The Raptor

I can hear the pachys working out their morning jitters before I open my eyes. Their paddock is about twenty yards from my window, and the echoing crack when their bony skulls collide is loud enough that I haven’t used my alarm clock in months. I roll over in bed to watch them at it, Brutus and Caesar leaping on the climbing rocks, swinging their armored craniums at one another like warhammers. The five females look on from below without much interest. Finally, Brutus ducks his head and bleats surrender, hopping down the rugged ledges. Caesar honks. Victorious. Morning warmup is over. I get up, stretching. 

I am already thinking of her.

She’s watching me before I even see her. I know her by the pale gray color of her feathers, shading to black along her muzzle and touched with yellow at the corners of her eyes. There’s a band of black around her slender throat, almost like a loon’s. She’s meant for somewhere cold and unforgiving. I can picture her running down musk oxen on the windswept taiga or stalking deer through a frozen birch forest, a silent-footed ghost among the trees. She trills and shakes her head at me, taking one step out of cover and toward the fence, and then another. Soon she’s within arm’s reach. I almost reach between the humming wires to stroke her, the urge to touch her is so strong.

“Good morning,” I whisper. She trills again, fixing me with her slit-pupiled golden stare. She has killed three keepers and maimed eight more in her six short years of life. I wonder if any of them touched her first, if she let them feel the silky softness of her plumage, smell the musky secretions on the backs of her thighs. Navya says her first keeper, a man named Roger Carmichael, let himself into the pen through the dinner gate, naked as the day he was born. There are rumors that a video of his death remains on file somewhere in the park’s archives, but so far nobody’s been biting at my half-joking desire to see it.

In my mind’s eye, when I touch myself at night, flat on my belly underneath the sheets, I picture it like this. It’s dark. The wind from the bay sighs through the palms. He makes his rounds as usual. Maybe someone notices a fearful brightness in his eyes, a tremor in his usually effortless smile. Maybe not. When he comes to the pen he heads for the dinner gate’s console in the game warden’s shack. It was all run digitally then. Now it’s all manual. No way to get in on your own. But not that night. That night the outer doors opened for him, and I think by the time alarms began to go off he had begun to undress himself. By the time the outer doors had shut and locked again, there were probably others trying to stop him, begging with him through the two-inch steel mesh of the gate. 

The inner doors open, and she is waiting for him with her sisters. It isn’t over quickly. They like their meat flooded with cortisol, sour with terror, and so they tear his belly open, gnaw and worry at his arms, his legs, his face, but there is no killing blow. Only his screams, and the sound of tearing flesh. Most nights I bring myself to climax imagining that I am in his place, my entrails glistening in the moonlight, my last breaths stuttering sharp and desperate as their claws slip between my ribs and test the slippery surface of my lungs. I imagine her bloody snout between my legs, and the white-hot kiss of her serrated teeth.

“She’s a nasty one,” says Kensington. I look back. I didn’t hear her approach. The park’s game warden stands a few yards away, a fresh sunburn across the bridge of her freckled nose. She doesn’t like to get too close to the raptor pen. “Saw her take the arm off an investor from some French biotech firm back in the summer of ‘08. Snipped it right off halfway to the elbow when he gestured a little too near the wires.”

“I think she’s beautiful,” I say, unable to keep the defensive note out of my tone. When I turn around, two of the others have joined her at the edge of the pen. 

“Oh, she is,” says Kensington. “But I’ll tell you, I tracked a tiger through the foothills of the Sapatura range in Gujarat. Man-eater, five hundred pounds of him. He came up on me while I was squatting in the scrub and gave me these.” She turns and pulls up the back of her shirt to reveal four ragged scars running parallel at an angle across her lower back. I can tell there are more concealed by her clothes, and the thought of them quickens my heartbeat. “Damn near pulled my spine out, never been so terrified in my life. Had to put three bullets in his head before he finally gave up and died. On God, I’d rather be back in that gully with a tiger on my back and piss in my boots than set one foot inside that bloody pen.”

Ahmed brings the cow and the three of us work the dinner gate in easy concert, Kensington leading it past the outer gate. She retreats and Ahmed throws the arm-length lever to close it in. The poor thing lows in distress, rubbing up against the short tunnel of the lock between the halves of the dinner gate. I wrap my hands around the rubber grip of the inner gate’s lever, which unlocks only when the outer gate is closed. A tug to the left to free it from its slot, then down three notches and the inner gate pulls slowly open. The cow is snorting in panic now, nostrils full of the raptors’ musk. I can see her eyes rolling in their sockets through the mesh of the dinner gate. 

The raptors rush her, all five of them bursting from the vegetation. My girl lands on her back, jaws snapping shut on the nape of her neck, claws furrowing her flanks as the cow lurches out into the wooded pen, stumbling and bellowing in agony, trying to kick at her attackers. They dart around her, quick and nimble as eight-foot sparrows. The sickle-shaped dewclaws on their hind legs flash. Strings of blood fly through the air. One of them is under the cow, tearing at her udder, milk and blood pouring out over its jaws in a mingled river.

Blood loss takes her strength in a matter of seconds, but it takes much longer for true death to come. I watch from the operations booth as they poke their heads between her ribs and tear away the softest parts of her. The ears. The eyes. The bloody nightmare of her udder smeared over the grass and splashed on the fronds of the nodding palms and the ferns still sleeping coiled as fiddleheads. My girl is eating the tongue out of her mouth, pulling at it in quick, vicious jerks like a thrush winkling a snail out of its shell. But still, the cow is alive. Her hooves move slowly, pushing furrows in the earth. Her torn and bloodied flank heaves up and down, the terrible rasp of her breathing audible even over the sounds of the raptors feeding.

The sultry mid-morning heat feels cool against my burning skin. I cannot catch my breath. Dewclaws click against exposed white bone. Flesh tears. Gristle crunches. I am so hot I cannot think. I lean against the booth’s whitewashed brick wall, my hand against the front of my khaki shorts. Zookeepers. We all dress like lesbians. Maybe I am one. Men have never interested me. I came for the first time at the age of twenty-two to documentary footage of hyenas gorging on the carcass of a dead bull hippo. The gleam of pinkish membranes, torn and tattered. The glistening light of its huge, heavy liver and the white bulk of its lungs, already rotting. Blood on the hyenas’ muzzles. Blood on the raptors’ now.

Kensington is at the door, hanging on the frame. “Are you alright?” she asks.

The cantina is deserted so early in the day. Ceiling fans turn slowly, lazy shadows passing over Kensington’s face, interspersed with wedges of buttery light. Our glasses of iced tea sweat in the heat. “It takes it out of you, watching them kill,” says Kensington. “No shame in getting a little light-headed.”

I press my glass against my forehead, relishing the chill. She doesn’t understand, this great white hunter straight out of some pulp serial. She doesn’t see that their killing is different from ours. Purer. More beautiful. I smile a little. “It’s the heat,” I say. “The humidity, especially this time of year.”

Kensington gives me a look, like she thinks I’m cracking wise. “Saw one of those big sons of bitches with the horns over their eyes get hold of a man at the California park. Damn thing was supposed to be under to have a tooth extracted, but they had the dosage wrong. Tore out of its straps and got him by the arm. He was a big farm boy, almost three hundred pounds, six foot six, but that thing swung him up in the air like a sock monkey. Carnotaurus. Hell of a name. Swung him up, I heard every joint and ligament in that arm go one by one in the space of about half a second. Firecrackers in a string.”

I imagine my arm breaking like that, a jagged wave of flesh punctured by shards of bone, my whole weight pulling on the joint of my shoulder as I arc up, up, up into the air. A single searing instant of perfect weightlessness as I reach the apex of my climb. “Do you ever think about it?” I ask. “What it would feel like if one of them got you.”

She sips her tea. The fan turns. Shadow and light, shadow and light, slicing her features in two. “Every minute I’m around them.” 

The rest of the day passes quietly. Watermelons for the argentinosaurs with their big spatulate heads and friendly voices, like enormous geese. Scraping conjunctival buildup from the wrinkled hide under a styracosaur’s eye. Swabbing dilophosaurus piss off the stones they marked at the edges of their territory in the paddock to test their creatine levels. They don’t like to hydrate, especially the males. We haven’t figured out why.

Even three years into working at the park, I feel wonder looking at them. Their beauty overwhelms me, not just the sturm und drang of the tyrannosaurus running full pelt after a pig or one of the roe deer bred on the island as feed, but the delicate miracle of a struthiomimus courting with its mating dance, tailfeathers fanned out in a wild technicolor display, the ripple of a spinosaur’s fatty hump and the delicate motion of its prehensile upper lip and snout as it plunged its head into the whitewater rapids in search of salmon. I have seen things no other human being ever has. I have touched the flanks of living miracles.

But the raptors. The raptors. Her, especially. They understand where they are, I think. They understand what’s being done to them. Their exploitation. They want us to suffer for it. I’ve never been a very moral person, but the zeal of that, the fire, it excites me. I want them to have their revenge. I want to be their pound of flesh. Even if it's all in my imagination, the thought fills me with pleasure. By day’s end I stink of a dozen different species. I catch a ride back to the staff dorms with Uter, the park’s soft-spoken facilities chief, and two of his staff. I sit in the truck bed with them. The breeze feels good. 

As we pull up at the dorms a light, warm rain begins to fall. I linger outside in it for a while, letting it wash off the worst of the afternoon’s grime. I go in at the first flash of lightning in the distance. I need a shower. In my room I strip out of my soaking clothes and throw them over the rack in the bathroom. Cold water cascades over my skin, numbing my lips and toes. As a teenager I used to stand like this for hours, willing the water to cool the awful thoughts that boiled behind my eyes. I thoughts others could see it, then. I thought they knew what I was, what I wanted, how I delighted in split nails and the sight of roadkill the way others lusted over dirty magazines.

I was wrong. I am invisible, unremarkable, even. I have never made friends readily. I have never drawn attention. Stooped and bony, falcon’s beak nose and receding chin, hair the color of dirty water. When I get out of the shower, Kensington is sitting on my bed. Sex in the colloquial sense may hold little interest to me, but the thought of seeing what other scars her clothes might hide is enough to motivate me through it, all that touching and moaning and pressing together of wet, sticky things. I am not disappointed. Keloids on her right shoulder blade where she must have been dragged over rough ground. Old puncture wounds on her left calf. A long, ropy scar winding from her left elbow to the base of her throat which she tells me she got from a stingray while free-diving in Barbados.  

I help her to a pair of serviceable orgasms, then fake my own as she laps at me, a finger gently probing in my anus. She wants to hold me after. I allow it, trying to relax into her arms, but I am restless. Anxious. Her skin feels cloying against mine. Just when I’m about to ask her to leave, my ability to wear a smile and answer inane chit-chat dangerously depleted, she sits up, the sheets falling from her muscled shoulders, and says, “I have something for you. Can you get your laptop?”

I don’t allow myself to dream until the video is playing. I do want her close, then. I let her wrap her arms around me from behind and rest her chin on my shoulder. I am vibrating with excitement as on the laptop screen Roger Carmichael enters the dinner gate and begins to remove his clothes. He folds them carefully, shirt and shorts and boxers, and sets them on the ground. He’s handsome. Lean and toned. 

“I got it from Schiavo in IT,” says Kensington, her lips brushing my ear. “Told him I wanted to review it, for security purposes. You’ve been poking around trying to find this for quite a while, haven’t you?”

I am touching myself as the inner gates begin to open. It’s not like I imagined it — Carmichael is crying, talking to himself — but in a way it’s soothing to know he wasn’t like I am. I don’t have to share them with anyone else. I can love them the way I want to love them, and when I give myself to them — to her — I’ll know that I’m their first. They come in so fast, the security footage blurred by their speed, that it takes Carmichael a moment to scream. His mouth gapes in a huge, silent O as the cut across his belly starts to bleed. Blood sheets down his front. They pull him down. My girl tears an ear from his skull along with a long scrap of flesh and scalp. He is screaming. Writhing as they pull him apart. 

I come, unable to contain my scream. Kensington slips her fingers through mine, into me, and Carmichael is blowing bubbles in his own dark blood as he fights to breathe. I can see the exposed muscles of his chest flexing and twitching with each desperate inhalation. “His girlfriend left him,” Kensington whispers. “He fell apart, kept saying he had nothing to live for. Guess nobody took him seriously.”

I feel it coming this time, arching my back against Kensington, parting myself for her as the heel of her hand rubs my clit and she hooks her strong fingers inside me, stroking and pushing, and it shudders through me like a gale. My head rocks back. I keen as it carries me, and on the screen Carmichael’s teeth are visible through the ruin of his cheeks and one of the raptors is pulling his intestines out as another digs in his pelvis, sniffing and nipping at his groin. “Is it the blood that turns you on,” Kensington murmurs, “or do you wish that was you, waiting naked in the dinner gate?”

I should save the video, ration it out, but long after Kensington leaves I lie awake watching and re-watching it, imagining myself in Carmichael’s place. I wouldn’t snivel. I wouldn’t cry. I would go to my lady with reverence, and kneel as the inner gates open. I would show her my throat as she stepped over the threshold, and I would pray, as she lays me open from my belly to my mouth, that I am still alive when they start to eat me.