The Wilds

by Julia Elliott

  Tim and Possum used to maintain a constant stream of abusive banter, but Tim has grown quieter ever since he had a kid. And now Possum, who’s neck-deep in law school debt and who financed three ghetto properties with credit cards during the height of the real-estate bubble, never sleeps.

  “Superviruses,” says Possum. “Postmodern plagues. Rogue nanobots that tinker with your neurons and turn you into a raving lunatic.”

  He flashes a cryptic grin, lights his hundredth cigarette. The clouds above the mountains are turning pink. Possum regards their softness with bloodshot eyes.

  I wonder if Darren the landscape painter is out in some meadow with his easel. I wonder if his wife, Willow, the grief therapist, is meditating on their fifty-foot deck.

  The night we moved to Saluda, Bill and I were still hauling boxes into our rented cottage when Willow and Darren showed up with an asparagus quiche. Their dog snapped at me. And Willow, in her aggressively gentle therapist voice, explained that Karma was working through some issues. They’d researched dogs to find the sweetest breeds, settling on a golden retriever/lab mix for its loving docile qualities. But Karma turned out to be vicious. She once chased me into a creek and nipped my calf.

  Our house, designed as a summer cottage for our landlords’ parents, perched on the dark side of the mountain. We had a ridiculously pastoral view: Angora goats and llamas milling about in a green valley, their picture-book barn poised on a hillock. I was writing a dissertation on female mystics. Bill got a job at a bakery in town. That winter, as I pored over microfiche printouts of medieval manuscripts, Bill read books like The Permaculture Bible. He dreamed of lush gardens as snow blanketed the mountains and valley. From late November to early May, our world was frozen. All day I sat cocooned in a comforter, drinking green tea and reading about the visionary fits of my mystics. Every night, after Bill came chugging up the slushy dirt road in the truck, we’d start up with the red wine.

  One morning a blizzard curled around our house like a great white beast. The light was a an eerie pink. Bill stood in the doorway, holding our old four-track recorder.

  “Look what I found,” he said.

  We had a vintage Wurlitzer, three guitars, a cheap violin, and a broken flute. Bill could play anything, while I could get by on the Wurlitzer. But I could do things with my voice that he couldn’t. At 11:00 AM we opened a bottle of wine and embraced the delirium of winter. Crouched by the woodstove with his guitar, Bill strummed demented Appalachian riffs.

  “Gronta zool nevah flocksam lamb,” I sang, half joking, half ecstatic.

  We chanted nonsense like snowed-in half-starved monks. Howled like Pentecostals. We layered shimmering harmonies and attempted authentic yodels. After three or four glasses of wine, we couldn’t stop laughing at the exquisite absurdity of it all. We stripped off layers of thermal fleece and wool. We groped on the couch, the woodstove ablaze, combining our selves in yet another way.

  All winter we made plans for the summer, where the garden would go and what we’d plant and how sweet and abundant our organic vegetables would be. In the spring, mammals would crawl from their musky holes. Insects would hatch. The landlords would shave dirty wool from their sheep, and pregnant goats would drop steaming kids into the straw.

  It’s that weird time between day and night when lightning bugs sway out from the woods. Possum has driven off to replenish his arsenal of cigarettes and power bars. Tim’s talking about his infant daughter, about the skull-splitting rage he sometimes feels when she cries all night. When he sees the dainty spasm of her yawn, his exhausted nervous system surges with the purest love he’s ever felt. But then the fatigue after that is even more intense. And she’ll start screaming again, an amazing roar for such a small person, with her moth-sized lungs and tensed fists.

  “Does Bill even know that Violet exists?” Tim asks.

  “When I spoke to him last Christmas, I told him Jenna was pregnant.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing, really. You know Bill.”

  Tim has known Bill the longest, since high school, when they were both pimply creatures learning to play guitar. Bill had mastered the instrument in two months, with astonishing proficiency. Tim had switched to bass. They kept up this arrangement all through college and formed Swole their junior year. Then Possum and I stepped into the picture. As Bill regarded me through silky black bangs, I thought him the most attractive boy I’d ever seen. I loved his huge eyes and the acne scars on his cheeks, which saved him from being too pretty.

  We played dense frenetic music, a rabid mutant of punk and prog, each of us striving to worm in a quirky rhythm or micromelody. I had to howl like a manic monkey just to be heard. When I listen to our old seven-inch, I’m amused by our naïve arrogance but impressed by our relentless energy—the essence of hormonal youth, splooged and shrieked.

  “Remember when Bill didn’t speak for a week?”

  “I’m very familiar with that tactic of his.”

  “He’d come to practice, do his thing, but not utter a single word. I think that was right before you two started dating. He thought Possum and you were some kind of thing.”

  “He was an only child,” I say, “raised in that house surrounded by goat pastures.”

  I gaze down the road again, see a billow of dust. But it’s only Possum.

  “What if he’s dead in there?” Possum says. His grin tenses into a grimace. He scratches his head as we stare him down.

  Tim squints at the cabin and shakes his head.

  “But then again, his truck is gone.” Possum’s voice quavers into damage-control mode. “Which means he’s not dead, that he’s off gallivanting somewhere. Fucking frolicking. Full of happy Bill thoughts about sweet potato harvests and apple cider.”

  “What if he parks his truck behind the cabin?” I say. “Or it could be back by his garden, full of manure or something. And then he might be, you know, in the cabin.”

  “But we’ve yelled for him more than once,” says Tim. “Wouldn’t he come out?”

  “Maybe he can’t come out.”

  “Let’s scale the fucking fence.”

  Possum has already inserted his left foot in the chain-link mesh. Now he’s almost at the top, where barbed wire lies coiled, ready to tear his tender lawyer hands or disembowel him. But he somehow hoists himself over in a single maneuver that resembles a movie stunt. Lands like a ninja, dusts himself off, and smirks. Possum strolls over to the gate.

  “Ha!” he says. “He left it unlocked.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Bill,” I say.

  But Bill has indeed left the padlock open, which makes me think he’s on the premises, down in the pit he cleared for a garden or holed up inside, perhaps peering out at us, perhaps chuckling, perhaps scowling and twitching at the threshold of craziness.

  It’s almost dark. The cabin, I know, has no electricity. But I have a penlight in my purse, and we slip onto the porch like thieves. I point my thin beam of light: at a basket of kindling, at a dusty box of canning jars, at Mushrooms Demystified, splayed on the seat of his plastic chair.

  “The door’s unlocked too,” Possum whispers.

  “Knock first,” says Tim. “He might go Rambo with his air rifle.”

  Possum knocks, a loud knuckle-rap on the door.

  “Yo, Bill!” he yells. “Open up.” But Bill doesn’t answer.

  When we step into the cramped darkness of the cabin, I’m overcome by the inexplicable smell of Bill: a clean animal odor tinged with cinnamon and dust. A hint of cumin. A vague plastic smell like Band-Aids.

  I remember Bill’s letter about digging out a tree stump. The earth had collapsed onto a fox’s den, a nest of keening pups. According to Bill, their lair had smelled of milk and piss, something dark and sweet like overripe yams. He didn’t touch them. He sat in his camp chair drinking beer, waiting for the mother, who appeared near dusk, a jolt of gleaming red fur, to move her pups one by one. When she snatched the puling creatures up with her teeth,
they went limp and silent. Every time she darted off into the woods, she’d look back at Bill, meet his eyes to make sure they had an understanding.

  “Imagine all the middle-class dog walkers,” says Possum, “gentle eaters of Sunday brunch, roasting their radioactive pets on spits.”

  “Or eating them raw,” says Tim. “Tearing frail Chihuahuas apart with their hands.”

  “We would resort to cannibalism,” says Possum. “How could we not?”

  We sit on the dark porch, waiting for Bill. Katydids and crickets signal frantically for mates. I’m pretty sure Bill still has the insect recordings we made our second summer on the mountain. I’m pretty sure he still has that box of cassettes and CDs in chronological order, spanning from the early days of Swole all the way up to our third summer, when I left in a silent rage. And perhaps he has other recordings, brilliant and mysterious, that he made after I went away.

  I’d meant to duplicate all of our recordings while he was at work. But every time I stepped into the moldy basement, with its damp Berber carpet, sweating walls, and deceptively innocent toothpaste smell, I’d feel a wobble of panic in my heart. I’d rush back up into brighter air.

  Millipedes had invaded the basement bathroom our second summer on the mountain. Every morning Bill found two dozen slithering around the dewy toilet base. He’d smash them with a hoe. Their crushed bodies smelled like toothpaste. Flecks of brown chitin littered the carpet. The woods that enveloped us were practically a rain forest, and the summer humidity didn’t let up until first frost.

  That fall, the landlords’ daughter, off at college for the first time, suffered from food allergies, and when the health center treated her with steroids, she had a mental breakdown. She went jogging after a star, followed it all the way out to an interstate exit, where the police found her, dehydrated and chattering about astrology. They sent her home. Every time she had a squabble with her parents, she’d run off into the woods. I’d be gazing out the window at the autumn leaves when she’d dart by our house, a whir of anxiousness and flowing hair. And one of the landlords’ llamas, Zephyr, had started spitting. Every time I strolled through the goat pasture, Zephyr would rush up, a flurry of black fur and dust, and attempt to spit a reddish jet of puke into my face.

  When winter came, Bill turned vegan and lost fifteen pounds. He wanted to live off the grid, he said, away from bourgeois pretenders, in a small cabin that would meet our basic needs. The landlords’ daughter was still having episodes, wandering the woods behind our house. Zephyr was still a dark furious presence down in the goat pasture.

  I got an instructorship sixty miles away at Clemson, would drive off into the mountains and return exhausted just as Bill got back from his stint at the bakery. We’d throw a meal together, open a bottle of wine, talk about the cabin we planned to build that spring, though we never agreed on how big it would be and whether or not it would have electricity.

  Fifteen pounds lighter, Bill could never get warm. Huddled by the stove, he wore two layers of thermal underwear, a dingy mustard snowsuit, a wool cap with a special cotton lining he’d sewn in himself. In the flickering firelight, his cheeks looked ghoulish and his enormous eyes brimmed with strange fevers.

  “I have a sinus headache,” he said one night, “because you didn’t clean the cheese knife.”

  “What?”

  “You used it to cut vegetables. All it takes is one tiny particle of dairy to make me sick.”

  Bill winced like a martyr and turned back to Mysteries of Beekeeping Explained.

  By summer our arguments had swelled luxuriant and green, like the poison-oak patch behind our house. We spent entire nights screaming our throats raw. Sometimes the landlords’ imbalanced daughter, out prowling, would pause at one of our open windows to listen, an ecstatic grin on her face.

  In July I got a job offer in Atlanta with the English department at Georgia State and Bill moved down into the basement with the millipedes.

  One warm shrieking night, I drifted down to the basement. I intended to climb on top of Bill and kiss him all over his face. He lay prone on the moldy sofa he’d covered with a sheet, one arm flopped onto the floor. I could hear his thick breathing, louder than the silvery pulse of the katydids. I could smell the oddly minty scent of crushed millipedes. I straddled Bill. He opened his eyes. When I leaned down to kiss him, his thin black tongue slithered out of his mouth—a millipede, I realized, its underside feathery with a thousand moving legs. I floated back up the stairs, out of the house, and into the blackness of the sky.

  Only when I was hovering high over the trees did the sadness of his transformation hit me. I woke up and e-mailed the English department at Georgia State.

  “Brain-computer interface,” says Possum. “Wetware made of insect parts and frog neurons. Telepathic cockroaches creeping around your house, gathering data for marketing companies.”

  “But I thought everybody had a crystal implanted in their head and voluntarily broadcast all brain farts to the mainframe,” says Tim.

  “They do, but the cockroaches are looking for microtrends, subthoughts, unconscious motivations.”

  When Possum is deep into the bullshit intricacies of postmodern surveillance, and he has lit his thousandth cigarette, and Tim has drifted, once more, to the edge of the woods to take a leak, Bill arrives.

  It’s 10:10 PM. An owl offers an ominous hoot in his honor, then flutters off to snatch some clueless rodent into the howling air.

  Bill must be surprised to see us. But by the time he kills his lights and opens his gate, eases his truck into its spot, and emerges, with a cloth bag of groceries, he has composed himself. He’s a slight figure, moving through darkness toward the porch, and I find myself gripping the handles of my chair.

  “Well, well, well,” he says.

  If I could see his face it would show only the faintest quirk of shock, I’m sure—an eyebrow twitch, a shifting of frown lines—the same look he used to get when he spotted yet another millipede gliding across the damp linoleum of our basement bathroom.

  “It’s us,” I say, shining my penlight at Possum. “And watch out for Tim. He’s creeping around your property somewhere. Please don’t shoot him.”

  “I’ll try not to,” says Bill. “I’ve upgraded to a Savage Mark II, a big improvement on the old Beeman.”

  “Killer,” says Possum.

  “Been doing a little hunting.” Bill steps onto the porch, puts down his groceries, stands warm and humming a foot away from me. “Though I do keep it under my bed at night.”

  During our second winter on the mountain, on a sunny day after the first snow, alone in the house, I’d gotten caught up in a three-hour frenzy of vacuuming. With fierce efficiency, I’d vacuumed the walls and the baseboards and every square inch of floor. I emptied closets and cupboards and drawers, probed with my sucking wand under furniture and behind appliances. I vacuumed until I reached the ecstatic state of a fasting medieval nun, feverish with holy purpose.

  When I squatted beside our bed to peer beneath it, I saw a dried roach, floating balls of filth and hair, a wool sock coated with dust. And I saw Bill’s machete, the one he’d bought to harvest heirloom grains, stashed under his side of the bed. He’d never mentioned that there was a weapon under our bed, poised within easy gripping distance.

  I cleaned the machete with a damp rag and placed it exactly as I’d found it. I went to my office and dug a box of Camel Lights from a drawer. I smoked only one, out on the front porch, as the iced branches near our chimney dripped.

  Possum’s pacing out in the front yard, in light as crisp and tart as a Granny Smith apple. His black boots gleam. His goblin grin has erupted in its full glory, thanks to two cans of Red Bull and a half-dozen cigarettes. He walks circles around Tim, who’s reclining in a broken lawn chair he found stashed under Bill’s cabin.

  “Why not directly into their nervous systems?” Tim yawns. “Computer-calibrated microdoses for intricate mood adjustment, released by nanobot teams in the brain.�
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  “Not drugs per se,” says Possum, “but drug technologies. They might use bacteria, or viruses, or bioengineered parasites, for example.”

  Bill has disappeared again.

  This morning, in the dark chill of the cabin, I’d heard him getting dressed. As a bird warbled outside the window, I thought I was in Atlanta, waking up to a car alarm. But then I smelled Bill, the cedar of the cabin, the glandular odor of small game animals. He actually sells their pelts on eBay, drives to the local library to check his account and upload pics. The walls of his cabin are soft with patches of fur.

  Last night he told us that hipsters in Brooklyn will pay sixty dollars for a coonskin cap. That the Etsy crafting crowd can’t get enough of his bones. That’s why his industrial shelves are lined with the bleached craniums of foxes and coons. That’s why he has tackle boxes packed with the delicate skulls of birds. Some girl in Philadelphia dips them in silver and strings them on vintage chains.

  “But I only kill what I eat,” Bill said, describing the taste of fox as wild, with a hint of brassy urine. “You have to soak the meat in vinegar.”

  “Trap or shoot?” Possum asked.

  “Both.” And then Bill told us about the ingenious bird traps he’d made of bamboo. He described the thrill of hooking brook trout, the sadness he’d felt when he shot his first rabbit and heard it scream.

  In the guttering light of kerosene lanterns, we drank warm beer on the porch. Our cooler had run out of ice and Bill has no refrigerator. Sometime after midnight, Bill dug out the shoe box of old Swole cassettes and played them on his boom box. The music was ridiculously fast, as though calibrated to a hummingbird’s nervous system. And we marveled at the thrill we’d felt back then, when we were enmeshed in every last bleep and sputter.