The Wilding: A Novel

by Benjamin Percy

  He spoons through a bowl of oatmeal and drinks a half pot of black coffee before walking to his father’s room. The bed, with its duck-and-cattail-patterned comforter, is crisply made. The green-carpeted floor is vacuumed. The clothes—jeans, flannel shirts, Gold Toe socks—are folded neatly in the drawers of the oak dresser his father built in the garage. The mirror above it reveals Brian as he walks to the night table and picks up the clock radio. The power went out briefly the other day, during the storm, and the clock flashes red, a nonsense code of numbers. He checks his watch and sets the clock to 7:36 and blows the dust off it—a wisp of yellow, like some sorcerer’s magic dust, cast into the air to conjure the dead. “I met someone,” he says to the clock. Somewhere within it a wire-tangled brain hums with electricity.

  By eight o’clock he is driving along O.B. Riley. The road cuts through a great hump of earth and basaltic bedrock, exposing strata, the thickest of them the gray cake of Mazama ash, nearly eight thousand years old, expelled from the belly of what is now Crater Lake. He imagines the air swarming with fireflies of ash, the ground bubbling over with a red porridge of magma—a world so much different from this one—the evidence of it imprinted below the calm surface, seen only when the earth is stripped back to reveal its red-muscled, white-boned interior.

  There is a cindered track of Forest Service road fifty yards up the hill from her home. He parks there, hidden among the pines, and waits. He keeps a rifle scope in his glove box and he withdraws it now to study the windows, where lights glow but no bodies move. The pumpkin is gone from the porch. There is a two-door garage and one of the doors is open. In it sits a white Subaru wagon. The hatch is open and full of what looks like camping gear—bright-colored backpacks, the blue pupae of rolled sleeping bags. A minute passes before a door opens and the husband—the idiot—appears in the dim light of the garage, struggling with the weight of a plastic cooler. He heaves it into the back of the Subaru and then pushes the bags around to accommodate its size. He is wearing jeans and a red thermal long-sleeve under a gray T-shirt. He slams shut the hatch—the muted thump of it audible even to Brian—and then yells something into the house before reentering it, absent

  a few seconds before returning with a boy. He looks about ten, pale and slightly built. Brian catches a glimpse of him before he climbs into the car, joined by his father. The engine coughs to life and before long they are a sun flash in the distance, traveling away.

  His phone rings and he turns down another customer and thanks her for her time and just when he hits the red button, END, the door to the house opens and Karen appears. She pauses there, half in, half out, testing the door, making certain it is unlocked, before closing it. She wears a white visor and tank top, the pink running shorts from the other day. Brian lifts the scope to his eye once more and observes her as she grabs one foot—pulling it back, stretching her thigh—and then the other. She does a few lunges. She rotates her head and windmills her arms. She uses the porch stair to do some calf raises. And then, with a small jump, she is off, her fists striking the air while her feet beat the ground, as she approaches the end of the driveway. There Brian entertains a wish no different from that of a girl pulling petals from a daisy, murmuring, Loves me, loves me not. Karen will make a choice—left or right—either moving toward her husband or moving toward Brian. He wills her to turn right, clenching up his face in concentration, trying to manipulate her muscles, her very bones, and when they appear to listen to him, sending her up the hill, toward him, he feels his expression go through a remarkable transformation. His eyes go wide. His face loosens, slack with bewilderment. And then his lips pull back and a smile creeps up his cheeks. He is smiling. He touches it as if to marvel at its rareness.

  Karen grows larger in the scope until he can see a crooked lower tooth, the pores on her nose, flashing in and out of sight as the trees interrupt his view. She is moving closer. Soon she will pass the road where he is parked. But he doesn’t worry about her spotting him. He almost welcomes it, imagining her pace slowing, her arm rising in a wave, the bright flash of a smile on her face to match his.

  JUSTIN

  His father is a creature of habit. Anything outside the familiar he labels “different.” Sushi. Soccer. Rap music. Even in the wilderness, the place he goes to escape, he seeks out what he knows. There, he will point out to Justin, a thatch of willows from which they once chopped branches for roasting marshmallows. Or there, at the top of that tree, the tangled nest that looks like steel wool, where the osprey returns year after year.

  For as long as they have been visiting the Ochocos, they have made their camp in Echo Canyon, along the South Fork of the John Day River. Aside from the occasional Forest Service truck grumbling down a nearby logging road, they rarely see anyone and his father considers the spot his own.

  To remember the exact location, he has blaze-marked a pine with his hatchet. “Keep an eye out,” he says now—and then yells, “There!” indicating the tree with the wound scabbed over by hard orange sap. They pull off the road and park under its branches.

  Justin climbs from the Bronco—followed by Graham and the dog—and pauses. It is the air. It feels, it tastes, so good to breathe. Whenever he comes here, he can’t get used to it: how the air somehow seems older than other air, like the breath of a stone drawn from a glacial stream. It seems to carry sounds farther, more sharply. A pinecone falling. The whisk of an owl’s wings when it leaves a branch. The wind sighing through a spiderweb. A coyote gnawing on a bone.

  A deer. Justin can hear it coming from a long way off, pushing its way through the trees. And then it appears at the edge of the road and steps cautiously onto the gravel. None of them moves and the buck doesn’t see them. It has a heavy, lengthy throwback rack that forms a crown. Its eyes and its snout are black and damp. Even from a distance of thirty yards, they can see its muscles tightening and loosening beneath its hide.

  They stand like this for some time, and then his father tires of the reverie and bangs shut the driver-side door. The buck startles at the sound, stepping clumsily backward, before trotting away, back into the forest, vanishing between the trees midleap, as if its antlers fit just so. Justin watches his father watch it go. His expression carries a mixture of envy and hunger. Even as he dreams a bullet into its hide, he admires the beauty of its architecture, its speed.

  He comes around the front of the Bronco and joins them. In the way of fathers on 1950s television shows, he brings his hand to Graham’s head and messes his hair. “Maybe we’ll run into him tomorrow, hey?” he says.

  Graham plays the dutiful grandson, smiling even as he tries with his fingers to comb his hair back into its proper place.

  Before they set off into the woods, Justin glances back at the Bronco. Anyone who drives by will see it and will be able to find them, if they wanted to, something he might have once found reassuring. But not today, not with Seth’s hateful face lingering in his mind.

  They tramp along, loaded down with rifles and poles and tents and backpacks, his father casually listing off every piece of vegetation, the wild white onions and yarrow and Queen Anne’s lace. He knows the name of everything. When Justin was a boy, his father would quiz him regularly. Doing so brought order to a wilderness that would have otherwise appeared swarming and impenetrable. Now Graham has his book out and is frantically leafing through its pages, following up on everything his grandfather tells him.

  The trees open up. Justin expects to find the vast bear grass meadow that runs up into the thatch of willows growing along the South Fork, and next to it, their old fire pit, probably with a few weeds growing through its ashes. They find something else entirely.

  A hundred yards away, at the far edge of the meadow, near the old logging road, stands a backhoe holding in its scoop a block of dark earth it extracted from the neat hole beneath it. Nearby squat two diggers, a payloader, and a bulldozer, their broad metal shovels gleaming dangerously in the sun, like sabers lifted before the charge of a squadron. Next to them stand
s a bright blue Porta-Potty. The grass of the meadow has been spray painted in great hieroglyphic designs that predict what will become of the canyon.

  Normally they would veer right, toward the nearby river, but without a word Justin’s father continues forward, flattening a path in the grass. Justin and Graham follow while the dog wanders around, sometimes ahead and sometimes behind, always panting. His whole body seems to wag along with his tail as he sniffs at a clump of lupin and pees on a molehill and pops his jaw at a grasshopper and barks at a yellow-bellied marmot that chatters its warning from a nearby burrow.

  They tour the work site silently. All around them the grass is trampled down and decorated with trash. A crumpled-up bag from McDonald’s. An empty Skoal tin. Cigarette butts. Justin’s father picks up a crushed Coke can, examining it as if it were some curious artifact, before tossing it over his shoulder.

  Justin’s wife often teases him for the way he blinks rapid-fire whenever taken aback. And he is aware of the habit now, when his eyelids shutter open and closed repeatedly, as if to remove some grit from his vision. Blinking is all he can think to do. He has always thought of this place as the very definition of wild. To see all this human evidence overlying it seems wrong, mismatched, like green grass poking through a snowdrift.

  A tall stand of pines edges the meadow and each tree has a pink X spray painted across its trunk. A dozen have already been sawed down—their stumps pulled from the ground, leaving behind gaping cavities a man could lie down inside—to accommodate the passage of the equipment from the road to the meadow. Justin can smell sap and damp soil. Sawdust, nearly white, decorates the ground like freshly fallen snow. Survey markers are planted here and there. It is difficult to imagine what will happen within the next few weeks, months, years.

  This coming Monday a legion of men in Carhartt jackets and steel-toe boots will swarm the canyon, logging and brush-clearing. Bobby wants the entire canyon cleaned out before Christmas, beginning the project before the year turns over for tax purposes. And then, come spring, after the snow melts, roads will be laid down on a primitive basis, followed by utilities. As soon as electricity hisses beneath the forest floor, Justin’s father and his crew will tap into it and begin work on the lodge, which Bobby wants to house a pro shop, a restaurant, a bar, a banquet hall, and fifty rooms. By next fall the spec homes will go up and retired Californians wearing polo shirts will begin buying up the lots.

  Graham approaches a spray-painted pine. He reaches his camera to his eye and snaps a photo.

  “What did you do that for?” Justin’s father says.

  “What for?” With the camera still poised to shoot, Graham rotates on his heel and takes another photo, this one of his grandfather hooking his thumb in his belt.

  “What kind of picture is that?”

  Graham lets the camera hang loose around his neck and shrugs.

  “You want to be working for the National Geographic, you should be taking a picture of an elk on top of a mountain or something. Now that would be a picture.”

  Graham stands there another moment, waiting to see if his grandfather has anything more to say, and then asks what the X means.

  “It means it’s marked,” his grandfather says. “Like a buck in the crosshairs.” He kicks vaguely at the shovel of a tractor. The impact creates a dull bong that sends Boo into a barking fit. “Shut up, Boo.” By some trick of the light he looks ten years older. There is a distant expression on his face that betrays feelings of regret or sadness or something else. Resignation, perhaps.

  The pine doesn’t know what will happen to it. It will remain unsuspecting, pumping its sap and stretching its roots farther and farther into the soil, until the saw hits its bark. And when that happens, when the saw screams and the wood chips fan from the cut, its future will disappear. The wind will no longer run through its needles like fingers through hair. Birds will no longer roost in its branches. Hunters will no longer pause in its shade to pull from a water bottle or a cigarette. Instead the tree will be felled, its branches sliced off. The log will be collected, stacked on a flatbed, and choked with chains, driven to a mill and sectioned into boards that will end up part of somebody’s dining room or fence or pool cue or gun cabinet or maybe the dresser drawer where they keep their socks rolled into balls. And isn’t that the real mystery of life: who you’ll end up being consumed by? Or what you’ll end up consuming?

  Justin’s father looks around him as if the canyon has been made suspect, as if he will never see it correctly again. It bothers them both to think of the canyon as a hazy memory that they’ll struggle to organize a year from now: Where was that place we used to camp? That bend of the river that offered the best trout?

  “Fuck,” he says.

  “Dad.”

  “What?”

  Justin jogs his eyes at Graham. “Language.”

  His father dismisses him with a wave. “Nothing wrong with dropping a cuss here and there, so long as you keep your mouth clean around the girls.”

  “You never let me swear growing up.”

  “Look what happened.” Again he messes Graham’s hair, and this time, when Graham goes to neaten it, his grandfather snatches his hand and shakes his head, no. “This little guy could use some roughness about him.”

  Maybe it is the builder in him, the way he determines the weakness of things, looking at people the way he might look at houses, noting water intrusion or uneven flooring. It certainly informed his parenting. Justin remembers when his father took him to a slaughterhouse. At the time he was a little older than Graham. He had left out a package of hamburger that spoiled and his father saw their field trip as a remedy for such carelessness.

  He remembers the smell of the slaughterhouse—of animal sweat and shit mixed up with the minerally sourness of blood. He remembers the clattering of hooves and machinery, the high-pitched screams of the dying—all of it echoing throughout the vast chamber like a horrible music played from red-lunged accordions and drum sets constructed from bone.

  BRIAN

  His first few weeks back in central Oregon he spent much of his time changing bandages, applying salve to the wound that continually dried out and cracked and sent a trickle of blood into his eye so that his vision went red, and then with a blink, clear.

  Every day he would crawl into the Jeep he had bought thirdhand in high school and drive around, needing the speed, the distance between him and the rest of the world. He kept the windows down and let the air bully its way into the cab, down his throat, hot and dry and flavored with the familiar taste of sage and juniper. The world tasted the same but looked different, the plateaus and buttes stacked up like slabs of meat, the ponderosas scabbed over with bark the color of dried blood. The bandage that patched his skull would flutter against the wind and one time tore off entirely, sucked out the window, into the day, where a clump of rabbitbrush caught it and june bugs and fire ants and bluebottle flies drank of the red wetness collected in it.

  During this time it was difficult to shop for groceries and order a burger and get mail from the mailbox and even speak to people—about weather, politics, the price of gas—those things that seemed so irrelevant. Being ordinary was difficult, almost startling. He felt as he used to, as a teenager, after a long day of skiing Mount Bachelor, when sprawled out on the couch or lying in bed, his thighs would seize up, his knees would bend, imagining the rise and fall of snow-groomed trails. His body couldn’t realize that it had slowed down, that the white huddled shapes of trees weren’t rushing past.

  This was why he drove and stomped his foot against the accelerator: to maintain his speed. And then his father died and slowed everything down again.

  He found his father in the driveway, in the truck, the engine still running. He had backed up into a juniper tree and remained there long enough for the tailpipe to scorch the bark. His body slumped against the door. Slowly Brian approached the truck. Through the window he could see first his hair, the color of cigarette ash, and then below it, the emptine
ss of his face, and knew him to be dead. His mouth was open and his tongue hung from it. His left eye was a tiny red planet. A rope of blood ran from his nose. An aneurysm, the doctor said.

  His father had put the truck in reverse and turned around in his seat to eye the long curve of the driveway and a vessel at the base of his brain burst. Just like that. Something he had done a thousand times before—the safest thing in the world—had killed him. It was like getting lung cancer from pouring cereal or choking to death when checking e-mail: it didn’t make sense or seem fair. Especially considering what Brian had walked away from, dented and spoiled, but alive. At the funeral many people said his father was with God, which meant God was death. Afterward he did not cry. He only felt profoundly lonely and staggered around the house, peering into rooms, trying their doorknobs to see if they were locked.

  JUSTIN

  When they approach the river, Boo freezes. “You see that?” Justin’s father says, nodding in the dog’s direction. “He’s sighted something. Maybe a ptarmigan or a grouse.”

  It is another thirty yards to where Boo points, his body black and rigid, his snout indicating something hidden along the edge of the meadow, where the bear grass gives way to willow thickets. “At ease.” The dog relaxes his pose and wags his tail but keeps his eyes focused ahead of him.

  Here is a stand of willows, and beyond it, their fire pit. A tent crouches next to it, a brown vinyl dome tent, the kind that might have been purchased from a hardware shop in the late seventies. Its front flap is unzippered, gaping and fleshy and trembling, like an old man’s mouth.