The Wilding (6 page)

JUSTIN

Justin has not spoken to his father for three months. Not since he returned home from the hospital and began weight lifting in the living room, shirtless, his chest cloven by a zipper-shaped scar. “Got to get back into it,” he said. When Justin scolded him for this, his father told him to fuck off, mind his business.

Paul has always been like bad weather—relentless, expansive, irritating—but since the heart attack he has grown even wilder and more unreasonable, as if, having cheated death, the laws of life no longer apply to him.

The long silence is not unusual. Over the years, their conversations often begin on a normal note—how’s work, how’s the fishing. Then their voices rise in argument, though usually they can’t remember what about after a few weeks pass. Such is the natural rhythm between them—every season for them like the emotional course of a year for most fathers and sons, where the small pangs of affection felt during the holidays are inevitably followed by arguments followed by long silences followed by making peace.

Which is why, when November nears and his father calls and invites Justin to join him camping and hunting in Echo Canyon, he only hesitates a moment before saying yes.

“You’re sure?” his father says.

“Sure I’m sure.” And suddenly he is. He looks forward to leaving behind the traffic that hums through the town, the exhaust-spewing trucks and SUVs. He looks forward to getting some clean air in him and some motion under him. And he looks forward to spending one last weekend in Echo Canyon, so that he might say good-bye, as Bobby Fremont plans to break ground next week.

“Good. I think . . .” His father’s voice falls off a cliff here, uncharacteristically uncertain.

Justin tries to fill in the sentence for him. “Some guy time would definitely be healthy.”

“Exactly,” his father says, relieved, his voice rising to a manly pitch reserved for taverns and locker rooms. “We’ll drink some beers and raise some hell!” He clears his throat. “And, you know, shoot the bull.”

Several silent seconds pass as Justin wonders what kind of conversation qualifies as
bull:
hunting stories, dirty jokes, drywalling advice?

“And bring that kid of yours,” his father says before hanging up. “I’ll make a man out of him yet.”

That night Justin dreams a dream he has not had in a long time.

He is in a meadow lit by silvery moonlight. From the surrounding forest a song plays, a children’s song, “Teddy Bears’ Picnic.” It sounds muted and scratchy, as if played on an old gramophone. “If you go down in the woods today, you better not go alone. It’s lovely down in the woods today, but safer to stay at home.” The lyrics, sung in a lazy baritone, have always bothered him. His mother claims he howled and clapped his hands over his ears and ran from the room every time she tried to play it for him as a child.

From the trees, a half circle of black hunchbacked figures emerges, advancing into the meadow. Their shapes seem to waver, shifting like smoke. After a few loping paces they stop and sway to the music and lower themselves, as if crouching. From them comes a noise Justin recognizes—a scream—a scream of pain brought on by an animal caught in barbed wire while his father roughly whispered,
Shoot, shoot, shoot.
He is flinching, as if subject to some blunt force, flinching before the shadows of the forest of his mind.

The figures move forward again. As they come closer, he recognizes them as bears, all of them walking upright, wobbly-legged. Strands of barbed wire hang from them like the wires of a lurid marionette. Their fur is damp with blood. Their eyes are black. Together their chests swell in a collective breath, the prelude to another scream that goes on and on as they continue forward, spreading out into an irregular crescent that will, in a black knot, enclose him.

He jerks awake with the song still looping through his head and his father’s face taking shape in every shadow of the room. Outside the moon creeps higher in the sky and his fear gives way to an uneasy state of anticipation as he thinks about the trip—his ability to steady his rifle and his father.

KAREN

Tonight she grills steaks. She thinks her husband ought to do this—she thinks he ought to do a number of things, like lift weights and scream at football games and take a wrench to leaky faucets. These are, after all, things that men do. But he isn’t very handy and doesn’t have time for the gym and the only sport he watches with any interest is soccer. She doesn’t know what the right word is for him. Tame? Maybe this is why he doesn’t have many friends?

Whenever she asks him to grill, he plays dumb, fumbling with the knobs and dropping the tongs and sighing loudly, saying he doesn’t remember the temperature for pork, questioning whether he needs all the burners on and how high. The meat is always dry and rubbery by the time he is done with it. Long ago she stopped asking for his help, and now she stands on the back patio, tending the three-burner, stainless steel Ducane grill with the steaks sputtering and hissing inside and the smoke rising off it to mingle with the smoke rising from their chimney. The evening is cool and Justin threw into the fireplace some split pine from the tall pile of firewood his father cut and dropped off earlier in the week.

She uses a dry rub of garlic salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper, and cinnamon, a little sweet to balance out the spice. She tosses the steaks—big porterhouse cuts from a grass-fed Angus they had slaughtered to fill the freezer in their garage—on the grill for ten seconds, then flips them, sealing in the juice. She snaps off the flame for the central burner and closes the lid and the grill becomes a kind of convection oven. Waves of heat come off it, but she doesn’t step away, even as her skin goes tight and she feels as if she is going to split, as if her inside is bigger than her outside.

When the steaks are done—she can tell just by pushing the tongs against them, the give of the meat—she drops them onto a plate and carries them inside, where at the kitchen table her husband is grading papers and her son is reading the latest issue of
National Geographic.

“Heads up, mouths open,” she says and sets down the steaming plate next to the wooden salad bowl full of spinach and romaine lettuce, the homemade multigrain bread wrapped in a cloth. Everything is organic. Beef hormones cause cancer and cause girls to have their periods at nine. Pesticides on lettuce cause cancer and autism. The preservatives in bread cause cancer. The preservatives in croutons cause cancer. The preservatives in mayonnaise-based dressing cause cancer and the transfat in it causes coronary heart disease. She subscribes to e-newsletters like the
Daily Green
and subscribes to RSS feeds from Safemama.com. She shops mainly at the Bend co-op. She belongs to a community-supported farm. She believes she is taking care of her family—she is keeping them from harm. For this, she receives no thanks. Her husband whines about the money she spends on food and her son whines about wanting a McDonald’s burger, a Mountain Dew.

Now the two of them glance up at her. Without saying a word, they fill their plates and begin to eat. Justin neatly arranges his meal into three even sections. “I don’t like my food to trespass on other food,” he once said—her husband, who now holds a pen in one hand and a fork in the other, at once munching his salad and scribbling some marginal comment in green ink on a student’s essay. The table is quiet except for the sound of their chewing, their silverware clinking and sawing. In the fireplace a pitch pocket pops, and for a moment they all look there, where orange flames lick their tongues across the half-blackened wood, before returning their attention to their plates.

When Karen cuts her steak, the center is as purple as a plum, just the way she likes it. A well-done steak is a steak charred through with carcinogens. Blood pools on her plate and she soaks it up with her bread. Before bringing it to her mouth, she says, “Doesn’t anybody want to talk? About something?”

Justin slows his chewing, swallows, licks his lips. “What do you want to talk about?” Spinach clings to his teeth.

“Surprise me.”

Justin’s eyes go to the window, where shadows gather in the failing light. “I can’t think of a single thing to talk about.” He returns his attention to his salad. “Sorry.”

Graham sets down his fork and wipes his face with his napkin. “Dave Jasper got busted at school.” Karen and Justin look at him and under their gaze he stutters out, “You know Dave. From soccer. From fifth grade—”

“For what?” Justin says.

“For killing coons.” His eyes dart between them. “His brother goes out in his truck, down dirt roads, and into alfalfa fields, his brother and his brother’s friends, and they take Dave with them. They spotlight the coons and the coons freeze and they jump out of the truck and kill the coons with baseball bats.”

Karen’s hand falls to the table and makes the plates clatter.

Graham’s voice gets faster; he is excited by her disgust, she can tell, like a boy handling lizards, worms, things that make her shriek. “In shop class, Dave was making this bat with nails in it. It was totally medieval-looking and Mr. Steele asked him about it and Dave told him and that’s how he got busted.”

“That’s disgusting. That’s like, serial killer in the making. You’ve heard about how they torture animals when they’re young?” Her tone is at first almost amusedly horrified, but as it grows more severe, the smile on Graham’s face fades. “I don’t think you should be anywhere near that kid, that Dave—”

“Karen.” Justin gives a half wave of his hand. “Don’t overreact.”

“I don’t think I’m overreacting. I don’t think I’m overreacting.”

“It’s disturbing, I know. But boys do crazy stuff.
I’ve
done crazy stuff.”

That’s rich. Her husband, who scolds her for leaving out her shoes, who folds his socks into tidy little balls, thinks he’s a wild man. She crosses her arms and gives him a bitter twist of a smile. “Like
what
?”

“Thrown frogs under the wheels of cars. Shot squirrels and rabbits with BB guns. When I was in high school, a few of us used to kill marmots for money. Ranchers would pay us two bucks a marmot. We’d fill the back of a pickup. I’m not saying I look back on that fondly. I’m saying it’s the nature of boys.” He has his knife out before him. Its point is aimed at her.

Graham takes a drink of milk and says, “I had this—I—”

“I’m saying that Dave Jasper did something stupid, but one day Graham will probably do something stupid, because boys do stupid things, and you don’t want people labeling
him
a psycho.”

“Graham is
not
that kind of boy.”

“I had this dream last night,” Graham says, almost yelling. Karen goes quiet and turns her attention to him, trying to smile and not quite pulling it off. But she’ll listen. He’s trying, after all, to salvage their dinner, to turn the conversation. “It was a crazy dream.”

“Let’s hear it.” Karen neatens her silverware.

“I dreamed about us going hunting.” He nods at his father. “About when we go to Echo Canyon. I dreamed I got shot. Some man was hunting me through the forest and I kept trying to outrun him but he was always there, around every corner. At one point I looked down and noticed I was naked.” He blushes here as if imagining them imagining him stripped of clothes. “And my body was totally covered in fur. Not hair.
Fur.
”

“That sounds more like your grandpa.” Karen’s joke has an edge to it. She does not like, not one bit, the idea of her son away for the weekend with his grandfather. She believes him to be more than a bad influence, someone who finds the faults in everything, who makes fun of organic food and fair trade and liberal pantywaists, who speaks of blood and weaponry with smiling relish. He is those things, and those things are bad enough, but he is also half bent with the same kind of madness that would send someone into the night with a baseball bat jeweled with nails. She doesn’t trust him. And around him she doesn’t trust her husband, so easily cowed.

No one laughs at her joke. If anything, Graham’s voice grows more earnest when he says, “Finally he got me.” He indicates where, right beneath his left breast. “When I woke up it hurt.” He rubs the spot. “It still hurts.”

At that moment something drops down the chimney and onto the fire. There is a terrible screeching, the noise a nail makes when drawn harshly across metal. Something moves there, a black thing surrounded briefly by flames—an owl, Karen realizes—a great horned owl the size of a toddler.

She can barely register the seeming impossibility of such a thing—when the owl opens its wings and hurriedly flaps them and launches itself into the air. Its claws are open and its beak is open and it flaps and screeches its way through the living room, battering the walls and windows, seeking escape, its feathers smoldering, leaving smoke in the air like contrails from a jet. There is an old wedding photo sitting on the mantel and the owl knocks it from its perch and it shatters on the floor. Then the owl makes a beeline for the dinette. Justin releases a scream to match the owl’s and Graham falls over backward in his chair and Karen ducks down and runs for the front door and throws it open and not ten seconds later the owl departs through it, disappearing into the evening.

Karen has her hands over her heart to settle it, its beating like a hammer wrapped in cloth. “Holy shit.” She closes the door and leans against it.

Graham pulls himself—and then his chair—up from the floor. He opens and closes his mouth but doesn’t seem to know what to say. The house smells as if it is cooking. A few feathers—clear and incandescent, the color burned out of them—float through the air like the lost wings of wasps.

“What the hell happened?” Karen says. Her breathing is tough, like she just got back from a run.

Justin shakes his head as if he doesn’t know even as he says, “When I was a kid, starlings would fall down the chimney. They liked the updraft. The warmth of it. Sometimes they’d get high on the fumes and pass out.” He stands and walks to the fireplace and picks up the fallen photo—he and Karen are smiling in the back of a limousine—the glass from its frame now sprayed across the hardwood, reflecting the fire and seeming to emit an orange glow. “I guess we ought to get a chimney cap.”

“Why don’t we have one? Shouldn’t you have installed one? You know we didn’t have one, so you must have thought about this?” She cannot stop herself. Her shock has turned over like a black dog and become anger that grows worse when he only half tunes in to the upset buzz of her voice as it rises between them like the smoke of the burning owl. “Seriously, Justin,” she says, moving toward him, snatching the photo and setting it roughly on the mantel once more. “The windowsill has dryrot. The outlet in the bathroom doesn’t work. There are bees’ nests in the soffits. One of the porch steps feels off-kilter.” Her voice is close to cracking with emotion. She hates when she comes undone, but lately it happens more and more, her temper flashing, taking over.

Sometimes she feels like two women. One of the women is a mother and wife. And after Graham takes his nightly bath—after he brushes his teeth and pulls on his jammies and climbs into bed—he calls out for this mother and she walks down the hall and pauses in the doorway of his bedroom. He lies there, the covers pulled up to his chin. At the sight of her, his eyes scrunch shut and his mouth trembles with the start of a smile, as he pretends to sleep. She walks slowly to his bed—slowly because every footstep scares a shiver or a giggle from him—and then she—again, slowly—drags the sheet from his body until he is completely exposed. They both are laughing at this point. At the base of his bed, with two hands, she then snaps the sheet and it hangs in the air a moment before sinking into the shape of him. And then it is time for the kiss—one on each eye, the nose, the mouth.

This last Christmas she bought him a digital camera. Since then, he was rarely without it, its carrier clipped to his belt. He studied its manual as if he would be tested—dog-earing pages, highlighting passages. He would snap photos of things she thought strange. A damp mass of hair pulled from the drain. A dead chipmunk by the side of the road. His big toe after he accidentally rammed it into the coffee table and brought a half-moon bruise to the nail. He talked seriously about aperture, megapixels, the light being all wrong. She thought he was so funny, not really a boy but a funny little man. When she asked him what he liked so much about photography, he brought his hand to his chin and rubbed it, completely earnest, unaware of how theatrical he appeared. Many of his movements and speech patterns were like this, like he was putting on a show, playing adult. Finally he said that he liked the way the camera stopped time. “It’s like a superpower. I can freeze something forever, exactly how it was. Do you know what I mean?”

She knew. She kept a shoebox in the back of her closet. In it were trinkets from the past—her retainer, pressed flowers, a pencil sketch of a horse, love letters from old boyfriends, a blue ribbon from a district track meet, and some photos, among them a shot of her soon after she graduated from high school. That summer, with a group of girlfriends, she had climbed South Sister. The photo caught her at its summit, among the clouds, balanced on a knob of basalt. She wasn’t facing the camera, but staring off at the ragged jawline of the Cascades. She wasn’t smiling, but looked happy, satisfied, and stared hard into the distance as if she was about to journey there and only needed to steel herself to the idea.

So there was the woman who tucked her son into bed each night, who baked cookies and dirtied her knees in the garden—and then there was the other woman, the one on top of the mountain, the one Karen lately couldn’t get out of her head. For years she had been neglecting that person, shoving her down into a hole, containing her behind walls mortared by makeup and casseroles and laundry detergent.

That used to be me,
she thought when she sat on the edge of the bed and studied the photo—or sometimes, in disbelief,
that’s me?

That’s who the anger belongs to, the woman who climbs mountains, who wants her life to count for something, to mean something, and these past few years she has steadily come to believe that isn’t the case.