JUNGLE CAT
I fall asleep in the belly of a tiger, striped orange and gold, and when I wake, I’m a pile of tiger-shit, bloody like a newborn. Jungle Cat pings around my brain, cheap pachinko chimes, I’ve earned the grand prize. Predator, teeth, glistening and white… I’m looking at one, a tooth, I mean, against a red sky. I reach for it and dust chalks up my fingers, orange and fine. A tooth on the ground of the desert. My tongue finds a damp cavern. One bowling pin knocked down.
My tooth on the ground of the desert.
I look to the sky and see white. Stars explode across my vision, drowning me in doves, pearls, bubbles, satin, tender meaty flesh. My head snaps back down. The sun, it’s the burning, agonizing sun, that’s splitting my head in half. Of course it is. Desert heat. Desert sun.
I laugh and cover my eyes, curl into the shape of an armadillo.
It is now that I remember what I’ve forgotten.
Where the fuck am I?
Me, and my tooth, on the ground of the desert. My stomach aches in a sour way, my mouth is dry, and my head feels screwed on. I was drinking last night, then. Sure. I was drinking, probably slugging down whiskey or rum or some of that cheap beer, whatever the guys had on hand. Must’ve been a bar, must’ve been with friends. I flex my hands and feel them split open.
I sit up, look at these hands, now bleeding onto the ground. Must not’ve been with friends. A fight. A fight after some drinking. Could’ve been Cooper, guy with a wire rod up his ass. But would he toss me out here?
Out here, indeed. I squint and can’t see anything beyond the horizon, other than miles of dusty red stretching out in all directions. Shit. No water, of course. Of course.
Shit.
I get up, feel all my bones crack. Brittle bones. My mother used to force milk down my throat—I used to be a little bitch about it—and swore I’d have the strongest bones in town. Back when I played baseball. Back when I needed bones for anything but hurting. My neck cracks, bad, and I realize I probably lost the fight. Explains the tooth.
I grab for anything, those things I was thinking when I first woke up, that dream I was having, but it all slides out of my hands like sand. Wasn’t I in the jaws of a great beast? Fear knocks on my heart, and it’s not just because I’m surrounded by desert. No, there is something worse, itching at my brain.
I gotta start walking. Always said that there’s no use staying still. Move forwards. I move forwards and for about a mile it’s a whole lot more desert. The sun starts to bake on my back, and I can feel my skin crack and peel. Never tanned too well. More memories of my mother squeezing sunscreen into her hand and slapping the cold stuff onto my back, the other hand holding a cigarette. Why am I thinking of my mother so much?
I’m walking in the desert but suddenly I’m walking down Fir Street, Mother in my back pocket screaming about some test I’d failed but I don’t care, it’s the summer and I’m free again. I run down the street, light coming in through the big oak trees, to my boys with the crooked teeth and jagged scars from where we cut our hands and swore that we were brothers. I’m running to my boys and they’re laughing, saying we’re gonna go jump into the lake, cool off with a couple of beers we snuck from our fridges that our parents won’t even notice.
I stop and I am back in the desert, and Fir Street whirls away from me like watercolor washed down the sink. And I remember that when we jumped into that lake that day Tommy hit his head on a rock and split it right open. There was so much blood it turned the water red. I remember looking at his skull, at the brain you could see peeking out, and standing totally still, not even shivering or anything. I was just wondering what I was supposed to do. I was looking at the inside of my friend’s head, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with that. Still don’t, I guess.
I’m in the desert and Tommy’s been dead a long time. I’ll join him if I don’t get out of here soon. I keep walking. I know how to walk for a long time in the sun. Did a lot of this once, but I was heavier then. Weighed down by a pack and those clothes and thick boots and a gun. Carrying that thing gets heavy, real heavy. I’m light now, so light I could run to the end of this desert and back, like flying, like a red sparrow when it catches the first glint of morning.
I can do it all but I don’t. I trudge along like the good soldier I am, legs and back straight, eyes ahead. Ahead is something, shimmering in the distance, a golden lamplight sparkling on the horizon. As I get closer, it solidifies into glitzy lights, neon signs, and I hear the sweet sound of trashy music and clinking chips. Finally, a fucking casino.
The flashing sign reads ‘Tiger’s Belly’, and it makes me lick my chapped lips. I step inside, into the cool dark beast. Air conditioning welcomes me, the greetings of heaven, and a myriad of angels clad in black descend on me with plastic trays. Their smiles are so white I have to squint again, and I’m reminded of that dove-pearl-bubble-satin-flesh headache I have. Long legs too, so long I’ve got to look up to see how high they go.
“Drink?” They all ask me in unison.
Of course. I take all of them—can’t be rude—and drink until my throat eases up on me. I feel good and push through them, fingers itching for a slotto. My wife used to call my ceaseless trigger finger on the machines the ‘Slottery’, and I shortened it to ‘Slotto’ because it’s hard, a few drinks in, to enunciate all of Slot-tuh-ree.
You and your slottery, she’d say. You think if you do it enough, you’ll win.
I’d just laugh and say when I got my billion dollars she wasn’t getting a single cent. It was a joke that played like a broken record because we said it so many times, but then we didn’t really have anything else to say to each other. She wanted me to stop drinking and I wanted her to stop screwing our neighbor. Pair of animals, I guess.
A machine approaches me and shakes my hand, invites me to sit. How kind. I kindly do. Pat my pockets, my empty pockets. I’m in a casino with empty pockets. What kind of idiot am I? I punch the machine a few times, my hand wincing from the pain. The machine fights back, knocks a couple sevens into my eyes until I’m seeing stars. I spit on it and back off, punch its side one more time for good measure. It doesn’t help.
From across the room I catch a card dealer’s blood red eye, and he winks. I try my luck at his table. Couple of slick bobcats are gathered around the table, cards clutched in their paws. The dealer deals me in, though I’ve got empty pockets. Every card I pick up is blank, a cool plane of white. Almost like vanilla ice cream. My mouth waters enough to lick it.
“Any more drinks?” I ask the dealer.
His red eyes hold me in place. When he opens his mouth, a snake’s tongue flits out. But I can understand him.
“How many more do you need?” he slithers. “How many until you’re done?”
I laugh and push all my chips forward. All in. The bobcats have a flush, and a full house and a two pair. I lay down my empty cards and keep laughing. I stumble off the seat, beasts growling behind me, and wander through the mirrored maze of machines and money. I want to bet on everything. I feel so lucky today.
My daughter once brought me a four leafed clover before I left for the casino. Back when I said I was “off to work”, and my wife pretended she didn’t know where I was going. Julia always knew, though. Smart kid. She handed me this clover and said it would give me the best luck that night, and when I came home rich she wanted a new doll, then maybe a pool in the backyard. She wanted a pool so the other kids would come over, because she couldn’t really make friends. I took the clover from her and said she would go nowhere near water for as long as I lived, but I’d get her a real nice doll.
I lost everything that night, clover tucked in my front pocket. I remember—I remember!—walking out, cool wind ruffling my hair, thinking that this really might be the end. I might as well take the shotgun off the wall and aim it right where I’d been aiming it for all of my life. At my own head. And this time, I’d fire.
That’s it. All my screwed-on head can hold without spilling over. I don’t remember a thing more than that. Machines ring, a winner is announced, he’s won the big jackpot! But it isn’t me. It’s never me. A bunch of jackrabbits hop over to the winner, hopping over my feet, swarming him with gold tokens. The gold is piling up around him, and I feel something cool touch my leg.
I look down. Gold tokens. I look up. It’s a mirror. I’m looking at a mirror. And the winner is me. It’s finally, finally me. I didn’t even know it, but it’s me. Soft fur and cold coins clink, surrounding me, warming my cold body.
“Thank you,” I say to no one.
I see my card dealer cleaning a machine gun with an oiled rag. When he looks up, his face is Tommy’s, with the same split down the skull. He aims, thank God.
I smile as the gold gets up to my neck. He pulls the trigger, thank God. I laugh and laugh and laugh and feel my insides glow with punctures.
Suddenly I’ve fallen, and I’m flat on my back, looking at a sky full of punctures. Stars, I realize. I roll over and spit out a tooth and groan. Curling up, I close my eyes and picture myself swimming in a pool full of blood bubbling like champagne. It makes me so happy I fall asleep with a smile on my face.
Victoria Capitano is a student in the Philadelphia area, attending Emerson College in the fall. Her work can be found in Exist Otherwise, The Susquehanna Apprentice, and Mosaic Magazine. Besides writing, she also enjoys filmmaking and photography.
