The Wildlands

by Abby Geni

  I did not give much consideration to the future, though I knew that in the glove compartment there was a map with a target on it: Amarillo, Texas. I knew that in my brother’s pocket, there was a folded sheet of paper with instructions for building a pipe bomb. I also knew that under the driver’s seat, there was a gun.

  22

  We crossed into Texas in the middle of July. At the time, we were traveling on a dirt lane so small and out of the way that there was no sign posted at the state line. We were surrounded only by desert and dry grasses. I would not realize for several hours that for the first time, I had left Oklahoma.

  Our passage kicked up clouds of dust that lingered in our wake. Tucker navigated down a road that was pocked with boulders, eroded into runnels and ruts. The wheels jolted. There were no radio stations this far out in the country, just a hiss of static, interrupted every now and then by ghostly voices reciting Bible verses. I sat with one arm slung out the window of our new car—another pickup truck, this one black. The sun was high, the air reverberating with the screech of crickets. The earth was so dehydrated that it had cracked into a network of fissures. The clumps of grass were uneven in hue, some vibrant green, some sickly yellow, some dead looking, rattling in the wind. I could discern no pattern to determine which plants thrived and which did not.

  Tucker parked by a lone, spindly fir and got out to pee. I climbed out of the car too and stood in the shade, inhaling the nectar of the tree. It had been a day or two since I had seen anyone except my brother. There were no signs of human life out here. I could not smell anything artificial, only sun-splashed grass and the musk of the desiccated earth. There weren’t any buildings in view, a total dearth of houses and farms, no telephone poles, no tractors, no wires overhead, not even an airplane in the distance. Tucker and I might have been the only survivors of an alien invasion or a nuclear war. The last humans on the planet.

  He topped up the gas tank from a canister in the truck bed. He took a swig from a bottle of water and insisted that I finish the rest. He sniffed his own armpit, removed his tank top, and applied a layer of deodorant. Bare to the waist, he stretched and ran a hand over his cropped brown mane.

  “Want to do some shooting?” he said.

  He took his gun from the gap beneath the driver’s seat and a box of bullets from the glove compartment. I watched him load the weapon, the fingers on his intact hand flicking deftly. I was not sure what kind of gun it was—only that it was heavy and shiny, with a recoil strong enough to nearly sprain my wrist.

  I had been around guns all my life, but only at a distance. I had seen revolvers on dashboards and holsters on belts. Whenever I passed the Mercy shooting range, a series of tinny explosions echoed on the air. Each different brand and caliber seemed to have its own pitch, some high and crystalline, some low and guttural. Many of our neighbors in the trailer park owned a pistol or two—it was Oklahoma, after all—but Darlene was not crazy about guns, so I had never held one in my hands until recently. She steered me away from playmates whose parents appeared on social media holding hunting rifles. She refused to let me visit a gun show outside Mercy. She always said that guns had only one purpose, and it was not a purpose she cared for.

  Tucker, however, did not share this opinion. He had named his weapon Mama Bear and handled it with poise and affection. Now he squinted along the barrel and nodded, satisfied. He was barefoot in the grass, and I was too.

  “Want to go first?” he said.

  “No thanks. My wrist is still sore from last time.”

  “Okay. Watch my technique. Remember—exhale when you squeeze the trigger.”

  His posture was relaxed but steady. He took aim at an upper branch of the pine tree. Even though I was prepared for the report, the sound still made me jump. A twig splintered. A clot of leaves fell. Tucker whooped with pride. The fir shook from the impact, and a cloud of sparrows took flight. I had not known they were there, dark shapes nestled among the dark branches, until they broke away, rising toward the sky in a spiral of wild cries.

  ON THE ROAD, WE TALKED. We did not have individual chats so much as one long discussion that never really ended and contained all the subjects in the world. Tucker and I spoke about life and death and snacks and road games and movies and the history of our family and the future of the human race. Conversation ebbed and flowed between us like a dream-state, sometimes intense and focused, sometimes shallow and desultory, interrupted by long periods of companionable silence. I might catnap for a few miles in the passenger’s seat. Tucker might sing along with the radio. Then one of us would speak up as though no pause had occurred, picking up the thread from before or answering a question broached hours ago.

  On a cloudless afternoon, we came upon a tiny town—not even a stoplight, just four or five houses and a gas station. Tucker replenished the pickup’s tank, as well as the spare canister he kept in the truck bed. He took a roll of bills from the glove compartment, banded by a scrunchy. (This was our bank. Tucker had not yet told me how he came by so much cash.) He peeled off a few bills and went to pay the clerk. I watched through the window, remaining out of view. He returned with a root beer for me and a bag of corn nuts for himself. We pulled away with a squeal of tires.

  “Do you have a best friend?” I asked.

  Tucker considered the matter for a mile or two. Then he said, “I used to.”

  “What happened?”

  “His name was Mike,” he said. “He’s dead to me now.”

  “He died?”

  “No. Dead to me.” Tucker frowned. “I met Mike a few years back. I was spending a lot of time with this group called ECO.”

  I nodded.

  “Mike brought me in,” he said. “We had the same goals, or I thought we did. He was the one who taught me how to handle explosives. He showed me all the different kinds. Land mines. Pipe bombs. How to use fertilizer. That’s tricky, by the way. If you get the mixture even a little bit wrong, you’ve got a big old dud. Mike taught me a lot of things.”

  He paused, chewing on his tongue. Then he turned to me. “What about you? Do you have a best friend?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I thought he might make a joke at my expense, but instead he nodded.

  “Friendship is a tough one,” he said. “It takes some of us a while to figure out how to connect.”

  The next hour slipped by in a balmy wash. We passed windmills and silos. We passed fields being watered by metallic, insectoid sprinklers at least half a mile in length, silver and stark, rotating and filling the breeze with gusts of spray. We passed wide pastures strewn with sheep. We passed barns too decrepit to ever be repaired, their roofs caving in, sunk under curtains of ivy.

  “Tell me about Daddy,” I said. “What was he like?”

  Tucker drummed contemplatively on the steering wheel.

  “Let me think on that,” he said. “It’s hard to sum up a whole person. I’ll get back to you later.”

  “Okay.”

  The radio gave a screech of high-pitched static. I hadn’t realized it was still on and smacked the button to shut it off. A brown, stubbled field sprawled across the landscape. In the distance a tractor plowed doggedly along, carrying a comet’s tail of dust.

  “Once upon a time,” Tucker said, and I smiled.

  He began to tell me a story—the same story he had been telling me since our first day outside the bunker. It started as a road game, a way to pass the time, but it was blossoming into something more. He was spinning the tale of us on our adventure. He always referred to us in the third person—Corey and Tucker—as though we were well-known characters like Hansel and Gretel or Cinderella.

  “Corey and Tucker were driving west,” he said. “It had been a long day and they were both tired, starting to think about where they might sleep that night. They had to find the right place. Somewhere safe and good.”

  I nestled deeper into my seat.

  “They saw a little forest,” he
went on. “Tucker thought it would be fine. He thought they should stop and spend the night there. But Corey knew better. The trees didn’t look right somehow. Corey wondered whether the place might be under a spell.”

  I glanced eagerly through the windshield. A straggly copse stood to the side of the road. The branches seemed weary, the leaves withered and beige. A moment earlier, I would have thought the trees were just thirsty, but now they appeared eerie, even malevolent. Their trunks were crooked and swollen with burls.

  “Then, in the distance, they saw a farm,” Tucker said. “The barn was red. Corey noticed it first. He always had the sharpest eyes of anyone.”

  I sat up straighter.

  “Maybe they could sleep in the barn that night,” Tucker said. “They were so tired, after all. But as they drew closer, they saw that the farm was no good either.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “There was a man walking in the pasture. A tractor working in the field. Too many humans. Corey and Tucker might be captured and thrown in jail if they stopped there.”

  I clung to the strap of my seat belt. I held my breath until the drab little barn was safely in the rearview mirror, shrinking into shadows.

  “That was close,” Tucker murmured.

  I nodded.

  “Corey and Tucker traveled on,” he said. “Together and alone.”

  His stories were the best part of any day. He did not make things up—not exactly. Corey and Tucker never battled an ogre or visited a castle in the clouds or came upon a magic lamp that granted wishes. Instead, my brother would describe what we were doing now or what we had done earlier. Sometimes he broke his narration to announce, This is all true, you know. This really happened. He dropped a lens over the world that made the wind willful, every animal sentient, each object rife with possibility. Anything could happen.

  “About Daddy,” he said.

  He had shaken off his storytelling voice now; we were back to conversation. I slung my feet on the dashboard and turned to look at him.

  “I guess the best way to tell you about him is this,” Tucker said. “All us kids have pieces of him. I got his hands. His way of working with them. He could fix anything with a motor in it, and I reckon I inherited that from him.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Darlene got his common sense,” he went on. “That girl is nothing if not practical. She doesn’t give a hoot about ideas or philosophy or the big picture, but she gets shit done. Daddy was always good in a crisis. Darlene is too.”

  I looked down at my lap.

  “Jane got his laugh,” Tucker said. “The way she throws her head back and guffaws all the way down to her belly. It’s Daddy, note for note.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  Tucker wore a wistful expression. I had seen it many times before; this look crossed his face whenever he mentioned our parents.

  “What about me?” I said.

  “Heart,” he said, without pause. “You love like Daddy did.”

  I considered this, my imagination tangled up with the rattle of the engine, the roar of the wind, and the irregular jolt of rocks under the wheels. The sun slipped below the horizon. The sky was gauzy and gray. A mesh of fireflies flickered in the fields. Occasionally one of them would smash against the windshield, and the pulp it left behind would continue to fluoresce for a little while after it was already dead. The air cooled with each passing mile.

  I was not thinking about Darlene and Jane. This was an active process, rather than an unconscious forgetting. It took work not to consider them. Whenever their names came into my mind, I would pretend to shatter the words with a hammer. On some level, I was aware that if I stopped to consider what I had done—what I was doing—I would not be able to bear it, so I kept my attention fixed on the present. I stayed as close to Corey’s perspective as I could, pushing Cora into the background.

  Corey was unencumbered by memory. Corey had been around for only a few weeks, and his mind was filled with immediate things: food and shelter and the heightened state of his senses. The roar of the wind. The sting of root beer on his tongue. The scent of cow manure and hay.

  And the stories Tucker told. Corey believed every word. Whenever Tucker spun his marvelous tales, Corey became both the audience and the protagonist. Listening, he was captivated by his own heroics, a glorious feedback loop of action and mythology, the epic journey of two boys on the run, alive with adventure and purpose, skirting danger and magic at every turn, united and sanctified by their fraternal bond.

  “Once upon a time,” Tucker said.

  I turned toward him, eyes wide, waiting.

  23

  In the morning, I awoke to something kissing my cheek—a damp, fluttering pressure. I opened my eyes to see a monarch butterfly perched at the corner of my mouth. When I blinked, it took flight. I watched it dart away, its trajectory erratic, finally alighting on a clot of nettles.

  The grass beneath me was wet with dew, and my clothes were sodden in the creases, clinging at the seams. My mouth tasted sour. Tucker was still sleeping, splayed on his back with every limb extended. It looked as though he had fallen from a great height, plummeting into slumber. Something was tickling my elbow. I plucked a large millipede off my skin, hurling it into the bracken.

  It was just after dawn. We were parked in the shelter of a line of trees planted along the road to block the wind. The branches shifted in the raw light. The tallest leaves flared gold, high enough to catch the new sun’s rays, but the lower boughs were still in shadow. I climbed into the bed of the pickup truck, where there were bottles of water and stale sandwiches. In the distance, a church bell clanged. I counted seven tones. It occurred to me that I did not know what day of the week it was. I was only vaguely aware that we were somewhere in July.

  I breakfasted sitting on the plating of the truck bed, my bare feet swinging beside the bumper in the open air. My shins were decorated with mosquito bites. The light moved down the trees as the sun rose, the hot glow glazing each twig in sequence, painting each leaf a vibrant hue. A warm wind caressed my face and throat. I was still not used to the breeze touching my scalp so thoroughly, without my curtain of long hair to muffle the sensation.

  Once again, I reminded myself that I was a boy.

  I had never thought about gender before. I was a few years shy of puberty, young enough that I played with the boys at recess and thought nothing of it. While the girls sat in the shade, making friendship bracelets or playing clapping games—hands flashing, voices chanting—the boys ran for all they were worth across the field. I preferred their company, the full-body physicality of their games. Boys seemed simpler than girls—not dumber, not exactly, but less intricately calibrated. Unlike my sisters, unlike my girlfriends, the boys I knew seemed to have only one feeling at a time, a single strong emotion vibrating like the note of a tuning fork.

  I had not yet reached the age of crushes. In some ways, I was a little behind the curve. I watched as the other girls scribbled Mrs. Scott Westerman in the pages of their notebooks or passed sweaty, folded notes down the row of desks to ask, Do you like me Y/N? I did not understand the adoration that gripped them, lingering in their blood for a few heady days before fading without a trace.

  In truth, I often felt out of my depth among them. Some of this arose from my family’s circumstances. Nobody ever wanted to come over to No. 43—the home of the saddest family in Mercy. I could not afford to join the Girl Scouts, though the uniform might have masked some of my otherness. I did not go to Sunday school or take part in services, which might have allied me with the children of the church brigade (Darlene’s term, always spoken with an eye roll). I could not afford to attend sleepaway camp, a faraway environment where my family’s stigma might have faded. The other girls weren’t cruel to me, but I was never invited to birthday parties or playdates; the hothouse intimacy of one-on-one time was beyond my reach. That was where friendships were smelted from unrefined ore into pure metal: two girls st
aying up past their bedtime, painting one another’s nails, trying on one another’s clothes, wondering about ghosts, confiding secrets, swapping tokens of undying affection, hours of whispering in the darkness.

  Still, I had rarely felt lonely. I found the other girls amiable enough in general, but their problems always seemed empty to me. Bursting into tears over a bad grade or a weekend being grounded. I would often fail to react to the climax of this kind of story, expecting that there had to be more to come. My experience of childhood was different than most—different in ways that were impossible for a nine-year-old to articulate. My friends from school still had living parents, houses with backyards, and their own bedrooms, or at least their own beds. Maybe they weren’t rich, but they always had enough—enough food on the table, enough money to pay the bills, enough free time to grow bored, enough affection at home that they sometimes felt stifled. They could complain about a parent who insisted on helping them with their homework every night. They could grouse about an older sibling who went away to college and became a show-off. They never seemed to realize that their problems were actually gifts.

  Now I glanced down at my body: my masculine pose, my cargo shorts, my dirty feet, my bare torso. I no longer felt uncomfortable wandering around without a shirt, even in public. It made the heat more bearable. Besides, nobody ever gave my exposed skin a second glance, not even the time Tucker and I washed our hair and armpits at the faucet behind a gas station.

  I jumped down from the truck bed. A cardboard box of bullets was nestled beside my brother’s roll of cash in the glove compartment. I groped under the driver’s seat, removed the gun, and loaded it as Tucker taught me. It was heavy in my hands and warm from the morning heat. The gun was not inanimate and inert in the way of most objects. It had the latent potentiality of an unhatched egg: not quite alive but suffused with possibility and power.