The Wilding: A Novel

by Benjamin Percy

  That is what bothers him most, the sight of the underwear. Immediately the image of his wife’s face rises up before him; it is closed, locked, like a door he doesn’t own the key for. He wonders how much more wooden she will become when he tells her about this, their time in the canyon.

  He inspects the bag. It will remain functional, so long as he hugs it to his chest when he walks, to mend the long, tattered wound torn into it. He goes about collecting their clothes and garbage and cooking utensils. When he lays his hand on the frying pan, its coldness creeps up his arm, along with the feeling he is being watched. He scans the forest for any movement. A chipmunk worries at a pinecone. A camp-robber bird flits among the trees.

  As he returns to camp the feeling doesn’t go away.

  His feet feel cold and bloodless while over the fire he boils water for coffee. The smell of grounds wakes his father. He emerges from the tent in his white T-shirt and his holey BVDs. He stretches and yawns dramatically and the noise brings Boo from the tent. Boo promptly picks up the boot with his teeth and presents it to Justin’s father as a cat would a dead mouse. “Goddammit, Boo.” His father picks up the boot and shakes it at him. “Bad dog. Bad dog.”

  Boo yips once and cocks his head in confusion and his father examines the boot. “Thing looks like a hay baler got it,” he says before hurling it thirty yards into the river. It bobs in the water a moment, traveling away from them like a slow-moving target in a shooting gallery, and then sinks from sight.

  Justin tries to keep his voice at a reasonable pitch. “I think we should go.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re scared.”

  Justin tells him about last night—the visitation—and then this morning—the torn tree limb. As he speaks, his father approaches the bag where it lies near the tent like a gutted animal. He kicks at it and it lets out a rattle as the pans and plates within it shift.

  “I want to go. Okay? Can we go?”

  “We will.”

  “When?”

  “We will.”

  “But when? We will when?”

  “Tonight. Like we planned.” His father is almost smiling, Justin can tell. It’s the possibility of danger that excites him, the courting of it.

  “Think about Graham.”

  “Don’t you remember? You’re a million times more likely to die of a bee sting. Remember that?”

  “A hundred times.”

  “A hundred. A million.” He shrugs as if there weren’t any difference. “Over fifty years, I’ve been coming here. Never had any troubles.”

  “This is trouble.” Justin points to the bag as evidence. “You’ve got your trouble right here.”

  Justin must be gazing at him with naked fury on his face. To defend against it, his father crosses his arms. “This place won’t be here tomorrow,” he says. “I got a few hours left to enjoy it. I’m going to eat a nice breakfast. And I’m going to breathe some nice fresh air. I’m going to listen to the birds and watch the clouds and hike around some. Then I’m going to bag a deer, a big one.” With his tongue he reaches for a tuft of beard, pulls the hair into his mouth, and chews. “And there’s nothing you or any redneck or bear in the world can say to convince me otherwise.” He slaps Justin on the thigh—once—as though punctuating a sentence, indicating a definitive end to the conversation.

  Graham wakes up with a wet rattle in his chest. He sits next to the campfire and coughs into his fist and moves to another lawn chair when the smoke bends with the breeze and billows into his face and worsens his coughing. When he can, he sucks on his inhaler, taking two hits of Albuterol. This helps him to eventually expel several globs of mucus from his lungs. He spits them into the fire, where they sizzle.

  When his coughing finally ceases, the morning’s sounds are waiting. The river. A crow’s wings fluttering in the brush only a few yards away. The chittering of a marmot. The noise of something losing its purchase from a tree and clattering through its branches to hit the forest floor with a deadened thump.

  The sun drives through the trunks of trees and throws a lurid red light upon everything. It is almost painful to the eye, the canyon everywhere crimson and cut with shadows.

  “Red sky morning, sailor take warning,” Justin’s father says, his eyes regarding the woods.

  When his father goes down to the river to splash some water on his face and scrub his armpits, Justin draws near to where Graham sits, his elbows on his knees and his camera in his hands. “What are you doing?”

  “Looking at my pictures.”

  On the screen Justin sees the shot Graham took last night, when they sat around the campfire—only Justin isn’t present. The focus is on his father, his lips moist with liquor and arranged in a crooked smile.

  “Where am I?”

  “I guess I didn’t include you.”

  The words sting in the way they fittingly capture the weekend. Justin begins to feel what every parent feels—when his or her child enters that special phase of life defined by locked bedroom doors and profane music and theatrical eye rolling—betrayed by the growing distance between them. “Oh,” is all he can manage in response.

  Then Graham points to the place above his father’s shoulder. “Do you see that?” He leans in and uses the zoom feature, bringing the background closer, until the screen reveals a pixelated silhouette with two firefly eyes, watching. “What is that?”

  “I don’t know,” Justin says. About last night, he has mentioned nothing—nothing about the pressure of the snout against the tent, nothing about the canvas bag torn from the tree—knowing he will only frighten the boy. “Probably a possum.” Justin’s gaze rises to the forest, to the place where the eyes were. There, among the pines, shadows play.

  “You don’t think it’s a bear?”

  “No. I don’t think that.”

  Justin’s mounting sense of alarm collapses and folds up inside him when Graham punches the button that shuts off the camera and makes the screen go dark. That he, a mere child, can dismiss the possibility of danger makes Justin inwardly scold himself for being so easy to scare—even as the eyes burn faintly in his mind.

  “Dad?” Graham says, looking at Justin now, really looking at him. Steadfast, concerned, sensitive—this is his son—and Justin puts an arm around his shoulder as if to welcome him back. “I miss Mom.”

  “We’ll see her soon.”

  They look at each other for a time. His eyes are that beautiful shade of gray you would pick for a gem in a meaningful piece of jewelry. Justin sees in them a resolve unavailable to him at that age, when his weaker parts would crumble easily and he would always do as he was told without any self-possession. Justin gives him a pretend punch in the chin and draws him close and claps him on the back with a half-violent affection.

  “But first there’s today to get through. And I’m looking forward to today,” Justin says, even as his eyes drop to the camera. “I’ve got a feeling it’s going to be a good day.”

  BRIAN

  He was afraid of this. When he turns on the television, the screen lightens to reveal a reporter standing in the woods. His handheld microphone reads Z-21 across its handle. On these local stations you’ll always find a different guy wearing the same bad tie and ill-fitting JC Penney suit, all of them either fresh out of college and hungry to prove themselves or else old and tired with yellow teeth and black dye jobs, their hunched posture indicating their grim acceptance of never making it out of minor-league news. This reporter is no exception, no older than Brian and stuttering his way through a report of a Bigfoot sighting. When he gestures to the pine forest behind him and says, “It was near here, in these very woods, that the alleged creature was allegedly spotted,” his tone is alternately fearful and joking, as if he doesn’t know quite how to pitch the story.

  The live shot cuts to an earlier interview. The reporter stabs the microphone at a man with a silvery beard stained orange around the mouth from tobacco. He wears a camo hat and flannel shirt with a gray hood sewn into it. “Can you te
ll us what you saw?” the reporter asks off-camera.

  “Well.” The man—Jim Ott, Witness, the white tape at the bottom of the screen reads in black lettering—takes off his hat and scratches his head before saying, “I don’t want to say it was or it wasn’t. Him, you know. Sasquatch. I don’t know. This is all very strange. But this thing, let me tell you about it, was bipedal.” Here he squares his shoulders, proud of the word. “And for those out there who are saying, oh, it’s a bear—nothing but a bear—let me ask, you ever seen a bear do this?” He departs the screen now and the cameraman takes a moment to find him again, out there in the road, mimicking the movements of Brian, lurching along with one arm before his face, like some hillbilly Nosferatu.

  Then he comes back to the reporter, laughing and shaking his head. “Swear to God. Cross my heart. Honest to goodness. All that. I mean it. That’s what I saw. I tell you what, though. They always say Bigfoot is tall, but this one was short.” He puzzles over this a moment. “Maybe it was a infant.”

  The report continues but Brian doesn’t hear any more of it, doesn’t even seem to breathe until the newsbreak ends and a National Guard commercial takes over. A man with a grease-painted face leaps from a plane and into the night sky, lost to the darkness as Brian punches off the television.

  By the time he dresses and chews his way through two bowls of cereal and drives to O.B. Riley, the road is lined with trucks and the woods are busy with men toting rifles, oiled and ready to fire. There are dogs—pointers and labs—everywhere, some of them leashed to bumpers, others darting freely through the trees and the slow-moving traffic. He rolls down his window and the cool breeze carries the noise of dogs baying, rifles firing, and men speaking in low voices. He overhears one man saying a Bigfoot head would look real nice on his office wall, among the lacquered trout and trophy bucks. Another asks if it would be a kind of cannibalism, eating Bigfoot.

  They are and they are not talking about him. He cannot help but imagine them as his enemies. Running a knife along his neck to make a blood necklace. Pulling the guts from his belly and hosing down his insides. Peeling the meat from his bones and rubbing garlic salt and cayenne pepper into his rump before grilling it over hot coals. When a man in a Carhartt jacket looks at him, Brian glances away in a hurry, very nearly expecting him to yell out, “There! He’s the one we want!” And then they would swarm toward him and beat at his windows with their fists, the butts of their rifles, shaking the truck and finally turning it over and dragging him from the cab to cook on a bonfire spit while they danced around and stomped their feet.

  His guts roil and his breath quickens with a panicky feeling that convinces him he will die if he doesn’t quit this place. It is then, when rounding a bend in the road, when fluttering his boot above the accelerator, that he spots her house. He hates to see it this way, through the invading traffic, with so many men tromping about as if in competition with him. But such thoughts are short-lived as he notices the garage door descending and the white Ford Focus pulling out of the driveway.

  Two cars are between them, so he feels anonymous in trailing her, through this hilly section of forest and into town, where she pulls into the Safeway parking lot. He maintains his distance, heading to the other side of the lot, waiting to kill the ignition until she pops out of her car and disappears into the store.

  JUSTIN

  So they set off for the day, their last in the canyon. Once they are under the trees, bright flakes of sunlight move across their faces and the noise of the river falls away, replaced by the hush of the forest. Today they will stake out a different location, a clear-cut situated at the southern tip of the canyon. In previous years, Justin’s father has killed five big bucks there, among the shorn acres of stumps, and he considers the place lucky and his own.

  They follow a hard-packed game trail, a narrow ribbon of dirt, its dirt polished from years of hooves trampling along it. Boo leads the way as they hike its wandering length for one mile, two. They find the river and walk along it. The water rushes toward them, seeming to slow them, to push them back the way they came.

  Every now and then the dog approaches Justin’s father with a stick and he will hurl it into the woods and the dog will dart after it, crashing through the underbrush, loudly sniffing for his treasure. Graham looks like he wants to join in their game without quite knowing how. Eventually he finds a stick of his own and peels the bark off it and rattles it against the tree trunks as he passes them until his grandfather gives him a glare that indicates he needs to quit it.

  Midmorning, Justin’s father starts up one of his monologues. He has so many theories—about 9/11, weaponry, homosexuals, antiperspirants as a cause of Alzheimer’s—and this particular theory concerns the end of the world. Justin doesn’t know what triggers the subject—maybe some question Graham asked him or maybe his own determined want to share those bricks that when stacked and sealed together make up the architecture of life as he sees it.

  “I’m thinking, thirty, forty years from now, we’ll be gone. It’s the cycle of things. Nature finds a way to cure itself of pollutants, assailants, junk that disrupts the harmony of it all. That’s what we are. Junk.” His voice slows and deepens to accompany the prophecy. “Could be a virus. An asteroid. A bomb. And poof—problem solved. The human problem.”

  Justin tunes out his father’s voice as he picks his way through a cluster of thorn apple bushes and in place of his chatter hears Boo mewl. The dog has gone still, his hackles raised. A series of shivers work through his fur and make it ripple like some black tributary of the river they stand alongside.

  And then, from somewhere across the South Fork, comes a sound—a deep groan that goes on for several seconds—and all of them are stilled. Boo’s head points like a compass needle to the source of the sound, the woods.

  “Quiet!” his father says when Justin opens his mouth to speak. He has one hand cupped around his ear, while the other holds his rifle. When after a moment they have heard nothing else, Justin says, “You think it’s the bear?”

  He does not have an answer, because right now Boo breaks away from them and leaps into the river. The dog, wild with energy, swims surprisingly straight and clean through the torrent of the rapids. But the water is fast-moving and foaming and pulls the dog a good thirty feet downstream before he makes it across. Once there he shakes off quickly and rushes the sandy bank and enters the woods, and then a moment later appears again on the bank, barking at something in the trees.

  “Boo,” Justin’s father yells. “Boo, goddammit, get over here!”

  The dog does not acknowledge him but continues barking when he runs in a wide circle and then vanishes into another section of underbrush. His bark is sharp and loud so that they can hear him, over the noise of the river, long after he is lost from sight into the woods. Branches snap. Bushes rustle. And then a silence sets in that in this deep shadowed canyon seems too silent.

  Dust clings to the air and drifts across the river. Some of it sticks to their skin. His father cannot stop shaking his head. He bites his lip and Justin half expects blood to leak from it. His eyes are burned spots in a face flickering with sunlight thrown this way and that by the breeze-blown branches.

  His father immediately wants to ford the river and search for Boo.

  “What about Graham?” Justin says.

  His father tugs at his beard and then tightens his hand into a fist that shakes a little. “We’ve got guns.”

  “It’s just a dog, Dad.”

  His father shoots back at him before the last word leaves his mouth: “Shut up. Will you just shut up for one second?”

  “Try to think about your real family right now.”

  He looks at Justin with a mystified expression, as if thinking, You mean you? And Justin wonders, were he the one missing, would his father so keenly seek him out?

  Then his father fixes his gaze on some point across the river. Justin would slap him except for the brutal expression on his face. “No,” his father finally say
s. His voice is soft, but snake soft, as if it could uncoil powerfully when provoked. He blinks at Justin quickly, sending a message: no, no, no. They will not leave the canyon without Boo.

  So Justin suggests to his father, since they are so close already, that they might make their lunch at camp. He is not hungry—not in the slightest—but he tells his father sincerely that with food in their bellies, they can think this through, they can determine what to do next, his secret hope being that his father will come to his senses in this time.

  And who knows, he tells his father, the smell of cooked venison might bring the dog from the forest.

  “Or something else,” his father says.

  His father puts two fingers to his mouth and whistles that special ear-zinging whistle Justin has always wished to master. When Boo does not respond he mutters, “Damn,” and kicks stupidly at a tree and then tightens his lips in pitiful defiance and begins marching toward camp with his rifle held at his side like a spear.

  BRIAN

  Above him a red eye blinks. The glass doors split open. He grabs a cart and circles it through the fruits and vegetables, and then the bakery, spotting her there. She wears black fleece and blue jeans, her hair tied up in a ponytail that bobs when she walks. In one hand she carries a basket weighed down by oranges and bananas. She stops to inspect the baguettes before tucking one under her arm like a child pretending to be slain by a sword.

  She starts off again and he pushes his cart forward in such a hurry that he nearly strikes a boy who comes wandering around a table stacked high with boxes of doughnuts. He has a bowl-shaped haircut and sad brown eyes. Maybe he is eight, maybe eleven—Brian doesn’t feel particularly apt at judging the ages of children. “Sorry,” both of them say. And then the boy is on his way, but not before putting his hand up in a gesture of apology and departure.