The Wilding (4 page)

BRIAN

Brian haunts this stretch of the river to learn the passages the beavers travel between their lodge and seed caches. He places the trap in a black, glassy section where the water runs deep and where the bank is slick from their bellies and tails slithering along it and where the beavers heap little piles of mud with castor secretion beneath them. The trap—a double long spring jumper—looks like some metallic species of moth. He baits it with willow twigs basted with musk sacs that smell of a vinegary unwashed groin. He places the trap a foot beneath the water and attaches it to a drowning line.

Normally he is patient. He knows he should wait until late winter, early spring. He knows their pelts are glossiest and thickest then. But he has a project—a sewing project—he is working on that cannot wait.

This morning a cool wind blows steadily and shakes the pines and looses from the birch trees golden leaves that scatter across the surface of the river and glitter like coins on their way downstream. The sky is ghost-gray, thick with clouds that carry rain in them. From where he stands along the bank, his boots sinking slowly into the mud, he can see the trapped beaver, a black shadow the size and shape of an oversized football. A twenty-five-pounder, he guesses, its hind leg seized by the trap, its body floating in line with the current. The water bulges over it, making a small rapid.

His father taught him how to trap, how to skin and gut the animal, how to cook its meat and boil its tail, how to prepare its pelt and sell it at auction. Every winter they woke together before dawn and pulled on their insulated coveralls and trudged through the snow and chipped through the ice to check or set their traps. He remembers the chimneys of steam rising from the holes in the river, the hot coffee splashed from a thermos, the blood looking so bright in the snow.

In his pocket his cell phone chirps to life, its ringtone the song of a chickadee. He digs it out and studies its screen and sees there a number he does not recognize. He has not spoken to anyone yet this morning and the coffee he drank earlier has not fully crawled through his system, so he takes a moment to clear his throat, orienting himself in the human world, which feels so far from this choke of woods and rush of water.

“This is Brian at Pop-a-Lock Locksmith.”

He stands only five feet three inches but his combat boots cheat him some height. He wears black jeans and a matching denim jacket. His face is squarish, his eyes large and ghostly turquoise, his mouth regularly downturned in a construction of seeming gloom or discomfort. He keeps his hair in a high-and-tight buzz—a habit maintained from his time in the service—that draws attention to the dent in his forehead, a pinkish saucer-shaped place that looks like a third eye socket sealed with skin. He has a nervous habit of tracing its outline with his finger, as he does now, when the voice on the other end of the line belongs to a woman.

Her name is Karen—she feels so stupid, she
knows
she ought to keep a key hidden outside—her name is Karen and she just came back from a run to find the door locked. It was her husband, the idiot. She can’t believe he has done this to her. He drives her crazy sometimes. Now she is at a neighbor’s house. She has to get to work soon. She asks Brian to hurry, if he can.

“I can,” he tells her, “but I’m in the middle of another job.” He wonders if she can hear the clean rush of the river, the wind sighing through the pines. “As soon as I finish up, I’ll be right there. Maybe twenty minutes?”

She gives him the address. “I’ll be across the street, so I’ll see you pull into the driveway.” She comes from someplace else, he knows. Her voice is flat-toned, without the clipped consonants, the long vowels, the almost brutal rhythm that inflects the speech of a local. He imagines, from the soft pop her lips make at the end of a sentence, that she is wearing lipstick. A woman who wears lipstick to run. Maybe this is why he leaves the beaver dangling in its trap, knowing the glacier-fed water will preserve its carcass until he returns.

He is parked along the edge of a Forest Service road west of town. In square black lettering the name of the company runs along the sides of his Ford F-10, along with its motto: “Who has your keys?” The brochures show his father—clean-shaven and muscular, someone Brian hardly recognizes—handing a blond woman and her blond-headed boy their freshly cut keys. Everyone is smiling because they know the house is now safe, a fortress. No one will trespass. This is what Pop-a-Lock emphasizes more than anything: fear and trust.

Their customers are generally new homeowners who worry a prior resident will return some night and slide his old key into the lock and find that it fits snugly, so that he might step into the house without a sound and remove all the jewelry and silver and then perhaps step into his former bedroom with a knife in hand and a smile cutting his face. Or someone will lose his keys and suspect them stolen. Or someone will lock herself out of her car or her house and not have a spare key hidden under the geranium pot. Brian makes locks, he defeats locks.

He keys the ignition and drives the truck along a network of dirt roads that spill into wider cinder roads that finally connect to asphalt thoroughfares. The rain begins hesitantly, with a few thick drops splatting his windshield and thudding the roof of his truck, so many seconds passing between each impact, sounding like a conversation that can’t quite find its rhythm. And then, in a rush, the world seems made of water.

Brian slows his speed to forty. He clicks on his headlights. He turns on the air to chase away the fog creeping along the windows. His wipers flash back and forth to carve away glimpses of a gray world. Lightning flashes. Thunder growls.

Most people are wise enough to stay inside, hunkered down in their recliners with a mug of coffee, a newspaper folded across their lap, every now and then standing up to approach the window and say, “Still blowing.” Brian can see them silhouetted in their windows, pulling aside their curtains, as he drives along Highway 97, and then Empire, and then O.B. Riley, on his way to her house.

Through the steady curtain of rain he spots a dump truck, bright orange and flashing its hazard lights and coming toward him, no doubt coming from one of so many developments throughout the city, carrying the rubble of a hill flattened by dynamite or eaten by excavators. When he passes it, its engine growls and its tires tear through a puddle and send up a four-foot wave that hammers his door.

She lives in a wooded neighborhood where each home is set back on a piney lot. The houses are modest. Ranches mostly, with rugged arms of lava rock hugging their bottom half so that they appear to grow from the ground.

The road rises up a hill and loops through a series of basalt outcroppings decorated with streaks of guano and tangles of roots. Aside from a few cars, the road belongs to him alone, so he can afford to take a corner a little too fast. He experiences a moment of weightlessness as the truck hydroplanes, drifting into the next lane—and then the tires find their purchase and the truck stutters forward. To either side of the road, trees sway in the wind. Beyond them he can see the fast-moving gray-bottomed clouds, though barely, with so many fresh drops speckling the window and his wipers only able to swipe so fast.

The house is a two-story neocolonial with a brick facade. He knows this because in a former life he took a history of architecture class at Central Oregon Community College. He still has the books on his bookshelf, from that class and a few others, to paw through occasionally. That was before he enlisted, back when he planned on becoming—he doesn’t know what—
some
thing.

She wears pink running shorts, a white tank top, a visor through which her raven black hair rises into a high ponytail. She marches toward him. Her arms pump, her hands made into little fists. The muscles in her thighs, dramatically etched, explode with every step as if trying to shove their way out. “Thanks for coming,” she says, closing the distance between them.

“No problem.”

She is a few years older than he, early thirties, and about the same height. For this he is thankful. He finds it difficult to speak with people, especially women, when they stand much taller than he. He will often position himself on a stair or a curb or the upward lift of a hill so that he can be the one to look down.

He almost extends his hand for a shake, but doesn’t, remembering what his father told him: a woman must offer her hand first or she views it as an invasion. Still, the desire to touch her is strong. He turns away to yank open the hopper and pull down the tailgate and retrieve his toolbox, a big red Craftsman with a mucky rectangle on it, the remains of a Marine Corps bumper sticker he shaved off with a knife and spit.

She moves under the open canopy to shade herself from the rain. She has her arms crossed. She barely manages a smile, her face pinched with embarrassment and anger. “It’s so annoying, paying somebody to let me into my own house.”

“Sorry.”

“No, no, no.” She extends a hand to briefly touch his forearm. A candle flame of warmth lingers there. “It’s not you who’s annoying. I didn’t mean to insinuate that. Obviously it’s not you. It’s my husband.”

He doesn’t know how to respond to this, and they stand there for a moment, looking at each other. Above them a rain-drenched basketball net hangs like a chandelier. The wind gathers speed and hurls a wall of rain at them, darkening their clothes.

A shiver works its way through her body and she glances over her shoulder and he follows her eyes across the street to a white ranch with green shutters. In the picture window stands an elderly couple, watching them. “My neighbors,” she says. “They don’t have much to do.”

He raises his arm to give them a wave and they retreat from their window as if he just slung a rock at them.

“I guess I’m scary,” he says.

She gives him an appraising look, the corner of her mouth hooked up in a smile. “I guess.” The rain sticks to her eyelashes. Beads run down her bare shoulders.

“Listen,” he says. “You better head back to the nosy neighbors. This might take a minute or it might take thirty.”

“Please hurry,” she says in an exaggerated whisper. “It smells horribly of mothballs over there.”

“Oh, and I thought that was your perfume.” He is not normally clever. The line surprises him.

“You.” She scrunches up her face in mock anger and lifts her fist as if to hit him, then realizes they don’t know each other at all. “Okay. I’m going now.”

He watches her move away from him, her running shoes kicking up tails of water. A varicose vein trails up the back of her leg like a worm nested there.

On the front porch he sets down his toolbox and hunches over it. Nearby sits a wooden bench stenciled with ivy designs, and to either side of it, two clay pots crowded with red geraniums. A withered pumpkin is seated on the bench, left over from Halloween. Its sunken eyes and its sagging grin have black mold in them. Brian can smell the sweet smell of its rotting. A slatted wooden railing surrounds the porch. Beyond it, a half-moon garden of chrysanthemums, autumn crocus, and goldenrod. He imagines her squatting out there, deadheading flowers, pulling weeds. In the rain, mud rises up from the mulch and splatters the side of the house.

He observes all of this while slowly unloading his tools, finally selecting a hook pick. He tries the door. The knob turns freely. He pushes and the door catches against the deadbolt. He slides the hook pick into it. Carefully, like a dentist skimming the plaque off a sensitive tooth, he counts the number of pins within the lock. Then he selects a blank key and polishes the top of it—the part the pins will come into contact with—before shoving it into the deadbolt and turning it, binding it with the lock. He jiggles it several times before withdrawing it. The polished brass carries perpendicular scrapes from the pins. He uses a rat-tail file to etch the key, following the scrapes, carving away only a few millimeters of brass before polishing the blank again and returning it to the deadbolt and repeating the process several times over. Wet weather makes for stubborn locks. After twenty minutes, the lock gives and the door yawns open and he peers into the shadowy foyer before turning to wave his hand, to give the all-clear, only to see her already jogging toward him.

She bounds up the stairs and runs a hand across her face, wiping away the rain. “You’re my savior.” She is smiling. He can’t help but feel there is something joyless about the smile. Her lips are red. Her teeth are long and white; they remind him of bones seen through a wound.

He nods. “I’m your savior.” He can’t seem to stop himself from nodding. She has her head cocked, watching him curiously, waiting for him to say something else—probably good-bye—but he likes standing on her porch while the rain hisses and the pine trees sway. He likes feeling the heat of her next to him. He likes smelling her sweat mixed up with the dank sage riding the breeze. So he tries to prolong the moment by saying something to keep himself here longer—the first thing that pops into his head: “You like to run?” He barely holds back the flinch he feels ready to seize his face.

“I run every morning.”

“And you like that?”

With almost a frown, a brusque shake of her head. “It makes me feel better.”

His hand begins to rise toward his forehead, to circle the dent there, but at the last minute he stops it, not wanting to call attention to the injury. In the air his hand hangs, as if he were reaching out to her.

Her grip closes around his like a trap, surprisingly strong. She thinks he is offering her a parting handshake. He is so thankful for her mistake he blurts out, “On the house!”

She releases his hand and looks to the roof with a startled expression. “What is?”

“Me.” He crouches on the ground and begins collecting his tools. In the distance thunder rumbles. “This service, I mean. The unlocked door.”

“Oh. You scared me for a second there.” She gives a nervous laugh and puts a hand to her breast. “I thought you meant—are you sure? I’m happy to pay. It’s my fault after all.” Her smile falters. “My husband’s.”