The Wildlands

by Abby Geni

  “We have an APB out,” Roy said. “We’re still in the first forty-eight hours, so that’s good. Do you have extended family anywhere? Are y’all aware of any friends Tucker might get in touch with?”

  “We don’t have any family left,” Darlene said. “The tornado took everything.”

  Roy made a note on his pad. His face was illuminated from beneath by a small desk lamp. Darlene could see a swatch of stubble beneath his ear, a place he had missed while shaving. There was a clock on the wall, loud and insistent. Jane kept jiggling her feet. Her restlessness shook the sofa.

  “Evidence,” Darlene said at last. Her voice came out higher than normal.

  “Excuse me?” Roy said.

  “You said that y’all have evidence. Why do y’all think Tucker is involved in any of this?”

  He set down his pen with deliberate slowness.

  “Right,” he said. “So.”

  “What’s going on?” Darlene said.

  “The bombing,” he said.

  “At Jolly?”

  Roy nodded, his expression grave. “Blood was found at the scene. We sent the DNA to a lab in Oklahoma City. We got the results back yesterday. Your brother was already in the system, and they were able to match—”

  “No,” Jane said. Her voice was firm but flat, as though she were answering a question posed by a teacher in class.

  “I’m afraid there’s no doubt,” Roy said. “Tucker set off the explosion. That’s why Kendra and I came by yesterday. We needed to know if y’all had been in touch with your brother. We thought he might be hiding out with y’all. Taking shelter.”

  Darlene closed her eyes. The sensation was novel. It was equal parts comprehension and distress—two things she had always thought of as unrelated, now mingled into a single, painful surge. Without meaning to, without being aware of it, she had been gathering information about Tucker for days. From stories on the news, from gossip at the grocery store, even from the police officers during their visit to No. 43—despite their reticence—Darlene had gleaned enough. All the unrelated scraps and shards were merging into a story.

  “What about Cora?” she said.

  “I don’t believe in coincidences,” Roy said. “We know Tucker’s in town. Now Cora’s missing. It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” Darlene said helplessly. “None of this makes sense.”

  Roy passed a manila folder across the table. She saw Tucker McCloud written on top in large, angry print. There was a picture of her brother paper-clipped to the front. Darlene snatched at the file. Looking closer, she realized the photograph was a mug shot. Tucker wore an orange jumpsuit and held a black sign with white letters on it: a date, a location, and a long string of numbers. The name of the county was one she recognized, farther east, near Tulsa.

  “Let me tell y’all about your brother,” Roy said.

  Darlene breathed.

  As she opened the file, he began to speak. He talked as though he knew Tucker well—not as a person but a case study, a composite of various traits and actions. Leafing through the pages, Darlene was listening with half her mind, reading with the other. Roy did not know everything, of course—only what ended up in the official report. A second mug shot showed Tucker with a blond beard. In a third, he stood framed in profile. A pixelated image of Tucker at a rally looked as though it had been printed out from somebody’s social media feed.

  “He’s a criminal?” Darlene said, gesturing to the thick file. “I mean, he was already a criminal?”

  “Yes,” Roy said.

  For so long, questions about Tucker had droned in her mind like bees in a hive, a hum that lasted for the past few years. On good days, Darlene pictured her brother working in a coffee shop, living in a big city, sharing a rundown apartment with roommates. On bad days, her imagination took her to darker places. Perhaps Tucker was sleeping in the street, begging for spare change. Perhaps he had become addicted to drugs. Every so often, she would be jolted by a surge of despair, wondering whether he was dead. An anonymous corpse found in an alley. A plain pine coffin. A headstone reading John Doe. Maybe he never came home, not because he was heartless but because he was six feet under. Maybe she had been furious at him all this while for something he could not help.

  Now, without warning, she was being offered all the information she could ever ask for—all of it terrible, surprising, and strange.

  “His first arrest was a month after his eighteenth birthday,” Roy said. “He wasn’t a minor, so I reckon that’s why nobody contacted y’all at the time. There was an illegal protest at a zoo in Pawnee. I believe Tucker was kept in jail overnight and released with a warning. There should be a note in there—”

  Darlene flipped through the file. Roy was saying something about jurisdictional regulations. It seemed Tucker had joined up with an animal rights group called the Environmental Conservatory Organization. (“ECO for short,” Roy said. “It’s clever, I guess.”) Six months after his first offense, Tucker was arrested in Muskogee. Along with two other members of ECO, he attempted to sabotage a lumber crew in an old-growth forest, the habitat of a rare breed of owl. Since it was Tucker’s second offense, he was fined and given probation, his DNA entered into the system. His codefendants had longer rap sheets, and their punishments were more severe. Tucker was warned to stay away from ECO, to make regular contact with a probation officer, to find a job, to forget about saving the animals and worry about saving himself.

  He did not listen. He violated his probation immediately, falling off the radar for the entirety of that long, gray winter.

  As Darlene leafed through the folder, her heart quickened its pace. Criminal mischief. Vandalism. Possession of a deadly weapon. There was a photograph of Tucker standing beside a young woman with tattoos up and down her arms, her breastbone emblazoned with a phoenix in jewel tones. Tucker was grinning, but the young woman was stone-faced and held one arm in the air, flashing the sign for peace, or possibly victory. Both of them were lanky and underfed, dressed in ragged ensembles and visibly unwashed.

  Dimly, Darlene heard an echo of her brother’s voice ringing in her mind: Do you believe that everything happens for a reason? During their fight, he had mentioned natural disasters and alarm bells. He talked about finding meaning and needing a purpose. At the time, Darlene did not put much credence in any of this—the misguided ramblings of a grief-stricken boy—but maybe she had been wrong. Perhaps ECO gave him the meaning he sought. With these people, he might have found some kind of purpose. Darlene did not entirely understand it, but a pattern was forming in her mind.

  Roy was still talking; from a police standpoint, Tucker’s behavior had been erratic. He was a person of interest in a bomb threat at a puppy mill. In a town called Sulphur, he chained himself to the door of a CEO’s office to protest the company’s policy of animal testing. A month later, he was picked up for vagrancy, sleeping on the streets of Oklahoma City and panhandling. His fingerprints were found in Lawton at the scene of a failed arson attempt on a chicken farm. According to Roy, activists often displayed this kind of chaotic decision-making. Groups like ECO were disorganized by their very nature, a loose cadre of like-minded radicals who did not act in lockstep, who all had different passions and levels of commitment. Some hoped to save the dolphins. Others were frantic about invasive species. Some could only talk about melting ice caps and rising sea levels. Others insisted that the biggest threat to life on earth was deforestation. Some wanted to engage in nonviolent protests: sit-ins, hunger strikes, and letter-writing campaigns. Others—like Tucker—were out for something more.

  “So he’s serious about all this,” Darlene said. “It’s not just some hobby.”

  “Serious as a heart attack,” Roy said. “The boy’s on a mission.”

  “An activist,” she murmured, trying out the term.

  Beyond the window, a siren sounded. Darlene glanced up in surprise. She heard an engine turn over as a squad car pulled
away. She had forgotten that the whole police station was not involved in her personal disaster. The sun poured through the window, coating the table with luminescent fractals. She listened to the wail of the siren, mournful and robotic, until it faded from earshot.

  Near the back of the file was another photograph, the most recent image of Tucker that the police seemed to have. Darlene leaned forward and peered at the stranger captured there, dressed in a T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off, his chin lifted. He was barefoot and tan. She wondered when the snapshot was taken, who took it—who her brother was smiling at with such affection and brio—and how it found its way into a police file. Squinting, she caught the hint of an outline on Tucker’s shirt. A faded white shape. A polar bear.

  With a jolt, Darlene recognized the T-shirt. She had given it to him for his birthday many years ago. (Her brother always loved polar bears. He saw them as an emblem of the wild—powerful, beautiful, untamable, and endangered.) Tucker must have packed the T-shirt specially when he left No. 43. He carried it with him on the road all this time. He tore the sleeves off, but he kept it. Somewhere inside this lean, angry man was her brother. If only she could chip away the hard surface and unveil the lost, familiar boy within.

  “A year ago, Tucker’s behavior escalated,” Roy said.

  Darlene glanced up. “How so?”

  “There was an act of sabotage at a factory in Noble County. Not long after, there was a case of arson in Tulsa. Your brother has a few open warrants in his name. He’s left fingerprints and DNA all over Oklahoma.”

  “My lord,” Jane breathed.

  Roy paused, frowning. Darlene watched him apprehensively. The sunlight touched his jaw and throat as he shifted in his seat.

  “Tucker’s first bombing was in Ponca City,” he said. “Six months ago.”

  “His first?” Darlene said.

  “I reckon he didn’t like the look of a slaughterhouse. The blast—let me see—” Roy recited from one of the reports in his hand. “It shattered the pneumonic killing box and the quarter-carcass lifting machine. A thousand head of cattle got loose that day.”

  Jane leaned forward and spoke, her voice higher than normal.

  “Tucker blew up a slaughterhouse?” she said.

  “Yes,” Roy said. “Him and a few other ECO members. They used homemade pipe bombs, similar to the ones we believe were used at Jolly Cosmetics.”

  Jane slumped back in her seat, looking horrified. She had obviously reached her quota for terrible news.

  “And his second bombing was just a few days ago,” Roy said. “Right here in Mercy.”

  “So there’s no doubt . . .” Darlene began, then trailed off.

  “None. Perfect DNA match.”

  Jane covered her eyes with a hand.

  “Tucker lost quite a bit of blood at Jolly Cosmetics,” Roy said. “Not enough to be fatal, but still, pretty bad. Enough to slow him down. I’m thinking that’s why he wanted Cora with him. Maybe he’ll let her go once he’s healed up.”

  Darlene swallowed hard.

  “This is a trying time for both of y’all,” Roy said. “I appreciate your cooperation.”

  “Of course,” she whispered.

  “Moving forward, things are going to happen pretty fast. To start with, we’ll get the ball rolling on those wiretaps, and hopefully—”

  He went on, speaking with circular gestures as though painting an imaginary mural in midair. Darlene closed her ears. On the final page of her brother’s file was a police sketch, taken from the security footage at Jolly Cosmetics. She had seen it before; Roy had shown it to her in her living room. It doesn’t look a thing like him, she said then. And yet, this was her brother—she knew that now.

  Malicious little eyes. A sharp beak of a nose. A smug smirk hovering around a narrow mouth. The criminal depicted in this sketch had built pipe bombs with his own two hands. He had returned to Mercy on the anniversary of the tornado to cause more harm. He had taken Cora—maybe by force, maybe through coaxing and coercion.

  Darlene could not recognize her brother in any of those actions. She could not find his face in the drawing. She slammed the file shut and pushed it away.

  16

  They spent the next few nights in a motel. The trailer was now a crime scene, wreathed in yellow plastic tape and besieged by reporters. The Amber Alert summoned them to Mercy from all across the country. Darlene was reminded of birds of prey circling in the desert. In the past, she had sometimes seen a throng of hawks, falcons, and turkey vultures wheeling on a distant updraft. This could only mean one thing: an animal was wounded or dying out there. The predators came in anticipation of blood.

  The reporters converged on Shady Acres to take pictures of No. 43, even though it stood empty. Nothing this salacious had happened in years. Three years, to be precise. The saddest family in Mercy was once again front and center—even sadder than before. Not just orphans. Not just victims. Now there was a bomber and a stolen child in the mix.

  Jane did not go to school; the reporters were there too, lurking in the parking lot, waiting. Darlene called in sick from work, dipping into her meager savings. Over the past few years, she managed to put away a tiny amount in case of disaster. Every week, rain or shine, she would add a few dollars to the stockpile, even if it meant skipping a meal or letting the pickup truck go too long without an oil change. Experience had taught her that there was always another disaster coming. She needed to be prepared.

  Their motel room, at least, was free. Given the family’s history, the owner proffered their accommodations. The reporters were here too—it was not hard for them to suss out that the McCloud sisters had taken refuge in the only hotel in Mercy—but they got no farther than the lobby. The clerk at the front desk was a model of Southwestern reticence, implacable beneath his cowboy hat. He kept a shotgun in easy reach, leaning against the wall nearby, clearly visible to all. He would not give the reporters the gift of eye contact, much less Darlene and Jane’s room number. Stymied, they lingered outside the front door.

  Time moved strangely. Sometimes it lunged ahead, a few hours gone in the blink of an eye, and other times it dripped like honey from a spoon. The motel room was small and brown, the carpet uneven, the wallpaper too faded to tell what the pattern had once been. Each morning, Darlene hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door to keep the maid away. The hallway smelled of boiled cabbage. The pipes knocked whenever someone flushed a toilet.

  The motel did, at least, have an indoor pool. Darlene and Jane had not thought to bring bathing suits, but they didn’t mind swimming in T-shirts and panties. It was a pleasant enough way to pass the time. Most days, they had the water to themselves. Sounds echoed against the tiled walls. A bank of windows let in the sun, muted through condensation and steam. The pool was a shade of blue that did not occur in nature. The water was so rank with chlorine that just walking into the room made their eyes sting. Jane and Darlene cut slow strokes. They practiced the dead man’s float, Jane lying on her back, blond locks flaring around her head as Darlene stood beside her, one hand delicately brushing the small of her sister’s back. The bottom of the pool was coated with a stubbly stucco that marked their feet with something like razor burn. Jane’s hair took on a greenish hue.

  They did not watch the news, only the movie channel, mostly classics and musicals, nothing contemporary. Once Darlene turned on the TV and saw live footage of the motel’s dreary exterior, the camera panning across the windows. If she had gone over and opened the blinds, she would have been on national TV right then and there. Quickly she changed the channel.

  This time, she had decided that there would be no interviews. She kept her cell phone off, in a drawer, out of sight. She did not check email or social media. She knew exactly what the reporters would say if they could reach her—at once shameless and sympathetic, promising money and a spotlight and “a chance to tell your side of the story.” Darlene did not care if she went bankrupt. She had learned her lesson: she
would never again make the mistake of crossing over to the other side of the TV screen.

  One evening she went for a walk to clear her head, leaving Jane on her twin bed inside a nest of fast food wrappers and dirty napkins. Darlene used the fire exit at the back of the motel. The clerk informed her that the alarm on the door was broken, and he stepped outside first, scoping out the sidewalk to make sure no one else was there. The wind was as warm as bathwater. Fireflies pulsed above the prairie as the sun dipped beneath the horizon. It was June, and the air smelled of summer—pollen and fertilizer and sweet pesticides.

  Darlene strolled down the lane toward the convenience store, reveling in her solitude. The landscape was distinctly unlovely. The motel stood near the highway, built for travelers who had nowhere better to stop for the night on their way to someplace more interesting. A patchwork of fields stretched to the horizon—one glistening with knee-high soybeans, one bald and brown, one so thick with dandelions that there seemed to be more yellow than green. A few oil derricks were working in the distance. Now, in the evening, they became almost beautiful, silhouetted against a multicolored sky, architectural in their design, at once bulky and insubstantial, dancing and dancing.

  At the shop, Darlene bought bread and peanut butter and jelly, a few cheese sticks, and a tub of ice cream. There was no fridge in the motel room, but Jane would finish everything before it turned. The clerk wore a scarlet uniform that brought out the pimples on his cheeks. He was chewing tobacco, spitting periodically into a cup. Darlene slid her money across the counter, but he pushed it back and shook his head.

  “On me,” he said.

  Above his head, a TV was bolted to the wall. Against her will, Darlene glanced up. She saw her sister’s photograph on the screen. Little Cora. Lost Cora.