Wild Things

by A. M. Dellamonica

  I’d heaved him across the house and into the tub, thinking he could drain there. He fell in face first, his butt pointed up at the ceiling. I meant to call the police, but even so I couldn’t leave him that way. It was undignified; it felt cruel.

  So I reached into the tub, wheezing with the effort I’d already made, and tried wrangling him over, onto his side or sort of sitting. I was pulling on his feet—I didn’t want to grab the obvious handhold near his center of gravity. Awkward, slippery fumbling in a close space, and all of it made harder by the thick, numb scar tissue on my palms. By the time I had him flipped upright, I was soaked in sweat…

  …and my hands itched.

  Know how a hot dog looks after it’s been skewered and stuck in a campfire? The red, burned meat, the seared brown-black blisters? I made a point, in those days, of not looking at my palms much. Other people stared when I went out; I refused to wear gloves, to hide. But I was something of a genius at getting through the days without looking at the burns myself.

  Naturally, this was another thing the therapist had an issue with.

  (After we ran, the story I gave out about my hands was half the truth: I told people I was a firefighter, told them I got burned doing a rescue. But I also said I saved the guy, that it was Aidan, and that his weird pale skin was grafts. I’d give them a good look at my scorched-sausage palms and say, “And then we fell in love.”

  “Awww,” these strangers would reply. Everyone loves a romance, right? So far, nobody’d turned us in.)

  Anyway, the hands—I’d moved him and they itched. I took a good look.

  It was splinters, driven into the burns. They were lined up like little dominos, bristles driven in to the lines of my hand, life line, heart line, brain line…all the grooves where palm readers look for meaning. Tiny spiked fences of bristling birch, dividing my hands into mapped terrain, lumps of territory, each filament barely aglow with the blue that had come to mean magic.

  “Go to jail,” I whispered. “Go directly to jail. Do not pass go.”

  Behind me, someone answered, in a voice so deep it vibrated my bathroom mirror: “Ma’am? May ah have some pants, please?”

  My best cash job that summer was delivering concrete statues to people who wanted Italian Cupids or ornate birdbaths or what-have-you on their front lawns. My boss, Vitaly, claimed to ship them from whatever country the designs nominally originated in, but he really cast and painted them in his garage. All very authentic, he was fond of saying. He pronounced it “Aww Thenn Teek.”

  It was a good gig. I drove all the back roads, coming to know offbeat ways to get from town to park to vineyard, identifying a dozen isolated spots where Aidan and I might hide if a manhunt broke out.

  When he wasn’t at the bakery, I’d bring my swamp man along. We turned off the AC, letting the cab of the truck heat up. I swigged water and sweated as the sun baked in. The almond tint in his birch-bark skin came out and he looked as human as anyone. We’d pretend-fight over music as we drove around the little British Columbia locales with their funny names: Osoyoos, Penticton, the Naramata Bench.

  We explored the Similkameen, delivering jumped-up lawn dwarves, the occasional Buddha or Ganesha, once even an Easter Island head the size of a ten-year-old boy. The vineyards and orchards spread out on either side of the highway, cultivated land in patchwork arrangements, divided by fences. It rolled down to the powder-blue waters of Okanagan Lake—which was supposed to be home to a monster, Ogopogo, they called it, sort of a Canadian Loch Ness monster, a tale from before magic broke into the world.

  I wondered about Ogopogo when I had nothing else to keep my mind off my problems. Was it there before the magic escaped? Was there one now? Sea monsters had been sinking ships in the Pacific since the magical outbreak in Oregon.

  Was Ogopogo alone, or did it have a mate?

  Our best conversations happened on those long stretches in the truck. I’d pick a random childhood memory: my favorite book when I was ten, the first movie I saw in a theater, some toy I got for a Christmas present.

  Once: “When I was a kid, my mother bought jelly in cans.”

  Aidan busted out grinning. “Yeah. There was a plastic lid on the bottom of the can, for once it was opened—”

  “Like for canned coffee. And you used a can opener.”

  “The jam would have these grooves from the can lid,” he replied.

  “Like circles in a pool of water, but frozen in place, and full of fruit seeds. I liked raspberry.”

  “Strawberry for me.” He drummed his fingers on the dash, keeping time with his clangy Nicaraguan jazz. “You could get those circles with coffee, too, if you opened the can carefully enough.”

  “Yeah, and then trace them with your finger until the machine pattern disappeared, and it was just like sand, with finger-circles.”

  We loved finding these little ‘before’ things we had in common. Like the fact that we both studied Sparta in grade four. We’d both tried and failed to get our mothers to buy us Cap’n Crunch—too much sugar, was their ruling. We’d both collected soup labels for a while, to mail in for some prize neither of us could remember getting, and sold magazine subscriptions—unsuccessfully—for school fundraisers.

  Nostalgia, I concluded, after the coffee can conversation ended with us screwing madly in the back of the truck, next to a full-sized concrete Roman warrior swaddled in bubble wrap, had become some kind of aphrodisiac.

  One of our grim little in-jokes is that the bog loves Aidan for his mind.

  “Spill it,” I’d said, that first day, after I got him out of the bathtub and into a discarded pair of Richard’s pants and a Vancouver Fire Department T-shirt. “What happened to you?”

  “I got caught in the magical outbreak, in Oregon.”

  “You’re one of the missing townspeople?”

  “Not a local. I am—well, I was a biologist.”

  “A scientist?” It was stupidly thrilling just to be near him; I hadn’t felt like this since I’d had a pointless crush on my grade six social studies teacher. He could have been talking about the War of 1812 and I would have been riveted. That I managed to say, “Go on,” and not, “Do me now!” was something of a miracle.

  But he was magic. Contaminated. He had to go, or I’d never get my old life back.

  “We’d camped on the edge of a riparian zone, taking DNA samples. We’re—we were—building a taxonomy database. Three of us: me, Debbie, Ian. Then Debbie didn’t come back from the weekly food run to Indigo Springs. When we realized she was hours overdue I decided we should go out, trace her steps, report her missing if need be.”

  “We were packing up, and the quake walloped us. Trees fell across the path, there were aftershocks, and naturally we lit out for town. We couldn’t know that was the epicenter. After sunset, we were blind. The magic was changing everything, the trees were getting bigger, and the wildlife—”

  He rubbed his face. “Pitch black, the sounds…and we realized all the animals who could were fleeing past us, running away from the direction we had taken. But then I pitched off the edge of the trail and into an ice-cold pool. I swallowed—I all but drowned. I scraped myself on all sorts of things, and a birch branch stabbed through my forearm…”

  I remembered holding on to the burning man as long as I could. They’d had to force me to let go; one of the guys from the firehouse almost broke my wrist. It was the day after we’d found out that magic existed and I’d been so scared and angry.

  As Aidan talked I pulled the blue splinters out of the meat of my palm, leaving dotted lines like tattoos among the burn scars.

  “Ian called my name, for a while,” Aidan said. “Until somethin’ scared him. He ran, and I tried to follow. I thought I did follow, in some fashion. I could hear him. I was beside him or with him. But it was all a muddle. I was in the forest, becoming tangled with it, and it was as if the trees and ferns and all the little birds were watching Ian, and I was within them…”

  “He died?”

&
nbsp; “There was an ants’ nest. Big, magically contaminated ants. They tore him apart while the rain forest watched…” His hands drifted up, as if to cover his ears.

  To block out the memory of screaming, I thought. I held up my scorched, punctured palm. “I saw a man burn to death that same day. It was slow. I couldn’t help.”

  He reached out with just a fingertip, tracing my heart line. We stared into each other’s eyes, dizzy, voltage building between us, until it was break apart or kiss. I knew there was no way, no way at all, I’d ever call the cops on him.

  He’s gotta go, I thought again. Keep your lips to yourself, Calla.

  Finally he closed his eyes and drew back, saying, “I’ve been woven into the rain forest ever since. Diffused. Watching, growing, spread thin.”

  “We’re hundreds of miles from Oregon.”

  “An ecosystem is one big body, just as a person’s a big collection of cells. I gathered in that lake, more of myself every day, caught somehow near a swirl of lilies by the dam. I found my glasses on the lake bottom and grabbed on to a birch stump. It’s taken months to be me again, Calla. And this morning, I felt something separate, a part of me that wasn’t tied to it all, a way out—”

  “The picture I took?”

  Aidan stared out at my yard. Salmonberry canes were growing against the door, extending long thorns around its frame. It was crazy, but we could both sense they wanted to get in. “It wants me back. I might be better off if I go to the authorities—they’d put me in a plastic room; it might be safe.”

  “Safe,” I said glumly, looking at my palm. “If what you’re saying’s true, the whole Pacific Northwest is…?”

  “Saturated with magic,” he said. “Every leaf, every tree, every rat, bug, and starling.”

  “Nobody knows?”

  “Government must know,” he said. “They just can’t admit.”

  It was all I could do not to put my arms around him. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I don’t keep plants or pets. We’re the only things alive in here.”

  Like most of the contaminated, I was devolving into an animal.

  The process started with my nose.

  I was allergic to dust and pollen as a kid, and both my parents smoked. I’d never thought I had much of a sense of smell, even after I left home. But that day I fled with Aidan, a whole World of Stink flowered out to find me. An hour after I’d driven off, outstripping the chronic gridlock of the suburbs, I started picking up the faint whiff of oil in the AC, the ghost of a dog Richard had taken with him nine months earlier, when he left me, and the salt and oil in a bag of chips wedged under the backseat.

  I smelled blackberries ripening on the side of the highway and had to fight an urge to pull over. Because that was the other thing: I was hungry. The last thing I’d done before leaving Vancouver was eat everything remaining in my fridge, finishing with the six leftover squares of June’s birthday cake.

  When I parked at a highway rest stop, I got my first mind-blowing, heady whiff of fresh salmon. I felt my entire body lurch at it, ravenous, straining to grab, to eat it raw, to eat it all.

  So, I’d thought, digging out my wallet and making for the vendor, who was selling fish burgers out of a big white catering van. I’m a bear.

  I got strong too—scarily strong—over the weeks that followed. It made it easy to wrangle Vitaly’s concrete monuments onto and off of the dolly I carried in my truck.

  The smell thing I was fine with; the strength too. But bears live to pack on the fat in the summer and snooze through the winter. What was Aidan thinking when he said we should move to Alberta? The cold and dark would slow his sap, and I’d be under the covers, dreaming and belching fish. We’d be helpless; anyone might come for us.

  One of the few people I did repeat deliveries to was a woman who ran a funk and antique store in Osoyoos—she seemed to like having one concrete albatross in stock at any given time. I supposed she must have sold them; she reordered, maybe one every two to three weeks. She’s the one who told me that technically the South Okanagan wasn’t a desert—it got an inch or two too much rain, each year.

  My swamp man said ecosystems didn’t have tidy boundaries: they blurred. Wine country lacked the lush wet of Vancouver—no ferns, no squash of cedar mulch underfoot, no Emily Carr landscape with its filtered green light and heavy blankets of blue spruce vegetation. The desert landscape verged on Georgia O’Keeffe: sagebrush, trembling aspen, and ponderosa pine, the latter dying by the thousands as an infestation of pine beetles—not magical, a disaster predating the current crisis, but still going strong—gnawed its way through the province.

  But animals weren’t ruled by neat climate-zone borders on human maps. Maybe the coast didn’t have rattlesnakes or praying mantises or wild mountain sheep, but the sky was all one piece, and within it the osprey hunted from the sea to the vineyards and beyond. Under it, salmon made the long voyage inland from the ocean every year. Honeybees and bumblebees spread pollen like messages, from plant to plant and province to province, crossing the border without regard for our rules, our guards, and our guns.

  So we got found, of course; it had only ever been a matter of time. But it wasn’t the police who came for Aidan.

  In the hollow on the acreage where our rented trailer was parked, it started to rain, water pounding like a thousand ball bearings on the roof one night when we were screwing. The storm continued through to the dawn. The locals called it a cloudburst at first, welcoming the break from the thirty-five degree heat. But then it went on, growing from anomaly to nuisance to, ominously, a threat to the harvest. People stared at the skies, muttering about grapes and hang time and mudslides.

  Even then, we didn’t realize what it meant. As lightning pounded and crashed overhead, Aidan went to the bakery in rubber boots and a slicker, and I thought nothing had changed but the weather.

  Vitaly called and I drove to his workshop, crawling the highway at thirty miles an hour, headlights on, windshield wipers squeaking in vain. He was waiting under an umbrella, beside a concrete rendering of a scantily clad nymph with a big bird in her arms.

  “What do you think?” he said.

  “Leda and the swan, I assume?” The bird looked less like it was nuzzling her affectionately and more like it might be about to bite her ear off.

  “Met a guy online who’s using the magical outbreak as an excuse to develop a Greek temple. Says the old gods are coming back to get us.”

  I laughed. Then I thought: Oh, shit, what if they are?

  Vitaly thrust a bigger-than-usual wedge of paper at me. “Shipping forms.”

  I scanned them. “In the States?”

  He shrugged. “You said you had ID. Is it a problem?”

  “I can get through the border,” I said. The papers were import documents, all legitimate enough, though Vitaly’d filled the forms out by hand with green ink. There was space on the grid for more entries.

  “So?”

  I wrapped the papers in plastic, carefully, to keep out the water. “Tell me one thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It is actually statues I’ve been delivering all this time? They aren’t full of pot?”

  He howled laughter into the downpour. “I’m a net consumer, Calla—not a producer. I’d smoke myself silly in a week if I was dealing. ’Sides, I’m too old for adventures in cross-border smuggling. You won’t get arrested, I swear.”

  “Okay.”

  “Not on my account, anyway.”

  “Okay,” I said again. “Can you pay me in U.S. this time? So I have money to buy…whatever, while I’m there?”

  He nodded and fished in the unlocked cupboard in his garage for a few bills. “So we’re good?”

  “We’re great.” I was so excited I’d almost broken a sweat.

  I drove to the nearest greasy spoon, bought four double burgers, ate them one after another as I made for home. I found the trailer in a growing puddle, the sodden sagebrush and prickly pear of our yard looking like it was fixing to
gasp and drown. A flock of maybe seventy Canada geese and their newly fledged young were waiting, staring intensely at the trailer. They hissed at me as I passed.

  “He’s mine,” I told them. “You can’t have him.”

  Aidan was inside with the heat on and the stove running all four burners, watching the birds watch him.

  “At least it’s not the police,” he said weakly.

  I didn’t point out that the bog was bigger than the cops. “I say this qualifies as not getting away with it anymore.”

  “Yeah. So…Alberta?”

  I shook off the water, drying my hands over the burners. “I want to go to the States, Clyde.”

  “You’ll get snagged trying to save me,” he said. “I’m not worth it.”

  “You are precious like rubies,” I said. “But it’s not just about saving you. I want to go south. I’ve seen the Prairies, and winter frightens me.”

  “You don’t know that you’ll hibernate,” he said.

  “If we go toward the cold, I will. I know it.”

  “So we exploit that. Find somewhere to hole up for the winter, ride out the weather in a shared coma.” He cupped my face in his hands. “You know I love to sleep with you.”

  “That sounds like a great way to wake up in custody,” I said. “Aidan, even if we don’t get grabbed, even if the world doesn’t end before spring, there’s always an end. That same ticking clock, am I right?”

  His pale lips were set, a mulish expression.

  “I want time with you. I don’t want to spend it unconscious in some moldy rented basement. I want to see adobe houses and a Civil War battlefield or the Bonneville Salt Flats. Even the friggin’ Alamo would do.”

  “I want to give you that, Calla. I love you; I want to give you whatever you want.” He couldn’t quite hold his temper. “But I have no goddamned passport, and the border ain’t some joke.”