Fierce Kingdom

by Gin Phillips

  That last thought is sharp enough that it makes her look behind her. She glances back toward the spilled paper cups turned up like sand castle turrets. Back toward the knives that are too far away now. The third man, Destin, does not sound quite human. She imagines some monster from an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. Monsters are not swayed by old teachers.

  “The police—” she starts, but apparently Robby Montgomery does not want to make conversation with anyone but Mrs. Powell, because he cuts her off, barely glancing at her.

  “That way,” he says, pointing with his rifle toward the side door of the restaurant. “Out that way and head back down toward the sea lions. You know the sea lions?”

  So they all shuffle toward the side door—Kailynn in front, Lincoln and her in the middle, Mrs. Powell in the back with Robby Montgomery. The door is only barely attached to the hinges now—he must have forced it open, and she is surprised they didn’t hear him break it even beyond their soundproof door.

  Outside, the Coke machine lights are psychedelic after the dimness of the restaurant. Beyond the trees, there is still the sound of guns and shouting. The banana leaves are flapping, and she heads down the walkway.

  “Faster,” calls out Robby Montgomery, and Joan picks up her pace.

  Margaret Powell is well aware that she may die in the next few minutes, shot in the back by one of her students. She is not completely surprised.

  Kailynn and the other woman are moving much faster than she is, getting farther and farther away, but Robby is only a few feet behind her. She glances back at him, trying not to be too obvious. He seems to be doing an impression of a soldier in Vietnam, peering left and right up into the trees, and it would be ridiculous in a different situation. She is still not quite sure if he is protecting her or leading her to slaughter, and she is not sure that he knows, either. He is clearly a psychopath. Or close enough that it doesn’t make a difference. But even Hitler was kind to puppies, wasn’t he?

  Her knee is throbbing. Sometimes sitting is worse than standing.

  They are long past the shadow of the thatched roof. There is still gunfire, off and on, from the front of the zoo. And Robby is still back there, following. She did not expect him to stay close like this. She slows, looking back again, and this time she does not try to disguise the fact that she has noticed him.

  “Are you coming with us?” she asks.

  He shakes his head, but he is coming toward her. He is tall, even though he still has some baby fat. His gun is loose in his hand, bobbing along like a metal detector or something else that doesn’t kill people.

  She has begun to think that the more she talks to him, the better. The more he hears her voice, the more he has to accept that she is a real person. A person who held his hand in line and who helped him tie his shoes. (She does not remember doing those things, but she imagines she did them for all her students at one time or another.)

  “You’re moving too slow,” he says. “You’ve got to go faster.”

  She stops entirely and turns to face him.

  “I am sixty-eight years old,” she says. “I have a bad knee. This is as fast as I go.”

  The mother has paused ahead of them, her little boy on her hip. She is looking over her shoulder. Margaret wishes the mother would not wait.

  “Walk with me, Robby,” she says, using her teacher voice, which has worked on every child she has ever taught. She is sure she is conveying that she would like his company: that usually works best with the troubled kids, the bad kids, the ones the other teachers might scream at or send to the principal’s office. Those kids are the ones who most want attention, and that is the secret to winning them over.

  She does not want his company, of course. The truth is that she does not like him back there behind her. She wants him where she can see him. Another secret: you always assign the troublemakers the seats closest to your desk.

  She is not surprised that she taught him. She has fantasized about some version of this—imagined, countless times, having some thug pull a gun on her and demand her purse, only to say, “Hey, is that you, Mrs. Powell?” She has taught so many students—thousands over the years—and she has taught them all in this same city, so she runs into her former students constantly, in malls and restaurants and parking lots. All those eight-year-olds transformed into men in suits and women in high-heeled boots.

  “Mrs. Powell!” they always say, always smiling, and she never has any idea who they are, because, of course, they have grown up, but she knows they were her students by the way they say her name.

  Sometimes she remembers them. Sometimes she can even remember where they sat or what they gave her for Christmas. They hug her and they tell her that they are lawyers or doctors or car salesmen or that they have three daughters or a son in college. They want her to know how they have turned out.

  There are others. Ones who have never introduced themselves, but she knows how they have turned out. Demetrius Johnson was the first one to wind up on death row. He killed a boy in a fight over a television, and when he was in her classroom, he kicked a little girl hard enough that he made her leg bleed. But he also was very good at jigsaw puzzles, and it was a real talent, the kind that could have meant something. Then there was Jake Harriman, who was the sweetest boy, never gave her a bit of trouble, but his family was bad and he had bruises on him. She told the principal about it, and DHR visited, but nothing ever happened, and then a couple of decades later she saw his face on the news after he’d killed a woman in the Kmart parking lot and stolen her car. Death row. Horace Lee Block was loud and could never sit still, and he had a mean streak even then, and she had to pry his arms off when he gave her a hug. Death row.

  She sees their names in the newspaper and stares at their unrecognizable photos on the news. By her count she has taught four murderers, six rapists, and nine armed robbers. She does not mean to keep track of the numbers, but they add themselves up anyway. Three of her boys and girls have been murdered, including one little girl whose husband set her on fire. She remembers one long braid, tied with those little hair twists that had plastic balls on the end of them. It is all horrible, and plenty of times seeing the mug shot of some dead-eyed monster and remembering a skinny little boy with ashy elbows made her want to quit teaching altogether, because the worst part is that it is hardly ever shocking. They are set on their paths before she ever meets them. When they come to her angry and sullen, full of swear words, violent, their parents are usually angry and sullen and full of swear words, violent. When they come to her desperate, empty, their parents are desperate and empty. She sees which direction they are headed, usually, and there is nothing she can do about it. Sometimes she has tried, and it is like huffing and puffing at a brick house.

  They walk out of her classroom, and they never even look back. They are gone.

  But Robby. It does not make sense to her, although she is still struggling to remember him clearly. He could not stop talking. She knows that. Poor thing, his voice was so loud, like there was no volume knob on it, so when other kids whispered away, she caught him every time. He was awkward socially, but he wasn’t a discipline problem. She thinks of a thickset boy who laughed too loud at other kids’ jokes and said “yes ma’am” every time she told him to be quiet, and he was a rule-follower, she thinks. No, not a rule-follower—he was a pleaser. The effect was the same, but the reasons were different.

  She feels the moment he catches up to her: he is warm. He smells slightly of onions.

  “Why do we have to hurry?” she asks him softly, and she remembers how he would ask to help with the bulletin boards, but she cannot think of a single conversation she ever had with him.

  “Mark,” he says. “Partly. He’ll be coming.”

  “Is he your friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “If he’s your friend,” she says tentatively, “can’t you tell him not to shoot us?”

&nbs
p; She is facing forward, not looking at him, and he takes a while to answer. They pass under the spreading oak tree, and there is a signpost full of arrows that are unreadable in the dark, but she knows they are following the ZOO EXIT sign.

  “He’s got ideas of his own,” he says finally, and then he is lifting his gun. She is about to scream a warning to the others, but he keeps lifting it, firing several shots at the tops of the trees, and it feels as if her ears might have cracked open. She touches them, feeling for blood.

  She can barely hear his voice as he yells.

  “Stay where I can see you!” he calls out, and she realizes that Kailynn and the woman and boy were disappearing around a bend in the path. They are no longer disappearing—they are statues.

  “Don’t stop,” Robby yells at them, more frustrated than before. “You can’t stop. But stay close.”

  His gun is pointed at the ground again. The others start moving, looking back frequently. She can feel her pulse in her bad knee.

  “You’d told them to go fast,” she says.

  He doesn’t answer. She freezes when she sees him reaching for her, but then his hand is on her elbow steering her forward, gently enough. He is not hurting her.

  “We all go fast,” he says.

  It is clear that he wants her to shut up, but she is discovering that it does not really matter what he wants. She is no longer quite so afraid of what he might do to her: death is not as terrifying as she once thought. That would make more sense if she were standing here imagining heaven with golden streets, or if she were daydreaming about a tearful reunion with her parents, who she would love to see again, in any form, bodies or souls or angels. But she is not thinking about any of that.

  She has been told all her life that there is a God. It surely is true. She has been trying to remind herself of it. She has been talking to him. But she wasn’t thinking of God in the moment when the edge of that counter was cutting into her back and she was looking into the black hole of the rifle: she was thinking that her daughter is grown and has made it very clear that she does not need much of anything from Margaret anymore, and her parents are dead, and her ex-husband has remarried some woman who is both younger and fatter than she is, and there is nothing left that she has to do. She is not eager to die, but the thought doesn’t panic her.

  So she limps along and says, “Did you kill people today?”

  He shrugs. It is the most juvenile answer she can imagine.

  “You’re saying you’re not sure?”

  He shrugs again. The longer she is with him, the more she can see the third grader underneath.

  “Are you sorry for it?” she asks.

  He ducks under a tree branch.

  “No, ma’am.”

  Then why, she wants to ask, didn’t you kill me? If it comes so easy to you?

  They are nearly at the bottom of the hill as they pass under the carved wooden arch that announces AFRICAN TRAILS, and now they are out of Africa entirely. His hand is still loose on her elbow. For someone she remembers as a chatterbox, he does not use so many words. Maybe the evil has changed him. Maybe the third grader is no longer in there after all.

  Kailynn and the woman disappear around a bend in the path again, and this time he does not yell at them. So it is only her and Robby, and just when she has given up on him talking, he starts again.

  “You know when you pop a blister?” he says. He squeezes her elbow lightly. “That’s what it’s like. Don’t you feel like, you know, there’s this satisfaction to it, popping things? Like zits, too, and blisters and things that are puffed up and shouldn’t even be there. There’s something in you that wants to burst them. Maybe that should tell you something. Because you may think you’re solid, but the least prick and we’re all just skin and pus and infection, and I think we know that. We make things up, you know? All the things we think are so important—none of it matters. None of it’s real. And maybe it’s better, maybe, to pop the bubble. Did you ever think that? That maybe you’d be better off to let yourself drain out? Because otherwise we’re just swelled-up blisters dripping pus and blood, but we pretend like we’re goddamn unicorns—excuse me—unicorns or fairies or something, like we’re beautiful and magical, but we’re sacks of nothing.”

  He inhales loudly. Margaret is not sure if it is embarrassment at his monologue or only a lack of oxygen. She hits a patch of uneven concrete, nearly turning her ankle.

  She thinks and thinks, but she cannot come up with a response that feels helpful. She does not want to encourage the talk of people as pus-filled sacks. She spins her bracelet around her wrist—a Kate Spade that she paid twenty dollars for on sale.

  “You think none of this is real?” she says.

  “I think we live our lives doing stupid things and believing stupid things,” he says more quietly.

  He is trying to convince her, she realizes. He is laying out his argument.

  “So you killed people because you think they’re better off?” she says.

  “I don’t know if I killed them. It’s not that they’re better off. It’s not like I’m Jesus saving souls or something. But they’re not worse off. We can’t be worse off.”

  She swallows, tasting acid. She was right in the beginning: he is a psychopath, and he is making her go fast enough that she is almost stumbling. She can no longer hear the music, but the sounds coming from the front of the zoo are getting louder—voices, men’s voices, lots of them, and the bang of something metal.

  “Do you still have oranges for lunch?” he asks.

  She is surprised enough that she does not consider her answer.

  “Sometimes,” she says.

  “You cut the peel off instead of eating around it,” he says.

  She does not know how he remembers that.

  “Yes,” she says.

  He stops and scrapes something from the bottom of his shoe. She does not want to think about what kinds of things might be stuck to the bottom of his shoe.

  “Did you ever learn how to use an axe?” he asks.

  She thinks back. So he’d been around the year she had two trees fall in her yard within six months of each other, and it was absurd the money that landscapers wanted to charge to chop up the things. After the second tree, she’d bought an axe and had been determined to learn how to chop wood herself. All the little boys in her class had been very taken with her idea.

  “No,” she says. “I ripped open my hands on the handle. I wound up paying someone.”

  “I used to imagine you out in your yard in overalls,” he says. “With your axe. And then you’d go rock on your front porch and drink lemonade. Do you have a front porch?”

  “No. I used to have a deck in the back.”

  “Do you live in the country?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “I always wanted to.”

  “Live in the country?”

  “Yeah. Where you could walk in the woods.”

  A flash of light makes her look up from the concrete unspooling in front of her. She can see the lake through the branches, all lit up. A few steps in front of her, the train track cuts across the concrete, and Kailynn and the woman and boy are standing there.

  Robby lets go of her and waves toward the lake.

  “I’m going back up,” he says. “Go somewhere around the sea lions and the birds. Find a place and hide. Wait until it’s done.”

  He is turning around before she realizes that he is leaving. And for some reason she remembers a moment from who-knows-how-many years ago, and Robby was surely not in her class then, but she was doing a science lesson about roots, and she was talking about moss. She’d found big hunks of green moss in the park, and she’d passed them around to talk about how they lacked true roots, but the children did not want to talk about roots. They wanted to put the moss on their heads to pretend it was hair, and they mashed thei
r faces against it to see what it would be like to sleep in the forest with a moss pillow, and she’d given up on the science and just watched them hold the plants.

  “Come with us,” she says to him.

  He stops, mouth slightly open as he turns back to her.

  “Why?” he asks.

  If she were honest, she could tell him it is because he has a gun. If they run into his friends, that gun would be worth something. But also, if she were honest, she would tell him that she is sure she can save him. She feels the rush of it jolt through her, sharp like the scrape of worn-out cartilage against bone. She can see it all play out: bringing him, hands up, to the police and visiting him in prison and bringing him pie, if that’s allowed, and she would write him letters asking him if he’d rather have chocolate or coconut. She could save him and also save them all, and it is impossible not to imagine the headlines announcing how she had convinced him to put down his weapons, how she had reached him when everyone else had failed.

  He is still watching her, waiting. She has to put together all these thoughts of second chances and pies and moss.

  “We can tell them—the police—how you helped us,” she says. “We can tell them—”

  He smiles at her; she can see his teeth in the dark.

  “It’s okay, Mrs. Powell,” he interrupts.

  “What’s okay?”

  He has turned around again.

  “You don’t have to tell them anything,” he says, voice as loud as it ever was, and she hears every word clearly.

  He walks up the hill, and he never even looks back. He is gone.

  7:49 p.m.

  The clouds are thick again, blocking the moonlight. The pond spreads out in front of her, and Joan can see the decorations hung on the fencing and even floating, somehow, in the water itself. A multicolored sea monster blinks in the middle of the pond, and she can see other lit figures along the edges. Beyond the water, of course, is the noise coming from the zoo entrance.