The Wilding (7 page)

Now her husband walks past her, through the living room, across the short hallway, to the dinette, where Graham is again seated, watching them. Justin pulls up his chair and retrieves his napkin off the floor. With his fork he stabs at the remains of his salad. “I’m so busy I can’t get my own work done. It bothers you so much, call someone.”

She follows him as far as the hallway and stops there, between rooms. “Don’t you think that’s your job?”

“I told you I’m too busy.”

“To call someone? You’re too busy to call someone?”

“No. I thought you meant—” He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “If you want me to call someone, I can call someone.”

“I want you to call someone.”

“Okay. I will.” His eyes are still closed. “Let’s change the subject, okay?”

“Okay,” she says and means it. She doesn’t want to be angry. Especially in front of Graham. She steps into the dinette and goes to her son, puts her hands on his shoulders, squeezes. “It’s okay.” He bends his neck to look up at her and she puts her hand to his face, which seems to change every time she looks at him. When he was younger, he used to walk around the house in his woolly socks and shoot lightning bolts from his fingertips—zapping her on the elbow, the knee—and one day he startled her in the bathroom and she jerked a hot curling iron to his forehead. He still carries the scar, a little reminder of the moment, just above his left eyebrow. It was an accident—she kept telling him that—it was an accident. But she had hurt him, and when you hurt your child, it doesn’t matter whether you meant to or not. The hurt is there, imprinted on them, because of you. The wrong word or a raised hand no different from the toxins in so many foods, working their way into them, changing them for the worse. She touches the scar now and then kisses it. “Everything’s okay.”

She spots a bit of gray in his hair. “You’ve got something,” she says and seeks the something with her fingers. When she recognizes it as a feather, she flicks it away. “Jesus,” she says and sticks out her tongue. “I hate birds. I’ve always hated them ever since I saw that bird movie—what’s it called?”

“The Birds?”
Justin says.

“That’s the one.” Again she shivers at the memory of the owl. “
God.
Nature.”

BRIAN

Sometimes the biggest challenge of the day seems to be figuring out what shows to watch. He sinks into the couch and flips through the five hundred channels available to him and shoves Doritos into his mouth until the bag is empty and his camo shirt is dusted over orange. A few months ago, on the Discovery Channel, he happened upon a program about skinwalkers. These were Navajo witches who scrabbled about on all fours while wearing wolf hides. Their eyes burned against their pale faces like red mites pressed into fungus. They chanted backward chants to raise evil spirits and they unearthed graves and they stole hair and skin and fingernails from the dead and ground them into a corpse powder that they blew in your face to give you a ghost sickness.

He had always been fascinated by the supernatural. As a child he used his allowance to buy
Tales from the Crypt
comic books and he snuck from his father’s bookshelves novels by Stephen King and he asked to spend the night at a neighbor’s house only because he could rent R-rated horror movies. Nights he often spent with his blanket wrapped around him like a cocoon, the breathing hole at his mouth the only part of him exposed.

In eighth grade he dressed up as an ape for Halloween. He had a full-body suit with shaggy black hair and a mouthful of teeth. No one at school knew who he was. He would walk up to girls and stare at them and say nothing and they would press their backs to their lockers and hide behind their friends to give him a wide berth. Some people laughed but with a nervousness that made their laughter come across as forced and wheezy. It was the first time he felt powerful.

He kept the ape suit in his closet and sometimes he would put it on and stare at himself in the mirror and thump his chest—once, twice—while breathing heavily into his mask. He did not know why but it gave him an erection. Normally his father would not return from work until dinnertime, so he felt safe to walk around the house in the ape suit and watch television and do his homework at the kitchen table, but one day his father came home early and because Brian had the television volume up he did not hear the growl of the engine or the crunch of gravel or even the rattle of keys. When his father pushed open the door to the garage with a pizza balanced in one hand, Brian sprang up from the couch. This startled a yell from his father and he dropped the pizza box on the floor—its cardboard mouth burped cheese and pepperoni.

Moths—Pandora moths the size of hands—fluttered in from outside while his father leaned against the open door and observed Brian with hooded eyes that revealed his curiosity and disappointment. “What’s wrong with you?” he finally said. The ape suit went in the garbage that night, but Brian hasn’t stopped thinking about it—the way an amputee will never stop thinking about a lost limb—remembering the sense of power that came with it.

Over the past few months he has trapped weasel and pine martens and coyote and beaver and even a wolverine. For all except the beaver, which required an open-cut dissection, he sliced around the hind legs below the hock and sliced up the back of the hind legs to the anus and from there stripped the pelt off the hind legs. He removed the tail bone by slicing from the anus along the bottom side of the tail to its tip and then worked it free from the bone. He pulled the skin delicately off their pink bodies as if pulling a damp nightgown from a woman, pausing at the head, where he had to cut through their ear cartilage and around the eyes and through their lips to slip off the pelt completely.

Then came the fat, the flesh, the gristle—scraping it off—and then washing the pelt with soap and water and patting it off with a towel. He keeps several wooden stretchers in the garage and he centered the pelts on them and pulled them taut and waited a day for them to dry and then turned them and waited another day and then wetted their underside with vegetable oil to keep them pliant and brushed their fur with a dog comb so that they appeared fluffy, shiny.

From the Goodwill he bought a mannequin to use as a frame. He had learned how to sew in the service, but never with leather. The Internet told him everything he did not already know, such as how to keep the holes clean by lightly dampening the stitch groove and polishing the diamond awl blade with a block of beeswax before every punch. With a waxed five-cord linen thread that runs from a thousand-yard spool he used a saddle stitch method, pulling snug so as not to break the thread or rip a stitch.

He made the leggings first—from four gray-furred coyotes—and then puzzled the rest of the pelts together to match his upper body, binding the variant furs and their colors to make a patchwork coat that hung from him loosely and would not tear if he ran and contorted himself oddly when climbing a tree or leaping across a canal.

And now he is nearly done, tying off the final stitch for the helmet or mask—he isn’t sure what to call it—made from the beaver he trapped the other day. He is in the living room—seated on the same lumpy couch and watching the same wood-framed Mitsubishi television as he was when his father surprised him so many years ago.
Wheel of Fortune
is playing. Pat Sajak is making small talk with a contestant, a man from Kentucky who has a wonderful wife and dreams of one day taking a cruise to Alaska. His hands are deformed. They look like fleshy lobster claws. Another contestant spins the wheel for him.

The sun has set. The curtains are closed. The mannequin stands nearby, draped in the hair suit. Its blue eyes stare into a void and its pink mouth puckers into a dead smile. On television the wheel is spinning, and in the living room Brian is scissoring off a loose thread and knotting its end. The category is Action and the puzzle is three words. Brian sharpens a pair of scissors on a whetstone, then holds his fist inside the furred mask to brace it as he scissors two eye holes and carves open a slit for breathing.

The wheel is rattling its kaleidoscope of pie-wedge colors, glittery numbers. It nearly comes to a stop on bankruptcy but clicks forward another notch to the silvery promise of a thousand dollars. “Touching you naked,” Brian says to the television. And then, more loudly, “It’s
touching you naked,
you idiots.”

The man closes his eyes and lifts his deformed hands as if in benediction. A moment passes before Brian realizes the man is crossing his fingers. “Thumbing your nose,” the man guesses. Lights flash. Bells ring. The audience claps and Pat Sajak smiles and the man does a little dance and throws back his head and opens his mouth to reveal a black cave of laughter that seems to swallow up the screen when Brian punches the remote and everything goes dark.

Brian stands from the couch and approaches the mannequin. He stares into its blank blue eyes a moment before fitting the mask over its head. He surveys his work as a tailor, tidying a sleeve, brushing his hands across the fur, petting it. A musky smell rises off the suit, somewhere between a groin and a wet dog—a smell that surrounds him, minutes later, when he strips naked and steps into the pants and tightens their belt and then pulls on the jacket and finally the mask. The noise and the heat of his breathing surround him and he experiences that old familiar feeling of power and excitement. An erection throbs to life. It is his first in months.

He walks from the living room down a narrow hallway and into his bedroom. There is a full-length mirror mounted on the closet door and he studies his reflection in it. The only source of light is a 40-watt bulb glowing above him. It has about the same effect as a flashlight, throwing long shadows that squirm all over his body when he moves. He likes the way the mask fits snugly to his face, like armor.

When Brian was young, his father took him to a Noh drama playing at the community college. The music was unlike any he had ever heard: the calm murmur of the bamboo flute backgrounded by the sometimes slow, sometimes manic tapping of the taiko drum. And he remembers, more than anything, the masks the actors wore.

In every Noh drama there are five types of masks—gods, demons, men, women, and the elderly—meant to depict the essential spirit of the character. And these five masks were sold afterward in the lobby. He remembers picking up the demonic mask, with its red skin and bulging white eyes. A thin mustache framed its mouth, trailing to its chin. Horns rose from its forehead. In the way of little boys, he loved it precisely for its ugliness. He begged his father to buy him one as a souvenir, but they were too expensive, so he settled instead for a cassette that featured music from the production.

He still has the tape. Its cover is faded and its sound is bothered by the occasional hiss of static, but it plays. His boom box from high school still sits on his dresser and he inserts the tape into it now and turns up the volume.

The reedy whistle of a flute fills the room, followed by a gunshot chorus of drumbeats. He begins to dance. The hair suit weighs probably thirty pounds and at first he slings his arms and bends his legs with some clumsiness, getting used to this second skin—and then he becomes more comfortable, his motions more fluid. Sweat begins to trail down his back and stomach. Beneath the mask his breath is like a great wind.

As the music plays, as he leaps about his room, there is a kind of darkroom going on inside his skull. Pictures get dipped in briny solutions. At first they are white. Then they darken in places to reveal a naked woman with a paper bag over her head, a pistol growing out of a man’s crotch, a Muslim laying down a prayer rug made of human flesh, a camel burning, a six-fingered hand giving him the finger.

And then he goes to the boom box and hits the stop button and feels trembling all through his body a quiet sense of power. He pulls on a pair of white tube socks and then his combat boots, shined to a black gleam.

“I’m going out,” he yells to the house and pauses a moment in the doorway as if awaiting a reply.

Years ago, they decided to have a reunion, his friends from the war. They came from scattered corners of the state but they arrived in Portland at the precise hour—at 8:00 p.m., at twenty hundred hours—at the Irish bar called the Book of Kells whose vast, dark-wooded interior reminded Brian of the belly of a ship. All three were members of the same unit, and though they had not seen each other for many months, they felt instantly comfortable for the history they shared. Two-handed handshakes gave way to hugs gave way to meaty backslaps. Jim was a round-faced man who worked for the Tigard postal service and kept his head shaved and offered an apologetic laugh at the end of every sentence, while Troy was tall and slight with his receding hairline pulled back into a weak ponytail, with punch-colored pouches under his eyes from the long hours he worked as a manager at Kinko’s. They said, “So how the hell are you?” and “You’re looking good,” when they worked their way through the bodies and the tables and found a snug at the back of the bar. A dim light hung over the table and made their skin and their teeth appear yellow.

A waitress in a black skirt and a white collared shirt asked them if they needed a menu and they told her please and then ordered burgers and a pitcher of Bud Light and when she asked if Carlsberg was all right instead, they said, “Sure, sure,” and then gave Jim—who had suggested they meet here—a hard time for choosing a joint too good to serve Bud for crissakes.

At first Brian joked and laughed along with them, when they mashed through their burgers and popped fries in their mouths and licked ketchup off their fingers, but then the beer began to take hold of his mind and his thoughts dimmed along with the lights and he said less and less, simply nodding along with the conversation, rubbing the depression in his forehead.

Troy spoke constantly and had difficulty sitting still. He had always been a nervous man, but Brian noticed now his fingernails chewed down to blood. “You remember that time,” he said. “You remember? With Big Back?” He told the story of the hotel compound where they were stationed briefly. There was no running water, so to reduce the stink, the Porta-Johns were set outside. This lance corporal—a former high school football star who went by the name of Big Back—was in the john with a
Hustler
when the compound came under mortar and rocket attack. With the smoke whirling and the air shaking and men running in every direction, he blasted out of the john with his pants around his ankles and his dick still in his hand. “Quite possibly the funniest thing in world history.”

Brian had been looking forward to seeing them—he really had—but watching Troy tell rapid-fire stories with a mouth full of food and listening to Jim chuckle—
huh-huh-huh,
a kind of heavy breathing—made him feel empty, as if the hole in his forehead had opened and his fluids had drained from it and his body could blow away at any instant, a mere papery husk. He had expected the very opposite; he had expected this meeting to bring him some kind of sustenance, like the rare burger that bled on his plate. These were, after all, the men he showered and shit with, the men he bunked beside, listening to them snore and mumble in their dreams. Together they had stood rigidly in formation and played poker with nudie cards and watched burnt-orange tracer rounds hurry through the night sky like falling stars. “How sick are you, motherfuckers?” a lieutenant had asked them during their second tour. “Sick. We’re sick motherfuckers, sir,” they had said. “We bleed green. Corps to the core.” All had tattooed in black ink the eagle, globe, and anchor across their left shoulder.

When the waitress came by to ask if they wanted a third pitcher, Brian was the last one to say yes.

All his life he has lived in this house—this three-bedroom ranch with the lava-rock chimney and the red cinder driveway—located in Deschutes River Woods, a thickly forested development on the outskirts of town. There are no streetlamps here. Only the stars spiraling above him, the moon staring through the trees like a scarred eye from another world. For a moment Brian stands in his driveway, letting his eyes adjust, before loping off into the trees.

In so many ways he seems to lack some retinal nerve capable of seeing the world as others see it. He knows that most people, in the middle of the woods, in the middle of the night, would feel some level of fear. He does not. If anything, he feels comforted by the black solitude it offers him. When you have seen what he has, and when you know a world away other people are going to the mall and throwing frisbees in the park and drinking coffee in an outdoor café, you come to accept that everything you have ever known to make sense makes probably no sense.