Next-to-Last of the Tiger Men and Mack’s Last Rhino (Two Short Stories) Read online

  PRAISE FOR OTHER WORKS BY ALEX BLEDSOE

  “Bledsoe brings a real warmth and a messy humanity to his modern-day fairy story.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Bledsoe is getting better with each and every book.”

  —Bookgasm

  OTHER TITLES BY ALEX BLEDSOE

  Wisp of a Thing

  Wake of the Bloody Angel

  The Hum and the Shiver

  Dark Jenny

  The Girls with Games of Blood

  NEXT-TO-LAST OF THE TIGER MEN & MACK’S LAST RHINO

  ALEX BLEDSOE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2013 Alex Bledsoe

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by StoryFront, Seattle

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  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and StoryFront are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  eISBN: 9781477870204

  Cover design by Inkd

  CONTENTS

  NEXT-TO-LAST OF THE TIGER MEN

  MACK’S LAST RHINO

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  NEXT-TO-LAST OF THE TIGER MEN

  Brazil, 1992

  T. S. Bunch dismounted from the scraggly rental horse. He raised his right foot and repeatedly shook his leg; the antifungal powder he’d poured into his underwear that morning clumped uncomfortably in the humid air. He checked the crude map in his pocket against the tableau before him.

  The Mato Grosso region of Brazil consisted of marshland interspersed with a few meager farms and ranches located on the rare dry acres, similar to parts of Bunch’s native West Tennessee. The slope ahead was almost mountainous for this area and crowned by a small tin-roof shack visible just above the morning fog. Bunch saw no smoke from the chimney and no movement anywhere around, although the enormous buriti palms resounded with the cries of unseen wildlife.

  Bunch wore jeans and a T-shirt under a camouflage hunting vest. A Farm Aid baseball cap kept his long, stringy hair out of his face. He pulled his double-barreled shotgun from the saddle case, snapped open the breach, and slid two 12‑gauge shells into it. He held the gun loosely in his right hand and took the horse’s reins with his left.

  The path dipped down, and the dregs of the morning’s chowder-thick mist cut visibility to less than a hundred yards. Bunch strained senses honed by a lifetime in the woods, conscious of the wet smack of his steps on the hard-packed path. This had to be the right place: the flimsy two-room structure ahead was the only dwelling within miles, and the jaguar skin in the open doorway was unmistakable.

  He stopped ten feet from the hut. “Hey, y’all! Anybody in there, don’t shoot me, I ain’t with the government! I’m lookin’ for Linda Fontana!”

  A small, lean dog of indeterminate breed poked his head out from under the jaguar skin and growled. Bunch growled back, and the dog withdrew. In a moment it returned with another dog, and both bared their teeth.

  Bunch pointed the shotgun one-handed. “Y’all better back up, or you’re gonna end up with more holes than a donut shop.”

  An old man pushed the skin aside and peered out at him. He wore a traditional loincloth under a tattered plaid shirt, and his dark red skin stretched tight over lean muscle and a comfortable belly. He leaned against the doorjamb and closed his bloodshot eyes. “Você sabe que horas são?”

  Bunch took out his Portuguese phrase book and flipped to the pages with the corners turned down. “Uh…eu estou procurando Linda Fontana.” He held his hand high above his head. “Linda. Tall chick. Mean.”

  The hungover old man squinted at him. “Leenduh?”

  Bunch nodded patiently. Drunks were the same all over the world.

  The old man jerked his thumb at the slope behind his shack. “Leenduh. Perto do riacho.”

  “Thanks,” Bunch said. He tied his horse to a tree next to the shack and went over the top of the hill. He didn’t hear the old man mutter “Yankee dumb-ass” before going back inside. If he had, he would’ve been furious: not for the implied opinion of his intelligence, but for being referred to as a Yankee.

  Behind the building, Bunch found a series of gentle terraces now overgrown with weeds and vines; evidently the old man wasn’t much of a farmer. He picked his way down the hill, startling a fer-de-lance snake in the process. Finally, through the mist, he saw a wide, shallow stream.

  Several yards away, someone crouched on a fallen tree that spanned the creek. Clad in a black sports bra and tattered denim shorts, the woman clutched a long spear and watched the water intently. Her skin was tan and her blonde hair so sun-bleached, it was almost white.

  Suddenly the spear shot into the water, then pulled back with a large, flat fish impaled on its point. Even at this distance, Bunch saw the distinctive red belly and snapping teeth of the most vicious species of piranha.

  “Careful, the fish here bite harder than you do,” Bunch called.

  The woman jumped in surprise and dropped the fish as she removed it from the spear. The water rippled as other piranhas rushed to devour their injured comrade.

  Linda Fontana scowled and shook her head. “Well, look who’s here,” she said in her distinctive Tennessee twang. “Come on down, I got a candiru with your name on it. How’d you find me?”

  “It wasn’t that hard, once I realized people in Brazil speak Portuguese and not Spanish,” he said. “And amazingly, everyone seems to know about the six-foot blonde psychopath living out here with the drunken old jaguar hunter. They already have a name for you: Loira Louca.” Roughly translated, it meant “crazy blonde.”

  Linda put the zagaya spear across her shoulders and draped her arms over it. “So you came all the way down here just to be a smart-ass.”

  “I’m actually here at the request of your employees at Fontana Enterprises. They find themselves at just a bit of a loss without their micromanaging boss. You remember her, don’t you? Oh, what was her name?”

  “I’m on vacation, Bunch. I ain’t taken any time off in seven years. I’ve got it comin’.”

  “Comin’ and goin’, from what I hear. They’re still talking about you at the hospital over in Africa, too. You have this way of endearing yourself.”

  “Go home, Bunch,” she said, and walked past him toward the hut.

  “You might’ve been on vacation when you left three months ago,” he called after her, “but I think they consider it AWOL now. They kinda want to know why you ain’t bothered to write.”

  She stopped and turned wearily to face him. “You can see the reason, can’t you?”

  He nodded, sympathetic despite himself. The jagged, fresh scar ran down the side of her face to the corner of her mouth, then under her jaw and neck, almost down to her cleavage. It was stark pinkish-white against her deep tan, and traces of stitch marks still remained. “It ain’t exactly a beauty mark,” he agreed.

  “No. And I ain’t exactly the same person I was. So if I do things differently now, well, that’s just the way it is.” She turned and continued up the hill.

  Bunch sighed and swiped at the omnipresent flies. He knew what the scar meant to her. Not that she was disfigured—Linda was not that vain—but that she’d failed at her job. Linda Fontana, the “Babe in the Woods,” ac
e big-game hunter and safari guide, CEO of Fontana Enterprises, had nearly gotten her face sliced off due to her own stupidity. And she was running around the mountains of Brazil to atone for that momentary, monumentally dumb mistake that now glared out at her from every mirror.

  Twenty years earlier, T. S. Bunch and Linda Fontana had met in the third grade at Gibbsville Elementary School. Linda’s father was a naturalist working at the Pink Palace Museum in Memphis; Bunch’s father ran a crane at the railroad yard. Linda’s mother had died, while Bunch’s mother existed only in a vodka-induced haze.

  Linda and Bunch became friends over BB guns. For different reasons, both preferred the solitude of the Tennessee forests to human company, and in the other each found a kindred spirit. When they graduated from pellet guns to real firearms, they spent every weekend prowling the woods and farmland around Gibbsville, knocking off squirrels, rabbits, and possums. Linda was the best hunter and tracker Bunch had ever seen; and no one else, Linda knew, was watched over by as much divine luck as T. S. Bunch.

  The changes during their junior-high years only reinforced their childhood attachment. Teenage Linda, blonde and model-gorgeous, intimidated most of the boys. She was taller, stronger, and faster than they were, and her dates reported that she approached making out, like everything else, with complete enthusiasm and dedication. That scared the boys even more.

  The friendship between Linda and Bunch never crossed any romantic lines. He considered Linda far too skinny to be attractive, and she thought him entirely too unmotivated and greasy. As they grew, their other differences became more obvious. Linda was an honor student, despite the thickest imaginable Southern accent; Bunch had been held back in kindergarten. But their bond remained, the one constant for them both.

  When Linda went off to college, Bunch discovered a new skill: flying small planes and especially helicopters. With the help of two lottery jackpots—his legendary luck, according to Linda—he relocated to Louisiana and became a semisuccessful crop duster, while Linda took advantage of a small inheritance and started a cable show to teach kids about nature. That show, Alligator Ike, became a surprise sensation, resulting in profits that allowed her to sponsor the kind of ecological and wildlife management programs she admired. But she wasn’t interested in just running a small media empire. Africa beckoned, and her lifelong dream to be a big-game hunter now dangled within reach. To some it might have seemed to contradict her conservation work, but those people didn’t understand how hunting and preservation were connected. If made off-limits to legitimate hunters, an animal such as the leopard would be wiped out quickly by farmers as a nuisance and by poachers as forbidden treasure, no matter what laws were in place to protect it. As a game animal, it generated money from the hunting industry that helped secure the species’ survival, which in turn proved its value to the locals who might feel otherwise.

  From the moment she stepped off the plane, the “Babe in the Woods” became the stuff of campfire stories and native whispers. Not only was she a woman in a decidedly male career, but she could outdo the other guides in almost every aspect of the trade. She was a better tracker, a better shot, a fountain of knowledge (thanks to her upbringing as a naturalist’s daughter), and scrupulously honest. In the space of a single hunting season, she shattered the invisible barrier that had existed between her and the men to become an accepted equal.

  Once established, she hired Bunch as her assistant and co–safari guide. Their services were expensive but worth it—with Bunch’s luck and Linda’s skill, their parties often brought down trophies that went straight into Rowland Ward’s record books. They also endeared themselves to the local governments by assisting with any problem animals that cropped up: man-killers that would continue to slaughter until forcibly stopped. The animals may have been merely responding to man’s encroachment on their territories, but it was hard to tell that to a woman wailing over her half-eaten child.

  And everything went along splendidly, absolutely faultlessly, until Bunch caught the flu and dropped out of the first trip of the season, a zoo safari to collect a giant anteater.

  “So you’re going to hunt a jaguar with nothin’ but a long pointy stick, and that’ll make it all better, right?” Bunch said. He sat on a stump and watched Linda throw the spear at a target nailed to a tree ten yards away. It thunked unerringly into the middle circle, in the notch made by countless other accurate throws.

  “You still here?” she said without looking at him.

  “Yeah, I’m in for the duration. Sucks, don’t it?”

  “I don’t have to explain anything to you. I don’t want or need your dang help. In fact, if you stay here and try to help, it just means I’ll have to start over, ’cause I’m gonna do this on my own.”

  He nodded toward the hut. “So who’s the old rummy in the diaper?”

  She put her hands on her hips. “He’s Christophe Joaquim, the last of the true tigreros. He’s my teacher.”

  “You already know how to drink.”

  She sighed with a deep exasperation only Bunch could provoke. “Am I gonna have to just shoot you, skin you, and ship you back myself to get you to leave?”

  He smiled. “Maybe. If you think you’re up to it.”

  “Bunch, I been learnin’ to kill jaguars by hand. Your scrawny self wouldn’t even make me breathe hard.”

  “You’re a Martian, you know that?”

  Linda blinked in surprise. “Excuse me?”

  “A Martian. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Read it on the flight down. It explains how men and women are so different, they could be from separate planets. When women get in trouble, they like to get together and talk it over. When a man’s got a problem, he hides in his cave to figure it out. He doesn’t want anyone to bother him and he doesn’t want any help, ’cause that implies he ain’t able to handle his own problems. That he’s weak.” He smiled smugly. “That’s what you’re doin’ here, ain’t it? I mean, you may have all them curves and jiggly parts, but you’re acting just like a Martian.”

  Linda said nothing and concentrated on her next throw. But inside she was furious because Bunch had hit it as accurately as her spear impaling its target. And she hated it when he was right.

  Unnoticed by Bunch or Linda, Christophe Joaquim sat in his shack and watched through the window as Linda practiced. His head thundered from the canha he’d drunk the night before, which left the inside of his mouth sweet and gummy. He knew he should stop drinking so much, but each time he sobered up, he realized he was old and alone and lived in a two-room shack with a pair of dogs and a wobbly kitchen table. Then he’d uncork the bottle again.

  He swatted at the gnats drawn by his syrupy breath. The woman’s eye was flawless, her form impeccable, and she wore the chill calm of a professional killer at almost every moment. It was that calm that had persuaded him to instruct her when she had shown up at his door three months earlier, the last of the stitches still in her face, a small bag of clothes her only possession. Once he had been like her: young, lithe, and deadly. And while he’d never trained a woman before, he’d also never met one whose stillness frightened him quite like hers did.

  So he’d shown her the skills of the tigrero, the term for men who killed the largest cat in the Americas, the jaguar. These animals were not exactly plentiful, but they were lethal when encountered—the ones in his area of the Mato Grosso averaged three hundred pounds, and Christophe knew larger ones lurked in the distant marshes and swamps. Even a small jaguar possessed jaws so strong, it could kill its prey by piercing the skull with one fatal bite.

  It was a very specialized trade, and not many men grew old in it; Christophe’s own teacher had died at age thirty-one. In a time of nuclear weapons and smart bombs, hunting a jaguar with only a spear seemed insane to most people, but with visibility down to a matter of a few feet in the insanely thick foliage, the zagaya was actually more practical. If a hunter’s first shot missed or only wounded the jaguar, the cat would either charge instantly, before a
nother shot was possible, or escape into the anonymous grass. If it charged, it would nearly always kill the hunter. With the zagaya, a hunter could continue to fight, keeping the cat off until its strength or the hunter’s gave out.

  With relentless dedication that verged on true obsession, Linda became Christophe’s equal in every practical aspect of the tigrero trade. He’d backed her up on three hunts already, and after the first one he had only to stand back and watch. Technically, she was ready for her first solo kill.

  But he understood that if she faced a jaguar alone today, she would die.

  It was commonly held that death meant nothing to a true tigrero. Christophe believed it himself as a young man, learning from his seemingly fearless master. But now he was tired and he realized he’d always been afraid of death. That fear, in fact, had allowed him to grow old in this exceptionally risky business.

  There was no fear of death in Linda Fontana.

  Something inside the tall woman was missing or out of balance. The scar on her face went deeper than mere skin and tissue; it marred her very nature. If she confronted a tigre alone now, she would do everything right technically. Yet when it came down to it, the tigre would fight for its very existence, and Linda would not. The difference was crucial.

  Christophe also sensed the depth of her connection with this new scrawny American. Perhaps he could reach that damaged part of her soul and repair it, just as the doctors had repaired her face. The mark would remain, but she would be whole again. Only when that happened would she be a true tigrero.

  And then she would leave him.

  He belched slightly and reached for the jug beside the table.

  The afternoon sun slid behind the trees, creating a golden light that bathed everything in luminescence. Animal cries changed as the day shift gave way to night.

  Bunch, Linda, and Christophe sat at the uneven table in the ridiculously small shack. The bedroom, behind a wooden partition, took up the rest of the building, and Bunch wondered for a moment about the sleeping arrangements. Then he grabbed at his glass as the table wobbled under someone’s elbows.