The Coors got their tiger from the town’s strip mall, which closed before I was born, but my parents remembered it. My mom told my siblings and me about a woman with long, gray hair who would bring the tiger cubs to sell pictures and to sell the cubs when they got too big. No one but the Coors could afford a tiger, but a whole lot of people could afford a picture. My mom had a picture with the tiger that would later belong to the Coors. We could all recognize it because of its pattern.
“It doesn’t look like a usual tiger,” my mom had explained. “I’ve never seen another tiger with curvy stripes.” She took me to our stuffy library and found a book on big cats to try and show me a normal tiger, but someone had cut all the pictures from the book. She frowned when she saw it. “Someone didn’t have enough money to print their own pictures.” So we brought the book up to the front.
“I don’t get the chain,” my brother once commented. “It’s not doing anything.”
For our whole lives, we never saw it stand up once.
Sometimes though, late at night, I could hear it bellowing and huffing up to the sky. As a child, I was always too scared to look. I would learn to sleep through it.
I asked her, because I was so curious about my neighbor’s tiger, “What is the tiger’s name? Is it a boy tiger or a girl tiger?”
She looked at me like I was stupid. “It’s just a tiger.” And she went and sat back at her seat with all the other well-dressed girls and boys, and they laughed and giggled at the picture of the lazy tiger.
That was the first time I had ever been made to feel small. I looked down at my fraying collar, the worn butterfly graphic on my dirt-stained shirt, at my hand-me-down sneakers that didn’t light up anymore. I felt myself getting smaller and smaller.
Annabell got voted prom queen our senior year, just like everyone knew she would. Her uncle got reelected too, which surprised no one. The only unexpected thing to happen that spring was her father hitting one of the church women with his police cruiser. The expected outcome—and this is what happened—was for Sheriff Coors to come out blameless, and for a little while, he did. The church woman was walking around a blind corner, and he was flying down the back roads as so many of us do. The news said she hit the windshield so damn hard she cracked it and got knocked into a coma.
After that, the tiger started crying loud enough to wake me up, like it could feel something was wrong. It kept getting louder and louder.
When Annabell and I held the same diplomas and stood with our families in the high school parking lot, dressed in the same robes, I dared to feel that we were equals. Of course, I was wrong. I knew I was. I got my reminder when we ended up going to the same restaurant. We heard Annabell say it was her favorite place. The waitress knew her name. They were regulars. She took so long talking to Annabell she didn’t take our order for twenty minutes, but my family didn’t mind.
“Calm down,” I remember my father saying. “It’s the Coors.”
Even though the money we spent there meant more to us than the money they spent meant to them.
I had to work over the summer, and Annabell did not. I worked at a local fried chicken place—now an empty building with a faded FOR LEASE sign in its window—and her family would come through and ask for extra things. The big thing was the extra sauce. More than two packs of sauce are—no, were an extra 17¢, but for the Coors, they were f-r-e-e. The owner had gone to school with the family’s matriarch.
In his words, “Give them whatever they want.”
Annabell and I got into the same university. Our families gathered to celebrate on the same day, and our side of the fence was much louder than hers. It made me proud. We outdid the Coors.
Weeks passed, and it was my last night at home. The tiger cried and cried and cried. I couldn’t sleep.
“It would seem,” I can hear the happiness in my mom’s voice states apart, “that things are starting to change around here.” She pauses. “Or at least they can.”
When I come home for break, the town has grown restless. All it took was one drop of rain to create a storm. The people are tired of the Coors.
On the last day of break, a woman, boldened by the town’s anger, comes up and admits she and Sheriff Coors had been having an affair. He was going to see her the night he hit that woman. She’s got all the evidence and tells us she’s not too proud to share it. So she does.
Mrs. Coors falls apart in shame, and the house goes up for sale. My mother hears she filed for divorce. I hear Annabell is thinking about dropping out of school.
In all of this, I guess the Coors forgot to feed their pet.
The tiger, after over ten years, decides to test the mesh fencing and finds they’re stronger.
From my brother, I hear the tiger pushed their way through the fencing, but the mesh crumpled down, caught on the trail out of the backyard. The tiger struggled and struggled until it choked up and died.
He said, “She was strong enough to escape the cage but not strong enough to get out of the yard, I guess.”
After all this time, I got to find out. It was a girl tiger.
I go back to school, and Annabell doesn’t. Out-of-towners buy the house next door, but they don’t have the generational power of the Coors. So my town, for as much as it can be, is equal. While I’m gone, houses go down and come up. More and more people move in. Things change. I don’t mind it.
One lunch break, I tell my coworker that my rich neighbors had a tiger when I was growing up. She says we’ve got to go to the zoo so she can see one for herself. She’s never seen a tiger.
The one we find there is what my mother would have said was “a normal kind of tiger.” It’s not asleep when we get there. It’s pacing its enclosure, muscles rippling and coat shining.
Mostly, though, I’m looking at its straight stripes.
