sign across the street was off. He’d hid the long black car among the shadows of the station.

Again, he wondered if he was doing the right thing.

The door opened again. And there was Annie.

* * * * *

She was wearing shorts and a Judas Priest tank top and a hint of a smile. “Yeah?”

“Just, ah, thought you and your family should know. The grizzly got loose. Could be anywhere.” He needed an excuse to see Annie and figured the Gloucks wouldn’t find out until tomorrow that the bear had been killed inside the auction yard. “I’d keep everyone inside. At least tonight.”

“Is that why you came by? To warn us?”

“Yeah.”

Annie let the silence grow, then said, “Not to apologize for the other day?”

Frank let a hint of his own smile out. “No.”

Okay. Thanks.” She started to close the door.

“I know where the money is,” Frank said.

The door stopped. Annie’s eye peered out from the crack, watching Frank for a moment. The light was suddenly shut off, leaving Frank in momentary complete darkness. He just waited.

“So what?” Annie asked softly.

“You still interested?”

“Maybe.” A pause. “You interested?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I got a feeling that I won’t be getting all the money I’m owed.”

“So you think stealing it is a good idea?”

“I figure I deserve it.”

“So where is it?”

Frank let a hint of his own smile out.

Annie crossed her arms and smirked. “Fine. When you planning this?”

“Soon.” He turned and walked back to his car.

“Hey,” Annie called after him. “You gonna apologize for the other day?”

Frank opened the driver’s door. He looked back at Annie, silhouetted on the front steps. He smiled fully this time, nothing hidden. “No,” he said, and got in the car and drove away.

DAY THIRTY-THREE

Surprisingly, Sturm hadn’t been pissed about the bear’s escape. On the contrary, he had been delighted. “Got me a genuine killer grizzly—no, no, a goddamn killer
Kodiak
,” he shouted over the phone at sunrise. It sounded like he’d been up all night. The skull and teeth were going on his desk, right next to the tiger. “Get to the yard soon as you can. Got someone I’d like you to meet.”

Frank fed all the cats at the vet office, then packed fifty pounds of meat into an ice chest in the trunk of the long black car and drove through town. He felt like he’d lived in here his entire life. He could dimly remember the night out in the desert, when he was trying to break the plastic cuffs, but the memory was so distant it might as well have happened to someone else. His mother still lived within his memories in vivid, precise details, but the images of his father often flickered into images of Sturm, like overlapping radio stations.

* * * * *

When he got to the auction yard, he found a new truck, some overhauled refrigerated vehicle, parked in front. The engine was shut off, but the cargo cooler wheezed laboriously under the midmorning sun. Sturm and another guy were standing in the shade at the back of the truck; Sturm raised a hand as Frank drove past and parked.

Sturm said, “Like to introduce you to Billy…” Sturm obviously didn’t know the guy’s last name. “Well, he’s brought us something special.”

Billy reminded Frank of a squirrel that had lost a fight with a riding lawnmower. He was mostly bald, except for a braided foot of hair where the hair grew at the top of the back of the neck. A long, stringy goatee erupted off the end of his chin; there was no hair above his lip. A couple of sores at the left side of his mouth looked like they might be infected and his upper teeth probably came from a toy vending machine that waited near the exit doors in a supermarket. Whatever was left of the bottom row, that was all his, no question.

He grabbed Frank’s right hand and shook it like he was trying to rip it loose. Something about the guy’s grip felt stunted and curiously lumpy, but Frank couldn’t have pulled his hand away if he had tried. He was too busy trying not to breathe air contaminated with Billy’s breath.

“Heard all about you, that’s right, friend of the animals and all that. Well, any friend of animals is a friend of mine. Them cats are in damn good shape—feeding ’em meat, right?” Billy answered his own question. “Right.” He finally released Frank’s hand.

Frank backed up slightly, eyeballing a row of fresh beer bottles, ice still clinging to the glass, lined up along the truck’s bumper.

Billy followed his look, and handed a Frank a beer. Frank couldn’t help but notice how mangled his hand was, like it had been slammed in a pickup door a few times and the tailgate too, just for the hell of it. A few fingers were gone, Frank couldn’t actually tell exactly which ones—only a few nubs peeked shyly around the sweating bottle. Billy’s thumb looked suspiciously like a big toe.

“Much obliged,” Frank said.

“Betcha,” Billy said. “Always got some on hand, since I gotta keep the truck cold anyways.”

Frank nodded, as if this made perfect sense. He figured maybe Billy had a dead animal on display and he needed to keep the corpse frozen. When Frank was around nine or ten, his mom took him to the county fair and he paid fifty cents to walk into an air-conditioned semi-trailer and see a big plastic-looking shark behind sheets of rippled glass that were supposed to be ice. Still, the shark had been huge, and Frank had stayed for hours, squinting through the ripples, trying to see the shark better. Finally, the truck owner had to kick him out.

“Go on, son,” Sturm said. “Ask him what’s in there.”

Frank looked at Billy. “What’s in there?”

Billy smiled. The top row of teeth looked like it had frightened the bottom row into rotting and melting away. He leaned into a quick spiel. “A genuine dinosaur. Right in front of your eyes. Guaranteed. Biggest reptile you’ve ever seen. It eats crocodiles for breakfast. Deadliest predator to stalk the Earth. Spanning the ages all the back to the dreaded Paleolithic Era. Which is before the Jurassic Park era, just so you know. It is nature unleashed in all her raw fury. Behold…” Billy snapped the latches at the back of the truck open and swung the thick door wide. “The awesome power of the Komodo Dragon.”

The dragon stared coolly out at Frank and flicked its tongue at the wall absentmindedly. Frank hadn’t been expecting the thing to be alive. But it made no move to dart to the back end of the trailer, content only to lethargically move its eyes. Frank touched the metal interior and it was cool, but not freezing, like a knife that had been left out all night.

“I keep it cold so he stays calm,” Billy said.

Frank realized Billy and Sturm were waiting for his reaction.

He said, “That’s a damn big lizard.” And it was true. The Komodo Dragon easily stretched across the eight foot trailer, even with the head curled around slightly and a solid three or four feet of tail along the opposite wall. The head and neck looked like an uncircumcised penis that had gotten surly one day and grown teeth and a tongue.

The claws, incredibly, were even longer than the Kodiak’s. These were thinner. Sharper. Meaner.

“The spit alone will make you sicker n’ hell,” Billy said. He held up his mangled hand. “When it was just a pup, sonofabitch got hold of my hand here, and I kicked it in the head, got it off. Didn’t think it was so bad at first. Hell, just poured some tequila over it. Shit. Inside of two days I woke up, found myself in the emergency ward. That shit fucked me up but good. That monster, he ain’t nothing to fuck around with.”

“You gonna shoot it?” Frank asked Sturm.

“Hell no,” Sturm said. “Jack and Pine are picking up a motherhumping white Siberian tiger as we speak. I don’t need to tell you that that’s one of the rarest goddamn animals on the planet right now. And,” he lowered his voice, “story goes, it’s the same tiger that went after that faggot magician few years back.”

“No shit?” Billy asked. “I heard they had to put it down.”

“Supposedly, they switched it with a tiger that was already dead.”

“I’ll be damned,” Billy said.

“Tonight, we got ourselves a regular rumble in the jungle; this damn dinosaur is gonna to go toe-to-toe with that tiger in the bottom of the town pool.”

* * * * *

When Frank came over the slight bridge that traversed the dry creekbed that cut across the north end of the valley on his way back to the vet hospital, he saw Mr. Noe’s Mercedes parked on his side of the highway. It was late, and the nearly horizontal rays burned the back of the Mercedes into a slippery white fire. Frank’s first instinct was to just hit the gas instead of the brakes and just crash right into the fucker. But he managed to at least take his foot off the gas, and coasted up on the other car.

Mr. Noe stood in the sunroof, aiming his rifle at something in the empty irrigation ditch. He fired, twice. Theo, in the driver’s seat, glanced at the rearview mirror. By then, Frank was close enough to see Theo’s eyes narrow as Theo caught sight of the long black car.

Frank drifted over into the oncoming lane and stopped directly across from the Mercedes. Mr. Noe turned to look, gave a little bow, and then turned and fired a third time. Something cracked inside of Frank’s head and filled him with unease. This was all wrong. These two fucks weren’t just shooting pheasants or raccoons. He shut off the car and got out.

Mr. Noe waved and dropped back into the passenger seat and Theo made the little car leap forward and by the time Frank had crossed the dotted yellow line in the center of the highway, the Mercedes was twenty yards away and gaining speed.

Frank didn’t bother to chase them. He kept going on to the irrigation ditch.

Petunia was down there.

She’d been shot three times. One bullet had passed through her chest, one through her fourth row of nipples, and one had shattered upon impact as it struck the outermost, center muscle in her thick jaw, sending shards of itself along her skull, into her eye, her throat.

Frank jumped into the ditch and said, “Easy girl. Easy.” Petunia whirled and snapped at the direction of his voice, shredding herself even further. “Easy. Oh please. Just …” Petunia dragged herself towards him in a barking frenzy, spraying blood with every horrible crunch from her ruined jaw. Frank finally made himself shut up by clasping a hand over his mouth. He crouched and watched until he couldn’t help but try and silently reach out to gently touch the uninjured side of her neck.

She ripped herself at him and chased him out of the ditch.

Frank stumbled back to the highway. He looked towards town, where the Mercedes had headed. Fighting the urge to follow, he grabbed a bottle from his car and went to watch Petunia either pass out or die.

* * * * *

Half an hour later, when Frank finally dared to get in closer, he wasn’t sure if she was unconscious or dead. She didn’t react when he gathered her in his arms and carried her to the long black car. He put her on the front seat, cradling her head in his lap as he steered with one hand on the steering wheel, the other on the dog, and talked to her the whole way, telling her about all the squirrels she would chase when she got better and how pretty she was and how he was going to take care of her and how Mr. Noe and Theo were going to be hurting worse than she was real soon. But when he finally got her back to the office and up on an examining table, Petunia was dead.

* * * * *

Frank sat on the floor for a long time. Then he carefully washed her and stitched up her wounds. He closed her eyes. He eased her tense muscles, moving the legs gently, letting her relax. He put her tongue back inside her teeth. He laid a white sheet on the floor and wrapped it around her more carefully than a new parent tending to an infant.

He put Petunia in the back seat of the long black car, but before he left, he unlocked all three outside doors to the vet hospital and let them stand open. He shut the freezer off and left the lid open. The ten thousand went in the trunk, under the spare tire. Then he went along the row of cages and unlocked all of them, letting the doors swing open by themselves. The cats watched him without moving.

“Go on. Get the hell out of here,” he told them.

* * * * *

He drove to the Glouck house. The girl that had been hanging in the dead tree his first day in town was out front, sitting on a wooden see-saw, as if waiting for someone to play. He’d overheard the mothers calling her Amber.

“Where’s your boots?” she asked.

Frank took Petunia out of the back seat and gently laid her in front of the satellite dish. He turned to Amber. “Your sister here?”

The front door slammed open and Annie came running out. She had seen the figure wrapped in the white sheet. Strong, tan legs faltered and slowed as she got closer until she finally simply stopped moving forward. She clapped a hand over her mouth. Tears filled her eyes, spilled out, and ran down her cheeks. “Why?” was the only thing she managed to get out before a sob choked her throat and stopped any more words.

Frank didn’t say anything. His vision grew blurry. It took him a moment to realize that his own tears were flooding his eyes. He couldn’t remember the last time he had actually cried. He hadn’t even shed any tears when his mother was buried. Something tore, deep inside of him. It sounded awfully like the duct tape under the sink. It kept ripping, shredding some thin membrane down in the darkness. The voice hissed in approval and urged whatever had been sealed inside to squirm free. He shook, his knees buckled, and he collapsed onto his haunches, hands and face numb.

Annie stepped closer and knelt beside him.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry. I couldn’t help her.”

Annie took his face and kissed his tears, her own hot tears spilling down her cheeks, mingling with his.

A great, agonizing wail grew in Frank’s chest and he felt that if he didn’t let it out and scream for every animal he ever hurt or killed, for all of the animals in his miserable life, his entire body would explode in pain. But he choked it back, rocking back and forth on the Glouck’s front lawn.

Annie held him close, sobbing into his ear.

Frank heard nothing but the anguished cry of the Kodiak, the horses, the big cats, all of them. And underneath it all, the voice. The voice, saying it’s about goddamn time. Enough is enough. You’ve been the goddamn grim reaper to the animal world for too long now, and it was time to end it. To end it all.

Annie grabbed the back of his skull and kissed him.

The pain floated up into the sky and dissipated among the stars.

He looked into Annie’s eyes and saw compassion. Kindness. Love. He took a deep breath. She wiped his tears away. He reached out, curled his hand around her ear, slipping her hair back. Her eyes never left his. He pulled her close and kissed her, hard. He tasted tears mixed with saliva.

He lowered his head and touched his forehead to hers. “The money? It’s all in a gunsafe, hidden in the barn. It’s in a stall in the back, inside a freezer. You got that?”

“I—”

“It’s heavy, but you’ll figure it out. I know you will.” He kissed her again. “Remember, it’s in the barn. In a freezer. In the back.” The edge in his voice was sharp enough to shave steel. “Tonight is gonna be your only chance.”