Fantastic Women: 18 Tales of the Surreal and the Sublime from Tin House

by Неизвестный

  Mama said she felt sorry for Mrs. Wild. Dressed in tight jeans and heels, Mama’d invite the hunched lady to have coffee in our spotless living room. She made fun of Mrs. Wild’s dresses when the poor woman left, but sometimes she was sad, and I knew she was thinking about my little brother, who’d weighed three pounds when born and looked like a frog and died in a humid tank of oxygen.

  Mr. Wild always rolled in after dark, in a black Chrysler New Yorker, appearing briefly in starlight, moonlight, or streetlight, always shrouded in a suit. He worked in the secret depths of a nuclear plant, thirty miles away, a glowing futuristic fortress surrounded by high walls. The family was from way up North, somewhere between Pennsylvania and the North Pole, where the world froze into a solid block of ice for months on end and people lived half their lives indoors. But now, in the teeming Southern air, the transplanted boys were growing, faster and faster, so fast their mother had to keep two industrial freezers in the garage, one for milk, the other for meat—hot dogs, chickens, turkeys, and hams; pork chops, baloney, and liver; a thousand cuts of beef and strange bloody meats seldom eaten in our part of the world.

  We were deep into summer and you could see the vines moving, winding around branches, sprouting bumps and barnacles and woody boils that would fester until they could stand it no more, then break out into red and purple. It was night and the Wild boys hooted in the shrubbery. They wore dirty cutoff jeans. They carried knives and guns and homemade bombs. I could smell their weird metallic sweat, drifting on a breeze that rustled through the honeysuckle. The Wild boys had dug tunnels under the ground. They had filled the treetops with catwalks. They whirred from tree to tree on zip lines and hopped from attic windows out into the bustling night.

  I crouched in the bushes in Mama’s green chiffon evening gown, wearing my crown of bird skulls. I’d collected the skulls for two years, spray-painted them gold, and glued them to a Burger King crown, along with fake emeralds and glowing shells of june bugs. Thin, long hair tickled my spine. My Barbie binoculars were crap, and I’d smashed them with a rock. I was on the lookout for Brian, the oldest Wild, who sometimes left his den to smoke. I was deeply in love with him. Every time I saw him, reclining in his plastic lawn chair, pouting in dark sunglasses, my heart twisted like a worm in the cocoon of my chest.

  My father taught medieval history at the community college. I’d found an ancient love potion in one of his books. And inside a purple Crown Royal pouch, buried under an assortment of amulets, was a fancy perfume bottle full of magical fluid. Lightning bugs bobbed in the rich air. Crickets throbbed. A fat, bloody moon hung over the house of the neighborhood alcoholics.

  I heard the click of the sliding glass door that led to Brian’s lair. And he came out into the night, pulsing with beauty and mystery. His hair was long, wild and black. He’d shaved his beard into a devil point. And you could tell by the way he sighed and flopped around that he dreamed of better places—glamorous and distant, with a different kind of light. Because of him I’d taken up smoking. I stole butts from my father and kept them in a sock with a pink Bic, Tic Tacs, and a tiny spray can of Lysol. I fantasized about smoking with Brian: Brian leaning over to light my cigarette, our sensuous exhalations intertwining, Brian kissing my smoky mouth. My longing pulled me over the invisible boundary into the Wild’s honeysucklechoked yard. I was in the atmosphere, sniffing ferret musk and a thousand flowers, when a hand slipped over my mouth. It smelled of onions and dirt. A small, hot body pressed against my back.

  “Don’t make a sound,” said a boy.

  “We’ve got knives,” said another. They snatched my wrists behind my back. Other boys came out into the moonlight, and Brian slipped inside the house, tossing his cigarette butt behind him.

  “Stand up,” a boy said.

  Their chests glowed with firefly juice. They had steak knives strapped to their belts and some of them wore goggles. White cats strolled among them, sometimes sniffing their bare feet. “Move,” yelled a small Wild, no older than six, a butter knife dangling from his Cub Scout belt. They pushed me toward a crooked magnolia. In the sweet, knotty dark of the tree, they’d nailed boards for climbing, and they forced me up, higher and higher, the gauze of my skirt catching on branches, until we reached their tree house, a rickety box with one window that framed the moon. Two boys squirmed around me to climb in first. They lit a stinking kerosene lantern, which sat on a milk crate. They flashed their knives at me. One of the boys prodded my butt with a stick and said, “Get in.” I climbed up into the creaky orange glow of the tree house.

  Five Wilds surrounded me with glares and grimaces. A cat poked its white head through the window and stared at me. Birds fluttered and fussed in the branches.

  “Give Ben the signal,” said the biggest boy in the room, whose name, I think, was Tim. “He knows how to deal with spies.”

  “Spies?” I said.

  “Shut up. Don’t talk. You’re on our property.”

  One of the boys opened an old medicine cabinet that was mounted on the wall beside the window. Inside were several ordinary light switches and a doorbell. He pressed the doorbell.

  “What are you?” said the little Wild, staring dreamily at my crown.

  “Shut up,” said Tim. “Don’t speak to the prisoner. She’s got to be interrogated.”

  Something heavy jumped in the branches then, and shook the tree house. A flash-lit mask of a wolf man appeared at the window, sputtering with evil cackles. He was copying somebody on television, though I couldn’t quite place the laugh.

  “What have we here?” said the wolf man. “A princess?”

  Two boards beneath the window opened and the wolf man squeezed through a primitive secret door. He closed the narrow door behind him and stood before me in karate pants and a black bathrobe too big for his skinny body. He wore no shirt under the robe, and a live garter snake twirled around his pimply neck. I thought I knew which Wild he was but I couldn’t quite remember the face under the mask. He sat on an overturned plastic bucket, elbows on his knees, and gazed down at me through his mask, a cheap Halloween thing with molded plastic hair. The wolf man had a silly widow’s peak, a hard fat beard, and vampire fangs that looked like buck teeth.

  I sat on the floor, feeling dizzy in the press of boys. They smelled of strange metals, stale biscuits, and fermented grass. Their hair was oily, and Kool-Aid stains darkened their greedy mouths.

  “We’ll have to search her,” said the wolf man, picking a cigarette from his robe pocket. There was a small mouth-hole in the mask, and the wolf man inserted his cigarette into it. His brothers licked their lips as they watched him light it with a silver lighter. The wolf man took an awkward puff.

  “Gimme one,” said the little Wild, but no one paid him any attention.

  “She’s got something hidden under her skirt,” said the wolf man, pointing with his cigarette at one of my secret pockets.

  They stuck their filthy, gnarled hands into the soft film of my skirts, snatching my treasures from me: my lipsticks, my notebook, my voodoo doll of mean old drunk Mrs. Bickle. The wolf man tried to read the notebook, but he couldn’t understand my special language. He emptied my purple pouch on the table and picked through my magic things.

  “Quit squirming,” hissed Tim, pinching my nape, looking for the nerves that would paralyze me.

  The wolf man examined my amulet for night flying, a big gold medallion with a luna moth Shrinky-Dinked to the front. He opened my power locket and dumped the red powder onto the floor. I think he was smirking under the mask. His eyes gleamed, wet and meaty behind the dead plastic.

  He found my love potion buried deep in the pouch, wrapped in a gauzy violet scarf, and held the soft bundle in his palm, squeezing it and cocking his head. Slowly, he unraveled it. He examined the perfume bottle in the lamplight, mouthing the word on the label: Poison. I don’t think he understood that this was the name of a perfume. And the sight of this word, printed so precisely on an old-fashioned bottle filled with dark algae-green cream
, as though packaged by goblins, must have unsettled him. Poison was my mother’s perfume. When she dabbed it on her pulse points she made a mean face in the mirror, as though going out into the night to kill. The summer after my brother died, I saw my mother flee a noisy neighborhood party to rush into the arms of a strange man; they fell into uncut grass.

  The wolf man unscrewed the cap. My love potion filled the tree house with goats and tortured lilies. He shuddered and put the cap back on and turned his wet eyes away. His brothers groaned. According to the ancient recipe, just smelling the potion was dangerous, though I’d had to make substitutes with modern ingredients from cans and boxes, and I knew this would weaken the brew.

  “That smell,” said the wolf man, turning to look at me. “It made me gag.”

  “It won’t hurt you,” I said. “It’s not really poison.”

  “Make her eat it then,” said the brother with the cowlick and bulldog eyes.

  I tried to squirm away but the Wilds were on me, this time binding my wrists with fishing line. The wolf man knelt near me, holding the bottle in his fist. I could smell his scalp. The snake on his neck lifted its head to look at me and opened its velvety pink mouth. Its fangs were too little to see, but I could imagine them—clear as diamonds, wet and sparkling sharp. The wolf man dabbed a green droplet on his fingertip and pushed it toward my lips.

  “Lick it,” he said. “If it’s not poison.”

  I turned my face away, and the Wilds pressed around me, flashing their knives and grunting.

  “Lick it, lick it, lick it,” they chanted.

  My tongue felt parched and gross. It slithered out and dabbed the drop. I closed my eyes to block their faces from my mind and tried not to swallow. I would hold the poison in my mouth and spit it out when they let me go. I thought of Brian, reclining in his lawn chair, but the image of the wolf man billowed up in my head. Hunched in his bathrobe, laughing his midnight-TV laugh, he staggered through the twisted branches.

  I kept away from the Wilds after that and did not spy on them and grew two inches and learned how to talk to birds. My father had ordered a xeroxed copy of a book so ancient that a library in England had to keep it in a special tank. This book was full of useful information: how to communicate with animals, how to make your own cough medicine, how to keep the devil from visiting your bed at night. It also contained love potions, but when I came to these passages I skipped over them with a beating heart. School had started. I spent hours in fluorescent classrooms, breathing disinfectant and chalk and the smell of warm, young bodies shut up. Two groups of girls wanted me as a friend, and I jumped between them, keeping my independence. Ben Wild was two grades ahead of me. At school he ran with bad boys and lurked under stairwells and slipped off to McDonald’s for lunch. Sometimes I saw him slinking down the hall in the silent in-school-suspension line, guarded by Mrs. Beard, a mammoth woman with a face like a sunburned fist.

  Ben had a thick, pubic unibrow, and his mother couldn’t keep his black curls cut. Tucked into the nest of his hair was a strange acnescarred face with glowing green eyes and slick, pimento-red lips. Sometimes we locked eyes at school. He’d laugh at me and say, sarcastically, “There goes the fairy princess.” He was always making nasty remarks to his friends. People whispered that his mother was pregnant again—with twins, triplets, quadruplets, quintuplets, sextuplets. They invented terms for outlandish broods, like megaduplets, and referred to the Wild boys as “the litter,” “the pack,” or “the swarm.”

  In health class we watched creepy, outdated films on lice, scabies, menstruation, scoliosis, and drug mania. I saw cartoon bugs burrowing under the soft skins of children, leaving red maps of infection. I saw pretty girls transform into twisted, tragic creatures who hobbled down school hallways in back braces. I saw hippie chicks dance ecstatically in throbbing psychedelic light, only to hurl themselves out of windows. Womanhood was bound up with disease. Ecstasy led to bashed-open skulls and the apocalyptic wail of police sirens. Parasites lurked everywhere: little bloodsuckers hopping into your hair; big perverts with candy and needles. But the disease had already touched me. My right nipple swelled. I could feel a hard lump wobbling inside when I picked at it. My mother laughed when I asked for a bra, and my deformity was visible beneath three shirts.

  One day Ben Wild called me “Cyclops.” The name spread through our school like lice. I vowed revenge and took to my spell books and started watching the Wild house again.

  I learned that Brian had an older girlfriend from the neighborhood, a dental hygienist, which was fine with me because I didn’t love him anymore. I learned that Mrs. Wild was pregnant and that she had a nervous breakdown every Wednesday evening after picking up three of her sons from midget-football practice and allowing them to gorge on ice cream. I learned that Mr. Wild sometimes lingered in his car for thirty minutes before venturing into the house. And most important, I learned that Ben wore his wolf-man mask every month on the night of the full moon.

  I had several theories: Ben fantasized about being a wolf man; Ben had told his little brothers, years ago, that he was a wolf man, and he kept up his ruse to control them with fear; Ben donned the wolf-man mask as some kind of deep, ironic joke. But no one in his family seemed afraid of the wolf-man mask. They never said much about it, simply commenting, in September, when the full moon came, that it was wolf night again. And Ben went about his activities as though everything were normal: taking out the garbage, bumming cigarettes from Brian, shooting hoops with Tim.

  In October a hurricane swept through our town. Before the storm I saw Ben outside in his backyard, standing in the weird sulfurous light with wind whipping through his hair. Something flickered through me and I wanted to join him, to snuggle in the hectic, stinking warmth of the Wild pack. But Mama screamed at the back door, and I ran inside our lonely house. Daddy made us sit in the pantry, where he told stories of green knights and enchanted ladies as Mama rolled her eyes and the storm lashed at our roof. My father was getting plump. His pale, clammy skin sometimes broke out into rashes. I knew all of his stories, word by word. I knew every sarcastic phrase in my mother’s repertoire, and the contents of her closet no longer fascinated me. I was sick of my parents’ faces and hungry for new life. Into the dark blinking windows of my dreams, Wild boys would sometimes scramble. They’d run howling through our house, kicking over end tables and smearing mud on our wall-to-wall carpet. They’d tear doors off hinges and let night storms fly through our house.

  Our power was out for four days. Houses flickered with candlelight. Children ruled the dark chaos and the Wild boys prowled the battered neighborhood with guns and knives. On the third day Tim Wild came to our back door and told us his parents were having a cookout. They had a freezer of meat that was going to go bad; the whole block was invited.

  It was a warm day and autumn mange patched the ragged trees. Smells of charred meat floated through the neighborhood; a million gnats had hatched in the muggy air. It was strange to see Mr. Wild out in daylight, cooking on their rusty grill, so tall, so skinny and pale, his shiny square of hair gone bristly like the coat of a dog. He hunched over the spitting meat, grinning with long teeth. He wore glasses. His ancient jogging suit had faded to a strange purple, and sweat dripped from the stubbled point of his chin. Children whispered that he was too smart to talk, that nothing he said made sense, that he had green false teeth and a robot eye and a creepy vampire accent. His wife looked worn-out, fussing with paper napkins that kept blowing all over the yard, mustard stains blotting her massive poly-knit bosom. The boys looked exactly like Mr. Wild. Children said he’d planted his evil clones directly into her belly, and now another one was growing down in the warm, dark wet.

  The Wild boys hadn’t bathed since the storm and they ran around the yard with gristly bones in their fists. They had been gobbling meat all day and their mouths were slick with blood and grease. They’d darkened their faces with charcoal. They whizzed through the treetops; their heads popped up from secret holes. Immune
to their mother’s screams, they cackled and smacked, lunged at heaped platters, stabbed morsels of flesh on the tips of their knives. White cats jumped on the picnic table and carried whole pork chops into the trees.

  There was nothing to eat but meat and white bread that turned to pure sugar when it hit your spit. There were no forks left. I fixed myself a plate and took it to Brian’s lawn chair. I had a blistered wienie and a steak, black on the outside but raw and oozing inside. I had a hot dog bun infested with ice. I ate the steak with my hands, and warm blood dripped down my throat. Gnats landed on my cheeks to lick sweat with their invisible tongues. I ate more meat: crumbly, dry hamburger and fatty pork loin and chunks of bitter liver; gamy lamb and slippery lumps of veal. I gnawed at the stubborn tendons of turkey legs and savored sausage that melted like candy on my tongue. I nibbled minute greasy quail with soft skeletons and sucked tender feathers of flesh from roasted ribs. The sky flushed pink and I ate as the boiling sun sank. I ate until my paper plate dissolved in my hands. When I finally came out of my cannibal trance, the moon was up, rolling like a carcass on the spit of its axis. And Ben Wild was staring at me through the sliding glass door that led to his brother’s den. He was wearing his wolf-man mask, as I should have expected, though I’d forgotten all about the full moon, and he startled me with his goofy monster face.

  Adults murmured near the dying grill. They were drinking beer. My mother’s sarcastic laughter drifted across the sea of withering honeysuckle, and I knew my father had already skulked home to bed. I peered through the door of the den and saw shapes moving in candlelight. A boy barked. The door slid open all by itself, and I suspected that one of the Wilds had pulled it with a string. Or maybe the little smart-asses had rigged up something more complicated.