The Wilding (16 page)

A small fire not long ago burned through this plateau, making the trees sharp and black at their tops like diseased fangs. When Justin brushes against a pine, its shadow sticks to him. Boo races here and there, stirring up black dust and sniffing at invisible tendrils of scent. And then, as if they have stepped from one room to the next, they are past the scorched section of forest, walking again in the shade of red-barked ponderosas and lodgepoles.

A basalt cornice juts from the canyon wall and his father climbs out on it. Far below him, in the spots the sunlight has not yet warmed, vapors float up and finger the air. The trees down there appear so thickly huddled, the river scribing between them a silver path scarcely visible. His father coughs something from his lungs and spits it over the edge and follows its fall and laughs softly.

“Please come away from there, Dad.”

As if on cue, his father’s boot scuds against a knob of rock. He stumbles toward the edge, then jerks his body backward and finds his balance. He does not cry out. He does not retreat from the crag. He simply clears his throat and brings the rifle to his shoulder to glass the canyon below. He is so natural and fearless, standing casually at the edge of a two-hundred-foot drop, peering through his scope and cursing the big stags for hiding from him, the goddamned chickens.

“Would you come away from there?” Justin says.

“Why?”

“Because you’re making me nervous. And because there’s a better place over there.” Justin points to a nearby shady spot, a collection of boulders arranged in a kind of half-moon shape with several feet between them, where they could rest their rifles. “How about we go over there? Please.”

Sometimes dying in bed seems like the only thing that scares his father. He acknowledges what Justin said with a sigh and retreats from the ledge and tramps toward the boulders, where he says, “Now this is a good spot,” as if it were his discovery.

For the next hour they crouch behind the boulders, bracing their rifles upon them, glassing the canyon floor. Every now and then Justin glances at his son, sometimes reminding him to be careful, to keep his finger off the trigger unless he plans to shoot. “Do I look stupid?” he says to Justin and Justin says, “No. You look twelve.”

He remembers lying in bed with Karen, so many years ago, both of them naked and bathed in moonlight. At the time she was seven months pregnant and they were sweating, breathing heavily, having just made love. He was curled around her back, still inside her. One of his hands gripped her swollen breast and she grabbed it and pulled it down to her belly. “The baby,” she said. He felt a flutter beneath his palm and imagined the baby floating inside her, encased in a watery sac, its little hands and feet fighting against it. He was not a religious man, but in the dark, with the baby moving and the warm buzz of sex playing through his veins, he could believe in anything, so he offered up a prayer for his son. He prayed that nothing would ever harm him, that the boy would grow into a happy, healthy man. He hopes the prayer somehow imprinted itself into his bones and blood, like something Karen consumed, its nutrients broken down and filtered through a cord into Graham, helping him along, even now.

The sun continues its slow path across the sky and casts its light into the canyon at such an angle that the west side is bathed in crisp yellow light, the east as dark as night. Through Justin’s scope, among the columns of light between the shadows of the trees, he spots a buck, his color blending so perfectly with the stone and dirt Justin can only see him when he moves. There is great beauty in the way his muscles work under his hide. He is feeding at the edge of a meadow, and when he angles into it, Justin gets that feeling you get before you kill. Twitchy. His skin tingles. He experiences a warm rush of blood behind the eyes that feels a little like an erection. Everything in the world goes blurry except for his target, so distinct he can see every hair and sharp-edged horn. He could squeeze the trigger now, but something makes him pull his face away from the scope, wanting to share the moment with his son.

Here he is, expecting to advise Graham, maybe put an arm around his shoulder and guide the line of his rifle. But the boy has already spotted the deer. Justin can tell from the stillness of his body. He is like a hawk on a telephone pole, staring through his scope with utter attentiveness.

Justin watches him in silence. There is something in his son’s face. A tightening of his jaw and a flaring of his nostrils that foretells what will come. He isn’t going to ask permission. He is going to shoot. It makes him seem faraway and unfamiliar. He is so enchanted by the desire to kill—the same acute and forceful feeling that drove primitive man to bring a blade of obsidian to a stick and sharpen it—that his current life, his school and his bicycle and his bedroom with the desk scored from the snarl of his pencil and the giant beer mug filled with brown pennies and the movie-monster posters hanging on the wall, has become nothing but a tiny black fly he brushes aside with his hand before bringing it to the stock and tightening his finger around the trigger.

Earlier, his grandfather explained to him the importance of accuracy. “One shot,” he said. “One kill.” If you don’t kill the animal straight off, it would twist and cry out and bound off into the woods and you would have to follow the puddles of blood until at the base of some tree you would find it, its eyes looking at you, asking
why?

Justin expects him to miss. It is, after all, more than a two-hundred-yard shot, downhill. Justin again sights the buck with his scope and brings that faraway world closer and waits for the crack of the rifle. Before he hears the bullet, he witnesses its destination, as the buck jackknifes in the air, and, after it lands, takes off running in a crooked way. The gunshot follows, loud like the kind of sound the sky would make if it broke open.

“You got him,” Justin says and puts his hand in Graham’s hair, proud and saddened.

“I killed it?”

“We’ll see. You got him. I know that much.”

Maybe it is a trick of the light, a shadow thrown by the pine boughs that reach over them, but his face seems to have subtly darkened. He says, “But it kept running.” Justin can’t tell if Graham is bothered more by the possibility of its escape or its imminent death.

“That’s the way it works.” Justin explains that if he got in a good shot, the deer will run only a little while and then collapse and flop a few times before quitting. It strikes Justin as backward, explaining death to someone after giving them permission to kill. Not for the first time, he hopes he hasn’t made a mistake, bringing the boy.

Justin’s father stands beside them and scans the canyon below. “Somebody tell me exactly what happened.”

“Graham shot a buck. Five-pointer, I think.”

His father scratches absently at his belly. His mouth widens and tightens and can’t seem to settle on a single emotion, expressing at once his elation and perplexity. “I didn’t see anything.”

“It was there. He shot it.”

“So you saw it, too?” This seems to almost anger him. “Why didn’t I see it?” A gust of wind comes along and pops his hat off his head. It rolls a few feet from him before he retrieves it and fits it back in its place. “I wish I had seen it.”

“It’s gone now.” Graham raises the rifle so fluidly to scan the canyon, it is like a natural extension of his body.

The first time Justin killed anything—a robin with a BB gun—he felt a black stone in his throat and wetness in his eyes. He studies his son now. What Justin witnessed before in his face—hunger—has vanished, but Graham doesn’t look as though he is going to cry. If his eyes are wet it is only from the wind. He looks pale and deflated and a little disappointed in himself, like a man who has run over a dog, who has listened to its body crumple moistly beneath the tires of his truck and now realizes he must park on the roadside and drag its body into the ditch.

KAREN

She isn’t used to restaurants like this one, a former blacksmith shop renovated into a California-chic lounge and restaurant. The walls are brick and basalt, roughly mortared. The chairs are black leather. The tables, darkly polished pine. The dim lighting is made a little brighter by the many mirrors staggered throughout the dining area. In her water glass floats a slice of lemon that sheds pulp and leaks yellow blood. When the waiter lays her napkin across her lap, she isn’t sure whether to say
thank you
or
back off.

Across from her sits Bobby Fremont. Since last week, when he asked her out to lunch, she hasn’t thought much about what she is doing—about what it means to secretly agree to a meal with a man other than her husband—but on the drive over she made herself imagine a scenario where they laughed about local politics, talked about their favorite television shows, and ate salads. But now here they are and his eyes never seem to leave her, his gaze hungry and probing, slipping her blouse over her head, unhooking her bra, hiking up her skirt. She feels at once flattered and debased. Maybe that’s why she’s here—to feel that way.

Bend is a small enough town that she looks around often, looks for a familiar, wondering face. What she would say to a friend or neighbor or colleague, she isn’t sure. She lifts her water to her mouth. Ice clatters against her teeth. She has drained her glass already.

Her husband is several hundred miles away, and the distance feels good. It feels right. As though they ought to be separated. Justin prefers not to talk about how things have soured between them, but once in a while, when he is in a foul mood or has sucked down a few beers, she can get him to fight. “You’re not the person I married,” he said a few weeks ago. She didn’t argue.

He thought it was about the baby. It wasn’t. The baby was just a black doorway that took her into a far room of the house where the windows offered a different view. She is unhappy. She does not enjoy her life as it is, and she thinks her marriage has something to do with this. Sometimes she feels guilty about wanting to escape. She has, after all, what most would call an enviable life. A beautiful child, a good job, a nice house. She has her looks and her health. She lives in the shadow of the mountains. Sometimes she reviews this list, counting off on her fingers all the things she
ought
to be grateful for. She tries to smile. But when she smiles the smile feels more like a fissure that leads down her throat to some darkness inside her.

She likes to go online and plug in to Google terms like “bubonic plague” and “genocide” and “elephantiasis” and even “irritable bowel syndrome.” She scrolls through the Web sites and gasps at the photographs and momentarily feels better.

The waiter—a red-haired twenty-something with sideburns—appears at their tableside and sets their plates before them: the ribeye for Bobby, pan-seared halibut for her. The waiter asks if there is anything he can do for them—more water? “Yes,” she says. The same word spoken to Bobby when he called and asked if she was busy, if she would like to meet him for lunch. Yes. Automatically. Not thinking, just responding. She isn’t sure what else she will say yes to—she isn’t sure even what else she should say, as they sit across from each other, his gaze steadily trained on her, seeking out her eyes—her eyes darting around the room, focusing on nothing and everything.

She has known Bobby for years. Every time she and her husband went to a party or an opening or a fund-raiser, there he was, moving through the room, clapping shoulders, shaking hands. Some people complained about the way Bend has changed, the way Bobby has changed it, the big parking lots and boxy buildings of their new outdoor mall, the hurriedly constructed housing developments with the same five neo-Tudor designs replicated over and over.

The two of them had never exchanged a
How are you?
a
Lovely to see you,
until two weeks ago, when she met a girlfriend at Deschutes Brewery. One pint turned into three. She never got out anymore and the beer was so cold and she was so thirsty and when she got off her stool she had to concentrate to keep from stumbling. She felt warm and loose. The music called down from the overhead speakers and made her want to dance. Minutes later, she walked out of the bathroom and directly into Bobby. “Oopsie,” he said and caught her, his hands on her waist, his face an inch from hers. She could feel the heat coming off him. He is much older than she, but handsome and fit and powerfully confident. She kissed him then. Full on the mouth. And he had kissed her back, but first he laughed, and when he did, she could feel the laughter inside of her. And that was it. She pulled away and returned to her stool and grabbed her purse and said good-bye to her friend and didn’t look back. The next morning she did not feel regretful so much as she worried that someone had seen them, that Bobby would say something or want more than what she gave him.

Now here they are. His smile, crowded with too-white teeth, is a dare. This lunch is a dare.

Her legs bounce beneath the table. She ran ten miles this morning and still she wants to move, to race along the sidewalks that snake through town. She has so much energy. She aches with it. She remembers feeling this way as a teenager. Growing pains, her mother called it.

“So?” Bobby says, wiping his mouth with his napkin.

“So.”

He raises his eyebrows and she puzzles over something to say. She hasn’t been on a date—is that what this is?—in more than a dozen years. “Tell me something you learned recently.” This is what she usually asks Graham at dinner. She wants to hit herself, to bring the palm of her hand to her forehead with a smack.

“Ooh,” he says. “Good question.”

“Really?”

He saws off a hunk of steak and pops it in his mouth. He does not set down his fork or knife but holds them upright while chewing noisily. “Here you go. Here’s something.” He still hasn’t swallowed but that doesn’t stop him. “I was out at a real estate site the other day, a place I’m thinking about buying. The owner took the agent and me down a narrow dirt road in the middle of nowhere—truly—middle of fucking nowhere—into a gulch. So we’re poking around and find these wires and cans with holes drilled in them. Apparently the buckaroos used to use this as a place to catch wild horses. We’re talking early twentieth century. They’d drive the horses into the canyon where other men would be waiting. As the panicked horses dashed in, the buckaroos pulled the wires taut from where they were lying on the ground. The wires had strips of fabric on them and cans filled with pebbles. The horses would believe they were suddenly fenced in. And if they brushed up against the wire, the pebbles would rattle loudly in the cans and scare them. Isn’t that neat?”

“That is. Neat.”

He swirls the wine in the goblet, sniffs deeply, sips, and pops his lips. When he speaks again, his tone has shifted from awe to contempt. “What a bunch of stupid horses. And what a simple concept to capture them.” His eyes, already on her, seem to narrow their focus. “No need for trees or wood or axes or hours of labor or waiting for the smell of men to fade away.”

She gulps some of her water.

“No riding broken horses to exhaustion chasing a bolting herd.”

She gulps some more, and then her glass is empty again except for ice, the lemon buried beneath it like a drowned canary. She glances around the restaurant for their waiter and can’t find him and when she looks again at Bobby she finds his eyes still on her.

“What about you?” he says.

She has to pee, she realizes. “What about me?” Her hair is down. She never wears her hair down anymore. It feels alien, brushing against her face, obscuring her peripheral vision. She feels masked by it, hidden. A good thing. With the restaurant full and people walking by on the street, there are so many chances someone might spot her.

“What have you learned?”

“Oh. Let’s see.” Her eyes drop to his plate, the forest of broccoli along its edge. “Did you know broccoli is one of the gassiest things you can eat?” Her mouth seems to belong to someone else. She cannot understand why she said this. Maybe because she doesn’t care? But if she didn’t care she wouldn’t want to climb under the table right now in embarrassment.

His smile breaks for a second before reasserting itself on his face. “Note to self.” He turns his plate so that the broccoli is at the far side of it.

“Sorry.”

“For what?”

“I’m just not used to this.”

“It’s fine.”

“Is it?”

Bobby knifes into the steak again. “We’re just having lunch.”

“Is that all we’re having?”

She likes the way Bobby looks at her, so intently and so differently from her husband, whose eyes don’t seek her out, always focused elsewhere, on a book, a pile of papers, the window. She sometimes wishes she could snatch them out of his head and train them on her. “Just
look
at me when I’m talking to you.” But she also knows that when he does look at her—hungrily, as she steps out of the shower and pulls the towel off the bar—she wishes he would go away. Maybe because that’s the only company of hers he seems to crave; otherwise, they could remain in their separate rooms for all he cared. That’s what it felt like anyway. She’s mixed up; they’re mixed up. She knows it.

“You want to know what else I’ve learned? I’ve learned that everyone has two faces. There is the outside face, the mask they wear for the world, and the inside face, the one that comes out when the blinds are down and the doors are closed.”

“Is that so?”

“It is. It is so. Let me give you an example. Do you know Tom Bear Claws?”

“The Indian. The one who hates you.”

“The very same. Did you know that he doesn’t hate me and I don’t hate him? That we’re in fact friends and business partners? Did you know that?”

“I don’t understand.”

“That’s because you only know the outside face.” He lifts his wine goblet and holds it up so that one of his eyes, oversize and bowled, looks through the glass at her. “Outside face, inside face.”

“I guess.”

She looks outside, where a cloud scuds over the sun, darkening the world. Her reflection takes form in the window. Her hair is covering most of her face, but she can see her lips and they’re red and upturned in a strange smile. She hasn’t seen this woman in a long time and barely recognizes her.

“You look beautiful, you know.”

She barks out a laugh.

“What?”

“Say that again.”

“You look beautiful?”

“I haven’t heard it in a long time. It’s nice to hear it.”

In dreams, sometimes you have to run—something is chasing you—but no matter how hard you try, your body responds as if tied down by leaden weights. She felt that way a lot. She felt she was slogging through a waking dream. But nothing was chasing her. Instead she was chasing something, maybe just a feeling: buoyancy.

She wasn’t sure what you called this. A midlife crisis. A seven-year itch that rashed out five years late. She feels bored, resentful, claustrophobic, weighed down.

Bobby says, “What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”

She smiles and tips her head—she can’t decide if he is being silly or charming. It is the sort of question a boy might have asked her, long ago, when parked on top of Pilot Butte, the stars above and the lights of the city below equally bright.

“I don’t know.” She wants to say her son pulled from between her legs and laid between her breasts, the blood still pumping between them through a cord, but she doesn’t. Instead she picks up her glass and swirls the ice in it. “You?”

“You.”

“Oh, boy. You know how to lay it on thick, don’t you?”

“Hey, I mean it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’re stunning. You really are.”

She realizes she is toying with her hair, tossing it, coiling a strand of it around a finger and letting it swing loose. “I’m married, Bobby.”

“I don’t really believe in marriage. I’ve tried it three times, you know, so I’m kind of an expert on the matter. And in my mind, it doesn’t make sense. It’s not how we work. You want to wear the same pair of pants—or eat the same meal—your entire life? I love this ribeye, but I’d hate it if I ordered it every day.”

“So I’m meat to you?” She isn’t sure of her tone, whether flirting or mocking.

“We’re all meat, Karen. But I only meant it as an analogy.”

When the check comes, she reaches for it even though she knows he will insist. Reaching for it momentarily reasserts some sense of control. And then his hand is there, on top of hers, heavy and tanned and wormed over with veins. “That’s mine,” he says.

She concedes the check by withdrawing her hand.

“Let’s go back to my place,” Bobby says, not asking, telling. “Get a drink?”

She glances at her watch without even noting the time. “I don’t think so.”

“You have something better to do?”

“I need to go running.”