The Wilding: A Novel

by Benjamin Percy

  She is in the best shape of her life. Sometimes she stands naked before the mirror and studies her body. She is deeply tan except for the starkly defined paleness from her shorts and sports bra, her skin as white and damp after a hard run as something drawn from a shell. She stretches or walks in place just to see her body move and ripple, as if there was something trapped beneath the thin sheath of her skin.

  She likes the way she looks. And she knows other people do, too, knows her effect on men. She cannot go to Blockbuster without being trailed by a clerk asking if she prefers comedies or romance, cannot visit the grocery store without a stocker asking if she needs help finding anything. She likes the way she can turn a head, earn a smile. But there is a very thin line that divides feeling powerful and powerless, like now, when the man in the red Dodge truck slows to pace her. She tries to ignore him. He makes that impossible by rolling down his window, yelling, does she know how to drive stick?

  She doesn’t look at him but yells back, “I know how to read a license plate number.”

  With that he curses something, lost to the wind and the roar of the engine when he stomps on the accelerator. She wonders why so many men go through life thinking of themselves as predator and women as prey? She wonders where this comes from, this hunger, whether it is taught or inborn, a tooth-and-claw impulse that comes from that far-off time when we loped through the woods and slumbered in caves. Maybe this is why she enjoyed the locksmith so much. She could tell he desired her—but he was so small, which made his desire feel like a child’s, almost cute, certainly harmless.

  Of course she sees the same cruel hunger even in children, sees it in the schools she visits as a nutritionist. The other day, she was at Obsidian Junior High, seated at a table in the cafeteria with a junk food display. She had all sorts of gross-out trivia available, including a pile of fat, candlewax yellow, in a glass container—and a sign that equated it to a Whopper, large fries, and chocolate shake at Burger King. Every once in a while a student would stop by and say, “Gross,” or “How’s it going, Mrs. C?” but mostly they ignored her, walking by, their trays piled high with Tater Tots and fried chicken tenders. In the swirl of bodies, one girl caught her attention, a pimply girl with frizzy brown hair and a hen-shaped body. She looked already middle-aged, though couldn’t have been more than fourteen. She sat with her friends, all of them a little off, their eyeglasses thick and their teeth crooked, their haircuts and their clothes homemade. They were playing some sort of game—Pokemon or Magic, one of those—and the hen-shaped girl was standing up, bending over to study a cluster of cards. At a neighboring table, a group of boys wearing Nike apparel began to hoot and snicker and point their fingers, and at first Karen thought they were just being boys, just making some mean idiotic boy joke about a big ass. Then she noticed the red stain that crept down the thigh of the girl; she was wearing pale blue jeans against which the blood looked impossibly bright. She was having her period. She was having her period and didn’t realize it, hadn’t worn a pad, maybe never needed one before now.

  At first Karen did nothing. She wasn’t a teacher and wasn’t permanently based at any school, so she felt sometimes separate from what went on in the hallways and classrooms. So she watched the boys laughing and sneering, watched one of them dip a Tater Tot in ketchup and hurl it at the girl, watched it strike her head, clinging wetly to her hair. And then he threw another, and another, and soon the rest of the boys joined in, pelting the girl, her hair and back and ass. Karen watched all of this as if it were happening on television, as if the girl were a lame wildebeest and the boys long-jawed crocodiles. It was only after the girl began to stagger away with a slack expression on her face—wiping her hands across her shirt and pants, trying to clean away but instead smearing the ketchup—that Karen jumped up and raced toward the boys and slammed her hand down on their table and said to stop it—stop it, damn it—they ought to be ashamed of themselves.

  She fears for the girl. She will grow paler and fatter as time progresses. She will go to the community college. She will move into a one-bedroom apartment, and in its living room, an old wood-paneled television will stand along one wall, and along the other, guinea pigs, cages and cages of them stacked up like apartments. The carpet will be littered with wood shavings and shit pellets. She will work at the library or the DMV and her co-workers will talk behind her back about how she smells like celery and cedar and urine. She will die alone. This depresses the hell out of Karen. Because she knows the girl could do better. There are so many routes to run, so many paths to choose.

  Karen thinks about that often, the many different lives that could have been available to her. She could have married the boy she dated in high school, Doug, the lineman with the blue eyes, small teeth, and long, thin penis, in which case she might have stayed in Portland and died with him when a few years ago he head-onned a logging truck coming over the Santiam Pass. Or she might have used her college fund to travel to Europe, where she imagined herself walking slowly through museums and wearing tight black jeans and eating chocolate croissants at outdoor cafés. Or a few years ago she might have forgotten to change the batteries in the smoke detector and not known soon enough about the grease fire she started when she left the bacon on the stove too long and maybe the smoke inhalation would have left her brain damaged or maybe the flames would have scorched her face and made it appear melted. And within each of those possibilities nested a million other possibilities, every one of them dependent on whether a phone was answered, a step was icy, a door was locked, every one of them resulting in a different Karen, all the different versions of herself branching outward through time like the jumble of roadways and dirt paths available to her now, as paved with ambition as they are potholed and roadblocked with limitation, so that sometimes she feels she truthfully shouldn’t even bother and might as well lie on the couch all day and shovel Cherry Garcia ice cream into her mouth.

  Trees wall the roads she runs. Sunlight flashes through their branches and through the sunlight fall browned needles from the ponderosas and yellowed leaves from the birches and aspens. The rings on a tree, she knows, tell a story. A wet year brings a fat ring. A fire or disease or drought brings a thin ring. The tree grows around barbed wire, around stones, around snapped saw blades, swallowing them. She once heard a story of a logger who found a tooth deep inside a tree. She didn’t used to be so poisonous in her thinking. When she thinks of the toxins built up inside of her from so many years of eating carelessly, of the resentment that has grown steadily over fifteen years of marriage, of the stretch marks and the varicose veins that came from two pregnancies, only one of them fulfilled, she thinks the inside of her body must tell a story like a tree. Were she to break open a bone, perhaps it would look like the inside of a coffee mug—riddled with lines, stained with brown blotches.

  She runs on gravel shoulders and she runs on mountain bike paths and she runs on county two-lane. The tunnel of trees opens up—cut away in squares of browned grass that extend to porches busy with pumpkins and straw bales—and next to the narrow asphalt lane a sidewalk appears and she runs along it as the houses grow closer and closer together. Five crows balance on a fencepost, watching her approach. When she passes by, one of the crows opens its wings and makes a high, keening sound.

  Her feet thud against cement. She once read that every time she took a running step, her knee absorbed eight times her body weight. That was over nine hundred pounds. She is amazed by this, the thousands of pounds she forces upon her body every run, the resilience of her body. It makes her feel powerful. Not like her job, her marriage, where she sometimes feels like a mannequin made out of clear plastic, insubstantial to the point of translucence.

  There was a time, of course, when she felt differently, felt most alive when with Justin. She liked to pretend she was in the inky clutch of one of those poems he used to read to her in college, that time when the world was defined by laughter and pleasant moans, bars and coffeehouses, reading and talking deep into the nig
ht, showering together, taking turns shampooing each other’s hair. But that was before.

  Now they fell asleep early and watched television when eating meals. And there were little things that over time made her want to scream. The way he hummed along with the radio. The way he neglected to turn on the fan, so that she had stand there and breathe in the smell of his shit when putting on her makeup. The way he insisted on reading the paper in order. The way his snore began as a putter before deepening into a full-throated roar, like an outboard motor unmooring from a dock and heading into open water. The books in her office had shifted from a mishmash of Sylvia Plath and Kate Chopin and Danielle Steele to the purely clinical, Nutrition for Life, The F-Factor Diet, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, nothing fun or meaningful.

  Romance, once the most important thing, had come to seem the least. Romance belonged to the selfish part of her; the part that responded to its own hunger, that fed itself and not others. Marriage, children: they made her look increasingly outward instead of inward. It was as though, long before she lost the baby, she had lost herself. The old Karen—whom she occasionally spotted in a photograph, blowing cigarette smoke between her lips or reclining on a beach towel in a red bikini—had steadily shrunk over the years, replaced by someone who served others. Even at work, counseling the girls who shoved fingers down their throats, the boys who gnashed down whole bags of potato chips in one sitting, she was selfless, allowing herself to get snarled up in their pain and neglecting her own.

  But lately—through her running, as she sheds the sweat and fat that feel like years of accumulated poison so that her body feels lighter, almost buoyant—she is reclaiming herself, kicking her way greedily into the world again as she did so many years ago at the jumping bridge.

  The jumping bridge was a suspended railroad track that ran over the river near her high school. The smell of oil and formaldehyde rose off the ties when she and her girlfriends stood on them, suspended forty feet above the water. They would strip down to their underwear and their naked skin would go tight with goose pimples when they curled their toes over the edge of the timbers and said, “You go,” and “No, you go.”

  Karen remembers stepping off the edge, the wind roaring in her ears, the river rising up toward her, the feeling of weightlessness before her body broke the surface of the water. She would bring her feet together tightly, trying to needle her way downward and touch the muddy bottom, not knowing what was down there, not caring. She remembers one time making it all the way, feeling the cold mud suddenly sucking at her feet. She opened her eyes in the gray-green murkiness and saw next to her a broken cement block with tentacles of rebar coming out of it. She had laughed at the sight of it, thrilled at how alive she was, and the laughter took the form of a wobbling bubble that rose from her mouth to the sunlit surface of the river.

  She thinks of this when that old smell rises up to greet her, when she approaches the north-south train tracks that split Bend like a zipper. Fifty feet from them, the lights begin to flash and the gates begin to drop. She keeps running and glances down the tracks and sees the freight train, a big steel snake, approaching. For a moment she considers trying to outrun it, dashing across—for the same reason she used to leap off the bridge into the river, the thrill and danger of it. She stutter-steps forward and then reconsiders, slowing her pace, pausing a few feet from the tracks, jogging in place. The whistle sounds. The ground begins to tremble beneath her. She feels her pulse ticking in her neck.

  A car pulls up on the other side of the tracks, a black BMW with a license plate that reads, THE MAN. Its horn beeps and she looks a little closer, looks through the tinted windshield to see a face she recognizes—white teeth, white hair—Bobby. Someone else is in the car with him, a dark silhouette larger than the passenger seat. The driver’s side window goes down and Bobby gives her a wave. She returns the gesture, then glances around: the road behind her is empty except for a white truck parked two blocks behind her, its engine idling, a crooked line of exhaust rising from its tailpipe.

  The train grows closer. The whistle shrieks again and the crossing bells clang and the wheels clatter. Bobby leans his head out the window and shouts something she can’t hear. And then the engine is upon them, blasting past them, hauling so many flatcars stacked high with timber. The logs are stripped, a patchy mix of brown and white, what looks like a whole forest whittled down to toothpicks. A hard wind comes off the train and knocks her back a step; it smells of oil and resin. A swirl of dirt and cinder rises up and bites her skin. She stops jogging and stands flat-footed and feels the ground shaking, feels the train’s power rising up her legs, pounding her heart. Through the boxcars she glimpses flashes of Bobby, still leaning out the window, watching her, smiling.

  And then the train is past them, the noise of it rattling away, like a toolbox tumbling down basement steps. And the lights stop flashing and the gates rise and the world seems suddenly so quiet, with the engine of Bobby’s car purring softly, the only noise between them. She starts forward and when she crosses the tracks feels a sudden lurch in her heart, as if she is about to be struck, as if another train might roar along and plaster her to the tracks. But nothing happens.

  She passes the car and glances in the open window and spots the Indian there—the Warm Springs Indian—Tom Bear Claws—the guy who visits Justin’s class every year as a guest speaker, the guy who regularly appears in the newspapers railing against Bobby developing Echo Canyon, the guy they talked about the other day at lunch. She had forgotten about that until now, seeing them together, their eyes on her. “Need a ride?” Bobby says.

  She hesitates a step. “Nope.”

  “Good seeing you.”

  “Yeah,” she calls over her shoulder, already past him.

  She tries to hurry but his voice follows her, catches her. “You look good.”

  She closes her eyes and runs faster, and when her feet beat the ground, pushing her forward, she imagines she can feel the train’s force still surging through her, like another heart beating out of rhythm with her own.

  JUSTIN

  A dream about a big black bird flutters away with his waking. This morning is worse than the last. His eyelashes are caked with gunk, and his pillow, damp with snot. There is a swelling beneath his jaw, each of his glands feeling like a watery marble. He massages his sinuses and feels something draining down the back of his throat. With a groan, he pulls off his sleeping bag and steps into his jeans. The cold has crept into their fabric and makes his skin pimple with gooseflesh.

  His body feels as though it has calcified during the night. Just outside the tent, he snaps his neck and pushes his knuckles into his lower back until a juicy series of pops loosens him some.

  The night has left the world dewy with its afterbreath. A light mist clings to the ground, coiling around tree trunks and floating along the river, soon to be burned away by the rising sun.

  He notices then the grass around the tent, freshly trampled down, and the boot lying before him. Its leather is badly torn and discolored, as if it has passed through the digestive tract of a large animal. He recognizes it as belonging to the dead man. He stands there for a long time, staring at it, trying to make his brain work, still foggy with sleep. The sight of it is as disconcerting as a spider crawling across a projector’s lens, magnified on the screen. A frightening interruption to the half dream of dawn.

  He remembers what Graham said before—about bears being practically as smart as humans—and wonders what kind of animal would leave a warning. No kind of animal.

  It must have been the dog. The dog found it and set it there. That is the only reasonable explanation.

  As he approaches the fire pit, he steps around the boot, keeping an eye on it as if it might spring up and kick him. He kindles some wood with balled-up pieces of newspaper and before long has a fire crackling.

  He thinks about last night. It has taken on a black-and-white quality, like a scene vaguely remembered from an old movie. The danger he felt the
n no longer seems substantial as he breathes in the cold morning air and observes the air growing brighter all around him. But this sense of passing safety vanishes when he walks to the edge of the forest to retrieve the canvas bag and finds it missing.

  The branch hangs crookedly, torn from the tree, leaving a tear-shaped gash of bright white wood along the trunk. Near the ground, where the rope was anchored, he observes a pattern of worn-away bark, chewed and clawed until the last thread snapped. The grass lies trampled all around the tree and into the woods. In the air something lingers. If he flares his nostrils and breathes deeply, he can smell it. It smells a little like Boo when he comes out of the river and shakes off. Spermy. Hairy. With a touch of fryer-grease musk.

  He listens, but hears only birdsong and the river, so he lifts his foot and takes one hesitant step, moving across a border, from the steadily brightening meadow to the shadow-clad forest. He feels a tingling in his feet as he does, as though the heat of the bear’s passage lingers below him. He moves forward, picking his way through a cluster of bushes, stepping over a log, and taking care not to snap a branch or trip on a root. After only a few yards he encounters the rope, lying among the browned pine needles like a snake. He follows it through a tight corridor of trees and find at its end the bag, still attached, but torn open, its contents strewn all over the forest floor.

  A package of Oreos lies in tatters beneath a bush, chewed open and emptied. Several empty cans of Pepsi rest here and there among the trees, their thin metal ragged from the bear chewing it open to lick the sugary residue. The handle has snapped off the frying pan.

  Clothes, their dirty clothes, have been stomped into the dirt and draped oddly over bushes. Shirts and socks and jeans. At his feet he finds a pair of underwear. Kid-size tighty whities. He picks them up. They are still damp with saliva and ripped along the butt. He imagines his son inside them, the teeth gnawing on him, opening him up.