The Wilding: A Novel

by Benjamin Percy

  She can barely register the seeming impossibility of such a thing—when the owl opens its wings and hurriedly flaps them and launches itself into the air. Its claws are open and its beak is open and it flaps and screeches its way through the living room, battering the walls and windows, seeking escape, its feathers smoldering, leaving smoke in the air like contrails from a jet. There is an old wedding photo sitting on the mantel and the owl knocks it from its perch and it shatters on the floor. Then the owl makes a beeline for the dinette. Justin releases a scream to match the owl’s and Graham falls over backward in his chair and Karen ducks down and runs for the front door and throws it open and not ten seconds later the owl departs through it, disappearing into the evening.

  Karen has her hands over her heart to settle it, its beating like a hammer wrapped in cloth. “Holy shit.” She closes the door and leans against it.

  Graham pulls himself—and then his chair—up from the floor. He opens and closes his mouth but doesn’t seem to know what to say. The house smells as if it is cooking. A few feathers—clear and incandescent, the color burned out of them—float through the air like the lost wings of wasps.

  “What the hell happened?” Karen says. Her breathing is tough, like she just got back from a run.

  Justin shakes his head as if he doesn’t know even as he says, “When I was a kid, starlings would fall down the chimney. They liked the updraft. The warmth of it. Sometimes they’d get high on the fumes and pass out.” He stands and walks to the fireplace and picks up the fallen photo—he and Karen are smiling in the back of a limousine—the glass from its frame now sprayed across the hardwood, reflecting the fire and seeming to emit an orange glow. “I guess we ought to get a chimney cap.”

  “Why don’t we have one? Shouldn’t you have installed one? You know we didn’t have one, so you must have thought about this?” She cannot stop herself. Her shock has turned over like a black dog and become anger that grows worse when he only half tunes in to the upset buzz of her voice as it rises between them like the smoke of the burning owl. “Seriously, Justin,” she says, moving toward him, snatching the photo and setting it roughly on the mantel once more. “The windowsill has dryrot. The outlet in the bathroom doesn’t work. There are bees’ nests in the soffits. One of the porch steps feels off-kilter.” Her voice is close to cracking with emotion. She hates when she comes undone, but lately it happens more and more, her temper flashing, taking over.

  Sometimes she feels like two women. One of the women is a mother and wife. And after Graham takes his nightly bath—after he brushes his teeth and pulls on his jammies and climbs into bed—he calls out for this mother and she walks down the hall and pauses in the doorway of his bedroom. He lies there, the covers pulled up to his chin. At the sight of her, his eyes scrunch shut and his mouth trembles with the start of a smile, as he pretends to sleep. She walks slowly to his bed—slowly because every footstep scares a shiver or a giggle from him—and then she—again, slowly—drags the sheet from his body until he is completely exposed. They both are laughing at this point. At the base of his bed, with two hands, she then snaps the sheet and it hangs in the air a moment before sinking into the shape of him. And then it is time for the kiss—one on each eye, the nose, the mouth.

  This last Christmas she bought him a digital camera. Since then, he was rarely without it, its carrier clipped to his belt. He studied its manual as if he would be tested—dog-earing pages, highlighting passages. He would snap photos of things she thought strange. A damp mass of hair pulled from the drain. A dead chipmunk by the side of the road. His big toe after he accidentally rammed it into the coffee table and brought a half-moon bruise to the nail. He talked seriously about aperture, megapixels, the light being all wrong. She thought he was so funny, not really a boy but a funny little man. When she asked him what he liked so much about photography, he brought his hand to his chin and rubbed it, completely earnest, unaware of how theatrical he appeared. Many of his movements and speech patterns were like this, like he was putting on a show, playing adult. Finally he said that he liked the way the camera stopped time. “It’s like a superpower. I can freeze something forever, exactly how it was. Do you know what I mean?”

  She knew. She kept a shoebox in the back of her closet. In it were trinkets from the past—her retainer, pressed flowers, a pencil sketch of a horse, love letters from old boyfriends, a blue ribbon from a district track meet, and some photos, among them a shot of her soon after she graduated from high school. That summer, with a group of girlfriends, she had climbed South Sister. The photo caught her at its summit, among the clouds, balanced on a knob of basalt. She wasn’t facing the camera, but staring off at the ragged jawline of the Cascades. She wasn’t smiling, but looked happy, satisfied, and stared hard into the distance as if she was about to journey there and only needed to steel herself to the idea.

  So there was the woman who tucked her son into bed each night, who baked cookies and dirtied her knees in the garden—and then there was the other woman, the one on top of the mountain, the one Karen lately couldn’t get out of her head. For years she had been neglecting that person, shoving her down into a hole, containing her behind walls mortared by makeup and casseroles and laundry detergent.

  That used to be me, she thought when she sat on the edge of the bed and studied the photo—or sometimes, in disbelief, that’s me?

  That’s who the anger belongs to, the woman who climbs mountains, who wants her life to count for something, to mean something, and these past few years she has steadily come to believe that isn’t the case.

  Now her husband walks past her, through the living room, across the short hallway, to the dinette, where Graham is again seated, watching them. Justin pulls up his chair and retrieves his napkin off the floor. With his fork he stabs at the remains of his salad. “I’m so busy I can’t get my own work done. It bothers you so much, call someone.”

  She follows him as far as the hallway and stops there, between rooms. “Don’t you think that’s your job?”

  “I told you I’m too busy.”

  “To call someone? You’re too busy to call someone?”

  “No. I thought you meant—” He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “If you want me to call someone, I can call someone.”

  “I want you to call someone.”

  “Okay. I will.” His eyes are still closed. “Let’s change the subject, okay?”

  “Okay,” she says and means it. She doesn’t want to be angry. Especially in front of Graham. She steps into the dinette and goes to her son, puts her hands on his shoulders, squeezes. “It’s okay.” He bends his neck to look up at her and she puts her hand to his face, which seems to change every time she looks at him. When he was younger, he used to walk around the house in his woolly socks and shoot lightning bolts from his fingertips—zapping her on the elbow, the knee—and one day he startled her in the bathroom and she jerked a hot curling iron to his forehead. He still carries the scar, a little reminder of the moment, just above his left eyebrow. It was an accident—she kept telling him that—it was an accident. But she had hurt him, and when you hurt your child, it doesn’t matter whether you meant to or not. The hurt is there, imprinted on them, because of you. The wrong word or a raised hand no different from the toxins in so many foods, working their way into them, changing them for the worse. She touches the scar now and then kisses it. “Everything’s okay.”

  She spots a bit of gray in his hair. “You’ve got something,” she says and seeks the something with her fingers. When she recognizes it as a feather, she flicks it away. “Jesus,” she says and sticks out her tongue. “I hate birds. I’ve always hated them ever since I saw that bird movie—what’s it called?”

  “The Birds?” Justin says.

  “That’s the one.” Again she shivers at the memory of the owl. “God. Nature.”

  BRIAN

  Sometimes the biggest challenge of the day seems to be figuring out what shows to watch. He sinks into the couch and flip
s through the five hundred channels available to him and shoves Doritos into his mouth until the bag is empty and his camo shirt is dusted over orange. A few months ago, on the Discovery Channel, he happened upon a program about skinwalkers. These were Navajo witches who scrabbled about on all fours while wearing wolf hides. Their eyes burned against their pale faces like red mites pressed into fungus. They chanted backward chants to raise evil spirits and they unearthed graves and they stole hair and skin and fingernails from the dead and ground them into a corpse powder that they blew in your face to give you a ghost sickness.

  He had always been fascinated by the supernatural. As a child he used his allowance to buy Tales from the Crypt comic books and he snuck from his father’s bookshelves novels by Stephen King and he asked to spend the night at a neighbor’s house only because he could rent R-rated horror movies. Nights he often spent with his blanket wrapped around him like a cocoon, the breathing hole at his mouth the only part of him exposed.

  In eighth grade he dressed up as an ape for Halloween. He had a full-body suit with shaggy black hair and a mouthful of teeth. No one at school knew who he was. He would walk up to girls and stare at them and say nothing and they would press their backs to their lockers and hide behind their friends to give him a wide berth. Some people laughed but with a nervousness that made their laughter come across as forced and wheezy. It was the first time he felt powerful.

  He kept the ape suit in his closet and sometimes he would put it on and stare at himself in the mirror and thump his chest—once, twice—while breathing heavily into his mask. He did not know why but it gave him an erection. Normally his father would not return from work until dinnertime, so he felt safe to walk around the house in the ape suit and watch television and do his homework at the kitchen table, but one day his father came home early and because Brian had the television volume up he did not hear the growl of the engine or the crunch of gravel or even the rattle of keys. When his father pushed open the door to the garage with a pizza balanced in one hand, Brian sprang up from the couch. This startled a yell from his father and he dropped the pizza box on the floor—its cardboard mouth burped cheese and pepperoni.

  Moths—Pandora moths the size of hands—fluttered in from outside while his father leaned against the open door and observed Brian with hooded eyes that revealed his curiosity and disappointment. “What’s wrong with you?” he finally said. The ape suit went in the garbage that night, but Brian hasn’t stopped thinking about it—the way an amputee will never stop thinking about a lost limb—remembering the sense of power that came with it.

  Over the past few months he has trapped weasel and pine martens and coyote and beaver and even a wolverine. For all except the beaver, which required an open-cut dissection, he sliced around the hind legs below the hock and sliced up the back of the hind legs to the anus and from there stripped the pelt off the hind legs. He removed the tail bone by slicing from the anus along the bottom side of the tail to its tip and then worked it free from the bone. He pulled the skin delicately off their pink bodies as if pulling a damp nightgown from a woman, pausing at the head, where he had to cut through their ear cartilage and around the eyes and through their lips to slip off the pelt completely.

  Then came the fat, the flesh, the gristle—scraping it off—and then washing the pelt with soap and water and patting it off with a towel. He keeps several wooden stretchers in the garage and he centered the pelts on them and pulled them taut and waited a day for them to dry and then turned them and waited another day and then wetted their underside with vegetable oil to keep them pliant and brushed their fur with a dog comb so that they appeared fluffy, shiny.

  From the Goodwill he bought a mannequin to use as a frame. He had learned how to sew in the service, but never with leather. The Internet told him everything he did not already know, such as how to keep the holes clean by lightly dampening the stitch groove and polishing the diamond awl blade with a block of beeswax before every punch. With a waxed five-cord linen thread that runs from a thousand-yard spool he used a saddle stitch method, pulling snug so as not to break the thread or rip a stitch.

  He made the leggings first—from four gray-furred coyotes—and then puzzled the rest of the pelts together to match his upper body, binding the variant furs and their colors to make a patchwork coat that hung from him loosely and would not tear if he ran and contorted himself oddly when climbing a tree or leaping across a canal.

  And now he is nearly done, tying off the final stitch for the helmet or mask—he isn’t sure what to call it—made from the beaver he trapped the other day. He is in the living room—seated on the same lumpy couch and watching the same wood-framed Mitsubishi television as he was when his father surprised him so many years ago. Wheel of Fortune is playing. Pat Sajak is making small talk with a contestant, a man from Kentucky who has a wonderful wife and dreams of one day taking a cruise to Alaska. His hands are deformed. They look like fleshy lobster claws. Another contestant spins the wheel for him.

  The sun has set. The curtains are closed. The mannequin stands nearby, draped in the hair suit. Its blue eyes stare into a void and its pink mouth puckers into a dead smile. On television the wheel is spinning, and in the living room Brian is scissoring off a loose thread and knotting its end. The category is Action and the puzzle is three words. Brian sharpens a pair of scissors on a whetstone, then holds his fist inside the furred mask to brace it as he scissors two eye holes and carves open a slit for breathing.

  The wheel is rattling its kaleidoscope of pie-wedge colors, glittery numbers. It nearly comes to a stop on bankruptcy but clicks forward another notch to the silvery promise of a thousand dollars. “Touching you naked,” Brian says to the television. And then, more loudly, “It’s touching you naked, you idiots.”

  The man closes his eyes and lifts his deformed hands as if in benediction. A moment passes before Brian realizes the man is crossing his fingers. “Thumbing your nose,” the man guesses. Lights flash. Bells ring. The audience claps and Pat Sajak smiles and the man does a little dance and throws back his head and opens his mouth to reveal a black cave of laughter that seems to swallow up the screen when Brian punches the remote and everything goes dark.

  Brian stands from the couch and approaches the mannequin. He stares into its blank blue eyes a moment before fitting the mask over its head. He surveys his work as a tailor, tidying a sleeve, brushing his hands across the fur, petting it. A musky smell rises off the suit, somewhere between a groin and a wet dog—a smell that surrounds him, minutes later, when he strips naked and steps into the pants and tightens their belt and then pulls on the jacket and finally the mask. The noise and the heat of his breathing surround him and he experiences that old familiar feeling of power and excitement. An erection throbs to life. It is his first in months.

  He walks from the living room down a narrow hallway and into his bedroom. There is a full-length mirror mounted on the closet door and he studies his reflection in it. The only source of light is a 40-watt bulb glowing above him. It has about the same effect as a flashlight, throwing long shadows that squirm all over his body when he moves. He likes the way the mask fits snugly to his face, like armor.

  When Brian was young, his father took him to a Noh drama playing at the community college. The music was unlike any he had ever heard: the calm murmur of the bamboo flute backgrounded by the sometimes slow, sometimes manic tapping of the taiko drum. And he remembers, more than anything, the masks the actors wore.

  In every Noh drama there are five types of masks—gods, demons, men, women, and the elderly—meant to depict the essential spirit of the character. And these five masks were sold afterward in the lobby. He remembers picking up the demonic mask, with its red skin and bulging white eyes. A thin mustache framed its mouth, trailing to its chin. Horns rose from its forehead. In the way of little boys, he loved it precisely for its ugliness. He begged his father to buy him one as a souvenir, but they were too expensive, so he settled instead for a cassette that featured
music from the production.

  He still has the tape. Its cover is faded and its sound is bothered by the occasional hiss of static, but it plays. His boom box from high school still sits on his dresser and he inserts the tape into it now and turns up the volume.

  The reedy whistle of a flute fills the room, followed by a gunshot chorus of drumbeats. He begins to dance. The hair suit weighs probably thirty pounds and at first he slings his arms and bends his legs with some clumsiness, getting used to this second skin—and then he becomes more comfortable, his motions more fluid. Sweat begins to trail down his back and stomach. Beneath the mask his breath is like a great wind.

  As the music plays, as he leaps about his room, there is a kind of darkroom going on inside his skull. Pictures get dipped in briny solutions. At first they are white. Then they darken in places to reveal a naked woman with a paper bag over her head, a pistol growing out of a man’s crotch, a Muslim laying down a prayer rug made of human flesh, a camel burning, a six-fingered hand giving him the finger.

  And then he goes to the boom box and hits the stop button and feels trembling all through his body a quiet sense of power. He pulls on a pair of white tube socks and then his combat boots, shined to a black gleam.

  “I’m going out,” he yells to the house and pauses a moment in the doorway as if awaiting a reply.

  Years ago, they decided to have a reunion, his friends from the war. They came from scattered corners of the state but they arrived in Portland at the precise hour—at 8:00 p.m., at twenty hundred hours—at the Irish bar called the Book of Kells whose vast, dark-wooded interior reminded Brian of the belly of a ship. All three were members of the same unit, and though they had not seen each other for many months, they felt instantly comfortable for the history they shared. Two-handed handshakes gave way to hugs gave way to meaty backslaps. Jim was a round-faced man who worked for the Tigard postal service and kept his head shaved and offered an apologetic laugh at the end of every sentence, while Troy was tall and slight with his receding hairline pulled back into a weak ponytail, with punch-colored pouches under his eyes from the long hours he worked as a manager at Kinko’s. They said, “So how the hell are you?” and “You’re looking good,” when they worked their way through the bodies and the tables and found a snug at the back of the bar. A dim light hung over the table and made their skin and their teeth appear yellow.