Foodchain (35 page)

Annie ran her hand across his prickly scalp. “What are you going to do?”

Frank was dimly aware of one of the mothers, standing silhouetted in the doorway, Annie in front of him, staring into his eyes, and the body of Petunia in the sheet. He stood and walked away.

Instead of climbing in the car, he passed the front grille and kept going. The gas station had closed for the night. Frank didn’t care. He walked up to the front door and kicked in the glass. He ducked under the metal push bar and grabbed the entire case of rum. When he came out, Annie was still watching him.

Frank put the box in the passenger seat, and for a moment, he wanted to say how sorry he was for everything, but instead, he finally just started the car, slammed the door, and drove into the darkness.

* * * * *

He saw the lights of the town pool a mile off. After parking in the driveway of an abandoned farmhouse, he walked the rest of the way. If things went bad, he didn’t want to come running out of the pool and have to jump in his car. It was too slow. He wanted to slip away in the dark and get back to the office quietly.             

Men stood in little knots on the front lawn, smoking, drinking. Rifles and shotguns lined the bike rack. No weapons were allowed in the pool. Chuck was charging ten bucks just to get inside. When he saw Frank, he visibly flinched. “Where you been, man? Sturm’s pissed as all hell. You better get inside and take care of it.” Chuck looked like the conflict might make him throw up. He changed tactics. “Say, what was that stuff you gave me? I was just wondering. The other day,” he added and said nothing else.

“Yeah.”

“I was just curious, you know, what it was called.”

“You need some more?”

“Well, yeah, now that you mention it…but I was…. you know, I was just wondering what you called it.” Chuck snapped his fingers and pointed at a big guy in a leather duster that had been trying to slip past him. “Ten bucks—you, Mr. Universe there—ten bucks, pal.” The big guy reluctantly gave up the cash, then hurried on inside. “So. What’s it called again? I wanted to look it up,” Chuck asked, taking a wad of cash the size of a softball out of his front pants pocket and tucking the money into a leather saddle bag under his stool.

“I call it, ‘Frank’s Surprise.’”

“Oh yeah?” Chuck looked disappointed.

“I’ll have some for you tonight. Same amount, same price. Tomorrow morning at the latest,” Frank said and that seemed to cheer Chuck up a little.

* * * * *

The first few notes of the national anthem lurched out of the loudspeakers, and everyone took that as the signal for the fight and started inside. Frank let the current carry him into the cinderblock walls. He swept past the front office, the entrance to the changing rooms and toilets, and the shower, until it threw him against the shallow end.

To the left, Chuck and Pine had done a good job sealing off the deep end. Chicken wire, reinforced every four feet with a stout pole anchored in a five-gallon bucket of cement, stretched across the shallow end. Men climbed down the three-foot ladders and lined up along the fence, wanting to see the fight up close and personal. Black, brittle leaves were scattered across the dull white paint like dead scales against a fish’s white belly. Most of the men lined up along the edges of the deep end.

A stainless steel box, at least six feet long and four feet high, hung on the edge between the low and high diving boards from a series of ropes and pulleys. The box was nearly solid, with only a single row of holes the size of quarters along the top; it was tilted at such a steep angle that the line of holes pointed up at the high board. A separate rope led to a catch on the gate.

Fourteen feet below, the bottom was covered with six inches of murky water, choked with algae. And even that water was disappearing fast. When Frank, Sturm, and Girdler had visited, the water was around two feet deep. Next week there would be nothing but algae, spread thin and dying under that relentless sun. Week after that, dust.

Someone threw a bottle into the deep end. It shattered and Frank saw the previously hidden Komodo Dragon tear away from the corner up near the shallow end and zigzag across the thin pool of water, moving faster than Princess and Lady going after a sheep. It circled around in the corner under the high board and sank back into the water.

Sturm hit the record as he burst out of the doorway of the front office, sending the needle skipping and tearing across the vinyl.

The guy was looking up at the speakers and joking with his buddies and had no idea Sturm was about to come down like a hammer striking the primer of a shell. Sturm went in low and jerked the guy’s boots out from under him with his left hand while grabbing hold of the guy’s belt with his right and pushing down. All the guy really felt was his legs get yanked from under him and the gritted surface of the pool deck smash into his face, shattering the cartilage in his nose, cracking the bone above the eyes, and breaking his upper two front teeth.

Sturm was so mad he jerked one of his pistols out and shot the guy’s hand. “Throw another fucking bottle!” he hollered, letting everyone around the pool hear him loud and clear. He clicked the hammer back in the sudden quiet and aimed at the back of the guy’s head. “What’s that? What?” Sturm tilted his head.

The guy whimpered something.

“You’re sorry? You fucking ought to be.” Sturm eased the hammer up and put the pistol back in its holster. He stepped up to the edge, let his voice bounce around the hollow concrete. “Anybody else feel like interfering with this fight? This establishment has rules, and anybody thinks these rules don’t apply to him, then he’d best be thinking hard about this decision. In fact, he best be thinking about it so hard he leaves. Right fucking now.”

Frank trailed Sturm at a distance as men crowded the edge, climbed up on the roof of the front office, hung off the two lifeguard towers. The clowns sat along the high board, the best seats in the house, except for the shallow board, which was reserved for Sturm and Theo only. Frank slowed, watching faces, clothes, gestures.

And there was Mr. Noe, still in his white suit, one leg hooked around the ladder bars by the deep end’s lifeguard tower, taking pictures with a cheap, disposable camera.

Frank wished he hadn’t left the shotgun in the car.

* * * * *

Sturm climbed up on the low diving board and everyone cheered. He let the applause build, then nodded to Jack. Frank figured he must have missed all the speeches, because Sturm wasn’t wasting any time. Jack swiftly pulled the gate up, releasing the tiger. It came out backwards, clawing at the smooth metal of the box in a blur of white fur. But it couldn’t catch hold, and slid along the wall all the way down, splashing into the water, turning the white coat quite green.

The Komodo watched the tiger for a moment, tongue sliding greasily in and out as it tasted the air, and turned back to clawing at the wall. The tiger scampered out of the water and coiled itself at the edge of the shallow end, near the chicken wire. After that, the two animals refused to look at each other.

Frank didn’t want Sturm to see him, so he kept his head down and worked his way around behind Sturm. Men shouted, screamed at the tiger and the Komodo Dragon, but neither animal moved much. Frank overheard someone say, “I’ve seen better fights at my son’s school, and he’s in fucking third grade.”

Frank eased his way around the diving boards, avoiding Jack and Pine, who were lowering the tiger box and dragging it back away from the edge. Billy was right there, saying, “Maybe it’s still cold. Shit, I dunno.”

“Thought you said it was mean,” Pine said.

“Oh it is, you betcha. But this, this I dunno,” Billy said.

Frank hung back, near the fence, and rounded the corner. Mr. Noe was still taking pictures. Frank slid between men until he was directly behind the white suit. He let his eyes flicker up to Sturm, who was busy stomping back and forth on the low diving board. Frank knew Sturm was looking for him, wondering how in the hell to get these two animals to fight. Frank didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was hunched over in front of him, clicking away at the bottom of the pool.

It was easy. He waited until Mr. Noe leaned out one more time to take a picture, peeled Mr. Noe’s hand off the ladder handle and simply pushed at the same time. Gently. In the small of the back. Mr. Noe’s center of gravity shifted unexpectedly, and almost in slow motion, before he realized that he was too far out, before his balance had a chance to sound the alarm bell, he slowly toppled over and fell.

He shrieked, an anxious, desperate bleat. Frank wished he had seen the man’s eyes when he had finally realized that he was about to fall into the empty pool, but Frank was already slipping backwards through the cluster of men.

Mr. Noe, for some reason, held onto the camera the whole way down. He landed on his shoulder in the water and the flash went off. The impact cranked his head sideways and forward; if he’d hit a slightly different angle, if his head had gone backwards instead of crushing his chin into his chest, and the fall would have snapped his neck instantly. But Mr. Noe wasn’t that lucky. His ribs collapsed into his collarbone and his pelvis settled over his face, leaving his bony legs jutting limply into space, like trees that had snapped in half in a high wind. They flopped back and forth, eventually slapping against the edge of the wall, not five feet from the Komodo Dragon.

Frank caught Sturm staring at him.

The men laughed, cheered. Everyone had simply assumed that Mr. Noe had leaned out too far, and lost his balance, but Sturm knew better. Frank met those ice-cold eyes for a moment, and shrugged. Sturm nodded imperceptibly, telling Frank that they would be speaking later.

The tiger’s ears swiveled and froze as they locked onto Mr. Noe, and it collected itself, lowering the front shoulders and tensing its rear haunches.

The Dragon’s tongue shot out, retracted.

Mr. Noe struggled to lift his head out of the water with his good shoulder, the left one, since the right shoulder and upper arm had been broken in the fall, just enough to grab a breath. He pushed himself around and managed to wriggle over to the edge of the water. He still hadn’t seen the Dragon yet, and this brought him even closer, to within a yard of the giant lizard.

“When’s the last time that lizard of yours ate anything substantial?” Sturm asked.

“Last week,” Billy asked. “Fed it a pig for a show down in San Jose.”

But no one else moved. No one wanted to be seen as interfering in a fight.

The Komodo, making no sudden movements, moving almost lazily, clamped half-inch teeth on Mr. Noe’s upper arm, puncturing the triceps and biceps like wood screws through jello, and jerked him sideways.

Mr. Noe’s shriek echoed around the bare cement walls and into the sky. His right arm splashed uselessly in the water as the Komodo Dragon dragged him deeper in the water. It sank its claws into his chest and pulled at the left arm. Mr. Noe’s scream came out in bubbles as the teeth shredded the muscles from his upper arm down to his wrist, like ripping off a wet sock. It bit down harder and pulled, taking the middle finger as it tore the flesh away.

The tiger crept forward.

The dragon went after Mr. Noe’s armpit. His legs scissored frantically, like a fly whose wings had been pulled off. The Komodo held him down and kept tearing at the soft flesh under his arm. Bloody swatches of the white suit floated in the algae. After a while, the legs stopped moving.

The tiger finally settled down and just watched the Dragon eat.

Frank wished it had lasted longer.

* * * * *

After the Komodo Dragon had gorged itself on Mr. Noe, there wasn’t much left. A few scraps of ragged muscle and bone left in a trail, with a few larger chunks inside pelvis and the skull, but not even enough to bury him in a child’s coffin. The Komodo Dragon was an especially efficient killer and scavenger, and broke off chunks of bones and joints and swallowed them without any trouble at all. It kept Mr. Noe’s ribcage and backbone with it as it skittered along back to its corner, ignoring the white tiger. When it had become obvious that nothing else was going to happen, the men had drifted away on their own.

Sturm watched the Komodo Dragon and Siberian white tiger for a while. The tiger had moved in and taken the pelvis and leg. Most of it was mostly just bone and ligaments; the Komodo had focused primarily on the other leg. But there was some tissue left, stubbornly clinging to the bone down near Mr. Noe’s toes, and the tiger happily settled into place and gnawed on the bones.

* * * * *

“Where were you?” Sturm demanded. Except for Sturm and the clowns, the pool was empty. Billy and Theo waited near the pool entrance.

Frank had stayed. Sturm had seen him, and Frank didn’t see the point in hiding; he knew he wouldn’t make it out the valley without one of the clowns or even Theo tracking him down and shooting him in the back. Frank stood. “I was tending to a wounded animal.”

“And what animal was that?”

“Petunia. The Glouck’s dog.”

“The Glouck’s dog.”

“Yeah. She’d been wounded. I thought it was my job to take care of wounded animals. After all, I am the vet in this town.”

“Let’s go for a ride,” Sturm said.

* * * * *

They went out to Sturm’s pickup and Theo handed his father a blanket. Sturm wrapped it around his shoulders, and climbed up into the pickup bed. He settled into a La-Z-boy and gestured for Frank to climb up and sit on the wheel well. Jack followed Frank and Theo slammed the tailgate. Theo hopped in the front, started the engine, and drove slowly through town.