Jeff Jacobson - Foodchain

So Frank wondered if his dreams were trying to tell him something when he woke up under his cot. Maybe it was just from sleeping this close to so many animals. He got dressed and checked on the animals. Most of them were now awake and hungry. They didn’t make a sound, just watched him warily.

Out back, behind the barn, was a freezer. Sturm had stocked it with fifty pounds of frozen lamb shanks, five-pound bricks wrapped in butcher paper and stamped with a red date. Most of the meat was over fourteen years old. Frank set out six packages, setting them on top of the freezer to thaw in the morning sun.

True enough, Frank found the fridge in the examining room stuffed full of beer, except for the bottom shelf. That was full of food. Bacon. Eggs. A roasted chicken, wrapped in aluminum foil. The freezer contained a selection of frozen food, mostly TV dinners. Frank cooked a couple of TV dinners and zapped up some coffee using an old microwave, and then took a long, ridiculously hot shower. He came out of it feeling better then he had in days.

Clothing had been left on a neat pile on the stacks of dog food. It fit fine, although Frank had to poke a new hole in the belt so he could cinch the jeans tight. He wore a long sleeve gray cowboy shirt, Wrangler jeans, and black White workboots. The clothes calmed him; he felt ready. Confident.

* * * * *

Sturm drove in around ten and waited for Frank to come out to the pickup. “Called an old friend last night,” he said through the window, bottom lip full of snuff. “How’re the girls?” He spit.

Frank shrugged. “Pissed.”

Sturm laughed, cowboy hat bobbing like a cork in boiling water. “Think they’ll be healthy enough for a hunt?”

“Depends on when you want to hunt ’em.”

“You tell me.”

Frank shrugged again. “Hard to say. They been starved for so long, don’t know if the muscles’ll come back. I mean, no point in hunting crippled animals. Maybe a couple of months, just to see.”

“Wish I had a couple of months, son. Tell you what. You got a week, maybe a week and a half at the most,” Sturm said, tipped his cowboy hat, and took off in a cloud of dust, orange in the morning sun.

* * * * *

Frank spent the first few days taking care of the animals and reading everything about them he could find at night in the tiny office just off the operating room that was chock full of veterinary textbooks. Mornings, he mixed antibiotics, vitamins, and deworming pills into the food. For the next few days, he found fist-sized clumps of what looked like sluggish spaghetti in the animals’ watery diarrhea. After the animals had eaten, he’d drag a long hose through the middle section, aim the nozzle through the chain link cages and wash their shit across the concrete into a waiting gutter. After three days, he was pleased to see that the stool was fairly solid. Most of the blood in the urine seemed to disappear as well.

After washing the cages, he’d push raw hamburger through the chain link, but he never opened the doors. He was careful to never look directly into the cats’ eyes. Once in a while, feeding the cats made him feel uncomfortably like the zookeeper, and he’d have to back off for a while and grab a beer. Unlike the zookeeper, though, the cats, after a few days, would lick his palms, their tongues feeling like soft, wet sandpaper. The books told him their tongues were covered in tiny rasps that helped the cats lick meat off bones. He always kept his hands flat; despite the seemingly affectionate licking, he knew they’d chew off his fingers in a heartbeat. He had to resist the urge to name them.

In the meantime, he nailed up chicken wire in the barn, building a large cage for the monkeys. Their constant screeching and howling were getting on his nerves at night. He thought about pouring tranquilizer over their food and let them sleep for a few days. In the textbooks, he discovered they were spider monkeys.

The clowns brought over the rhino. Frank walked it carefully down the chute; it moved slowly, mechanically. Frank filled the largest stall with straw and hoped the rhino would like it, or at least feel comfortable enough to lie down. But once inside, the great beast just stood there, immobile and emotionless, like a lobotomized bull. Frank dumped an entire bale of alfalfa into the stall and couldn’t have been more pleased when the rhino slowly lowered its head and started munching the green hay.

DAY THIRTEEN

As Frank lay on the narrow vinyl couch in the tiny office late at night, reading about the kidney functions of large cats, a severe, insistent buzzer vibrated throughout the hospital. He snapped the book shut and sat up. His first reaction was that the clowns were here, but they always just barged in through the back door. Curious, he made his way up to the front desk. There was a dark shadow behind the curtains in the front windows.

It was Annie. In the harsh orange glow of the bare bulb above the front door, she looked scared; her eyes were red and swollen. Behind her were two of her brothers, faces dark with fresh bruises and scrapes. Both grasped the handles of two wheelbarrows. The first wheelbarrow held Petunia. The dog lay on her side in a nest of old towels, breathing heavy, almost growling in and out; her front paws were held away from the body, stiff and covered with what looked like melted chocolate. The second wheelbarrow had been filled with knotted, twisted chunks of pine firewood. “I need your help,” Annie said.

Frank didn’t think twice. “Bring her in.”

They wheeled the dog right into the waiting room, and both brothers carried her suspended in one of the towels back into the operating room. Frank switched on the overhead light and got a closer look. Petunia’s front paws were charred black, seeping plasma. “What happened?”

Annie’s little hands curled into fists. “These two cunts trapped her under the porch, knocked her sideways, and then went after her with a lighter and a can of hairspray.”

“Fuckin’ thing shouldn’ta eaten my—” The brother didn’t get a chance to finish. Faster than Frank could follow, Annie’s arm shot out, whistling past her brother’s head. He flinched, too late. Something bloody hit the examining table with a faint slap. Frank realized it was the brother’s left earlobe as Annie neatly wiped the blade of her straight razor on the old towels.

The brother clapped his hand to the side of his head and looked like he wanted to say something as a thin trickle of blood meandered down his neck.

“Go ahead,” Annie taunted. “Spit it out. Swear at me. Please. Next time it’ll be your fucking nose.”

He kept quiet. The second brother hung back, looking the monkeys, at the door, the green tiles on the floor, anywhere but at his sister.

Annie turned back to Frank. “Please help her.”

Frank chewed on the inside of his cheek, wondering if any of the books in the back room talked about treating burns. He didn’t want to appear clueless to Annie, so he said, “She’s gonna need…rest, some antibiotics, and she’s gonna have to stay off these front paws, give ’em a chance to heal.” He met Annie’s eyes. “She’ll have to stay here. Maybe in a cage. She can’t walk on these. We’ll have to keep her quiet.”

Annie nodded. “You do whatever you have to.” Her bottom lip quivered and a fat tear squeezed itself out of her right eye and rolled down her cheek. “Please, just help her.”

Frank had the two brothers hold the dog down as he slipped a padded plastic cup over the dog’s muzzle. A circular rubber tube was attached to the cup; this was connected to a hose that ran to the wall. Frank had been reading about the halothane and isoflurane, anesthetic that was inhaled, instead of injected, since he hadn’t wanted to get close enough to the cats to slip a needle full of Acepromazine into their veins unless they were unconscious. He made a few quick calculations in his head, adjusted the vaporizer output on the wall, and fervently hoped the concentration wouldn’t kill Petunia.