The Wilding (26 page)

At that moment the clouds close around the moon. There is a time of bewildering darkness. “I can’t see anything,” Graham says. Justin holds a hand in front of his eyes and can see it only faintly and only when his fingers wiggle. An unseen shaft of heat passes over him—a breath, he feels certain—that sends him reeling back.

“Dad?” Graham says in a panicked voice and Justin says, “I’m here,” and the clouds scud away from the moon and its blue light reveals only their frightened faces and the collection of machinery in a clearing edged by trees.

Justin asks Graham if he is ready to go and he says yes, he is. He stares into Justin’s eyes with a mixture of fear, daring, and trust that fills Justin with the desire to hold him forever and keep him from harm. Together they step forward, temporarily renewed—until, at the far end of the clearing, a dimly seen shadow comes alive and moves toward them—growing more and more distinct—the broad triangular head, the wetly spiked fur, and the tumbling bulk of the bear.

They stop and so does it, matching their movements. Its shape seems to waver, almost indistinguishable from the woods, its movement like the movement of leaves in a high wind.

Then Justin takes one step forward, and in either ridicule or contest, it matches him, moving into the moonlight, its broad head rising up into a silver-striped hump. Murky eyes come into view and focus on him, like a dim pair of flashlights deep in a cave. It opens its mouth and grumbles in its throaty language. This time he moves back a step and it moves forward another. He remembers Graham’s book and studies its ears. They are horribly small.

Graham makes a whimpering noise and the bear retreats, blurring into the shadows. From behind the tractors Justin hears its labored breathing and the thud of its weight, its footsteps, at measured intervals. He pushes his son against the giant tire of a backhoe and tells him not to move, to keep his eyes and his ears sharp. The wind pauses and an important stillness descends upon the forest. The air seems almost to hum at a frequency he cannot hear but feels.

Then, only ten feet away, a woof announces a shape materializing out of the darkness. The bear has circled around them. Near the edge of the cliff, with the expanse of the canyon behind it, it regards them. The silver stripe along its back glows in the moonlight.

The bear lowers its body a few inches, as if readying to spring. Then comes a whooshing noise as its lungs swell, the breath before the roar. Justin lifts his rifle to his shoulder and squints down the line of it, hesitating at the trigger when the bear takes two shambling steps forward and unhinges its jaw. Thunder comes. Justin feels the air shake, just barely, like when you grip a train track, a trembling.

He suffers from the sense of detachment sometimes experienced in the classroom. He feels as if he is floating away from his body and watching everything from the outside, from someplace remote, separate from the horror of it all. He understands how fragile the whole situation is, how if he moves too fast or shoots too far to the right, the bear will lope toward them and crack open their skulls with its jaws.

Then comes a gunshot that drags him back into reality—the low, flat
crack
shocking him so much he drops his rifle. Because he has not fired. He has not felt the kick, as powerful as a horse’s hoof, against his shoulder. The gunshot has come from beside him, from his son, who has stepped away from the backhoe and compressed the trigger of his rifle. Flame seems to jump from the end of its barrel. And in the brief yellow light, while the noise of the gunshot widens around them, the bear staggers. The bullet has zipped past its snarling teeth, over its lolling tongue, and into the shadows of its throat. The bear collapses into a heap, maybe ten feet away, thrashing its head and coughing as though it has swallowed a bee.

Justin does not have time to pick up his rifle. He does not have time to think. He only has time to acknowledge this heart-drumming, bladder-bursting fear as he breaks from his trance and hurries forward to intercept his son.

“Quick,” he says when he grabs Graham by the arm and drags him—where?—into the night again. He goes one way, and then another, and then the backhoe is before them, only a few feet away. He pulls himself up by the handrail, and then his son, both of them balanced on the small metal step. He yanks at the glass door of the cab. It swings open. They crawl inside, Justin on the seat, Graham on his lap. They are a few feet off the ground and surrounded by glass. He can only hope that the bear cannot find them here, if they remain still and quiet.

But at that very moment it rouses itself into a four-legged stance to consider them, looking right at them. Its tongue hangs from its mouth and blood drains off it, making what looks like a steadily growing shadow on the ground. The glass of the cab is thin and Justin can hear the growl, the bubbling sound beneath it.

Justin reaches for the ignition and finds it empty. He yanks down the sunshade and the key falls to the floor and he pushes Graham off his lap and reaches around in the dark space between his feet and claws up the key and shoves it into the ignition and looks out the window to see the bear lumbering toward them.

He cranks the ignition and the engine comes to life with a roar. He has operated heavy equipment before, working for his father. The light is dim and the controls somewhat different from what he’s used to, but he figures out the boom, the dipper, the bucket. He disengages the safety locks and jams down the stick and the backhoe comes to life, rotating, swinging the boom, the bucket, like a scorpion’s tail.

Something has come loose inside him. Rage. He is in a trance of rage. He feels it expand inside his body, filling him up, pushing against his joints, his skin. It finds an exit through a scream so feral it seems to belong to someone else, separate from what he is capable of, powerful. There is a kind of joy that joins his craze, a heightened thrill.

The grizzly rises up on its haunches just as the bucket hits it—the backhoe shuddering—the bear staggering back and teetering at the edge of the cliff, grappling with the dark air, swinging its arms madly in a vain attempt to find some purchase. And then it is gone. 

He imagines the wind roaring in its ears. He imagines its enormous body turning over and over again in the air, as the bear plummets toward the bottom of the canyon, so that the moon in the sky is visible one moment and the moon reflected in the fast-approaching river the next. He imagines all of that soft fur seeming suddenly to gather into a fist and the great snap of its spine breaking against the water. He imagines the water carrying it away, a great shape vanishing into nothingness.

Maybe a minute passes before he cancels the ignition and pulls his son again into his lap and wraps his arms around him in a crushing hug. They remain there for a long time. They remain there—in and out of sleep—until the darkness, like a curtain, slowly lifts and the sun washes away the stars and colors the canyon red, a color that to his agonized imagination looks like blood.

BRIAN

Brian wakes to a high-pitched murmur—a voice, he realizes, a voice at the edge of panic. Not from a television or radio, and not from some pissed-off Sunni throwing up his arms and yanking at his beard and hurling a shoe—though foggily he considers all these possibilities—but from the woman, Karen. In the dark, he is sitting upright, his knees tucked against his chest and his arms hugged around his legs, a ball. Who am I? he thinks. No, not who—that’s not the word.
Where
is what he means. His mind is so far gone he cannot find the right words. Where am I?

For some time his eyes have been open, but it isn’t until her voice rises in volume—“Are you listening to me? Do you hear the words that are coming out of my mouth?”—that he blinks away the last of his dreams and notices the clothes hanging dimly all around him and understands where he is and feels a wretched panic. He startles forward, through the vine-like tangle of pant legs, toward the bars of light leaking through the closet doors. The sudden movement brings with it dizziness and a starfish-shaped throbbing in his forehead that tentacles its way into his teeth and down his arm into his fingers. He mouth tastes like metal. His tongue is like a dried-up slug. His skin, enveloped so long in fur, feels gluey and raw. His crotch is sopping wet and he can smell piss—he has pissed himself. He takes a deep breath and waits for the pain to pass before pressing his eyes to an open slat and peering into the bedroom.

Sunlight is filtering in the window. The room is empty. The migraine knocked him out all night, he realizes. Sometimes this happens; hours will pass in a fog of pain. And now she is awake and maybe the husband and the boy are home. And now he is trapped.

His eyes go to the open doorway, where he hears and feels the thud of footsteps. Karen walks by, and then walks by again, pacing. She is wearing sweatpants and a white T-shirt. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail and a phone is pressed to her ear. “I know they’re all right—you already said that—but I want to talk to them. Why can’t I talk to them?” Her free arm cuts the air as if she is trying to stab something with it. She is gone for a few seconds and then flashes by the doorway again. “When will they be released? When can they come home?” She sighs heavily on her way to the kitchen. She continues to talk but her words are distant and garbled, lost to him.

He studies the room. The bed across from him has a Star Wars comforter. The dresser in the corner has action figures marching across it. The bookshelf is crowded with fantasy and sci-fi novels. It looks a little like his room, he sadly realizes. When he shifts his position, he hears the squelch of his piss-soaked pants and the sound makes his face scrunch up, makes him want to weep at his pathetic condition. He is pathetic. He feels revulsion for himself.

He can dream all he wants about making someone his but in truth he does not know how to. He has only slept with a handful of women and all of them turned him away after a few days. There was always a good-bye for him and in some deep part of his mind he has already realized that this is good-bye.

His hidden nature has been suddenly revealed, as it is with those 3-D books he owned as a child, pages full of seemingly random patterns that disguised a picture—a skull, a train, a flock of birds frozen in flight—exposed once you let your eyes go out of focus. He is a beast. That is what he is. Just look at him. He holds out his arms as evidence. He is like some beastly toy passed down through a family, handled roughly, ripped apart and sewn back together over and over again, finally ending up in the back of some closet, forgotten and collecting dust.

The engine of hunger that brought him here quits. He puts his hands to his eyes and hides in the darkness he creates. He wants to leave, wants to leave right now, but what else waits for him? Where will he go and what will he look forward to there? He wishes he could crawl into the wall, behind the Sheetrock, among the studs, where he could shove puffs of insulation into his eyes and ears, where he could disappear for the rest of time.

In a blank state of mind, no longer thinking about all the things he might have done or all the things he might do, thinking only about what he sees with his eyes open or shut—the color black—he waits until he hears water running—she has started the shower—and then drags himself from the closet.

His headache still tolls against the side of his skull when he pauses in the hallway. To his right waits the front door—to his left, the master bedroom, the master bath, the shower, her. He goes one way and then changes his mind and goes the other, laying his feet down as softly as he can, testing the hardwood before depressing his weight on it, one deliberate step after another, making his soundless trail down the hallway.

Her clothes are scattered across the floor of the room, a trail that leads to the open doorway of the bathroom. Steam escapes from it, white tendrils of steam that grope the air and beckon him forward. Straight ahead, through the clear plastic curtain, he sees her—her nakedness fogged over, indistinct, like something out of a dream.

For a moment he stands there and as he lingers imagines that if he just stays long enough, if he studies her body hard enough, if he wishes desperately enough for his hair in the drain and his magazines by the toilet and his blue-handled toothbrush at the sink, then that life might take form.

There is a small blinking blackness at the corner of his eye, like the pulse of a cursor on a computer screen. He turns his head to look for it and finds only the emptiness of the hallway stretching to the front door. He remembers how not long ago he hunched on the other side of it and picked at the lock, picked his way into her life. He walks toward it now, and then through it, into the painful brightness of the day, with the knowledge that looking inside yourself is a little like looking inside a lock—you find darkness and a maze of confusion.

Away. That is where he wants to go. Deep into the woods, far from the glow of streetlamps and television sets, the gaze of human eyes. Imagining the spaciousness of the forest makes him feel calmer, more certain of himself, his ability to live.

When he sets off into the trees, when he lurches forward, staying low to the ground, using his hands as well as his feet to guide him, away from his house, away from Bend, he becomes the woods, which means he doesn’t have to be anything else, invisible, gone.

EPILOGUE

Today Echo Canyon hosts a party to celebrate its opening, nearly two years after they broke ground. Justin has traded in his Subaru for an F-10 pickup and he drives it there, along the winding road through the Ochocos, so familiar except for the black crosses of telephone poles that stagger their way into the canyon with low-slung wires hanging between them. In the passenger seat sits his father.

They never found the bear, but they found him. A mile downriver. Soaked, hypothermic, sprawled out in the mud of the bank. A stroke. It had laid him to waste, made him into a thing only half alive.

A part of Justin can’t stand to think of his father as he is now, limp and doughy, with a bit of drool sliding from his mouth, one of his eyes lazy and always rolling away white as if to investigate something in his skull.

And another part of him feels serene, relieved, maybe even a little triumphant.

An ironwork gate—its metal cut into silhouettes of quail and moose and trees—hangs at the front entrance, and when he passes through it, the luxury cabins begin, each set back from the road on a one-acre wooded lot.

“Here we are,” Justin says and in response his father says nothing, has said nothing for more than two years except to moan or smack his tongue around wetly. His body, strapped in place by the seat belt, leans with every turn of the road. His face is like one appearing on a milk carton: lost.

The freshly paved road dips down into the canyon whose floor has been swept clean of trees and carpeted with fairways and putting greens, their green an unnatural shade, like something sold in a bottle. Nylon flags flutter in the breeze, their tips pointing downwind, pointing the way past so many sand bunkers and water hazards rimmed by cattails, until he finally reaches the first tee, and rising up next to it, the lodge.

It is four stories and stretches the length of a football field, a veritable castle of iron and timber that took hundreds of men and days to complete. Since the stroke, his father’s company has dissolved, along with its contract with Bobby Fremont. Justin wonders how the lodge would have looked if his father had built it. Likely wilder, more splintery and rough-hewn.

Smoke curls from a river-rock chimney and then the wind flattens it out and spreads it into a hazy gray layer. He parks in a lot full of cars. From the back of the pickup he pulls a wheelchair and locks its brakes and opens the passenger door and unbuckles his father and says, “Okay, Dad. Down we go.”

His father breathes with a sort of wounded rasp. One of his eyes is closed and his mouth is open and Justin hugs him gently, as if afraid he might break, and then lifts him out of the truck. In his arms his father feels like nothing, like sticks wrapped in soft parchment. He lowers him into the wheelchair and buckles him in and touches his hair, neatening it. His father’s good eye regards him severely—an ember in a dying fire. Justin smiles at him. It’s a curious smile, at once comforting and contemptuous.

They follow a shale pathway that leads through a wildflower garden that runs up against a vast lava-rock patio busy with Adirondack chairs.

At the entryway of the lodge, oaken double doors reach ten feet in height and carry etchings of mountains and forests and an eagle backlit by the sun. They open up into the reception area, where the ceiling rises to the full height of the lodge. Here a wall of segmented windows looks out onto the nearby river, the South Fork, its waters humming along cold and black and streaked yellow from the setting sun. A wooden walking bridge makes an arch over it. You can enjoy the view from one of many Navajo-patterned couches with potted plants set between them. Everything here is costly, the thousand little touches to make it perfect, from the curved wooden staircases that glow like honey, to the ironwork railings, to the carved hutch in the corner that features pottery by Native artists, and so on. There is a pro shop to his left, and to his right, a massive fireplace that crackles as he pushes his father past it, into the reception hall.

Two dozen long walnut tables are staggered across its length. The tables have been set for dinner and the plates are thin and silver and will soon carry steaks and roasted asparagus and mashed potatoes drowned in white gravy. Elk-horn chandeliers hang over each of them, their light revealing the many dozens of fancily dressed men and women milling about with wine goblets and ale mugs in their hands. A jazz band plays on a temporary stage erected at the far side of the hall.

It isn’t hard to spot Bobby Fremont. A flurry of movement surrounds him wherever he goes, shaking hands and clapping people on the back and laughing at their jokes and his own. Justin watches him approach a big man with a face like a dried creek bed, Tom Bear Claws.

He is wearing cowboy boots polished to a shine, blue jeans with a crease ironed into them, and a blazer over a white collared shirt. His plaited braid reaches halfway down his back. His rings and his gold tooth catch the light. He shakes hands with Fremont. He smiles broadly. As he should. For years he has been pushing the construction of, and a consortium of lenders for, an off-reservation casino. A few months ago, the
Bend Bulletin
reported that the Cascade Locks is at last under construction, with plans to open by the new year. Fremont provided a good chunk of financing, which will have a projected 40 percent return every year. For the first time in Oregon history, with governor approval, there will be an off-rez casino. Justin remembers clearly the grotto full of rock art; it is clear now why the Indians gave up Echo Canyon with only the pretense of a fight.

A minute later Fremont moves on to chat with another gaggle of donors, abandoning Bear Claws, whose eyes meet Justin’s across the room. Bear Claws’s gaze drops to Justin’s father and his smile fades. He gives a nod and Justin returns the gesture. They have not spoken, they have not even been in a room together, as far as Justin can recall, since that time at City Hall when Bear Claws and his father grappled with each other. A waiter walks by carrying aloft a tray of champagne. Justin grabs one and brings it to his lips like an antidote to the gathering dusk outside.

He tries to imagine his father out of his wheelchair, standing among all these suits, shaking hands and making small talk, and can’t. He wouldn’t want to be here; Justin won’t hold him hostage. He pushes his father from the hall to the foyer, where Justin runs his hands across the polished wood of the front desk. On it sits a cut-glass vase from which lilies lean palely. And on the wall behind it hangs an oil painting of bears. There are a half dozen of them lumbering along a browned hillside. The air above them is an October gray, a parking-garage gray, anticipating the onset of winter. At first glance the scene appears serene. Then he looks closer. An aspen in the foreground seems to throw up its arms in terror. The undersides of its leaves glimmer with a murky light and rattle as the wind passes through them. And the bears, their fur seems to be moving, shimmering like windblown wheat. Their eyes are wild and they look like they are going to crawl out of the frame and into the room and eat Justin to fatten themselves up for the cold months ahead.

He leaves the lodge, pushing his father, whose body and wheelchair shudder along a cinder path that takes them to the first tee. The wheels of the chair whisper on the grass when he shoves his father up the rise and pauses there. The breeze plays across his face and carries a different smell to it, as if the earth has been tilled and turned. Above him the sky is darkening and clouds glimmer like pearls in the purple distance.

He gives a pretend swing of a club and then follows his invisible ball down the blue-green softness of the fairway, maybe fifty yards, and then pauses. This is where the tree was, he thinks. With his toe he traces an X in the grass to match the X spray painted on the tree near where he last spent time with his father before he was rendered mute and lame. A place that had once been so dark and strange and wild to him is now a place of friendly sunsets and fresh-cut grass and jazz bands and gold watches.

From behind him comes a voice. “There’s a monster in those woods,” it says.

Justin turns to find Bobby walking toward him. He is smiling and pointing with the flute of champagne he carries. “Just a bear, I’m sure. People have been talking about it. It hides in the trees, just off the ninth hole. Hairy. Some say Sasquatch.” He laughs at this. “When people park their golf carts, when they pull out their putters to putt, sometimes the thing sneaks over and steals whatever food or beer they have on them. Can you believe that shit?” Beneath his white-toothed smile and gym-built shoulders is a terrible dog-like presence, oily and rank, pressing up against you, always hungry and wanting to either hump your leg or bite your neck.

“I hate bears,” Justin says.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I imagine you do.” He lets loose a sigh that smells like Dentyne and alcohol. And then his gaze drops to Paul, who is breathing heavily through his nose and observing Bobby with his one good eye.

“Can you hear me, Paul?” Bobby says and his tongue plays his gum from one side of his mouth to the other. “Pauly boy?” His voice louder now, almost yelling. “You like what we did with the place, Paul?” He sweeps his hand across the length of the canyon as if speaking of a redecorated bathroom. “We sure could have used your help.” As always his smile has a way of lingering several beats too long. He looks at Justin when he says, “Can he even hear me?”

“Yeah.”

“He can understand me?”

“I think so. Other people aren’t so sure, but I think so.”

“Huh.” He cocks his head and studies Paul a moment longer. “Shame.” Then he drains his glass and says, “Anyway. How’s Karen?”

“Karen?” Justin is surprised he even knows her name. “She’s pretty good. We’re pretty good actually.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah. We’re doing really good.” And they are. There are bad days. But there are more good days, when they stare across the pillows at each other and run their hands across each other’s faces, tracing the line of a nose, the curve of a chin, as if they forgot the shape of love and are trying, carefully, to remember.

“That’s good.”

“It is.”

“Good,” Bobby says, with seemingly nothing in his voice, not enthusiasm, nor questioning, just volume to carry the words. He pats Justin on the shoulder and lets his hand rest there. “Okay then. Just wanted to say hello. Now it’s time for me to disappear.” He massages Justin’s shoulder. “Always nice seeing you. Come inside, join the party.”

“In a little bit.”

A band of crows flies by, gabbing as they pass over Justin to roost in the high branches of a tree. Before vanishing, their shadows play across the wide expanse of green grass and he thinks about the innumerable hands and nails and trees that have built this human reef and of the forest that has been peeled away to make room for it. He thinks about how the canyon was once alive and powerful, no longer. That part of it has been chopped down and dug up and seeded and fertilized and mowed, all the wildness conquered and gone, so that men—the biggest animal—might live and play.

About this he feels mixed up. He knows the beauty of the development comes from the ruins of the wilderness, but in those ruins, as in the ruins of his father, he finds some peculiar satisfaction. He still wakes up sometimes believing he is back in the woods: his heap of laundry is a boulder, his cedar chest a stump, his closet a cave that hides some creature hungry for him. He calms his racing pulse—he feels a little bigger, stronger—by imagining the trees sawed down to stumps to make room for sunlight and green grass.

With his sleeve he wipes the drool from his father’s mouth. “What do you think, Dad?” he says and takes in the basalt walls, the way the rock lifts and arcs around him. His father stiffens and moans and swings an arm clumsily before going still again, his eye trained on the sky, where the light is fading. Justin says, “Time to go home,” but before he grabs the handles of the wheelchair, before he turns them back to the lodge, he takes one final look at the forest that borders the fairway as if searching for something among the trees, the wild remains of his father, maybe all three of them, still out there somewhere, huddled around a campfire or loping along a darkened trail.