The Wilding: A Novel

by Benjamin Percy

  “Yes.”

  “Can I ask you a weird question?”

  “Yes.”

  The words come slowly. “Does that deer know he’s a deer? Or is he just like a tree. Or something. Like, does he even think about anything? When he got shot—”

  “You shot him,” Justin says, the English teacher in him interrupting, wanting his son to take ownership of his language and recognize what he has done. Not to shame him, but to edify him.

  Graham nods and chews a dried strip of skin from his lip. “When I shot him, did he think I’m dying?”

  What does it feel like to be hunted—he wants to know—to be a deer staring down the wrong end of a rifle, to feel a bullet puncture your skin and mushroom inside you, ripping open your guts, breaking through bone? It is an important question.

  His grandfather answers. “Graham. Listen to me. This is what it thinks: I’m hungry. And I’m tired. And I’m going to shit now. That’s what it thinks. But it doesn’t think like you and me think. It’s just meat and bone.” And then he sighs and runs a hand thoughtfully through his beard and surprises Justin by making a leaf-in-the-wind motion with his hand. “Come over here.”

  Graham goes to him and his grandfather takes him under his outstretched arm. “I want you to do something for me. I want you to get down on your knees. And then I want you to put your hands together. Now say a prayer. Be thankful.”

  Thankful for the deer’s sacrifice or thankful for his true aim or thankful for the thrill of the hunt—Justin isn’t sure—but they bow their heads and close their eyes, praying an old family prayer—“The Lord has been good to me, and so I thank the Lord”—while the blood soaks into the soil and Boo chews his way through a femur and the birds sequestered above them mutter among themselves.

  Afterward, Graham seems a little better. Rather than choking the barrel of his rifle with both hands, as if trying to wring the oil from it, he slings it over his shoulder and examines the deer more closely, running his palm along its fur and prodding the bullet hole with his thumb.

  They take pictures. Justin’s father borrows the camera from Graham and instructs him to stand behind the deer and rest his foot on top of its shoulder.

  “There. This is a great angle. You in shadow, the deer in the sun. It’s a great picture. Seriously.” He takes the camera away from his eye a moment and studies Graham with a directorial gaze. “Do me a favor? Take the rifle and brace it against your hip, so that it’s aimed upward at, like, a forty-five-degree angle.”

  Graham does as he is told and his grandfather says, “Now look like a badass.”

  Graham stares at him blankly. And then his face slowly changes shape—his eyes narrowing, his upper lip curling—as he tries to make it an Eastwood moment.

  “Perfect.” His grandfather raises his free hand, his thumb and forefinger coming together as a circle. The flash blinks three times before filling the air with light and Graham’s eyes glimmer red for an instant, like an animal surprised by headlights on a nighttime country road.

  His grandfather studies the camera, turning it over in his hands, before approaching Graham. “Now push the button that lets me see it.”

  Graham takes the camera and fiddles with its controls until he brings the photograph up on the screen.

  “Now that’s a picture.” His grandfather massages his shoulders. “Taking photos like that, you’ll make it into Field and Stream no problem.”

  “National Geographic,” Graham says.

  “National Geographic, eat your heart out.”

  They regard each other so that for a moment Justin feels excluded. And then, from above, comes a great flapping and cawing as the birds fly suddenly from their perch. Justin looks up in time to see their departing blackness and what might be a dark, massive head leaning over the edge and then pulling back out of sight. Justin remembers the claw marks and remembers the seemingly fresh pictographs and feels his skin tighten all over. Dust and pebbles fall all around them with a hissing and ticking and then everything goes quiet.

  Justin’s father stares skyward for a long time, waiting for something. When it doesn’t come, he pulls his knife from his belt—its blade scored with cuts and its handle stained by so many years of blood—and says, “Time to open this deer up and see what it’s made of.”

  Justin’s father guides Graham through the cleaning. First he jabs the knife into the deer. The moist insult of metal connecting with flesh has always made Justin cringe, but Graham leans closer to watch as its belly unzips and his grandfather reaches inside the incision to withdraw the gut sack, holding it out before him like some freakish birth, gray and oblong and bulging, then laying it aside. Graham prods it with a bone and it breaks open and makes the air rank with a smell like wet feathers and spoiled gravy.

  Justin occupies himself by clearing away a section of the boneyard, enough to reveal the narrow stream that comes to life beneath it so that they might wash the blood from the meat and the viscera from their hands. He wears an insulated backpack and shrugs it off now and pulls from it a box of ziplock freezer bags. Into these he drops the liver and the heart, still warm even after Graham dunks them in springwater.

  Later, Justin’s father will hoist the deer onto his shoulders and with blood oozing down his back carry it through the chute and into the main canyon, where they will find a skinning tree. He will tie a noose around its antlers and hoist it into the air and show Graham the whitish membrane that binds the hide to the muscle and bring a blade to it and make a sawing motion until enough of it comes loose for him to grab and pull and force apart with a sound like a big Band-Aid pulled slowly off a damp wound. And the deer will hang naked, its muscles’ color somewhere between red and purple, its rump padded with white fat.

  But that will come later.

  Right now, with his hands gloved in blood, he rises from his crouch and stands before the wall of the grotto. He appears to be studying the rock art. Then he lifts his hand to the basalt and begins to add his own cipher, dipping his hand occasionally into the deer to refresh his paint supply. After a time Graham copies him. And then so does Justin—all of them going to work on the rock. They start in with soft hesitant strokes that turn rougher and before long their hands move as fast as their muscles will allow, painting bloody swirls and bloody blobs and big bloody eyes that come together in a kind of mural.

  Justin feels gripped by a reckless idea. The darkness of the woods and the thrill of the hunt and the wildness of his father have torn away some protective seal inside him; he cannot control himself. For a moment, just a moment, he forgets about his mortgage payment, his shaggy lawn, his Subaru and the groaning noise it makes when he turns left, his desk and the pile of ungraded papers waiting on it. All of that has gone someplace else, replaced by an urge, a wildness.

  “Hey, Dad? Know what I think would be a good color on you?” His father gives him a fleeting look just as Justin scoops up a handful of blood and palms it into his face as you would a pie. “Red!”

  His father recoils until the wall stops him. Justin was smiling, but now his smile fails as he wonders what kind of spirit has overtaken him, as he tries to read his father’s expression, a red mask. He runs his fingers along his cheeks and they track flesh-toned lines through the blood. “I always knew you were crazy,” Paul says. Blood oozes into his mouth and he spits it out. Then he reaches into the pile of viscera and laughingly hurls a lung at Justin and it knocks the hat off his head.

  And for a while, they are close as his father has always wanted them to be close, in that old-time way, like the men in Western movies, affectionately slugging each other, belly-laughing around the campfire.

  The dried blood makes a gruesome brown lacework of their skin so that they hardly recognize each other when they return to camp carrying their insulated packs laden with quartered meat. They empty the venison into their five-day cooler and arrange the freezer packs throughout the stacks of chops and steaks and roasts to preserve them.

  Then they rummage thro
ugh the tent, joking about snakes, as they collect clean jeans and T-shirts and underwear and go down to the river and peel off their blood-encrusted clothes and step naked into water so cold it takes away their breath and makes them whoop and shiver. They splash at each other and then take up handfuls of sand from the river bottom and use it to scrub away the blood and sweat until their skin glows clean and pink. As the red husk falls away from Justin, dissolved and carried downstream, he feels his earlier wildness subside, his senses return.

  Around them, as the afternoon wanes, the land mellows into green and gold colors. In the fire pit they arrange a knee-high teepee of sticks. His father strikes a wooden match and drops it into a cluster of brown pine needles and they catch flame with a crackling noise. The flames work their way up the sticks and when they burn a white-hot color Justin sets a log into the fire and the flames take to it, too. His father retrieves some Coors from a rock cairn he built in the river. He hands one to Justin and another to Graham.

  “Um,” Justin says. “How about no?”

  “Come on,” his father says, his voice taking on a confidential buddy-buddy tone. He cracks the tab of his can. Beer foams out the top and when he slurps at it some of the foam sticks to his beard. “What’s wrong with you? Come on. Let him have a beer. Don’t be a puss. Don’t be a girl. We’ve got to make him into a man. That’s why I brought him out here. That’s why you brought him out here, isn’t it?”

  Justin isn’t sure he can answer that question; it’s what he’s been struggling to answer since they climbed out of the Bronco.

  “Why else, if not to—”

  “Fine,” Justin says. “But just one.” He holds out his index finger to indicate the number and then drops it into a point aimed at Graham’s chest. “Again, your mother, she shouldn’t hear about this.”

  “I won’t tell.” He turns the beer over several times as if he has never seen one before. He opens it gently, the tab hissing, then popping. When he takes his first sip, his face registers some displeasure at the taste, but he doesn’t complain.

  They drink the beers—so cold—and then Graham and his grandfather go into the surrounding woods to gather fistfuls of wild onions. They chop them into fingernail-sized bits and fry them with butter until they caramelize, and they taste good, like candy, alongside the venison steaks browned over the fire. Even as they take pleasure in their dinner and enjoy the pleasant burn in their muscles, Justin scans the long dry ridges that hang over them, unable to shake the feeling that they are being watched by eyes they cannot see.

  “You’re eating what you killed,” Justin’s father says to Graham before popping a forkful of meat into his mouth. “That’s responsibility. That’s something to be proud of.”

  Graham cannot help but smile at the compliment, at the beer in his hand. Justin imagines his son has experienced today a glimpse of adulthood in all its loveliness and ugliness, the ugliness mostly forgotten as he rams his knife into his half-eaten steak and saws off another slice.

  The sun sinks through a reef of clouds and into the mountains and the sky flushes. The trees are green when they start dinner and as the sky grows darker they turn purple, then black. He pulls off his boots and his socks and enjoys the feel of the grass and the dirt, the prickly mound of it beneath his arches. His skin burns and so do his muscles, but in a pleasant way. An earned way. It has been so long since he has spent a full day under the sun, sweating, relying on his muscles as much as his mind. He thinks about this often: how the day-in, day-out routine of the classroom—the lectures, the papers, the conferences—feels insubstantial. Evenings, he looks back on his day feeling vacant, headachy, uncertain, and uncaring of what he has accomplished. Whereas now he feels very full indeed.

  He remembers how, when he was a child, he would often eat his dinner alone with his mother. He would ask where his father was, when he would get home, even though he knew the answer. He was at a construction site—operating a payloader, smoothing concrete with a trowel, telling somebody to do something. He would come home after dark and collapse on the couch with an exhausted smile on his face and a beer balanced on his chest. Justin always wondered about that smile; it wasn’t until he was an adult that he understood it. If his father experienced this sensation at the end of every day, well, there is something to be envied in that.

  BRIAN

  He wears the hair mask and nothing else when he goes to the hallway closet to drag out his dumbbells. He knows sleep is a long way off for him. And he knows that when he feels the poisons building up inside him, the best solution is to throw some weights around. He learned this in the military, the mindless rhythm of weight lifting, the therapy of it. He picks the weights up, he puts them back down, pleasuring in the heavy breathing, the clank when he slides another plate on the bar, the bright red explosion when a capillary bursts in his eye.

  The dumbbells weigh forty pounds each and he slings them up and down, working his biceps. The veins rise jaggedly from his neck and forearms. Beneath the mask his breath goes hoo-hee, hoo-hee.

  The television is tuned in to one of those shows where a poor family gets its home ripped apart and built again to suit its needs. Right now the host, a hyperactive man with bleached blond hair, is running through the demolished house with a bullhorn, yelling at the construction crew in a happy, psychotic voice. “We’ve got to hurry, people. We’ve only got two days to change this family’s lives.”

  He does push-ups. He does military press. He does squats and lunges and calf raises. He does triceps extensions followed by shoulder presses followed by upright rows followed by lateral raises, the weights growing heavier in his hands, making his palms go as red as the tip of his erection throbbing before him.

  He gets a beer. And then another. He drinks between sets and the living room takes on a hazy dreamlike quality. When he finally sets down the dumbbells, the show is nearly over. The family—six kids and a single mother with cancer—cries when touring its new home. It has a big-screen plasma and an aquarium built into the wall and a fire pole that reaches from the second story. Everyone has his or her own bedroom. The host has his arm around the mother, who smiles with tears racing down her cheeks. “This is a new beginning,” she says. “This is the life I always hoped for.”

  Brian shuts off the television and examines his reflection in its darkened screen, his muscles now pumped up with blood, trapped beneath his skin. Then he goes to pull on the rest of the suit.

  The drive takes ten minutes. In town, the streetlights give off tired circles of light at regular intervals, soon replaced by the darkness of the outlying roads. He has to focus to keep his wheels trained precisely. More than a few times he swerves onto the shoulder and the cinders tacking and clinking against the wheel startle him into correcting his course. He parks a hundred yards away, on that same service road as before. When he gets out of the truck and moves into the woods, toward the house, he doesn’t hurry or throw anxious glances over his shoulder. The night feels like such a familiar place for him. And the suit makes him feel invisible.

  The living room window swims with watery blue light cast by the television, like a nighttime pool. He creeps up to it and peers inside. He cannot find her at first. He looks for her in the usual places, on the couch, the recliner. Then some movement catches his eye and he rises up a little to find her on the rug, doing crunches. She wears a black sports bra and yoga pants. She is watching a food show, some sort of competition involving people with knives and white chef smocks. Her face is scrunched up in a look of pain, but she doesn’t pause, doesn’t rest, just keeps pulling her knees to her chest, holding her arms out for balance. Brian watches her do at least fifty before she finally falls back to the floor with a thump.

  Brian ducks behind a bush when a car grumbles by. Then he climbs the porch, trying to step as softly as he can. He expects the doorknob to be locked, and it is, and so he slides the key from his pocket and works it into the knob, which turns with a soft click. And just like that he is in the house, standing i
n a short hallway with a coat rack and mirror in it, the same collection of shoes he saw before. Outside another car goes by, its headlights sweeping across the house and making the mirror flash. Right then Brian’s reflection moves from shadow into light—the mask on his face suddenly evil and snarling—and he almost screams.

  Instead he takes a deep shuddering breath. As he does he can smell the smell of Karen: something lemony underlined by sweat. It’s the kind of smell he imagines a taste for.

  The lights are all off except in the kitchen. Just ahead of him, to his left, an archway opens into the living room. He peeks around it and takes in the layout of the room. Bookcases line the walls. A couch with laundry piled on it and a recliner with an end table carrying an unlit lamp. The television in the corner. And Karen on the floor, hurrying through another set of crunches.

  Her body is angled away from Brian so he can step into the room without being observed. She makes a little contended grunt with each crunch, her noise and the noise of the cooking show hiding his footsteps as he moves forward, crouching behind the loveseat. In the dim light of the television her skin looks soft, pale, like the inside of a wrist. Brian imagines clearing his throat to announce himself. He imagines what would happen next. She would scream and grab something—a lamp maybe—to brain him with, but then he would peel off his mask and she would say, “Oh,” and he would say, “Yes, it’s me,” and she would set down the lamp and look at him curiously—anxious, yes, but curious more than anything. After she scolded him, saying, “You could have knocked,” and after he apologized, saying, “I’m sorry. I just wanted to watch you. I like to watch you,” she would make a drink for both of them and before long he would lean in for a long sweet kiss that grew into something hungrier. The thought excites him. His erection is jammed painfully against his pants.

  And then the phone rings.