The Wild Inside

by Jamey Bradbury

  It’s okay if you do, Helen said. Your dad says he’s a good guy.

  I might of been on fire my face was so hot. I wondered if she would of felt the same if she knew Jesse’s secret. If Dad would of felt the same. Would he still say Jesse was a good guy? People don’t like learning they have been lied to. Maybe it was the same with Hatch, Jesse had lied to him, and that’s why Hatch had chased him all the way to our woods. I searched inside myself for the answer, but I hadn’t got that part of the story.

  Helen’s grin got bigger and I shot her a glare, but she was busy stretching her skin, she didn’t see. It wasn’t like she thought. I understood Jesse, but I still couldn’t trust him. If I could of chased him off our property, shoved his pack and all his money in his arms, and be certain he would go on his way, I would of done so in a second.

  Except whenever I convinced myself of that, an exhaustion rolled over me, a real, physical thing that made just standing up seem like the most difficult task anyone ever undertook. It wasn’t my weariness. It was Jesse’s. Now that what happened behind the barn had stopped playing on a loop in my head, I could focus on the other brief glimpses of his life I had got with one taste of him. His spent legs as he walked alongside highways and shivered under a cold rain. His heart slamming in my chest when he run down a street in the dark. A pair of men shouting after him, a freezing night in a small town, a good situation gone wrong. This was how he’d made his way north. I couldn’t stitch every part of the story together, but I could hear the train whistles and truck engines and noise of passing traffic that was the sound track of his journey. To look at the handful of places he’d grown to like, see each of them for the last time.

  Then I seen myself. Me, and Dad, and Scott, the three of us in the cab of the truck as we careened toward Jesse. It wasn’t his calm that kept him from moving but fatigue. I felt it, I become it. From the time I had spent in the woods, spying on this family, I had noticed that even though the paint on the house was peeling and the dog yard needed a good cleaning and there was a truck up on blocks in the drive, the kids seemed healthy and relaxed. Safe. The man coming toward me, saying, Help you?, he should of been scary, big as he was. The closer he come, though, the more certain I felt this man wasn’t dangerous or hateful. When he questioned me, suspicious as he was, his eyes seemed kind. Everything here telling me this place might be safe, at least for now. Even as the memory of so many other so-called safe situations going sour nagged at me. Help you? he said and I found my voice. I hope so.

  You okay? Helen said.

  I wiped at my face. Cleared my throat. Fine. Reckon dinner’s ready.

  I started for the house without her, wishing not for dinner but for the ermine I’d just skinned. Since Helen was with me, I hadn’t drunk from it, but now I wished I’d found a way. Anything to blot out everything Jesse carried with him. What I carried with me now. Having him round was trouble, I was certain. But I couldn’t send him away, neither, knowing what I knew. Not if it meant another road, another sleepless night.

  10

  If I do nothing else before I die, I will see the northern lights.

  i’ve seen them, you know. the northern lights.

  What were they like?

  like p.k. says. only stranger. like the sky is breathing light.

  I can’t wait to see them. There’s so much.

  so much?

  World. Stuff I want to see. Stuff I want to do. Places I want to go.

  Two different handwritings. Two different voices, two people talking back and forth. I could see it now that I was really paying attention, not just to what was wrote in the margins of Jesse’s Kleinhaus book but how it was wrote. Both in blue pen, one handwriting smaller than the other. I’d seen Jesse draw plenty, his tiny but neat writing describing the parts of the dog wheel he’d designed, the careful letters labeling the bins he’d organized in the kennel. So one set of notes was most likely Jesse’s. But the other?

  It wasn’t late but Dad was already asleep. Helen had stayed after supper a good while, the four of us drug out a board game we hadn’t played since long before Mom died. Then we’d waved Helen down the drive. When the sound of her Jeep’s engine grew faint, Dad give me a look like he wanted to say something. Instead he put an arm round me, give me a squeeze, then announced he was awful tired, he thought he’d turn in early.

  I took the Kleinhaus book with me downstairs, out the back door. Jesse’s lamp was lit. I walked the short distance to the shed, lining words up inside my head in neat rows then kicking them apart when they didn’t come out the way I aimed. I was outside his door before I wanted to be, could hear him rustling round inside.

  I knocked.

  He flushed when he seen me. His eyes gray as storm clouds.

  Wordlessly, I held up the Kleinhaus book.

  He stepped aside then, and I come in.

  He’d found himself a new pack somewhere along the way and though he didn’t have too many belongings, they was all laid out on his table. His notebook and stub of pencil, a couple adventure novels, pairs of underwear and socks. Comb, harmonica.

  You taking off? I asked.

  He brushed past me and carried on packing.

  You don’t have to, I said.

  His face was red, sweat trickling down the side. He had to be hot, the sides of the woodstove glowed red, and he was dressed in his usual way, a too-big sweater over a flannel shirt. I had joked to Dad once about Jesse’s uniform, and Dad said, quiet, You ever stop to think that’s all the clothes he’s got? Later, he give Jesse some of his old shirts and a pair of Carhartts that was too small for him but plenty large on Jesse. Now I seen how his clothes was a sort of camouflage. Jesse was like them critters whose coats are brown in the summer but turn white in the winter to match the snow. They’re just about impossible to see even when they’re right in front of you.

  I tossed the Kleinhaus book on the bed. I’ve read that book maybe twenty times, I said. You think I would of recognized parts of that story when I heard them.

  He’d finished packing everything but the Kleinhaus book. Carried the pack across the small space then waited, watching me.

  My dad don’t know nothing about you, I told him and it come out sounding like a threat, so I added, And I ain’t going to say nothing. To anyone.

  He finally spoke up. Unless?

  Unless what?

  He stayed by the door. In case he needed to run, I realized. He’d been here before, tense and distrustful as someone used his secret like an object, something to trade for something else.

  Unless nothing, I said. I ain’t warning you. Or threatening you. You can trust me.

  But I heard the words in my head, said by a half dozen different voices. The plunging in his stomach when it turned out not to be true.

  His hand on the doorknob, wariness radiated off of him.

  You like it here, don’t you? I asked. You like my dad. You wouldn’t work so hard to make things nicer round here if you didn’t want to stay.

  It doesn’t matter now, he said.

  I sat down on his cot, the spot farthest from him. If you corner a nervous animal, even if you got good intentions, it won’t come to you willingly. Even your own dogs are likely to snap at you if they feel hemmed in and threatened.

  Listen, I said. I don’t give a damn one way or the other. Stay or go. But I also know you. I know you want to stay. And I know you never lived in Maine with your grandparents. You never lived in Montana. You never went anywhere in your life, till you run off from home.

  Congratulations, Jesse said. You can read.

  Every muscle in him tense. He didn’t have no reason to trust me, specially when I had something on him. I could put us on equal ground, I realized, if I give him a secret of my own. I sighed.

  I know stuff that ain’t in that book, too, I told him. I know you wish you could step out of your own skin sometimes. Take it off, like a coat. I didn’t get that from a book.

  Jesse’s shoulders dropped the tiniest bit.
>
  I know something happened between you and Tom Hatch, I went on. Behind the barn. Something bad. He hurt you. And you hurt him back.

  The wood in the stove cracked loud in the still cabin. Jesse winced. How?

  There’s two ways to get to know someone, I told him. One way, you learn them through their words and actions.

  I dug into my pocket. It was awkward, seated on the bed like I was. But I didn’t want him to spook when I took out my knife. I laid it on the foot of the cot, closer to him than to me.

  He glanced at it. The other way? he asked.

  I can show you.

  A long silence as he studied me. I couldn’t tell if he was thinking back to a moment in the woods when he come upon something he shouldn’t of seen. If he already knew my secret. I thought of the day I taught him how to handle Zip, how he’d reacted when I told him seventeen was awfully young to travel clear across the country alone. You’re seventeen, aren’t you? And you spend almost every day alone in the woods. A lot of people would ask about that. His eyes, unreadable as ever. I braced my hands against the stiff mattress, held myself where I was, against the urge to take the knife and cut past my own wondering into the truth of him.

  He moved slow. An eternity before the knife was in his hand, the blade open. He pointed it at me.

  Not me, I said. You.

  A whole crowd of thoughts clamoring in his head, each one surfacing on his face, till one finally spoke loudest. He pressed the tip of the knife into the palm of his hand and blood welled up, I smelled it the moment before I seen it. My stomach growled and I had to stop myself from lunging across the cot, grabbing the knife, and making a real cut.

  Instead, I took his hand. Think about home, I told him.

  I only tasted. Just enough to be able to tell him about himself later.

  To watch his father, my father, climb into the cab of some big machine and steer it toward an open field, his face already beaded with sweat from the morning’s work. To feel my mother’s fingers stroke my hair and hear her ask, How’s my girl? To step into the cool of the barn, the thick odor of cows and the stench of their shit, familiar and overwhelming. To sit in the shade, lost in a world different from my own, till I glance over the top of the book and find Tom Hatch studying me. To lay in bed and stare at a blank ceiling and wear my body like a stranger’s clothes.

  After, I told his own life back to him.

  When he didn’t say nothing, I told him how I’d finally recognized Kleinhaus’s story in the one he’d been telling. How his lies had convinced me he couldn’t be trusted. And that I come back from the woods because I needed to know if he was the kind of person my dad should let stay nearby, work our property. Come inside the house anytime he wanted. Become a part of the family.

  He touched his mouth. The place where he’d bit his own lip still red and slightly swollen. Understanding in his eyes.

  Sorry about that, I said.

  What did you see then? he asked.

  It’s not just seeing—

  I get it, he said.

  I could tell he didn’t, he probably thought it was just a sort of mind reading, but there wasn’t no way to make him really understand. I seen Tom Hatch, I said, and he was there in the room with us, a moment we shared now, our heart hammering and the weight of him.

  So you saw— Jesse started, then stopped. You felt—

  Not everything, I said. That’s not how it works. I get what I get in a taste. Just parts of the story. Whatever’s on a person’s mind, I reckon.

  Jesse nodded. You reminded me of Tom.

  When I socked you?

  He touched his mouth, the place where he’d bled.

  I really am sorry ’bout that.

  Jesse got up, fed a log to the woodstove even though the fire was blazing. A tiny burst of joy, like bubbles fizzing round you when you jump into a lake, they pop against your skin. His joy. Delight at the crackling fire, at the stack of wood near the stove, the shed full of wood outside. Warmth all through the winter and never a worry that he wouldn’t be able to get warm when he was cold. All that sensation washed over me in less than a second, and I understood Jesse a little more than I had in the moment before. I leaned against the wall, lightheaded.

  He sat back down next to me and I shook my head to clear it.

  The two of you didn’t come to Alaska together, I said. Not after what happened. You come up, then—

  He followed me.

  He followed you, I echoed. Would he come looking for you again?

  Jesse’s face clouded over. I don’t want to talk about him.

  We can stop soon as you tell me if he might come back.

  Jesse got up then, took two strides across the room and realized that was as far as he was going to get. Turned round. He run his hands through his hair, it had got shaggy over the last weeks, it stood up in little spikes. Why does it matter? he said.

  It matters, I said, because I stabbed him. Could of killed him. I imagine that ain’t something a man just lets slide.

  His face went pale. He stopped his pacing and his hands fell. I couldn’t take his eyes on me. I stood, put the knife back in my pocket. Opened the door and let winter into the shed. I was burning up. I wished he hadn’t stoked the fire.

  He come up behind me when I was hunting, I said, frowning, remembering. We tussled a bit. I know I got out my knife. Then he struck me. I don’t recall stabbing him, but I must of. He sent me flying and I blacked out. I didn’t know what I done till he showed up the next day, bleeding all over the place.

  I closed the door, and the room was instantly too hot.

  How could I forget a thing like that? I asked. I dropped onto the cot again. Saying what I done didn’t lift the weight from me. I could claim I was only trying to defend myself, that it was Hatch who started our wrestling match when he put his hand on me. But the truth was like a seed I had swallowed, it had took root inside me. The moment Hatch touched me, I’d felt the smile on my own face. My body already acting on the realization it took my mind another handful of seconds to come to, that this stranger had just give me an excuse to let myself lose control. To do exactly what my mother had warned me against all my life.

  I held my head in my hands, my face on fire.

  The bed sagged a little when Jesse sat down next to me. He put his hand on my back. You didn’t mean to, he said.

  But I did. And it don’t matter that I’m sorry now. When it happened, I knew what I wanted.

  It spilled out of me then, the way Hatch had drug himself into our yard and how I seen the recognition in his eyes when I knelt next to him. Easy enough, with Jesse silent and the two of us so close, to tell him about the panic that sent me back into the woods, the fear that Dad would come home knowing what I’d worked hard to hide from him before I even knew it had to be hidden.

  I wanted Hatch to die, I said. Just so I wouldn’t be in trouble.

  It’s okay, he said.

  I made a promise, I told him. Never to hurt a person. It ain’t okay.

  He slid his arm round me. Yes, it is.

  My ear against his chest. His heart beating, steady.

  He won’t come back, Jesse said after a time.

  I sat up. You certain about that?

  He won’t come looking for you, he said. And I doubt he wants anything to do with me.

  How come—

  Can we just leave it at that?

  His eyes on mine, plainly pleading. Behind them, a whole tangle of thought, the history of him. Plenty more there that I couldn’t see, layers of feelings and desires and fears and memories I hadn’t drunk in. I had learned, the few times I had tasted another person, how so many thoughts and memories could surface at once, one on top of another, one mind thinking and feeling a dozen things at the same time. Already I felt too far away from him, in a separate room, no windows, no doors. The way I always felt with other folks, always tapping on surfaces, putting my ear to a wall to hear the mumbling going on in the next room. Wishing I could make a door, f
ind a way inside.

  Jesse traced the cut he’d made on his own palm, the wound already bloodless and ready to scab over.

  I should go, I said.

  What about the pack?

  I froze in the doorway. Sorry?

  My book, he said. It was inside a backpack.

  I felt my head shake slowly. No, I said and drew the word out. No, I didn’t find a pack. Just the book.

  Oh, he said.

  I had learned to be quiet so I could get close to the animals I hunted without startling them. Jesse had learned to be quiet for different reasons. We might of stayed where we was, staring at each other all night if he hadn’t spoke up finally.

  Maybe it fell out, he finally said.

  I should go, I said.

  Wait.

  He reached past me to close the door. Then his hand on me. In my hair. His lips on mine. It was different from when I’d kissed him before, softer. Only the ghost of blood in my mouth from the wound on his lip. I felt him inside me, closer than I’d ever got to anyone else.

  I got to go, I said when he drew away.

  Across the small stretch of yard between the shed and the house. Making new tracks in the fresh snow that had fallen in the last hour or so. My heart thudding in my chest again. My thoughts on the backpack, still hidden under my bed. And on Jesse, and the distance I put between us with every step.

  11

  That week, Helen become what Jesse called a fixture round our place. She come out in her big Jeep or riding alongside Dad in his truck after a shift at the clinic and spent evenings helping to clean the dog yard, making cobbler for our Thanksgiving meal. Holding Dad’s hand when the two of them sauntered down the trail. One afternoon, I stayed behind to help Jesse work on the training wheel and caught a glimpse of them from the corner of my eye. For the briefest moment, the figure in the red coat next to Dad wasn’t Helen, but Mom. Then the sun come out from behind clouds, the day brightened, and I seen the coat was more maroon than red, the hair was a couple shades too light, and the woman at Dad’s side was almost as tall as him, instead of a whole head shorter.