The Wilds

by Julia Elliott

  My mother glances around the world she has made for herself.

  “Get away from that filth,” Mom says, and she runs inside. I trudge after her.

  She’s retching over the trash can but can’t bring anything up. My father appears in the kitchen doorway, crouched in drunken-ogre mode, his sarcastic smile fluttering with repressed giggles, and I slip into the shadows of the hallway. Dad lunges at my mother, staggering and twitching in his old madman routine. I’ve seen him dig his false teeth vampirically into her neck. I’ve seen her, bursting with animal happiness, gasping for kisses. But this morning Mom jumps and wrings the damp neckline of her housecoat. She rolls her eyes, mutters the word idiot, and heads for the stairs.

  “Wait,” says Dad. “You’ve got to spank Kate.”

  My heart sinks. My ears become the equipment of a bat, huge and intricate, keening in the shadowy emptiness.

  “What did she do?”

  “She stole cigarettes. And she almost made me throw up.”

  “Why don’t you do it?”

  “As you can see, I’ve been partaking.”

  “Don’t you think she’s getting too old for spankings? She’s about to grow breasts, for God’s sake.”

  “What?” says Dad. “This is news to me.”

  “Well, maybe not breast breasts, but something. And even if she’s not physically mature, she’s at that age.”

  “She tried to make me puke my breakfast,” whines Dad.

  Mom laughs.

  “That’s not funny. And she attempted to make off with a whole pack of cigarettes this time.”

  “Okay,” says Mom. “I’ll do it, only because you already told her, and if we don’t do what we say we’re gonna do, they’ll walk all over us. But this’ll be the last time. When school starts, we need to come up with a new kind of punishment.”

  “She’s got about thirty minutes, I think,” says Dad, squinting at the place where his wristwatch usually is. “I’ll send her up.”

  My parents depart to their respective lairs, and I stumble into the bright chaos of the backyard. The twins are boxing amid a throng of screaming boys. The fat, matted dogs grunt beneath our clothesline, where yellow nylon panties and linty boxer shorts flutter in a sunny dust cloud. And Cabbage squats on the picnic table, picking through robin guts with a pair of tweezers, a white dust mask covering his nose and mouth.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I scream at him. Cabbage jumps, which makes me smile.

  “Playing operation,” he says.

  “Those guts are contaminated,” I say. “You’re gonna get a disease just from touching them.”

  “Disease? Like what?”

  “Leprosy, AIDS, epilepsy, hemophilia, diabetes, or the Elephant Man disease.”

  “Oh my God, no way!”

  “Yes way. If you don’t do something fast, your muscles are gonna puff up like biscuit dough and bust right through your skin. You’re gonna bleed all over the fucking place, Cabbage. Green fungus’ll grow in your nose and mouth, and your eyes are gonna turn black and shrivel up like frostbit toes.”

  “Shit,” says Cabbage, dropping his tweezers. He removes his dust mask and thrusts his thumb into his mouth. He tries not to cry.

  “You fool!” I shriek, jumping up and down for emphasis. “What the hell are you doing sticking that filthy thumb in your mouth? Do you actually want to die?”

  “Damn,” hisses Cabbage. He pulls his thumb from his mouth and spits on it.

  “Here’s an old Indian cure that might just save your life,” I say solemnly. “You’ve got to wash your hands in milk and peroxide. You’ve got to eat an ant and pray to the god of the underworld and the god of the moon. Then you’ve got to find a toad with orange eyes. Lick the toad belly six times while chanting prayers to the stars, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll live.”

  I follow Cabbage inside. In the kitchen he pulls the milk jug from the refrigerator and fills a large steel bowl. He sets the bowl on the floor and sits Indian style over it. He mumbles some creepy baby gibberish and plunges his little hands into the cold, white, animal fluid. Leaving the bowl on the floor, Cabbage heads for the bathroom, where he finds a brown, economy-sized bottle of peroxide under the sink. I stand in the doorway watching as he splashes the sizzling medicine into his palm and rubs it over both hands, making a face and muttering. He dries his hands with toilet paper, sniffs his fingers, and runs outside. I follow him around as he lifts bricks and rocks in search of ants.

  “Don’t want no fire ant,” he says.

  “It’s got to be a fire ant, or the spell won’t work, and you’ll die and go down under the ground.”

  “What gon’ happen down there?”

  “Little slimy creatures are always fluttering against you, nibbling you and sticking their needle teeth in your skin. And there’s nothing to eat but canned spinach and nothing to drink but cough syrup, and the place smells like the devil’s farts, which is like burning plastic and rotten catfish and Mr. Horton’s denture breath all mixed together. And there’s no windows and there’s bright fluorescent hospital light and nothing to watch on TV but the news.”

  “Shit,” says Cabbage, dashing for the anthill at the edge of Mom’s okra patch. Squatting, he sticks a twig in the hill, gathers a few furious insects, and lifts the utensil to his grimacing lips. Cabbage mashes an ant between two fingers and pops it into his mouth, screams, swallows, then flings the stick far from him. He drops to his knees. He thrusts his nose into the grass and gabbles a prayer to the underworld; then he lifts his head up and scans the sky.

  “Ain’t no moon up there,” he says, fixing his harrowed frog eyes upon me.

  “The devil has the moon down in the ground. It’s like a helium balloon. He lets it go each night, and it floats up into the sky.”

  “He got a string tied to it?” Cabbage asks.

  “Yep.”

  “Thought so.”

  “The moon is made of green cheese, which stinks, and that’s another bad thing about hell. There’s no one to play with down there, except babies with vampire teeth.”

  Cabbage shudders and starts digging a hole in the ground with his knobby tree-frog fingers. Then he lowers his face to the mouth of the hole, cups his lips with his palms, and in a deep croaky voice recites his prayer to the moon.

  “Jibba jibba, regog mooga, onga poobah, salong teet.”

  “In hell you don’t have a family,” I tell him, “but sometimes, when the devil’s bored, he’ll make a fake family with the skins of dead animals and old hair he’s pulled out of hairbrushes, just to trick you. You’ll think you have your family back, but then you’ll notice that the puppets are hollow and filled with dust, and when the devil laughs at you he sounds like TV static and screaming rabbits.”

  I look up to see my father standing on the back stoop, eating a Little Debbie Star Crunch and staring up into the trees. He looks like he wants to sprout feathers and a beak and fly up there to romp in the branches with some sexy medieval witch who’s turned herself into a hawk. A warm breeze flutters his hair, and longing oozes from him, but all he can do is chomp a huge bite out of his Star Crunch and close his eyes as he chews the sticky sweet gunk. When he opens his eyes, he catches me looking. He winces. He grins. He tries to look sober.

  “Upstairs, young lady,” he says in his professional voice, “on the double.”

  The moment has come. The underbellies of sluggish clouds glow a sickly green. My boxing brothers, who are now trying to kill each other, look like poisonous elves. All around them, half-naked boys with bent spines hoot and leer.

  “Good left hook, Bill,” yells Dad. “You better watch out, Little Jack.”

  Dad slips on his glasses to watch the boxing match, and I trudge upstairs.

  Unlike the rest of our house, my parents’ bedroom is cold. The window unit, going full blast, leaks picklish chemicals; the room smells like boiled peanuts and Listerine. My parents’ bed looks damp and lumpy, as though stuffed with dead rodents, the mattress ba
ttered and drenched by the throes of my father’s gigantic, nightmare-wracked body. A crusty plate sits on the dresser, between two perfume bottles, reflected in the stark sadness of the mirror.

  My parents like to keep us waiting in the alien chill for at least five minutes to heighten the horror of the punishment. I usually use this time to pick through their drawers and closets. Behind a dusty vaporizer and several cartons of Dorals, I discover an old pack of Pampers from Cabbage’s babyhood. An idea so brilliant I slap myself in the face for not thinking of it sooner pops into my head. My heart gets that belchy feeling as I hop out of my shorts. I take a Pamper from the plastic package and unfold it. I pull it up to my crotch and fasten the adhesive tabs. The Pamper fits tight like puffy bikini bottoms. I examine myself in the mirror, and the sight of my scrawny, diapered frog body is like a sip of vinegar. I turn my stinging eyes away and pull on my shorts. After checking my figure for conspicuous lumps, I try out different facial expressions until I settle on a Joan of Arc scowl, the haughty look a beautiful virgin tied to a stake would give her bitter old executioner when he struck the match.

  Mom strides in at this moment, trying to look businesslike. She’s changed into a matching floral shorts-and-top set and curled her limp bangs into two crispy cylinders that frame her little cat face. My lips tremble with a burning smirk as Mom fishes through her belt collection, choosing a pink leather number with fake rubies encrusting the big brass buckle. Mom doubles the belt and lashes at a pillow to test its power. She gives me a firm look, and I bend over the bed, gripping the bedpost hard.

  The worn bedspread smells of sweat and dust and fabric softener. Chill bumps prickle my limbs. I close my eyes and listen to Mom’s slight grunting as she whips me. The lash striking my butt is a mere flick of pressure on the puffy padding of the Pamper, but I scream and flinch as though I’m about to fall into a seizure.

  “Quit exaggerating,” Mom hisses. “It doesn’t hurt that much.”

  “It does,” I bellow, realizing that I’ll have to make myself cry. I try to think of sad things—my parents dying, for example—but generic fantasies don’t cut it. I picture little Cabbage struggling to breathe in the humid tank of his incubator, his lizard rib cage rising and falling in the acidic light of the hospital. I think of T. W. Manley, waving the little fish-fin hand he was born with, driving by on his beloved go-cart. I consider Duncan, a fat neighbor with Down syndrome, whose mother always dresses him in brown polyester slacks. I recall the night that Dad, upon receiving a phone call informing him that his mother was dead, shook the house with the earthquake of his weeping. I remember the day our neighbor’s daughter drowned, and the drunk old woman spent the afternoon winding through her rose garden in a slip, cutting roses until she had nothing left but tangles of thorny vines. I think of hungry African children and Hiroshima body shadows and Soviet teenagers who spend their whole youths in hideous jeans. I think of filth-packed vacuum cleaner bags and closets crammed with ugly Christmas sweaters and the way the inside of a church smells when a hundred bored people with bad breath open their mouths to sing.

  At last the tears start trickling, and the sadness of the world courses through my scrawny body, hurling me into the musky nest of my parents’ bed, where I give in to the delicious abandon of weeping. My mother hangs her belt on its hook and slips out of the room. I start feeling sorry for myself. I’m an ugly runt, breastless and knobby-kneed, writhing on a cheap bedspread, wearing a Pamper under my linty shorts. My hair won’t hold a curl, and I’ve blown my chances for a home perm. My nose won’t stop growing. I’m a peeling, sunburned, freckled monster who’ll never know the casual beauty of radiant, suntanned limbs. My mouth is a scrap heap of bitter metal. School will start soon, and I’ll have to face my class without breasts, without a tan, without a perm.

  By the time I’m done wallowing, it’s almost evening. I climb off the bed and am overjoyed to discover, on the dresser, an open pack of cigarettes. I figure I deserve at least six after what I endured, so I slip the cancer sticks into the empty cups of my training bra. Then I tiptoe down the stairs, through the dark living room, and out into the yard, where dark birds churn the sky. The twins have put down their boxing gloves. They’re sitting in the long grass, taking turns scratching each other’s back. And Cabbage walks toward me in the balmy air, cupping something in his hands.

  “Got him,” says Cabbage, slightly opening the cage of his palms.

  Cabbage holds a toad, belly-down. A tiny head pokes out, nostrils quivering, goggle eyes glowing in the sulfur light. The beauty of the toad’s eyes shocks me—rich and marbled gold. I lose myself in their intricacies, breathing in smells of warm pine straw, metallic boy-sweat, the crisp, dusty gaminess of the bones around Cabbage’s neck. The sky flushes pink. A breeze, light as a genie, swirls through the thick air.

  Cabbage sticks out his little tongue, turns the toad belly-up, and licks it.

  “What does it taste like?” I ask.

  “Rain,” he whispers, “with Lysol and ham.”

  “Now chant,” I say.

  “O gobwe gammu,” says Cabbage, “hep me not die. Gwabu, gwabu, gwabu.”

  He licks the toad solemnly and closes his eyes in prayer. When he opens them, the yard fills with the moist whistling of the blackbird flock. The air has darkened.

  “Gwabu monsoon ubu booboo,” says Cabbage, holding the toad high in the air. Lightning bugs rise from dusky shadows. Cabbage marches with his toad to the picnic table.

  “Belteety momamabu,” he says, blessing the piles of robin guts with his toad. The moon has floated to the edge of the sky like a bubble of golden grease. Gardenias perfume the dead-bird stench. Flies walk around on the robin guts like delicate and mysterious robots. Cabbage moves off, chanting in the darkness, and I feel the backyard expanding around me, glittering with stars and bugs, crawling with strange beasts. Dad is in the kitchen, smoking, a warm light illuminating his bald spot. Mom laughs at something he has said—they must be in love again. Some kind of stew boils on the stove, crickets are singing, and the twins are humming the Donkey Kong theme. I light a cigarette, lie on my back in the pine straw, and take a deep, sweet drag while staring up at Venus, which pulses in the sky.

  Caveman Diet

  Clad in a deerskin loincloth, his ripped body gleaming with boar lard, Zugnord looms above us on a stone dais. We are flabby newbies, he tactfully suggests, snatched from the industrial teat of civilization, where we’ve grown battery-fed and soft, our blood percolating with poisons. We are half-dead, our brains zombified by office work and Internet surfing. We are discontent. But so was Zugnord, once. Projected behind him on a vast screen is his former self, Wilbur Sims, a paunchy, befuddled dumpling of a man in rumpled khakis. He squints at the camera like some subterranean rodent.

  We gasp. For how could this clammy, balding creature have transformed into Zugnord? Zugnord with his glistening pecs and flowing Tarzan hair? Zugnord with his bold eagle eyes? Zugnord, who looks as though he could leap over a boulder and tackle a mastodon, gut it with a piece of expertly chiseled flint?

  As Zugnord clicks through his slideshow, we gasp and gasp. We watch in amazement as a chunky troll of a man sheds flab, sprouts hair, stands tall, and wields the most exquisitely sculpted limbs we have ever seen. We watch him journey from a dark gym to a sun-dappled forest, where he builds his own wood hut. Watch him forage for berries, dig up tubers, kill deer with a hand-hewn bow and arrow. Watch him sketch magic symbols onto his face with charcoal, arrange bones on the ground, dance and chant in the light of the full moon. We would not be surprised if he sprouted wings and flew up into the stars.

  “But enough about me,” says Zugnord. “Tonight is all about you. Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”

  The banquet hall of Hominid Hotel resembles an imperial stateroom from Planet of the Apes, a vast pseudo-cave with undulating walls of stained concrete, indoor streams, and flickering gas torches. Lush fruit trees grow out of the pebble-tile floors, a feature that was p
robably absent in a typical Paleolithic cave, but whatever. I could also take issue with the melodramatic mural that sweeps along the curved wall behind the stage. It features a hunting scene—a mammoth stippled with spears, Schwarzeneggerian hominids exulting around the flailing beast. I recall my college anthropology teacher lecturing us on Aurignacian cave art, debunking the mythical male hunter as she cleaned her glasses with the sleeve of her polyester dashiki. According to her, a typical hunt scene was probably a family working together with spears and nets to bag a rodent or monkey.

  But I’m not here to nitpick. I’m here to lose weight. I’m here to become a sinewy cavewoman with a core of steel and a glint of primal vitality in my eyes. I’m here to purge my body and mind, shed the bloat of civilization, cast off the epochs of agricultural decadence that have collected around my midsection. The banquet hall is packed with pudgy office drones, rich mothers serious about vanquishing baby weight, and B-list celebrities at the dawn of middle age. I myself won the stair-walk competition at my corporate office, and the prize was three weeks off and a free ride at Pleisto-Scene Island, the Paleopalooza of fitness adventure tourism. I left my fiancé sulking in his man cave, slumped in the ennui of our two-year engagement. Despite his protests that I’m perfect the way I am, despite the terror lurking in his eyes as he kissed me goodbye (yes, he would miss me sorely, but not for the right reasons), I dashed off to transform myself.

  The lights dim. Tribal electronica pumps from hidden speakers. And Zugnord, our fearless leader, speaks to us in his mellow baritone, radiating casual virility.

  “This is the beginning of a journey,” he says, “deep into the self.”

  According to Zugnord, there is a caveperson, crouched and muzzled, within each of us. According to Zugnord, we will travel to the land of our ancestors, awaken primitive parts of our brains, forge new synaptic maps, and tap into hidden stores of vitality.

  “You will walk into an ancient forest and meet your uncorrupted hominid self,” says Zugnord, fumbling with his remote. A lush forest scene glows upon the screen behind him—primeval, Edenic. Zugnord reads through the guest list in alphabetical order. One by one, people walk up to the stage as he calls their names, accepting their Paleolithic workout costumes. Zugnord presents the guests with pomegranates, symbolic of the fall into decadent agriculture, and whispers something into their ears.