The Library at Mount Char Page 13

  She turned and looked into the other pit, the one with the male. The sound of their voices had disturbed his sleep. He was awake now, studying her with unblinking yellow eyes. She shivered and stepped in a little closer to Marcus. “He’s really big.”

  “I’m living large.” Marcus puffed his cigar and spread his arms wide, a gesture that took in the lion pit, the forty landscaped acres, the ten-foot concrete wall surrounding the grounds. Marcus—Little Z to the hip-hop cognoscenti—lived on a Connecticut estate that had once been the weekend getaway of a hedge-fund manager. He put his arm around Aliane’s shoulders and pulled her forward to look down at the male.

  “Hey, you want me to wake her up too?”

  “No!” Aliane said, a little too quickly. “No…I mean, that’s OK. Let it sleep.” The big lion put his head back down, closed his eyes. She snuggled in close, stifling a cigar-smoke sneeze.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.” But when she looked at the sleeping lion, some deep part of her stirred. Before she’d become a model she lived in a small village in Brazil, near the Pantanal. Jaguar attacks were not unheard-of. A boy in her fourth-grade class had been killed. Once she saw a farmer with his scalp hanging loose, his face drenched with blood. “Can they, you know, get out?”

  Marcus shook his head. “No way. That pit is fifteen feet deep. You can’t tell from up here, but the walls slope back towards the inside. So, like, there’s no way to get a grip or anything. Ain’t no way they’re climbing out of there.”

  “Oh. Well…good,” she said, trying to sound convinced. “Wow, baby. That’s really cool. Can we go back to the party?”

  “In a minute. Gotta feed them first.” He grinned. “You wanna go fishing?”

  “Fishing?”

  “Come with me.” He circled around the side of the pit to a trail that led deeper into the woods.

  “I don’t know, Marcus…it’s pretty dark.” She glanced back at the house. The party was in full swing. Marcus’s latest single—“Pimp Hand”—was blaring out over the stereo. “I’m out of wine.”

  “We’ll get you some more wine in a minute. Come on, you really want to see this. It’s the funniest thing ever.”

  The forest behind him was very dark, but his watch was a Patek Philippe. And he’s going to put me in a video. Maybe.

  “OK,” she said. “Fine.”

  II

  The big lion’s dream was the same every night. Golden grass brushed at his whiskers. The breeze carried the scent of wildebeest and zebra. The sun hung low on the horizon, and the shadows of the baobab trees lay long.

  Home.

  In Dresden’s dream his daughter was still very small. She paced him as he walked, moving in his shadow just as Dresden had done with his own father. He was teaching her the rudiments of their craft: the location of the drinking holes, the proper way to drift in from downwind of one’s prey, the words to show respect to the Forest God after a kill. It was a good memory, a good dream.

  But then it turned.

  Dresden froze in his tracks, one forepaw hanging just above the ground. He perked his ears up and leaned forward, straining to catch a scrap of sound carried by the breeze. Naga heard it too, deep and buzzy, a bit like a roar and a bit like the sound of angry bees except not at all like either one. It sounded like metal.

  It sounded like men.

  Wait, he said to Naga. Watch. She swished her tail, acknowledging the order. But Dresden was older than was common for a new father, and he had mostly forgotten what it was to be young and playful. He did not see the mischief in her eyes. He left her then, moving through the grasses, low and slow and silent. In the dream he was not afraid, not yet. But the part of him that was not dreaming ached to do something else, anything else, to take his cub and flee, to rip and tear, to shred those things that brought the sounds of men into his world. But of course he could do nothing. That was the way of this dream.

  Dresden rose up in the grass to stand at his full height. His eyes glinted in the twilight, twin bright points framed by the inky shadows of his mane. The gazelle they had been stalking caught sight of him and fled. He did not care. His attention was all on the buzzing sound and, a moment later, on the brown cloud of dust that accompanied it.

  Dresden watched them, uneasy. He knew of men, and he understood their guns well enough.

  Then unease turned to terror. Naga had not waited. Naga had not watched. Instead she approached the men with all the bravado of youth. As he watched, a man raised a gun to his shoulder and, with a puff and a crack, Naga fell. Dresden, roaring, charged across the veldt for the last time, not caring about the danger, wanting only to seize the prey that dared hurt his daughter, to rend and tear, to shred its life.

  Instead, mid-charge, he watched as the men raised the sticks to their shoulders, felt the sting of the needles in his back, his neck. Suddenly he could no longer stand.

  Dresden, dreaming, understood he would wake in a distant land, wake in a high-walled trap, slick beyond climbing, tall beyond jumping. There would be no escape. The rest of his life stretched out before him, worse than any nightmare. Worse, they would take Naga as well. He had failed his cub. That knowledge bore down on his heart like a stone.

  He and his cub would wake under strange stars, and all the days and nights of her life would be poisoned by the sounds and smells of men.

  —

  NOW, SEASONS LATER and an ocean away, Dresden jerked awake. He saw humans in the pit with him, three of them, very close.

  Dresden wondered if he might still be dreaming. He raised his head, sniffed the night air. It stank of smoke. The horizon glowed with unnatural light. Not far away, machines roared and clanked. This is real, then. He gathered his feet under him and stood, rumbling a little deep in his chest. His craft stirred in him for the first time in a very long while. If they came just a bit closer, he would spring. If not, then he would sidle up to them, pretending to be—

  “Good evening,” one of the three said. “Please pardon our intrusion. We mean no disrespect.” He spoke in the language of the hunt, spoke it perfectly, though perhaps with the tiniest hint of tiger accent. “Are you the one they call the Thorn of Dawn?”

  Dresden blinked. Thorn of Dawn was the name his father had given him. He thought he would never hear it again. Astonished, he swished his tail. Yes.

  “Good. I thought that it might be you. I am called Michael. I hunted for a time with the pride of the Red Wind.” He glanced around the pit. “It was there that I heard of your troubles.”

  For a moment, Dresden was speechless. The Red Wind lived a long run or so to the west of his home. They were fierce, and well respected. Hunted with them? A man? After a moment’s consideration he made the sound he might have made if he saw another lion in the distance: Who are you? What do you want?

  “That is a bit involved. Let me begin by saying that I am the adopted son of Ablakha, and apprentice to the tiger Nobununga. I bear Nobununga’s scent, and hunt at his side. This is my brother David, who is the slave of murder, and my sister Carolyn, also of the house of Ablakha. We come bearing news of Nobununga. May we approach?”

  Ablakha? Dresden knew the name. He was a heretic, an enemy of the Forest God. But Nobununga was a different matter. He was an ancient tiger, said to be the ruler of all the forests of the world. Dresden padded over to the man and sniffed him, just as he might have done when receiving a fellow lion. And, sure enough, the man did smell of tiger. Hmm.

  Dresden decided to err on the side of courtesy—if even half of what he heard about Nobununga was true, that would be the wisest course. He froze and allowed himself to be scented in turn. The man gave his mane a quick sniff and backed away. This was exactly the proper thing for a junior hunter to do in these circumstances.

  Dresden furrowed his brow. He had no love for men in general, and Ablakha was an enemy of God. But each night he spent under these strange stars, Dresden had prayed himself to sleep. He did not bemoan the fate that had fallen to him,
did not protest that his lifelong piety was rewarded in this way. He asked nothing for himself. He prayed only that his cub be given a chance at life beyond this cage. Each night Dresden begged God to grant him this one prayer, to accept his own life as forfeit. He could not think how this might possibly be related…but God had surprised him before.

  Dresden settled back on his haunches and lifted his forepaw, gave it a quick lick. This was a respectful gesture, if not quite a welcome.

  Despite himself, he was curious to hear what the man had to say.

  III

  “—and that motherfuckin’ lion dropped not five feet away from me, I kid you not,” Marcus was saying. “He was pissed. If my third shot hadn’t caught him just right…”

  “For real?” Aliane said.

  “For real.”

  The little patch of forest they were in was supposed to look wild. It pretty much did from a distance. Up close, not so much. Even if you discounted the little Christmas-tree lights marking the path, something about it said “landscaping.” The palms were too evenly spaced, or something. But wild or not, Marcus’s walled forest was plenty big. She could barely make out the sounds of the party.

  “Anyway, once the big lion was asleep, I just walked over and picked up the cub. She was little-bitty then. And then when I did that, I heard this roar and here comes momma running after me now.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Well, I put down the cub. But it was too late. Momma was a crafty bitch—she snuck in a lot closer than the daddy had been, and all our tranquilizer guns were empty. So one of the native guys, he pulls out a rifle and shoots her.”

  “Aww! You shot her? She was just trying to protect her baby.”

  “Yeah, we shot her! She was fixin’ to eat my ass. And lucky we did, too. She landed on one of them dudes we had toting our tents and tore his arm all up before she died. I heard later it had to get amputated.”

  Some of what Aliane felt must have shown on her face.

  “It’s OK. I gave him some money.” Marcus looked at her. “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said. Then, in hopes of changing the subject, “How long ago was this?”

  “Mmm…this was maybe a month after I got off tour, so I guess it must be coming up on a year now. Naga—she was the cub—has grown a lot. Back at the house I got a picture of me standing with my foot on her dad while I’m holding her. Now she’s pushing two hundred pounds, and she’s only half-grown.”

  “Damn. How big’s the daddy?”

  “Like, maybe four hundred pounds? It took four people to lift him. Twelve hours later we was all on a plane back to Connecticut.”

  “They let you bring lions in?”

  “I got a permit. This here’s a zoo.”

  Aliane looked around her and shivered. The weed was doing its thing, but not in a good way. The landscaped forest seemed very dark, very deep. She could hardly hear the party at all anymore. For some reason she thought of Mae, her mother, thought of their last fight. Aliane had come home from the city to visit, but she had not brought enough drugs. After two days she grew sick. She lost control of her bowels, became weak. She huddled on the mat where she had slept as a child, sweating, shaking. Mae brought her a bowl of feijoada, a glass of water, and a cool cloth, her face soft and compassionate in the light of the candle. She remembered the hurt on Mae’s face when she slapped the bowl out of her hands. She didn’t want food. Food was not what she needed. She left the next morning without saying good-bye, fled to São Paolo, to the lights and the nightclubs and the men who would give her things if she would do things for them. She didn’t mind. Anything was better than growing old in a simple shack on the edge of the Pantanal, wasting her life the way Mae had done. But here in the shadows Mae’s face came to her again.

  “Let’s go back,” Aliane said. “I’m, um, cold.”

  “In a minute. We’re almost there.”

  A few steps later the path ended in a small clearing. Marcus opened up a panel in what had looked like a tree. All of a sudden the clearing was flooded with light.

  “Whoa.” She blinked. “What’s that building?” It looked like a garden shed, except on stilts.

  “Chicken coop,” he said. “The zoo guy said to keep it way over here so they can’t smell the lions. It gets ’em all riled-up.”

  Just like the towels and the marble foyer, the door to the chicken coop had been stamped with Marcus’s initials, written in flowery Old English script. On a chicken coop? “Palhaço,” she said, louder than she intended.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” She gave him her best cover-girl smile.

  Marcus smiled back. “Here, take this.” He handed her a long bamboo pole with a length of thin rope tied to one end.

  “What’s this for?”

  “Told you,” he said. “We’re going fishing.” He grinned. “You’ll probably want to wait out here. It’s pretty smelly inside.” A moment later she heard a wild cacophony from inside the shed, five parts angry chicken noises and one part irritated rap star.

  “C’mere, you little shit!”

  Squawk, flutter, cackle.

  “Goddammit!”

  After a couple of minutes of this the door opened and Marcus emerged holding a wire cage containing two chickens. The birds’ wings flapped quite a bit, but they were reasonably calm, all things considered.

  “Gimme that,” he said.

  She handed over the bamboo rod. Marcus put it over his shoulder like a fishing pole. The cage in his other hand reminded her of a tackle box. He made a lasso out of the string on the end of the pole and slipped it around one chicken’s foot.

  All of a sudden it dawned on her what he was going to do. “Oh, Marcus, no…”

  He flashed her his album-cover grin, his gold grill shiny against his white skin. “Gangsta, baby. Come on.” He headed back the way they had come. She followed, then stopped. “Marcus?”

  “What?”

  “I thought I saw something move over there.”

  He squinted out into the night. “Probably a monkey,” he said. “We got a couple of monkeys in the trees. They won’t bother you. Come on.”

  Aliane walked behind him, feeling sick. It seemed to her that the chickens grew agitated as they approached the lion pit. Only a little, though. If it was me getting fed to that cat I’d be squawking my head off, she thought. They’re lucky they’re so dumb.

  A minute or so later they emerged in the small clearing. Marcus walked out onto the bridge between the two lion pits and dangled the chicken over the edge. He let out some slack in the line. The chicken flapped its wings, helpless. It squawked in terror.

  “Oh, Marcus, don’t do this….”

  “Just watch!” He snickered. “It’s hilarious.” He bounced the chicken at the end of the string. “C’mere, Dresden,” Marcus called. “C’mere, big guy! Suppertime.”

  “Baby, please, why don’t we go back to the—” She broke off. Marcus wasn’t smiling anymore. “Baby, what’s wrong?”

  “Dresden?” Marcus said. “C’mere, big guy.” He looked back and forth across the pit. Aliane followed his gaze. The pit was an oval shape, deep but not terribly big. It was about forty feet across at its widest point. There was grass on the bottom, some concrete boulders, a couple of sawed-off tree trunks that were supposed to look natural but didn’t. You could see every inch of the pit from where they were standing.

  “Where’s the lion?” she asked.

  Marcus just looked at her. His eyes were very wide. The chicken dangling at the end of its string squawked again, outraged. Marcus dropped the pole. The bird fell five feet or so. The loop came off its foot. With a bit of fluttering it freed itself, then stomped around, making outraged clucks.

  Nothing came to see what the fuss was about.

  “Marcus, where’s the lion?”

  “Shhhh,” Marcus said. He held one manicured finger up to his lips. His brow was knotted. He lifted up the back of his shirt and pulled out a pearl-handled 9mm a
utomatic.

  “Are you saying it got out?” she whispered. “How could it get out? You said there was no way—”

  “Shh!” Marcus’s face was strained. It was too dark to see much, but he could still listen. After a moment, Aliane listened with him.

  Crickets. The soft echoes of cars on the freeway. Up by the house, there was a big splash as someone fell into the pool. Laughter.

  Then, closer in—not far away at all, really—a branch cracked.

  “Marcus?” she said softly.

  He turned and looked at her. There was no need for him to speak. The look on his face said it all.

  The pit was empty.

  The pit was empty and something was moving out in the night.

  IV

  “Marcus, o que é que é?”

  “I don’t know,” said Marcus. He didn’t speak Portuguese but, really, there was only one thing she could be asking about. But he did know. A stick had cracked, close by, a big one. He jacked the slide back on his pistol, cocking it. In the distance, up at the house, a bunch of asshole freeloaders were laughing. By now the album was on to the third track, something called “Money Shot” that his A&R man liked quite a bit and, oh, something was moving out there in the night.

  “What do we do?”

  Marcus rocked his head in time with “Money Shot,” thinking. Then it came to him: “The Husbandry Room,” he said. The zoo guy had shown it to him. It was an underground room between the two lion pits, very solid, with poured concrete walls and metal doors. There was a slit in the wall with a metal slide in it for watching the lions, like the slit in the door of a jail cell. “We can get in there and…” What? Make a call? Hide out? It didn’t matter. He would be safe. “Come on.”

  “Yeah, fuck that,” Aliane said behind him. “I’m going back to the—” She stopped and gasped. “Marcus?”

  Something in her tone made him turn. Just in front of her, less than five feet away, stood the lion she had come to see. His muzzle wrinkled back over thick yellow fangs.