The Wilding: A Novel

by Benjamin Percy

  At first Brian thinks the noise comes from the television—the two-note chime sounding similar to the local Z-21 weather warning—but when Karen reaches for the remote and the television blinks off, Brian ducks behind the chair just as Karen jumps from the floor. She hits the chair in her passing and it rocks back and Brian catches it with his hand. He tries to hold his breath, to seem as if he is part of the room, when Karen appears next to him, looming over him in the near dark.

  Brian feels stinging spots on his skin, certain she can see him. But she can’t. Her eyes are foggy from staring into the light of the television. And she is moving across the living room now, through the archway, down the hallway, into the kitchen, where her phone calls to her.

  Brian tries to move quietly when he hurries to the other side of the chair and crouches down. He can hear the scrape of the phone as she lifts it off the counter, the click as she flips it open, her voice saying, “Hey, Rachel,” and then, “Did he?” and then laughter.

  Brian feels suddenly cut off, separate from her. His erection withers. The beer is wearing off, replaced by tiredness. He feels the urge to run, to return home and take a cold shower and crawl into bed, alone. Alone is where he is meant to be. The laughter in the other room continues. It oppresses him, makes him feel limp, somehow defeated, her connection to someone else. He knows he could never make her laugh like that.

  He rises from his hiding place and then spots on the couch the folded clothes, her underwear stacked into a neat pile, some of it lace, purple. He grabs one, and then a few other things, a shirt, a skirt, whatever rests on top, before he retreats from the room, sneaking his way out the door, clomping down the porch, hurrying to the place where he parked his truck.

  He is careless in his rush. He runs up the road instead of through the woods. His fast breathing fills up his mask and drowns out the noise of the world, including the engine of the truck, the crunch and hum of its tires as it moves toward him. About a second before it turns the corner, he notices a glow, growing brighter. And then the truck appears thirty yards ahead, its high beams arresting him. Maybe it is the beer, which has settled over him like a heavy cloak, but he doesn’t react quickly enough. He simply stands in the middle of the road, holding up one arm to shade his eyes, until the brakes squeal and the truck lurches to a rocking halt. Only then does instinct kick in and he reels into the forest.

  The truck stays there for a long time and from a far-off vantage in the trees, Brian crouches, growling, Stupid, stupid, to himself, so stupid.

  JUSTIN

  After Graham finishes his dinner and sets his plate aside, he pulls out his book—Wildlife of the Pacific Northwest—and begins to flutter through its pages before settling on one. Justin asks him what he is reading about and he says, “I’m reading about mule deer.”

  “When you get a second, tell me what it says about bears.”

  Graham flips to the glossary and studies it a moment before finding the correct page number. Then he thumbs open the book to that section and presses down on the spine so that the pages lie flat. His eyes lift to meet Justin’s. “You want me to read it to you? Out loud?”

  “Sure.”

  When he reads, he traces each line with his finger, telling them in an almost singsong voice that bears have shaggy fur and rudimentary tails and plantigrade feet. They have acute hearing and a keen sense of smell that can decipher dead meat at a distance of at least seven miles. He tells them how a bear’s ears don’t grow with its body—remaining the same size, from cub to silverback—so you can measure the age of a bear like so: the smaller the ears appear in relation to its head, the older the animal.

  They are among the most behaviorally complex of animals. “Practically as smart as humans,” Graham says and his grandfather emits a low growl as if in agreement.

  Justin says, “Out of curiosity, what does it say in there about grizzlies?”

  His father says, “Why?”

  “You remember how a few months ago those girls got attacked by a bear? At Cline Falls? People were saying it was a grizzly and—”

  “No grizzlies in Oregon.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Not since the Depression. That’s the last time anybody bagged one anyway.”

  “I’m just curious, okay? What’s the harm in looking it up?”

  In response his father takes a swig of beer and then rolls his head around on his shoulders, cracking his neck.

  “Just look it up,” Justin says.

  Graham waits for his grandfather to object and then turns a few more pages and begins to read again. “ ‘Ursus arctos horribilis.’ ” He butchers the pronunciation, but when he looks at Justin for approval, he nods so that the boy will continue. Graham tells them how grizzlies feed on berries, bulbs, roots, rodents, pine nuts, moose, elk, mountain goats, sheep, and the occasional human. “Basically everything.” They have concave faces. Their paws are black with wrinkled skin on the pads and their claws are long and curved and used for digging up roots and excavating den sites. They have a distinguishing shoulder hump. This hump is actually a mass of muscle that enables them to swing their paws with such remarkable striking force. They live in Alaska, Canada, Idaho, Montana, Washington, and Wyoming. “So we’re safe, huh, Dad?” He pauses here to take a sip of beer as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  A minute ago his grandfather scraped up a handful of dirt and now he is flinging pinches of it at Justin, dirtying his chest, his lap. Justin brushes it away and ignores him until he reaches for another handful.

  “Why are you doing that?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Well, quit it.”

  He smiles and readjusts his weight and looks around as if for something else to throw.

  “Hold on,” Graham says. “There’s a footnote.” His eyes drop to the bottom of the page. “ ‘The North Cascades Recovery Area is located in Washington. Its ten thousand square acres are bound by the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, the I-90 corridor, and the east border of the Wenatchee-Okanogan National Forest and the Loomis State Forest. The grizzly population here has more than tripled in the past ten years and the Forest Service predicts the number to grow exponentially and for the bear to eventually reclaim its place in North America.’ ”

  Boo stands up then and studies the forest as if heeding a way-off call silent to all ears but his own. His tail wags hesitantly and then he huffs, an almost bark. Justin’s father pats the dog on the head. “Good boy.” He doesn’t seem the slightest bit curious about what the dog has smelled or seen. He is too busy concentrating on his beer as it rises from his thigh to his mouth. The dog regards him before whining again and running his tongue across his snout as if he can taste as well as smell something in the air.

  “Listen to this,” Graham says with the trace of a smile on his lips. “ ‘You are a hundred times more likely to die of a bee sting than a bear attack, and a hundred thousand times more likely to die in a traffic accident.’ ”

  In this halo of fire surrounded by so much darkness, Justin does not feel reassured. If their bear is a grizzly, he wonders what has drawn it down from Washington—the warmer weather? The endless supply of garbage cans and Dumpsters? The trout-filled rivers? Hunger has to be the reason. It is always the reason.

  His father stands from his chair and moves about the fire and it throws his shadow on the woods like the shape of a prowling animal. “I need a drink.”

  “You’ve already got a drink.”

  “A real drink.” He rifles around in their makeshift kitchen until he locates the bottle of Jack. He holds it up and examines it, like a translucent agate, then gives it a swish. The poison sacs swirl whitely in the whiskey. “Anybody thirsty?” he says with a sickle of a smile cutting his cheeks.

  “I think that’s a really, really bad idea.”

  “Always the life of the party,” he says, as if to himself. “My son.”

  “Let me remind you what happened earlier today.” Justin is using
his paternal voice, he realizes, the voice he uses on Graham when he forgets to take out the trash or neglects to mow the lawn. “You, bent in half, unable to breathe, with something—I don’t know what—going haywire inside of you.”

  He finds his seat again. The lawn chair groans beneath his weight and Boo lifts his head from his paws to regard him, then yawns and clacks his teeth. “I’ll just take one tiny little sip,” he says. With his fingers he indicates how small a sip it will be before unscrewing the cap. “For medicinal purposes. It’ll burn all the badness out of me.” He raises the bottle in a toast and takes in a mouthful of liquor and smacks his lips and shrugs his shoulders. “Don’t taste any different.”

  He grows quiet after that. Warily, Justin watches him. A minute later, his eyes blink and reblink as if to find their focus. The occasional shiver runs through him. He shakes his legs and stares into the fire, as if ready to race away from the flames should they flare up and singe him. The cocktail has affected him in an unsettling way, but Justin doesn’t see what any further pestering can accomplish save elevating his heart rate, so he keeps his eyes sharply trained on him, waiting for him to slump over.

  He never does. It no doubt helps that he weighs two-sixty and carries around a belly full of food. After twenty minutes, the worst of it has worked through him, and he grows still and meditative. His stare burns through the haze of the heat waves rising from the flames. “I can’t feel my lips,” is all he says during this time, so softly Justin isn’t sure he says anything.

  When some wood cracks and pops, sparks swirl up to join the stars. Justin looks up in time to see one of them fall and go sizzling across the sky, briefly brightening the night like autumn lightning. Then comes another. A meteor shower. Justin tells everyone to look. Each flash of light is perpetually renewed by another star and then another star coming loose and streaking into brightness and then nothingness.

  “There’s one,” Justin says and Graham says, “That was a good one.”

  Then the moon rises and blots out the stars. It has a white ring around it, making it look like a great celestial eye, staring down on them. An owl swoops in and out its light.

  Graham rises to his feet, a little unsteadily. Justin remembers his first beer. He drank it on a hunting trip such as this. His joints had felt oiled. His head, warm and cloudy. When he coughed he saw fireflies floating around the edges of his vision. Funny, how people go numb over time. How, when they’re young, such a small tease can affect their systems so powerfully. A can of beer reducing you to giggles. A glimpse of an underwear ad in the newspaper furnishing you with a hard-on so rigid it feels as though it’s going to snap.

  “There he is,” Justin’s father says, talking about Graham but looking at Justin. “There he is—all grown up. That’s my boy.”

  Graham has a hollow-boned build, like his mother. From the dopey grin sliding across his face, Justin can tell he is feeling what Justin would feel after working his way through a six-pack. “How about a picture?” he says, with a kind of sway and swing to his voice. “I haven’t taken many pictures. And I’d like to take one.”

  Graham walks to the other side of the fire and Justin readies to catch him, but the boy makes it there without stumbling and lifts his camera to his face and says, “Cheese.” He smiles as if he were the subject of the photo and Justin leans toward his father and lifts his beer as the light of the flash washes over them and temporarily keeps the night at bay.

  Just then Boo comes trotting out of the dark, grinning around a bone with a strip of denim sticking to it. Justin’s father says, “Release,” and takes the bone and stands there, holding it, staring at it, not knowing what to do. Boo pants and wags his whole body along with his tail and Justin’s father looks at him. What he is feeling now, Justin doesn’t know. His emotion is masked, hidden behind his beard.

  Justin wakes in the small hours of the night to a vivid sense of danger. He reaches out and touches his son, not to rouse him but to feel him, to know he is there. Every nerve in his body has gone alert. The frogs seem unnaturally loud in their drumming and the darkness beyond the flap of his tent seems too still.

  It is that old hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck sensation. You just know. Justin knows something stands outside, maybe only a few feet away, studying the tent. He concentrates on his ear, opening it up to accept every sound, trying to blot out the rumble of the river and determine whether it is a hand or a paw or the wind brushing up against the tent.

  He might wait ten minutes or he might wait an hour—it’s hard to tell, as he floats in a gray zone between waking and dreaming—and then he notices, only inches away from his cot, the tent wall is moving, denting inward. This is not the wind. This is a compacted pressure—rounded and growing in size, coming slowly toward him. A snout or a paw. A snout, he decides, when he hears a sharp exhalation—huff—against the canvas. He is sitting up in his cot and leaning away from the indention, only an inch from his face. It has stretched the canvas to its limit. A stake is preventing it from going any farther. He imagines it coming loose in the soil, allowing the snout to press forward, into him. He imagines what is waiting on the other side—a muscled head—wider than his torso—bearing a button black nose that he can presently hear sniffing and blowing as it explores the scent of the tent and guesses at what lies hidden inside it. And he imagines, finally, his face snatched off like a mask, swallowed in a lathery slurp.

  He feels a scream in his throat and dampens it to a whimper by clamping his jaw so tightly that something clicks behind his ear. It is all he can do to keep from rolling out of his sleeping bag, shouting a warning, waking his father from his slumber, so that they might snatch up their rifles and fire in tandem.

  Instead he does something he doesn’t completely understand. His hand rises. He watches it climb, shaking, like a bird blown by an updraft, toward the snout, which has by this time darkened the canvas with its saliva, making a design like a melted bat. His hand pauses and he holds his breath before touching it as gently as he has ever touched anything.

  Immediately it pulls away and the canvas returns in a slow snap to its original shape. He waits for what must be the longest silence of his life, certain the tent is about to collapse all around them or tear open with a sudden slash.

  Then he hears what must be its tongue licking its chops—the saliva popping and hissing in an almost electric way. The clacking of big teeth coming together. A snort. And a shushing as it slinks away, its paws dragging through the grass.

  After another minute he rises from his cot and draws aside the flap and peers outside. There is no moon. The stars offer meager light. The darkness seems anchored among the woods and so the woods seem to possess the night.

  He thinks of the Cline Falls attack—and how one of the girls granted Z-21 an exclusive interview after she was discharged from the hospital. Her parents sat on either side of her on their living room couch. They held her hands and nodded along with her account with concerned looks on their faces. She wore a ball cap when she talked about waking up to a growling noise. She remembered the tent collapsing all around her, the weight of the bear pressing down on her. She remembered its huge black shape against the starlit sky, knocking her down when she tried to run. Its hot breath when it took her head into its mouth, gnawing, trying to find a way into her. She could not feel anything at this point, she reassured the reporter. She was too jacked-up with fear to feel. She could only hear. Its heavy panting all around her. And the noise of its teeth against her skull, like a rake dragged over concrete. Eventually it spit her out and shambled off, leaving her alone and weeping. She took off her hat then and showed the reporter how her scalp had healed into a vast scar that looked like chewed bubblegum of flavors strawberry and grape.

  The black obscurity of the night invites thoughts such as this. And Justin cannot help but imagine a fate far worse than the girl’s. Someone, months from now, will find his jacket at the mouth of a cave, torn and spotted with blood. In a pile, maybe near a primitive heart
h, there will be bones, piled one on top of the other, all of them scarred with spindly little lines—from teeth—cracked open with all the marrow sucked from them.

  KAREN

  When she rolls over in bed and her arm flops across the empty stretch of mattress, her hand in the hollow of his indented pillow—when she pulls aside the blankets and walks naked through the house, the blinds pulled, only the sunlight peeking around the edges of them—when she grinds only enough beans for half a pot of coffee—when she paws through the newspaper and scatters its sections messily—she finds she does not miss her family, not at all.

  For breakfast she eats an apple sliced over cottage cheese. She washes this down with a short mug of coffee. The apple is organic and the cottage cheese is organic and the coffee is organic and fair trade. With every swallow, she imagines she can feel the goodness of the food breaking down inside her, dissolving into nutrients that build her body up instead of break it down. Then she pulls on her sports bra and shorts, slides her feet into her sneakers, and double-knots the laces. She is out the door, on the porch, where she spends the next few minutes stretching, the bands of her muscles as tight as her skin in the cool mountain air.

  She hopes Graham is doing all right, especially with that son-of-a-bitch grandfather, who bullies him as if he were his own, just another version of Justin, one he can mold to his liking, make into more of a man. She really wishes his heart would just give out. The world, she thinks, would be better off. She knows this is an awful thing to think, but she can’t help but think it about him.

  She will run ten miles today—pounding up and down Awbrey Butte, looping past Drake Park on her way through downtown—and then walk another mile to cool down. She checks her watch and expects to be back in a little over an hour.

  She starts by jogging a slow pace. After the first hundred yards, her joints—at first stiff, as if clotted with rust—stop clicking and protesting. Her muscles go warm and loose with blood. Her pace quickens, her legs and arms arranged in sharp angles, scissoring the air. The sound her sneakers make on pavement matches the pounding of her heart. She takes in deep lungfuls of cool air that breathe out hot.