The Wildlands

by Abby Geni

  In retrospect, Tucker was no better off. The stress manifested differently in him—he was a ball of fire. He paced. He teased me to get me to chase him and then he ran with abandon. He snuck outside to smoke cigarettes away from Darlene’s disapproving gaze. He did not sleep. I remembered waking once in an unfamiliar lobby where we were spending the night with a few other refugees of the tornado. The air was dark, filled with whispery exhalations. Darlene was pressed up against me, Jane on the other side, the room illuminated by the red glow of an exit sign. I saw my brother standing against the wall. His back was erect, his hands tangled in his hair, his expression somewhere between awe and horror. He did not move, struck in a posture of sudden insight.

  Yet most of the time he seemed fine. It was Tucker who ushered me across the threshold of No. 43 for the first time. It was Tucker who salvaged a mattress from an alley and dragged it home—the same mattress where Jane and I still slept. It was Tucker who christened our new oven by heating up a frozen pizza. It was Tucker who sang me to sleep every evening, playing an accompaniment of air guitar. It was Tucker who did magic tricks to cheer me up, pretending to bend spoons and pull coins from my ear. It was Tucker who stole me away at night to visit somebody else’s horses in a faraway field.

  I did not recall much about the evening he ran away. It began with an argument between my brother and Darlene. I was in bed, lying beside Jane, who, of course, slept through the whole thing. Through the wall, I caught the sound of an open hand smacking against the table. I could hear most of what they shouted, but none of it made sense to me; I could not figure out why they were fighting, only anger and mysterious accusations and long words and sudden changes of subject and the intensity of their overlapping voices. They might as well have been speaking some other language. I held my breath in the darkness, twisting the sheet in my fingers. I prayed for Darlene to get control of her temper, for Tucker to back down, for the argument to fade away.

  Instead, a door slammed. On the other side of the wall, Darlene let out a choked sob. There were footsteps on the gravel path outside.

  And just like that, Tucker was gone.

  5

  The heat baked the air into paste, and the row of trailers cast little shade. A pair of turkey vultures floated high in the blue. I was looking forward to having No. 43 to myself for a few hours. Jane had study group and soccer practice; she and Darlene would not be home until late. Jewel-bright grasshoppers buzzed around me, their wings aglitter. Each day, the grass was a little higher and the insects a little larger.

  Outside No. 43, I stopped. Something was not right. The door stood ajar, and there was a smudge on the metal. I stared in bewilderment, trying to figure out what I was seeing. Paint, maybe. A splotch of crimson. Looking closer, I could make out a slippery bracelet of red encircling the doorknob.

  For a while I stood there, the straps of my backpack digging into my shoulders. The sun was a blazing pinwheel. My plan for the afternoon was still bright in my mind: a snack of peanut butter and pickles, an hour or two of solitude, some cartoons.

  Through the door gap, I glimpsed the familiar linoleum, a slice of couch. I took a step back, trying to think. There was something I was supposed to do now. I was nine years old, a latchkey kid, capable, not easily frightened. Most afternoons I rode the school bus home and let myself in. I knew what to do if a stranger knocked on the door. I knew what to do if the toilet backed up, if the power went out. I knew where the fire extinguisher was.

  But I had never anticipated this particular situation. My brain was boiled, limp, useless. A crow gave a jagged cry. I set my backpack down and shaded my eyes with a hand, gazing up and down the indifferent row of trailers. Not a soul in sight.

  I leaned close, sniffing the blood.

  “Hello?” I called.

  No answer. I pushed the door open, careful not to touch the red smudge. There was a bang from inside, followed by a splash. Water began to run in the bathroom, making the pipes knock. The toilet flushed like a lion’s roar.

  There was blood on the linoleum—a shoe print with a geometric tread. A track led through the trailer. Just one foot. The blood was fresh, still wet enough to glisten. There were not many places where a human being could be concealed in here. No. 43 was a crisp rectangle with the kitchen on one end and the bedroom I shared with Jane on the other. The bathroom sat in the middle, with a tiny hallway—as narrow as a burrow—passing by it. The living room was dim, the air filled with dust motes.

  The bathroom door crashed open. A man strode toward me.

  He was holding one hand aloft in an awkward way. His fingers were bent at wrong angles, the palm a mangled pulp. I was too startled to make a sound. Blood streamed down the man’s wrist. The fabric of his shirt was marred by irregular blotches of mottled crimson.

  On the left side, his pant leg was torn. Beneath it, the flesh was torn too. The wound was so terrible that for a moment my mind grew quiet. I could not take in what I was seeing, and the sense of unreality made me feel calm. His calf had been gouged as though a bear clawed him. The skin hung in strips—deep, symmetrical scratches. A pool on the floor. A bloody sock. A red shoe.

  “Thank God,” he said. “Please help me.”

  I screamed. The sound rose out of me like an ambulance’s wail. It seemed bigger than my body, shrill and high.

  “You get out,” I shouted. “This is my house. You get out!”

  “Calm down,” he said.

  “Look at this mess. Blood all over Darlene’s floors!”

  He stepped back, holding up his intact hand in a placating gesture. I stepped back too, doubling the space between us. I inhaled the tang of the air freshener, my fists clenched at my sides. For the first time, I noticed that the man had a messy brown ponytail and a thick golden beard.

  “I don’t know how bad I’m hurt,” he said. “I might be dying.”

  I stared at him.

  “I’m so glad it’s you,” he said. “I wanted it to be you.”

  Confused, I let my gaze roam across him again. He was tall, lanky, and angular. One hand was broken, maybe beyond repair. He did not seem to have the right number of digits, and the ones that remained were no longer uniform in length. The pinkie and ring finger had been reduced to sodden stumps. His jeans were not blue anymore, soaked with mud and blood. His weight was planted on the right side, the left knee bent, his foot just skimming the ground. His shirt was inked with red—squiggles and smears like an alien alphabet—but I could not see a wound there. He was both dark and pale, with a broad jaw and straight nose. At last, I met his eyes.

  He swayed and stretched out a hand, groping for the wall to steady himself. With a wail of elation, I ran to my brother.

  6

  Tucker told me to feed him, so I made him a sandwich. He asked for water, so I fetched him a glass, which he drank in frantic assault, spilling it down his chin. I fixed him another sandwich. I refilled his glass again and again. He ate and drank as though he had not seen food or water in weeks. In his haste, he smeared blood on the bread and ate it anyway.

  He told me to help him out of his clothes. The smell coming off him was intense—mud, sweat, a tang of sewage, and some kind of curdled sourness that reminded me of the dead mice I occasionally found in Darlene’s traps in the kitchen. Tucker’s clothes were stiff with blood, which presented a problem. The fabric would not fold. Several buttons were pasted shut. His wounds were too severe to allow for contact, and I could not figure out how to pull his cuff over his mangled hand or tug his pants down without brushing against his injured skin. Eventually I took a pair of scissors and cut the cloth away, as I had seen doctors do on TV. I was no longer nauseous or shaky. The urgency of the situation elevated me into a pragmatic state of mind.

  Tucker told me to clean his wounds. He told me I would have to be brave and persist, even if it made him scream. I guided him toward the bathroom ahead of me; the hallway was too narrow to accommodate both of us at once. We did not have a bat
htub in the trailer, only a shower stall. With my help, Tucker climbed in, naked now except for his underwear, and slumped down onto the tile. From this angle, I could see the full extent of his thinness—the definition of his ribs, the knobs of his spine. He laid his cheek against the wall and closed his eyes.

  I knew how to care for cuts and bruises, but this was new territory. After a moment’s consideration, I grabbed Darlene’s soap, which was unscented and hypoallergenic. Perhaps it would be easier on my brother’s injuries than Jane’s floral body washes. I poured a dollop into my palm, then hesitated, reluctant to touch him. It seemed that he might have dozed off, lolling on the tile.

  “Do it,” he said without opening his eyes.

  When I turned on the shower, Tucker flinched away from the sprinkle of water. I lathered up my hands and leaned down, preparing myself. Everything in the bathroom was an unpleasant sea-foam hue, against which the droplets of blood stood out like neon. Gingerly, I took hold of Tucker’s damaged fingers. His left pinkie now ended at the second knuckle, his ring finger at the third. The tip of each wound was blackened. There was not much blood, as though the burn had sealed all the fluids in.

  His other fingers were scraped and discolored, but intact. I pushed back a few flaps of loose flesh to lather the crevices beneath. Tucker growled. The skin on his palm did not seem like skin anymore—it was too sticky, too raw. Crouching awkwardly beside the toilet, I plucked pebbles from the exposed ribbons of his muscle. I rubbed soap into every orifice I could see. Froth and blood swirled down the drain. The door to the shower stall was open, wetting the bathroom floor, the toilet, and me.

  Eventually I turned my attention to Tucker’s calf. On closer inspection, the gashes in his leg did not seem as dire. They were long but not terribly deep. I washed them out as best I could, guiding the water through a riverbed of corrugated muscle, the liquid clouded with grit and soap. Tucker did not wince or protest as I finished my work. He was now ominously silent.

  “Get up,” I said.

  He did not move. I tapped his shoulder.

  “Get up.”

  He stirred, blinking at me.

  Slowly, slowly, I helped him back into the living room. He leaned on me so heavily that I thought I might crumple beneath his weight. As I laid him down on the couch, he seemed to be drifting in and out of consciousness. He would lie quiet for a moment, breathing in the deep, rhythmic manner of someone asleep, and his muscles would go slack as though he had slipped beyond me. Then he would twitch and grimace. He would open his eyes and give me instructions. I got gauze and medical tape from the first aid kit. I smeared disinfectant—a few years out of date—onto his lacerations. I patched him up as best I could. He looked like a mummy when I was through, his hand and calf swaddled in clumsy loops of white.

  As Tucker lay with his eyes closed, I realized that he was still dressed in only his underwear, nearly naked. I was confronted with the undeniable maleness of him—narrow hips, his chest a flat plane, his nipples embedded in a tussock of fur like strawberries in a garden, his legs devoid of excess fat, a man made of corners and lines. His white briefs were soaked, which meant that I could see the dark mat of his pubic hair through the fabric. I could make out the outline of his genitalia, a limp, coiled snake. I had lived in a landscape of women for most of my life. I had seen Darlene and Jane in every state of undress, but Tucker was a different animal altogether. His masculinity was astonishing.

  “Does Darlene have any drugs?” he said.

  “What?” I said, recalling myself to the moment.

  “The prescription kind.”

  “I don’t think so. Just stuff for headaches and cramps.”

  He shrugged. “Give me what you’ve got.”

  I found a few bottles of painkillers in the medicine cabinet. Normally I was not supposed to touch them. Tucker shook a handful from each container into his palm, not bothering to count the pills.

  “I’m cold,” he said.

  Before my eyes, his flesh became textured with goosebumps. I hurried to the closet and dug through Darlene’s things. There was an old pair of sweatpants, a stretched, faded T-shirt, and some wool socks. I was not sure what to do for shoes—Tucker’s were too bloodstained to be salvaged, and his feet were too big to cram into Darlene’s sneakers.

  Back in the living room, I helped my brother dress. He was shivering so badly that I had to be firm with him, guiding his movements like a parent with a newborn. Blood had already started to soak through the gauze on his hand.

  “I’m really here, aren’t I?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  When he was clothed, I sat beside him on the couch, not touching him. For the first time, I could smell Tucker himself—not his wounds, not his filth, not the blood. There was a ripe adolescent tang that was all his own.

  “Did it work?” he said.

  I did not know what he was talking about, but it seemed best to placate him.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “It went okay? I thought I planned for everything.”

  “You did great.”

  I glanced around the trailer. Tucker’s clothes were piled by the wall, stained and sliced into swatches. His bloody foot had left a track across the floor. The bathroom was damp and scarlet splattered. Even the front door was streaked with red.

  “What time is it?” Tucker said.

  I looked at the clock on the microwave.

  “Seven,” I said in surprise. Only a few hours had gone by. It seemed like much longer. The sky was hazy through the window, the sun hovering above the horizon, filling the trailer with a thick, otherworldly light.

  “Time keeps passing,” Tucker said in frustration. “Listen, you’ve got to clean up now. Clean up everything, okay? Get rid of the whole mess. Make it look like it did before.”

  I was not expecting this. I anticipated praise for my heroism, rather than a list of new tasks, but it did not occur to me to disobey my brother. While he rested, I scrubbed down the surfaces in the bathroom and shoved the towels into the washing machine, making sure to use cold water that would rinse the blood out rather than hot that would bake it in. I mopped. As I wiped the front door, spray bottle in one hand, roll of paper towels in the other, I felt halfway between worlds. Behind me the sun was setting, the flat Southwestern sky dotted with oval clouds. Inside the trailer, my absent, present brother lay on the couch. With each blink, I was surprised again to find him there—as large as life, at once mysterious and solid, unknown and familiar.

  “Get rid of my clothes,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  He propped himself up on his elbows, grimacing with pain.

  “You’ve got to destroy them,” he said. “Maybe bury them or . . . Can you burn them? That would be best.”

  I was not supposed to play with fire, but I sometimes did anyway. I knew how to light a match, how long I could hold my finger over the flame before it began to hurt. The neighbors kept a metal trash can outside their back door. Mr. Avila once told me that he burned his old documents since it was “better than a shredder when the government came knocking.” He and his wife were not particularly friendly, but I was used to their cantankerous ways and felt comfortable trespassing on their property in an emergency.

  I collected Tucker’s clothes—what was left of them—and slipped outside again. Evening had fallen, enriching the air and lengthening the shadows. The wind carried the drone of cicadas. There was no one in sight. The Avilas would be at work until late; she was a waitress, he a bartender, always on the graveyard shift, furious whenever Jane woke them on weekend mornings kicking her soccer ball against our wall. Now I stuffed Tucker’s clothes into the trash can and fetched Mr. Avila’s bottle of kerosene from its hiding place. I lit a match, and the evidence went up with a whoosh of heat and light.

  For a moment, I stood in the gloaming, savoring the hum of the insects, the faint glimmer of stars. The wind was cool. Summer was coming, and summer in Oklahoma
was no joke, but for now the breeze lifted the tumble of curls away from my shoulders.

  I was waiting for Darlene. I had been waiting for her since Tucker’s arrival. With part of my mind, I had been listening for the crackle of car wheels in the gravel, the slam of a door. She would bring Jane with her, but Jane was not important to me now. Darlene would know what to do. When she arrived, the burden of Tucker’s dreadful injuries would be lifted out of my hands. I would be free to celebrate the fact that he had returned to us.

  As I entered the trailer, my brother rose to his feet, limping toward me. He looked strange in his too-small outfit, his ankles and a swath of belly exposed, as though he had been stretched like a rubber doll.

  “What are you doing?” I said. “Don’t get up.”

  “I have to,” he said.

  “Darlene will be home soon. She’ll take care of you.”

  “No,” he said savagely. “No Darlene. Nobody else.”

  He reached the front door and slumped against the jamb, breathing hard. He towered over me, his face contorted with pain.

  “Help me down to the ravine,” he said. “I can sleep there for a while.”

  “In the ravine?”

  “I’ve been there for the past two nights. It’s fine, Cora. Come on.”

  I opened my arms in an instinctive gesture, barring his exit. For the first time, I felt a surge of panic.

  “I don’t understand what’s happening,” I said. “You just got back. I missed you so much. Darlene has to see you. She’ll take care of everything, I promise. You’re hurt so bad, Tucker. You can’t leave. You can’t leave us again.”

  My brother reached out and cupped my chin in his palm. The touch sent out waves of familiarity strong enough to make me shiver. This was a customary gesture of his, reassuring and gentle. I remembered it at a level beneath consciousness. He had done it since I was little.