“After we knock it out we’re going to throw it in the back of the truck,” Tommy told me. “And then we’ll drive over to Randy’s. He’s going to keep the tiger in his basement to scare the shit out of people.”
Tommy grabbed the bolt cutter and I followed. I was scared, but mostly what I was thinking about was how we’d get paid some good cash for this and how it would be great to slap a stack of bills down in front of my father and how that stack of bills might prompt my father to finally say he was proud of me.
We walked over to the cage and Tommy was right, the tiger didn’t look good. The fur on its chest was rubbed raw and one of its eyes was glassed over with a cataract. His breath kept catching in its throat. The tiger brought its head up to the bars of the cage and I scratched him behind his ears.
“Quit dicking around,” Tommy said. “Do it already.”
I reached in the cage and pinched the back of the tiger’s neck and he slumped over. Tommy opened the lock and we hauled the tiger to the truck.
“When we meet Randy, you need to be cool, okay?” Tommy told me as we drove. “Don’t be your normal dumbass self.”
I hadn’t planned to say a word when we got to Randy’s house, because who hadn’t heard a story about a stolen tiger deal going sour and someone getting shot up? In my neighborhood you heard these kinds of stories all the time. I knew to keep my mouth shut.
We pulled into the driveway and Randy came running out of his house. It was pretty cold outside to be shirtless and barefoot, but it didn’t look like it was bothering Randy all that much.
“Where’s my guy?” he yelled to Tommy. “Where’s my guy?’
The tiger was still out cold, his tongue lolling around. I could see where muscles had formerly filled his body, where his fur lay slack.
Randy ran his hand over the bare spots on the tiger’s fur, then he slid his fingers up the tiger’s neck. He shifted his fingers around a couple of times. Then he did it again. He shook his head.
“This tiger you brought me doesn’t have a goddamn pulse,” he said.
Tommy put his fingers on the tiger’s neck, shifted them around.
“It was alive when we stole it,” he said. “It must have died on the way here.”
“You brought me a dead tiger,” Randy said as he walked back toward his house. “When you bring me a live tiger, you get your meth.”
Tommy hadn’t said anything to me about us stealing the tiger in trade for drugs. I wondered if maybe Randy was mistaken, that maybe Randy had misunderstood Tommy when they’d struck their deal.
“Don’t worry,” Tommy told me. “I’ll get this straightened out.”
Tommy followed Randy inside. While I waited, I looked at the tiger. I felt bad about what we’d put it through, what everyone had put it through, that its last moments of life were bumping around in the back of a pickup instead of chasing down a water buffalo on the savannah. A minute or two later, Tommy walked out of the house, smiling.
“I don’t know about you,” he said, holding up a dime bag, “but I’m sick of everything being stupid and boring.”
Tommy shook some of the meth onto his knuckle and snorted. He held out the baggie to me. I also hated how boring and stupid our lives were now. More than that though, I hated how sometimes life threw you a curveball — how you thought you were going to make some money selling a stolen tiger to make your dad proud, but then all the sudden there were drugs instead of money and then you were probably going to relapse mostly because you didn’t want to disappoint your best friend who had recently drawn a very funny cartoon about an octopus on your ass cheeks that would not come off your body no matter how hard you scrubbed.
“Before we go on this bender,” I told Tommy, “before this all happens, we need to bury the tiger.”
“No problem,” he said.
We drove back to my house and I snuck inside the garage and grabbed two shovels. Once when I was high I’d stolen my father’s old riding lawn mower. I pushed it out of the garage and started it up when I was a block away so he didn’t wake up. I drove the mower down the street, right up to the door of the pawnshop and sold it for eighty bucks. My father had bought another lawn mower recently and I ran my hand over it as I walked by, thinking how the new one was probably worth way more.
Tommy and I had decided to bury the tiger by the river. We’d dig a hole and then maybe one of us would say some kind words. After that, after our shoulders ached from digging, we’d get high and drive to the bars downtown. We’d planned all this out already, but when I got back to the truck, I saw Tommy hoovering a line off the hood. The bag was already half gone.
Tommy threw his hair out of his eyes and looked at me. “You’re judging me, aren’t you? I can feel your judgey-ass eyes all over me.”
“I’m not judging you,” I said. “I just want to get this tiger in the ground before you get too paranoid to dig.”
“You’re not going to even get high,” Tommy said, pressing his index finger into my chest. “You’ll puss out. When it comes to it, you’ll start rubbing on your six-month coin and then you’ll run to a goddamn meeting and everyone there will say you saved yourself when you ran away from me.”
I slapped Tommy’s finger away from my chest, but he grabbed onto my forearm. I twisted it away, but then Tommy dropped down and hooked my leg. As we wrestled, I tried to slide my arm around to the back of Tommy’s neck to knock him out, but he smacked my hand away. He shoved me down on the front lawn and tried to jump on top of me, but I stuck my foot out and kicked him square in the gut. Tommy reeled back against the truck and stood there for a second catching his breath. As he stood there, a large paw rose up from the payload and slashed across his jacket. Tommy fell forward and I watched as the tiger leapt from the truck and onto Tommy’s back. Tommy started screaming and I ran toward him and smacked the tiger in the ribs with the shovel. The tiger was stunned for a second and he rolled off Tommy. But then he charged at me. I dropped the shovel and ran, but he snagged my pant leg with his paws. I kicked at his face, but then he got a hold of my other leg. The tiger began to reel me toward his mouth.
“Knock him out!” I yelled to Tommy, “Knock him out!” But Tommy was gone, running down the block, not looking back.
The tiger pulled me closer, clawing its way up my body. I thought I was done for, but then the motion lights on my front porch kicked on and the entire yard lit up and then there was my father striding toward me, holding up his compound bow, and then ffffffftttt, one into the tiger’s chest, and then ffffffftttt, one splitting the tiger’s forehead, and then fffffffftttt, one last arrow into my thigh, deep, deep inside there, so I would never forget.
SOMEDAY ALL OF THIS WILL PROBABLY BE YOURS
My boyfriend, Atomic, is speed dating.
A bell rings, he moves on to another woman.
It’s a Mexican restaurant and I’m stuck outside. I press my face against the window and see Atomic sitting in a high-backed chair across from a blonde woman sipping a margarita. He’s already beautiful, but we took twenty-five bucks and got him a haircut, just in case. We went over to Men’s Wearhouse and shoplifted a shirt and a tie. He took out his nose ring and slid it into my ear.
“It’s an investment,” he told me before he walked inside. “This night is an investment in us.”
The bell rings again and Atomic slides over to another table, gives a big smile to a mousy-looking brunette.
“Should I call myself William?” he asked me. “Or is Willem sexier?”
I stand out in the cold. My name is still my name. I still look how I look. I still love Atomic the most of anyone I’ve ever loved.