The Wilding: A Novel

by Benjamin Percy

  Troy put out his hands as if to catch the pint glasses and the napkin fell from his thumb to reveal the raw wound there. “What the fuck, Brian?”

  “Stop saying that.” He only recognized the words as belonging to him after they were uttered.

  “Saying what?”

  “That word. Theater.”

  “You’re really not acting like yourself. You’re acting—”

  “Stop saying that word.”

  “It’s just a word. What’s wrong with it?”

  “It makes me want to kill you.”

  The noise of the bar fell away and a stare hardened between Jim and Troy, heavy with meaning, before their eyes swung toward him again. “Where you staying tonight?” Jim said. “We’ll call you a cab.”

  “I don’t need you to call a cab. I need you to stop pretending you’re war heroes.” And with this being said, the bar vanished and in its place stretched a great desert where the windblown pumice ate at your skin and the heat made your skin peel away and revealed a redness, your interior. The feel of Iraq settled over Brian, the vastness of the desert and the blue sky hanging over it, the hot wind like the breath of a clay oven, the scorpions napping under every stone. It was a place that did not care about him or about any man because in its age it had seen so many die and so many born only to later die.

  Right then the waitress appeared next to him with a smile full of teeth. “You guys doing all right here?”

  His hand answered her, leaping off the table to grab her by the forearm. “Have you ever heard of Fallujah?”

  Immediately her smile fell from her face. Her eyes crinkled up with pain and panic. She tugged against him. “Please let me go.”

  “Al Anbar?”

  “Please.”

  Her arm was so thin and tender. He knew if he squeezed only a little harder—twisted—a damp snap would come. “See?” he said to the table. “She’s got no clue. Nobody knows there’s a war going on. Nobody cares.”

  “Let her go.” This was Troy, his voice deep and punishing. He made a manacle of his hand, locking it around Brian’s wrist, the pain sharp where he dug his fingertips into the veins and tendons.

  Brian released the waitress and threw all of his weight across the table—concentrated into a fist that connected with Troy—his mouth, his lips bursting against his teeth. Instantly, blood. His mouth appeared terribly lipsticked. He did not scream but the waitress did, a scream that went on and on like a siren and made every face in the bar swivel toward them.

  There was a moment—before his knuckles started to throb, before Jim pinned him to the wall, before Troy ripped a handful of napkins from the dispenser and pressed them to his face, before the bartender pulled the phone from beneath the bar and punched 9-1-1—there was a moment when the world seemed to freeze, everything pausing for the barest instant, as if Brian could still turn around and go back to a more peaceful time.

  He hadn’t meant to punch Troy. This was not to say he regretted it, only that he hadn’t chosen to strike him. So many of his decisions now seemed instinctual, processed only on the most basic level, as when the bomb had detonated, when he had thrown up his arms to defend his face—and suddenly he found himself on that road again, when the explosion first took hold of the Humvee, lifting it, ripping it open, making him feel surprised, not fearful or angry or anything else, only surprised, with the first sparks of adrenaline racing through him, as if this were a sudden drop in a carnival ride, metal screaming, the sky and the ground confused, something he would laugh about later.

  And then the world was back in motion, careening forward, with Troy yelling at him through a mouthful of blood, “You’re wrong in the head.”

  He reaches a meadow, a circle of moonlight, and hurries to the far end of the silvery space where the forest resumes. The shadows are waiting for him there—so dark they seem palpable, like cloaks, something he could wrap himself up in. The shadows are where he feels safest. They slide across his body as if licking him, happy for their reunion. It is difficult to see under the trees and now and then he can hear things crashing about in the undergrowth, but he does not feel afraid, only occasionally startled, such as when an owl swoops through a column of moonlight, its wings silent, its face as broad and white as a dinner plate.

  He sometimes stomps through Manzanita thickets and sometimes follows game trails—about a foot wide, packed and furrowed dirt—that curve left and right, rarely straight, an always bending corridor that finds the holes in the walls of the forest. Branches claw at him but his suit protects him, a pliant armor. He smashes through a huckleberry thicket and the smell of the plump, late-season berries stays with him, his fur blackened with their blood. The ground occasionally goes soft with sudden patches of mud, the remains of the storm. The mud sticks to his boots and he stops now and then to scrape it off against a log. He can hear the hiss of the river long before he sees it and when he rounds a curve and descends a slope the trees fall away and the moonlight is all around him. The river is the color of mercury. He jogs along its shore until he reaches a fallen tree broad enough to scuttle crabwise over, into the woods again, now closing in on O.B. Riley, her road, her neighborhood, her.

  Something is shifting inside him. Since meeting the woman, Karen, he has had what can only be described as feelings. For the first time in a long time he feels like more than a machine of reflex, more than someone who only wants or does not want. In this case there is want, unquestionably, but underlying the want is a certain human tenderness, maybe. It is a maze of emotion whose end he does not know and whose course he follows through the woods.

  He is outside, leaning against a squad car, his hands cuffed behind him. A pool of pink vomit steams at his feet. His mouth tastes like acid. His mind is blistering. A block-shaped officer stands nearby—another twenty yards away, scribbling on a pad, speaking to Troy and Jim, who stand with their arms crossed. Night has settled over the city. Despite the streetlamps, the headlights, the alternating flashes of blue and red thrown from the squad car, the shadows are thick enough that everyone looks like a threat, all the people walking along the sidewalks staring at him, their faces sharp and toothy, their shirts and jeans dark, so that they appear to blend into the night, to fade and reappear from one instant to the next. A car full of teenagers roars by and, red-faced, they howl out the window at him like skinned jackals.

  His forehead throbs in time with his heartbeat. His vision rises and falls on yellow waves of drunkenness. He doesn’t feel angry anymore. He feels numb, deflated. So when he hears Troy speaking—when he hears Troy trying to convince the officer not to arrest him, saying, “You can’t go from no law to law. You can’t”—he isn’t thankful so much as hopeful that soon this will all be over, soon, and then he can sleep.

  Her house looks different in the dark—squatter, more forbidding—its windows square sockets of yellow light. He crouches in the bushes, thinking he is in the right place, but it isn’t until he glimpses her inside—ponytailed, frowning—that he scurries on all fours into the yard and huddles next to a hedge that runs below the picture window.

  He rises inch by inch, so as to appear part of the landscape, and once over the sill peers in the window, beyond the living room, and spies her standing framed in a lamplit doorway. It is as though she is packaged by it, waiting for him.

  The moment is fleeting. The kitchen sits to the left of the living room and from it comes a man—a tall, thinly built man with his shirt tucked into his pants despite the late hour. He has his right hand in his pocket and from the way it bulges beneath the khaki fabric Brian imagines him a coin jangler, the type who rolls quarters and dimes around with his fingers, making a song. He addresses Karen without looking at her directly, his eyes flitting back and forth between her face and the floor. Brian cannot perceive his words—they come across only as a low-voiced murmur—but he can read in Karen’s expression an obvious distaste.

  This is the husband responsible for locking her out—the idiot, she called him. He certain
ly looks like an idiot. He looks like an insurance salesman who reads the Wall Street Journal and plays golf on the weekends and keeps careful score with those tiny pencils. Brian feels assaulted by his presence. He looks wrong in the house—he looks wrong next to Karen—like a mismatched piece of furniture.

  The man turns to the window as if he senses Brian’s searching stare. But Brian does not duck or scamper off into the woods. Yes, he knows the man cannot see him, can see only a window full of night that reflects a ghostly image of his living room—but even if he could, even if the sun were high and an alarm sounded, Brian would remain footed to this property, unafraid.

  The key gives him that sense of access, ownership. He can picture himself inside the house—sitting on the sofa, eating off the wedding china, spitting toothpaste in the sink, shoving his thumbs deep into the eyes of the man until blood wells from them. The vision brings with it a shifting sensation, as though the drudgery of his life is about to change, to take on a new dimension, all because of her.

  JUSTIN

  In the morning Justin and his son load their gear into the Subaru wagon and drive to his father’s house. His father’s house. It is his, even though he shares it with Justin’s mother, even though Justin grew up there alongside them. Decidedly his.

  Along the way Graham plays his Nintendo DS—something called “The Legend of Zelda”—where a young elf fires arrows and casts spells to battle his way through an elaborate wilderness maze. Justin asks Graham if he is excited, and he says he is, though he never lifts his gaze from the screen, nor do his thumbs cease their frantic dance across the control pad.

  “You’ll be leaving that thing in the car. You know that, right?”

  His eyes remain intent on his work. “I just wanted to get in one last game.”

  “And then you’re going to shut it off and for three days forget it exists.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he says, and then, “Dad?”

  “What?”

  “Define guy time.”

  “Say again?”

  “You keep saying guy time. We’re going to have some guy time. That’s what you keep saying.”

  “You know what I mean. Hunting, fishing, camping, hanging.”

  “Hanging?”

  “You know. Bathing in a river. Sitting around a campfire. Scratching your armpits. Eating beans and farting and not caring if Mom hears. It’s fun. Stepping outside your comfort zone and challenging yourself. Becoming a man.” Justin flits his hand in a half circle as if trying to conjure something in the air, maybe a vision of Graham twenty years from now. “And all that stuff.”

  “Mmm.” Not looking up from his video game.

  They pass through what was once a forested area, razed down to stumps that used to be tall healthy ponderosas—thousands of them—standing like sentinels along the road Justin has driven all his life. Now they are gone and everything looks absent. For a moment he forgets where he is, not recognizing this place, the sky revealed in a way he has never before seen.

  And then, just as abruptly as they disappeared, the trees begin again, thickly clustered, the sunlight filtering through them in strobelike flashes that brighten the way. He hangs a right down a long driveway that opens up into a clearing. In the middle of it crouches the cabin, two stories tall with a red steel roof. Smoke curls thickly from the river-rock chimney and spreads into a thin gray haze.

  A pea-gravel path leads to a set of rough stone steps that rise up to the porch. Next to the railing sits an old Maxwell House coffee can, the damp grounds within it looking a lot like chewing tobacco, soon to be shaken throughout the garden for fertilizer. A sheep skull hangs above the front door like a gargoyle. They scrape their shoes on the welcome mat and enter without knocking. There are bone-work pegs by the door from which hang camouflage hats, rain slickers, a Carhartt jacket. Beneath them sit boots caked with mud and whiskered with grass. The honey-colored hardwood groans beneath their weight as they move across it, down a short hallway that opens up into the living room. A wooden hutch stands against the wall. Inside of it sits an arrangement of bone china and finely decorated teapots, one of the little touches his mother made to call attention away from the bear hides and trophy fish and skull-and-rack mounts crowding the walls. There are two bay windows in the living room that let in the light. This is where Justin finds his father.

  He is sitting in a lotus position in a square of sunlight. He wears faded blue jeans and a long-sleeved thermal. He has disassembled his rifle and spread it across a Budweiser beach towel. The room stinks of gun oil. When he looks up, his eyes catch the light like glass from an old bottle. He smiles genuinely and rises to greet them. On Justin’s shoulder he lays his hand, warm and enormous. “Ready to face the day, troops?”

  “Sure thing,” Justin says.

  “And what about you?” He squats in front of Graham and his height is such that even when balanced on his haunches they are eye-to-eye.

  Graham nods his yes. He has a blush oval of a face, almost eggish, topped by straight blond hair that he keeps parted severely to one side. His arms and legs are thin, the knobby joints like knots in a pale rope. Delicate is a good word for him. Around his neck hangs a lariat attached to a digital camera, his most prized possession. He wears safari pants and a fishing vest with many zippered compartments. A narrow-mouth Nalgene water bottle dangles from one side of his belt, and from the other, a Leatherman tool. Aside from the camera, he is fully outfitted with things Justin bought for him last week at Gander Mountain. Graham has seemed anxious about the trip—his first hunting trip, his first time away from his mother for more than a night—but once outfitted he must have felt armored because the furrow between his eyebrows vanished and he stopped chewing incessantly at his fingernails.

  “You’re always so quiet,” Justin’s father says to him. “Why are you always so quiet?”

  Graham shrugs and gives him a shy smile and Justin’s father locks his hands behind Graham’s neck and draws him close until their foreheads touch roughly. “Come on. I want to teach you something.” His knees pop when he straightens himself out and again when he returns to the beach towel. He pats the floor next to him and Graham joins him there.

  “Don’t suppose your old man ever showed you how to clean a gun? No? I didn’t think so. Time to listen up, okay?” He explains how all firearms—“I’m talking about rifles, handguns, shotguns, even bazookas”—are exposed to mechanical wear as well as the abrasive effects of weather and unexpected handling problems, such as being dropped in a river. “Which your old man once did, you know. He ever tell you that story?” Again, the flash of his eyes.

  You would think, after so many years, Justin would feel a certain numbness to his father’s jabs, like a nerve deadened by repeated hits. But no. Even if he keeps his arms crossed and his expression composed, a part of him flinches. His father is always going for the seams, hoping to tear Justin open and let his stuffing fall out. Sometimes Justin fights back, but mostly he tightens his lips into a thin line, holding it all in, hoping to avoid the several exhausting weeks it takes to repair a breach between them.

  His father shows Graham how to make certain the weapon is unloaded, how to check for possible obstructions, holding the muzzle toward a light source and looking from chamber to muzzle. He takes a brass bristle brush and runs it down the bore to remove any grit or burs. Then he soaks a patch in solvent and attaches it to the end of the cleaning rod and runs this down the bore as well, followed by a dry follow-up patch meant to detect traces of rust, followed by a patch with a light coat of gun oil on it. Then they clean all the exposed parts of the action, the inside of the receiver, the face of the breechblock, with a stiff toothbrush. “Mirror-clean,” he calls it.

  It is a lecture Justin heard many times growing up. Seeing it directed at his son, who watched his grandfather with wide damp eyes, makes Justin feel nostalgic and worried at once. He remembers the words Karen spoke to him that morning. “Don’t let him bully Graham the way he bullies you.”
/>
  “I’ll do my best,” he said and she said, “Try. Please.”

  At the time she was standing in front of the sink, drying her hands on a flour-sack dish towel. The light was coming in through the window, surrounding her in a kind of spotlight, and he remembers looking at her, really looking at her. She had a young body whose age you recognized only if you looked closely at her face. The crinkling of skin around her eyes and mouth. The veins trailing faintly across her temple. The constellation of age marks on her cheek. It was as if she were several people cobbled together and he was uncertain how much of her still resembled the woman he had fallen in love with.

  “What?” she said. “What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing.”

  Graham came into the kitchen then and set his cereal bowl on the counter and she kissed him on the forehead and asked how he was doing—

  “Good”—and if he was excited—“Yes.” She smiled faintly and said in a voice meant for them both, “Please be careful.”

  “I’m always careful,” Graham said.

  “I know you are. I know. Just remember that your grandpa doesn’t know his limits anymore. In many ways he’s more of a child than you are.”

  Justin watches his father now as he begins to gather up their gear and march back and forth from the cabin to the Bronco, so weighed down with rifles and ammunition and knives and fishing gear that his movements produce a metallic ringing, like the movements of keys on a ring.

  They follow the red-colored road into the desert, with Bend behind them and the Ochocos ahead. The big orange circle of the sun seems to have the sky to itself. It floats above them, casting a hazy light.

  A few minutes into the drive, Justin looks back to see Graham sitting quietly in the backseat, and beyond him, a multitude of houses, already growing dim and gray in the distance. Past them the land gathers into foothills and the foothills rear up into snowcapped peaks that block out vast sections of the sky. The Cascades forever keep Justin oriented. All his life, if lost, hiking through the woods or driving along some strip of county two-lane, he needs only to spot the familiar crowned point of North Sister or the flat-topped Mount Bachelor. They breathe over him. They help him find his way. Now he adjusts the side mirror and in it observes the mountains growing smaller behind him. He places his hand on their reflection.