Jeff Jacobson - Foodchain

A flashlight flickered over Frank and Red; another man was waiting for them. Folds of pale, hairy flesh spilled out from around a leather apron and erupted around his chin. Tiny dull eyes gazed out from between snarled eyebrows and blackheads. Loose rubber boots rose almost to his knees. A metal tube dangled from his belt. He carried the flashlight in his right hand and a large plastic bucket in his left. The bucket was full of fresh bones. Plenty of gristle. Chunks of meat, some covered in gray fur, swimming in blood.

They walked. The zookeeper led the way, picking his way through rows of cages, sweeping his flashlight back and forth in the dusty air. Many of the cages were secured on flatbed truck trailers. Animals started to appear. Most were dead. There were a lot of big cats. A lion sprawled on his side, all four legs splayed away from his swollen stomach. A dead leopard, his head wedged between two bars. Flies crawled over its gray tongue. The flashlight kept checking cage locks and doors, nailing cringing animals into corners, scattering the black shadows under the flatbeds.

They passed a cage that ran the length of a flatbed. A huge animal stood motionless inside. Four ancient, sagging pillars rose into shoulders that crested at nearly six feet tall. The creature was over thirteen feet long, covered in a heavy, wrinkled gray skin that seemed at least twice as big as the bones underneath. It reminded Frank of a horse, with a long, sloping skull that tapered down to a rounded snout. Black eyes reflected the flashlight. Two flat, smooth spots, like stumps of trees, dominated the top of its nose.

Frank realized that he was looking at an old rhinoceros, standing ankle deep in its own shit. Its horns had been cut off. Flies, sluggish in the cool air, covered the entire cage like a buzzing black blanket.

A tiger paced incessantly along thin bars, rumbling low in his throat. Several lionesses lay in separate corners of one large cage, tails flicking at sluggish flies. At the sight of the zookeeper and the bucket, they pulled themselves to their feet and snarled. It sounded like old muscle car engines, old 454 V-8s, sounds that made your teeth vibrate and shake your fillings loose.

The entire zoo erupted in more snarls, howls, screeches. It was feeding time and everybody was hungry; but Frank knew this went beyond simple hunger. He could count ribs on nearly every animal; they were slowly starving to death. This was where circuses came to die, where animals too old, too tired, too unpredictable, finished their lives, in a carnival junkyard, refugees from dying traveling zoos, unprepared private owners, and cancelled casino shows. It was a waiting room for the damned, as if hell was simply too full at the moment.

The zookeeper strolled from cage to cage, reaching into the bucket and tossing scraps of bloody meat through the bars. Frank recognized leg muscles, paws, and other pieces of dogs from the meat in the bucket. The cats pounced instantly, growling, snarling, snatching the chunks, ripping the morsels away from each other.

They reached the last cage in the row. It held a huge male lion, nearly ten feet long. He jammed his massive snout against the cage door, straining the thin bailing wire that had been twisted around the bars, securing the door. A very deep, very drawn sigh hushed out from his chest. He tilted his head and roared, shaking the matted mane and exposing teeth bigger than the quiet gentlemen’s fingers. The sound reminded Frank of a jet taking off. The roar held enough authority to quiet the rest of the zoo, at least for a few seconds.

Frank noticed the zookeeper didn’t get too close while tossing the meat into the cages. He may have been fat and lazy, but he wasn’t stupid. Frank took a long, hard look at the bailing wire holding the door shut. It looked like it had been there for a long time; most of the wire had rusted together.

The zookeeper pulled a greyhound’s head out of the bucket, holding onto the slim ear. He tossed the skull into the cage. The lion seized and cracked the greyhound’s skull between those giant teeth. It sounded like small branches being snapped for kindling.

Red started crying again, really sobbing. His nose dribbled more mucus, then suddenly erupted with blood. The thick liquid bubbled out of his nostrils, sheeting his upper lip in crimson snot, and kept spilling down, across his bottom lip and over his chin. Frank wondered if the accountant had discovered the wonderful world of cocaine; if so, that might explain Castellari’s financial concerns. Frank almost felt sorry for the guy.

The zookeeper looked at Red like he’d just scraped a plump white bug out from under his toenail with a pocketknife. He snorted, coughed up a thick ball of phlegm and stuck it in his bottom lip, saving it for later. He grinned. “Didn’t think you would be back. Thought you were smarter.”

Mucus bubbles swelled in Red’s nostrils and popped. “Hey,” Red croaked. “Hey. You guys listening? I can make you rich. Rich. Oh Jesus, I’ve got so much money stashed away, you have no idea. Please. Just listen to me. Please.”

Frank tried to tune out Red’s bleating and focus on the quiet gentlemen. Overpowering them was out of the question. They just stood there like goddamn Buddhist statues. Although these guys were about as Asian as John Wayne when he pretended to be Genghis Khan in that movie where he’d worn some kind of goofy wig and heavy goop over his eyes to make him look Oriental. Frank wondered if they were anywhere near where they made that movie, because it had been filmed a tad too close to a nuclear test site, and as it turned out, as the whole cast, the whole crew, everybody really, had grown themselves nasty, awful lively cases of cancer, just like Frank’s Mom, who in the end couldn’t do a whole hell of a lot more than bark sticky clots of blood out of her charbroiled lungs onto wadded balls of Kleenex as he helped her apply lipstick even as her wig slid off and— FUCKING CHRIST —

Frank bit the side of his tongue. Not too hard. Just enough to draw blood. Just enough to snap things back into focus. The fear had his mind on the run; it kept racing, looping, straying back into tangents, slipping back into his past. He shifted gears, skipping down through the spinning teeth in his mind, and tried to focus on the moment.

Acting like he thought they were on the move again, Frank took two steps forward and collided with the zookeeper. The fat man flinched, jerked away. The bucket hit the ground and toppled over. Blood and meat spilled out into the dust.

Frank stepped back and mumbled, “Sorry,” aware of the blood seeping into the dirt, watching the lion’s nostrils expand and contract.

The zookeeper shoved him, holding the flashlight against Frank’s throat. The metal tube came out of his belt and made a crackling sound as he held it up to Frank’s face. “Just what exactly is your fucking problem, retard?” he asked. “I’ll fry your brain like goddamn scrambled eggs.”

The lion roared again and slammed into the bars, eyes narrowing into slits, nostrils flaring.

* * * * *

A lone flatbed blocked the path. It looked like some kind of tank, at least thirty feet long and ten feet high. Narrow metal stairs had been secured to the side, rising from the ground and clinging to the side of the tank for about twenty feet before descending back to the ground.

The zookeeper stomped up the stairs; the rusty metal shuddered and groaned. He sidled along the catwalk, flinging the remaining blood in the bucket over the tank. After dropping the bucket next to him, he looked down at the men and said, “Awright then. Make ’em strip. I ain’t fetching any more clothes out this time. It ain’t good for ’em; fucks ’em up .” He shook his chins. “They puke out that shit for days.”