The Wilding: A Novel

by Benjamin Percy

  And then, when he spots the crushed PBR can gleaming in the grass, his imagination dissolves and he becomes forty again. Of course Seth did this. In his panic, Justin forgot he even existed, but now imagines him clearly, as if he stands next to him: the smile on his face when he swings the crowbar into the windows, when he plunges his knife into the tires, pleasuring in the sound, the crash and hiss orchestrated by an anger that seems to come from nowhere but comes in fact from the outlook of someone who perceives himself to be drowning while others float by comfortably on their pleasure boats. It is an outlook Justin can no longer sympathize with. He wants Seth unemployed, foreclosed upon, shoved out of his hometown by sky-high property taxes. He wants a fluorescent-lit travel plaza cemented over that shitty gas station/bait shop where they first met. He wants this canyon gutted, burned, made into a mall where grandmothers walk every morning in purple jumpsuits.

  Justin’s heart is beating hard. His hot face feels as if it has been electrified and his mind feels full of damp-winged wasps. He realizes how much the last few days have touched him—so incrementally he has not noticed their cumulative effect until now—with absolute fear.

  For one horrible instant, he slips into an imprecise state of mind during which time he fears he might crumple into a heap—suddenly weighed down by fatigue, shock, horror, all of that bad stuff—and rock back and forth and shake his head and scrunch shut his eyes and not speak for a very long time—months, maybe years—and then only with the aid of medication. It seems such an attractive option, compared to the alternative, acknowledging the spasms racking his son’s face as he tries to control his emotions.

  Tears cover the boy’s cheeks. He has his hunting cap off, as if mourning something. And Justin knows that to save his son’s life he first has to save his own; he has to keep a lock on his sanity. A black cloud has descended on them and to dispel it he needs to say something, to blow it away with a comforting word or two. “Everything is going to be fine,” is the best he can manage.

  “Oh.” His son’s voice sounds uncertain but his features relax and he looks to the top of the canyon as though leaving is now a reasonable possibility. He uses both hands to wipe away his tears. “But the truck is dead.”

  Justin nods a reluctant yes.

  “So what are we going to do?”

  That is a question with many branches forking from it. Will we live? is one of them. Will it hurt when I die? Those are the questions that matter and the answers Justin has to avoid to keep the fear outside and a single-minded courage in.

  “Don’t worry.”

  “But what are we going to do?” Graham is stuck on these words, their barren possibility. “It’s that ghost story Grandpa was telling us, isn’t it? That’s why this is happening? Because we shouldn’t be here? Because they’re tearing down the canyon?”

  It is a child’s response, and Justin loves him for it. Despite all that has happened, he remains a child and carries a child’s superstition for how the world throws its good and bad luck at people. “No,” Justin says and hugs him tightly, smothering him. When they pull away, Justin does his best to give Graham a hopeful smile and pluck at his shirt collar and tug at his sleeves as much to keep his hands busy as to neaten him. “You going to be all right?”

  Graham nods, not favoring Justin with his eyes, but setting his shoulders and his feet so that he appears erect. An impression of being all right.

  “Good,” Justin says. “That’s good. That’s how I need you to be. Now let’s go back to camp. Let’s wait for your grandpa.”

  Graham fits his cap on his head and starts back to camp and Justin follows him there and adds wood to the smoldering fire until it catches flame. Then he adds another log to chase away with bright orange light the approaching dark.

  A thistle grows next to Justin. Without really thinking about it, he pulls it from the earth and shakes the dirt from its roots and thumbs open its clenched flower and mashes the purple crown of spores into a cream. His hands need to do something and his eyes need something else to look at, so he continues to destroy it, peeling the leaves off the stem and letting them fall one by one and pausing only when he notices an egg sac, encased in silk and deposited in that narrow space where the leaf meets the stem so that the bees and the birds cannot disturb it. He makes a clumsy attempt to return the thistle to the crater he has pulled it from, but after a moment it falls over and he leaves it lying there.

  A noise makes Justin look up. It comes from nearby, from the woods. A thud. As much a vibration as a sound, like the blunt end of an ax striking a tree or a bird in full flight hitting a window. A sound that reminds Justin of barriers and the pain of their forceful collision. A warning?

  He tries to imagine a happy ending to the day. It isn’t easy. His father will either return or he won’t. If he doesn’t, if he doesn’t by midnight, then they will leave and head back up the gravel road until it gives way to asphalt and leads to town. And if his father does return—and wasn’t that still a possibility? Wasn’t it? Perhaps even with Boo panting beside him—then they would all laugh and slap each other on the back and head off into John Day, where they would stop for burgers and fries drowned in ketchup. Graham would show them the pictures he had taken and they would all agree it had been an adventure, something to bring up ten years from now at Thanksgiving dinner. This is the happy ending he stores in his mind when he goes to the river and fishes around in the rock cairn and withdraws a Pepsi and carries it to his son. “Looks like you need one of these.”

  Graham takes it and sets it down between his feet.

  More noise comes from the nearby forest. At the rustle of motion Graham looks at Justin quickly. He is dirty and red in the face. The panic in his eyes infects Justin, who grabs his rifle and stares dimly into the trees and spots a form of black shadows moving. These become two possums, one chasing the other, both hissing, as they leap from branch to branch and then hurry down a tree trunk to the forest floor and then pause to regard Justin with their black eyes as if to remind him they are not to be feared.

  “It’s nothing,” Justin says and settles back into his seat with his rifle resting on his thighs.

  PAUL

  He looks out over the river with red-rimmed half-lidded eyes. His fingernails are broken and clotted with dirt from burying the dog. He feels empty, carved out. His heart seems to beat too sluggishly one moment, too hurriedly the next. Several times he had to sit down in the trail, dizzy, with what looked like black flies twirling around the edges of his vision. And now the river seems too, too wide and full of rapids, an impossible distance. He has never believed, not really, not even when waylaid in the hospital, in his own mortality—and the possibility of it these past few hours has finally disturbed his peace of mind. He is like a man who wakes from a nightmare and stares at the room around him in silence, wondering if the threat has passed, if the closet will bang open and reveal a glowing set of yellow eyes.

  Walking upriver does not occur to him. Nor does firing his rifle to draw his son to aid him. There is only the riverbank before him. He sees it as if through a tunnel. His mind chugs through a slow series of calculations before he finally shrugs off his backpack and unzips it and pulls out two twenty-foot nylon ropes and fastens them into a sheet bend. His hands are clumsy and his mind foggy, so this takes time. His fingers can’t maintain their grip on the rope. He examines his left hand as you would a failed tool you’re considering tossing aside. It is red and peppered with bits of dirt and shaking slightly. His fingers look alarmingly swollen. He tries to flex them. They are at a loss. He closes his eyes. There is bile at the back of his throat and he swallows it down.

  Around his waist he slowly, slowly tethers one end of the rope in an anchor hitch. Then he walks to a nearby tree and again ties the knot, this time around its trunk. He leans against the tree for a pained, breathless minute, then takes a deep breath, steadying himself, and goes to the river.

  He glances over his shoulder, expecting to find the bear shouldering its
way out of the woods. And then he enters the water, his boots and then his legs disappearing into it, until the river creeps up to his belly. Normally he finds the cold invigorating, better than a cup of coffee for waking him, but right now he begins to shiver. His pace slows considerably here, in the middle of the river, where the water rolls over white. He winds the rope around his wrists and allows only a little slack, ready for the worst to happen. All around him boulders peer out of the water, their surface as black and slick as sealskin. When his body hitches to the left and stumbles a pace downstream, he tightens his grip on the rope, ready for the river to swallow him up. But he finds his balance by bracing himself against a boulder, hugging it, gasping.

  During this short period of time, he feels very alone, the river seeming more like an ocean; the boulder is an island and the surrounding reef is busy with the shadows of sharks and the riverbanks are thick with jungle that camouflage long-tusked boars and colorful, poisonous snakes.

  He cannot imagine letting go of the boulder. It is more than his legs, so sluggish and rubbery. It is the ache in his chest, his heart feeling punctured, as if it were deflating. And it is his mind, thick with exhaustion and on the verge of collapse. Everywhere he looks he sees an echo, another hazier version standing next to it. The clouds have an echo. That tree has an echo. The canyon has an echo.

  The shivers working through his body finally convince him to release the rock, to push forward, knowing he is growing hypothermic. He staggers forward and when more than halfway across the river his foot slides out from under him. He goes sprawling and slams his knee against a rock and cries out in pain but loses the cry in a garble as water fills his mouth.

  The river sweeps him up and drags him several feet before the rope goes taut and he spins and struggles limply against the anchor of it. He thinks he can pull himself from the water, but the current’s force is too great. He thinks the rope will swing him toward the shore, but it has caught against a collection of boulders. He tries to find his footing, each time with no success. His feet hang downstream. He can feel the water pulling on his boots and thinks that they might come loose from him and float away like little boats. He knows now what the hooked fish feels. The weight of the water threatens to bend him backward, to snap him in half, against the rope, which has worked its way above his beltline and below his shirt, so that it digs directly into his skin with a burning pressure that matches the feeling in his chest, a combustion working toward a red explosion.

  He imagines he can see Justin and Graham on the shore, can see them in flashes interrupted by the gray oblivion of the river. Graham is waving his arms and Justin is rushing into the water to save him. And then Paul heaves himself upward—he makes one last stubborn lunge—reaching for them, his mouth hanging open, his head sidelong like a fish resisting a hook. He reaches for his son.

  And then he collapses into the water and the river boils over him for another minute until the sharp-edged boulder bites through the rope and sends his body wheeling downstream like a piece of driftwood or any other part of the forest. Aside from the rope anchored to the tree, you never would have known he was there, as the river continues to gurgle and hiss, hiding beneath its surface snags and rocks and creatures drowned and alive.

  JUSTIN

  There is a perimeter of light and warmth around the fire and they stick to it. The darkness is like smoke slowly settling over them, a black vapor ever-thickening. The trees begin to look less like trees and more like cloaked wraiths. While Justin sits in the twilight and watches for his father, he feels as though time is slowing, thickening. Seconds feel like minutes, and minutes like hours, and the thing he most wants to happen—for his father to step out of the forest with a wave—won’t happen. He wills it to happen and the effect is like willing yourself to sleep—any second now, yes, all right, soon, here it comes—in only making him more twitchy, overcome by a fatigued anger.

  His father is out there. Justin shouldn’t have let him go. His father had been crying—like a lumbering child—had succumbed to a bracing hug. He had not acted like himself. Justin should have been stronger, louder, should have demanded his father return to camp. He has food and water in his pack, a first-aid kit, but a flashlight? Of course you don’t need any of those things if you’re dead, Justin thinks and immediately tries to banish the thought by shaking his head and grinding the heels of his hands into his eyes. He can’t be. Not dead, not him.

  There is too much to think about. There is so much in his head. And all of it bad. At school, when he faced a pile of student papers, a faculty meeting, parent-teacher conferences, a basketball game, he would make a list, write everything down, and then check the items off as he completed them. That always made him feel better, made the chaos more manageable. He wishes he had a piece of paper now. Then he could go over everything.

  There is food—they really ought to eat something. Food will help him think, keep his energy levels up. And there is his father, who ought to be back by now but who could not be dead, not like the skeleton out in the woods, not like the dog whose collar was left behind like a warning. There is Seth with his smile and his crowbar. And there is the bear. The bear and Graham. He didn’t want to think of them together, not in the same sentence, not in the same canyon, with night closing around them, but there you go, here they are.

  As if that weren’t enough. What about his wife? Of course his wife, who might or might not be fretting about them right now, glancing at the microwave clock. He has done exactly what she bade him not to do. How long will it take before she calls his mother? And then 9-1-1? No, not Karen. She is too practical for 9-1-1. She won’t see this as an emergency, not yet. She will start with the Forest Service—but probably not until ten o’clock and only an answering machine will pick up—and then the John Day police—but only a patrolman will be on duty and after inquiring about their whereabouts he will direct her to the Forest Service. And when she says—in annoyance, more than panic, sharpening her voice—that she already tried them, damn it, the patrolman will chuckle and say not to worry, ma’am, boys will be boys, and sure as shit he can’t count the number of times a hunting trip has gone on a day or two longer than planned, when the beer is flowing, when the bucks are hiding in the big pines.

  Karen will spend the next few hours pacing through the house, flipping the television on and off, staring into the fridge. And then what? He told her they might not be back until late. She might simply fall asleep. Or she might call 9-1-1, but even then it will take a lot of effort on her part to motivate any sort of action, to convince them anything is out of the ordinary. And even if, by some miracle of persistence, Karen badgers a ranger out of bed and sends him grumbling through the Ochocos in his green truck, it will be dawn before he reaches the canyon and by then the construction crew will have arrived anyway. How long are they from help? A long way. They have a whole night ahead of them. And he doesn’t think he can stand another night, not without his father.

  Somewhere in the distance an owl hoots—followed by another. Their voices become a strange, sweet music. He imagines his frightened face seen dimly through the evening gloom and tries to harden his expression for the benefit of his son, grim and silent.

  “Graham,” Justin says. “I’ve got one for you. Did you know that the Indians believe owls and whip-poor-wills and a few other birds—I can’t remember what kind—but did you know they believe owls are vessels that carry souls back and forth between the land of the living and the land of the dead?”

  “Are they coming to take us away?” Graham says in a sober voice.

  “No,” Justin says. “Of course not. I was just saying. . . .” He cannot look his son in the face so he focuses on his feet instead, where a soda can reflects the orange shimmering light of the fire. “Drink your Pepsi, okay?”

  Graham nods and takes a sip and uses his knuckles to rub some wakefulness and good feelings into his eyes.

  And then comes night. Stars blink to life and Justin studies them. When he was
a child, his father frequently pointed out the constellations, their names so strange, like code words that might open a secret door. He tries to remember one of them now, fancying the idea that a great black door would open and they might all step through it—and into his kitchen, where sunlight would stream through the window, warming his skin. The coffeemaker would be burbling on the counter. Bacon would be frying on the stove. NPR would be playing from the faux-antique radio.

  But he is still sitting here, staring into the fire. “You’re so stupid,” he nearly says, “look what you’ve done,” but doesn’t.

  Instead he says, “What should we do?”

  “What should we do?” Graham says. His face tightens into an ugly expression, revealing someone Justin doesn’t know. He hurls his Pepsi and it thuds and fizzes somewhere off in the darkness. “You’re the dad. You’re supposed to know.” And then his face melts, becomes soft again. He closes his eyes, his eyelids paper-thin. “I’m scared,” he says. “I wish Grandpa were here.”

  The comment doesn’t wound him, but it gives him a shove and his vision shifts, abruptly, laterally. His father is not here. It is up to Justin to make a decision. He feels something inside him growing to fill the space where there was nothing. He tells his son not to worry. He looks around and his mind muscles its way around a plan. He explains it as it comes to him. He will climb up a tree, a tall tree, and see if he can get cell coverage. “And then,” he says, “if I can’t get a signal, we are going to hike out of here.” They aren’t going to try. They are going to do it. There is no sense sitting here, he says, like a couple of sitting ducks.