Jeff Jacobson - Foodchain

“Shit, Chuck. So this is where you been hiding them sisters you keep telling us that you fucked last year,” Pine said.

“That’s fuckin’ funny. Absofuckin’ hilarious, cuntwipe.” Chuck leaned over, peering at Pine’s piss poor excuse for a mustache. Unlike his chin, Pine’s mustache was sparse, sprouting in embarrassed fits and starts. Chuck kept going. “Considering whatever the hell that is on your lip there. Fuck is that? Pubic hair? Looks like you’re the one’s been smoking monkey dick.”

“Ape dick,” Sturm corrected, and nobody was sure if they should laugh or not. “Those in there are apes, not monkeys. Monkeys got tails, see?”

* * * * *

In addition to being educational, Sturm had also been thinking ahead. He instructed the clowns to bring raw hamburger and bananas. During the ride, Pine had injected Ace into the bananas and soaked the hamburger in the drug. And as they’d wandered through the zoo, they’d doled out the hamburger to the cats and bananas to the monkeys. When they walked back, they found the monkeys dropping out of trees. The clowns went around picking them up by the long, sinewy tails and dropping them into gunnysacks.

The whole loading process didn’t take nearly as long as Frank had expected; once the tour was over, he was impressed with how serious the clowns acted. There was no horsing around, no calling each other names, no laughing, and no drinking. The animals were sluggish after their extra meal, and the tranquilizers didn’t hurt. The cats got most of the drugs. They tied the sleeping cats’ front and back paws together with duct tape, and wrapped it around the cats muzzles for good measure. Then two of them would hoist a cat onto their backs and walking stiffly, legs moving in unison, they carried the cats out to the cattle trailers and laid the unconscious animals gently in the thick straw. It took four of them to carry the tiger.

As the sun rose, Frank got the rhino into the first truck by himself; he held a flake of hay and loaded the majestic, sad creature into the trailer. The head, bigger than an engine block, swung towards Frank and she heaved and puffed for a while, before taking a step forward. It took the old girl a while to make it up the ramp. Sturm said, “Son, you take all the time you need with that animal. It’ll be something special, to put this one down.”

Before they left, Frank set the zookeeper’s house trailer on fire.

* * * * *

He rode in the truck that carried the rhino. Jack was driving. They were second in line, just behind Sturm’s pickup. The other three trucks followed, with Chuck and the tow truck bringing up the rear. Although it was now early morning, the sun was already hot and hellish.

Sturm reached the front gate, got out and opened it. As he drove on through, the CB crackled with his voice. “Chuck, close that gate behind you. No point in advertising nobody’s home.”

As Jack eased the massive semi through the narrow gate, Frank caught a glimpse of a dark smudge, far down the highway. “Hold it,” he snapped and jerked the binoculars up.

But instead of a squad car, Frank stared at a turd brown station wagon that had been manufactured sometime during the Carter administration. Someone had jacked it up into a four-wheel drive, and now the doors sat nearly four feet off the ground. It looked like some six-year-old’s idea of a really cool Matchbox car. Frank was suddenly acutely aware of the black smoke he could see in the semi’s side mirror. The smoke bled up into the nearly white sky, growing thicker and darker by the second as flames consumed the cheap insulation and pressboard of the house trailer. “Shit. Somebody’s watching us.”

“Who? Cop?” Jack asked.

“No. Some kind of four wheel drive station wagon.”

Jack snatched the CB from the cradle as Sturm pulled out away from them, picking up speed on the blacktop. “We got a problem here, Mr. Sturm. Don’t know how, but them fucking Gloucks followed us. They’re watching.”

Brake lights flashed on the back of Sturm’s pickup.

Pine’s voice broke in. “Those fuckers. Let’s go say howdy.”

Jack nodded slowly, watching the car, maybe a mile distant. “Might be a good opportunity here, take care of that goddamn family once and for all,” he said into the mike. “Nobody’s around.”

Chuck agreed. “Fuck yes. Let’s go settle them right now. Nobody’ll know.”

But Sturm voice came back, quick and harsh, “No. Leave ’em be. We got these animals to get back home. Worry about them people later. They’ll get what’s coming to ’em. Don’t you worry. Now let’s go home.”

And with that, the pickup accelerated, and slowly, slowly, the convoy followed, gathering speed as they rolled through the desert. For the first time, the zoo was quiet, empty except for the alligators. Frank hoped the starvation took a long time, until they finally started to turn on each other, boiling the tank in the frothing madness of hunger and blood.

* * * * *

They followed the highway north, along Frank’s original route, without incident. Once, they had spotted a sheriff’s car, coming the opposite way, but it had sped past without slowing. Frank was glad once they hit I-80, because of the extra traffic. A few semis with livestock trailers would blend in with the blur of all of the other trucks. Around noon, Sturm’s right blinker began to flash, and the convoy took the off ramp, pulling into the same rest stop where Frank had cracked the trucker in the head.

“Why are we stopping?” he asked, keeping his voice level and unconcerned.

“Can’t cross the state line in daylight,” Jack said. “We’re gonna have to stop here and wait it out. Soon as its dark, we’ll cross.”

They parked all over the place so as not to make it obvious the trucks were traveling together. The place was busier than last time, full of semis, tourists squeezing in one last trip of the summer, and students headed for college. Frank hoped the tranquilizers would hold; he didn’t want some family in a minivan getting curious and one of the big cats chewing off a toddler’s groping hand.

Frank got out to stretch. He slowly walked along the line of rumbling semis, easing the kinks out of his back and shoulders. There was a sharp, twisting pain in his right side and he wondered if he’d pulled something while whipping the fence post over his head. It didn’t feel serious, but it was enough to make him catch his breath.

He squatted in the thin shade of a few dusty trees and looked back at the semi. Heat waves danced on the trailer’s roof. Frank realized the temperature inside the trailer had to be over a hundred and ten. Maybe a hundred and twenty.

He found Jack eyeballing a carload of sorority girls. “We gotta cool these animals down somehow,” Frank said. “They’re gonna cook.”

The girls giggled and cast tentative glances at Jack, eyes full of lust and fear. Jack never looked away from their car. “Then take care of it. You’re the vet.”

Frank couldn’t argue with that. He should have known better. He walked the length of the grassy area on the outskirts of the parking lot and found what he needed. After grabbing a wrench, a hammer, and a screwdriver from Sturm’s toolbox, he had the automatic sprinklers on in under a minute. Like machine guns, the sprinklers spit arcs of water out in precise bursts, first spraying the grass, then the trucks once Frank adjusted their aim.

The cats weren’t happy. Still not fully awake, they pressed themselves into corners, turning their faces away from the water. Except one. It lay sprawled near the back and never flinched even as drops of water rolled down the matted fur. Frank watched the sharp ridges and valleys of the cat’s rib, but it wasn’t breathing. “Shit,” Frank whispered.