Wilderness, Page 4

  He was silent.

  "Okay," she said. "Please be careful with him."

  And for the first time ever, that was that.

  #

  XIV.

  "Where we going, papa?"

  "Pete, we're going to work," Ebur said, shifting down to keep the truck from fishtailing off the mountainside in the black ice.

  "Did a horse get loose?"

  "No. Not that work."

  "Other work?"

  "Yes."

  "The one momma doesn't like?"

  "Yes."

  "Oh boy. This will be just delightful."

  He looked over at his son, eyebrow cocked.

  "Delightful means something we like. Full of the like."

  "Ah," he said. "Did you learn that from your mom?"

  "Aunt Ali."

  He bit his lip and focused on the road.

  "Are people dead?"

  "Do you know what that is?"

  "Somebody doesn't have them in it anymore."

  That was one way of putting it. "Does that scare you?"

  Peter said. "Happens to everybody like getting born or growing up."

  He didn't object that some kids didn't get to grow up because they died, kids like Peter put in situations like Ebur's, but the kid's point struck true anyways. "Yes. Yes it does. But we don't want it to happen to you too soon so we need to keep you back, okay? You stay behind me."

  "Okay papa."

  "And you run if I tell you to run. You do what I say."

  "You got it papa, just like with the horses."

  "Just like with the horses, that's right."

  "Cause otherwise the horses might buck me off."

  He nodded.

  "Who we after?"

  "Ms. Kallie."

  "The Cat Lady?"

  "The Cat Lady, yes."

 

  "She did something bad?"

  "I think so, Pete. I think so."

  "How so?"

  "She's got a day that can fit a lot of things into it and the problem I'm trying to solve needs someone that can be there at just about any time of the day. And she has big things that crush people and animal claws. And she carries around a scalpel that--"

  "What's a scalpel?"

  "The sort of knife the doctors used when they cut out your tonsils."

  "Okay. Does she carry ice cream too?"

  "No. She uses it for bad things. Cutting things that don't need cutting. That's why you need to do what I say, in case she's dangerous."

  "Ms. Kallie would never hurt me."

  "Maybe not," he said. "But just in case."

  "Just in case."

  "Good boy."

 

  Ali called.

  He threw the phone to his son. "Answer that, would you Pete?"

  Peter used his little thumb to slide the thing and answer the call.

  "Press the speaker button with the little waves coming out."

  "--Ello? Hello?"

  "Alison."

  "Ebur. Am I on speaker?"

  "Here with Peter."

  "Hi Pete!"

  "Hello Aunt Alison."

  "Can we talk privately, Ebur?"

  "No. I'm driving."

  "You really need a headset."

  "I don't plan on turning my phone into a Walkman."

  "Fine. From the looks of things here, he was suffocated."

  Peter cocked his head, curious, but he was polite and did not speak.

  Ebur sat waiting.

  "Do you know anything that would do that? Cover a mouth like that?"

  Ebur said, "I have an idea."

  "Where are you headed? It's time we start sharing."

  "Turpentine Creek."

  "You think Kallie did this?"

  "Yes," he said.

  "Oh no, no, no, Ebur, see now--"

  "Then don't come," he said.

  Peter looked anxious.

  "I'll finish up here first. Then I'll call the barracks to get the interns out of bed."

  "Okay," he said.

  "You're taking Peter?"

  "I'm taking Peter."

  "Please don't."

  "What happened to your spirit of adventure?"

  She was silent. Then she said, "Please, Ebur, it's bad enough. This has been too many, too quick. I can barely process it all and it's my job."

 

  "I can," he said. "And one of my other jobs is being a dad."

  "Not every man has to grow up to face these kinds of things."

  Ebur didn't say what he wanted to say to that. He just said instead, "They should so others don't have to. The best thing a man can do is die that others might live. Dying well's the best thing I can show the boy."

  "Oh Ebur."

  "Goodnight, Alison. I'll see you soon or I won't."

  "Goodbye," Peter said. He pressed the end button. "I didn't hang up on her did I?"

  He had. "No you didn't," Ebur said. "All good. Gird up your loins," he said, quoting his father's sermon on Job to the boy.

  "What's that?"

  "Gird like a girdle."

  "What's that?"

  "Means put a cup on like in baseball."

  "Oh. Like armor," Peter said.

  "Yes," Ebur said. "Chainmail."

  Peter buckled his seatbelt.

  "Good," he said, his heart hammering. And he hammered the gas too.

  #

  XIV.

  The truck struggled to get up the ice on the giant hill that lead to Turpentine Creek, but the truck made it. The snow was coming down hard now, coating a once green hillside in its mollifying blanket, its own smothering act. He rolled down both windows due to the fog, cranked the heat, tossed his coat over onto Peter, and started eyeing the perimeter of the fences as they circled around. Most of the animals were sleeping and almost all of the cabins were dark, but once in awhile, on the side of the cages, his headlights would catch some barbarous red in the retina of a hiding beast. There were more than savage baboons and snakes. There were mostly lions and mostly tigers and mostly bears. He wanted to finish establishing a perimeter to see if she had hidden anything before going straight to Kallie's cabin and questioning her and having whatever showdown he would have.

  He didn't have to wait long. At the far end of the campus, down where the hillside dipped, he saw a form.

  "Is that Ms. Kallie?"

  "If it is, she's not going to look pretty."

  "Is she dead?"

  "That or she's hiding from something very, very badly." He pulled it so that lights went right over her, got out, and walked up to her.

  Peter stayed behind him and peeked out every so often to get a good look.

  "Grab my flashlight out of the glove box, will you?"

  She'd been mangled like the others, brutally murdered, her hand was clinging to the fence, her face looking distant. Ebur looked at the wires of the fence, followed the angle of her arm and noticed both it and the one beyond it -- the actual cage that held the cats -- had been severed to create an opening. Snipped. More than snipped with the great wire cutters you'd see on spy films. Rent in twain. As if someone had used the jaws of life to unleash the jaws of death. There she lay, pointing at it clear as day, lying in the tall grass. An option opened up to him that he had not considered. That it was not a man he hunted, but rather that which hunted man. He looked closer in the fallen snow and saw paw prints like where melons had dropped, mingling the crimson and muddied white.

  A roar sounded behind him. A roar that, when not obscured by a cellphone speaker and the sight of clattered cans, seemed unmistakable. His drums. He'd wanted drums. He turned to face them.

  There, in the tall grass, stood Pajah. He'd encountered Pajah before when he'd taken Peter to learn from Kallie, Pajah who seemed to have taken a liking to his son, Pajah who had been beaten with an aluminum bat so that on the right side, the canines had been broken, the top one
down to the jawbone. He remembered she could not eat normal prey. So turned loose without raw chicken from the interns, she would not hunt a rabbit or a deer. She would be left with no choice but to hunt for men and the sons of men.

  She roared again. And the others began to carol, crying as they would into caves in the wild, echoing the chorus of the hunt and waking the whole campus. Normally they did it only at feeding time. And he realized, as he saw his son frozen in terror at the roar, that this too counted as normally.

  "Peter," he said without moving. "You see the way that tailgate's busted over?"

  Peter shook out a nod.

  "I want you to move slowly towards the bed of the truck, climb under that and tuck yourself as tight as you can."

  "Closer to the tiger?"

  "Yes, son, closer. And don't make eye contact with Pajah."

  "Good Pajah," said a disbelieving little voice.

  Ebur clapped and fanned out to the right, standing his ground. He knew if either of them ran, they'd be dead. She'd told them to put up one hell of a fight if it attacked. To never turn your back and run because they'd go into predator mode. The truck was still running, though, and that might not include trucks. He didn't know. He couldn't know how fast the cat could run, but certainly faster than him, thinking as he fanned and clapped, further from the truck, further now, Pajah eyeing them both, Peter walking towards her without eyeing her, head high, good boy, strong boy, climbing now over the bent and mangled metal caused by Thomas' car. And he climbed up and over without the cat reacting and as he started to climb into the lip, the cat lunged out of the grass and began clawing at the metal to get at the kid.

  Peter then screamed.

  Ebur shouted and sprinted towards the door. And the great tiger watched him, got down and scrambled ever at him like a train derailed. Ebur was in and the truck was in gear and gunning it up the slippery slope, pushed sideways as the meat of the thing ran into it. He saw it running in the snow behind him and then it was gone.

  He got momentum in the low part of the hill and kept circling the perimeter and gunned up the side to climb the top and heard nothing but the engine and the wind in the grass, his arm out the window, listening as he climbed higher. Near the top, Pajah came again out of the grass and lunged as if to come through the window, a claw through his arm, her mangled teeth -- the teeth that had wrapped around the mouth of Ingrid, the teeth that had crushed the spine of Jerome, the claws that had slit the throat of Thomas, the teeth that had eaten Brady -- sinking into his shoulder. He hollered hard. He pulled out his pistol and aimed it at the cat's head as they crested the hill, the thing latched onto him like a leech, hanging on without a thing to hold it, not wanting to let go for fear of getting run over by that manmade machine. And he saw himself in the cat and set down the gun. Instead of jerking or crying out, he gave into the pain and he looked at it in the eye and said, loud, low, firm: "Let go. You go on and let go now."

  And Pajah, she let go.

 

  She ran alongside the truck for a time, switched sides, still sprinting hard, still chasing, almost as if she were unsure herself why she'd turned loose the prey she chased, the challenge to her territory. And he saw a wall of men ahead, a wall of young men and young women armed with tranquilizer guns and Ali at the front of them, pistol raised, Mark by her side with his gun unholstered. Well he drove right at them and not the interns. Mark got off a shot before Ebur was in his way. The man was swearing, Ebur fishtailed so that he blocked the man and the woman that wanted to be his wife, wanted to render his wife irrelevant. The tranquilizers went into the cat and the snow and the blood and the shouting slowed.

  #

  XV.

  "Why did you cut those cages?" he was asking Ali.

  "What do you mean?"

  "They were cut like the SUVs you use the jaws of life on."

  "I wanted us to be able to work a case again."

 

  "A case? A case?! You killed half of poker night!"

  "That dumb cat killed them."

  "Manslaughter."

  "I was thinking more lost kitty than renegade killer."

  "It's a tiger, Alison, not a calico."

  "I know. I'm so sorry." The look of dread there again.

  "Why didn't you just tell me?"

  "Because when it started killing, then I was in trouble and I wanted to hunt with you but I couldn't be with you if you found my fingerprints on Pandora's box, now could I?"

  He shook his head. "You know you're going to jail for this, Ali. There will be none of that now."

  "I can't believe you brought Peter out here."

  "How was I supposed to know you let a monster loose?"

  She looked at him. She looked hard. "I was trying to keep another on a leash."

  He shook his head. "Use it on yourself next time and save us all the trouble and the grief."

  The interns, some of them anyways, were staring.

  Mark opened his mouth to talk.

  Ebur said, "See you Sunday, Mark." And he went over to the one ambulance in Eureka to get his shoulder patched up before he lost his arm. And he wondered if back during all of the old walkabouts -- did they ever let men as old and tired as him face the tiger alone? And if so, did those fathers feel like this when they returned bloody? Full of faithfulness and goodness? Full of gentleness and wilderness?

  Also by Lancelot:

  Writing Rules, Revised

  The Blimps of Venus

  When Timbers Start

  The Encounter Stories

  A.R.C.

  Wombrovers

  Carry Cannons By Our Sides

  Photonovels:

  Cold Brewed

  The Joplin Undercurrent

  Stay in touch at https://lanceschaubert.org/ and shoot me your best email so I can send you more of my best work.