Escape Clause

3

They caged the tigers separately in the bottom of the old barn, in what had once been cow stalls. Since a chain-link fence had been enough to keep the tigers separated from any number of chubby, delicious-looking Minnesota Zoo visitors, they’d wrapped the stalls with more chain link. The cage doors, made from chain-link fence gates, were locked with steel snap shackles.

There’d been no electric power in the barn, the ancient wires gnawed through by rodents, so they’d bought two long orange cables, which they plugged in at the house and then laid across the barnyard into the lower level.

Inside, the Simonian brothers had rigged up three work lights from Sears, hung from the rafters, and screwed in hundred-watt bulbs. The work lights were plugged into a power strip at the end of one of the orange cables. The light was bright, harsh, and threw knife-edged shadows over the interior of the barn.

There were no windows.

Against one wall, they’d installed a makeshift table made of a four-by-eight sheet of plywood, sitting on aluminum sawhorses and covered with plastic sheeting. Five waist-high meat dryers were plugged into the second orange cable. Four plastic tubs would hold discarded guts and unneeded tiger organs. A hose, also strung over from the house, would wash everything down.

Though the barn had not housed cattle for decades, there was still an earthy odor about it, not entirely unpleasant, which took Hamlet Simonian back to happier days on his grandmother’s farm in Armenia. Happier at a safe distance, anyway.

–

They’d wheeled the inert tigers into the barn and into the two separate cages on the dollies, then rolled them off the dollies onto the floor. The male tiger was tough to move, even though they only had to move him a foot or so off the dolly. His formidable muscles were slack as bedsheets and simply hard to get hold of, and the cage was small enough that they couldn’t work standing up.

When they finally got it done, they locked the cages, locked the outer door, and went and hid. Neither tiger was yet stirring. They’d give it until the next day before they returned to the farm, in case somebody had been watching and got curious about all the activity in the middle of the night.

–

They met again at the farm the next morning to start work.

“Shoot the fuckin’ tiger, Ham,” said Winston Peck VI. Peck popped a Xanax. “Do it.”

Peck was a tall, round-shouldered man, brown hair now touched with gray. He had a tight brown Teddy Roosevelt mustache and wore gold-rimmed glasses with round lenses. He looked like a college athlete going to seed in middle age: he was thirty pounds too heavy.

“I dunno, man,” Hamlet Simonian said. He was bulb-nosed, with dark hair, what was left of it, and sweating hard. He had a Remington.308 in one hand. The night before, they’d used a tranquilizer gun, shooting darts, to take the cats out of the zoo. “Now it seems kinda… terrible. A terrible thing to do.”

“You knew what was going to happen,” Peck said. “You knew the plan.”

“I didn’t know I was going to be the shooter. I thought Hayk…”

The two tigers looked through the bars of their separate cages with a kind of quiet rapaciousness. They were beautiful animals, gold and white with ripples of black, and orange eyes. They were hungry, since it hadn’t seemed to Peck that there was any point in feeding them.

If the snap shackles on the doors were suddenly undone, Simonian had no doubt what would happen: they’d get eaten. Forget about the gun, forget about running, those tigers would eat his South Caucasian ass like a hungry trucker choking down a ham sandwich. A Ham Simonian sandwich.

“Ham, shoot the fuckin’ tiger.”

“Why don’t you do it, man? I don’t think I got the guts,” Simonian said. “Maybe we ought to wait for Hayk. He’d do it.” Hayk was Hamlet’s older brother by ten months, and he was much larger, stronger, and meaner than Hamlet.

“Because I don’t know how to do it,” Peck said. He was getting seriously impatient. Killing the tiger wasn’t the only thing he had to do this day. He was a busy man. “I’ve never shot a gun in my life. And we need to get started. Now.”

That wasn’t strictly true-he’d shot rifles on several occasions, and a shotgun, in the company of his father, but he wasn’t sure of his skills, and mostly didn’t want to be the one to shoot the tiger.

“Ah, shit.” Simonian edged up to the male tiger’s cage. He was by far the larger of the two, though that wouldn’t matter much if either one of them got out. The smaller female, Katya, weighed nearly four hundred pounds and to the nervous Simonian, it seemed like twenty pounds of that was teeth and claws. Getting taken down by Katya would be like getting attacked by a four-hundred-pound chainsaw.

And forget about it with Artur, the muscular male. He was six hundred and forty pounds of furry hunger. He could take your head off with one swipe of his well-armed paw, and then squish it like a grape between his three-inch canine teeth.

“Shoot-the-fuckin’-tiger,” Peck said.

Simonian lifted the gun and looked down the iron sights at Artur, who stared calmly back at him, unafraid, even though something about his eyes suggested that he knew what was coming. Drips of sweat rolled into Hamlet’s eyes and he took the gun down and wiped the sweat away with his shirtsleeve, then brought the gun back up and aimed right between the tiger’s eyes, five feet away, and yanked the trigger.

The gun went off and to Simonian’s surprise, the tiger dropped to the floor, stone-cold dead. Katya, the female, screamed and launched herself at the cage’s chain-link fence, which ballooned out toward Simonian, who scrambled away from the maddened cat. The muzzle blast inside the barn basement had been ferocious, and Simonian could hear his ears ringing; it was a moment before he became aware that Peck was running around the barn shouting, “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!”

“What? What?”

“You shot me, you asshole,” Peck said. He was holding his hand flat on his head, and when he took it away, there was a splash of blood in his palm. His baseball cap, which had been given to him by a crew member of the movie The Revenant, lay on the floor. Peck told people it was a gift from Leonardo DiCaprio himself, though he was lying about that.

“Let me look, let me look,” Simonian said. Behind him, Katya threw herself at the cage again, a rattling impact that bent the chain-link fence.

“Hurts, hurts, hurts,” Peck cried, still wandering in circles.

Simonian nervously watched the agitated cat as he and Peck moved to one of the work lights, and Peck tilted his head down. Through his thinning hair, Simonian could see a knife-like cut that was bleeding, but seemed superficial. “It’s not bad,” he reported. “Must have been a ricochet, a little scrap of metal or something. You could press some toilet paper against it and the bleeding would stop.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. It looks like a paper cut,” Simonian said. “It’s nothing.”

“Hurts like a motherfucker. I’m lucky I’m not dead,” Peck said. “I’m going to go find some toilet paper. You drag the cat out of there.”

“Drag the cat? Man, he weighs six hundred pounds or something…”

“Use the dolly. I didn’t expect you to throw it over your shoulder, dumbass,” Peck said. “I’m gonna go get some toilet paper. I’m bleeding like a sieve here.”

“Okay.”

“Speaking of dumbasses, where is your dumbass brother? He was supposed to be here an hour ago.”

“He had to get a knife, a special knife for removing the skin,” Simonian said. He dropped the rifle, which hit the floor with a noisy clank, and Peck flinched away. Simonian picked it up and said, “No bullet in the thing.” He tapped the bolt.

“No bullet in the thing,” Peck repeated, shaking his head. “You’re a real fuckin’ gunman, you know that, dumbass?”

“If I’m such a dumbass, how come I shoot the tiger and it drops dead? One shot?” Simonian asked.

“Blind luck,” Peck said. He added, “I gotta get some toilet paper.” He picked his hat up off the floor, looked at it, said, “You shot a hole in it. This was my best hat and it’s ruined. I’m amazed that you didn’t shoot me between the eyes.” He tramped off toward the door and out onto the slice of green lawn that Simonian could see from where he was standing. A second later, Peck stepped back and said, “I’m sorry about that dumbass thing. I’m a little tense, you know? That was a good shot. I’m proud of you, Hamlet. I mean, except for the part where the shrapnel hit me. You’re sure the tiger’s dead?”

“He better be,” Simonian said, “or Hayk gonna get one big surprise when he tries to skin that bad boy.”

“Yeah,” said Peck. “I’m going to get toilet paper.”

He disappeared into the sunshine, headed for his truck, where he kept a first aid kit. He wasn’t really sorry about calling Simonian a dumbass, because Simonian was a dumbass. He had to pretend, though, because he still needed the brothers. For a while, anyway. That was simple good management.

Back in the barn, Hamlet Simonian turned back to the cages, where Katya was making desperate purring sounds at her mate, as though trying to rouse him from a deep sleep.

She knew he was dead, Simonian thought. He could see it in her eyes when she turned to look at him.

Another thought occurred to him: he should shoot her now. He shouldn’t wait, despite Peck. If he didn’t shoot her now, something bad would happen. Like, really bad.

He thought about it, then started rolling a dolly over to the dead tiger’s cage. He didn’t have the guts to shoot another tiger, at least, not on the same day that he’d shot the first one.

But not shooting the girl, he thought, was a mistake.

They were going to make it anyway.