The Wilds

by Julia Elliott

  “Be patient,” says your father. “It’s a popular ride.”

  You are standing in line at an amusement park beneath a merciless afternoon sun. As you inch closer and closer to the glowing aqua canal, you think of Sisyphus. The heat, the out-gassing asphalt, the fair-food aromas entice dormant addictions from your cells. You long for a corn dog. You dream of guzzling a Coke. You feel ravenous, thirsty, excitable, sick. You idly spy on the family in front of you—a young black couple with two little boys. Though you sneer at the family’s matching Universal Studios sun visors, you can’t help but soften in the presence of the children, especially when you notice that the older boy is doing his best to terrify his younger brother.

  “Sharks can bite through bone,” he says. “They have three hundred and fifty teeth. The teeth grow in rows.”

  You fondly recall the days when your own little brothers thought you were an omniscient fairy princess and believed every bit of nonsense you told them. You remember the thrill of pure power as your ridiculous inventions became part of their personal mythology. Perhaps your blog is a feeble attempt to restore this lost power, you think, sighing as you realize that you will never have a captive audience as riveted as your younger brothers once were.

  “Sharks are sometimes twenty feet long,” the boy informs his brother, stretching his arms out for emphasis. You do not notice your mother’s crazed grin. You do not see her creeping into the family’s personal space, nor does your father, who gazes longingly at a fake island that dots the horizon.

  “Come here, my little black brother,” your mother says, grabbing the smaller boy by the shoulders. His parents smile tensely as your mother pulls the child close to her grinning face.

  “I want you to study hard and go to Carolina,” she says, “because if it weren’t for you people, we wouldn’t have a football team.”

  Your father winces. The shame you feel overwhelms your nervous system. You are unable to speak. Regressing to teenage coping mechanisms, you step away from your parents and pretend that you are not related to them by blood, that you don’t know them, that you have never seen their faces. Just as you are about to weave off into the crowd in search of a restroom, you hear your father in damage-control mode.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “She’s suffering from memory problems, and we don’t know . . . I mean, she sometimes says peculiar things.”

  “Racist things,” you add, feeling another stab of shame, as though you yourself are racist, and perhaps you are. Perhaps racist ideas embedded in your brain by society explain the intense feelings of guilt that overcome you as you watch the black couple’s hard eyes go soft with understanding. And then they turn away from you and your pitiful parents and pretend that the incident never happened, though their children keep glancing back at your mother while whispering and giggling into their hands.

  “Jenny,” says your father, “you can’t say things like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Racist things,” your father whispers.

  “God told me to say it,” your mother says with a haughty simper, and then she, too, gazes out at the distant island.

  “Here comes the boat!” your mother screams. “Here comes the boat!” And the black family cannot help but turn to inspect her again.

  “I can’t wait to get on the boat!” your mother says to them, pressing forward, defying American proxemics customs.

  A teen captain eases a glittery fuchsia pontoon into the channel and coasts up to dock. Tourists file out on the other side of the canal.

  “What a big boat!” cries your mother. “When can we get on?”

  “Just a minute, Jenny, be patient,” says your father. “The other passengers have to get off first.”

  The captain, watching the crowd through purple sunglasses, chews gum and lolls in the fighter’s chair. When it’s finally your turn, your mother pushes forward and sits in the same row as the black family, right beside the shark expert. There’s one seat left in the row, and your father takes it. You sit behind them.

  “I’m Captain Jack,” the pilot announces into his bullhorn. “Welcome aboard the Sea Urchin.”

  Captain Jack guides the boat through the fake channel, which is connected to a fake inlet, the whole system fed by the blinding blue ocean. You smell marsh and tar and gasoline. You hold on to your hat as the boat lurches into open water.

  “Here we go!” your mother screams, squirming in her seat. Your father smiles a martyr’s grim smile.

  “Back in 1974,” says Captain Jack, “a great white shark named Jaws murdered dozens of innocent people. They even made a movie about it. We’re going to tour a few spots where the evil fish made its kills. But don’t worry, Jaws is long dead. And if we do have any trouble, this boat is protected by a forty-millimeter grenade launcher, courtesy of the US Army.”

  The boat churns sluggishly, then stops. Pointing toward the horizon, Captain Jack informs the crowd that a young female swimmer was slain twenty yards from Amity Island. You hear mock gasps. You hear laughter. And then the primordial vision of a fin appears, knifing through blue water—the theatrics laughable but faintly, viscerally, horrifying.

  “Jaws!” cries the shark expert, grabbing his little brother by the shoulders.

  “Where? Where?” asks your mother. “What is it, James? What is that thing?”

  “A shark, Jenny.”

  “What’s a shark?”

  “A huge killer fish with sharp teeth, but it’s not a real shark. It’s Jaws.”

  “Jaws?”

  “From the movie.”

  “Here it comes,” says the shark expert. “Here comes Jaws.”

  “Here comes Jaws, Jaws, Jaws,” says your mother.

  As the fin weaves toward you, and the huge back of the beast darkens the clear water, someone behind you lets out a fake scream.

  “OH MY GOD A SHARK. WATCH OUT!” the captain’s voice booms from the PA system, mock dramatic, as though he’s reading a children’s book.

  And up pops Jaws’s mammoth head at the familiar angle, all gulping mouth and gleaming teeth, the tongue slick and writhing—the archetype of engulfment. It’s a little rubbery and mechanical, but pretty impressive. And huge.

  Your mother sits stunned, staring into the abysmal mouth. Then she yelps and jumps into your father’s arms. Their physical contact makes you uncomfortable. You look out at the water. The murderous beast sinks back into obscurity.

  “It’s not real, Jenny. It’s a robot,” your father says.

  “What’s a robot?” your mother asks.

  The shark expert snickers and elbows his brother.

  “A machine, Jenny.”

  “Is it trying to kill us?” she asks.

  “Of course not,” says your father.

  “THERE IT IS AGAIN! IT’S TRYING TO KILL US!” declares the captain, the words booming from the sky as though narrated by God.

  Jaws pops up on the other side of the boat, and your mother begins to cry, her face ripped open at the mouth, loose around the eyes, ravaged by decades of cheap food, polluted air, carcinogenic sun, and disappointment. Your father’s well-composed expression is devastated by a twitching grin.

  The captain lazily grabs a harpoon gun and shoots the shark in the back. A geyser of steam bursts from the wound, and then magenta blood spurts out.

  “Kill it! Kill it!” shrieks your mother.

  But Jaws, hard to kill, sinks out of sight. The monster lurks around in the vast deep.

  “Is Jaws dead?” your mother asks.

  “I don’t know,” says your father. “But it’s a robot, Jenny.”

  “Is Jaws dead?” your mother screams at the captain.

  Everyone is looking. You feel another surge of adolescent shame—wasps in your stomach, fire in your cheeks. You contemplate the husband situation. You picture your husband disappearing into the woods with his field bag, his mushroom book, his canteen. You wonder what you would do if he didn’t come back. You picture yourself pacing around t
he cabin alone, walking from window to window to watch fog float up from the darkening wood.

  Jaws’s next appearance, unannounced by the captain, takes everyone by surprise, and the entire boat lets out a primal wail, quickly followed by chuckles that subside as the prehistoric fish gnaws at the boat hull with its razor teeth, jerking the vessel from left to right.

  Your mother, screaming like a terrified lab monkey, attempts to climb onto your father’s lap. She won’t stop screaming, ruthless and earsplitting, and people are struggling with the shapes of their mouths.

  You try to stand up to help your parents, but they are locked in an embrace, exclusive and distant. And the shark is circling the boat, darkening the ocean with its blood. Captain Jack has no choice but to fire grenades into the boiling sea. Bombs strike the bank, exploding with outlandish displays of smoke and flame. When one of the grenades hits a fuel dock, a gas tank bursts into a fiery blob the size of a hot-air balloon.

  “OH MY GOD!” cries Captain Jack. “I CAN’T STOP THE BOAT AND WE’RE HEADED RIGHT FOR IT!”

  The Wilds

  The Wild family moved into the house behind ours. For two years the split-level had been dead, open to prowling neighborhood children; its sunken den had become a nest of slugs and millipedes, its attic a froth of bats. Now eight brothers flung their restless bodies around the property. The largest Wild, a bearded boy of seventeen, shut himself up in the basement den. The littlest Wild, a tangle-haired half-naked thing, rumored to be a biter, lurked around in the shrubbery. The Wilds kept cats, lizards, and ferrets. Rabbits, hamsters, turtles, and snakes. A bubble of musky, ammoniac air enveloped their home like a force field, and the second you dared step through it you felt dizzy; a hundred arrows whistled around your ears. Their mother was frequently seen hauling in bags of supplies, and when she climbed from the battered shell of her station wagon, the boys would jump her like a band of hunger-crazed outlaws, snatching cookies and chips and tiny shrink-wrapped cakes. They’d scuttle up into the trees. They kept quiet up there, waiting out their mother’s fits. She was a lumpy, old-fashioned lady, forever in a rumpled dress and panty hose, with a pouf of hair as golden and crunchy as a pork rind. She’d tear her hairdo into wilted clumps and shake her fists at the trees. “I’m having a nervous breakdown,” she’d say, sometimes falling to her knees.

  Mama said she felt sorry for Mrs. Wild. Dressed in tight jeans and heels, Mama would invite the hunched lady to have coffee in our spotless living room. She made fun of Mrs. Wild’s dresses when the poor woman left, but sometimes she was sad, and I knew she was thinking about my little brother, who’d weighed three pounds when he was born and died in a humid tank of oxygen.

  Mr. Wild always rolled in after dark, in a black Chrysler New Yorker, appearing briefly in streetlight, always shrouded in a suit. He worked in the secret depths of a nuclear plant, thirty miles away, a glowing futuristic fortress surrounded by high walls. The family was from way up north, somewhere between Pennsylvania and the North Pole, where the world froze into a solid block of ice for months on end and people lived half their lives indoors. But now, in the teeming Southern air, the transplanted boys were growing, faster and faster, so fast their mother reputedly had to keep two industrial freezers in the garage, one for milk, the other for meat—hot dogs, chickens, turkeys, and hams; pork chops, baloney, and liver; a thousand cuts of beef and strange bloody meats seldom eaten in our part of the world.

  We were deep into summer and you could see the vines growing, winding around branches, sprouting bumps and barnacles and woody boils that would fester until they could stand it no more, then break out into red and purple. It was night and the Wild boys hooted in their shrubbery. They wore dirty cutoff jeans. They carried knives and BB guns and homemade bombs. I could smell their weird metallic sweat drifting on a breeze that rustled through the honeysuckle. The Wild boys had dug tunnels under the ground. They had filled the treetops with catwalks. They whirred from tree to tree on zip lines and hopped from attic windows out into the bustling night.

  I crouched in the bushes in Mama’s green chiffon evening gown, wearing my crown of bird skulls. I’d collected the skulls for two years, spray-painted them gold, and glued them to a Burger King crown, along with fake emeralds and glowing shells of June bugs. Thin, long hair tickled my spine. My Barbie binoculars were crap, and I’d smashed them with a rock. I was on the lookout for Brian, the oldest Wild, who sometimes left his den to smoke. I was deeply in love with him. Every time I saw him, reclining in his plastic lawn chair, pouting in dark sunglasses, my heart twisted like a worm in the cocoon of my chest.

  My father taught medieval history at the community college. I’d found a recipe for an ancient love potion in one of his books, and inside a purple Crown Royal pouch, buried under an assortment of amulets, I’d placed a fancy perfume bottle full of the magical fluid.

  Lightning bugs bobbed in the rich air. Crickets throbbed. A fat, bloody moon hung over the house of the neighborhood alcoholics. I heard the click of the sliding glass door that led to Brian’s lair, and he came out into the night, pulsing with beauty and mystery. His hair was long, wild, and black. He’d shaved his beard into a devil’s point. You could tell by the way he sighed and flopped around that he dreamed of better places—glamorous and distant, with a different kind of light. Because of him I’d taken up smoking. I stole butts from my mother and kept them in a sock with a pink Bic, Tic Tacs, and a tiny spray can of Lysol. I fantasized about smoking with Brian: Brian leaning over to light my cigarette, our sensuous exhalations intertwining, Brian kissing my smoky mouth. My longing pulled me over the invisible boundary into the Wilds’ honeysuckle-choked yard. I was in their habitat, sniffing ferret musk and a thousand flowers, when a hand slipped over my mouth. It smelled of onions and dirt. A small, hot body pressed against my back.

  “Don’t make a sound,” said a boy.

  “We’ve got knives,” said another. They snatched my wrists and twisted them behind my back. Other boys came out into the moonlight, and Brian slipped inside the house, tossing his cigarette butt behind him.

  “Stand up,” a boy said.

  Their chests glowed with firefly juice. They had steak knives strapped to their belts and some of them wore goggles. White cats strolled among them, sometimes sniffing their bare feet. “Move,” yelled a small Wild, no older than six, a butter knife dangling from his Cub Scout belt. They pushed me toward a crooked magnolia. In the sweet, knotty dark of the tree, they’d nailed boards for climbing, and they forced me up, higher and higher, the gauze of my skirt catching on branches, until we reached their tree house, a rickety box with one window that framed the moon. Two boys squirmed around me to climb in first. They lit a stinking kerosene lantern that sat on a milk crate. They flashed their knives at me. One of the boys prodded my butt with a stick and said, “Get in.” I climbed up into the creaky orange glow of the tree house.

  Five Wilds surrounded me with glares and grimaces. A cat poked its white head through the window and stared at me. Birds fluttered and fussed in the branches.

  “Give Ben the signal,” said the biggest boy in the room, whose name, I think, was Tim. “He knows how to deal with spies.”

  “Spies?” I said.

  “Shut up. Don’t talk. You’re on our property.”

  One of the boys opened an old medicine cabinet that was mounted on the wall beside the window. Inside were several ordinary light switches and a doorbell. He pressed the doorbell.

  “What are you?” said the little Wild, staring dreamily at my crown.

  “Shut up,” said Tim. “Don’t speak to the prisoner. She’s got to be interrogated.”

  Something heavy jumped in the branches then and shook the tree house. A flashlit mask of a wolfman appeared at the window, sputtering with evil cackles. He was copying somebody on television, though I couldn’t quite place the laugh.

  “What have we here?” said the wolfman. “A princess?”

  Two boards beneath the window opened and the wolfman
squeezed through a primitive secret door. He closed the narrow door behind him and stood before me in karate pants and a black bathrobe too big for his skinny body. He wore no shirt under the robe, and a live garter snake twirled around his pimply neck. I thought I knew which Wild he was but I couldn’t quite remember the face under the mask. He sat on an overturned plastic bucket, elbows on his knees, and gazed down at me through his mask, a cheap Halloween thing with molded plastic hair. The wolfman had a silly widow’s peak, a hard fat beard, and vampire fangs that looked like buck teeth.

  I sat on the floor, feeling dizzy in the press of boys. They smelled of stale biscuits and fermented grass. Their hair was oily, and Kool-Aid stains darkened their greedy mouths.

  “We’ll have to search her,” said the wolfman, plucking a cigarette from his robe pocket. There was a small mouth hole in the mask, and the wolfman inserted his cigarette into it. His brothers licked their lips as they watched him light it with a silver lighter. The wolfman took an awkward puff.

  “Gimme one,” said the little Wild, but no one paid him any attention.

  “She’s got something hidden under her skirt,” said the wolfman, pointing with his cigarette at one of my secret pockets.

  They stuck their filthy, gnarled hands into the soft film of my skirts, snatching my treasures from me: my lipsticks, my notebook, my voodoo doll of mean old drunk Mrs. Bickle. The wolfman tried to read the notebook, but he couldn’t understand my special language. He pulled objects from my purple pouch and picked through my magic things.

  “Quit squirming,” hissed Tim, pinching my nape, looking for the nerve that would paralyze me.

  The wolfman examined my amulet for night flying, a big gold medallion with a luna moth Shrinky-Dinked to the front. He opened my power locket and dumped the red powder onto the floor. I think he was smirking under the mask. His eyes gleamed, wet and meaty behind the dead plastic.

  He found my love potion buried deep in the pouch, wrapped in a gauzy violet scarf, and held the soft bundle in his palm, squeezing it and cocking his head. Slowly, he unraveled it. He examined the perfume bottle in the lamplight, mouthing the word on the label: Poison. I don’t think he understood that it was the name of a perfume. And the sight of this word, printed so precisely on an old-fashioned bottle filled with dark algae-green liquid, as though packaged by goblins, must have unsettled him. Poison was my mother’s perfume. When she dabbed it on her pulse points, she made a mean face in the mirror, as though going out into the night to kill. The summer after my brother died, I’d seen my mother flee a noisy neighborhood party to rush into the arms of a strange man; they’d fallen into uncut grass. The man had moaned as though he’d been poisoned.