The Wilds

by Julia Elliott

  As Pip went on about the Corvette he wanted to buy, she thought about Bob, how, in the past, he was always quietly tinkering with something. And then poor Pip started up on Korea, told her about coming back home after starving in that bamboo cage, eating for a solid year in a trance, waking up one day to the shock of three hundred pounds. He’d lost the weight and gotten married. But then he gained it back, got divorced, lost it again—his whole life staked to that tedious fluctuation.

  That night when she got home, Bob turned from the television and spoke to her.

  “Look at this joker,” he said, pointing at Ronald Reagan, the movie star who was running for president, the one who looked like a handsome lizard.

  The next day Bob bathed himself and rolled out onto the screened porch. Watching the lake, they shelled field peas all morning. She knew that Pip would come flying out of the blue in his boat, and when he did, Bob cleared his throat and said nothing.

  Pip’s boat appeared every afternoon for the next week. They’d hold their breath and wait for the high whine of his motor to fade.

  Bob started doing his leg exercises, made an appointment with the hotshot therapist in Columbia. In two years he could get around the house with a walker. By Reagan’s second term he was ambling with a cane. He took care of the chickens, started dabbling with quail. And every year they sold more land, acre by acre, until all they had was their cottage—mansions towering on every side, the lake a circus of Jet Skis, houseboats so big they blotted out the sun.

  Bob and Elise got old on the lake, their son breezing in twice a year to say hello. And they planned to die there, right on the water, even though the place was turning to shit.

  Elise fingers the scab on her arm. It’s been a week since she gouged the microchip out with the sharp scissors she nabbed from the Dementia Ward desk. All this time she’s kept the fleck of metal in her locket and nobody’s said one word. The nurses know better than to touch her locket, a thirtieth-anniversary gift from Bob—not a heart, like you’d expect, just a circle of gold that opens via a hinge, a clip of Bob’s gray hair stuffed inside as a sweet joke. To thirty more years of glorious monotony, Bob said, and they laughed, opened another jar of mulberry wine.

  A tech nurse escorts Elise out to the pear orchard. Just as soon as she’s released into the flock of seniors, Pip Stukes comes swaggering across the grass.

  “Hey, good-lookin’, what you got cookin’?”

  Elise takes his arm as usual and they promenade across stepping-stones, over to their favorite bench. Pip talks about his son, who dropped by this morning with Pip’s grandbaby, now a grown girl. He talks about the artificial bacon he had for breakfast and the blue jay that perched on his windowsill. Then he goes quiet and just stares at her, filling the space between them with sighs. It’s warm for November. The mums have dried up and the pear trees drop their last red leaves. When Pip leans in to kiss her, Elise embraces him, keeping her lips off limits while hugging him close enough to slip the microchip into his shirt pocket.

  She sits back and smiles. It feels good to be invisible.

  “You remember that island?” says Pip.

  Elise nods, touches his cheek, stands up on her robot legs, and then walks off into the canna lilies. Behind the dead flowers are two big dumpsters and, if she’s calculated correctly, a door leading into the Dogwood Library.

  When Bob wakes up, she’s standing there in a shaft of late-morning light, a small-boned woman wearing strap-on plastic Power Units like something from the Sci-Fi Channel, her gray hair cropped into an elfin cap.

  “Elise,” he rasps.

  “Bob,” she says.

  His thick lids slide down over watery eyes.

  “Bob?” she says. He shifts in his chair but won’t wake up.

  She checks his pulse, grabs his blanket from the bed, and tucks it around him. Makes sure he’s got on proper socks under his corduroy slippers. And then she rolls him toward the door.

  Though Elise has spent many an afternoon wrinkling her nose at the smell of chickens, she isn’t prepared for the endless stream of barracks southwest on Highway 301: three giant buildings as long as trains and leaking a stench so shocking she can’t believe it doesn’t jolt Bob from his nap. Mouth-breathing, she hustles to get past the nastiness, fingering the button that operates his chair, kicking it into high gear, the one the nurses use when they’re in a tizzy.

  She’s been walking for an hour, on a strip of highway shoulder that comes and goes, smooth sailing for a mile and then she’ll hit a patch of bumpy asphalt and veer onto the road. A number of motorists have passed—mostly big trucks, pickups, the occasional SUV—and she worries that some upstanding citizen has already called Eden Village. She expects a cop car to roll up any minute. Expects to see the officer put on his gentle smile, the one he uses with feeble-minded people and lunatics, geezers and little children. She would prefer a back road, some decent air and greenery, but she knows she wouldn’t remember the way.

  If she recalls correctly, 301 is almost a straight shot to the water. Though her legs don’t hurt, her shoulders do, an ache that dips into her bones. Her fingers cramp as they grip the handles of Bob’s chair. And she’s too thirsty to spit. She imagines sweating glasses of sweet tea, cold Coca-Cola in little bottles, lemonade with hunks of fruit floating in the pitcher. She remembers the time she took Bob to meet her grandmother. They drank from a pump on the old wraparound porch, drawing cool springwater up from the earth. She recalls sipping from the garden hose and tasting rubber. Remembers the special flavor of Bob’s musty canteen, the one they always took camping. She and Bob once hiked up Looking Glass Rock, crouched under a waterfall with their mouths open, taking giant gulps, the whole mountain wet with dew. Hosts of tiny frogs clung to the stone, suckers on their toes.

  When they get to the lake Elise will roll Bob to the end of their old pier. It’ll be dusk by then, she thinks, catfish crowding in the shallows. She wants him to see water on every side when he wakes up, vast and black, with the sky in pink turmoil, as though it’s just the two of them, out there floating in a little boat.

  Feral

  That autumn a pack of feral dogs swept into our school yard, barking and keening and charging the air with an electrifying stench—wild festering creatures, some bald with mange, others buried in clumps of matted frizz, or hobbling on three legs, or squinting through worm-eaten eyes. Rip Driggers was on the porch of my portable, cooling off after a laughing fit, and he came scrambling through the door, waving his fists and spitting, “Dogs, dogs, dogs, hundreds of ’em—craziest mutts you ever saw.” We were into the sluggish haze of afternoon, picking at a Dickinson poem, the room smelling of sour socks. My dozing seventh-graders dashed from their seats to the windows. The dogs were their salvation, mongrel hordes pouring in from strange, magic parts of the earth.

  The animals skittered around the playground, yapping at each other, squirting piss onto swing sets, sniffing each other’s piss, pissing on each other’s piss, snorting at each other’s anuses, and snarling. They threw themselves into tangles of squealing and flew apart again.

  The principal emerged from the cafeteria, peered at the dogs, and then hurried back inside. A minute later his nasal drone issued from the PA system: “A collection of stray canines has entered our playground area. Teachers and students must not leave the main building or their portable classrooms. Please check to make sure all doors are closed and locked.”

  I stood at a window watching the wild beasts prance in the sun.

  In less than fifteen minutes a fleet of SUVs glittered in the school’s front drive. Mothers sat idling, but no one could leave the school yet, even though the dogs had moved down to the soccer field, even though the ASPCA, the Humane Society, the police and fire departments had all been called, even though the soul-stirring, apocalyptic wails of multiple sirens announced that authority figures were speeding nigh.

  Suddenly I’d found myself past thirty, shacked up with a fussy bald man nine years my senior who e
njoyed monitoring every facet of our household—finances, thermostat, hot-water heater, water and electricity usage, lawn maintenance, and pest control. His brain had become a grid of interlocking systems. His eyes were shrinking into beads as the years went by—he who had once been a luminescent lover, a beautiful, pale trembler with long, flowing hair. I didn’t know how this had happened. But now he sat by our sliding glass door, clutching his Beeman air rifle, some of his old pluck surging back as he scanned the yard for curs.

  “The bastards,” as he called them, had chewed our plastic garbage cans to shreds, had consumed every edible morsel in our trash, had strewn the remaining filth far and wide. The hunger-crazed beasts came in the night and gobbled up anything vaguely organic—sprouting potatoes, blood-smeared butcher paper, old leather slippers—and then they puked; they ate their own warm puke; they ran in crazy circles, pausing to deposit steaming mounds of crap onto our green lawn—usually a masterpiece of emptiness now polka-dotted with yellow nitrogen stains.

  The previous week the dogs had sprayed our garage with their spicy pee and sent my husband into a tizzy. He removed every object, pressure-washed the area with bleach water, and then slathered key spots with Get Serious! pet odor and pheromone extractor. At night he slid his recliner close to the sliding glass door to keep his vigils. While consuming exactly three Budweisers, he’d brood in the dark with his gun, waiting for that moment when the brutes would come whirling into his floodlit territory, rearranging the molecules of air with their yipping and fried-egg stink. BB pellets did not kill the dogs, who did not seem to remember from one night to the next that they’d been shot, but the yelp of a struck dog made my husband smile. And he, a passionate advocate for gun control, kept threatening to buy himself a serious firearm.

  I watched TV alone. Each night the news spouted facts about dog packs. Feral dogs, fast becoming a worldwide menace, dwelled in condemned buildings, junk-car lots, sewers, and abandoned strip malls. They invaded human territory to scavenge and hunt. They killed in teams, herding livestock, cats, and rodents into corners, where they tore them into bite-sized chunks. The American pet craze had led to an epidemic of abandoned dogs. A rash of dog-fighting rings had flared in rural ghettos. And the repressed wolfish instincts of domestic dogs had been coaxed out, had transmogrified into weird new breeds.

  The fighting champions of packs naturally ruled over the ex-pets, also over the bait dogs—smaller, wimpier dogs once bred to rile the fighters. You could recognize a bait dog by its shabby condition, its downtrodden vibe and crippled state: etched with scars, half-blind, riddled with abscesses and often lacking a limb, it slunk and whined around the glorious, snapping fighters—sinewy beasts with bear claws and yellow shark teeth. Some of the more splendid alphas had long incisors like baboons’. Others had needle claws that retracted into their toe pads like those of cats. Legions of freakish specialists had stepped out of the woodwork to describe these evolutionary quirks of reverted dog species, and they, along with innumerable dog-bite victims, bewildered farmers, and owners of dismembered cats, were always being interviewed on TV.

  My favorite dog specialist was an evolutionary ecologist who’d written his dissertation on the mating habits of wild primates that had forgone foraging to scavenge human food. He’d made his mark with a documentary on a troop of hamadryas baboons who spent their days picking through the rubble of a Saudi garbage dump. And now, back in the States, Dr. Vilkas had become interested in what he called “de-domestication.” He wore army fatigues. He shot his own footage with a digital Minicam. Half artist, half scientist, he looked a little wild himself, peering through unkempt black hair with an unnerving set of mismatched eyes—one blue, one green. Though an American citizen, Dr. Vilkas had a trace of an accent, trilling and growling, and the way he pronounced his z’s made me blush.

  He sported bite-proof arm and leg bands and drenched himself with special pheromones to keep his beloved dogs from attacking him. He skulked among them, filmed them eating and coupling and suckling their scraggly young, filmed them squealing in the throes of birth and barking with joy as they sabotaged a dumpster or disemboweled a rat.

  Dr. Vilkas followed dog packs as they migrated among urban dead-zones, blighted farm belts, and dying towns. Our own town fit the usual profile: failing schools, rinky-dink chicken farms, and closing plants, an obese and debt-strapped populace who fed on processed food, their offspring suffering new configurations of hyperactivity disorders and social dysfunction, children who gobbled generic methylphenidates and performed miserably on standardized tests.

  Dr. Vilkas gave no instructions on how to deal with the dog epidemic. He eluded authorities who solicited advice on how to hunt down and exterminate the dogs. Though he seemed to know something about the dogs’ roaming and sleeping patterns, he remained tight-lipped on these subjects while talking about the social habits of the dogs: their complex hierarchies, mating strategies, and choreographed hunting tactics; their territorial urination, sensitivity to pheromones, body language, and variations of barking.

  Howl, growl, yowl, snarl, yap, yip, woof. Each vocalization meant something, and domestic canine pets could pick up some of these messages. When a reporter asked Dr. Vilkas how frequently pets were tempted away from domestication into wildness, the specialist warned dog owners to keep their animals secured. And though he encouraged them to invest in sturdier leashes and to read books on canine psychology so as to recognize signs of restlessness, he couldn’t disguise his excitement over the thought of tame animals lured from their lives of monotonous sycophancy by the siren calls of ferals. His strange eyes shone. He gazed longingly at the horizon, where a chemical plant huffed filth into the sky.

  Outside, the autumn afternoon swelled golden, and the children squirmed in their desks. They looked grubby, their clothes rumpled, their hair greasy. I assumed their parents were distracted by the dog epidemic—everyone was. Because the students gabbled of nothing else, most teachers had given in to their obsession. We designed dog-themed lesson plans. The principal arranged for specialists to speak in the auditorium. Some even made classroom visits. Earlier that day, in my world history class, we’d watched a film on the history of canine domestication, learning that around a hundred thousand years ago, the first dogs had split from wolf species, emerging from forests to lurk near human territories—not put off by Homo sapiens’ decadent stink, eventually creeping up to human fires, dazzled by smells of roasting meat. In a time-lapse sequence, a wolf morphed into a German shepherd, which morphed into a collie, which morphed into a teacup Chihuahua, sending the children into howls of laughter.

  But now in English class a warm miasma of boredom settled on my students. Eyelids fluttered. Heads drooped. The restless among them jogged their knees, tapped their pencils, and glanced toward windows. Tammy Harley, swatting the air in front of her frown, said that Bobby Banes had cut one. A sly smile smoldered on Bobby’s freckled face—poor little Bobby, whose father hosed down the gut room at the poultry plant with scalding bleach water. And then three football players blasted long farts, timing their stunt with hand signals. Children covered their noses. They gasped and pretended to faint. Several cheerleaders scrambled from their seats to the air-conditioning vent, stood panting over it, screaming “Pigs!” and rolling their mascara-crusted eyes.

  My heart beat faster. I shivered. I felt a tingling sensation in my spine. Suddenly, I could detect the salty, rank smell of dogs and I wondered if some of the animals had been sleeping under my portable classroom. Seconds later, Tonya Gooding spotted a dog pack leaping from the trash-strewn copse that separated our school yard from a Burger King parking lot, splitting the day wide open with its barking and feral verve.

  “Damn!” she cried. “Looks like they flying.”

  Though I motioned for the kids to keep their rears glued to their seats, all but Jebediah Jinks, a preteen preacher with eleven siblings, flew to the windows. I took my usual station at the door, sniffing what was now almost palpable in the air.

/>   “Does anybody smell that?” I asked my students.

  “Smell what?” said Tonya Gooding.

  “‘As dead flies give perfume a bad smell, so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor,’” Jebediah preached from his desk. “A sign of the end times. A plague like frogs or locusts, except only with dogs, or like them swine Jesus put the demons in. We got war, we got AIDS and hurricanes, we got terrorists and obesity and homosexuality and dogs. You think God’s trying to tell us something?”

  The other kids just tittered.

  And the dogs came romping and snarling, tussling and woofing: mongrels big as panthers and little as squirrels, balding curs with skin like burnt cheese, mutts with lions’ manes, canines with dreadlocks matted over their eyes. Short dogs waddled on stumpy legs. Tall dogs loped like spooked gazelles. And the big, rangy fighters led the pack, nipping their inferiors.

  “‘The dogs shall eat Jezebel,’” croaked Jebediah, ogling Tammy Harley’s leopard-print miniskirt. “‘He that dies of Ahab in the city the dogs shall eat; and he that dies in the field, the birds of the sky will devour.’”

  Then I saw Dr. Vilkas sprinting from the woodlet after the pack, camera hoisted, lank hair streaming. My heart lurched. My ears burned. I stepped out onto the porch and locked the children inside. I could barely hear their muffled screams, so loud was the clamor of dogs. The air smelled of Fritos and urine. And hot winds blew, as though the mongrels had brought their own weather. I gripped the railing and watched Dr. Vilkas creep up on a skirmish between two alphas.