The shrapnel peppered his arm and shoulder with small pieces of metal later dug out with tweezers. Today, he has to hunt among his hairs to even find the scars. The real damage came to his skull—a section three inches in circumference, gone, carved away by a piece of metal driven through the air.
Here his second stop-loss tour ended with an honorable discharge and a Purple Heart and a photograph of him in the Bend Bulletin shaking hands with the mayor, his face half obscured by bandages, his mouth unsmiling, his eyes staring into the camera with a kind of deadened resolve as if it were a 60 x 80mm scope trained in his direction. Those first few months back in Oregon he would wake up feeling as though he had taken the wrong plane and arrived at a place where no one knew him and where he should not be and where his anxiety could at any moment take command of him. He knew he was being paranoid, knew his black-veined fear to be unreasonable—but he could not help himself despite this knowledge.
The high desert landscape didn’t help, central Oregon reminding him so much of Iraq. The sandy soil that rose up in clouds and clung to skin, to cars. The stark sections of land where no life could be found except a vulture circling the sky and range steers feeding off bunch grass. The daytime heat giving way to nights so cold you could see your breath. And so he straddled two regions at once, occupying a gray territory. He startled at loud noises: a train whistle, a backfiring car, a dynamite explosion from a hilltop community under construction. He peered carefully at the underbellies of bridges and overpasses when he drove beneath them, hunting for the IEDs he knew were not there. If someone walked by him quickly in the mall or on the sidewalk, he imagined striking them in the windpipe with his fist, dropping them, demanding to know the rush of their business.
No one ever asked him about the war. Not one neighbor, not one friend or former teacher, not even if they carried a Support Our Troops ribbon on their lapel or bumper. They only said, “It’s good you’re home.” It was at moments like this, especially when their eyes lingered on his forehead—at first the bandages, later the scar tissue, bubblegum pink—that he felt on the verge of collapse. Alone. Inapt. Not a part of Iraq, not a part of Oregon. Not a marine and not a citizen—just a vessel of blood and bone and gristle floating and turning in the air. For a long time he did not feel he was capable of continuing to live a normal life, of achieving any sort of sense of comfort. He felt that he had lost more than a section of his skull. He had lost himself as well.
He blames his frontal lobe. He remembers the doctors telling him about the spider-shaped lesion there. This was why he had such initial difficulty putting words together, solving math problems, maintaining an erection. This was why his expression rarely changed, stoned-faced, dead-faced. There was a numbing effect, as if someone had excised a certain nerve from his body. He remembers in the weeks after his discharge, sitting in a Shari’s restaurant, sipping coffee and forking into a piece of strawberry pie, when a mother and her child—a round-faced toddler with a black shock of hair—sat down at a nearby booth. When the toddler broke a green crayon and began crying inconsolably, a high-pitched wailing that made him think of an air-raid siren, he imagined smashing the kid’s skull against the edge of the table until it cleaved in two and spilled forth a red mess not so different from that of his pie. He wasn’t sure what he felt in that moment, a half-chewed bite of strawberry softening on his tongue. Anger? No. Anger was a word with too much octane in it. He felt an impulse to strike out. That was a better way of thinking about his mind and its rewiring, as something that responded to impulses. He knew he was not normal. He knew people would hate him if they were privy to his thoughts. He knew he ought to feel guilty, regretful, about the child, about the thousands of tiny nightmares that went through his head every day. But he does not.
He remembers when things didn’t feel so dark, when life seemed bright with beauty, with possibility. He remembers sitting in his desert cammies on a Curtiss Commando transport plane—on his way out of Romania after a refuel, on his way to Mosul—when he peered from the window and beyond the green rolling hills and sparkling lakes and saw the Carpathians mantled with snow and felt completely alive and connected to the two hundred men around him who would face horror and frustration and who would die for one another.
That feeling is unavailable to him now. He does not see himself as part of anything, only apart. His company is best suited for the woods.
Sometimes he drives out into the desert and parks in the shadow of a juniper or a monolith of rock whose shape suggests a fossilized animal. When he sits in his truck with the country sprawling all around him, when he hears the wind moaning through the canyons and whispering through the sagebrush, when he observes the sun ride up in the sky and burn the color out of stones and the moisture out of soil, when a cluster of ants carries a grasshopper carcass into their swarming nest, when a hawk drops out of the empty blue and strikes a rattlesnake and carries it off to a fencepost to peel apart, Brian understands he is a part of the scenery—simply an animal, a complicated animal—and as an animal he can be either prey or predator, a target or the arrow that hastens toward it.
Now, at the gas station, when he opens his eyes again, he finds the bleak weather departed, the clouds blown off into the desert. The rain has clarified the air, revealing the mountains, dusted with fresh snow that gleams in the sunlight. He can appreciate their beauty only distantly, distracted as he is by the faint throbbing in his temple. At moments like these, he cannot help but feel someone has bored into his skull to burrow around, picking at his mind like a careless locksmith.
JUSTIN
Justin has not spoken to his father for three months. Not since he returned home from the hospital and began weight lifting in the living room, shirtless, his chest cloven by a zipper-shaped scar. “Got to get back into it,” he said. When Justin scolded him for this, his father told him to fuck off, mind his business.
Paul has always been like bad weather—relentless, expansive, irritating—but since the heart attack he has grown even wilder and more unreasonable, as if, having cheated death, the laws of life no longer apply to him.
The long silence is not unusual. Over the years, their conversations often begin on a normal note—how’s work, how’s the fishing. Then their voices rise in argument, though usually they can’t remember what about after a few weeks pass. Such is the natural rhythm between them—every season for them like the emotional course of a year for most fathers and sons, where the small pangs of affection felt during the holidays are inevitably followed by arguments followed by long silences followed by making peace.
Which is why, when November nears and his father calls and invites Justin to join him camping and hunting in Echo Canyon, he only hesitates a moment before saying yes.
“You’re sure?” his father says.
“Sure I’m sure.” And suddenly he is. He looks forward to leaving behind the traffic that hums through the town, the exhaust-spewing trucks and SUVs. He looks forward to getting some clean air in him and some motion under him. And he looks forward to spending one last weekend in Echo Canyon, so that he might say good-bye, as Bobby Fremont plans to break ground next week.
“Good. I think . . .” His father’s voice falls off a cliff here, uncharacteristically uncertain.
Justin tries to fill in the sentence for him. “Some guy time would definitely be healthy.”
“Exactly,” his father says, relieved, his voice rising to a manly pitch reserved for taverns and locker rooms. “We’ll drink some beers and raise some hell!” He clears his throat. “And, you know, shoot the bull.”
Several silent seconds pass as Justin wonders what kind of conversation qualifies as bull: hunting stories, dirty jokes, drywalling advice?
“And bring that kid of yours,” his father says before hanging up. “I’ll make a man out of him yet.”
That night Justin dreams a dream he has not had in a long time.
He is in a meadow lit by silvery moonlight. From the surrounding forest a song plays
, a children’s song, “Teddy Bears’ Picnic.” It sounds muted and scratchy, as if played on an old gramophone. “If you go down in the woods today, you better not go alone. It’s lovely down in the woods today, but safer to stay at home.” The lyrics, sung in a lazy baritone, have always bothered him. His mother claims he howled and clapped his hands over his ears and ran from the room every time she tried to play it for him as a child.
From the trees, a half circle of black hunchbacked figures emerges, advancing into the meadow. Their shapes seem to waver, shifting like smoke. After a few loping paces they stop and sway to the music and lower themselves, as if crouching. From them comes a noise Justin recognizes—a scream—a scream of pain brought on by an animal caught in barbed wire while his father roughly whispered, Shoot, shoot, shoot. He is flinching, as if subject to some blunt force, flinching before the shadows of the forest of his mind.
The figures move forward again. As they come closer, he recognizes them as bears, all of them walking upright, wobbly-legged. Strands of barbed wire hang from them like the wires of a lurid marionette. Their fur is damp with blood. Their eyes are black. Together their chests swell in a collective breath, the prelude to another scream that goes on and on as they continue forward, spreading out into an irregular crescent that will, in a black knot, enclose him.
He jerks awake with the song still looping through his head and his father’s face taking shape in every shadow of the room. Outside the moon creeps higher in the sky and his fear gives way to an uneasy state of anticipation as he thinks about the trip—his ability to steady his rifle and his father.
KAREN
Tonight she grills steaks. She thinks her husband ought to do this—she thinks he ought to do a number of things, like lift weights and scream at football games and take a wrench to leaky faucets. These are, after all, things that men do. But he isn’t very handy and doesn’t have time for the gym and the only sport he watches with any interest is soccer. She doesn’t know what the right word is for him. Tame? Maybe this is why he doesn’t have many friends?
Whenever she asks him to grill, he plays dumb, fumbling with the knobs and dropping the tongs and sighing loudly, saying he doesn’t remember the temperature for pork, questioning whether he needs all the burners on and how high. The meat is always dry and rubbery by the time he is done with it. Long ago she stopped asking for his help, and now she stands on the back patio, tending the three-burner, stainless steel Ducane grill with the steaks sputtering and hissing inside and the smoke rising off it to mingle with the smoke rising from their chimney. The evening is cool and Justin threw into the fireplace some split pine from the tall pile of firewood his father cut and dropped off earlier in the week.
She uses a dry rub of garlic salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper, and cinnamon, a little sweet to balance out the spice. She tosses the steaks—big porterhouse cuts from a grass-fed Angus they had slaughtered to fill the freezer in their garage—on the grill for ten seconds, then flips them, sealing in the juice. She snaps off the flame for the central burner and closes the lid and the grill becomes a kind of convection oven. Waves of heat come off it, but she doesn’t step away, even as her skin goes tight and she feels as if she is going to split, as if her inside is bigger than her outside.
When the steaks are done—she can tell just by pushing the tongs against them, the give of the meat—she drops them onto a plate and carries them inside, where at the kitchen table her husband is grading papers and her son is reading the latest issue of National Geographic.
“Heads up, mouths open,” she says and sets down the steaming plate next to the wooden salad bowl full of spinach and romaine lettuce, the homemade multigrain bread wrapped in a cloth. Everything is organic. Beef hormones cause cancer and cause girls to have their periods at nine. Pesticides on lettuce cause cancer and autism. The preservatives in bread cause cancer. The preservatives in croutons cause cancer. The preservatives in mayonnaise-based dressing cause cancer and the transfat in it causes coronary heart disease. She subscribes to e-newsletters like the Daily Green and subscribes to RSS feeds from Safemama.com. She shops mainly at the Bend co-op. She belongs to a community-supported farm. She believes she is taking care of her family—she is keeping them from harm. For this, she receives no thanks. Her husband whines about the money she spends on food and her son whines about wanting a McDonald’s burger, a Mountain Dew.
Now the two of them glance up at her. Without saying a word, they fill their plates and begin to eat. Justin neatly arranges his meal into three even sections. “I don’t like my food to trespass on other food,” he once said—her husband, who now holds a pen in one hand and a fork in the other, at once munching his salad and scribbling some marginal comment in green ink on a student’s essay. The table is quiet except for the sound of their chewing, their silverware clinking and sawing. In the fireplace a pitch pocket pops, and for a moment they all look there, where orange flames lick their tongues across the half-blackened wood, before returning their attention to their plates.
When Karen cuts her steak, the center is as purple as a plum, just the way she likes it. A well-done steak is a steak charred through with carcinogens. Blood pools on her plate and she soaks it up with her bread. Before bringing it to her mouth, she says, “Doesn’t anybody want to talk? About something?”
Justin slows his chewing, swallows, licks his lips. “What do you want to talk about?” Spinach clings to his teeth.
“Surprise me.”
Justin’s eyes go to the window, where shadows gather in the failing light. “I can’t think of a single thing to talk about.” He returns his attention to his salad. “Sorry.”
Graham sets down his fork and wipes his face with his napkin. “Dave Jasper got busted at school.” Karen and Justin look at him and under their gaze he stutters out, “You know Dave. From soccer. From fifth grade—”
“For what?” Justin says.
“For killing coons.” His eyes dart between them. “His brother goes out in his truck, down dirt roads, and into alfalfa fields, his brother and his brother’s friends, and they take Dave with them. They spotlight the coons and the coons freeze and they jump out of the truck and kill the coons with baseball bats.”
Karen’s hand falls to the table and makes the plates clatter.
Graham’s voice gets faster; he is excited by her disgust, she can tell, like a boy handling lizards, worms, things that make her shriek. “In shop class, Dave was making this bat with nails in it. It was totally medieval-looking and Mr. Steele asked him about it and Dave told him and that’s how he got busted.”
“That’s disgusting. That’s like, serial killer in the making. You’ve heard about how they torture animals when they’re young?” Her tone is at first almost amusedly horrified, but as it grows more severe, the smile on Graham’s face fades. “I don’t think you should be anywhere near that kid, that Dave—”
“Karen.” Justin gives a half wave of his hand. “Don’t overreact.”
“I don’t think I’m overreacting. I don’t think I’m overreacting.”
“It’s disturbing, I know. But boys do crazy stuff. I’ve done crazy stuff.”
That’s rich. Her husband, who scolds her for leaving out her shoes, who folds his socks into tidy little balls, thinks he’s a wild man. She crosses her arms and gives him a bitter twist of a smile. “Like what?”
“Thrown frogs under the wheels of cars. Shot squirrels and rabbits with BB guns. When I was in high school, a few of us used to kill marmots for money. Ranchers would pay us two bucks a marmot. We’d fill the back of a pickup. I’m not saying I look back on that fondly. I’m saying it’s the nature of boys.” He has his knife out before him. Its point is aimed at her.
Graham takes a drink of milk and says, “I had this—I—”
“I’m saying that Dave Jasper did something stupid, but one day Graham will probably do something stupid, because boys do stupid things, and you don’t want people labeling him a psycho.”
“Graha
m is not that kind of boy.”
“I had this dream last night,” Graham says, almost yelling. Karen goes quiet and turns her attention to him, trying to smile and not quite pulling it off. But she’ll listen. He’s trying, after all, to salvage their dinner, to turn the conversation. “It was a crazy dream.”
“Let’s hear it.” Karen neatens her silverware.
“I dreamed about us going hunting.” He nods at his father. “About when we go to Echo Canyon. I dreamed I got shot. Some man was hunting me through the forest and I kept trying to outrun him but he was always there, around every corner. At one point I looked down and noticed I was naked.” He blushes here as if imagining them imagining him stripped of clothes. “And my body was totally covered in fur. Not hair. Fur.”
“That sounds more like your grandpa.” Karen’s joke has an edge to it. She does not like, not one bit, the idea of her son away for the weekend with his grandfather. She believes him to be more than a bad influence, someone who finds the faults in everything, who makes fun of organic food and fair trade and liberal pantywaists, who speaks of blood and weaponry with smiling relish. He is those things, and those things are bad enough, but he is also half bent with the same kind of madness that would send someone into the night with a baseball bat jeweled with nails. She doesn’t trust him. And around him she doesn’t trust her husband, so easily cowed.
No one laughs at her joke. If anything, Graham’s voice grows more earnest when he says, “Finally he got me.” He indicates where, right beneath his left breast. “When I woke up it hurt.” He rubs the spot. “It still hurts.”
At that moment something drops down the chimney and onto the fire. There is a terrible screeching, the noise a nail makes when drawn harshly across metal. Something moves there, a black thing surrounded briefly by flames—an owl, Karen realizes—a great horned owl the size of a toddler.
The Wilding: A Novel Page 5
