The Tiger Rising (7 page)

Beauchamp hit the brakes.

“We’re almost there,” he said. “You got to close your eyes so it’s a surprise.”

Rob closed his eyes and the jeep went forward slowly. “Don’t cheat now,” Beauchamp said. “Keep them eyes closed.”

“Yes, sir,” Rob said.

“All right,” Beauchamp said finally. “Go on and open them up.”

He had pulled the jeep up as close to the tiger cage as possible without driving right into it. “Tell me what you see,” he crowed. “Tell me what is before your very eyes.”

“A tiger,” said Rob. He let his mouth drop open. He tried to look excited and amazed.

“Damn straight,” said Beauchamp. “King of the jungle. And he’s all mine.”

“Wow,” said Rob. “You own him?”

“That’s right,” said Beauchamp. “Fellow I know owed me some money. Paid me with a tiger. That’s the way real men do business. In tigers. He come complete with the cage.” The toothpick in the side of his mouth danced up and down; Beauchamp put a finger up to steady it into silence.

“What are you going to do with him?” Rob asked.

“I’m studying my options. I figure I could set him up out front of the Kentucky Star, have him draw me some more business into the motel.”

The tiger stood and stared at Beauchamp. Beauchamp looked away from him. He tapped his thick fingers on the steering wheel.

“I also might just kill him,” Beauchamp said, “and skin him and make me a tiger coat. I ain’t made up my mind. He’s a lot of work, I’ll tell you that. He needs meat twice a day. That’s where you come in. I need you to come out here and feed him. Two bucks every time you do it. How’s that sound?”

Rob swallowed hard. “How do I get the meat in the cage?” he asked.

Beauchamp dug in his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. “With these,” he said. He shook the keys and they gave a sad jingle. “Don’t pay no attention to the big keys. They’re for the locks on the door. Open them up and that tiger will get out and eat you for sure. You understand? I ought not to give you this whole set, but I know you won’t open up that door. Right? You ain’t no fool, right?”

Rob, terrified that keys to the cage existed and that they were about to be handed to him, nodded.

“See this tiny key?” Beauchamp said.

Rob nodded again.

“That’s for the food door, right there.” Beauchamp pointed at a small door at the bottom of the cage. “You just open that up and toss the meat in a piece at a time. Like this.”

Beauchamp swung himself out of the jeep with a grunt. He reached in the back seat for the grocery bag, took out a piece of meat, bent over and unlocked the tiny door, opened it, and threw the meat in. The tiger leaped forward, and Beauchamp took a quick step backward, stumbling.

“That’s all there is to it,” he said, straightening up. His forehead was shiny with sweat, and his hands were trembling.

“What’s the tiger’s name?” Rob asked.

“Name?” said Beauchamp. “He ain’t got a name. You got to name something before you toss it a piece of meat?”

Rob shrugged and blushed. He bent over to scratch his legs so that he wouldn’t have to look at Beauchamp’s sweaty, angry face.

“You want to get introduced proper?” said Beauchamp in a mocking voice. “Well then, get on out of the jeep.”

Rob climbed down.

Beauchamp grabbed hold of the fence and shook it. The tiger looked up from his meat. His muzzle was red with blood; he stared at Beauchamp with a fierce look in his eyes that was familiar to Rob.

“Hey!” Beauchamp shouted. “You see this boy here?” He pointed at Rob. “He’s your meal ticket. Not me. It’s this boy. He’s got the keys now. Understand? I don’t got them no more. This boy’s got them. He’s your boy.”

The tiger stared at Beauchamp a minute more, and then he slowly lowered his head and started back to work on the meat.

“Now you two know each other,” said Beauchamp. He pulled a tattered bandanna from his pocket and wiped the sweat off his forehead.

On the hair-raising ride back to the Kentucky Star, Rob realized who the tiger’s stare reminded him of. It was Sistine. He knew that when he told her he had the keys to the cage, her eyes would glow with the same fierce light. He knew that she would insist that now they had to let the tiger go.

The last thing Beauchamp said to him was, “Don’t forget, now, this is our business deal. It don’t concern nobody else. You take that bag of meat and hide it somewhere, and I’ll bring you more meat tomorrow. In the meantime, you keep your mouth shut.”

At three o’clock, the school bus pulled up, belching and gasping and sighing. Norton and Billy Threemonger started pelting Rob with date palms before the bus even came to a complete stop. The bus door opened and Sistine came running toward him, dodging the dates, looking as serious as a soldier on a battlefield.

“Let’s go see the tiger,” she shouted to him.

Rob was dismayed to see that she was still wearing his shirt and jeans.

“Where’s your dress?” he blurted.

“In here,” she said. She held up the same grocery bag he had given her the night before. “I changed as soon as I got out of the house. My mother doesn’t know. I found a book in the library today and read about big cats. Do you know that panthers live in the woods here? We could set the tiger free, and he could live with them. Come on,” she said. She started to run.

Rob ran, too. But the keys to the cage felt heavy in his pocket, and they bumped up against his leg and slowed him down so that Sistine beat him there. When he arrived, she was standing pressed up against the fence, her fingers wrapped in the chainlink.

“Tigers are an endangered species, you know,” she said. “It’s up to us to save him.”

“Watch out he don’t attack you,” Rob said.

“He won’t. Tigers only attack people if they’re desperately hungry.”

“Well, this one ain’t hungry.”

“How do you know?” Sistine asked, turning around and looking at him.

“Well,” said Rob, “he ain’t skinny, is he? He don’t look starved.”

Sistine stared at him hard.

And Rob opened his mouth and let the word fall out. “
Keys,
” he said. Every secret, magic word he had ever known —
tiger
and
cancer
and
Caroline
— every word in his suitcase seemed to fall right out of him when he stood before Sistine.

“What?” she said.

“Keys,” he said again. He cleared his throat. “I got the keys to the cage.”

“How?”

“Beauchamp,” he told her. “He hired me to feed his tiger. And he gave me the keys.”

“All right!” said Sistine. “Now all we have to do is open the locks and let him go.”

“No,” said Rob.

“Are you crazy?” she asked him.

“It ain’t safe. It ain’t safe for him. My friend Willie May, she had a bird and let it go, and it just got ate up.”

“You’re not making sense,” she told him. “This is a tiger. A tiger, not a bird. And I don’t know who Willie May is, and I don’t care. You can’t stop me from letting this tiger go. I’ll do it without the keys. I’ll saw the locks off myself.”

“Don’t,” said Rob.

“Don’t,” she mocked back. And then she spun around and grabbed hold of the cage and shook it the same way Beauchamp had earlier that day.

“I hate this place,” she said. “I can’t wait for my dad to come and get me. When he gets here, I’m going to make him come out here and set this tiger free. That’s the first thing we’ll do.” She shook the cage harder. “I’ll get you out of here,” she said to the pacing tiger. “I promise.” She rattled the cage as if she were the one who was locked up. The tiger paced back and forth without stopping.

“Don’t,” said Rob.

But she didn’t stop. She shook the cage and beat her head against the chainlink, and then he heard her gasp. He was afraid that maybe she was choking. He went and stood next to her. And he saw that she was crying.
Crying.
Sistine.

He stood beside her, terrified and amazed. When his mother was alive — when he still cried about things — she had been the one who comforted him. She would cup her hand around the back of his neck and say to him, “You go on and cry. I got you. I got good hold of you.”

Before Rob could think whether it was right or whether it was wrong, he reached out and put his palm on Sistine’s neck. He could feel her pulse, beating in time with the tiger’s pacing. He whispered to her the same words his mother had whispered to him. “I got you,” he told her. “I got good hold of you.”

Sistine cried and cried. She cried as if she would never stop. And she did not tell him to take his hand away.

By the time they started walking back to the Kentucky Star, it was dusk. Sistine was not crying, but she wasn’t talking, either, not even about letting the tiger go.

“I have to call my mother,” she said to him in a tired voice when they got to the motel.

“I’ll go with you,” said Rob.

She didn’t tell him not to, so he walked with her across the parking lot. They were almost to the laundry room when Willie May materialized out of the purple darkness. She was leaning up against her car, smoking a cigarette.

“Boo,” she said to Rob.

“Hey,” he told her back.

“Somebody following you,” she said, jerking her head at Sistine.

“This is Sistine,” Rob told her. And then he turned to Sistine and said, “This is Willie May, the one I was telling you about, the one who had the bird and let it go.”

“So what?” said Sistine.

“So nothing,” said Willie May. Her glasses winked in the light from the falling Kentucky Star. “So I had me a bird.”

“Why are you hanging around in the parking lot trying to scare people?” Sistine asked, her voice hard and mean.

“I ain’t trying to scare people,” said Willie May.

“Willie May works here,” said Rob.

“That’s right,” said Willie May. She reached into the front pocket of her dress and pulled out a package of Eight Ball gum. “You know what?” she said to Sistine. “I know you. You ain’t got to introduce yourself to me. You angry. You got all the anger in the world inside you. I know angry when I meet it. Been angry most of my life.”

“I’m not angry,” Sistine snapped.

“All right,” said Willie May. She opened the package of Eight Ball. “You an angry liar, then. Here you go.” She held out a stick of gum to Sistine.

Sistine stared for a long minute at Willie May, and Willie May stared back. The last light of dusk disappeared, and the darkness moved in. Rob held his breath. He wanted desperately for the two of them to like each other. When Sistine finally reached out and took the gum from Willie May, he let his breath go in a quiet
whooosh
.

Willie May nodded at Sistine, and then she extended the pack to Rob. He took a piece and put it in his pocket for later.

Willie May lit another cigarette and laughed. “Ain’t that just like God,” she said, “throwing the two of you together?” She shook her head. “This boy full of sorrow, keeping it down low in his legs. And you,” — she pointed her cigarette at Sistine — “you all full of anger, got it snapping out of you like lightning. You some pair, that’s the truth.” She put her arms over her head and stretched and then straightened up and stepped away from the car.

Sistine stared at Willie May, with her mouth open. “How tall are you?” she asked.

“Six feet two,” said Willie May. “And I got to get on home. But first, I got some advice for you. I already gave this boy some advice. You ready for yours?”

Sistine nodded, her mouth still open.

“This is it: Ain’t nobody going to come and rescue you,” said Willie May. She opened the car door and sat down behind the wheel. “You got to rescue yourself. You understand what I mean?”

Sistine stared at Willie May. She said nothing.

Willie May cranked the engine. Rob and Sistine watched her drive away.

“I think she’s a prophetess,” said Sistine.

“A what?” Rob said.

“A prophetess,” said Sistine. “They’re painted all over the Sistine ceiling. They’re women who God speaks through.”

“Oh,” said Rob, “a prophetess.” He turned the word over in his mouth. “Prophetess,” he said again. He nodded. That sounded right. If God was going to talk through somebody, it made sense to Rob that he would pick Willie May.