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crawling on them, but Tommy and I had fake ants crawling all over us. We bonded over that shit.” “He’ll let you down,” my dad said, loading a bunch of arrows into a quiver to take down to the community center. “Or you’ll let him down. Letting people down is the only thing you two really have in common.”

      Even after a couple months of staying sober, my father wouldn’t accept Tommy as my friend. One night when Tommy picked me up, my dad ran outside and shot an arrow in the driver-side door of his truck. I apologized to Tommy, but he waved me off.

      “People have shot arrows at me before,” Tommy said, “and they probably will again.”

      Lately Tommy and I hung out down by the river. We’d gotten tired of going to the zoo long ago, and the time we’d tried to pick up women at the local pet store by knocking out those chinchillas had been an absolute disaster. Instead of going to AA meetings, we wrestled on the banks of the river to see which one of us could knock the other one out. Once when I knocked Tommy out I pulled down his pants and wrote the word “Jackass” across his ass cheeks in black marker, and the next time he knocked me out he wrote the word “Dummy” on mine. This continued on for the next couple of months, back and forth, sometimes one of us drawing a very funny and detailed picture on the other’s butt cheeks or writing a few sentences about our state of mind. Each time I got knocked out I went home and pulled down my pants and pondered Tommy’s writings or his cartoons in my bathroom mirror and I thought about how hilarious this whole situation was and how good it was to finally find someone who liked the same things I did. It was great to finally be able to communicate some of my struggles with another human being and also have something interesting they thought be written on my body a few days later. Tommy’s writings and cartoons were often very poignant and thoughtful. I really wished my father could see this side of him.

      “We’re not going to wrestle tonight,” Tommy said one night when he picked me up. “We’ve got a job to do.”

      “What job?” I asked.

      Tommy usually drove with his knees so he could gesture with his hands while he talked. Now he turned toward me and slapped me on the shoulder. At first I thought he was trying to knock me out, but this was just a regular, friendly shoulder slap.

      “We’re going to steal a tiger and then sell him to this guy I know,” he told me.

      Tommy turned down a driveway and I saw a small house behind a thin stand of trees. He shut off his headlights but kept the car creeping up the driveway.

      “This is it,” Tommy said. “The guy keeps a tiger in a cage in his backyard, but he doesn’t feed it enough. It’s a totally bad situation.”

      I tried to get a better look inside the house, to see if it looked like there was anyone at home. There were no lights on, but I knew that didn’t mean a damn thing. Most tiger owners I knew liked to sit at their kitchen tables and clean their guns and knives by the light of the moon, and I could only assume this tiger owner was exactly the same, sitting in the dark and waiting for that time when he could use those super-clean guns and knives on anyone who tried to steal his pet.

      “After we knock it out we’re going to throw it in the back of the truck,” Tommy told me. “And then we’ll drive over to Randy’s. He’s going to keep the tiger in his basement to scare the shit out of people.”

      Tommy grabbed the bolt cutter and I followed. I was scared, but mostly what I was thinking about was how we’d get paid some good cash for this and how it would be great to slap a stack of bills down in front of my father and how that stack of bills might prompt my father to finally say he was proud of me.

      We walked over to the cage and Tommy was right, the tiger didn’t look good. The fur on its chest was rubbed raw and one of its eyes was glassed over with a cataract. His breath kept catching in its throat. The tiger brought its head up to the bars of the cage and I scratched him behind his ears.

      “Quit dicking around,” Tommy said. “Do it already.”

      I reached in the cage and pinched the back of the tiger’s neck and he slumped over. Tommy opened the lock and we hauled the tiger to the truck.

      “When we meet Randy, you need to be cool, okay?” Tommy told me as we drove. “Don’t be your normal dumbass self.”

      I hadn’t planned to say a word when we got to Randy’s house, because who hadn’t heard a story about a stolen tiger deal going sour and someone getting shot up? In my neighborhood you heard these kinds of stories all the time. I knew to keep my mouth shut.

      We pulled into the driveway and Randy came running out of his house. It was pretty cold outside to be shirtless and barefoot, but it didn’t look like it was bothering Randy all that much.

      “Where’s my guy?” he yelled to Tommy. “Where’s my guy?’

      The tiger was still out cold, his tongue lolling around. I could see where muscles had formerly filled his body, where his fur lay slack.

      Randy ran his hand over the bare spots on the tiger’s fur, then he slid his fingers up the tiger’s neck. He shifted his fingers around a couple of times. Then he did it again. He shook his head.

      “This tiger you brought me doesn’t have a goddamn pulse,” he said.

      Tommy put his fingers on the tiger’s neck, shifted them around.

      “It was alive when we stole it,” he said. “It must have died on the way here.”

      “You brought me a dead tiger,” Randy said as he walked back toward his house. “When you bring me a live tiger, you get your meth.”

      Tommy hadn’t said anything to me about us stealing the tiger in trade for drugs. I wondered if maybe Randy was mistaken, that maybe Randy had misunderstood Tommy when they’d struck their deal.

      “Don’t worry,” Tommy told me. “I’ll get this straightened out.”

      Tommy followed Randy inside. While I waited, I looked at the tiger. I felt bad about what we’d put it through, what everyone had put it through, that its last moments of life were bumping around in the back of a pickup instead of chasing down a water buffalo on the savannah. A minute or two later, Tommy walked out of the house, smiling.

      “I don’t know about you,” he said, holding up a dime bag, “but I’m sick of everything being stupid and boring.”

      Tommy shook some of the meth onto his knuckle and snorted. He held out the baggie to me. I also hated how boring and stupid our lives were now. More than that though, I hated how sometimes life threw you a curveball—how you thought you were going to make some money selling a stolen tiger to make your dad proud, but then all the sudden there were drugs instead of money and then you were probably going to relapse mostly because you didn’t want to disappoint your best friend who had recently drawn a very funny cartoon about an octopus on your ass cheeks that would not come off your body no matter how hard you scrubbed.

      “Before we go on this bender,” I told Tommy, “before this all happens, we need to bury the tiger.”

      “No problem,” he said.

      We drove back to my house and I snuck inside the garage and grabbed two shovels. Once when I was high I’d stolen my father’s old riding lawn mower. I pushed it out of the garage and started it up when I was a block away so he didn’t wake up. I drove the mower down the street, right up to the door of the pawnshop and sold it for eighty bucks. My father had bought another lawn mower recently and I ran my hand over it as I walked by, thinking how the new one was probably worth way more.

      Tommy and I had decided to bury the tiger by the river. We’d dig a hole and then maybe one of us would say some kind words. After that, after our shoulders ached from digging, we’d get high and drive to the bars downtown. We’d planned all this out already, but when I got back to the truck, I saw Tommy hoovering a line off the hood. The bag was already half gone.

      Tommy threw his hair out of his eyes and looked at me. “You’re judging me, aren’t you? I can feel