Wicked River

by Jenny Milchman

  The water grew shallow; her knees scraped bottom.

  Natalie climbed out, wrapping her arms around her bare body, and ran.

  A whine as the tent zipper raked upward, and Doug crawled out.

  “You heard it too?” Natalie shouted.

  “Heard what?” her husband called.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Hiker’s midnight,” Doug said with a yawn as he strolled toward Natalie, holding out a set of clothes. “Or paddler’s, as the case may be.” He took a searching look around. “You only fall asleep that early out in nature.”

  Doug handed Natalie the clothes before shucking off his own. He waded into the water, dove without making a splash, then swam a few strokes before surfacing and standing waist deep.

  “Doug, did you hear that noise?” Natalie asked from shore. She was glad for the clothing, self-conscious as she yanked shorts over her damp legs and wriggled into a tee.

  Doug resembled a work of art come to life, standing with water grazing his hips, while moonlight cast its glow all over his exposed body.

  He shook his head. “What noise?”

  “It was loud as a shot. You must’ve heard it,” Natalie protested. She wrapped her arms around herself. “Something banged. Or crashed down.”

  Doug walked forward, rising out of the river like a Greek god. Silvery drops of water fell from his skin. “Well, there’re always noises in the woods,” he said, his tone of voice logical. “Was it a bird maybe? Some animal stepping on a stick?”

  It was Natalie’s turn to look around. “I guess it could’ve been.” She shivered.

  Doug began to use his shirt to towel off. “Let’s get the food and have something to eat.”

  “You came out of the tent at the same time as I got out of the water,” Natalie said, allowing herself to be steered toward the tent’s entrance. “I thought you heard it too.”

  Doug frowned. “I came to look for you. I woke up, and you were gone.”

  The explanation was simple—it made sense—yet Natalie felt something lacking behind it. She held back, her eyes scouring the nearby woods, the curve of the shoreline.

  “We never got to talk about it, did we?” Doug said suddenly.

  “Talk about what?”

  He began combing his fingers through his glistening hair. “What happened at the wedding. With Mark and Brett.”

  Natalie looked up sharply. She was glad Doug had brought this up, yet did there seem to be something just a little off in his timing? Not off—perfect. This might be the one topic that would serve as a distraction for Natalie, lead her to look the other way from whatever had startled her back in the lake.

  But what could have startled her that Doug wouldn’t want her to know about?

  “Okay,” she said, ducking low to climb into the tent, then rising to greet him challengingly. “What did happen at our wedding?”

  Doug’s face puckered. “You don’t have to sound like that,” he said. “And actually, I realized that in order to explain it to you, I have to go a ways further back.”

  “Further back,” Natalie repeated.

  Doug stooped down and began gathering up the sleeping bags in his arms. He knee-walked to the opening of the tent, fabric pooling around him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “A lot further.”

  • • •

  They dragged the food pack and their sleeping bags out of the tent and settled down beside the campfire, which crackled back to life once Doug struck a match. Natalie distributed the fresh fruit they’d brought, along with a hunk of bread and some sliced cheese, and they munched contentedly for a while before reclining on the cushy ground. The sky was densely packed with stars. It resembled a clove-studded orange, just enough space between each pinprick of light for a mere sliver of black. Natalie and Doug lay on their sides, fingers threaded, blinking up at the firmament.

  “After my father walked out, he left us with that giant apartment, not nearly paid off,” Doug began. “My dad used to go on these manic binge buys, way overextend himself. Actual repo men would come. And you know my mom… She can’t do anything for herself. She almost lost the one thing that hadn’t been taken away a dozen times. By the time I was in high school, we were most of the way to homeless.”

  “I’m sorry, honey,” Natalie murmured. She’d thought of her mother-in-law as a bit silly and helpless, but not completely incompetent. “I didn’t know it was that bad.”

  “I didn’t want to tell you,” Doug said, rolling away from her onto his back. “Your husband, a bum on the street.”

  “You were just a child,” Natalie said sharply, her voice an intrusion into the blanketed silence of the night. She sought her husband’s hand again, but Doug didn’t reach back.

  “Which brings me to Mark and Brett,” he said.

  A few flecks from the fire floated by Natalie’s face, insectile, wandering. She batted at them, raising herself on one elbow and looking at her husband.

  Doug rubbed at a piece of ash that had landed on his arm. It left behind a dark smudge. “We were all—the three of us, I mean—like a pack of wolf cubs wandering the city. We each had our individual deals. My dad you know about. Brett’s was a gambler and a coke fiend. Still is, as far as I know. Brett saw him even less than I did my own father after he hit the eject button. And Mark never knew he had a dad at all. Seriously…till we were ten, I don’t think Mark knew one was required.”

  Natalie swallowed, picturing the Oliver Twist–like group of urchins on the street.

  Doug continued to stare upward without blinking. “Mark and Brett are good guys, though. They really are. I’m not sure what exactly is going on with them right now, and it might be a little misguided, but I know it can’t be something really bad.”

  “Misguided?” Natalie echoed. “Do you even know who those two men were?”

  Doug turned to face her in the darkness. “No. I swear. I never saw them before in my life.”

  “You didn’t ask Mark or Brett?”

  Doug’s Adam’s apple twitched in his throat. “When there’s crap like we all had in our lives, you kind of learn not to, you know? We don’t necessarily ask about stuff. We just know that we’re there for each other.”

  Which wasn’t a yes or a no. And not having seen the men before wasn’t the same as not knowing what role they had played in whatever went on before the wedding. Doug’s explanation felt vague, somehow diffuse, yet there was truth to it as well. Her husband was staring right into her eyes, and Natalie could feel the need he had for her to understand.

  “You were right,” she said after a moment.

  “Always,” Doug agreed solemnly. Then he smiled, though it looked more like a slash across his face. “About what?”

  “What you said after the ceremony,” Natalie replied. “I don’t get it. I never had friends like that…who protected me from whatever I needed protection from. Claudia was the closest I got.”

  “She ain’t bad,” Doug said in the same joking tone. “I’d let Claudia put herself in front of a truck for me any day.”

  “Yeah,” Natalie said. “The truck would stop just because she told it to.”

  They both smiled in the dark.

  “Doug?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What made you tell me this now?” Natalie asked. She didn’t want to feel on edge—let alone all the way to suspicious—when things were so close and warm between them. But she couldn’t suppress the nagging feeling that she still wasn’t getting the whole story. “About your mom…and your friends?”

  Doug shrugged; she felt his shoulders lift against her. “I don’t know. Something about being out here, I guess. Totally on our own.”

  He began to rub the fleshy web between Natalie’s thumb and forefinger, and she felt her skin come alive. Her husband could ignite sensation in the most humdrum of body parts. S
he began picturing a take two, making love beside the fire, and the muscles in her legs weakened in anticipation.

  “That’s Snowshoe Mountain,” Doug said gruffly, still stroking. “See it?” He let go to trace the outline of a hump in the air. “We’ll be at its base this time tomorrow.”

  From somewhere to their left, a branch broke off a tree, clobbering the ground.

  “Now that I did hear.” Doug got to his feet, balling a fist. If he’d still been caressing Natalie’s hand, he would’ve crushed it.

  He seemed nervous, on edge somehow, but Natalie couldn’t imagine why. Despite her earlier scare in the water, she felt more relaxed than she had in years. Between the demands of planning a wedding and starting her new job, it had been a tense time lately, and it felt good to have both things behind her. But that wasn’t the entire explanation. Something about being up here kindled a state of calm she’d never experienced in the city.

  Doug broke through a nearby thicket, swiping at brush so violently it must have left scratches on his skin. Then he came back, displaying a length of fallen wood. “Lucky this didn’t fall on our tent.”

  Natalie stood up too. “Maybe a lightning strike weakened it.”

  Doug examined the branch. “I don’t see any scorch marks.”

  Both their gazes left the piece of wood to track a slow trajectory around the copse of trees that made up the rest of the island.

  “We’re alone here, aren’t we?” Natalie asked.

  “This place is twelve miles downriver,” Doug replied. “With no way to hike in. And it’s maybe an eighth of a mile in circumference. We’d see another boat.”

  Natalie nodded.

  Doug placed an arm around her. “It’d be easy to get spooked,” he said comfortingly. “We’re not used to isolation. But do you know how much safer we are right now than just crossing a street in the city?”

  Natalie nodded again.

  Then another crash disturbed the nighttime silence.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Much as a snake charmer calls forth a serpent from its basket, Kurt had summoned a newcomer to his camp. The plan he’d formed after stepping into the hole had succeeded like a charm, an incantation. It hadn’t delivered a human sadly; Kurt’s traps had yet to yield such spoils. But one ambush had been put to use, road tested, so to speak, and had worked exactly as planned.

  Over the course of the past few days since he’d been injured, Kurt had managed to perform at a fever pitch of activity. He felt no pain in his ankle. And who cared for sleep, or his usual daily routine of chores? Long summer days and brightly moonlit nights allowed him to transform the woods just as he’d envisioned.

  Now he lay flat on the ground, staring into the yellow eyes of a coyote.

  He’d been apprised of the coyote’s fall by a series of guttural yelps. It had landed at the bottom of Kurt’s deepest hole, a natural depression in the land, widened and deepened with a shovel left behind in the ruins of the ranger’s cabin. Kurt had to lower his own body down, then squat to hoist the coyote out. The beast had wept and mewled with pain, Kurt’s grunts of strain merging to compose the sweetest imaginable ballad. Kurt had worried that the beast would limp away while he chinned himself back out of the pit, but he needn’t have. The coyote lay, flank heaving, awaiting Kurt’s ministrations.

  It had broken its left hind leg. The break would’ve made the beast easy prey in the wild, but still—Kurt understood that the coyote had saved him far more than Kurt saving it. He figured out how to forge a splint out of sticks and immobilize the limb.

  Kurt had lived in these woods for almost two years now. It was high summer, the leaves fleshy and green. He had begun speaking unabashedly to them. Looking for expression, shadings of humanity, in their veins.

  No need for that anymore. He had a companion.

  At first, Kurt kept the cur captive—tying it to a stout tree with rope belonging to the female hiker he had failed at taming—but after hours of studying the animal, learning its nature, Kurt realized his mistake. He didn’t have to be frightened of this creature. The coyote was slinking around the tight circle Kurt had allowed it, looking up with humble gratitude, but not because of its injury nor the treatment Kurt had administered. Even in a robust state, this animal would be abasing itself on its belly versus growling and nipping at a man-sized human.

  It didn’t want to dominate Kurt; it wanted to be dominated by him.

  The ingot of understanding returned to Kurt in a jolt. Coyotes were pack animals, and this one was in need of an alpha.

  Kurt’s body rigidified with a singular joy as he continued to examine the beast, hearing it as clearly as if it had spoken. More clearly, for with speech, people had a tendency to obscure their purposes, either out of a desire to deceive or because they didn’t comprehend what they wanted themselves.

  The nourishment Kurt had always derived from other people could be gleaned in a different way. This coyote posed an option he had never considered.

  Kurt’s recently completed shelter had been built using a method one of the members of the utopia had shown him, requiring neither materials nor tools. Stick and daub, the approach was called. Water from the creek had turned dirt into a mud that dried beneath the sun. Kurt salvaged boards from the cabin, while second-growth forest provided spindly logs for the walls of an additional adjacent room. Two rooms! He had a palace, a whole kingdom, but no subjects to populate it.

  Kurt kept his eyes pinned to the coyote. Animals had a long history of serving as servants, companions, and proxy for kin.

  He had always counted his appeal as mental rather than physical, but recent exertions had rendered Kurt’s body strong, as rippled with muscle as a racehorse. His uncut hair was long and flowing, his skin copper, and his beard had grown bushy with health. He could be a real king now—and this coyote seemed to know it.

  The animal squatted, licking the wiry fur on its broken leg. Kurt could see the spot where the bone was fractured. Though overall he thought he had done a pretty good job, there was a clear jog in the limb.

  Kurt got down on his haunches too.

  The animal lowered its eyes, then started to crawl backward, away from Kurt, sticking close to the ground.

  “Stop!” Kurt said, a ringing shout, and the coyote paused and looked up at him.

  Gooseflesh peppered Kurt’s whole body. “I know,” he said, in a quiet, firm voice. “I know who you are.” He bent down, finding the spot on the animal’s leg.

  The cur let out a small whimper.

  Kurt pressed on the bone, gently at first, then harder. The limb jerked in response, and the coyote whined. Sweat gathered at Kurt’s temples; his body tingled all over. Could he split the bone without getting bitten? Create a compound fracture while remaining untouched himself? What treasures there were to be mined here, animal nature nearly as complex and multifaceted as what Kurt had observed in the human world.

  He probed the wound, and the coyote yelped.

  “Yes, yes,” Kurt murmured. “I know. It hurts.” He paused. “But you aren’t going to stop me, are you? Even though you could sink those fangs of yours into my flesh, cripple me, and change your lot in life in an instant.”

  He felt a shudder of satisfaction—not at hurting the coyote but at understanding it—when the animal let out a helpless, pained yip.

  • • •

  When the alpha showed up, it proved to be a whole different creature from the one Kurt had mastered. Growling menace, bloodlust in the glow of its eyes.

  “No,” Kurt snarled back. “You can’t have him.”

  His words were bravado, an act of sheer show. Terror of a sort he had only experienced once before in his life began to return. The fear didn’t arise from the prospect of being savaged by the alpha. It arose from the dread of being alone again.

  As a younger man, Kurt had been incarcerated, and though he hadn�
��t liked it particularly, the real punishment had been the constant, ever-looming fear of solitary confinement, which the guards had quickly learned to use against him. Its mere threat would cause Kurt’s mind to race like a rat in a cage, sweat to lather his body. Two human hands would be all the contact he’d get each day. Kurt would try to talk himself down from panic, imagining what he could’ve gleaned from those hands. Were they paper white or coffee brown? Did they bear tattoos or age spots? Retreat instantly or take their time after sliding in a tray?

  Crumbs. He would starve to death in days.

  The alpha coyote had brought with him the return of solitary.

  Upon its leader’s arrival, the coyote Kurt had come to know raced out of camp, awkward and clumsy, claws scrabbling against the dirt as it ran.

  While the alpha began to descend on Kurt, teeth audibly snapping.

  Kurt fell to the earth, assuming a position akin to the one he had noted during the time he’d been granted company, such that it was, the chance to learn the makeup of another being. He lay, chest rising and falling, curled into a shrimp-like C as he imitated the whines of the stinking cur he had lost. The alpha circled around him.

  Kurt kept his gaze averted, staring at the humpbacked mountain whose shadow loomed to the west, until it felt as if his eyes would bleed.

  The alpha sniffed him, and Kurt licked his own naked belly, repulsed by the taste of his flesh. And yet, something leapt inside him when he read identical disgust, contempt in the gold eyes of the alpha. He had anticipated how the alpha would feel.

  The alpha came so close that Kurt could feel the riffle of its coat in the breeze, smell its gamy odor. At last, the coyote turned, controlled by Kurt even as it believed itself to be in control. As the enormous beast began to lope away, Kurt remained still, breathing hard and thinking, You’re no different from the first. I know you too.

  And at that moment, circulating air currents, the direction of a rising wind, or the beneficence of a generous god caused Kurt to smell something that hadn’t been there a second before. The scent was far off, and high in the sky, so Kurt rose to his feet, forgetting to check on the alpha’s progress. It turned when it sensed Kurt’s motion, and started to sprint back toward him, baring black lips that exposed its fangs.