Jeff Jacobson - Foodchain

Frank had seen enough. He’d seen more than enough. He doubted that all the rum in Jamaica would erase the image. He tried not to run back to house, acutely aware that if Theo knew he’d been seen, he’d probably kill whoever was watching him. When Frank got back to the garden, he forced himself to stop for a moment, collect himself, slow his heart, watch his breathing. He went back up on the deck, got himself a beer, and told Sturm he couldn’t find Theo.

DAY SEVENTEEN

Frank dosed half a pound of ground lamb with Acepromazine and fed it to two more cats and the tiger early in the morning. They loaded the first of the lionesses and hauled her back to the ranch.

This time, it was Fairfax’s turn. He’d managed to squeeze back into his new clothes. By now, everyone knew his boots hurt like hell. Pine stationed himself by the horse trailer, while Chuck was a good twenty yards away at the pickup, and they had some fun calling him back and forth, asking Fairfax to watch the lioness for a moment, then calling him back over to the pickup to ask him what kind of caliber he thought was the best. Fairfax never did figure it out. He just thought they were being nice to him because it was his turn, and so he just kept hobbling around.

Like before, Frank and Pine opened the gate and swung it back around while everyone else waited with their rifles back by the pickups. No one was ready. Everybody expected the lioness to simply sit there, like with Theo. But with a streak of tan fur, the lioness erupted from the trailer and was simply gone, as if the cat was bending the light somehow, slipping through the morning sunlight in a hazy mirage.

It leaped over the barbed wire fence and was halfway to the house before Fairfax had even gotten his eye through a scope. As soon as he caught a glimpse of the animal, he fired, jerking repeatedly on the trigger of the semi-auto like he was scratching a nasty itch. But it was like trying to shoot a bumblebee out of your yard with a slingshot.

Bullets exploded into the back of Sturm’s house, spiraling through wood siding, concrete, glass. Sturm shouted into the gunfire, but Fairfax either wouldn’t stop or couldn’t hear. Finally, Chuck and Sturm jerked up their rifles and fired. The lioness went down in the garden. The gunfire died.

“I got it! I got it!” Fairfax screamed.

“You didn’t shoot shit, dickhead,” Pine said. “Fuck, it’d be halfway to Idaho by now if it was up to you.”

“What the hell is the matter with you?” Sturm ripped the rifle out of Fairfax’s pudgy hands. “You. Stupid. Goddamn. Asshole. You’re paying for all that damage, so help me God.”

Fairfax stood stock still, mouth open, realization sinking in like concrete in his veins. He licked his lips a few times, but nothing came out.

Sturm glared at him. “You fucking stupid, or do you just not give a shit?”

“I…I…oh good Lord.”

The men tried to hold it in, but snorts of laughter escaped anyway, sounding like they were trying to suck snot from somewhere up near their brain. Sturm growled through his teeth, whirled, and flung the rifle as far as he could into the field. Frank figured Fairfax was lucky Sturm didn’t just shoot him. Without another word, Sturm climbed into the Jeep. Theo started it up and everyone followed it back to the house.

* * * * *

They found Sturm on his knees in the dog pen, a little enclosure wrapped in chicken wire, set off in the back of the yard. Frank hadn’t realized that Sturm even had a dog until he saw Sturm cradling the black lab’s head. Frank immediately saw how a bullet had torn through the dog’s guts lengthwise. Bluish gray intestines had spilled out in a wash of blood on the concrete. The dog was still alive, breathing in low, keening sounds.

Sturm stood up, pinching at the bridge of his nose. He yanked his rifle out of the Jeep, shoved it up into Fairfax’s chest, eyes searing holes in the lawyer’s skull like a kid burning ants with a magnifying glass. “This is your doing. Now you finish the job, you sonofabitch.”

Fairfax’s fingers clasped the rifle against his will, but he knew better than to protest. He looked like he wanted to throw up. He stumbled over to the dog pen, put the barrel against the dog’s head, just in front of the soft ear, closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger. Afterwards, he couldn’t move, just stood there with his head down, shoulders hitching once in a while. Bob Bronson went inside and pretended he didn’t know him.

Sturm hurled a shovel at the pen as hard as he could. It hit the chicken wire behind Fairfax with a clang and he flinched. “You show my dog some respect and bury her deep out in the corner of the yard, over by the corn. Deep! You hear me, you fucking dumbshit? It best be deep, by God, or so help me, I’ll shoot you myself.” He turned back to the men. They were silent, subdued, respectful.

Sturm said, “Let’s go hunt us a tiger.”

* * * * *

When they got back to the vet hospital, the tiger looked like it was still unconscious. Still, nobody was in a rush to jump into the stall and find out. Instead, Chuck and Pine produced an oil barrel filled with ice and a beer bottles in the back of Chuck’s truck. Frank gladly accepted a beer. It was ice cold and tasted almost sweet. A few minutes later, a few bottles of Jack Daniels got passed around. Frank filled his flask and passed the bottle on.

When the tiger hadn’t moved in over twenty minutes, they picked it up by its paws. Nobody knew if it was male or female, nobody’d gotten brave enough to look close. They carried all six hundred pounds of cat out to the horse trailer.

Sturm had given Bronson the honor of hunting the tiger. But this time, he wanted to make sure that it was more of a real hunt and less like shooting fish in a barrel. So this time they went farther out, out in the foothills at the edge of Sturm’s property, to a dry creek bed cut from the hill by winter storms. Over the last hundred years, the creek had wandered back and forth with impunity across the five miles of level valley floor. Where they had parked the trailer, the creek was nearly twenty yards across, filled with dead creek grass, brittle and draped close over rocks as if the grass remembered when water ran over the gravel underbelly of the creek. Now, in the brutal summer heat, the gravel was covered in a chalky white crust, burnt in the sun.

Farther up, the creek’s banks rose sharply into loose, sandy soil, shrinking to only a fifteen-foot width. Pine backed the trailer up to where the creek narrowed, tires crunching on the white rocks.

Inside the trailer, the tiger didn’t make a sound. Frank got scared that the Ace had done something permanent, and once Pine turned off the engine, he got out and peered through the slats. But the tiger was awake, and watching him back. It growled low, then suddenly sprang, snarling and ripping at the chicken wire.

Everyone except Fairfax, who was back at the house burying the dog, gathered at the back of the trailer. Sturm took a stick and drew a map in a sandy stretch; it looked like a long, S-shaped crude drawing of the esophagus, stomach, and large intestine.

Sturm told Bronson, “We’ll drop you at this end here, up a ways, where the creek widens out.” He jabbed at what would have been the stomach in the drawing with his stick. “That’s where you wait. Then Pine and Frank’ll release the tiger and send it your way. We’ll be spread out up along the edge on top, just in case, but hell, in that narrow stretch, the bank’s at least fifteen, twenty feet high. That tiger, he’ll stick to the shadows in the ravine. He’ll end up right in your lap. You just be ready, right?”

Bronson slapped the butt of his rifle and grinned. “Shit. That tiger won’t know what hit it. Hope you’re hungry boys. That abalone was damn fine, but we got tiger on the menu tonight.” He licked his teeth. “And if it’s a male, then by God, I’m gonna eat the penis. Fella in Chinatown claims it’ll turn you into a goddamn sex machine.”