Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 105, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 640 & 641, March 1995

Prey Don’t Tell by Jere Hoar

Jere Hoar has worn many hats in his working life: editor, reporter, part-time lawyer, and teacher. The events of 1994 entitle him to wear one more: fiction writer. It was shortly after Mr. Hoar’s unpublished novel was named a finalist in the 1994 Hemingway First Novel Contest that he received the news that EQMM had accepted “Prey Don’t Tell.” We welcome the author, who hails from Oxford, Mississippi, to the ranks of EQMM firsts...

Charlie smells like musk perfume. He wears a green or maroon jacket with wide lapels, black pants with two-inch cuffs, black shoes with sponge soles, and an open-collar shirt that stands tall in back. The flat gold chain around his neck gets buried in gray hair that curls in the V of his collar. A college ring with a blue stone weights the third finger of his right hand. On the left hand is a band set with diamonds — not chips. He doesn’t need knucks. He doesn’t need a gun. Charlie is strong. “Just let some guy smart-mouth me,” he says. “Just let them!”

I’m a keeper at the zoo, Jack Leonard by name, Jack L. by nickname. Smart guys say it like “jackal.” I got a limp and I’m ugly. Now that Kally has left, I got Charlie for a friend. The lioness I’m in charge of don’t like me at all. Or if she does, she likes me the way she likes any cripple’ thing. She sees the hitch in my hip and says, Uh-huh! Just you wait, cripple man. Just you wait!

In Birmingham she clawed a keeper. They’d’ve put her down but she’s so pretty, we offered a trade. Got this fur on her neck like a lady’s cape. Got a walk about her, and a talk about her. When I throw her meat chunks she chuckle down deep. Thank you, cripple man, she say.

Some evenings after work when Charlie ain’t hurrying home to the good supper Kally cooked for him, or got a ball game to watch on his big TV, him and me sit outside the cat house and drink us some beer. “A twilight respite,” Charlie calls it.

Charlie explains things to me. His eyes hide deep in his face, like in caves, and sparkle out little and bright. Charlie’s maybe the smartest man I know, and the quickest. A man that crosses Charlie will have cause to wish he hadn’t.

Drinking on the grounds is against all rules, but we carry our beer in a paper sack to show the night guards some respect. They make a wide circle around Charlie. One that joked about seeing Charlie drink beer got fired for sleeping on duty and carelessness with a firearm. None of the rest of them want to see the grounds boss drink beer.

Charlie and me don’t call attention to ourselves. Just once we did. Charlie got the notion our oldest lion, Leo, needed some fresh meat. I took Leo on a chain to Monkey Island and let him look at them hanging in trees, screaming. I knew he wouldn’t cross the moat to get him one. He’s so old and spoiled he expects me to feed him.

When Leo came padding out of his cage, roaring loud enough to deafen a man, everything in the zoo screamed or barked or yowled or brayed. Leo showed his yellow snags and looked at Charlie. Charlie don’t like to be in the thin center of a lion’s eye. Leo made a little jump at him, but I got the chain and Leo ain’t gonna do nothing. He ain’t got it in him. But what does Charlie do? He runs.

I yell after Charlie, “Come back, Shane! Come back!”

Charlie comes back, draws himself up, and says, “Well, Jack L., I can retrieve my beer can, but I don’t think I can retrieve my dignity.”

I say, “How’d you move that fast, Charlie? I never saw a stout man run so fast.”

“Let it alone.”

I giggle.

“Okay, wise guy. What would you do if a lion came after you, and you didn’t have a weapon?”

“I’d order it to its cage.”

“Suppose that didn’t work.”

“I could run pretty fast if I had to.”

Charlie says patiently, “No you couldn’t. One of your legs is two inches shorter than the other.”

I showed Charlie and Leo my Reeboks. “These are magic shoes. I been practicing.”

“I can beat you in a fifty-meter dash, even with this.” Charlie pats the roll hanging over his belt.

“You named that thing?”

Charlie’s face gets hard like a rock. “Put that cat up. I’m going home and see what Kally fixed me for dinner.”

“Stay awhile, Charlie. I got another six-pack.”

“Get a life, why don’t you?”

That night I ate two peanut butter sandwiches with sour pickles while I watched a nature program about wolves. When there is not a nature program on TV, I watch my tapes. I’ve bought all the predator tapes. I got a life. There’s nothing better than living with predators, except maybe living with Kally.

“Jeez!” Charlie says the next time we meet for a drink. His lips tighten and he lifts his nose. “You smell like cat piss, man. You bathe in it?”

“No, I’m real careful, Charlie. I don’t want to get any on me. Cat piss must hop oh me from what cats have pissed on. It jumps like ticks do. That’s what I figure.”

“Where’d you acquire that idea?”

“I don’t know. I just thought it up.”

“Jeez! I don’t know why I put up with you. You’re nasty. You’re inhuman.”

“Kally didn’t think I was,” I say. My voice sounds whiny.

“Aw, kid, Kally felt sorry for you. You know how it is when you get some poor crippled dog out of the pound, and you want to feed it and make it normal?”

“Kally liked me. I know she did.”

“How could a woman stand a man that smells like cat piss?”

“You don’t have to talk to me like that, Charlie. It’s all right that you took Kally. I’m glad for her to live in your good house. I don’t have nothing like that for her.”

Charlie wipes the air with his hand and turns his face away.

“Here, have some beer. It’s imported, Charlie. I was working late and didn’t have time to wash like I should. I’ll sit downwind.”

Charlie reaches out a hand to feel the temperature of a bottle in the paper sack. Everything’s all right then, because this is the Bass Pale Ale Charlie likes. He slips one out of the sack, fumbles in his coat pocket, and asks, as always, “You got the key?”

“Charlie, does Kally ever — you know, ax you about me? How I’m doing and all?”

“Naw.” He gurgles the beer I’ve opened. “Kally don’t ax me nothing. Do not say ax ever again to me.”

“How is she?”

He shrugs.

“You used to brag on her. You used to tell me things she said.”

Charlie rubs his jaw. He hums “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” He gives me a sweet, sweet smile. “Will you shut up about Kally? Will you just shut up?”

“Charlie—” The whine that I don’t want in my voice has come. “Just one more thing. Does she ask about Duchess?”

“Naw.”

“That sounds wrong. Are you sure?”

“She doesn’t, I’m telling you.”

I shake my head.

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“I don’t know... Yeah, Charlie, I’m calling you a liar. You’re lying, Charlie. You’re lying.” I’ve doubled up my fists. I’m thinking about all the people I know who work big cats. We know cats better than people, and care about them every bit as much.

Charlie turns on the bench and pokes his red face toward mine. His yellowish eyes bulge. Every word sounds like a hammer tap. “She — ain’t — ever — coming — back. Get Kally out of your stupid head.”

“Why, Charlie, why?” I can’t seem to stop my whine.

Charlie’s words snap like whip cracks. “ ’Cause I kicked her narrow ass out. She’s gone. She got on the bus and left town. Took her brown suitcase and that hanging bag. We broke up. We split the blanket.”

“Oh.”

“So that’s that.”

“I guess.”

“No more Kally. I don’t have to listen to you carry on about Kally. Right?”

“I guess so.” Something hurt in my chest. My throat felt tight and dry. My eyes wanted to run. I didn’t have any taste for icy, imported beer. “—I guess that’s right.”

Charlie drank the six-pack of Bass alone.

For a while after I found out Kally was gone for good, nothing seemed to matter to me. I just went through the motions of being a keeper. Charlie tried to help. “Jeez!” he’d say. “Stand up straight. You look like your damn back is broke. What do you care about that whore?”

“Kally wasn’t a whore.”

“Sure she was. Didn’t I buy her off of you?”

“You never.”

“Sure I bought her.”

“She wouldn’t do that.” I was shaking my face back and forth, hard. My cheeks and nose were swaying on my face bones. “I want you to take that back.”

“Take it easy, kid. You’re right, in a manner of speaking. A man couldn’t buy her for twenty bucks, nor forty either.”

“Not a hundred! She worked, hard work, in the cat house taking care of tigers.”

Charlie smiled. “Okay, she worked in a cat house and wouldn’t lay down for a hundred. But she could be bought, Jack L. She went for the intangibles. Offer Kally intangibles and she’d open her legs.” His voice rose to falsetto. “She’d say, ‘Take me, take me.’ ”

“Bull! What’s intangibles?”

“Stuff you can’t even see. Good will... hot air. I gave her the words she wanted to hear... pictures made up out of air. I bought her for puffery. I said, ‘Come live with me, Kally. I can’t live without you.’ That’s what she wanted to hear. Coin of the realm with women.” Charlie slapped his leg and grinned like we were equals. “You told her you loved her. She told me you did.”

Charlie wiped his hand through the air like a bear slapping bees. “Ah, you dope. If a man wants to get in a woman’s pants the first thing he says is ‘I love you.’ Maybe he does love her while he’s in heat. Or maybe he thinks he’s in love because she’s all he thinks about at first.”

“You asked her to live with you,” I argued. “You must have felt something.”

“That’s the peanut you give a monkey to do its trick. See, if a guy my age wants a young woman regular, it’s what I have to pay. It’s what I buy her with. Now do you get it?”

“You mean you lied? I get it, Charlie. I get it real good.”

He wipes his hand through the air again, then brings it down and rubs his nose. “Did I ever lie to you? I lie to people who hold their hands out asking for it, begging for it. I lie to the ones who say ‘Give me the words I want to hear. I don’t care whether they are true or not.’ ”

“It was wrong. It was wrong to bait Kally off her job and then throw her away when you was done with her.”

Charlie sighs. “Nah, kid. It was right. That explains why I’m a supervisor and you shovel cat shit. I see the world as it is. You live in a dream world where the Blind Lady’s scales tilt in favor of the dummies. That makes you as stupid as Kally.”

What happened between Kally and Charlie I don’t know, and may never know, but something did. Something soured Charlie. After he told me she was gone he hated female things. We sat on the bench at the lion habitat more than before. He had time for it. But Charlie stared at the Duchess with squinty, mean eyes.

“The zoo ought to get shut of that cat. She’s a fugging menace,” Charlie says. “You can’t trust a female. Why do you come out here every night?”

“That beauty is very fussy. If I don’t take care of her she will starve down to a moth-eat rug. Somebody got to do what’s right for her.”

“You’re a natural fool,” Charlie says. “Leo, he’s steady and lazy. You can predict what a male will do. With Duchess you’ll find you’re a half-step slow.”

I drink my beer and grin and belch.

“She hates me,” he says bitterly.

“She loves me. Every time I go inside she takes the measure of my meatiest bones.”

“You can’t trust a bitch.” Charlie has drunk many beers. His voice catches. “They’ll step out on you.”

Across the moat, in the habitat, Duchess walks back and forth, back and forth. She yellow-eyes us like we’re impala on the Kalahari.

So I had to know what happened to Kally. I took a vacation day. While Charlie was working I went to his house.

It’s a white frame house in a middle-class neighborhood. Paint peels on it, and tall yellow grass stands in the yard. I went around back and looked in the kitchen window. Dirty dishes were piled on the table. Some stuff he’d thrown at the garbage can had missed it.

I popped the lock on the window with a short crowbar I’d carried inside my pants, along my upper thigh. Then I scrambled in.

The kitchen furniture was yellow Formica with rusty chrome legs. Leading off the kitchen was the den. It opened on a bedroom to the left and a bedroom to the right. Straight ahead was the living room. All the furniture was shiny oak. The couch was blue and puffy. The TV was a twenty-five-inch Motorola. The unmade bed in the big bedroom had controls like the power console on a car. I smelled the pillows. They didn’t smell like Kally. In a basket under the dresser in the bedroom was a six-month-old newspaper, seven ear swabs, and a cologne bottle with a label that said “Joop.” I opened it and lifted the stopper. The Saturday-night smell of it brought back Kally... her teasing and her playfulness and her smile. I pulled open the dresser drawer. The sight and smell made me close my eyes, weak in the knees. I picked up the boxes, the little brushes and lipsticks. I screwed the lipsticks in and out, thinking of them touching Kally’s mouth. I read the labels of liners and blushers and foundations and things like that.

And I knew.

However Kally left, she hadn’t expected to go. She would have taken her stuff. She always changed her face and clothes before going out in public. One minute she was a sweaty worker in a zoo you wouldn’t notice. Forty minutes later she was a jingly, sweet-smelling, short-skirted flirt who caused men to smile and turn their heads.

Kally was crazy about Charlie. She didn’t go away easy. He’d ’ave had to beat her up something fierce. And she was strong. So when she left, if she left, her face would have been cut by Charlie’s rings. She wouldn’t have wanted me to see her, or anyone to see her, for a long time. Maybe ever. She wouldn’t have looked like my princess.

So I had to get even with Charlie, me with my little brain.

What I did was get some of the tranquilizer the vet uses when we work on the teeth of a bear. I figured out the weight of a bear and Charlie’s weight, and doped his beer. We were sitting on the bench outside the cat house when I gave it to him. When he said, “You got a key?” I pretended the caps were tight on the bottles I opened. After he drank the second bottle, his chin fell to his chest.

I dragged him to the cat house, opened the door to the habitat, and dragged him toward the middle. After I cleaned up the drag marks I returned to Charlie, drank half a bottle of beer from my side of the carton, and poured the rest on Charlie’s face.

He wakes up sputtering. “Where are we?” Charlie says in a dopey voice.

“The lion habitat. Smell something funky? I turned out Duchess.”

Charlie sits up, propping his back with his hands. He looks two ways real fast. “You didn’t.”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Where is she?”

“To your left. Maybe you can see the flash of her eyes. They look green in reflected light. She don’t know what to do about us. She’s looking at us and looking away. No need to think about the entrance. It’s locked behind us.”

“Put her back in the cage.”

“This ain’t Leo.”

“Jeez, what are we going to do, Jack?”

“I don’t know about you. I’m going to run for the moat. There’s a gate there with a slide latch. I’m wearing my Reeboks.”

“You can’t outrun a lion, you damn fool! Nobody can.”

“I don’t have to outrun a lion. I just have to outrun you, Charlie.” I begin to laugh. “I just have to outrun dopey Charlie.”

“Bastard!” he screams.

I stand up. Before I can move, he is on me, shoving me to the ground. Gravel cuts my elbows. He’s stealing the advantage just like he stole everything I cared about. I grab his knees, but he kicks loose. I’m no match for Charlie’s weight and strength.

He stands over me, then melts into the dark.

Duchess is coming. She’s overcome doubt about what it means to have two humans in the lion habitat at night.

Charlie nears the moat. His form flickers across the beam of a streetlight. The moat is twenty feet deep and twenty feet wide with ten-foot fences close to each side.

Duchess’s pads swish toward me. She’s hungry... three days hungry. She smells the blood on my elbows.

If I look a little to one side at her in the dark, I can see her. Her eyes glow. Her yellow hide catches the light from the streetlamps and gives it back as a patch not quite black. The patch gets bigger. My snit thickens in my mouth. My breath whistles high in my nose. I lift my hands to ward her off. The odor of her hangs in the air. Then she passes me... is beyond me.

She has a genetic pattern to chase a thing that moves.

Then it happens. Maybe when he finds the escape gate is jammed... Maybe when he smells her. Maybe when he hears the swish of her pads. Maybe when she hits him. Charlie screams. The scream breaks off clean like the snap of an icicle.

I don’t need to see this scene on a TV screen.

When a cat is hungry she looks around at all the animals in the herd. Some stare back at her and say, You can’t catch me. The lion thinks, Which one can I catch? A baby thing, or one that limps, or one that runs — that’s what she can catch.

The first to run is the nervy animal that uses its energy fast.

When a lioness catches prey, she bats it down like a kid does a Ping-Pong ball. The front paws hug it like she loves it. She nuzzles its neck for a choke hold. Her bare feet fold up and rip down. Duchess’s dewclaws are like cotton-bale hooks. But after she breaks Charlie’s neck, Duchess doesn’t know what to do with him. She drags him around the habitat, coughing and moaning.

I get the cage key out of my pocket, slip out the attendants’ door, lock it, and pick up a fresh bottle of beer from my half of the carton. I drink half of it and pour the other half on my shirt. I reach up by the door and throw the emergency alarm switch that will ring in the headquarters building. The night watchman will see the light blink on the cat-house diagram on the map of the zoo and come running.

I limp into the dimly lit grounds yelling Help! I’m gonna sound drunk, but not too drunk, when I tell how Charlie wanted to play with Duchess like we did with Leo.

I’ll have to stop them from shooting her, of course. But I’m sure that when I open her cage and call she’ll come to the cripple man who brings the meat.