Wildman

by J. C. Geiger

  “You left?”

  “Discharged. Want a shot?” Bottle on a stump. The whisky goes down like hot water from a rusty teakettle. Lance chokes it back, eyes stinging. Stone pats his shoulder, something opening up between them.

  “Nice job. You’re getting good at this, Wildman.”

  “Blower,” Lance says, exhaling.

  “To hell with that. Fuck Mason. You’re still Wildman. You know what’s crazy? The only people who know my real story about basic training are you and this guy who comes into The Float sometimes, John Ganz. Giant beard. Old timber dude.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He got it,” Stone says. “Same deal, you know? This guy listens to classical music. Reads like three books a week. But who knows that about Ganz? You’d have to pay attention to know that. So there’s the fry cook and the broke-down lumberjack sitting at the bar talking about The Martian Chronicles and The Clan of the Cave Bear. And I’m telling him things nobody knows about me. I’m telling John Ganz, this total stranger.”

  “Yeah,” Lance says, looking at the fire. The way Stone’s voice is, it’s hard to look at him.

  “He got me,” Stone says. “You ever had that feeling? When someone gets it?”

  “Yeah,” Lance says. And he’s looking back toward the woods that lead to a parking lot and a window where she might still be awake. Then he makes himself look at Stone, who says:

  “How can a total stranger understand you better than the people you’ve known your entire life?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But it’s fucked up, right?”

  “Yeah,” Lance says. “It is.” Stone nods and walks toward the tracks. His boots crunch on the ballast. He hops up, balancing on the nearest rail.

  “So how about you?”

  “What about me?” Lance asks.

  “What’s your Telluride?”

  Lance is warm and light-headed from the whisky and before he can say I don’t know, he says Dakota.

  “Ha!” Stone lights up. He claps, hops down. “I knew it! No wonder Mason’s been such a prick. Man. The way she looks at you. Goosebumps.”

  “Yeah?” Lance says. “Do they have a thing? Dakota and Mason?”

  “Not yet,” Stone says. “He’s working on it. Has a bet going with Rocco, I think.”

  “He still owes me a thousand dollars.”

  “Good luck with that,” Stone says. “So hey, what are you still doing here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re leaving tomorrow, right?” Stone says. “Why aren’t you with her?”

  “Why aren’t you in Telluride?”

  “Hey,” Stone says, crunching down toward him. “Telluride is a thousand miles away. Dakota’s right there in her bedroom.”

  “It’s too late, man. She’s—”

  A hot flash of pain and Lance staggers sideways. His right cheek burns, tears dribbling from his eye. Stone just slapped him. Lance laughs a long, rolling laugh. It’s amazing. Hilarious, being slapped for that.

  “Wow, Stone,” he says. “That really hurt.”

  “It hurt when you put those towels behind my head,” Stone says.

  “What?”

  “After the accident. When you saved my life. That hurt too.” Stone grabs him by the shoulders. “I will slap the ever-living shit out of you, Wildman, if that’s what it takes to wake you up. Go get her.”

  Lance wonders if there is enough time. The woods are dark, but it’s not far to her door.

  Stone laughs.

  “What?” Lance says, barely hearing him.

  “You’re freaking out,” Stone says. “It’s not too late. Go!” Stone pushes him, and Lance stumbles. He’s out of the firelight and walking, almost to the trees when Stone calls out:

  “Lance! You told the cops I was driving?”

  “Yeah.” He stops, turning back. “That’s the story, right?”

  “That’s the story,” Stone says. “Promise me you’ll get Dakota. No matter what.”

  “Yes.”

  “So we’re even,” Stone says. “You saved my life. I saved yours. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  Lance walks back to the fire. They shake hands, and Stone claps him on the shoulder.

  “Goodbye, Wildman.”

  Then Stone is alone, orange and flickering by the fire. Same easy posture. Same faraway look. Like Lance had never been there at all.

  He is already moving—climbing up the slope through the trees, heart pounding, counting his steps, shedding the weight of Darren and Miriam and Breanna and even Stone. Sweating through his clothes and sucking in night air and breathing it out until there’s only Dakota and his footsteps, shrinking the distance between them, dissolving the woods into a parking lot, magnifying her window until he’s there, fist raised in front of the glass.

  Is this happening?

  He knocks. Three stiff raps, but the knocks keep beating, echoes reverberating in walls and windows. He can still run away. There’s still time. Then the zzzwwoooooop of a cord and clattering blinds. There is only a thin sheet of glass between them. Dakota stares as if taking in a painting. She unlatches the window. Slips it open.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Ghost hunt,” he says. “Want to come?”

  A smile breaks through, wild and bright. She vanishes from the window, leaving a dark void of space and the distant blue flicker of a television. The sigh of weather stripping and she’s out the door, pulling on shoes.

  His teeth are chattering so hard they’re bouncing his right leg. Or the other way around.

  “Trying to tell me something?” she says.

  “What?” he asks.

  He looks down. Locks his knees.

  “Want to come over?” he says. He can barely talk. Done talking.

  “Yes.”

  That moment of unreality: her hand slipping into his. A new sensation he’s coming to know. The drop of shoulders. Opening of lungs. The heart-hammering, gentle drift of Dakota’s company. All that’s left for them to do is cross the parking lot, so the parking lot becomes treacherous. Every creak and rustle, someone racing to stop them. An impossibly long walk and somehow they’re across, upstairs, and standing at the door to his room.

  The key won’t fit. This key never fits.

  He’s drilling at the lock when Dakota runs a finger across the back of his neck, right at the hairline. The sensation! A tickling, shivering, stop-and-do-it-again. He’s up on his tiptoes. He could melt into the floorboards and live for a week, just on that touch.

  The key slips in.

  The door closes behind them, and he and Dakota are alone in a dark room. He turns and she’s staring at him. Such a small space between them. He tries to close the gap with words, but they go liquid in his head, sloshing into one another, leaking from his mouth. He doesn’t understand himself.

  “What do you, so, do you—”

  She leans in past the place where words snap off. Their lips touch. Heads tilt, mouths opening and he’s drinking her in. Her mouth is hungry, moving against his, a pulsing rhythm. A current, carrying them downstream, their bodies together, crashing onto the bed.

  The kiss deepens, unbreakable. When he moves his head or brushes back her hair, she always rushes back to rescue him. Like breathing for one another. There is a dark velvet cloth over everything.

  Hunger turns feverish. Hands fight their way through buttons and zippers, snaps and clasps, until everything is skin and Dakota’s mouth. Every part, surprising. The channel down the center of her back, the shape of her breasts and how they fit in his hands, the glide of her stomach under his palm. How she moves. Her hips, shoving against him until it hurts. No shyness. Only what they both want.

  It’s too much. Fingernails on flesh. Her tongue against his earlobe, buried in his ear. The taste of arms, calves, and thighs. Sweat. Suffocating under bedsheets. Her mouth around individual fingers. Index, middle, shaking, laughing. So many sensations, all flooding toward one place
. He stops her.

  “It’s my first time.” She’s breathless, glowing. “What do you want?”

  “I want to try.”

  “Try.”

  He goes to his suitcase, takes out the blue plastic bag he’d gotten in Seattle, unwraps it. Wrestles through cardboard, trying to find the edge of the packet.

  “Let me help,” she says. “Come here.”

  She opens it for him. Helps him put it on. Helps him the whole way. It’s not like he expects. No sudden pop and blur. No moment where everything turns to golden light and he stops thinking. He’s thinking now. He worries. There are mechanical issues. Is it still on? Is he doing it right? Even the kissing gets tricky, and his head is so full that maybe it’s over too soon. Was it? He’s shaking again, peeling things off. Tissues. Crossing back and forth to the bathroom. Is this just what people do, every time?

  Finally they’re back under the sheets. Back to blue light and smiling.

  “Are you okay?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Are you?” He laughs.

  “What?”

  “The way we’re talking. It’s like we’ve just been in a car accident.”

  “A train wreck,” Dakota says.

  “Was it?”

  “What?”

  “A train wreck?”

  “No!”

  “Good,” he says. He slips his arm beneath her neck, pulls her close. “So I’m a natural.”

  “Supernatural,” she says.

  They’re kissing again. That is their magic—an endless kiss. When hands come off clocks and words crumble and the room loses traction and they’re slipping off a ledge, flying or falling, too fast to tell the difference.

  A scratching thing is right outside their window, much larger than whatever lives in the motel walls. It’s tapping on glass, chewing wood. Something with claws and teeth big enough to break the skin. Lance wants to investigate, but it’s behind the blinds. He’s afraid to wake Dakota.

  He shifts his position and she bolts up, bundling the sheets around her. She looks toward the window and the scratching noise.

  “Mr. Jangles?” she says.

  “Stop,” Lance says. “Don’t even joke.”

  The noise stops. They look at each other. It’s quiet.

  Dakota sighs and collapses on the mattress. She stretches out, arches her back, and gives a happy-morning shriek.

  “Wow,” he says. “Is that how you wake up?”

  “Mmmm. Only when I’ve just had the best night of my life.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “That was pretty much my first time, too.”

  He shivers.

  “Are you cold?”

  “No,” he says. “You make me shiver.”

  “Yeah? You make me hum.”

  He smiles, kisses her lips. He wants to tell her she’s perfect without making it sound like some stupid movie or some stupid song, but writers have taken all the good lines and ruined them, so he doesn’t say anything. He wonders about pretty much my first time and stares at the sleep lines on her cheek. Touches one. Smoother than it looks. She smiles. Has a boy ever done that before? Touched a sleep line on Dakota’s face?

  The thing at the window is back. Loud scratching.

  “Wildman!” She clutches his arm. “Save me!”

  Lance smiles, but his stomach is fluttering. He pounds his legs into his underwear and lands his right foot squarely in the crotch, tearing fabric. He wrestles them on, then his jeans.

  Shtk, Shtk, Shtk on the glass.

  Someone’s phone buzzes. Lance freezes at the window.

  “Damn it, phone!” Dakota says.

  Lance pulls the lift cord and blinds snap up. A squirrel, ghastly up close. Dark mouth parted over crooked teeth. Eyes like black glass. It tucks its head and cheeps—a sharp little alarm. Lance steps back and the rodent is a ripple of fur on the banister, winding down to pavement, bolting across the parking lot. Past a police car.

  “Squirrel?” Dakota says.

  “Chickaree,” he says.

  A police car. Lights off. No one inside. The first rip in the fabric of a normal day. And everything suddenly feels a little off. No vacuums running. No chatter outside the front office. A fresh-snow stillness in June.

  They still have last night’s magic locked inside. This room is a submarine, ocean leaning on all sides. If he opens the door, those dark waters will rush in and sweep them away.

  Dakota is standing.

  The room has already sprung a leak, through her phone. Dakota makes a choking sound.

  Lance opens the door.

  The warm breath of summer. Police cars at The Float. People shuffling in the parking lot. Small groups. Gray faces and white Styrofoam cups. So many white cups. A crowd with its own gravity, pulling them.

  The door is wide open and Lance cannot breathe.

  “Stone,” Dakota says.

  She makes a sound he’s never heard before. The wail of something breaking, deep inside her. Lance stands and watches her scream and there is nothing he can do.

  They are in the parking lot now. Red-rimmed eyes. Crumpled faces. They, too, are holding white cups. They have cried and shaken and transformed themselves until they belong here with these people. Lance does not remember who gave him the coffee.

  Dakota cries out again, making him jump. A yelping sound, like a kicked dog. She’s talking to an older man he doesn’t know. She makes the sound again and Lance gags, coffee coming up the back of his throat. Almost loses it. The crowd makes its low, steady churr:

  whywh­ywhyw­hywhy­whywh­ywhyw­hy

  The strike happened just there. By the fire pit.

  Right at 2:26 a.m. Same time every night.

  Didn’t even see him.

  Diverted to Seattle. That’s what they do.

  Drunk—

  Discharged—

  Police—

  Stone—

  Stone—

  Stone—

  The strike happened just there. By the fire pit.

  Right at 2:26 A.M. Same time every night.

  Facts, repeated like mantras. Repeated like prayers.

  Lance lifts his head, looking for Dakota. He finds Mason, whose face has a damp, surprised look. He keeps glancing backward, as if someone invisible is tapping his shoulder and running away. Then Mason is talking to Dakota. He drapes an arm around her, like a bear.

  He pulls her into his wide chest. She leans into him.

  Lance’s Styrofoam cup bends, turning from a perfect O to a long zero, coffee spilling over the rim, hot on his fingers. The cup is about to split. His feet twist away from Dakota and Mason and carry him to the field. Crunching weeds.

  One foot in front of the other until he’s back at the Trainsong.

  There is no one outside. Cheri’s office is dark for the first time. His phone comes alive in his pocket and he pulls it out, squeezing, trying to choke it quiet. Make it stop. He doesn’t recognize the number.

  “Hello?”

  “Lance? This is Robert.”

  “Robert?”

  A loud sigh, distorting to white noise.

  “Uh, ye-ah. Your car. The Buick. The one you love more than life itself. Ring any bells?”

  “Oh, Robert. Sorry.”

  “Well, she’s done.”

  “Done?”

  “Fixed. Runs like a beauty.”

  Lance can’t move. A warm breeze shakes the leaves. He scrunches his toes, feeling the rub of cotton.

  “Lance?” Robert says. “Lance?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just get yourself to the bus stop. Bea can pick you up. Okay?” They hang up and The Lance Hendricks Machine is moving again, carrying him to the road. His phone buzzes and it’s Dakota. She’s calling and he’s walking. That’s all he’s doing, just walking, and there’s nothing wrong with that. She calls again and again, and he’s just walking to the bus stop. He cannot answer calls. He is nothing but feet on pavement.

  The sun is a s
mall yellow bulb, thinning the grayness.

  This could still be a beautiful day.

  He’s on the shoulder when the pavement trembles. A rumbling in the soles of his shoes, just like the rails. A force is twisting toward him, through the woods. Hissing air brakes. An engine. Closer. Its first long metal edge rounds a corner. A semitruck with a big silver trailer.

  What would struck be like?

  A bone-breaking buckle. A quick twist in the air. Snapping wrists, cracking molars. Compression, then blood finds its way out. Over in a few seconds. The driver of the truck is eating potato chips. Lance can see the yellow foil of the bag, but the driver does not see him.

  Lance tastes exhaust, like the day Miriam saved his life.

  Jump.

  A one-word command. One simple impulse, brain to feet.

  Jump.

  The truck’s grill is a steel wall. He bends his knees and does not know what The Lance Hendricks Machine will do.

  Jump.

  The truck passes with a punch and drag of air. Skittering leaves.

  Lance leaps into the empty road.

  Exhales.

  His phone buzzes again, and he is feet on pavement. He is just walking to the bus stop.

  In Robert’s office, the fish is waiting for him. Silver lip protruding, it stares him down. Not swimming. Lance wonders how the fish catches the monkeys it eats, then wonders if the aquarium lid is on. He takes a step backward, and the office door bursts open.

  “She’s ready!” Robert says. He smiles at Lance. Scowls at the fish. “Be nice.”

  “Is the Buick really fixed?”

  He puts his hands on his hips. “Would I bullshit you?”

  “Sorry. It’s just that so many people have tried to fix it.”

  “Yeah,” Robert says. “But only one mechanic. C’mon.”

  Back in the garage, a fleet of gleaming hot rods surrounds the Buick like the setup for a joke. But Robert greets Lance’s car as respectfully as a gentleman taking a lady’s hand. He pops the hood and props it open with a rubber-tipped rod, opens the door with a gentle pull, and gets inside. He points to the engine and turns the key.

  It starts.

  The boom of the engine fills the space like a song in a cathedral. Robert revs the engine, grinning, raising his wild eyebrows. Lance’s jaw locks, eyes stinging, shaking his head. Robert shuts off the engine and gets out. He squares his shoulders with Lance. Looks him up and down. Robert is very tall. Lance steps backward.