The Wild Things (2 page)

“Claire?”

Max looked in the kitchen, the living room, the basement. No sign of Claire. He walked upstairs and finally heard her.

“I
didn’t
show him. That’s the
point
,” she was saying.

She was on the phone when Max entered her room, the first words of his story about to leave his mouth. Before he could begin, though, she fixed him with a look of great venom. He tiptoed out quickly.

“But why would she
say
that? She’s totally lying!”

He waited outside her door. When she was finished, he’d tell her all about Mrs. Mahoney, his triumph, and together they’d plan some kind of prank on the loony lady.

But then again, why wait? Max knew Claire would want to hear this right away, and would thank him -- for saving her from that troublesome conversation and delivering her into a much better one -- just as soon as she heard Max’s tale. He walked back into her room and--

“Get out, goddammit!” she screamed.

He stood for a moment, so shocked he couldn’t move or speak. This wasn’t at all the way he’d pictured things happening.

“Get out!” she screamed again, twice as loud as before, and kicked the door closed in his face.

His rage was fathomless, and was directed, with all its awesome power, at Claire. What had he done? He’d walked into her room. He’d wanted to talk to her. It wasn’t right or fair for her to treat him like she did, and she knew it.

And now she was going to pay the price.

There was still enough snow for effective construction, so he decided to carve a fort, state of the art, out of the snowbank across the street. And when her friends showed up, Max would be ready, and all would be avenged. It would be ugly, but she’d asked for it.

He put on his snow clothes and ran across the street. Using his mom’s gardening trowel, he dug and dug into the snowmass, soon finishing the main inner chamber. It was big enough to fit him and maybe one other person his size, and with a roof high enough that he could sit up inside. With the trowel, he carved a long deep shelf in the inner wall of the cave, to hold snowballs and maybe food or books. If he could get an extension cord long and sturdy enough, he figured, he could set up a TV. But that would have to wait until later.

Into the wall facing his house he dug a narrow peephole. Now he had a perfect view of the driveway and the front door of his house. He would be ready when Claire’s friends showed up and did their usual thing of standing in the driveway, talking and pretending to know how to chew tobacco and then spitting and drooling the brown juice into the grey snow.

Max looked at his watch, noting that it was 4:15, which meant that he probably had another fifteen minutes before they arrived. Claire’s friends showed up -- when they did show up, because sometimes they didn’t, though they said they would -- at 4:30 or so every day, because one of the boys who always came, bed-headed and called Finn, had to do after-school detention every day of the year. Who would pick a guy like that up from detention just to enjoy his company? Claire and her idiot friends. They all waited at school for the fumbler named Finn, then came to Max’s house for some reason.

Max used the time to amass a vast arsenal. The snow was a perfect texture, just wet enough to be sticky. All he needed to do was grab a handful and it was already a snowball -- snowballs that almost made themselves. Each one he would pack tight from all sides, smooth over, pack again, smooth over again, and then put on the shelf. In ten minutes he had packed thirty-one snowballs and had run out of room on his shelf.

So he built another shelf.

With the remaining five minutes, Max decided he needed a flag on top of his fort, so he left the cave and stood and searched around the surrounding woods for a stick, and found one about four feet tall and as straight as a flagpole. He stuck it into the roof of the fort and then tied his hat onto it. He backed up and was satisfied that it truly almost looked like a flag -- a flag raised for a great nation and before a glorious and morally necessary battle.

At 4:30 he was back in the cool comfort of his fort, peering through the peephole, watching for any movement at his house. No, he wasn’t cold. One might think that a boy who was out in the snow for so long would get cold, but Max was not. He was warm, partly because he had on many layers, and partly because boys who are part wolf and part wind do not get cold.

At 4:38, a station wagon pulled into his driveway. It was a car he knew well, an ancient red station wagon one of the boys who came around drove. Two boys and a girl got out. One boy was the bed-headed one named Finn. Another always wore black; this was Carlos. The girl was named Meika, and Max loved her without boundary.

Max could make out parts of a conversation as they walked into his house.

“Did Tonya tell you she didn’t do it?” Meika said.

“Yeah, she did,” Carlos said.

“That doesn’t mean we believe her,” Finn said.

The front door opened and Claire emerged.

“Speak of the devil,” Carlos said.

“What?” Claire said, and they all laughed.

Claire pretended to laugh, too, and they all filed past her and into the house. A minute later they emerged again. They probably wanted to chew tobacco, and Claire knew not to allow it in the house; their mom could always tell, hours or days later. As the boys, and Claire, began their disgusting coughing and spitting, Max knew the stage was set. He knew what he had to do. “Okay. Okay,” he said to himself. “Okay.”

He snaked out of the fort’s entrance, making sure he was undetected by the four targets across the street. Now standing across the street, he looked closely at Claire and her friends and confirmed that he had not been detected. He reached back into the fort for his ammunition. He gathered the snowballs carefully into all of his available pockets. When his pockets were full, he placed the rest kangaroo-style in the front of his coat. He left twenty snowballs in the fort, in case he needed to replenish his supply later.

Now he had to get closer. He needed to cross the street and position himself in the neighbor’s yard. There, he would have a fence to protect himself from the enemy fire. But it was a long way across the street, and surely they would see him running no more than forty feet away.

Then he had an idea.

He took one of his smaller snowballs and threw it as far as he could. He could throw far -- he could throw a baseball forty-four miles an hour, according to the radar thing at the batting cages -- so the snowball, a small one, sailed over the heads of Claire and her friends and into the far-neighbor’s yard. When it landed, it made a loud scratchy sound and the four teenagers all turned to see where the sound had come from. While they were distracted, Max darted across the street and dove behind the other neighbor’s fence.

The plan worked. He was smarter than he could stand. He advanced quickly.

He was now only about twenty feet away from the enemy, with the neighbor’s fence obscuring them. The four teenagers were doing their business with the chewing tobacco, the boys putting it in their mouths, the girls saying, “That stuff’s nasty,” and then saying other things that were stupid and were not worth saying. All the while, none of them had any idea that they were about to endure a devastating assault.

Max dropped all his snowballs onto the ground below him, and placed a line of ammunition on the lower beam of the fence. He kept seven snowballs in his various pockets, in case he needed to advance on the enemy and finish them off.

Finally he was ready. He took a long breath, heaving out something like dragon steam, and he began.

He unleashed a barrage of five snowballs, one after the other, throwing them faster than even he thought possible. His arm was some kind of machine, like a tennis-ball cannon.

Boom!

Boom!

Boom!

One hit the bed-headed kid in the chest. The sound was incredible, a hollow pop against his puffy jacket.

“What the hell?” he yelled.

Another smacked Meika in the thigh.

“Ah! What the!” she gasped.

One thumped onto the station wagon’s windshield; again the sound was great. Two missed their targets completely but it didn’t matter -- Max was already unloading another barrage. Four more left his cannon-arm, and these hit Claire’s shoulder, the car’s roof and door, and Carlos, right in the groin. He doubled over. Fantastic.

“Who is that?” Claire yelled.

Max ducked behind the fence but not before the boys deduced that Max was the source of the assault. They had figured out his position. Max got another arsenal ready, but when he peeked over the fence again -- “There’s the little bastard!” one said -- he was met by an avalanche of snow, which fell upon his head and back with great force and speed. The boys had been fast, and deposited a boulder of snow over the fence and onto Max. The fight was moving beyond artillery and into hand-to-hand combat sooner than Max had expected.

“How’s that feel, wuss?”

“You hit me in the balls, idiot.”

If Max could run across the street, he would be safe. Even if they followed him across the street, they would never be able to find his well-hidden fort, much less penetrate his defenses. He took off.

“Run, little grasshopper! Run!” they said.

“Look at his little legs go!”

As he began running, he launched one last snowball, arcing it so high it disappeared into the sun before Max could see where it would land.

He ran, and was across the street before the boys had even decided to follow. He zig-zagged through the pines to throw them off the scent, and then heard the last snowball land with an icy smack.

“Max, you freak!” he could hear Claire saying. “You hit Meika in the face!”

That was a shame, Meika was the one he hadn’t wanted to hit at all. Maybe she would think him more muscular because he’d hit her in the face? Did it ever work that way? He thought maybe. Max grinned as he reached the entrance to the fort. Maybe Meika would kiss him and touch his neck because he hit her in the face with snow.

He looked out his peephole, and could see Claire helping Meika, who was crying, her face red and raw. Why would anyone cry about getting hit in the face with a ball of ice and snow falling from the sky after almost hitting the sun?

Max was disappointed in her. Girls were such girls. Pretty soon Meika would be crying all the time, about everything, which is what Max’s mom seemed to do. A few years ago Max had said “What’s wrong?” and “Don’t cry, Mom,” but now there didn’t seem to be a point.

“Where’d he go?” one of the boys said. Max could hear the voice, but couldn’t find its source through his peephole.

“Wait. Check out the flag,” said the other boy.

Max made a mental note: next time, no flag.

He heard the footsteps of the two boys very close to his fort. Man, they were fast. Now they were behind him. He turned around and could see their feet just beyond the entrance to the cave.

“He’s in there,” one said. “I can see his stupid boots.”

“Hey kid, you in there?” the other asked.

“He’s in there,” the first said again. “The boots, dude.”

“Come out, or we’ll get you out.”

Max was starting to worry. It really did seem like they knew where Max’s fort was, and that he was inside it. He was stuck if he stayed in the fort, and would probably be slaughtered if he left it. His options seemed few.

Now a hand was inside the fort. One of the boys had shoved his arm through the roof. How’d he do that? Max kicked it, hard, and it retreated.

“Ow! Now you’re dead, kid,” a voice said.

Then it was very quiet for a moment.

And Max could no longer see their feet.

He heard some giggling, then some shushing.

Then it was quiet for a very long moment.

Now footsteps on the roof. A bit of snow-dust fell from the ceiling. Max felt safe, though, knowing that there were many layers of well-packed snow between the roof and his chamber. They stepped and stepped. So what, Max thought. Step all you want.

Then they jumped.

The sound was like a low, loud cough.

They jumped again.

More snowdust fell from the ceiling. The roof drew closer to Max’s head. He shrunk down, now laying flat. But still the ceiling seemed to be falling.

The crunch of earth swallowing earth.

They jumped once more.

Then white. All was white.

And the cold, the cold! It was in his jacket, in his eyes, his nose, his pants. He couldn’t breathe. He could hear almost nothing. He was drowning.

Then he heard the laughing. The boys were laughing.

“Nice fort,” one said.

“Come out,” the other said.

Max couldn’t move. He wasn’t sure he was alive.

“Get up, little grasshopper,” a voice said.

Max couldn’t move.
Was
he alive?

“Oh crap,” said a voice.

The sounds of digging. Furious scratching above.

The weight on Max’s back lightened and he found himself being lifted out of the white. The boys were pulling him up, and soon he was in the air again, breathing the light air. But he had no strength. He couldn’t stand. He fell to the ground like a puppet.

Laying on the snow, he coughed and coughed. His eyes were soaked, his skin scorched. His eyes didn’t work, his mouth would not open. His lungs heaved, his throat burned.

“You okay?” one of them asked.

Max rose to his knees, but couldn’t speak. He choked on snow and phlegm. His heart seemed to have split itself, migrated northward, and was now beating in each of his ears.

Where was Claire? She should have been with him by now. Holding his shoulder. Rubbing his neck. Cupping her hands around his ears, blowing hotly to warm him as she did just a year ago, when he had fallen through the ice in the creek after the blizzard.

But Claire was not near. Max stood up and the snow in his jacket drained down his back. He shuddered and shook. He looked to his sister, but she was attending to Meika, and seemed ready to let Max, her brother, die in the middle of this colorless afternoon in December.

“You hurt, kid?” one of the boys said. The other one had already walked back to the car.