The Wilding: A Novel

by Benjamin Percy

  His arm is covered in a raw-looking birthmark. It is hard not to stare. The skin appears smeared all over in raspberry jam. Brian forces his gaze elsewhere. He picks up a box of maple bars and pretends to read the label affixed to its packaging. Then his eyes jog back to study the mottled flesh. He wonders whether the children at school tease the boy, call him a freak, single him out at recess to throw sticks at and chase. He feels a sudden compulsion to rush over and tell him what to do, how to fight back, where to hit them and make them bleed so they will never bother him again.

  But Karen is nearly out of sight, so he silently wishes the boy good luck and tosses the maple bars in his cart. The aisles are crowded with people. He has difficulty negotiating between them as his cart has a wobbly wheel that makes it veer constantly right. He abandons it near the meat counter, where he pauses, ten yards away from her. She is squatting, studying the stacks of chicken breasts.

  The butcher—short, round-shouldered, his eyebrows as thick and arched as crowbars—comes toward Brian. He wipes his hands on his apron, leaving red smudges on the white fabric. Brian looks to her, looks to the butcher. “I’ll take—I’ll take some meat.”

  The butcher pulls on a pair of white plastic gloves with a snap. “Afraid you got to be more specific than that.”

  “Sorry. Steaks.”

  “Sirloin? Rib eye? Filet? What?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes what?”

  “I’m sorry. One second.” He makes an effort to study the glistening rows of meat. “I think I’ll have some New York strips. Two of them.”

  The butcher doesn’t bother asking him to pick out a pair, snatching two on his own, wrapping them in butcher paper, shoving them across the counter, yelling, “Next!”

  By this time she has noticed him. He takes the steaks and pretends to examine them while watching her out of the corner of his eye—when she rises from her squat and shakes her baguette at him. “I know you.” She is smiling. It feels good to be smiled at.

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re the key guy.”

  “That’s me. Brian.”

  “Brian the key guy.”

  “Who unlocks the hearts of women all over central Oregon.” He isn’t sure where that comes from, but he says it in a silly voice and hopes it won’t be taken seriously. He imagines a glint of mischief in his eye and hopes it will find a reflection in her.

  Thankfully she laughs. “Good line.”

  “Thanks.”

  This, he is thinking, this is what I always want life to be like. And then he notices her gaze, the way it bounces between his forehead and the rest of his face, uncertain what to focus on, what represents him, as when you speak to someone with a lazy eye and cannot determine which eye is the one that sees you. Under the fluorescent lights the scarred crater of his injury must be inescapable, like a cup carrying a shadow. “You’re wondering what happened?”

  “What? Oh, no. No. I’m sorry.”

  “I saw you looking at it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It’s hard not to look at. You’d have to try not to look at it.”

  “No. That’s not—”

  “Yes.” He brings his feet together as if the memory of the war alone makes him stand at attention. “You’ve seen the reports about roadside bombs, read the articles, though they’re harder to find these days, buried on page seven.” He forces a smile. “Anyway. That’s me. That’s my story.”

  And now what must he seem like? A half-wild man with his skull carved out as if by an ice cream scoop, with no expression and who knows what thoughts? He should have worn a hat.

  Then she does something unexpected. She rushes her hand to his, squeezing it, not a handshake this time but the smallest kind of hug, its warmth rising up his arm and seizing his heart like a drug. “I’m sorry.”

  He remembers Portland—the Irish bar, the waitress pulling away from his touch, her teeth bared in fear. But Karen isn’t afraid of him. There is something about her, like the boy with the birthmark, something wounded, that makes her different.

  “I think you’re—,” she says and he closes his eyes and holds his breath, waiting for any of the number of wonderful ways such a sentence might end. “I think there’s something wrong.” Her hand releases his and he snaps open his eyes to see her step away. She is looking at the floor and he follows her gaze there, to the linoleum glow, darkened by a pool of blood. His hand is wet with it. The steaks, poorly wrapped, are leaking from the butcher paper.

  He holds them out as an explanation. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m not hurt.” He looks around as though to find a paper towel or a wash basin. Blood continues to patter the puddle, making it larger, the red tongue of it reaching out to lick his boot. He can smell its vinegary odor. She continues to step back and he calls out to her, “I’m totally fine!”

  JUSTIN

  Clouds begin to pile up above them. They move and meet each other, closing the blue gulfs between them, like hands slowly weaving a spell of grayness over the day. The sun filters through the thinner clouds and shapeless sections of light roam across the canyon floor and walls.

  Graham coughs raggedly into his fist. “What are we going to do?”

  It isn’t a question Justin can answer, so he concentrates instead on the woods around him, where everything seems suspect. Every branch an outstretched claw. Every moving shadow like a sudden, sneaky dodge into concealment. He wishes his way out of the canyon and in doing so looks to the sky, his eyes lingering a second too long on the sun, so that when he looks away he sees a white dot, like the last of a television image when you hit the power button, bothered by a program you would rather not watch.

  They return to find their camp not as they left it. The cooler is open, its contents scattered across the camp. The lawn chairs are tipped over. The tent has collapsed and Justin’s sleeping bag sticks halfway from its opening like a stuck-out tongue.

  “What the hell,” he says as adrenaline-soaked panic hums in the background of his brain. “I mean, what the hell, Dad?” Justin knows this sounds like a line from a bad book, and he wants a line from a good book, but there is nothing else to say. “Dad?”

  His father picks up the sleeping bag and smells it, clearly lost in thought. “Mmm.”

  “Mmm what?”

  “Mmm the bear didn’t do this.”

  Justin waits for him to say something more and soon he does, when walking about the campsite, kicking through its remains. “Bears don’t unscrew a jar of peanut butter. They don’t unpeel a stick of jerky. Bears don’t drink Pabst Blue Ribbon and neither do I.” He peers around the cooler and knocks closed its lid. “And bears don’t steal whiskey.”

  The thought of Seth—who else could it be but him?—in their camp, sucking on a beer, rummaging roughly through their things, seemed trivial considering what had already happened. He felt only distractedly angry. If Seth were to walk out of the woods now, Justin could kill him without a second thought, throw his body in the river, and turn before the white water sucked it away. He knows this is completely outside his way of thinking, but that’s where the day has brought him. He wants to punch holes in trees, throw boulders around.

  “Let’s go now,” Justin says. “Can we just go? Now?”

  His father goes to the fire pit and squats next to it and begins to arrange fresh kindling. “Not without Boo, we won’t.”

  “We’ll go to John Day and—”

  “Not without Boo, we won’t!” This is said at a scream. A freakish look comes into his eyes that Justin doesn’t want to argue with, so he lifts his hands and lets them fall, as he seeks an explanation and gives up on one all in the same motion. “We’ll eat something,” his father says, his voice calm now, “and then we’re going to find him, like you said. Like you said we were going to. We’re going to track him. And if we run into anything else along the way, we’ll kill it.”

  Soon flames crackle and venison steaks sizzle in butter and Justin’s brain feel
s as if the clouds have dropped down and seized it.

  After they eat, Justin looks at his father, but his father is looking at the woods. His hope that his father will come to his senses fades when his father stands and moves away from the camp and arranges his rifle so that it runs behind his neck and parallel to his shoulders. His posture is that of a scarecrow stapled up in a dead cornfield. The rifle carries the weight of his arms or he carries the weight of it.

  Justin fishes a Pepsi out of the river cairn and hands it to Graham. He accepts it without a word and drinks it hesitantly, and then in a gulping way, as if he didn’t realize how thirsty he was. Justin pours the dregs of the coffee into a tin mug and drinks from it. It is horribly bitter but he swallows it down like medicine meant to purge something from his body.

  Birds chirp. The river makes a hissing sound. Patches of bush shudder in the breeze. The shadows of clouds move across the canyon floor. A june bug clacks its wings and he follows it with his eyes as it flies off a short distance and lands on a spray-painted patch of grass and tastes of it. The spray paint sharply turns like the elbow of the arm of a big body outlined by chalk.

  He tries to recall everything he knows about bears and a television show comes hazily to mind, something he watched on the Discovery Channel. Over footage of grizzlies pawing salmon from rivers—and black bears wrestling in meadows—a throaty British voice explained that all bears are originally descended from a creature the size of a small dog. That bear shoulder blades were used as sickles for reaping grass. That polar bears weigh some two hundred pounds less than they did fifteen years ago, due to diminishing feeding grounds. These are facts. Facts are manageable. Facts are things you can wrap your mind around and file away on your mental bookshelf and share with classrooms full of students. Facts calm him.

  His father must hear Justin approach, but he does not turn to greet him. “Come on,” Justin tells his back. “We’ll go get the police, the Forest Service, whomever. And then we’ll come back here. We’ll find Boo then.”

  His father says nothing. He has fallen into a stubborn silence no word of Justin’s can break. So Justin lays a hand on his shoulder, gives him a shake. His father swings around and stiff-arms Justin’s chest with one hand and slashes at him with the other, his knuckles glancing off Justin’s cheek. Justin stumbles back a few steps and his father tries to dodge his way past him. Without realizing it, Justin has made his hand into a fist, and now he swings it, stopping his father with a blow to the face that sends them both staggering back a few steps. Hot nails of pain feel driven between his knuckles and along his wrist. He experiences something similar inside his chest where the sensation of victory and shame mingle in a stabbing way. The slack look on his father’s face indicates he feels equally stunned; he brings his hand to his mouth, where blood already runs.

  Then his father rears back and lunges forward, his hands shooting out to seize Justin by the head. His father hurls him to the ground and the breath escapes his lungs in a gasp. Immediately his father falls on top of him and strikes him with a straight right followed by a series of short punches to the cheek. Justin feels a white hot pain in his ear. Sparks dance along the edges of his eyes. Justin grabs wildly at his father’s leg and drags him down and they lie crumpled together, giving each other a rough sequence of blows to the neck, the stomach, the face. Justin’s muscles knot against the force of his father’s fists. When his father elbows him in the nose, a sudden pain boils in and around his eyes that brings tears. Justin knees him in the groin and his father groans and strikes Justin’s forehead with his open palm, knocking him back into the ground with such force Justin literally feels his brain batter his skull and his vision goes black for a moment and then returns to the Technicolor sharpness brought on by the adrenaline humming through him.

  Graham abandons his place by the fire and runs to them. Their only noise is their wheezing breath, the occasional muffled grunt, the slap of fists against flesh. In this way they fight as brothers would, quietly, so their mother couldn’t hear.

  When Justin was a child, his father would wrestle with him, sometimes laying a knee on the side of Justin’s head or fishhooking his mouth with a finger until he begged, “Uncle.” But there isn’t any sort of satisfying close to this fight. Graham says, “Stop it,” softly at first—and then louder, “Stop hitting him! You’re hurting him.” Justin isn’t sure who Graham is referring to, but his voice is strong enough to break them apart. In this way nobody wins or loses. They just stop—satisfied somehow—climbing away from each other, panting, bleeding.

  Amidst the pain, there is a feeling of vacancy. As if a great room inside Justin, once cluttered with hard-angled furniture, has suddenly been emptied—with relief. They now look at each other with a resentful kind of understanding—and then at Graham, who stands with his arms cradled against himself, his elbows in his hands. “Just stop it,” he says.

  Justin presses his thumb to one nostril and blows and a thick strand of blood comes from it and clings to his thigh. He tries to wipe it away but it only smears into the denim like a gash of its own. “So?” Justin says. “Have we come to some sort of decision here?”

  “You tell me.” His father leans over to spit and then uses his forearm to wipe his mouth.

  A thin stream of blood trickles from Justin’s nose to his mouth and he swallows the metallic taste of it.

  “You already know the answer.”

  They move in the direction Boo has gone, toward an unknown danger. Justin tries to conjure in his head a vision of Karen, her hands on her hips, her lips pursed in vicious disapproval—but the image of her trembles at the edges before dissolving, as if part of his brain has come unplugged, the same part that once cared about the sale at Target and vacuuming under the furniture.

  They wade the South Fork with their rifles held above their heads and Graham clinging to Justin’s back. In the deepest part of the river, where it is coldest, the water comes up to Justin’s belly and threatens to pull his son away. Justin tells him to hold on tight. His arms are around Justin’s neck, constricting him like a tight-fitting backpack. Every step is a sliding uncertainty. Beneath the water, his boots stumble along slowly and blindly. The rocks are slick and uneven and occasionally seem to clamp down on his boots like teeth that will only let go when Justin heaves his boot from their grip and then tries to find another foothold even as the current yanks his foot riverward. The water rushes against his body, forming a white frothing collar around his waist, its force tremendous, so that he has to angle his body against it and make a diagonal path toward the shore. All it will take is one clumsy step on one algae-ridden rock and they will be lost to the river, carried downstream in an icy torrent.

  His father’s fists have left a headache pounding against his skull and he tries to ignore it now. He tries to concentrate every fiber of his mind on finding a proper foothold and slogging forward. His father arrives on the far bank several minutes before Justin and spends those minutes glancing back and forth between Justin and the woods, his face dense and compacted. He yells his encouragement when they near the shore, or so Justin guesses, since he sees his mouth move and his arm wave, though his words are lost to Justin, muted by the roar of the rapids and Graham panting nervously in his ear.

  Once across—once he pulls his foot from the water and sets it on the muddy bank—he tries immediately to shrug Graham off, though at first he doesn’t seem to want to let go, and they both very nearly keel over. “Get off,” Justin tells him, not unkindly—and at last the boy releases him. Justin breathes heavily and moves a few staggering paces from the mud to a stony embankment and more falls than sits down.

  Despite the chill of the water, he feels hot all over. His lungs burn. Two long fingers of fire rise up his back, reminding Justin of Graham’s unwieldy weight. His neck feels so rigid he wonders if he will ever turn it again. His quads and calves in particular feel warm and wooden, like lumber left in the sun. He massages them with his hands, hoping he won’t cramp up. A shado
w falls over him and he looks up to see Graham observing him with a dismal expression, his eyes wide and moist. “Sorry,” he says.

  “It’s okay,” Justin says. The spray from the river has dampened his hair and he runs his fingers through it and regards his father. A tree long ago fell from the forest and now its rotting husk lies across the embankment. His father has one foot on it and one foot on the ground, as though he is already stepping into the woods, pausing midstride only to see if they will follow. “Well?” he says.

  “Just give me a minute.”

  He checks his watch and says, “One minute.”

  Justin stares at the river, its gray water foaming over white, and remembers its interminable power as he struggled pitifully against where it wanted him to go. Over the noise of it, he can hear little, except for the distant tock of a woodpecker, like a clock that indicates a perilous appointment drawing near.

  He settles his breathing and by the time he does, his father has started into the forest without a word. Justin rises to follow him, leaning at first on his son as he shakes his legs and makes a hula-hoop motion with his hips, ironing the cricks from his muscles. His boots squish and his pants cling to him uncomfortably and when he enters the woods the light falls away as if in a sudden dusk. There are prints everywhere—as if exactly here, all the animals of the forest have decided to scribble in the dirt the graffiti of their passing—mostly the forked depressions of hooves, mingled with the long, thin, and vaguely human imprints left by raccoons and possums, all of them blending into each other. They bend their heads low to the ground and push their way through the thick underbrush and try to find among this ghostly procession of creatures the pattern of a dog’s paw. “Here,” Graham yells and waves them over and he points out a print like a scaly pear with thorns rising from it. It is located in a sandy pocket surrounded by a barren stretch of lava rock, so it takes them several minutes more to find another track, and then another, a series of them eventually coming together to reveal the dog’s flight. The prints wander through the woods, around stumps and over logs and through rabbitbrush, but with a definite northern direction. Eventually the brush opens up into a thin game trail and the tracks continue along it, less obvious now against the hard-packed dirt.