The Wilding: A Novel

by Benjamin Percy

  But the darkness of the cave remains uninterrupted. Still, the idea lingers—and seems even to intensify—when he moves slowly forward, his steps uneven over the rocky surface. One hand grips his rifle, the other the branch. His head feels hot and his hands feel cold and stiff and doomed to a slow response when he needs their action.

  Ten feet from the cave he kneels and lays down both the rifle and the branch. He removes a match and scratches it into a flame. The flame gutters, growing blue and then vanishing in a black puff as the wind drags it from the matchstick. He strikes another and cups a hand around it. The flame dances as he lowers it, but, shielded from the wind, it hugs the match and then the branch when he touches it to the tuft of needles where it flares and makes a noise like torn fabric. A blue-yellow color sputters and crawls along the branch.

  He snatches up his rifle and then the flaming branch and rises from his crouch and charges the cave entrance. At the last minute he hurls the branch inside and turns to run unsteadily along the cliff wall before circling back to where he first stood, observing the cave.

  His heart is like a hot hammer in his throat. The cave glows orange. Shadows play across its walls. It is the kind of place witches would gather, stirring their cauldron, speaking the darkest prophecies. He is glad Graham is not here to see the stuff of nightmares. All the rest of the world falls away, his attention singular, so that when a flock of geese passes closely overhead, he notices them only vaguely, their honks sounding like music from another realm, the way the distant ring of a buoy no doubt sounds to an exhausted swimmer pulled far from shore by the riptide.

  At any moment he expects the bear to explode from the den, the smoke swirling around it like a wreath. He is ready to fire. But he is ready to run, too.

  A minute passes. Then another. And still the bear does not come. The flames have died out. Smoke still billows from the cave but weakly, like steam pluming from a gray-lipped mouth on a winter’s day. He sighs and starts forward, this time with the intention of entering the cave.

  He no longer moves with the caution he exhibited earlier, his rifle in his hand but gripped carelessly, an umbrella on a sunny day. At the cave entrance, he pauses and looks back over his shoulder. Then he descends into the smoky dimness.

  He gropes around in the smoke, the embers offering some light but not enough. His feet clatter against rocks and his hands claw at the ground until they discover something damp, a collection of bones and blood, the remains of Boo. He scoops up what he can. He has by this time held his breath to the limit. His lungs demand air and he breathes in a great gasp of smoke and begins to cough, at first hesitantly and then miserably as the burn overtakes his throat and lungs.

  He staggers from the cave, hacking, clutching to his chest a skull with some spine still attached to it, a gruesome sculpture upholstered with patches of hair. He pets the remains and they smear away against his hand. He is crying again. There is nothing violent and shuddery about it, not like that embarrassing moment with his son. Tears are simply leaking down his cheeks.

  Boo listened to him, never rolled his eyes or whined at commands, always greeted him with slobbery kisses and a wagging tail. His loyalty was unconditional. If only humans were more like dogs, Paul is certain he would have loved more of them in his life.

  KAREN

  She isn’t worried, not really, about her husband and son. Not even when her call goes directly to Justin’s voice mail. They’re still in the canyon, still hunting, making the most of the weekend. He warned her that they might not return until midnight. The concern she initially felt for Graham has been relieved by the calming solitude of the past two days.

  She kindles a fire and pulls on a sweatshirt and fixes a dinner of turkey breast and steamed carrots and whole-grain bread. The plate is now empty, a smeary mess beside her, when she sits at the computer—Googling gangrene, blastomycosis, human intestinal parasites. She barely hears the doorbell the first time it rings. She is too busy reading, her lips pursed, her head cocked. She feels strangely serene, she feels good and normal, after clicking through so many images and descriptions about toxic secretions, rotting flesh.

  Earlier, when searching “animals attack,” she came upon a story about this couple who owned a snake, a python. They kept it in a glass cage in the living room. They fed it rats and mice, and after it had eaten, they allowed it out of its cage and let it wander the house. It would slide through their legs, over their laps, always friendly with a full belly. They considered the snake a part of the family and began sleeping with it at night. It would curl up between them and pleasure in their warmth. In the morning, when they readied for work, they would open up the top of its glass cage and the snake would pour into it, piled up at its bottom like a thick rope. But after a while, the snake resisted their prodding—it didn’t want to leave the bed—even when they tempted it with squealing mice.

  And then the snake refused to eat altogether. This went on for several days until one morning they woke to the snake turning over and over again, twisting into knotted designs, opening and closing its mouth as though to clear a yawn from its throat. They called over the veterinarian, who walked into their bedroom and observed the snake from a distance and said, “Do you know what’s wrong?” and they said, “No,” and he said, “I’ll tell you what’s wrong. Your snake is getting ready to eat you. He’s stretching out his body and his jaw so that he can curl around one of you and strangle you and swallow you in the night.”

  The doorbell rings again and she minimizes the window and rolls away from the desk and wonders only vaguely who could be at the door—the UPS man, another reporter asking about the Bigfoot sighting, the Jehovah’s Witnesses she saw scouring the neighborhood when on a run the other day.

  There was a time, after she lost the baby, when she dreaded answering the door. On the other side of it she would always find someone—a friend, a neighbor, a co-worker—with a pitying look on her face and a plastic container or glass dish in her hands. A casserole. Cinnamon rolls. Chocolate chip cookies. “Take this,” she would say. “And please let us know if you need anything. Do you need anything?”

  No. She needed nothing. Except for them to leave her alone.

  One day she opened the door and found a Bundt cake resting on the porch. No note. No one in sight. She picked up the cake and carried it across the yard and hurled it into the woods. For two days afterward, when she left the house, she could hear the faraway buzzing of the flies that feasted off it.

  And then one night Justin said, “Mary Elizabeth said she dropped off a Bundt cake.”

  “Oh, so that’s who left it. There was no note.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I threw it in the woods.”

  He was quiet for a long time. “You shouldn’t have done that. She baked it just for us,” he said. “And I happen to like Bundt cake.”

  The sun is setting when she pulls open the door to find Bobby on her porch. He is smiling. His teeth are very white against his tanned face. He has a dangerous look to his eyes, that kind of squint when there’s no sun. He wears khakis and a cornflower blue oxford cloth shirt with a pocket on the breast. He holds a red rose in his hand.

  She feels a hitch in her chest, the heart-stopping sensation that would come if she reached for a light switch in a dark room and encountered another hand instead. She steps back and the walls grow momentarily taller, the ceiling higher, the floors longer. It is one thing, meeting Bobby at a restaurant—and it is another, allowing him into her home.

  “Knock, knock,” he says and steps inside without invitation. Without hesitation. Her husband is defined by hesitation.

  “What are you doing here?” She feels a scuttling in her guts, some mixture of guilt and excitement that feels like bugs eating their way through her.

  He plants the rose in her hand. “I was in the neighborhood. I thought we’d celebrate.”

  “What?”

  “Echo Canyon. We break ground tomorrow. Big day. Big deal. Hey, do you have any w
ine?” He explained how thirsty he was—so thirsty—from speaking to Tom all day.

  “Um.”

  “Or a beer? I’m not picky. Something. I’m just thirsty as hell.”

  “All right. I guess.” She walks into the kitchen, walking sideways, so that she can keep an eye on him. At the sink she fills a glass with water and drops the rose in it and it totters for a moment as if it will tip over. “He was with you in the car the other day?”

  “Tom. Yes. At the train crossing. You looked amazing by the way. I wanted to kick him right out the door so that you could take his place and we could just drive and drive and drive.”

  She crosses her arms and asks about Tom. She still doesn’t get it, what he was saying the other day about them being friends, partners. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  She fixes him a drink—finding a bottle of Chardonnay from Sokol Blosser in the back of the fridge, uncorking it with a pop—and he wanders around the house, rotating a vase of dried flowers, peering into a cupboard, picking up a book and setting it down, all the while chatting, telling her how this all started when the governor and Warm Springs tribal council signed the compact for Cascade Locks Resort and Casino. Tom asked, after a few years of trying to negotiate the legal circuit, for Bobby’s help and he found himself always on the phone with lawyers. The tribe needed a fee-to-trust transfer to put in trust twenty-five acres of the sixty-acre site for gaming activities. And then there was Section 20 of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which required the secretary of the interior to determine whether the resort would (a) be in the tribe’s best interest and (b) not be damaging to the surrounding communities, which was particularly difficult to get past, since Hood River had nothing good to say about casinos and the type of people they would attract to their hamlet of apple orchards and fir-clustered hillsides.

  And then there were complications, due to the proximity to the river, concerning site drainage and utilities. And then they had to figure out how to alter the transportation routes to access to the development, which would involve a new interchange off I-84. And on and on it went, so complicated that his head felt as if it might cave under the weight of it all.

  After phone calls and dinners with lobbyists and lawyers and contractors and bureaucrats and politicians, after a fraternity brother of Bobby’s from Sigma Chi became the new secretary of the interior, they made Cascade Locks happen.

  “You did all this for an Indian casino? You got, what? A stake in it?”

  “No, baby. I got Echo Canyon.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  This was what he was talking about. Every now and then the Forest Service offers up isolated parcels of federal land in an effort to raise money—and now was such an occasion—in an effort to offset the shrinking revenue of timber sales. The Ochocos were filled with Indian gravesites, with petroglyphs and pictographs etched and smeared onto basalt. The Warm Springs Indians fished and hunted there. The tribe would have first bid at the land and they would take it.

  “So I tell Tom not to bid. Or to fuck up the bid. File the paperwork late. Send it to the wrong address. Make it disappear altogether. What, after all, are they ever going to do with that land? Fire an arrow into a deer? Smoke a peace pipe next to the river? They aren’t sentimental. It didn’t take any arm wrestling. A canyon for a gorge. A golf course for a casino. Tit for tat.”

  She doesn’t feel any sense of scandal, disapproval. There is too much guilt and nervousness roiling inside her to find fault in anyone else. If anything, she feels more vulnerable than ever. Every time she turns around there seems to be one less thing that makes Bend different from anywhere else in the country—and Bobby has a lot to do with that. Just being with him now, she feels a humming in the air, a prickling in her skin, as if she is about to change too, stripped down and built back up, a willful act of reconstruction. She doesn’t know whether to want it or not.

  He takes the wine glass that she didn’t realize she was holding out to him. “Thank you,” he says and raises the glass in a toast. “May your blessings outnumber the shamrocks that grow and may trouble avoid you wherever you go.”

  “Let’s hope.” She brings her glass to her lips and drinks heavily from it, several long swallows that leave her warm-bellied.

  On the counter sits a wooden bowl full of red apples. The apples look like hearts, waxy hearts encased in paraffin. He selects one and tosses it up in the air and catches it. “Let’s go to the living room, yeah? Sit down by the fire? Get comfy?” He departs the kitchen—not waiting for her to respond, knowing she will follow. And she does. And when he plops onto the sofa and pats the empty space beside him, she follows him there as well. The fire is snapping and crackling and over the faint smell of wood smoke, she can smell him. He smells like something from a bottle.

  “What are you doing here, Bobby?”

  He stares at her with some larger predatory perception, a slight flaring of the nostrils. “I told you. I was in the neighborhood.”

  “But what are you doing here? What are we doing?” Her voice sounds sad. She knows how easy it would be to say she doesn’t care—she doesn’t care about the past, she doesn’t care about the future, she doesn’t care about her family, she doesn’t care about anything except herself, what feels good to her, what she wants right now. She deserves that, doesn’t she? A little change. A little vacation. But every time she thinks this—I don’t care—she feels as though she has swallowed a pebble and now her belly is weighted with stone.

  The momentary pleasure isn’t worth the aggravation. Right? She is almost certain. When her gaze travels around the room—anywhere but his eyes—and itemizes the framed photos of her family, her son’s tennis shoes, a bookmarked novel of her husband’s—the same thought teases her: you’re not up to this.

  Then he rests his glass of wine on the coffee table and puts a hand on her knee. She wants to say no, but the word feels hazy and won’t take form on her lips. She crossed an invisible line the other day at lunch—and he crossed another line now when stepping into her house—and she isn’t sure if there’s any going back.

  The television is like a watchful gray eye and she sees in it their half-light reflection.

  He brings the apple to his mouth and noisily chews. It makes a crunching sound that sounds like a broken bone. A bit of pulp sticks to the corner of his mouth. His tongue arrows out, grabs it, disappears.

  Then a strange noise fills the room. A violent fluttering, a rapid-fire succession of hoots that draws all their attention to the fireplace.

  “The hell?” he says.

  There is a crumbling rush of soot and the flames dampen briefly. And then a dark shape flutters there—in the middle of the fire—an owl.

  Its hoots give way to a panicked screech so awful it makes Bobby drop his apple and bring his hands to his ears. And the owl escapes the fire with a sweep of its wings that sends smoke and cinders in every direction. It circles the room in pained terror, flying around them with its feathers smoldering.

  In this panicked moment, when the owl swoops toward Bobby with its claws outstretched, he races from the couch, knocking into the coffee table, knocking over his wine and shattering it into a long dribbling tongue of glass. His voice is somewhere between a whimper and shriek when he says, “Leave me alone! Leave me the fuck alone!” He is hunched over and loping around in circles and swinging his arms feebly at the great bird—and then it noisily flaps down the hallway into some secret corner of the house. Bobby trips over his feet and drops heavily to the floor, and when he does, something falls from his mouth and clatters on the hardwood.

  At first Karen thinks it is a chewed hunk of apple, damp and white and sickle shaped. And then she realizes—when Bobby raises his head and looks at her, his mouth arranged in a snarl—that the left side of his mouth appears oddly black. He is missing his teeth. Those square white teeth. He wears a dental plate. He claws it up now and rams it into his mouth and stands up in a hurry. He is panting. His hair is mussed and
falling across his face in white tendrils and he runs a hand back through his hair in an effort to neaten it.

  Toward the back of the house comes a screech and Bobby looks wildly to the hallway as though certain the owl will return for him. He only glances at Karen before rushing to the door, throwing it open, and running out into the evening.

  Karen remains on the couch with her wine glass gripped in her hand. The weird jolt she felt when the owl appeared—a power surge of a jolt—is followed now by a draining sensation. She feels incredibly heavy, barely able to lift herself from the couch and walk with leaden feet to the open door.

  Bobby is still there, out in the gloaming, one foot on the bottom step, the other on the short pea-gravel path that will take him to the driveway. He looks, from this vantage, small and old.

  He lifts his hand to point at his car. “So I guess I’ll—”

  “Yeah,” she says and closes the door and goes to find a broom to scare the owl from her house.

  JUSTIN

  Once in camp, Justin pauses only for a moment, and then moves on, having come to a decision: he will take his son to John Day and then return with a warden. He can be there and back within an hour. As he jogs across the meadow, a few hundred yards from the Bronco, he glances up to see that the sun has only just begun to sink from sight, and for a second he watches it, the decreasing brightness of it, and wishes it would stay there, wishes it would remain day, when everything seems a little safer, even if it’s not.

  And here is the Bronco. The tires are slashed. The windows are smashed in. The hood is thrown back and wires rise crookedly from the engine block like alien weeds. Perhaps, if he flays the wires and reattaches them, the Bronco might come alive with a loud chuff, but there is only one spare, and no matter how he bullies the steering wheel, the tires will only spin out and cut half-moon shapes into the cinder road.

  They stand arrested by the sight of it—horror struck is the only word—barely crediting what they see. For a moment Justin’s mind regresses and he becomes four again. A monster has done this, he feels certain. A bear that is more than a bear. It walks upright and speaks in a guttural voice and hungers for boymeat. It is possessed by the spirit of the forest. It watches them, near and invisible.