The Wild Inside

by Jamey Bradbury

  I nodded.

  I followed a pass that took me right between them. Come out the other side. But the only descent I found was a chute that makes Dalzell Gorge look like a playground slide. So that’s the farthest north I ever went from here. This was, you must’ve been about four or five. Two babies at home, I didn’t fancy plunging headfirst down the side of a mountain.

  The flames of the fire lapped at the night round us. Dark as pitch now but in the morning the sun would be up earlier than ever, we was gaining more and more light and in a couple more months the days would grow warmer and the snow would soften, the trees would bud and the grass green up and, for a time, making your way off the land would get easier. Then the snows and ice would come again. Collecting water, finding something to eat, staying warm would all get harder, unless you knew what you was doing.

  Dad wedged his thermos in the soft snow and put his hands out toward the fire. You know, he said, before Scott come along, before you was even born, I always figured on having a couple sons who’d run the dogs with me. I had it all pictured. We’d have a big kennel, a couple hundred dogs. Three or four of us all racing together.

  You sorry it didn’t turn out that way?

  He shook his head.

  Nope. You come along, and you was so good with the dogs from day one, like you could read their thoughts. You were a natural. In my wildest imagination, I couldn’t have conjured up a girl like you, Trace. It didn’t even matter when Scott got older and it turned out he wasn’t all that interesting in mushing. Don’t get me wrong, if he’d showed more of an interest, I would’ve taught him, too. But you learn pretty quick your kids are going to be drawn to their own thing. And it don’t really matter, long as they’re happy. I imagine Scott’ll go off to college once he’s done with school here. Maybe study photography, maybe writing. Maybe he’ll write for a newspaper or a magazine. I could see him coming home, covering the big race one of these days when you’re running it.

  The dogs was bedded down in the straw we’d laid out for them. Now Zip stood up, stretched, then moseyed over to lay with her head in my lap. I stroked the fur above her eyes, the velvety softness of her ears.

  What about me? I asked. What do you imagine about me?

  Dad took a stick in his hand, poked at the fire till its embers flared.

  I guess I always picture you on a sled, he said. Figure you’ll take over the property one day. Run a proper kennel like I thought about doing. Maybe you’ll be the one with sons and daughters racing along with you. A hundred dogs.

  I nodded.

  Who knows? he said.

  I tilted my head back. The sky, endless, empty. Starless that night.

  Who knows, I echoed.

  We turned in when the fire begun to die. Dad’s brain chattering, the edges of his thoughts growing fuzzier the closer he drifted to sleep. Still, I knew what he was going to ask before he give voice to it.

  Trace?

  Yeah.

  You sure Helen didn’t come check on you at all?

  I could of told him then. About Tom Hatch, how stabbing him was a mistake I might of ended where it started, if only I hadn’t gone back into the woods and found the pack full of money. A pack I assumed belonged to Hatch, so it was easy to claim the money as mine. Except that wasn’t even the real reason I kept the money. I kept it because I thought I needed it, because the only thing that mattered to me was racing and the money would pay my racing fees. It also made me beholden to Jesse, though, so that when Hatch showed up again, it wasn’t just a matter of finishing what I’d started the day I stabbed him. It was also a matter of owing something to Jesse. I owed him protection. I didn’t just owe it, I wanted it, wanted to protect him and keep him nearby. Close. I couldn’t let anyone hurt him because he was mine.

  And so I had feigned being sick, I convinced Dad to run my race, I hid Scott at a friend’s. I planned and waited, and made certain everyone I cared about was safe, and then I had finished what I’d started. And then Helen’s voice spoke my name through the windstorm, her eyes found me in the blowing snow. Her blood blossomed red between her fingers.

  Trace?

  I cleared my throat. I’m sure, I said.

  The wall I had been building all my life between us, this was the final brick. Cemented in place, I couldn’t never take it back. I had my own regret. My own horror at what I done. Worse, I had his confusion. His fear that something terrible had happened. It had, of course. There wasn’t no coming back from it.

  He sighed. Okay, he said, his voice small in the dark. Good night, kiddo. Love you.

  He did. Love like a wildfire, like a monsoon, like a tsunami, love that consumed him, that existed like a physical thing, something with breadth and depth and heft. I felt it when he was near, different from the way he loved Helen, or Mom. It was the love you have for something you have made, something that is still part of you. It was overwhelming, its endlessness, I couldn’t bear the weight of it. Yet I feared it would vanish if he knew what I done.

  It is like this, life is just a greedy vulture. I have read about how vultures will eat and eat, no matter how full they are, they will keep gobbling up whatever’s in front of them. Life gobbles up one thing and that just makes it greedier, so it starts swallowing other things, too. It starts with Mom. She walks into the night and never comes back. The dogs are next, one by one they are taken. Then our way of life. Then Dad, the way things used to be between me and him. And if you think there’s a way to get used to that kind of loss, all you have to do is live long enough. Nothing stays.

  I found it the next morning. Searching for the small knob of flint I needed to spark against my knife blade to make a fire, rummaging through the unfamiliar pockets of Jesse’s pack, thinking idly how I would have to mend my own pack when I returned home. I emptied it, then cursed. Held it upside down and shook it, and what fell on the ground wasn’t my lost flint, but a knife.

  I had took out the tin cup and the bag of rice, everything inside the pack, left it all in my room. But the knife must of been wedged under a seam inside the bag this whole time. A nice pocketknife with a pretty burled handle. I frowned. Picked it up, turned it over in my hand.

  And remembered spotting it among the cheap fluffy prizes lined up on the shelves of the Test Your Strength booth, Everyone walks away a winner, you there, you look like a strong man, step on over. The ringing bell, then Tom telling me to pick out my prize, he’d won it for me. I look with Jesse’s eyes past the stuffed bunnies and bears to the only object worth anything, a burl-handled pocketknife. And there’s a chorus of screams from one of the rides, and my stomach drops and soars at the same time as Tom leans over me, we kiss—

  My nose running, I wiped it with the sleeve of my coat. Then opened the knife. The blade sharp but stained a rusty brown, he hadn’t bothered to wipe it clean, likely because he’d been in a hurry. The blade itself emblazoned with the name of the manufacturer, the blood would of been harder to clean from the engraved letters. goodwin knife co.

  I dropped the knife, it made a hole in the snow.

  I hadn’t let myself think about the day I’d stabbed Hatch more than I absolutely had to, but now I called it up. There was the chattering in my head from the squirrel as the life drained from it.

  There was the bloody handprint on the trunk of the tree, and the grass, dewed with blood.

  There was Hatch, his hands already on me when I turned.

  And here, I always run into a wall, a blackness that descended upon me when Hatch tossed me aside and my head struck the hard root sticking out of the ground. I had tried to search for him inside me, some part of him that I had taken in, but I’d never found it.

  Because it wasn’t there.

  Instead of putting my effort into looking for Hatch, I put it into what I actually seen that day. Like the blood. It was already glistening on the blades of grass and smeared across the tree’s trunk before I spun round. On Hatch’s hand when he’d reached out for me. Hatch was already bleeding by the time
he come to me. Already weak. Too weak to toss aside a girl who was small, sure, but muscular and heavy. He hadn’t lunged at me, he’d staggered. Hadn’t grabbed me, but clutched at me, needing help. Because he was already in trouble before we met.

  I knelt, dug into the snow for the knife. Folded the blade back into the handle.

  You about ready to head back? Dad asked as he emerged from the trees where he’d gone off to take a piss.

  I nodded. My throat too dry to tell him yes. I was ready.

  I pocketed the knife. Two knives on me now. Mine, and the one that had started everything.

  21

  We got home just before dusk, it wasn’t hard to busy myself with the dogs then claim I was awful tired and hide myself in my room the rest of the evening. At dinner, Jesse joined Dad and Scott, the three of them barely talking, Helen on their minds. The VSO had called with an update, not that there was much new. Nothing at her house to indicate she’d meant to do something permanent to herself or that she’d only set out to go on a drive. No sign anyone had forced her to leave her house. Jesse, Scott, and Dad chewed and stared at their plates and their thoughts shone up through the floorboards like beams of light. Scott worried he’d left his camera at Helen’s, and then cringed, ashamed to be worried over a little thing like that when Helen was missing. Dad’s head filled with gruesome pictures, Helen torn apart by wolves, frozen in the forest, murdered by a stranger, smeared on the side of a highway miles and miles from here. Sometimes it wasn’t Helen he thought of, but Mom, a painful sort of mirroring, a life full of tragedy, a tugging at the seams that held him together.

  I closed my eyes and concentrated.

  Seen myself in Jesse’s thoughts. The nights we’d spent together, the shadowy parts of me, questions he had about what I knew about him, what I could know. Impressions from his time on the road with Steve Inga, traveling from one checkpoint to the next by snow machine. He’d liked Steve, who had reminded him a little of Tom, his willingness to pitch in with any job, his ease with tools. At the center of Jesse, that same box, locked tight. Things he kept himself from thinking about, things he kept even from himself.

  I could feel his thoughts, but I couldn’t make him think about the things he didn’t want to. It didn’t matter. There was other ways to learn what I needed to learn.

  I sat with my knees drawn up in the rocking chair that used to belong to Mom, listening to the din that rose up out of the silence downstairs.

  Dad poked his head into my room before he turned in, late, long past when he normally might of gone to bed. He was looking more and more like he done right after Mom died, eyes hollow and bloodshot.

  Not too late, okay?

  I could of reminded him then that I was eighteen and pretty far past needing someone to tell me when bedtime was. But I was comforted more than irritated by him checking in on me. From his perspective, it was his job to look out for me, and always would be.

  Love you, Dad, I said.

  Would there ever be a time I wasn’t waiting to hear the sounds of his sleep from down the hall? I watched the slender moon through my window as it traveled its slow course across the sky. At some point, the house was finally quiet.

  Outside, the stars was out. Maybe if I stayed up late enough, I’d get to see the northern lights. I thought of Jesse’s handwriting in the Kleinhaus book. If I do nothing else before I die, I will see the northern lights. The first time I read that, I’d thought it was Tom Hatch who’d wrote it. Felt like the words made him real to me, but he wasn’t never real to me.

  The dogs lifted their heads when I got to their houses, then lowered them again when it was clear I didn’t have no treats, and I wasn’t stopping to say hello.

  I knocked on the door of the shed then pushed it open.

  Jesse was waiting. He smiled when he seen me, got up from the bed and come put his arms round me. I prodded at him, at the closed-off part of him I couldn’t never get to. When he started to pull away, I stopped him. Lingered where I was, him close. The feeling of him comfortable, and the fire in the woodstove crackling and the smell of the shed and the light over everything, same as it always was. It could of been easy to just stay there, ignore all my questions, try to forget Hatch and Helen. Except the gift Helen give me made it impossible.

  You okay? His breath grazed my neck.

  Fine, I said and flicked the blade of my knife, I moved fast but only with enough pressure to slice through the layers of clothes, to barely pierce his skin.

  What—

  The word fell out of him and he backed away, his hand plastered over the same spot Hatch had staunched when he stumbled into our yard. Looking for help, I understood now. Not looking for me.

  Jesse took his hand away and blinked at the blood, a few drops.

  The funny thing about drinking, I told him, is you don’t get to pick what it teaches you. You only get bits and pieces of what’s on a person’s mind, and you almost never get exactly what you’re looking for. At least, that’s how it is with just a taste.

  His mind a whirlwind, never settling on a single thought, howling like the wind had howled the night I killed Helen.

  I crossed the room step by step, in no hurry. I was between him and the door. And like I had demonstrated before the race, I was stronger than him. By a lot. He knew it, too.

  When you drink enough to kill a critter, I went on, that’s a different story. You get everything from that last drink. A whole life. I thought I understood that. How many animals have I killed that way? How many lives have I drunk in? Hundreds?

  He backed away, wanting distance from me. Considered rushing me, wondered if he could wrench the knife from my grip. Come up with strategy after strategy, then discarded each one.

  How could I of known it would be different with a person? I said.

  Silence across the landscape of his head, deafening and brief.

  Tom? he asked at last. I thought you said—

  I held his shirt with one hand, sliced it open, top to bottom. One layer between us, gone.

  I did say, didn’t I? I was certain Hatch would come back. I was worried about you. Worried enough that I got you worried, too, huh? Why was you so worried?

  Cut open the next shirt. Seen Hatch in Jesse’s thoughts, at the window of the shed, begging to be let in.

  I thought I was protecting you, I told him. Thought I was protecting everyone. And, I’ll be honest, I didn’t think I had no choice. If I didn’t finish the job I started, I would of got in awful trouble.

  Shredded his undershirt, neck to hem, and exposed the skin underneath, the wrap he’d used to flatten his chest. Hatch, angry and red-faced in his thoughts. You can’t leave. No one will want you the way I do.

  Turns out, I didn’t have a job to finish, I said and held up the knife so he could see the name on the blade.

  Jesse’s brain was facile, a word I got from him, he thought it, not about his own wiliness but about Tom, who was also facile, good with a tool, resourceful when he was in a pinch. Fondness there inside Jesse. Surprise at his own ability to fix things. I felt it, the solution falling into place, the first time Jesse run away from somewhere. His own home, stealing away in the night and not leaving a note for his parents, or for Tom, who had showed up a week later at a spot they had talked about, a place they’d planned to go together. Another fight, another night of running. Across the country, all the way to Alaska, and the moment he took the knife in his hand, when he found himself on the edge of the new life he’d chased down, only sort of lost in the woods behind the house. Hatch trailing along behind, and when he got close enough, this one last reminder of Jesse’s old life, the knife went in, so easy it might of acted on its own. Jesse looked down at his own hand, round the handle, and wasn’t sorry. He wouldn’t let himself be. He looked back into Tom’s eyes. Just go home, he said through clenched teeth.

  Now, though, he was telling me he had no choice.

  You didn’t have to stab him, I said. You could of found another way.

&
nbsp; You saw what happened, he said. What Tom did. He was dangerous.

  Did I?

  The tip of the knife made a dimple in Jesse’s skin, the most pressure I could apply without breaking the surface. A flash of red, the barn, Hatch’s breath on my cheek, on Jesse’s.

  Did I see, though? I got pieces. Enough to put together a puzzle. Enough to put it together wrong.

  Blood welled, but I didn’t need it. I seen Tom through Jesse, felt his rough hands on my body, his lips on mine. I saw him the first day they, we, met, Tom’s pretty face already marred by old scars from the car accident that had made him an orphan.

  I just want to know the truth, I told Jesse and pressed the knife to his skin.

  He winced. You don’t need to do that, he said. I’ll tell you, I swear.

  You’re right. I don’t need to.

  I licked the tip of the knife.

  But I want to.

  Small cuts. That’s what I learned from the times I had dug the knife into my own skin, them times I went weeks without the woods. Small cuts, small tastes. Helen had give me access to him, but his blood was more vivid than his thoughts, tiny bursts of his life, morsels of truth pouring out of him, coursing through me. He’d left Hatch bleeding in the woods. It wasn’t regret that brought him back to Hatch but worry, he’d heard the two of us tussling and his concern divided itself, part of him feared Tom might be in trouble. A larger part worried that he might of found help too soon. He dropped his pack and run toward the sound of us struggling.

  When he found us, he launched himself at me. Shoved harder than he meant. I passed out, never got to hear him say to Tom, again, Please, go. Never got to watch him watching Tom, watching the life drain out of him. That’s what Jesse thought, so unsettled he forgot to go back for his pack when he run away again.

  Jesse pushed at me, but he was weaker now, his breath come in gasps and his pulse stuttered.

  Don’t worry, I said as I made another cut. We’re almost done.