The Wildlands

by Abby Geni

  So I ran.

  I dashed downhill, the cycling of my knees and the pounding of my shoes mere afterthoughts to the weightlessness of my being. Behind me someone cried out, but I did not look back. Maybe the crowd had noticed Chicken Man. Maybe the woman with the gray braid was chasing me. Maybe Tucker was being hauled off to jail by a furious mob. I kept going. Following my brother’s instructions was the only thing I could think of. My head reverberated with Cora’s wails, but Corey was the one in charge now, enacting Tucker’s plan.

  I darted through the zoo gates, avoiding the ticket booth, which was clogged by a massive summer camp group. I jogged into the big-cat house. There was a stitch in my side as I leapt down a set of concrete steps. The lavatories were hidden in damp shadows, stinking of urine and garbage. This was the end point of the first leg of my route. I ducked into the girls’ bathroom—a clever smoke screen for Corey—and glanced at my watch. Only six minutes had elapsed since the church bell struck nine.

  I waited. My heart was clanging so hard in my ears that I could hear the nuances of my own pulse—systole, diastole, repeat. If I was being chased, I would continue running along the next leg of Tucker’s escape route until I eluded my pursuers (Plan A). If no one was following me, I would adopt camouflage and blend into the crowd (Plan B). I fidgeted. The toilet seat was speckled with droplets. A swath of bathroom tissue wound across the floor, patterned with mud and shoe prints. I checked my watch again. A lion roared. Children were giggling nearby. I did not hear footsteps, no shouts of policemen, no sirens.

  At last, I pushed the stall door open. In the mirror above the sink, my eyes looked haunted. I tugged the baseball cap off my head and shoved it into the garbage can. Then I pulled a pink handkerchief from my pocket. It was my favorite one; I had brought it from home, though it had lain unused at the bottom of my bag until now. I folded the fabric the way Darlene taught me and tied it over my head. At once, my reflection became female. A tomboy with a short, sassy haircut. A bird-boned child dressed in nondescript clothing: tennis shoes, jean shorts, a gray T-shirt, nothing memorable. Cora disguised as Corey disguised as Cora again.

  For a moment, gazing at my own face, I dissolved into disarray once more. Cora and Corey clashed against one another, both hollering so loudly that I could not pick out one voice to follow.

  The bathroom door banged open. A woman eased inside, holding an infant in the crook of her arm. She was large breasted, large all over, and plainly suffering from the heat, her shirt stained with sweat. The baby lolled in her arms, its eyes smeary and unfocused, its hands opening and closing like anemones.

  “Would you fill this for me, hon?” she said.

  She unhooked a water bottle from a metal ring on her fanny pack. As she passed it to me, I stood frozen for a moment, unable to shift gears.

  “Hon?” she said. “You all right?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. I turned to the sink and grappled with the faucet. My hands were shaking so badly that the neck of the container rattled against the spigot. Behind me, the baby gave a querulous cry. I handed the water bottle to the woman, and she took a long pull.

  “You have a blessed day now,” she said.

  I stepped into the sunlight, wiping my sweaty palms on my shorts.

  Over the next hour, I changed my identity as often as I could, back and forth between Cora and Corey. I wore my pink kerchief for twenty minutes before removing it and balling it up in my pocket again. I put on my sunglasses instead. My heart kept revving like a car engine, sending surges of adrenaline through my veins. I forced myself to walk casually, taking up the smallest possible space on the wide, sun-soaked pathways of the zoo. Tucker had told me to alter my appearance regularly—he explained that camouflage would keep me safe—but I quickly grew confused about who I was supposed to be. I took off Corey’s sunglasses and reached in Cora’s pocket, where there was a cheap purple bracelet studded with fake rhinestones. A moment later, I realized that I was still strutting like a boy while dressed as a girl. I stopped in terror, sure that everyone had noticed. Trembling, I flung the bracelet into the grass. I glanced in the reflective surface of a window and realized I was not sure who I was supposed to be just then. The child looking back at me had no definitive markers of either personality.

  Sometime later, a group of boys in green summer camp T-shirts headed into the bathroom together without their counselor. I was standing nearby in the shade, pretending to watch a warthog sleeping. Striding blithely in Corey’s loping gait, I followed the boys down the concrete steps. I tried not to stare at a man standing at the row of urinals, humming while he peed. The overhead light was on the fritz here too, dimming at intervals.

  I tapped one of the boys on the shoulder. He was sandy haired and freckled, a husky child in a cowboy hat.

  “Hey,” I said. “Switch shirts with me.”

  “Huh?” he said.

  I groped in my pocket and held out a crumpled bill. I smoothed it out and waved it under the boy’s nose.

  “Twenty bucks,” I said.

  He had one of those faces that showed every thought in his head. I watched him look at my shirt, touch his own, examine the twenty dollars to verify it was real, then consider all the things he could buy with that money.

  “All right,” he said.

  Five minutes later, I was in the small-mammals house, following a group of children in identical green T-shirts, standing near but not exactly with them. I had been a nomad for a while, but the fragility of this rootless state had not struck me until now. There was no home for me to return to, no door to close. I was as vulnerable as a rabbit in a field, unable to retreat to a safe burrow.

  As the minutes ticked past, I moved into the reptile house, dark and cool, the lights kept low for the comfort of the animals. I cowered in corners, in shadows. Over the past weeks, I had learned to never loiter in one spot long enough to be remembered. The goal was to be unexceptional. I wiled away the time at the least interesting exhibits, the ones with the smallest crowds. People flocked in droves to the giraffes and the elephants, but nobody cared about the deer or the foxes—animals you could find in the wild right here in Texas.

  Around noon, I managed to switch shirts again, this time with a girl my age. She was not a camp member, just a child on summer break. The two of us were washing our hands side by side in the insufficient flow of the bathroom faucets when I blurted out my request and she complied. She wore a blue shirt with a picture of a robot on the front and a ketchup stain on the sleeve. She was tall, black, and svelte, her hair plaited into tiny coils that glittered with jewels and beads. I did not offer her any money, and she did not ask for any. She seemed pleased just to have a clean shirt. She did not inquire why I wanted to switch, either. She merely gave me a nod and strolled outside to meet her mother by the hot dog cart.

  Watching her go, I was overcome by a sensation I had never before experienced. I missed Darlene so much that it felt like a fever. I wanted to know where she was. I wanted to call her again. I wanted to throw myself into her arms and let her carry me home.

  Tucker and I planned to meet at four. There was a side entrance to the zoo that led through a little gate into a garden. I checked my watch once more. Behind my eyes, Chicken Man kept falling. The scene would not stop playing inside my head. My memory was operating like a malfunctioning film projector, the same fragmented sequence of events shown over and over. I saw Chicken Man crumple, transitioning before my eyes from a living creature into an inanimate object, no longer powered by his own muscles and mind.

  Maybe that was what death looked like. Maybe he was dead.

  I bought a soft pretzel, though I could not imagine eating anything. My throat was silted and grainy; I could barely manage to swallow the occasional sip of water from a drinking fountain. The pretzel was a symbol, a prop to show that I belonged at the zoo.

  By the time four o’clock rolled around, my stress had reached such a level that I had become clumsy, tripping ove
r my own feet. I approached the meeting point as the church bell clanged in the distance. The side entrance was small, tucked beside a maintenance building. A copse of evergreens bristled fiercely overhead, their branches interlocked in an inky canopy. There was no one else nearby. The crowds had thinned out as people headed home for their supper. Somewhere inside the zoo, a baby wailed, or possibly a monkey. I leaned against the bars of the gate, cheek to iron, relishing the cold metal.

  A shadow moved on the other side of the fence. There was a figure among the trunks, a flash of teeth.

  “I see you,” Tucker whispered.

  Then I was in his arms. I was not sure how it happened—whether I ran to him or he ran to me.

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  “I think so.”

  “Nice shirt,” he said, setting me down.

  I touched the robot on my chest, the ketchup stain on my sleeve.

  “Did anybody bother you?” Tucker said.

  “No.”

  “You stayed away from the staff? You hid in the bathroom?”

  “Yeah.”

  He straightened his shoulders. “I’m proud of you. You did good, Corey.”

  As he spoke that name aloud, I felt the hot pressure inside my chest release a little. I inhaled my first real breath in hours. My brother did not have a scratch on him. He wore jeans, a brand-new cowboy hat, and a tank top that showed off the jagged planes of his shoulders. I wondered what he had done all day. I wondered where he had hidden the gun.

  “Is he dead?” I said.

  Tucker made his fingers into a pistol and shot himself in the temple. I stared up at him.

  “It went like clockwork,” he said. “You drew everybody’s focus at exactly the right moment. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said faintly.

  “Hm?”

  “I didn’t know what the plan was.”

  “I think you did,” Tucker said. “On some level, you probably did.”

  I swung to the side just in time. My stomach emptied itself onto the grass in a single heave. Creamy bile splattered my shoe and a tree. My brother watched but did not touch me. I straightened up, wiping my mouth with the back of my wrist. My throat burned.

  “That’s just shock,” Tucker said. “It’ll wear off.”

  “I didn’t know the plan,” I repeated.

  The smell of the pines was tangy and cloying. Crickets chimed around us, and a robin warbled somewhere. Tucker rocked back and forth on his heels.

  “I’ve been in a sports bar all day,” he said. “Just watching the news. A random shooting, they’re calling it. The cops don’t know what to look for. They don’t have a goddamn clue. There were twenty people on the street, and nobody saw a thing.”

  A tremor ran through me, tingling up my spine.

  “I’m cold,” I said.

  “Just shock,” Tucker said.

  I might never have been as tired in my life as I was then—a child who had been far away from home for too long. Tucker led me down the path between the trees. I gripped his fingers for all I was worth, even though our heights did not line up and it was awkward for us both to walk while holding hands.

  Then he smiled down at me, the smile I loved most, showing no teeth, his eyes crinkled and gleaming. He swung me into his arms as though I weighed nothing at all.

  29

  At midnight, Tucker and I lay side by side in the back of a newly stolen pickup truck. The moon was high, nearly full, a pearly orb like a spider’s egg sac dangling from the sticky web of stars. We were both awake, staring up at the night sky. In school, I was taught to identify the Big Dipper, follow it to the Little Dipper, and locate the North Star. But I could not pick out any constellations now. There was no man-made glow to wash out the Milky Way. There were no trees or buildings to block my view. The darkness was a cloth thrown over the world, glittering with stars like sand on a beach towel, too many pinpricks of light to discern patterns.

  Tucker and I had fled Amarillo and vanished into Texas, off the map, off the grid. The air was so dry that my lungs ached. The night was filled with the robotic whirring of desert insects. Beneath my skin, the truck bed was pleasantly warm, retaining the heat of the day. The metal smelled of muddy dog and stale beer. Tucker shifted his weight, readjusting his legs on the plating.

  Neither of us could sleep. I was not sure where we were. Somewhere flat. Near the New Mexico border, maybe. I did not know how far a person could travel in six or seven hours. I did not know where we were going, and I did not particularly care. The farther we traveled from Chicken Man’s death, the lighter and cleaner I felt. Eventually the whole thing might just be a speck in the rearview mirror.

  “I want to call Darlene again,” I said.

  “Sure,” Tucker said. “It might be a little while, though. You’ll have to wait until we’re back in range of a cell tower.”

  “Okay.”

  “Darlene’s not like us,” he said. “Remember that, Corey.”

  I did not answer. The burring of the insects ticked up a notch.

  “I left the gate open for you,” Tucker said. “Just like I did for the horses and Sweetie. I opened the door at Shady Acres, and out you came.” He exhaled a slow breath. “Darlene would never have done that. Jane either.”

  I had napped in the car earlier—dropping into a dreamless void as soon as the adrenaline left my system—and I was off my usual schedule now, staring up at the moon like a nocturnal animal. I was not exactly sleepy, somewhere between alertness and a kind of delirium. A shadow darted across the stars above, maybe a bird, maybe a bat. A wind blew around me, circling the truck bed.

  On some level, I understood that something irrevocable had happened. I had crossed a threshold I could not come back from. I did not know yet what it meant for me, but I could feel the transformation; I was changing deep inside, at a level beneath flesh, beneath words.

  I rolled on my side to look at Tucker.

  “Tell me about Corey,” I said. “What was he like?”

  My brother made a soft noise, as though he had been waiting a long while for me to ask this question.

  “Once upon a time,” he said.

  I closed my eyes.

  “Actually, I have to tell you about Tucker first,” he said, interrupting himself.

  “Okay.”

  “Once upon a time, there was a boy who loved animals. I don’t know why he did. Tucker lived in a nice house with a nice family and a nice farm out back.”

  Somewhere in the distance, a bird cried out. It was a broken, breathless screech, echoing across the open fields. I knew that owls often sounded like this—distressed, distraught—when in fact they were nothing of the kind.

  “There was an owl on the farm too,” Tucker said. “I guess.”

  It was the first time I smiled all day.

  “For a while, life was good,” he said. “But nothing lasts forever, and somehow . . .” He trailed off. For a long moment, he lay silent.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “A dark wizard took notice of the boy’s family. He didn’t like how happy they were. How loving and carefree. He decided to put a curse on them.” Tucker clucked his tongue. “This wizard had power. Mama was the first to fall victim to it. She died in childbirth. It was hard for Tucker, as you can imagine.” A sigh. “He didn’t blame the new baby, you understand. He loved his little sister from the start. She was a golden girl, a sweet little star. But he had loved his mother too—”

  My cheeks were wet. The tears had started without my noticing. I was not sure what I was crying for: my lost mother, our lost farm, or the lost girl I had once been. Maybe I was crying for Big Tom or Chicken Man. For the murder I had accidentally facilitated. For the day I had just survived.

  “The wizard made a tornado,” my brother said. “He worked a vicious spell that took away Tucker’s home, his animals, his father. The wizard had a dark hear
t and no mercy.”

  I rolled onto my back again, staring up at the sky, tears dampening my short hair. On a night this clear, I could discern that the stars were not uniform. A few had color, a suggestion of blue or red mixed into their luminescence. Some were larger—as distinct as holes punched in a sheet of paper—while others were so faint that I could only glimpse them in my peripheral vision. If I looked straight at them, they melted into black.

  “After the tornado, things were rough,” my brother said. “The tragedy opened Tucker’s eyes. Maybe he could learn something from it, discover some meaning in it. He still had his sisters, after all. For a little while.”

  I could no longer see him—the darkness was too complete—but I knew his eyes were fixed on me.

  “Tucker had a hero’s heart,” he said. “He boldly left home. Soon he found a friend. But the guy was two-faced. Not to be trusted. A coward. After that, Tucker was alone a long while. Sometimes he felt he couldn’t go on.”

  The wind dried my cheeks. The tears were no longer coming; the story had begun to soothe me at last. I was not following everything my brother was saying, but I was storing it away, tucking his words into a safe, secret space to keep for some other season.

  “Then Tucker found Corey.” He smiled at these words. I couldn’t see his expression change in the darkness, but I could hear the parting of his lips, and his voice grew sweet.

  “And?” I said.

  “And the wizard had no power over Tucker anymore. Corey was the bravest, truest boy he had ever known. Together they changed the world.”

  “They did?” I said.

  For a moment, I almost believed again in the purpose of our journey, the certainty of my brother’s dream. Almost.

  “This is all true, you know,” Tucker said. “This really happened.”

  AUGUST

  30

  On a rain-swept afternoon, Darlene found herself outside her childhood home for the first time in years. She was not entirely sure how she came to be there. After leaving the grocery store, she had intended to drive back to No. 43, but somehow she ended up inside the path of devastation left by the finger of God.