The Wilding (20 page)

The train grows closer. The whistle shrieks again and the crossing bells clang and the wheels clatter. Bobby leans his head out the window and shouts something she can’t hear. And then the engine is upon them, blasting past them, hauling so many flatcars stacked high with timber. The logs are stripped, a patchy mix of brown and white, what looks like a whole forest whittled down to toothpicks. A hard wind comes off the train and knocks her back a step; it smells of oil and resin. A swirl of dirt and cinder rises up and bites her skin. She stops jogging and stands flat-footed and feels the ground shaking, feels the train’s power rising up her legs, pounding her heart. Through the boxcars she glimpses flashes of Bobby, still leaning out the window, watching her, smiling.

And then the train is past them, the noise of it rattling away, like a toolbox tumbling down basement steps. And the lights stop flashing and the gates rise and the world seems suddenly so quiet, with the engine of Bobby’s car purring softly, the only noise between them. She starts forward and when she crosses the tracks feels a sudden lurch in her heart, as if she is about to be struck, as if another train might roar along and plaster her to the tracks. But nothing happens.

She passes the car and glances in the open window and spots the Indian there—the Warm Springs Indian—Tom Bear Claws—the guy who visits Justin’s class every year as a guest speaker, the guy who regularly appears in the newspapers railing against Bobby developing Echo Canyon, the guy they talked about the other day at lunch. She had forgotten about that until now, seeing them together, their eyes on her. “Need a ride?” Bobby says.

She hesitates a step. “Nope.”

“Good seeing you.”

“Yeah,” she calls over her shoulder, already past him.

She tries to hurry but his voice follows her, catches her. “You look good.”

She closes her eyes and runs faster, and when her feet beat the ground, pushing her forward, she imagines she can feel the train’s force still surging through her, like another heart beating out of rhythm with her own.

JUSTIN

A dream about a big black bird flutters away with his waking. This morning is worse than the last. His eyelashes are caked with gunk, and his pillow, damp with snot. There is a swelling beneath his jaw, each of his glands feeling like a watery marble. He massages his sinuses and feels something draining down the back of his throat. With a groan, he pulls off his sleeping bag and steps into his jeans. The cold has crept into their fabric and makes his skin pimple with gooseflesh.

His body feels as though it has calcified during the night. Just outside the tent, he snaps his neck and pushes his knuckles into his lower back until a juicy series of pops loosens him some.

The night has left the world dewy with its afterbreath. A light mist clings to the ground, coiling around tree trunks and floating along the river, soon to be burned away by the rising sun.

He notices then the grass around the tent, freshly trampled down, and the boot lying before him. Its leather is badly torn and discolored, as if it has passed through the digestive tract of a large animal. He recognizes it as belonging to the dead man. He stands there for a long time, staring at it, trying to make his brain work, still foggy with sleep. The sight of it is as disconcerting as a spider crawling across a projector’s lens, magnified on the screen. A frightening interruption to the half dream of dawn.

He remembers what Graham said before—about bears being practically as smart as humans—and wonders what kind of animal would leave a warning. No kind of animal.

It must have been the dog. The dog found it and set it there. That is the only reasonable explanation.

As he approaches the fire pit, he steps around the boot, keeping an eye on it as if it might spring up and kick him. He kindles some wood with balled-up pieces of newspaper and before long has a fire crackling.

He thinks about last night. It has taken on a black-and-white quality, like a scene vaguely remembered from an old movie. The danger he felt then no longer seems substantial as he breathes in the cold morning air and observes the air growing brighter all around him. But this sense of passing safety vanishes when he walks to the edge of the forest to retrieve the canvas bag and finds it missing.

The branch hangs crookedly, torn from the tree, leaving a tear-shaped gash of bright white wood along the trunk. Near the ground, where the rope was anchored, he observes a pattern of worn-away bark, chewed and clawed until the last thread snapped. The grass lies trampled all around the tree and into the woods. In the air something lingers. If he flares his nostrils and breathes deeply, he can smell it. It smells a little like Boo when he comes out of the river and shakes off. Spermy.
Hairy.
With a touch of fryer-grease musk.

He listens, but hears only birdsong and the river, so he lifts his foot and takes one hesitant step, moving across a border, from the steadily brightening meadow to the shadow-clad forest. He feels a tingling in his feet as he does, as though the heat of the bear’s passage lingers below him. He moves forward, picking his way through a cluster of bushes, stepping over a log, and taking care not to snap a branch or trip on a root. After only a few yards he encounters the rope, lying among the browned pine needles like a snake. He follows it through a tight corridor of trees and find at its end the bag, still attached, but torn open, its contents strewn all over the forest floor.

A package of Oreos lies in tatters beneath a bush, chewed open and emptied. Several empty cans of Pepsi rest here and there among the trees, their thin metal ragged from the bear chewing it open to lick the sugary residue. The handle has snapped off the frying pan.

Clothes, their dirty clothes, have been stomped into the dirt and draped oddly over bushes. Shirts and socks and jeans. At his feet he finds a pair of underwear. Kid-size tighty whities. He picks them up. They are still damp with saliva and ripped along the butt. He imagines his son inside them, the teeth gnawing on him, opening him up.

That is what bothers him most, the sight of the underwear. Immediately the image of his wife’s face rises up before him; it is closed, locked, like a door he doesn’t own the key for. He wonders how much more wooden she will become when he tells her about this, their time in the canyon.

He inspects the bag. It will remain functional, so long as he hugs it to his chest when he walks, to mend the long, tattered wound torn into it. He goes about collecting their clothes and garbage and cooking utensils. When he lays his hand on the frying pan, its coldness creeps up his arm, along with the feeling he is being watched. He scans the forest for any movement. A chipmunk worries at a pinecone. A camp-robber bird flits among the trees.

As he returns to camp the feeling doesn’t go away.

His feet feel cold and bloodless while over the fire he boils water for coffee. The smell of grounds wakes his father. He emerges from the tent in his white T-shirt and his holey BVDs. He stretches and yawns dramatically and the noise brings Boo from the tent. Boo promptly picks up the boot with his teeth and presents it to Justin’s father as a cat would a dead mouse. “Goddammit, Boo.” His father picks up the boot and shakes it at him. “Bad dog.
Bad
dog.”

Boo yips once and cocks his head in confusion and his father examines the boot. “Thing looks like a hay baler got it,” he says before hurling it thirty yards into the river. It bobs in the water a moment, traveling away from them like a slow-moving target in a shooting gallery, and then sinks from sight.

Justin tries to keep his voice at a reasonable pitch. “I think we should go.”

“Don’t tell me you’re scared.”

Justin tells him about last night—the visitation—and then this morning—the torn tree limb. As he speaks, his father approaches the bag where it lies near the tent like a gutted animal. He kicks at it and it lets out a rattle as the pans and plates within it shift.

“I want to go. Okay? Can we go?”

“We will.”

“When?”

“We will.”

“But when? We will when?”

“Tonight. Like we planned.” His father is almost smiling, Justin can tell. It’s the possibility of danger that excites him, the courting of it.

“Think about Graham.”

“Don’t you remember? You’re a million times more likely to die of a bee sting. Remember that?”

“A
hundred
times.”

“A hundred. A million.” He shrugs as if there weren’t any difference. “Over fifty years, I’ve been coming here. Never had any troubles.”

“This is trouble.” Justin points to the bag as evidence. “You’ve got your trouble right here.”

Justin must be gazing at him with naked fury on his face. To defend against it, his father crosses his arms. “This place won’t be here tomorrow,” he says. “I got a few hours left to enjoy it. I’m going to eat a nice breakfast. And I’m going to breathe some nice fresh air. I’m going to listen to the birds and watch the clouds and hike around some. Then I’m going to bag a deer, a big one.” With his tongue he reaches for a tuft of beard, pulls the hair into his mouth, and chews. “And there’s nothing you or any redneck or bear in the world can say to convince me otherwise.” He slaps Justin on the thigh—once—as though punctuating a sentence, indicating a definitive end to the conversation.

Graham wakes up with a wet rattle in his chest. He sits next to the campfire and coughs into his fist and moves to another lawn chair when the smoke bends with the breeze and billows into his face and worsens his coughing. When he can, he sucks on his inhaler, taking two hits of Albuterol. This helps him to eventually expel several globs of mucus from his lungs. He spits them into the fire, where they sizzle.

When his coughing finally ceases, the morning’s sounds are waiting. The river. A crow’s wings fluttering in the brush only a few yards away. The chittering of a marmot. The noise of something losing its purchase from a tree and clattering through its branches to hit the forest floor with a deadened
thump.

The sun drives through the trunks of trees and throws a lurid red light upon everything. It is almost painful to the eye, the canyon everywhere crimson and cut with shadows.

“Red sky morning, sailor take warning,” Justin’s father says, his eyes regarding the woods.

When his father goes down to the river to splash some water on his face and scrub his armpits, Justin draws near to where Graham sits, his elbows on his knees and his camera in his hands. “What are you doing?”

“Looking at my pictures.”

On the screen Justin sees the shot Graham took last night, when they sat around the campfire—only Justin isn’t present. The focus is on his father, his lips moist with liquor and arranged in a crooked smile.

“Where am I?”

“I guess I didn’t include you.”

The words sting in the way they fittingly capture the weekend. Justin begins to feel what every parent feels—when his or her child enters that special phase of life defined by locked bedroom doors and profane music and theatrical eye rolling—betrayed by the growing distance between them. “Oh,” is all he can manage in response.

Then Graham points to the place above his father’s shoulder. “Do you see that?” He leans in and uses the zoom feature, bringing the background closer, until the screen reveals a pixelated silhouette with two firefly eyes, watching. “What is that?”

“I don’t know,” Justin says. About last night, he has mentioned nothing—nothing about the pressure of the snout against the tent, nothing about the canvas bag torn from the tree—knowing he will only frighten the boy. “Probably a possum.” Justin’s gaze rises to the forest, to the place where the eyes were. There, among the pines, shadows play.

“You don’t think it’s a bear?”

“No. I don’t think that.”

Justin’s mounting sense of alarm collapses and folds up inside him when Graham punches the button that shuts off the camera and makes the screen go dark. That he, a mere child, can dismiss the possibility of danger makes Justin inwardly scold himself for being so easy to scare—even as the eyes burn faintly in his mind.

“Dad?” Graham says, looking at Justin now, really looking at him. Steadfast, concerned, sensitive—this is his son—and Justin puts an arm around his shoulder as if to welcome him back. “I miss Mom.”

“We’ll see her soon.”

They look at each other for a time. His eyes are that beautiful shade of gray you would pick for a gem in a meaningful piece of jewelry. Justin sees in them a resolve unavailable to him at that age, when his weaker parts would crumble easily and he would always do as he was told without any self-possession. Justin gives him a pretend punch in the chin and draws him close and claps him on the back with a half-violent affection.

“But first there’s today to get through. And I’m looking forward to today,” Justin says, even as his eyes drop to the camera. “I’ve got a feeling it’s going to be a good day.”

BRIAN

He was afraid of this. When he turns on the television, the screen lightens to reveal a reporter standing in the woods. His handheld microphone reads Z-21 across its handle. On these local stations you’ll always find a different guy wearing the same bad tie and ill-fitting JC Penney suit, all of them either fresh out of college and hungry to prove themselves or else old and tired with yellow teeth and black dye jobs, their hunched posture indicating their grim acceptance of never making it out of minor-league news. This reporter is no exception, no older than Brian and stuttering his way through a report of a Bigfoot sighting. When he gestures to the pine forest behind him and says, “It was near here, in these very woods, that the alleged creature was allegedly spotted,” his tone is alternately fearful and joking, as if he doesn’t know quite how to pitch the story.

The live shot cuts to an earlier interview. The reporter stabs the microphone at a man with a silvery beard stained orange around the mouth from tobacco. He wears a camo hat and flannel shirt with a gray hood sewn into it. “Can you tell us what you saw?” the reporter asks off-camera.

“Well.” The man—
Jim Ott, Witness,
the white tape at the bottom of the screen reads in black lettering—takes off his hat and scratches his head before saying, “I don’t want to say it was or it wasn’t.
Him,
you know. Sasquatch. I don’t know. This is all very strange. But this thing, let me tell you about it, was bipedal.” Here he squares his shoulders, proud of the word. “And for those out there who are saying, oh, it’s a bear—nothing but a bear—let me ask, you ever seen a bear do this?” He departs the screen now and the cameraman takes a moment to find him again, out there in the road, mimicking the movements of Brian, lurching along with one arm before his face, like some hillbilly Nosferatu.

Then he comes back to the reporter, laughing and shaking his head. “Swear to God. Cross my heart. Honest to goodness. All that. I mean it. That’s what I saw. I tell you what, though. They always say Bigfoot is tall, but this one was short.” He puzzles over this a moment. “Maybe it was a infant.”

The report continues but Brian doesn’t hear any more of it, doesn’t even seem to breathe until the newsbreak ends and a National Guard commercial takes over. A man with a grease-painted face leaps from a plane and into the night sky, lost to the darkness as Brian punches off the television.

By the time he dresses and chews his way through two bowls of cereal and drives to O.B. Riley, the road is lined with trucks and the woods are busy with men toting rifles, oiled and ready to fire. There are dogs—pointers and labs—everywhere, some of them leashed to bumpers, others darting freely through the trees and the slow-moving traffic. He rolls down his window and the cool breeze carries the noise of dogs baying, rifles firing, and men speaking in low voices. He overhears one man saying a Bigfoot head would look real nice on his office wall, among the lacquered trout and trophy bucks. Another asks if it would be a kind of cannibalism, eating Bigfoot.

They are and they are not talking about him. He cannot help but imagine them as his enemies. Running a knife along his neck to make a blood necklace. Pulling the guts from his belly and hosing down his insides. Peeling the meat from his bones and rubbing garlic salt and cayenne pepper into his rump before grilling it over hot coals. When a man in a Carhartt jacket looks at him, Brian glances away in a hurry, very nearly expecting him to yell out, “There! He’s the one we want!” And then they would swarm toward him and beat at his windows with their fists, the butts of their rifles, shaking the truck and finally turning it over and dragging him from the cab to cook on a bonfire spit while they danced around and stomped their feet.

His guts roil and his breath quickens with a panicky feeling that convinces him he will die if he doesn’t quit this place. It is then, when rounding a bend in the road, when fluttering his boot above the accelerator, that he spots her house. He hates to see it this way, through the invading traffic, with so many men tromping about as if in competition with him. But such thoughts are short-lived as he notices the garage door descending and the white Ford Focus pulling out of the driveway.

Two cars are between them, so he feels anonymous in trailing her, through this hilly section of forest and into town, where she pulls into the Safeway parking lot. He maintains his distance, heading to the other side of the lot, waiting to kill the ignition until she pops out of her car and disappears into the store.