The Wilds

by Julia Elliott

  Though we could get no drunker, we drank more beer. Possum and Tim finally swayed off to sleep in the car. And Bill put on a CD of our mountain music, the stuff we’d concocted in the midst of a blizzard three years before. We sat on the porch as psychedelic crickets pulsed over a moaning Wurlitzer. And then: six meticulously layered violin tracks, silver smears of flute, and our voices—so many different versions of both of us. Moans, howls, hums, grunts. Lots of chanting. We circled each other, overlapped, fused, and retreated. We cleaved and melded and darted away.

  “How are your mystics?” Bill asked me.

  “I don’t ever get to read them. Too busy grading freshman essays.”

  “Do you miss them?”

  Of course I missed my scrawny passionate mystics, who starved themselves until their brains caught fire and Jesus stepped down from the ether, right into their freezing cells, his pink flesh so warm it almost burned their crimped fingers.

  “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  How could we help falling together in the darkness? How could we help giggling as we tripped over each other on the way to his futon? I still hadn’t gotten a decent look at him. But as we rooted in the dark, I could smell pure Bill, his hands musky from the little animals he killed. Eating meat had changed the taste of him. And he seemed denser yet lighter, stronger yet somehow more nebulous, Bill and not Bill.

  This morning, as he moved around the room getting dressed, making small domestic noises that were painfully familiar to me, I felt self-conscious and faked sleep, burrowed down under the blanket so that he couldn’t see my face. When he finally left, and I emerged from the covers to take a deep breath, I saw neat rows of animal skulls, white as industrial sugar, eyeless but somehow staring right through me.

  “Lisa is lucky,” says Possum. “Within ten years she might be able to clone herself, implant the embryo in her own uterus, and give birth to herself.”

  “And when my old carcass finally wears out,” I say, “I could put my half-mad brain into my daughter’s exquisite twenty-year-old body.”

  Bill’s still gone, and our hangovers have reached such a nasty pitch that we’ve popped open our first round of beers. My stomach’s empty, and the first five sips translate into instant giddiness. The woods look ethereal, the perfect medium for frolicking elves. Birds twit and fuss. And Bill comes strolling through the speckled light with four gleaming trout on a string. He’s even whistling, absurdly, and I wonder if he’s rehearsed this scene in his head. I wonder if he’s imagined that moment when he, the handsome outdoorsman, emerges from the woods bearing game he’s caught with his own clever hands as his decadent urban companions laze around drinking, our faces pasty from last night’s debauch.

  But Bill himself looks a bit green under the gills—way too skinny, I see with a catch in my heart—so skinny that his pants hang from his pelvic bones, his eye sockets look deeper, and his neck resembles a delicate stalk, hoisting the overlarge bloom of his head. I note eye bags, the kind he used to get when he couldn’t sleep. I see flares of gray at his temples. And he seems pretty eager to crack open a pale ale himself.

  “Rainbows?” says Possum.

  “Just brook trout,” says Bill. “But they’re tasty grilled.”

  We walk around back, where a stone patio overlooks his garden. He’s got a hand water pump set in a square of concrete, a hibachi grill, a Coleman camp stove. His kitchen is protected from the elements with a tin-roofed shed and furnished with a salvaged picnic table.

  As Bill guts the fish on a concrete block, Possum hunkers down beside him. Wobbling like a manic Weeble, he watches Bill scrape off scales and slice each trout from anus to jaw. Bill chops off heads, pulls dainty wads of guts from cavities, tosses the scraps into a plastic bucket. He rinses his hands and tells us that grits are simmering in his solar oven, which is down in the clearing behind his chicken coop. His beer can is flecked with silvery scales. His patched khakis, held up with a strand of twine, look adorable. And when he takes us to see his chickens, four coppery hens strutting behind a split-sapling fence, I want to kiss him again.

  We gather eggs and pick arugula and carry the pot of grits back to the patio. Bill puts the trout on the grill and makes a salad of baby greens and wild blackberries. He has a little raw cheddar. He has cilantro from the garden, a nub of organic salami, some bread from the bakery.

  As Bill makes scrambled eggs with cheese and salami, we have another round of warm beers. Birds flit through the woods in search of food. Birds scratch at the black forest floor. They peck bark for larvae and snap up glittering dragonflies. They thrust their beaks into the throats of flowers and suck.

  It’s after two. Tim and Possum have gone on a beer run. Bill and I sit at the picnic table gazing down at his garden, which isn’t getting enough sun.

  “I spend five hours a day grinding through scrub trees with a chainsaw,” he says. “But one day, I’ll have a view. One day, I’ll be able to see the Blue Ridge Mountains from here.”

  “You’re turning into your dad,” I joke, remembering stories from his youth, how his father, who suffers from obscure sinus issues, became obsessed with mold and waged war against the woods. After working eight-hour shifts at a chemical plant, he’d drive thirty miles home to his rustic property and fight the encroaching brush until dark. That’s why he surrounded their house with flocks of goats.

  “Now I know exactly how he feels,” says Bill, “though I’ve only got three acres of unruly wilderness to control.”

  “But you seem to be doing okay.”

  Bill shrugs. “How’s Atlanta?”

  “The same filthy sprawling mess it’s always been. I sit in my apartment grading papers most of the time, making the occasional excursion to the neighborhood bar. But I’ve got Tim and Possum to entertain me.”

  “You don’t have to live that way. I think you know that.”

  “A temporary solution.”

  “Solution to what?”

  “I’m still figuring some things out.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “My bowel situation is getting too dire for specificity.” I smile. “Now where is that composting toilet I’ve heard so much about?”

  Bill has a nonelectric, waterless composting toilet in his garden shed, sitting right beside the tiller we bought four years ago.

  On a giddy September day, just when the weather was starting to turn, we’d driven to an area outside Asheville where an old homestead was tucked between a Target and a Bank of America. The farmer’s family had owned the property for five generations, and over the last twenty years, the world had crept up to his door. High on a hill where his grandparents’ house was collapsing into ruins, the farmer told us about the time his aunt shot a goat that stank so bad it kept her awake at night. He told us about the first time he walked into a supermarket, at age nineteen. From our vantage point, we could see an Applebee’s sign rising beyond the farmer’s double-wide. We could see the carbon haze hovering over the paved valley like swathes of mist.

  I find Bill in the cabin, stretched out on his bed with The Goat Handbook, the room awash with forest light. I crawl in beside him and rest my head on his shoulder. I can see myself drifting into this life, doing garden chores and reading in the afternoon, learning to hunt and churn butter, creating strange music at night. But then I imagine the stuffiness of the cabin in winter, the smell of pelts, the funk of wool-swaddled bodies sponge-bathed with bowls of heated water. I imagine the endless snow. I see myself pacing around the woodstove, chattering as Bill sits in silence, burrowed deep in the mystery of himself like a hibernating mammal curled nose to belly.

  But still, we kiss. Still, I peel off his ancient T-shirt. I run my fingers over his abdomen, which is covered with chigger bites. I reach into the humid darkness of his boxer shorts and feel the familiar scruff with my fingertips. I glance up at the rows of skulls and laugh.

  “When the Chinese are buying American mail-order brides,” says Possum, “blond and luscious and s
weet sixteen, we’ll be the ones riding our bikes everywhere.”

  We’re on I-85, leaving Commerce, Georgia, kingdom of the outlet malls. We’re exhausted and rumpled and our mouths are smeared with grease. Stopping to grab a pizza an hour ago, we’d smelled middle-class aspiration in the air, faint and acidic like burnt plastic. We’d seen it in the hungry-eyed families, hauling shopping bags, slurping corn syrup from soggy paper cups.

  I need things (new sheets and a decent set of cookware), as does Tim (a stroller and a better car seat), but we’re too hungover to make sense of the staggering abundance—to choose from among twenty different types of skillets without reading the consumer ratings first. So we’re back on the road in the exurban hinterlands, which, Possum insists, will fall into wilderness when the oil runs out.

  Like a lover with a pure flame of passion in his heart, ready to burst into a tiger-orange blaze, Possum speaks of peak oil with wistful longing. When we pass a gated community called The Hollows, Possum falls into a rapture of speculation. Tim, waking from a nap, fires up a cigarette and joins him. The End of the World is something they can toss between them like a fraternal football, a prosthetic appendage that enables them, two troubled men, to touch each other.

  By the time we reach the blighted outskirts of Atlanta, they’re both giddy, speaking a notch louder, finishing each other’s sentences, the way Bill and I used to do.

  Traffic is slowing. The air is smoky with the smell of fresh-laid pavement. And they keep on dreaming up new nightmare worlds.

  We haven’t moved for ten minutes. I see a twist of smoke rising beyond an overpass, probably from a wreck, and I wonder what Bill’s doing. When we left him this morning he’d calmly descended into his garden with a tray of pepper seedlings. I noticed that his left tennis shoe had been repaired with duct tape. I noticed that his hair was thinning. I noticed that the sight of his thin, childish neck still made my heart feel sprained. In less than a month, I’ll see him in Columbia, South Carolina, our old stomping grounds, where we’ve agreed to shoot the lame video for Loser Bands of the Nineties.

  “I’ll do it,” he’d said last night at his cabin, which had surprised us all. As we huddled together in the depths of drunkenness, Bill had played our mountain music for Possum and Tim. Steeped in its strangeness, they sat smiling. A sweet flicker of something moved between me and Bill, and then all four of us, and we started talking about the lost days of Swole, when we were all glowing idiots with youth to burn.

  “Imagine dosing a whole city,” Possum says, “with some neuropharmaceutical a thousand times more potent than LSD.”

  “Sounds groovy.” Tim yawns. “You could live-blog the craziness.”

  “The CIA did it to Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951.”

  “I saw that on AlterNet.”

  “Acid in the local bakery’s bread, but you could hit the water supply.”

  “Or the air supply.”

  “Great name for a band.”

  We’re moving a few feet every five minutes, approaching what I assume is a wreck. I imagine iconic five-car pileups, crumpled metal, the apocalyptic stench of smoke. I imagine mangled travelers moaning on stretchers, their blitzed faces discreetly covered. Mushroom clouds swell. Helicopters dart like wasps. Just over the horizon, alien life-forms swarm in spaceships as sleek and black as insect eggs. I imagine the world ruptured, angelic screeches flying around my ears, my heart finally opening like a rose.

  When we reach the overpass, there’s nothing on the roadside but a piece of fender and some shattered glass. Traffic picks up. And soon we’re bearing down upon the city, navigating through a mess of orange construction cones.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Kelly Malloy and the Denise Shannon Literary Agency for helping me find the perfect place for my work. I am deeply indebted to the crew at Tin House Books and magazine—I could not have found a better home for my first two books. Meg Storey, my visionary editor, pored over these stories with obsessive attention and supernatural patience, unlocking their full potential. Nanci McCloskey has been a smart, accessible, and enthusiastic publicist. Using the gorgeous artwork of Catrin Welz-Stein, Diane Chonette designed a stunning book cover. I am also grateful to Michelle Wildgen at Tin House magazine, who saw potential in both past and recent stories and applied her editorial magic to them. Bradford Morrow of Conjunctions has been particularly supportive, providing an illustrious haven for my weirdo fiction for nearly a decade. Stephen Corey of the Georgia Review, who has patiently read my submissions since I was a student at UGA, has championed some of my best work. I would also like to thank George Singleton for supporting my endeavors and answering stupid questions about the publishing business. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, who published my work in the inaugural edition of Best American Fantasy, and Bill Henderson, who included my fiction in The Pushcart Prize XXXVII, helped me broaden and diversify my readership. Jon Mayes of Publishers Group West has gone above and beyond to promote this collection, as has my friend Bill Verner, whose knowledge about books and publishing has been revelatory for me. My friend Craig Brandhorst tinkered with half of the stories in this collection and slogged heroically through the bad ones that did not make it in. I would like to thank Cindi Boiter of Jasper magazine for her inexhaustible dedication to Columbia artists, Caitlin Bright of Tapp’s Arts Center for helping me dream up an amazing book launch, and my friend Stephen Taylor for designing my beautiful web site. Over the years the following organizations have provided essential funding for my creative projects: the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the South Carolina Arts Commission, and the University of South Carolina Office of the Provost. My colleagues at USC have been very supportive, especially those from the Extended University and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, as have my musician pals in Grey Egg. My wonderful in-laws, John and Sybil Dennis, continue to offer emotional support and crucial babysitting services as I work on my fiction and other projects. Special thanks to the Elliott clan, which has provided a lifetime of love and inspiration, particularly my father, Joseph Elliott, my late mother, Frances, and my brothers, Joe, Roddy, and Bob. Finally, I am continuously indebted to those people who sustain my sanity on a daily basis, sticking with me through the darkness and the light: my great friend (and sister I never had) Libby Furr, my long-suffering husband, Steve Dennis, and my daughter, Eva Dennis.

  © J. S. DENNIS

  JULIA ELLIOTT’s fiction has appeared in Tin House, the Georgia Review, Conjunctions, Best American Fantasy, and other publications. She has won a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award. Her debut novel, The New and Improved Romie Futch, will be published by Tin House Books in 2015. She teaches English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, where she lives with her daughter and husband, John Dennis. She and Dennis are founding members of Grey Egg, an experimental music collective.