The Wilding: A Novel

by Benjamin Percy

  As he carries on in a resolute voice about how they are going to do this and that, he hears a familiar gruffness, passed on from father to son like a baseball glove that doesn’t quite fit but carries in its leather the certainty of experience. “Does that sound like a plan?” he says and Graham nods eagerly.

  Justin can’t decide whether he is being brave or stupid. He unlocks the safety on his rifle and moves out of the firelight, and as he does, he feels as you do when stepping off the sidewalk and into a busy street with cars barreling toward you, their silver grills like gleaming mouths. The clouds open up and the moon takes the sky, brightening his way, but also making him feel exposed. Looking up at it, he remembers the corpse’s glass eye and imagines it in the moon’s place, floating there and observing him with an uncanny sight that sees clean into his marrow and understands his fear and enjoys it.

  All the trees here are amazingly fat and tall—old growths—so far saved from the fires and the loggers, never to be razed—until tomorrow. He walks hurriedly to the tallest, closest one he can find, a ponderosa with an X spray painted on it. Around its roots spreads a carpet of browned needles that crunch beneath his weight. He freezes like an intruder who has disturbed a creaky floorboard. He stands there, listening hard, but the silence hangs unbroken around him.

  Before he begins to climb, he briefly concentrates on the X and thinks about how it would feel to be devoured by a saw and smoothed by sandpaper and then hammered into something somewhere, freshly lacquered and etched with pretty designs, renewed, given a second life—yes, he will keep that image, tuck it in his pocket and carry it with him as he tries to make it through this night.

  The lowest branch hangs fifteen feet above the ground. He will have to shimmy his way up to it. He shoulders his rifle so that it hangs diagonally across his back. He then essentially leaps onto the tree, wrapping his legs and arms around it in a hug. The bark scrapes against his cheek and his palms, the insides of his wrists. The rifle digs painfully into his spine and he curses, knowing he should have loosened the strap. The only smell is the tang of sap and pine needles. There are small recesses between the scales of bark and he works his fingertips into them, using whatever purchase he can to keep from slipping. He then brings his legs around to the sides of the tree and presses upward until they have straightened out.

  His legs and arms are already quivering, their muscles not yet ready to give out, but close. He continues his slow crawl up the trunk, gripping and sliding and grunting and bleeding and sweating until at last the branch appears within reach, only a foot from his head. It is a risk, throwing his arm out to seize it. If his palm is too slippery or if his muscles give out, he will fall to the ground, where he might break an ankle or impotently stare upward, unable to gather the will to climb again.

  He tightens his legs around the trunk. His hand rises—trembling—from its place on the trunk and ties his fingers around the branch in a grip so tight his knuckles pop. He feels something crawl over the back of his hand, a spider. His grip almost loosens out of instinct, but he somehow maintains his hold and clenches his bicep, drawing himself upward until he pitches his other arm around the branch. His legs come loose from the trunk and hang dangling in the black air. The muzzle of the rifle nudges the back of his head and he realizes he has forgotten to engage the safety. The possibility of a bullet cutting through his skull makes him freeze for a moment, drawing in a deep breath.

  Then he pulls, every muscle in his body straining, until he heaves himself onto the branch, so that his torso hangs on one side, his legs on the other. His shirt has come up and the bark scuffs away his belly hair, leaves the skin there abraded. He tries to breathe, but the breaths will only come in tiny gasps because of the pressure on his stomach. The branches are now clustered thickly all around him. He grabs for one of them and misjudges the distance and almost loses his balance when his hand passes through pine needles and air. The ground seems to swell and shrink beneath him as he teeters on the branch. He stretches out his arm again, this time more carefully, and gets hold of a firm branch and uses it as leverage to pull himself up, bracing his body between the branches in a kind of seated position. The rifle clatters against the tree trunk and with some difficulty he pulls it off and clicks on the safety and then pats the stock as he would a companion who has shared an upsetting experience.

  He waits for a minute, waiting for the breath to calm in his chest and the burn to subside in his muscles, and then he peers over at the campfire. Graham is standing up; he is staring in Justin’s direction. Justin waves even as he knows Graham probably can’t see him. Then he fits the rifle over his shoulder again and begins to climb. Above him the tree seems to rise endlessly. He snakes his way through the branches, constantly pausing to readjust his grip, his footing, anticipating the next rung of his ascent and considering the best path. The moonlight filters through the branches in needlework patterns.

  Beneath the canopy there is no wind—the air, motionless—but as he climbs and moves above the darkness of the forest, below the darkness of the sky, the wind gusts, drying and watering his eyes, swaying the tree, carrying the faraway smell of a skunk, or something like it, its odor both sweet and sickening.

  Above the treetops, the sky swells around him, incalculably huge and black.

  In the distance, the gates of the canyon open up into the desert. There he can see the silhouettes of the Cascades, so small in the distance, their jagged corners and glaciers glowing with moonlight, but otherwise dark. The sight of them brings the same sort of oriented relief a traveler in a strange city experiences when he glances up at the familiar face of the moon.

  Below the mountains, he spots tiny universes of light—Bend and Redmond and Prineville—with John Day the closest of them. He clings to the trunk with one hand and pulls off his rifle with the other and carefully arranges himself in a perch to peer through his scope at the silent wilderness of houses, its blocks and buildings lit up and surrounding patches of blackness. He thinks he can discern, in a glimmering shudder of light, headlights moving along the streets and highways, some filing into garages and parking lots, some spreading out into the countryside. There, so far away, so safe and tranquil, is the little world in which he has been living so securely. And there, way off in the distance, he spots a cell phone tower blinking its red warning against low-flying aircraft. But when he pulls his phone out of his pocket and punches it on, the green glow of its screen reads “Searching System.” When a minute passes and it still hasn’t found a signal, he feels a sick sense of panic. He is off the grid completely—it is as if he has fallen out of time.

  From this vantage, the trees seem solid enough to walk on and for a few seconds he seriously considers running across their canopy, journeying away from here in any way he can. He only wants to return to Bend. Things have always been fine and safe in Bend. They will laugh about all of this in Bend.

  He nearly falls and then catches himself against a branch, suffering from a terrible case of vertigo, so that he hardly knows where he is, with civilization seeming so close and so far away.

  BRIAN

  At the time the CSH-Baghdad was the only hospital that could handle level 1 trauma. Seventy-seven beds, three operating rooms, six general surgeons, three orthopedists, two neurosurgeons, two emergency medicine physicians, a vascular surgeon, a radiologist, a psychologist, a neurologist. A cluster of anesthesiologists and nurses. They worked on everyone—from U.S./coalition soldiers to Iraqi soldiers, civilians, and detainees—and they worked on everything—from toothaches to mass casualty events that ripped a body in half or tapped a hole in a skull, as it was with Brian.

  Even once he got used to the shock of having a hole in his head, it remained a strange feeling, compounded by the strangeness of his surroundings, a white bed in a white room full of white beds on which lay soldiers blanketed in white bandages. At first, after waking from the red haze of surgery, he wanted to scream, to shut his eyes and refuse to accept his circumstances. That lasted for a
few minutes, after which time he was still there and the whiteness and the blood soaking through the whiteness and the pain throbbing in his skull had not disappeared and in the end he just accepted it all because he was lying there and the doctors and the nurses were speaking to him—“Can you tell me what year it is? Can you tell me who the president is? Can you spell the word dog?”—and what else could he do except believe this was almost reality?

  He was there for two weeks. During this time many men moved in and out of the beds surrounding him, but he remembered one in particular, a Private Mars from Louisiana who had lost his hand when the troop carrier he was riding atop as a gunner slid off a ravine and flipped on top of him.

  They lay there, talking, while clear fluids dripped into them and dark fluids dripped out. They talked a lot—constantly, it felt like—because talking felt safe. Safer than being alone with your thoughts. They talked about how thirsty they were and when the nurse would come around again with Cokes and waters. They talked about their fathers, who had both served in Vietnam and who had opposed them enlisting. They talked about why Jif was the superior brand of peanut butter. They talked about college basketball. They talked about how hot Angelina Jolie was and how with lips like that she must give the most incredible blow jobs in the whole world. They only thing they didn’t talk about was their injuries.

  Until one day when Mars told Brian a story about his grandfather, a WWII vet who had no legs. He was in the Philippines, on the island of Mindoro, when a land mine detonated beneath him. He was left with little below his knees, flaps of skin, chunks of muscle, broken bits of bone. His platoon had lost its medic in a firefight, so they did the best they could. Three men held him down while another sliced through his knees with a knife. Over a fire they heated a machete until it glowed orange. They used it to cauterize the arteries and then applied ointment and a protective plaster from a first-aid kit. They radioed in his coordinates and left him on a nearby beach and a copter picked him up a day later, feverish and with lines of infection creeping up his thighs.

  “When I think of that story, I think I’m lucky.” When Mars spoke he gestured with his stump and Brian could almost imagine a ghostly set of fingers waving to the room all around them, a room oozing with blood and moans. “We’re lucky.”

  Maybe for the first time Brian feels this way—he feels lucky—as he hurries through the night. Lucky enough to seek Karen out once more. Lucky enough to ignore the hunters who still wander the forest, looking for him. Though the shadows are thick, he still moves carefully, like a soldier in enemy territory, darting from tree to tree, huddling next to a bush now and then to listen to a faraway gunshot. He wears his hair suit and it makes him feel invisible, powerful.

  The memory of her touch lingers—so vivid that her hand might as well hold his, pulling him through the woods, toward her. He does not repel her. This is what he keeps coming back to, to the way his injury brought her closer to him and creased her face with sympathy, warmth. It is as though he has discovered some principle of magnets—he does not repel her, he attracts her—and he rushes now to a point of assembly.

  By the time he arrives, it is past midnight and her house is as dark as the forest, the windows offering no lamplight or the trembling, watery glow thrown by a television. He pauses where the trees run up to the lawn, listening for traffic along the road. Hearing nothing, he races across the grass to the garage and peers through the window of the side door, making certain that the husband isn’t home. In the gloom he spots only one car and then he heads up the steps and into the house, sliding the key in and out of the lock and pushing his way through the door.

  Brian stands for a moment in the entryway. Here is the familiar sight of the shoes lined up by the door, the coats hanging from hooks. Here is the familiar smell of pasta and leather and paper. He knows this place. It is beginning to feel like home.

  He takes a step forward, into that transitional space, with the hallway extending before him and archways opening to either side of him into the living room and dinette. Out of the corner of his eye he spots the clock on the VCR blinking—red, red, red, like an alarm—never reset after the storm blew through the other day and briefly knocked out the power.

  He moves with such slowness—slowly pulling his feet forward, slowly depressing his weight, making sure he doesn’t thud his boot against an end table or scare a creak out of the floorboards—when touring the house. He sits down on the couch. He gently touches the needles of a cactus. He stands below a mounted deer and stares into its wide and glassy eyes and reaches up to tap one of them before running his hand along its neck, the fur dry and rough. He peers into the cold cave of the fridge. He runs his hands along the countertops. He picks up a lipstick-stained glass next to the sink. It has a rose in it that he sets aside before bringing the glass to his mouth, tasting it. He pisses in the toilet, sitting down so as not to make a sound. He smells the toothpaste. The boy’s room he peers into but does not enter. In the office he shuffles through a pile of papers, holding them up to the moonlight coming through the window, and then stands curiously at the wooden crib before moving to the master bedroom.

  He remembers one occasion when his father repeatedly tried and failed to trap a beaver and finally in a rage kicked his way into their dam and clubbed the animals with a baseball bat while they hissed from their dank den. Now, at her doorway, surrounded by the dark, feeling at once weirdly strong and vulnerable, he imagines himself at once the club and the beaver.

  A purple bra hangs from the doorknob. He rubs it between his fingers. He can see her shape beneath the blankets. He can hear the slow rhythm of her breathing. He takes a step into the room and notices a clock seeming to blink from the nightstand—but when he turns toward it, the light scuttles away from him, and then away from him farther when he tries to chase it, always at the corner of his eye, a red flashing.

  “Oh no,” he says to the room. He brings his hand to his forehead and massages the crater there. The flashing deepens in its color. And now he can feel the first of many painful wires twisting down his cheek, his throat, his arm. The headache has snuck up on him. He didn’t notice it, tangled up as he was in the forest and then his thoughts—and now it is here, stretching itself, impatient to grow.

  As quietly as he can manage, he retreats to the hallway and finds his legs suddenly heavy. He thuds against the wall and grips the doorway to hold himself up. He staggers down the hallway and tries to remember the way but his headache won’t allow it. There is only a pulsing red star, eating up everything with its light. He stumbles back into a room, the boy’s room. The ceiling glows with paste-on planets and stars, the constellations wheeling in his sight. He wants only to jump into the bed, to pull the covers over his head, but even now he knows better. He goes to utter darkness. He goes to the closet and drags the door shut behind him.

  He grimaces and imagines an ugly black lacework working its way along his neck and arms, the tracery of his veins, as his surprise subsides and the throbbing hurt moves fully through him like an electrical current. Only one of his arms seems to work and he uses it to lift himself into a seated position, his back against the closet wall. Then he closes his eyes and lets the pain take him over.

  JUSTIN

  It takes him a half hour to climb the tree, but not nearly as much time to descend it. The view from his perch has renewed his energy, reminding him that another world exists outside the canyon. He drops through the branches, almost sliding between them, and when he reaches the lower limbs of the pine, he pauses in a crouch and scans the surrounding forest, peering into the dark doorways between trees.

  Nothing moves. A stillness has descended upon the canyon. When he drops from his roost, his hand brushes across the spray-painted X and he feels the hard glob of sap that has bubbled from it. He realizes this is the same tree Graham shot—was that yesterday?—yesterday seeming so long ago.

  Thirty yards away, in the circle of light thrown by the fire, Graham stands guard, his rifle ready. Everythin
g seems, for the moment, safe. So Justin hurriedly digs a hole with his hand and sets the dirt aside until the bullet casing from yesterday sits in his open palm, and then Graham’s, when Justin returns to the fire pit and hands it to him.

  “Still there,” Justin says. “Just like he said it would be.”

  This seems to bring Graham some comfort. He smiles a closed-mouth smile and brings the bullet to his mouth and blows on it. “I wish this was a silver bullet,” he says. “And I wish I had a wooden stake. And a rosary. And a bazooka.”

  “It’s easy to be full of wishes when you’re in a situation like this.”

  “Did you call?”

  Justin wearily shakes his head even as he smiles against the bad news. “No luck.”

  Graham is still staring at the shell, his eyes dark-circled and his shoulders resting in a fatigued stoop. “So we’re going to leave?”

  “We’ll wait a little longer. I’ve got a feeling he’ll be here any minute.”

  “How long? How long will we wait?”

  “Not long. Until he comes. Just a little longer.”

  So they sit there, surveying the woods, waiting in aching inactivity. Graham reaches out to take Justin’s hand, and the contact feels good, reassuring, a way to fight the canyon, so deep and cold and dark, its towering walls bearing in as if poised to close around them like a mouth.

  Justin snatches up another log and tosses it on the fire, a little too roughly, sending a gnat cloud of sparks into the air. The wood is dry and porous and a few seconds later the flames rise up in a gentle roar, playing orange light across the canyon walls and into the darker corners of the forest. Out of which steps the bear.

  One minute it wasn’t there and the next minute it is, as if a trapdoor has opened in the ceiling of the night, depositing it at the edge of the clearing, twenty yards away. In the heat waves thrown by the fire, the bear shimmers, like something unreal. Before Justin can register his alarm, the bear begins to lumber toward them in a charge. It moves in a rocking way, its enormous triangular head rising and falling, and with each rock it moves alarmingly closer. Justin registers the grotesque hump rising from between its shoulders. Despite the thick coating of fat, its muscles are evident, shuddering beneath its fur like so many animals trapped in a sack.