The Wilding (19 page)

JUSTIN

After Graham finishes his dinner and sets his plate aside, he pulls out his book—
Wildlife of the Pacific Northwest
—and begins to flutter through its pages before settling on one. Justin asks him what he is reading about and he says, “I’m reading about mule deer.”

“When you get a second, tell me what it says about bears.”

Graham flips to the glossary and studies it a moment before finding the correct page number. Then he thumbs open the book to that section and presses down on the spine so that the pages lie flat. His eyes lift to meet Justin’s. “You want me to read it to you? Out loud?”

“Sure.”

When he reads, he traces each line with his finger, telling them in an almost singsong voice that bears have shaggy fur and rudimentary tails and plantigrade feet. They have acute hearing and a keen sense of smell that can decipher dead meat at a distance of at least seven miles. He tells them how a bear’s ears don’t grow with its body—remaining the same size, from cub to silverback—so you can measure the age of a bear like so: the smaller the ears appear in relation to its head, the older the animal.

They are among the most behaviorally complex of animals. “Practically as smart as humans,” Graham says and his grandfather emits a low growl as if in agreement.

Justin says, “Out of curiosity, what does it say in there about grizzlies?”

His father says, “Why?”

“You remember how a few months ago those girls got attacked by a bear? At Cline Falls? People were saying it was a grizzly and—”

“No grizzlies in Oregon.”

“I know, but—”

“Not since the Depression. That’s the last time anybody bagged one anyway.”

“I’m just curious, okay? What’s the harm in looking it up?”

In response his father takes a swig of beer and then rolls his head around on his shoulders, cracking his neck.

“Just look it up,” Justin says.

Graham waits for his grandfather to object and then turns a few more pages and begins to read again.
“ ‘Ursus arctos horribilis.’ ”
He butchers the pronunciation, but when he looks at Justin for approval, he nods so that the boy will continue. Graham tells them how grizzlies feed on berries, bulbs, roots, rodents, pine nuts, moose, elk, mountain goats, sheep, and the occasional human. “Basically everything.” They have concave faces. Their paws are black with wrinkled skin on the pads and their claws are long and curved and used for digging up roots and excavating den sites. They have a distinguishing shoulder hump. This hump is actually a mass of muscle that enables them to swing their paws with such remarkable striking force. They live in Alaska, Canada, Idaho, Montana, Washington, and Wyoming. “So we’re safe, huh, Dad?” He pauses here to take a sip of beer as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

A minute ago his grandfather scraped up a handful of dirt and now he is flinging pinches of it at Justin, dirtying his chest, his lap. Justin brushes it away and ignores him until he reaches for another handful.

“Why are you doing that?”

“Dunno.”

“Well, quit it.”

He smiles and readjusts his weight and looks around as if for something else to throw.

“Hold on,” Graham says. “There’s a footnote.” His eyes drop to the bottom of the page. “ ‘The North Cascades Recovery Area is located in Washington. Its ten thousand square acres are bound by the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, the I-90 corridor, and the east border of the Wenatchee-Okanogan National Forest and the Loomis State Forest. The grizzly population here has more than tripled in the past ten years and the Forest Service predicts the number to grow exponentially and for the bear to eventually reclaim its place in North America.’ ”

Boo stands up then and studies the forest as if heeding a way-off call silent to all ears but his own. His tail wags hesitantly and then he huffs, an almost bark. Justin’s father pats the dog on the head. “Good boy.” He doesn’t seem the slightest bit curious about what the dog has smelled or seen. He is too busy concentrating on his beer as it rises from his thigh to his mouth. The dog regards him before whining again and running his tongue across his snout as if he can taste as well as smell something in the air.

“Listen to this,” Graham says with the trace of a smile on his lips. “ ‘You are a hundred times more likely to die of a bee sting than a bear attack, and a hundred thousand times more likely to die in a traffic accident.’ ”

In this halo of fire surrounded by so much darkness, Justin does not feel reassured. If their bear is a grizzly, he wonders what has drawn it down from Washington—the warmer weather? The endless supply of garbage cans and Dumpsters? The trout-filled rivers? Hunger has to be the reason. It is always the reason.

His father stands from his chair and moves about the fire and it throws his shadow on the woods like the shape of a prowling animal. “I need a drink.”

“You’ve already got a drink.”

“A real drink.” He rifles around in their makeshift kitchen until he locates the bottle of Jack. He holds it up and examines it, like a translucent agate, then gives it a swish. The poison sacs swirl whitely in the whiskey. “Anybody thirsty?” he says with a sickle of a smile cutting his cheeks.

“I think that’s a really, really bad idea.”

“Always the life of the party,” he says, as if to himself. “My son.”

“Let me remind you what happened earlier today.” Justin is using his paternal voice, he realizes, the voice he uses on Graham when he forgets to take out the trash or neglects to mow the lawn. “You, bent in half, unable to breathe, with something—I don’t know what—going haywire inside of you.”

He finds his seat again. The lawn chair groans beneath his weight and Boo lifts his head from his paws to regard him, then yawns and clacks his teeth. “I’ll just take one tiny little sip,” he says. With his fingers he indicates how small a sip it will be before unscrewing the cap. “For medicinal purposes. It’ll burn all the badness out of me.” He raises the bottle in a toast and takes in a mouthful of liquor and smacks his lips and shrugs his shoulders. “Don’t taste any different.”

He grows quiet after that. Warily, Justin watches him. A minute later, his eyes blink and reblink as if to find their focus. The occasional shiver runs through him. He shakes his legs and stares into the fire, as if ready to race away from the flames should they flare up and singe him. The cocktail has affected him in an unsettling way, but Justin doesn’t see what any further pestering can accomplish save elevating his heart rate, so he keeps his eyes sharply trained on him, waiting for him to slump over.

He never does. It no doubt helps that he weighs two-sixty and carries around a belly full of food. After twenty minutes, the worst of it has worked through him, and he grows still and meditative. His stare burns through the haze of the heat waves rising from the flames. “I can’t feel my lips,” is all he says during this time, so softly Justin isn’t sure he says anything.

When some wood cracks and pops, sparks swirl up to join the stars. Justin looks up in time to see one of them fall and go sizzling across the sky, briefly brightening the night like autumn lightning. Then comes another. A meteor shower. Justin tells everyone to look. Each flash of light is perpetually renewed by another star and then another star coming loose and streaking into brightness and then nothingness.

“There’s one,” Justin says and Graham says, “That was a good one.”

Then the moon rises and blots out the stars. It has a white ring around it, making it look like a great celestial eye, staring down on them. An owl swoops in and out its light.

Graham rises to his feet, a little unsteadily. Justin remembers his first beer. He drank it on a hunting trip such as this. His joints had felt oiled. His head, warm and cloudy. When he coughed he saw fireflies floating around the edges of his vision. Funny, how people go numb over time. How, when they’re young, such a small tease can affect their systems so powerfully. A can of beer reducing you to giggles. A glimpse of an underwear ad in the newspaper furnishing you with a hard-on so rigid it feels as though it’s going to snap.

“There he is,” Justin’s father says, talking about Graham but looking at Justin. “There he is—all grown up. That’s my boy.”

Graham has a hollow-boned build, like his mother. From the dopey grin sliding across his face, Justin can tell he is feeling what Justin would feel after working his way through a six-pack. “How about a picture?” he says, with a kind of sway and swing to his voice. “I haven’t taken many pictures. And I’d like to take one.”

Graham walks to the other side of the fire and Justin readies to catch him, but the boy makes it there without stumbling and lifts his camera to his face and says, “Cheese.” He smiles as if he were the subject of the photo and Justin leans toward his father and lifts his beer as the light of the flash washes over them and temporarily keeps the night at bay.

Just then Boo comes trotting out of the dark, grinning around a bone with a strip of denim sticking to it. Justin’s father says, “Release,” and takes the bone and stands there, holding it, staring at it, not knowing what to do. Boo pants and wags his whole body along with his tail and Justin’s father looks at him. What he is feeling now, Justin doesn’t know. His emotion is masked, hidden behind his beard.

Justin wakes in the small hours of the night to a vivid sense of danger. He reaches out and touches his son, not to rouse him but to feel him, to know he is there. Every nerve in his body has gone alert. The frogs seem unnaturally loud in their drumming and the darkness beyond the flap of his tent seems too still.

It is that old hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck sensation. You just know. Justin knows something stands outside, maybe only a few feet away, studying the tent. He concentrates on his ear, opening it up to accept every sound, trying to blot out the rumble of the river and determine whether it is a hand or a paw or the wind brushing up against the tent.

He might wait ten minutes or he might wait an hour—it’s hard to tell, as he floats in a gray zone between waking and dreaming—and then he notices, only inches away from his cot, the tent wall is moving, denting inward. This is not the wind. This is a compacted pressure—rounded and growing in size, coming slowly toward him. A snout or a paw. A snout, he decides, when he hears a sharp exhalation—
huff
—against the canvas. He is sitting up in his cot and leaning away from the indention, only an inch from his face. It has stretched the canvas to its limit. A stake is preventing it from going any farther. He imagines it coming loose in the soil, allowing the snout to press forward, into him. He imagines what is waiting on the other side—a muscled head—wider than his torso—bearing a button black nose that he can presently hear sniffing and blowing as it explores the scent of the tent and guesses at what lies hidden inside it. And he imagines, finally, his face snatched off like a mask, swallowed in a lathery slurp.

He feels a scream in his throat and dampens it to a whimper by clamping his jaw so tightly that something clicks behind his ear. It is all he can do to keep from rolling out of his sleeping bag, shouting a warning, waking his father from his slumber, so that they might snatch up their rifles and fire in tandem.

Instead he does something he doesn’t completely understand. His hand rises. He watches it climb, shaking, like a bird blown by an updraft, toward the snout, which has by this time darkened the canvas with its saliva, making a design like a melted bat. His hand pauses and he holds his breath before touching it as gently as he has ever touched anything.

Immediately it pulls away and the canvas returns in a slow snap to its original shape. He waits for what must be the longest silence of his life, certain the tent is about to collapse all around them or tear open with a sudden slash.

Then he hears what must be its tongue licking its chops—the saliva popping and hissing in an almost electric way. The clacking of big teeth coming together. A snort. And a shushing as it slinks away, its paws dragging through the grass.

After another minute he rises from his cot and draws aside the flap and peers outside. There is no moon. The stars offer meager light. The darkness seems anchored among the woods and so the woods seem to possess the night.

He thinks of the Cline Falls attack—and how one of the girls granted Z-21 an exclusive interview after she was discharged from the hospital. Her parents sat on either side of her on their living room couch. They held her hands and nodded along with her account with concerned looks on their faces. She wore a ball cap when she talked about waking up to a growling noise. She remembered the tent collapsing all around her, the weight of the bear pressing down on her. She remembered its huge black shape against the starlit sky, knocking her down when she tried to run. Its hot breath when it took her head into its mouth, gnawing, trying to find a way into her. She could not feel anything at this point, she reassured the reporter. She was too jacked-up with fear to feel. She could only
hear.
Its heavy panting all around her. And the noise of its teeth against her skull, like a rake dragged over concrete. Eventually it spit her out and shambled off, leaving her alone and weeping. She took off her hat then and showed the reporter how her scalp had healed into a vast scar that looked like chewed bubblegum of flavors strawberry and grape.

The black obscurity of the night invites thoughts such as this. And Justin cannot help but imagine a fate far worse than the girl’s. Someone, months from now, will find his jacket at the mouth of a cave, torn and spotted with blood. In a pile, maybe near a primitive hearth, there will be bones, piled one on top of the other, all of them scarred with spindly little lines—from teeth—cracked open with all the marrow sucked from them.

KAREN

When she rolls over in bed and her arm flops across the empty stretch of mattress, her hand in the hollow of his indented pillow—when she pulls aside the blankets and walks naked through the house, the blinds pulled, only the sunlight peeking around the edges of them—when she grinds only enough beans for half a pot of coffee—when she paws through the newspaper and scatters its sections messily—she finds she does not miss her family, not at all.

For breakfast she eats an apple sliced over cottage cheese. She washes this down with a short mug of coffee. The apple is organic and the cottage cheese is organic and the coffee is organic and fair trade. With every swallow, she imagines she can feel the goodness of the food breaking down inside her, dissolving into nutrients that build her body up instead of break it down. Then she pulls on her sports bra and shorts, slides her feet into her sneakers, and double-knots the laces. She is out the door, on the porch, where she spends the next few minutes stretching, the bands of her muscles as tight as her skin in the cool mountain air.

She hopes Graham is doing all right, especially with that son-of-a-bitch grandfather, who bullies him as if he were his own, just another version of Justin, one he can mold to his liking, make into more of a man. She really wishes his heart would just give out. The world, she thinks, would be better off. She knows this is an awful thing to think, but she can’t help but think it about him.

She will run ten miles today—pounding up and down Awbrey Butte, looping past Drake Park on her way through downtown—and then walk another mile to cool down. She checks her watch and expects to be back in a little over an hour.

She starts by jogging a slow pace. After the first hundred yards, her joints—at first stiff, as if clotted with rust—stop clicking and protesting. Her muscles go warm and loose with blood. Her pace quickens, her legs and arms arranged in sharp angles, scissoring the air. The sound her sneakers make on pavement matches the pounding of her heart. She takes in deep lungfuls of cool air that breathe out hot.

She is in the best shape of her life. Sometimes she stands naked before the mirror and studies her body. She is deeply tan except for the starkly defined paleness from her shorts and sports bra, her skin as white and damp after a hard run as something drawn from a shell. She stretches or walks in place just to see her body move and ripple, as if there was something trapped beneath the thin sheath of her skin.

She likes the way she looks. And she knows other people do, too, knows her effect on men. She cannot go to Blockbuster without being trailed by a clerk asking if she prefers comedies or romance, cannot visit the grocery store without a stocker asking if she needs help finding anything. She likes the way she can turn a head, earn a smile. But there is a very thin line that divides feeling powerful and powerless, like now, when the man in the red Dodge truck slows to pace her. She tries to ignore him. He makes that impossible by rolling down his window, yelling, does she know how to drive stick?

She doesn’t look at him but yells back, “I know how to read a license plate number.”

With that he curses something, lost to the wind and the roar of the engine when he stomps on the accelerator. She wonders why so many men go through life thinking of themselves as predator and women as prey? She wonders where this comes from, this hunger, whether it is taught or inborn, a tooth-and-claw impulse that comes from that far-off time when we loped through the woods and slumbered in caves. Maybe this is why she enjoyed the locksmith so much. She could tell he desired her—but he was so small, which made his desire feel like a child’s, almost cute, certainly harmless.

Of course she sees the same cruel hunger even in children, sees it in the schools she visits as a nutritionist. The other day, she was at Obsidian Junior High, seated at a table in the cafeteria with a junk food display. She had all sorts of gross-out trivia available, including a pile of fat, candlewax yellow, in a glass container—and a sign that equated it to a Whopper, large fries, and chocolate shake at Burger King. Every once in a while a student would stop by and say, “Gross,” or “How’s it going, Mrs. C?” but mostly they ignored her, walking by, their trays piled high with Tater Tots and fried chicken tenders. In the swirl of bodies, one girl caught her attention, a pimply girl with frizzy brown hair and a hen-shaped body. She looked already middle-aged, though couldn’t have been more than fourteen. She sat with her friends, all of them a little off, their eyeglasses thick and their teeth crooked, their haircuts and their clothes homemade. They were playing some sort of game—Pokemon or Magic, one of those—and the hen-shaped girl was standing up, bending over to study a cluster of cards. At a neighboring table, a group of boys wearing Nike apparel began to hoot and snicker and point their fingers, and at first Karen thought they were just being boys, just making some mean idiotic boy joke about a big ass. Then she noticed the red stain that crept down the thigh of the girl; she was wearing pale blue jeans against which the blood looked impossibly bright. She was having her period. She was having her period and didn’t realize it, hadn’t worn a pad, maybe never needed one before now.

At first Karen did nothing. She wasn’t a teacher and wasn’t permanently based at any school, so she felt sometimes separate from what went on in the hallways and classrooms. So she watched the boys laughing and sneering, watched one of them dip a Tater Tot in ketchup and hurl it at the girl, watched it strike her head, clinging wetly to her hair. And then he threw another, and another, and soon the rest of the boys joined in, pelting the girl, her hair and back and ass. Karen watched all of this as if it were happening on television, as if the girl were a lame wildebeest and the boys long-jawed crocodiles. It was only after the girl began to stagger away with a slack expression on her face—wiping her hands across her shirt and pants, trying to clean away but instead smearing the ketchup—that Karen jumped up and raced toward the boys and slammed her hand down on their table and said to stop it—stop it, damn it—they ought to be ashamed of themselves.

She fears for the girl. She will grow paler and fatter as time progresses. She will go to the community college. She will move into a one-bedroom apartment, and in its living room, an old wood-paneled television will stand along one wall, and along the other, guinea pigs, cages and cages of them stacked up like apartments. The carpet will be littered with wood shavings and shit pellets. She will work at the library or the DMV and her co-workers will talk behind her back about how she smells like celery and cedar and urine. She will die alone. This depresses the hell out of Karen. Because she knows the girl could do better. There are so many routes to run, so many paths to choose.

Karen thinks about that often, the many different lives that could have been available to her. She could have married the boy she dated in high school, Doug, the lineman with the blue eyes, small teeth, and long, thin penis, in which case she might have stayed in Portland and died with him when a few years ago he head-onned a logging truck coming over the Santiam Pass. Or she might have used her college fund to travel to Europe, where she imagined herself walking slowly through museums and wearing tight black jeans and eating chocolate croissants at outdoor cafés. Or a few years ago she might have forgotten to change the batteries in the smoke detector and not known soon enough about the grease fire she started when she left the bacon on the stove too long and maybe the smoke inhalation would have left her brain damaged or maybe the flames would have scorched her face and made it appear melted. And within each of those possibilities nested a million other possibilities, every one of them dependent on whether a phone was answered, a step was icy, a door was locked, every one of them resulting in a different Karen, all the different versions of herself branching outward through time like the jumble of roadways and dirt paths available to her now, as paved with ambition as they are potholed and roadblocked with limitation, so that sometimes she feels she truthfully shouldn’t even bother and might as well lie on the couch all day and shovel Cherry Garcia ice cream into her mouth.

Trees wall the roads she runs. Sunlight flashes through their branches and through the sunlight fall browned needles from the ponderosas and yellowed leaves from the birches and aspens. The rings on a tree, she knows, tell a story. A wet year brings a fat ring. A fire or disease or drought brings a thin ring. The tree grows around barbed wire, around stones, around snapped saw blades, swallowing them. She once heard a story of a logger who found a tooth deep inside a tree. She didn’t used to be so poisonous in her thinking. When she thinks of the toxins built up inside of her from so many years of eating carelessly, of the resentment that has grown steadily over fifteen years of marriage, of the stretch marks and the varicose veins that came from two pregnancies, only one of them fulfilled, she thinks the inside of her body must tell a story like a tree. Were she to break open a bone, perhaps it would look like the inside of a coffee mug—riddled with lines, stained with brown blotches.

She runs on gravel shoulders and she runs on mountain bike paths and she runs on county two-lane. The tunnel of trees opens up—cut away in squares of browned grass that extend to porches busy with pumpkins and straw bales—and next to the narrow asphalt lane a sidewalk appears and she runs along it as the houses grow closer and closer together. Five crows balance on a fencepost, watching her approach. When she passes by, one of the crows opens its wings and makes a high, keening sound.

Her feet thud against cement. She once read that every time she took a running step, her knee absorbed eight times her body weight. That was over nine hundred pounds. She is amazed by this, the thousands of pounds she forces upon her body every run, the resilience of her body. It makes her feel powerful. Not like her job, her marriage, where she sometimes feels like a mannequin made out of clear plastic, insubstantial to the point of translucence.

There was a time, of course, when she felt differently, felt most alive when with Justin. She liked to pretend she was in the inky clutch of one of those poems he used to read to her in college, that time when the world was defined by laughter and pleasant moans, bars and coffeehouses, reading and talking deep into the night, showering together, taking turns shampooing each other’s hair. But that was before.

Now they fell asleep early and watched television when eating meals. And there were little things that over time made her want to scream. The way he hummed along with the radio. The way he neglected to turn on the fan, so that she had stand there and breathe in the smell of his shit when putting on her makeup. The way he insisted on reading the paper in order. The way his snore began as a putter before deepening into a full-throated roar, like an outboard motor unmooring from a dock and heading into open water. The books in her office had shifted from a mishmash of Sylvia Plath and Kate Chopin and Danielle Steele to the purely clinical,
Nutrition for Life,
The F-Factor Diet,
What to Expect When You’re Expecting,
nothing fun or meaningful.

Romance, once the most important thing, had come to seem the least. Romance belonged to the selfish part of her; the part that responded to its own hunger, that fed itself and not others. Marriage, children: they made her look increasingly outward instead of inward. It was as though, long before she lost the baby, she had lost herself. The old Karen—whom she occasionally spotted in a photograph, blowing cigarette smoke between her lips or reclining on a beach towel in a red bikini—had steadily shrunk over the years, replaced by someone who served others. Even at work, counseling the girls who shoved fingers down their throats, the boys who gnashed down whole bags of potato chips in one sitting, she was selfless, allowing herself to get snarled up in their pain and neglecting her own.

But lately—through her running, as she sheds the sweat and fat that feel like years of accumulated poison so that her body feels lighter, almost buoyant—she is reclaiming herself, kicking her way greedily into the world again as she did so many years ago at the jumping bridge.

The jumping bridge was a suspended railroad track that ran over the river near her high school. The smell of oil and formaldehyde rose off the ties when she and her girlfriends stood on them, suspended forty feet above the water. They would strip down to their underwear and their naked skin would go tight with goose pimples when they curled their toes over the edge of the timbers and said, “You go,” and “No, you go.”

Karen remembers stepping off the edge, the wind roaring in her ears, the river rising up toward her, the feeling of weightlessness before her body broke the surface of the water. She would bring her feet together tightly, trying to needle her way downward and touch the muddy bottom, not knowing what was down there, not caring. She remembers one time making it all the way, feeling the cold mud suddenly sucking at her feet. She opened her eyes in the gray-green murkiness and saw next to her a broken cement block with tentacles of rebar coming out of it. She had laughed at the sight of it, thrilled at how alive she was, and the laughter took the form of a wobbling bubble that rose from her mouth to the sunlit surface of the river.

She thinks of this when that old smell rises up to greet her, when she approaches the north-south train tracks that split Bend like a zipper. Fifty feet from them, the lights begin to flash and the gates begin to drop. She keeps running and glances down the tracks and sees the freight train, a big steel snake, approaching. For a moment she considers trying to outrun it, dashing across—for the same reason she used to leap off the bridge into the river, the thrill and danger of it. She stutter-steps forward and then reconsiders, slowing her pace, pausing a few feet from the tracks, jogging in place. The whistle sounds. The ground begins to tremble beneath her. She feels her pulse ticking in her neck.

A car pulls up on the other side of the tracks, a black BMW with a license plate that reads, THE MAN. Its horn beeps and she looks a little closer, looks through the tinted windshield to see a face she recognizes—white teeth, white hair—Bobby. Someone else is in the car with him, a dark silhouette larger than the passenger seat. The driver’s side window goes down and Bobby gives her a wave. She returns the gesture, then glances around: the road behind her is empty except for a white truck parked two blocks behind her, its engine idling, a crooked line of exhaust rising from its tailpipe.