The Wilding: A Novel

by Benjamin Percy

  He clips a magpie and its wings open and close like a black hand. He shoots a marmot and it scurries a few paces with its sides gushing blood. Between shots he pumps the lever and the smoking brass shells land between his boots.

  Low-throated laughter rises from Justin’s father. He loops an arm around Graham’s neck and squeezes him tight in what appears to be half headlock, half hug. “You’re one good kid.”

  Justin watches from a short distance and notices the pink flush of his son’s skin, so different from his normal complexion—the pale yellow of an onion—resulting from his spending so much time inside, tapping at the keyboard or Photoshopping his pictures or leafing through a book.

  It is almost supernatural, how comfortable Graham seems with the rifle. Justin remembers when he was that age, the long hours he spent in the backyard, stapling paper targets to trees and firing at them until his shoulder darkened to a purple shade of bruise. Back then, he had always tried to obey his father, performing his best imitation of him, without ever pulling it off completely, like a clumsy marionette whose movements are obviously dictated by wires and wood. Graham is different. He is not a mimic. He is a student. He learns what he needs to know by asking questions and listening, like he is doing right now—aim over the target when shooting uphill, hold low when shooting downhill—and Justin worries what this might mean for him—this education—and how he might emerge from it changed.

  Justin’s father says, gloating, “You see? And you didn’t even want to give it to him!” He then picks up one of the shells and walks to the tree, the one Graham has shot. A yellow trail of pitch oozes from the bullet hole, sweetening the air. With a stick Justin’s father digs a hole in the ground, maybe five inches deep. He drops the shell in it like a seed. “There,” he says. “To mark the occasion. Now if we come back in ten years, the shell will still be there. It’ll be the same, but we’ll be different.”

  “Good job, Graham,” Justin says.

  Graham smiles and then gazes proudly at the rifle. “It’s a really good gun.”

  “Sure is.”

  “Do you want to hold it?” he says, as if Justin were the child.

  “Why not?” When Justin takes it, the metal is hot and he jerks his hand down to its stock and tries not to cry out.

  BRIAN

  When Brian was fourteen, he came home from school with a black eye. This wasn’t the first time. The other kids would call him shorty, small fry, half stack, oompa-loompa, and he would try to shrug it off, try not to let their words bother him, but they would always keep at it and after a time he wouldn’t be able to hold back.

  This was soon after his mother lit out for Eugene, and lately his father had been trying too hard to be a father. Clapping his son on the back. Calling him buddy. Talking loudly about trucks and fishing and basketball. When he saw the black eye, he grabbed his son by the chin and eyed him closely and asked what happened. Brian shrugged and said, “Some shit.” They went out then and bought some boxing gloves, black ones, so that his father might teach Brian the old one-two combo followed by a roundhouse.

  In their backyard he told Brian, “Stand like you stand when shooting a gun.” He placed one foot in front of the other. “It’s the same principle.” He lifted his right glove before his mouth and positioned his left next to his cheek. “Now put up your dukes. Now bend your knees and bounce on your toes. Good. Now hit me.” Brian took a step forward and hesitated. “Hit me,” his father said. “Hit me, you puss.”

  This was the first time his father had ever called him a name. Brian felt a stab upon hearing it and jabbed his father in the belly. “Harder. Like you mean it.” Brian swung with everything he had. His father stepped aside with his leg angled out to trip. The force of Brian’s swing carried him over it and he lay sprawled out in the dirt. “Get up.” Brian did as he was told, a bit hot and watery around the eyes. “You punch like a girl. Punch like you got balls.” His tone was almost furious.

  Brian forgot about his stance, his gloves, and lunged, swinging like a street fighter. His father’s body, so huge compared to his, eluded Brian with a few quick steps. His father faked a shot to his chest and Brian flinched and cowered, pitched forward by the pain he anticipated.

  “Come on,” his father said. “I haven’t even hit you and you’re acting like I hit you. You’re practically bawling.” Brian tried to calm himself, to breathe. He assumed the classic boxer pose and sprang forward and his father short-punched him in the mouth. Brian didn’t know if it was the pain or the shock or the humiliation, but he went down—with a clash of his teeth—and stayed down, crying.

  He remembers a deep purplish blood rushing all over his gloves when he put them to his mouth, as if his father’s fist had tapped the deepest blood in his body. “Oh, no,” his father said. “No, no, no.” Pulling off his gloves, pulling Brian into a hug. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” Both of them crying.

  Later, his front tooth turned gray, eventually fell out, and Brian woke up with twenty dollars under his pillow. His smile had a hole in it for over a year before the orthodontist implanted a false tooth whiter and squarer than the rest. During this time he learned not to smile. He learned how to talk by barely moving his lips.

  Sometimes he thinks about the hole—how vulnerable it made him feel, how his tongue constantly probed it—when he hunches before locks to prick them with his tools. Every house is a mouth. Her house is a mouth.

  JUSTIN

  Justin’s father fills his backpack and Graham’s with Nalgene water bottles, bags of trail mix, peanut butter sandwiches, a first-aid kit, waterproof matches, a poncho, a compass, bungee cords, Bushnell binoculars. Justin will carry the Gerber Reserve Insulator, a bulky, many-pocketed backpack full of freezer bags and freezer packs, to collect and keep cool the meat they hope to harvest. Years ago, they never would have needed it, since by October a thin blanket of snow inevitably covered these mountains. He remembers icicles dangling like blue fangs from tree branches and rock overhangs. Frost ornamenting pinecones. The river clotted up with ice. This afternoon the temperature will rise into the seventies. Meat will spoil quickly.

  His father pulls from his rucksack three blaze orange caps and tosses them to Justin and Graham and they try them on and then take them off to adjust their plastic bands and fit them snugly onto their heads. They pull on vests of a matching color. “The pumpkin brigade,” Justin’s father calls them.

  Justin finds the bottle of Hawaiian Tropic his wife packed and splats a dollop into his hand. He dips his thumb into this and dots Graham on the forehead, nose, cheeks, and ears, and tells him to rub it into his skin, while Justin makes the same pattern on his own face. The smell of coconut fills the air and Boo trots over to sniff them. Justin offers the sunscreen to his father but he refuses it. “For kids.”

  Just as they are about to sling their packs onto their shoulders and set off into the woods, they startle at a noise—the burst and scree and tinkle of broken glass. It comes from the far side of the meadow, where a man moves among the tractors carrying a crowbar. Justin’s father brings his hand to his forehead and makes a visor of it, watching the man climb onto the yellow hood of a bulldozer and cock his crowbar and swing and shatter the windshield so that the glass rains all around him and catches the light. He knocks the crowbar around inside the frame of the bulldozer, removing all the stray teeth of glass that have not come loose with his initial hit. Then he swings his crowbar in a half circle, as though it were a samurai sword, and pretends to sheathe it. He goes to the bright blue outhouse and gives it a shove. It rocks one way and then the other, teetering, finally toppling over with a thunk and shoosh when he heaves his weight against it a second time. Beyond him, through the trees, sits a cherry red pickup with jacked-up tires and a smiling silver grill.

  Without a word, Justin’s father snatches up his rifle and starts across the meadow at a fast clip. Of course he does not slow when Justin calls out to him. What choice does Justin have—now and so many times before—but
to follow? His rifle rests on a log, as though sunning itself. His hand hesitates before grasping it. “Stay here,” he tells Graham and then throws the strap over his shoulder, rather than carrying the rifle diagonally, as a soldier would, as his father did.

  He recognizes the man—the cashier from the gas station. Seth, his name tag had read. Like the noise the snake in their tent made. Sethhhh. He remembers his arms, their surging muscle seemingly capable of cracking the bones that held them in place. He had obviously felt a lot of anger toward them, just as he had obviously gotten a great deal of pleasure out of frightening Justin, when he leaned across the counter with a forbidding look on his face. Perhaps now, watching them approach him, he is pleased again.

  When they hurry their feet through the grass, it makes a whispering sound, as if the forest is, blade by blade, stone by stone, tree by tree, turning its attention to them. His father is breathing loudly, perhaps out of anger or perhaps out of exhaustion, winded by his fast pace and the thin mountain air. And then they are upon Seth, who waits with a guarded expression.

  “Howdy,” Seth says, wide-faced and staring hard at Justin’s father and his rifle. He wears a red tank top and tight blue jeans, his muscles unnaturally large and defined, like a grotesque anatomy lesson. He has hopped down from the bulldozer and leans against his crowbar as if it were a cane.

  A dripping sound comes from the fallen outhouse and fills the silence. All around them glass sparkles in the grass like glitter. On the bulldozer, where the windshield should reflect the orange glow of midmorning, a shadow lies instead, like an empty eye socket.

  “You enjoying yourself?” Justin’s father says in a joking, angry way.

  Seth smiles and gives a slow-motion swing of his crowbar. “As a matter of fact.”

  All the joking has fallen out of Justin’s father’s voice when he says, “Get out of here.”

  “Funny, I was going to tell you the same thing.”

  Justin is standing a little behind his father, but he steps forward now. “I got a kid here.”

  “You think I care, Bend,” Seth says. And Justin sees how it is: he is not a person, he is a stand-in for a community, a way of life that seems foreign and intrusive to so many who grew up around here. “I don’t.”

  Justin’s father lifts his rifle and draws a bead on Seth’s chest. “I said get out of here and I meant it.”

  In this moment Justin has the sudden sense of the world shifting, of morals and laws and civilized human behavior knocked out of place, vanishing in the stead of something wilder. He’s reminded now of Katrina. When the levees broke, so did social order. Rape. Pillage. Burn. Fire a .22 from your roof. Check the pocket of a dead man for his wallet. Doesn’t take much to take us there, Justin thinks. Is his father capable of killing someone? Undoubtedly yes.

  “You see my grandson over there.” Justin’s father humps his chin in Graham’s direction without taking his eyes off of Seth. “You don’t want him to see what the inside of your skull looks like, do you?”

  “You’d never do that,” Seth says. “I could walk right up to that rifle and stick my finger in it and you’d never do a thing.”

  “Come on and try.”

  “You’re so full of it.”

  Then his father swings the barrel left and fires. The crack of the gunshot is followed by the chime of glass shattering, falling from the red pickup, its left headlight destroyed.

  For a moment Seth stares at his truck. “You’ll fucking pay for that,” he says. Then, without even a glance, he walks away. He climbs into the cab and the engine roars to life. He crushes the accelerator and kicks up a plume of cinder and the sunlight twinkles off his side mirror when he retreats from them, lost finally among the trees.

  Justin’s father lowers his rifle. “I think I won that conversation.” He is smiling. He is proud of what he has done. Sometimes Justin wonders if he sees his fellow humans as anything more than complicated animals, not so different from a deer or a wolf, knitted together with the same sinew but in another design.

  They set off with their rifles strapped to their backs. They hike along the South Fork—past where it tears along in white rapids, groping at the boulders and logs, trying to carry them downstream—until it widens and calms and goes glassy with eddies in which pine needles pool.

  Boo climbs out onto a scarred jawbone of a rock and drinks messily from the river before sniffing at its muddy banks where the tracks of a toad shorten and then vanish, surrounded by the fern-like impression of wings, where an owl swooped down to make its breakfast. They pause here to drink from their Nalgene bottles and while Graham studies the tracks in the mud Justin says to his father, “I don’t know how I feel about leaving our camp unattended.”

  “Even if he did come back, which he won’t, what’s he going to do? Break one of our pots? Piss on our sleeping bags? Big deal.”

  “You pointed a gun at him.”

  “Ah,” he says. “That kind of shit happens all the time out here. It’s no worse offense than giving somebody the finger.”

  They step over roots and rocks and through the bright shards of sunlight lying like jigsaw pieces all over the ground. Every now and then a cloud passes over the sun at the very moment Justin steps into one of these jigsaw pieces so that its light goes out suddenly. One moment he is stepping into a square of brightness; the next he is pausing in a sudden dark. Camp-robber birds hop and flutter through the woods around them, unseen, like something pacing them.

  Justin’s father stops before a tree with a jagged black vein running down its middle. “You know the Indians used to douse their arrowheads with rattlesnake blood and charcoal taken from a tree struck by lightning.” He licks his thumb and runs it across the trunk. It comes away black. He traces it along the lip of his rifle, as if it were a crystal he wants to bring a sound from. Then he faces Graham and stabs his thumb against his forehead, pushing him back a step and leaving behind an inky smudge. “Now we’re ready.”

  They continue forward, stepping over fallen pinecones and branches, the litter of last night’s storm. Chipmunks dart forward to investigate their presence, then scatter into the underbrush. Every now and then his father pauses to study some tracks on the trail, rain-blurred but recent. They see the places where the deer have peeled away strips of bark from the river willows, where they have left their stool, where they have bedded down.

  Justin catches Graham looking off into the woods, as if sensing something, maybe worrying over the man with the crowbar or the story his grandfather shared with them last night.

  The basalt walls are pitted with holes from wind erosion or from the bubbling of gases long ago. These holes catch the shadows and look like the eye sockets of the earth. They follow a zigzagging series of switchbacks toward the top of the canyon, and as they do, sagebrush replaces bear grass and the soil steadily loses its moisture and around their boots the dust hangs in heavy clouds. His father casts a great shadow that Justin steps on when following him up and up and up.

  Finally they gain the rim of the canyon. Here the ground is cobbled with black lava rock that falls off into the long, wide, thickly wooded gulf. They stand gazing out over it. The sun has not reached a high enough angle to illuminate its bottom. It is a little like looking into the future, looking into the canyon. While they stand fully exposed in the daylight, below them it is already night. Or always night.

  The wind rushes fast-moving clouds through the sky and makes a hissing sound in the branches. It whips their clothes tight against their bodies and traces patterns in the dust, making the ground seem alive with its subtle movement. Justin misses the calmness at the bottom of the canyon and wishes the wind would stop. It feels intrusive, almost threatening, like some heavy-pawed beast blundering through the woods, rustling bushes and straining the branches of trees in its hurried passage.

  They continue along the edge for a good hundred yards until Justin’s father stops next to a stone cairn. Justin imagines he is studying it and conjuring in his mind the
pioneer or Indian who has piled the stones one on top of the other, while perhaps fancying that he sees some part of himself in them, trekking into an uncultivated territory to leave his mark with a bullet, and later, a building.

  Justin doesn’t say, “Dad?” for another few seconds until he notices his face has gone deeply red, approaching a sort of blackness, infected by shadow. Justin hurries to his side.

  At Justin’s touch he hunches forward, his knee knocking the stones loose from the cairn to scatter all over the ground, and when Justin says, “Dad?” again his father does not respond, lost in his private pain. One hand clutches his thigh and the other beats at invisible things in the air. He seems suddenly to lose weight, so that his coat hangs around his shoulders rather than hugging his broad back tightly. His skin goes from red to brown to gray-yellow in the space of a few seconds, those seconds like the turning of seasons, wintering his appearance.

  And then he’s better. He shakes his head as if to free some water from it, to clear his vision, and then he smiles weakly. “Just a little engine trouble. All better now.” He takes a deep breath and then another and this seems to inflate him. “All better.” He stands up straight, then hunches forward slightly, weighed down by pain or weakness.

  “Look at me,” Justin says. “Dad?”

  His eyes are empty, his pupils dilated like bullet holes entering into the blackness of his skull. Graham grabs Justin by the shirtsleeve and says, in a choked voice, “What’s wrong with Grandpa?”

  “Everything’s fine. Just shut up for a second.” He shakes off his son, who reaches for him again, before withdrawing.

  Justin calls out to his father several times before his body stiffens and he pushes Justin away, saying, “I’m here, I’m here.”

  “Should I call someone? I think I should call someone.”

  He raises his hand; it says as clearly as words, Don’t.