The Wilding: A Novel

by Benjamin Percy

  But Graham is different. He is the type of boy who prefers books to BB guns, who makes his bed every morning and plays computer games after he finishes his homework and never begs for the candy stacked next to the cash register. Exactly the type of boy, Karen was thinking, who might climb into a car with a stranger if told a convincing lie, not wanting to offend.

  She found his teacher, Mrs. Glover, in her classroom, working her way through a stack of math quizzes. And no, she hadn’t seen him, not since the final bell. Together they searched the school grounds and found no trace of him. With every room Karen peered into and found empty, a wind grew stronger inside her, until it felt as though there were a cyclone tearing loose everything she thought was securely nailed down.

  She tells Justin this as they drive around Bend, poking their heads into the video arcade, the pizza parlor, the cinema, the library, all the places Graham knows. They have called the police. They have called everyone in his class. Now there is nothing to do but look and wait. They randomly zip up and down the streets of Bend, their heads swinging back and forth as the world flies past the bug-speckled windshield. Karen has her cell phone cradled in her palm. Her mouth incessantly quivers as if only just holding on to a scream. At one point she grabs Justin’s arm and squeezes it, once. He can’t remember the last time she touched him—really intentionally touched him. Her warmth lingers there after she pulls her hand away. “I can’t do this again,” she says.

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “Everything is going to be fine.”

  Justin is a man with neat hair, parted clean on the right side, cut tight above the ears and along the neck. He brings a hand to it now, tidying it, part of him thinking that as long as every hair stays in its place, everything will be fine.

  It is. Someone spots Graham at Lava River Lanes, bowling with a strange old man in a leather-fringe jacket. Within minutes, two squad cars pull up with their lights flashing. The deputies race into the building, past the pool tables and arcade games, through the clouds of cigarette smoke, to lane nine, where they find Justin’s father, who decided on a whim to pick Graham up from school and teach him a thing or two about how to throw a hook ball.

  When Justin arrives, his father is waiting for them in the parking lot, leaning against a squad car with his hands in his pockets. “Can’t a man spend an afternoon with his grandson?” he says.

  “Of course, Dad. It’s just—”

  “Just what?”

  He goes on. Talking about how Justin needs to let the boy have some fun this, and how he ought to cut an old man some slack that—and so on—while his hands, big brown things, busily rake through his beard like paws through rotten wood, seeking grubs, worms to eat. Lately he has grown wilder and Justin has become more fearful and hesitant to challenge him.

  Karen holds Graham to her chest, pressing him into her with a pained look on her face, as if he were a lost organ she wants to force back inside her.

  Through the window comes a rectangle of moonlight, brightening the floor and the bottom of the bed. In the distance he can hear elk calling to each other. Their big booming voices spiral through the air, as if blown from a conch shell. He goes to the window. A cool juniper-scented breeze blows, making the curtains billow around him. In the distance he can see the Cascades. They glow in the moonlight, white-shouldered with snow and bearded with forests that look more black than green against them. In their foothills a small light flares, catching his eye. It vanishes a moment later and he is left to wonder about its origin, so far from the city—with no streetlamps or neon signs anywhere near it—a speck of glass caught in the folds of a vast black cloth.

  His wife is awake as well. He can tell from her breathing. She showered before bed, scrubbed her skin pink, and shampooed her hair into a silky blackness. These past few hours, every time she readjusts her body, trying to find a comfortable position, a puff of air carries the smell of her cleanness.

  He crawls into bed with her again. She has the sheet tucked over her chest and under her arms. She sighs in a way that means she is about to say something. And then she says it: “That man needs to be put in his place.”

  She is referring not only to today but to other days as well. Last week, for instance, when they went out to the cabin for lunch, his father took Graham into the backyard and Karen later found them hunched over a shallow hole, cheering for a scorpion they had pitted against a black widow spider.

  “My heart was going a mile a minute,” Karen says and puts her hand there, between her breasts.

  “I know.”

  “I swear, I almost hit him. I almost slapped him. That man is as careless with other people as he is with his own body.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “I don’t think you do, Justin. Everything went through my mind then. Everything you can imagine. I was certain he was dead. Our son. Do you know how that made me feel? Like it was happening all over again.” He doesn’t have to ask what she means by it. It has come to define her. She lifts her head off her pillow and then lets it fall again. “I don’t ever want to feel like that again.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. Quit apologizing. That’s how you talk to your father.”

  “Sorry.”

  She rolls on her side to fully face him and he says, “Kidding.” He kisses her on the forehead and keeps his lips there when he says, “I’ll talk to him.”

  “Will you really?”

  “I will.”

  His hand goes to the lip of the sheet and fingers it. Slowly he pulls it down, taking it from her chest, revealing the swell of her breasts, their paleness exaggerated in the moonlight—and her lips pinch a little tighter for every inch he moves it. He wants to roll on top of her and make love with the abandon that sometimes grows out of small moments of anger.

  Instead she says, “Please don’t,” and pulls the sheet around her and turns from him.

  He thinks of the light off in the woods—flaring and then going dark, like a dying star—and it calls to mind a poem. He and Karen used to have this game they would play. One would speak a line of poetry—and the other would follow it up. The game was born out of their time together in college, when they seemed most in love, constantly hungry for each other. In his apartment, after they made love on his creaky futon, he used to read her poetry as she drifted off to sleep.

  Now the game was more a thing of idleness, just two people calling back and forth to each other like birds in a forest. They might be in the kitchen, one of them chopping celery, the other peeling potatoes—or they might be hiking, one turning to observe the other behind on the trail. He took a moment to find the words, how they arranged themselves in a row, and then there they were: “My thoughts are crabbed and sallow / My tears like vinegar / Or the bitter blinking yellow / Of an acetic star.” And if he said them aloud, would she call back to him about the wry-faced pucker of the sour lemon moon—or would she deepen her breathing and feign sleep?

  Bobby Fremont is one of those men with money and enthusiasm, which allows him to do with his life whatever he wants. He is always coming or going, never standing still, traveling somewhere Justin has never been, doing something Justin never realized possible. He tells stories, often loudly and with many jabbing hand gestures, about hunting bighorn sheep in Wyoming or summiting Mount Cook in New Zealand or eating some twelve-course French meal that very nearly gave his mouth an orgasm. He is always smiling and has a big laugh that distracts your attention away from his close-set eyes.

  Much of the property surrounding Bend, he has at some point owned and developed and sold, to the Inn of the Seventh Mountain, the Bend Athletic Club, Widgi Creek, River’s Edge. He has been married three times—his latest wife one of those types who pencils in her eyebrows and dyes her hair blond to the point of invisibility—and his unstable taste for women seems to match his obsession and then abandonment of property.

  Long ago there must have been many like him, particularly in these Western territories. Men, wild and h
opeful, who chased after stakes and claims, their eyes always focused on the horizon and whatever goldness glowed there.

  It is because of Bobby that Justin and his father find themselves in a side room of the county courthouse, attending an open meeting for the Planning Commission. The windows are thin and tall, admitting only a little sunlight that deadens against the pine-paneled walls. They sit at a long wooden table that runs the length of the room and gives off a glow from the wrought-iron chandelier that hangs above it. A good number of men wearing leather vests and black string ties are crowded around the table, and at its head stands Bobby.

  He has a too-tan face that is finely wrinkled around his eyes and mouth. He keeps his white hair a little long and parted in the middle so that it waves out from his forehead. His eyes are a chalky blue and his gaze direct and calculating. Today he wears a collared khaki shirt tucked smartly into his jeans, while around his neck hangs a bolo tie with silver-tipped strings.

  Slowly he unrolls the map and when he tries to lay it flat, to smooth it with his hand, it snaps back, curling up again. His lawyer and a few other men, Justin’s father among them, help him set Starbucks coffee cups upon its corners to hold down the paper and make it tense and visible to everyone.

  It is a map of the Ochocos, its topographic lines like the swirling patterns of some great and elaborate fingerprint pressed down on it. Sketched onto the map in red pen is the perimeter of an area around twenty miles long and ten wide—and at its heart, the cavity of a canyon with a river curling through it.

  Next to the map he unrolls another, this one a magnified version of the red-inked area. From where Justin sits, near the middle of the table, he can barely make out the words that run across its top in black swirling script: Echo Canyon. Here, in this black-and-white rendering, the trees have been logged, the brush cleared, replaced by a lavish development. The choicest lots border the top of the canyon and overlook the golf course and paved biking trails that fill the canyon below them.

  After a time Bobby says, “There it is.” He raps the table with his knuckles and brings his hand under his chin and jogs his eyes across the room, briefly settling his stare on each of the men. He has that special talent of connecting with people, of making everyone in a crowd of listeners feel singled out. “One unbelievable—and I mean truly magnificent—iron-and-timbered lodge, three hundred lots, and the fastest, truest putting greens in all of Oregon.”

  Everyone leans forward and glances between the maps as if trying to imagine the asphalt roads, the river-rock driveways, the sand bunkers, and water hazards set on top of all that wildness.

  Justin can see in Bobby’s erect posture the gladness to finalize these proceedings, to settle the thousands of decisions and compromises—the rezoning, the development permits, the traffic and environment and water issues—and all the rest of it, all the seemingly endless hassles he has pursued the past few years.

  Then the door jerks open. There is a sudden shifting of attention, as everyone turns his head at once to observe Tom Bear Claws, followed by a bald-headed Bend Bulletin reporter clutching a notepad. They find a place at the table and Tom knocks his knuckles against its wood as if asking to be let in. “Sorry we’re late,” he says.

  “You’re not late,” Bobby says through a thin smile. “You were never invited.”

  “Hey. That hurts my feelings.”

  Justin knows Tom. Most do. For the past few years, ever since Justin took over Honors English, he has invited Tom into his classroom as a lecturer for the unit on Native American literature. Justin enjoys his playful cynicism, how he rarely takes anything too seriously. He will drag a stool to the front of the class and settle his bulk onto it and smile at everyone with his broad and craggy face—his skin the color of tobacco—and talk about Coyote and Mouse and Thought Woman and the Great Spirit, the Maker of all things.

  Once he kicked off his boot and peeled off his sock and showed the rattlesnake tattooed across the sole of his foot. It gave him the power to sneak up on his enemies without a sound, he said. “So you better keep an eye out.”

  Another time he read aloud a poem. He had written it on a yellow legal tablet. He pulled a pair of bifocals from his breast pocket and settled them on the end of his nose and made a barking noise into his fist before reading in a voice that rose and fell and lulled them all into a mystical reverie. Justin doesn’t remember precisely how it went. Something like this: “The light of the forest is red. The night’s wolves run through it and the day’s men recoil from it. Under the dark cover of the trees, things get lost and trapped and eaten. The light of the mind is red, too.”

  When Justin later asked if Tom had written the poem himself, he said, “Mostly.”

  Justin has never asked but guesses him fifty. His hair is the color of a spent charcoal briquette and he keeps it tied in a braid. Around his neck hangs a leather necklace jeweled with elk teeth, but so does he wear sport coats and drive a BMW and regularly golf at Widgi Creek. Regularly he’s quoted in the paper, the mouthpiece of the Warm Springs Reservation.

  He made his money in fishing. Peer into any lake, any river, and along its bottom—like coins in a dirty fountain—you will find bottle caps, the brightest things in the water. The idea came naturally: beer and fishing go hand in hand. Punch two holes on opposite sides of the cap, pinch it into a clam shape, and attach a hook to one end, leader to the other. The shiny spinning color draws the fish to strike.

  For a long time after college he worked for the Forest Service, but on the side, he started recycling beer caps from local taverns—the Elusive Trout, Big Dick’s Halfway Inn—selling his lures on the Internet. Then Miller called. Now his six-pack retails for thirty dollars in just about every outdoor store and bait shop in the country. With the money he helped fund Kah-Nee-Ta—the Warm Springs resort and casino—where coins clattered from slots and waterslides spiraled into pools. For several years he has pushed for another resort—an off-reservation site at Cascade Locks, along the Columbia. In ’05, the governor signed off on a tribal–state compact, the first step in establishing a trust for gaming, but since then, nothing has happened, the project tangled up in a web of red tape. There is talk of Tom managing Cascade Locks, but some say talk is all it is.

  Talk is what Tom is best at, and Justin observes him with the same bemused pleasure a patron of the local theater might feel when an actor takes on a new role.

  His voice has a somber petitioning tone, and beneath the fluorescent lights his face appears shadowed and cut sharply from clay. “My grandfather hunted Echo Canyon. My grandfather’s grandfather, too. For so many families, not just mine, it’s a sacred place. To build there ain’t right.”

  Bobby clears his throat and everyone looks at him. On either side of his mouth, from his nose to his chin, runs a deep set of wrinkles, like parentheses that imply he always has something hidden behind what he is saying. “Everything you just mentioned, we need to consider and honor, of course.” He seems to direct this more at the reporter than Tom. “We all appreciate—”

  Tom holds up the flat of his hand. “You make it sound like the commission hasn’t made up its mind yet. Give the bullshit a rest. We been talking about this for a year. What’s left to talk about? What’s next? Will there be a swimsuit competition?”

  Bobby smiles. It is a smile you aren’t meant to like. He is normally a pleasant man, but Justin once saw him blow up at a backyard barbeque party when he got into a screaming match with a very liberal, very outspoken pediatrician about drilling for oil in Alaska. The fight culminated with Bobby throwing a beer bottle against a fence, leaving behind a starburst of suds and shattered glass. Since then Justin has looked at him differently, always wondering about the anger that simmers just below the smile of his surface.

  Right now a muscle in Bobby’s jaw jumps. Then he lays both his hands on the table, on either side of the map, and brings his face close to it. The silver tips of his bolo tie swing back and forth like two tiny wrecking balls, knocking down paper for
ests, gouging open paper canyons.

  “One thing I’ve never liked about this town,” he says in a whisper he wants heard. “All the goddamned Indians.”

  Everyone goes still, too afraid or embarrassed to even look at Tom, who makes a noise like he is holding back a sneeze. Then he stands up so quickly he knocks his chair over. His boots crash against the floor. His lips peel back from his teeth. He cocks his arm to strike Bobby. Justin knows what will happen before it happens. There isn’t a day that goes by his father isn’t looking for a fight. He almost says, “Don’t,” but it’s too late: his father is rising now to obstruct Tom, reaching out to seize his fist midair. There is a sound like a baseball falling smartly into the basket of a mitt. Their arms shake with the tension between them. Then Tom gives up. He lets his hand drop and rolls his shoulder like an injured pitcher and stares Justin’s father in the eye. “Shut up, Paul,” he says, though Justin’s father has said nothing.

  Bobby regards Tom and puts his hand over his mouth as if to keep from saying something. Then his hand falls away and he smiles tightly and says, “This certainly isn’t helping your cause.”

  “Whether we’re nice or not, I already know how they’ll vote. So I might as well not be nice.” Tom lets his shoulders rise and fall in a shrug. “I might as well fuck with you, you know?”