The Wild Inside

by Jamey Bradbury

  The sky was clear and blue, by the faint light and the position of the sun just above the trees I could tell it was still morning but late, near about ten. Sometime in the night the wind had finally died, there was drifts about three feet deep against the barn and nearly burying the dog houses. I was lucky, the drift that had formed over me and Homer had acted like a blanket, kept us warm as I’d slept.

  The new snow had all but erased Helen. The only part of her visible was her eyes, froze open. The light in them gone.

  At first, I stayed pinned to the ground, wanting to look away from her but unable to. There was a wave rising, towering above me, weighted with the reality of Helen, dead beside me, and my knife, coated in her blood, and Dad, oblivious on the trail, and Scott, at school now but home by four thirty that day. The hole I had tore in their lives. A wave, building and building, it would crash down on me soon and when it did, I wouldn’t be able to swim against it, it would carry me away, useless and flailing.

  But I could do something now. Before it crashed. I couldn’t right what I done, but I could move.

  I wrenched myself up from the ground and led Homer inside, fed both dogs. Then drug out a sled, the one I’d meant to race with that year, and got out the rigging I’d need for just two dogs. Two retired dogs who hadn’t pulled a sled in ages, but the memory of it lived in their bones, they was still strong.

  I went back inside and forced myself to eat a bit of breakfast, a cold hunk of leftover elk meat that stuck in my throat. Then it was back outside with both dogs now, I put them on the line and instantly they began to bark and tug at the sled. I took them round the perimeter of the yard a couple times to get the eagerness out of their legs, then gee’d them toward the house and cut through the middle of the yard, where Helen waited.

  I knelt, pried my fingers under her. There wasn’t no give to her. Her body stiff, her clothes froze to the ground. I strained and felt something pull in my back. She tore free all at once, I tumbled back under the sudden release, and hit my head against the edge of the sled.

  Her eyes filled with sky. The kindness in her face was gone, everything gone. I thought of the way I had sent her off a few days before. You’re not my mother. I don’t need a mother. And I don’t need you.

  A wail grew inside me. I choked it off before it could escape.

  I took my glove off and tried to close her eyes, but the lids wouldn’t stay shut. Instead I fetched an old blanket from the barn and covered her. Wrapped her as careful as I could.

  Even bundled that way, she was near impossible to move. However much she’d weighed in life, death had doubled it. I panted as I drug her, the blanket bunched in my fists. Pulled her onto the sled, then stood with my hands on my knees, catching my breath. Went round and lifted her legs, spun her on her back till she was mostly on the rig. I fumbled with knots as I tied her body down with the same ropes we used for securing gear. Perversely glad that it was such a great effort. I deserved to struggle. Killing someone shouldn’t be an easy thing.

  On the trail, I could almost convince myself it was just another run. Except the quiet of the woods didn’t cool my mind and send my heart thrumming like usual. I remembered Hatch, the possibility of him, and waited for the hair on my neck to stand up. But the threat of him seemed distant now. Inconsequential. Not a word from my vocabulary, but Helen’s. All I could hear was her voice—

  Tracy?

  —and feel her concern, she’d carried it with her as she’d drove out to the house to check on me, despite the poor weather and the way the truck had fishtailed, her worry when she’d found the house empty, the impulse she’d felt to check the shed, a suspicion inside her, paired with amusement and nostalgia for her own young infatuation, that there was something growing between me and Jesse.

  I shook my glove off and sunk my teeth into the flesh of my own hand, deep enough to draw blood. Pain shot up my arm, electric and bracing. I couldn’t get lost in Helen now. I had work to do.

  The sled spilled out onto the lake and the dogs carried me over the ice, and all the breath went out of me. Ice, solid as stone, thick, and my mind like a panicking bird, throwing itself against a wall. No chance of the sled breaking through. No tools in my basket for chipping away at what had to be a good four or five inches of ice. It hadn’t occurred to me how cold it had got after an early winter of strangely warm days, and it had been ages since I come to the lake, I had trained and hunted most of the winter in other parts of the woods. I had imagined the water swallowing Helen like a throat, the floes of ice holding her under till the spring melt. Till I could find a way to tell Dad what I had done.

  I drove my two-dog team across the ice, north, more out of habit than hope. I remembered, the day Old Su died, dropping a stone into the water and how the ripples had sent the floes bobbing. I steered the dogs back toward the middle of the lake, searching for a crack, for a dark spot where the ice was thin enough to punch through. I remembered, too, the shape of the tool my dad, Helen’s dad, used to drill a hole in the ice, our hands round our hot mugs as we sipped and waited, the tug on my line when I caught a fish. I squeezed my eyes shut, shook my head. Tried to ignore Helen’s life, playing out inside me and distracting me.

  We traveled south, the dogs fresh and keen.

  The sound of a blade on ice, feel of the frozen air on my face as I spun, then toppled, landed hard, my brothers laughing at me.

  North again.

  Round in circles, the dogs galloping and their tongues wagging, and me on the back of the sled trying to hold down the panic rising inside me, trying to ignore what I’d took from Helen, every memory she had of ice. Solid ice, all around.

  I finally brung the dogs to a stop near the west side of the lake. Leaned on the handlebar and wrapped my arms round my head. With no more sound of the runners or the crunch of eight paws on ice, it was even louder inside me, the memory of Helen’s brothers laughing, the whisper of her skates’ blades. She shouted, Hey, Pop, watch! and I felt the toe of her skate catch the ice, her head, my head, turning before my body did, my whole self suddenly spinning. I shook my head again, plugged my ears with my fingers.

  Stop it! I hollered.

  My voice bounced against the ice, then the day was quiet. I opened my eyes, seen my dogs looking over their shoulders at me. Heard water churning. Falling. Finally able to think straight, I could see the lake in front of me instead of the Montana lake in Helen’s memory. No more laughter and shouting in my ears. Instead, I heard the rush of the waterfall, west of here. The little cove where the river emptied into the lake. The water there never completely froze over, no matter how cold it got.

  Let’s go! I called out. The dogs lunged forward and we followed the sound.

  It didn’t take long to reach it, a jagged shelf of ice round a hole at the base of the waterfall, maybe two feet wide. I undone the ropes that held Helen on the sled and pulled the blanket away. Twisted the fabric of her coat in my hands and hauled her out of the basket. She landed hard, her head thudding on the ice, and a cry startled from me.

  The dogs watched as I drug her by the feet toward the water. Their breath condensing on the air. Sliding her across the ice wasn’t no easier than dragging her over the snow, I coughed and wheezed. She stuck to the surface of the lake and I heaved her toward me. Took a step back, toward the hole.

  The scrim of ice cracked underneath me, then give way.

  The cold gripped me, I gasped and my insides turned to ice, then I bobbed to the surface, sputtering and gulping air, my arms and legs flailing and splashing and the water and cold like a vise round me, crushing my chest. My whole body a heart, slamming itself round but stuck in one place. I wrenched my head back to keep it out of the water. Seen the sky. A bird flying overhead. Gliding across the quiet of the day till that quiet was broken by the splashing and gasping of a girl about to drown or freeze to death.

  The thought calmed me down enough I stopped struggling. Sunk again, so tired, nothing under me, it would of been so easy to go under and no
t come back up. Easier than admitting to Dad that Helen was dead, I had killed her. Boots heavy on my feet, clothes weighing me down. Quiet now, for the bird. For me. Helen laid on the ice, staring unblinking at the sky and waiting for me to join her.

  Instead, I kicked. Rose up, grabbed the edge of the ice. It broke off in my hand. I kept kicking till I was on my belly, my forearms on the ice now, my coat sleeves freezing to the surface of the lake. I wrenched them free, kicking, inching forward onto the shelf of ice, my cheek on the lake now, my shoulders. A cracking sound under me, straining. Half out of the water. I couldn’t go back in. I kicked harder, my eyes on Helen’s shoulder. My fingertips brushed the top of her head. Kick. Kick. Still holding my breath. I exhaled. Flung my arm forward. Grabbed Helen’s coat. Pulled myself across the ice till I laid at her side.

  Funny how warm I was then. How far away everything was. The dogs was barking, they’d been making a ruckus the whole time I was in the lake, I realized now. They would be how Dad would find me, days from now, following their hungry barks till he come to the lake.

  Helen’s eyes on the sky, unable to follow the bird’s path. It was far away now.

  I’m sorry, I said between chattering teeth.

  I hauled myself up. Not shivering but quaking, my whole body racked and shuddering as I scooted away from the water then hauled Helen toward me, till we was on thicker ice. An hour, two, a whole day, it seemed, to strip her of her coat, her pants, her socks, and boots. Another whole day to strip myself, a week to crawl into her clothes, not warm but dryer than my soaked-through clothes, at least. Do this. Just do this one last thing, and you can go back home. Like this never happened. Except it had. Would continue to happen. Always.

  I pushed at her bare feet and she was a plank of wood scooting headfirst toward the water, till the ice broke under her. I inched myself back toward the sled. For a long second, she floated. Till she begun to drop, feet first. Her eyes the last thing visible before she disappeared under the water.

  My teeth clacking so hard my whole skull felt about to shatter. My bare hands stuck to the ice and I peeled them off, one then the other, as I crawled to the sled. The ice creaked, panic squeezed the breath from me, till I realized it was just the normal twanging of a froze-over lake. My arms and legs dumb, hard to work. Fumbling to pull myself into the basket. Under the blanket I’d used to cover Helen.

  I might of fallen asleep then. I might of got a whistle out first, something to tell the dogs it was time to go home. That’s where they went, back down the trail, without me to encourage them or holler them faster. They raced through the woods under snow-crusted branches, the day noontime bright and glittering, the kind of day you ought to spend outdoors. I stared at the patches of sky, struggled to keep my eyes open. Afraid of what I’d see when they closed. But when I couldn’t keep them open no more, when I finally did drift off, I didn’t see nothing. There wasn’t nothing left.

  Back at the house, still more to do. I left the dogs on the line and attached to the sled, tethered to a tree so they wouldn’t run off, while I hauled myself inside and crawled out of Helen’s clothes and into the shower. Lukewarm water likes needles all over me at first, till my skin begun to warm and I finally stopped shaking. I was lucky nothing was frostbit.

  Downstairs, I built a fire in the woodstove, stoked it, then fed Helen’s clothes to it, piece by piece. Her Carhartts smoldered while her wool socks burst into flame instantly. I would have to take her boots to the burn barrel, they would smoke something awful. I held her shirt to my face, remembering how after Mom died I had sometimes hid in her closet, where her blouses and sweaters still hung, and pressed my face to the fabric to catch the scent of her, clinging like a ghost to her things. Helen’s shirt smelled faintly of sweat, of metallic cold air, of dog and fabric softener and things baking. When I took it away, it was damp, and I threw it into the fire.

  Back outside to take the dogs off the line. I left the sled parked in front of the barn, the gangline strewn across the snow, while I fed the dogs again then rubbed their paws and checked them for cuts since I hadn’t took the time to fit them with booties.

  The ground where Helen had laid all night was rusty with the blood that had run out of her. No puddle, I’d disturbed the snow when I drug her onto the sled. But there was enough red spotted on the ground to tell something had bled there.

  I fetched a rake from the barn and tried not to think about how it was the same kind I’d seen through Jesse’s eyes. Used it to comb the red out of the snow.

  Exhaustion was creeping over me, ready to fell me like a tree. But it was after noon now, only a few hours before the Lesters would bring Scott home from school, and there was one last thing to do.

  I climbed into Helen’s Jeep and found her keys where she always left them, in the ignition, like anyone was welcome to use her car if ever they needed to. I turned the Jeep round, got it onto the highway, and drove. A half hour south I pulled to the side of the road and got out, locked it with the keys still in the ignition. A VSO or a state trooper would come across it sooner or later and start wondering who it might belong to. By then Dad would of already reported Helen missing, I imagined. People would search for her, police and coworkers from the clinic and folks from the village, she was well liked. They would find her, eventually. But not till spring.

  I run back home.

  When I got there, I finally crawled into bed. Certain I would plummet into sleep, every bone and muscle and inch of skin shredded. But when I closed my eyes, it only made finding Helen easier. I searched for sleep and found her life, lived it moment by moment and all at once. I stared at the ceiling and seen Helen, not a breath or pulse in her, just a pair of eyes under the ice.

  At first, I thought it was a dream. A hunger gnawing at my stomach, my trip to the refrigerator automatic, not an option but a routine. Then a checklist, one intention lined up after the next, an evening full of plans: Snack. Homework. Drawing. Anything good on TV tonight? Dinner, maybe I should offer to make it so I don’t have to eat Tracy’s cooking—

  I sat up in bed, my head pounding. Thoughts like bubbles continuing to float to the surface, then burst open, exposing me to—

  Scott? I hollered.

  His footsteps on the stairs, irritation pricking his skin, how he hated yelling, why couldn’t people just talk in normal voices?

  I clutched my head. These thoughts wasn’t mine, but they couldn’t be his. I wasn’t looking for them, hadn’t drunk him in ages. And the thoughts I’d got from him before wasn’t like this, clear, loud, happening inside me soon as he had them.

  What’s up? he said when he poked his head in my room.

  Concern that my sister looked sick again. Exasperation, there was always something going on with Tracy, trouble all the time. Hunger still scratching its nails at me, my shirt too tight at the armpits, I didn’t know why I picked this one to wear today, and a washed-out feeling, all I wanted to do was hide in my room a bit and draw or read in quiet, it had been too many days away from home and too many hours with a friend I now realized I only sort of liked.

  Nothing, I gasped, and I got up, shoved past him and shut myself in the bathroom.

  With a little distance, Scott was fainter but not gone. I could still find him, except there wasn’t no finding, he was there, present inside me without me needing to conjure him up, and the feeling and thought and impulse and experience wasn’t old but new, now. It didn’t make no sense. The taste I had got of Scott when we was younger was like the taste I had got of the first animal I ever caught, the chipmunk that wriggled out of my hand and bit me. Before I drained it I only got fleeting impressions, the briefest sense of its fear and the instinct that drove it to protect itself. A taste only gives you moments. I had got moments from people, too, thoughts and memories that was on their mind when I drunk. From Aaron, from Scott. From Jesse. Sometimes I could suss out what was on his mind even without drinking, we was so close, but I hadn’t never heard his thoughts, loud and unfiltered inside my own
head. I had drunk from hundreds of animals as they died warm in my hands, lived their lives. But their lives hadn’t opened me up to every other critter in the woods.

  Never make a person bleed, that’s what Mom had told me, what she’d made me promise.

  I had broke that promise plenty. But I hadn’t never drunk from a person as they died. Not till Helen.

  I crumpled to the floor as Scott knocked and asked, You okay, Trace?

  Go away, I said and closed my eyes.

  He went away, the floorboards creaking underfoot and the hinges on his bedroom door complaining. Still, he was there. Inside me. The closest I could be to anyone, hearing the voice in his own head narrate, feeling relief at taking off the too-tight shirt and pulling on a sweatshirt instead. He was there, a room away, yet louder than my own thoughts.

  20

  Dad didn’t win the Iditarod that year but he done all right, come in eighth with a team of fifteen, no more dogs dropped after Rohn. He finished in nine days, fourteen hours, twenty-one minutes, and three seconds. He didn’t tell me how running this particular race brought back the memory of Mom, aching and comforting at the same time, how the distance of months and the changes those months had brought somehow made the loss of her not exactly okay, but tolerable. He didn’t tell me, because he didn’t need to.

  The whole of his existence rushing at me before he even come inside the house the day he returned. At the sink, I scrubbed a plate for long minutes, even though I had polished it clean, concentrating on not sensing Scott, who was in the den, shoveling ashes from the fireplace. Unprepared to be pummeled by the pleasant fatigue and the gratitude for home that preceded Dad inside.

  I staggered, dropped the plate into the sink full of water, and gripped the edge of the counter.