The Wilding (11 page)

JUSTIN

His father is a creature of habit. Anything outside the familiar he labels “different.” Sushi. Soccer. Rap music. Even in the wilderness, the place he goes to escape, he seeks out what he knows.
There,
he will point out to Justin, a thatch of willows from which they once chopped branches for roasting marshmallows. Or
there,
at the top of that tree, the tangled nest that looks like steel wool, where the osprey returns year after year.

For as long as they have been visiting the Ochocos, they have made their camp in Echo Canyon, along the South Fork of the John Day River. Aside from the occasional Forest Service truck grumbling down a nearby logging road, they rarely see anyone and his father considers the spot his own.

To remember the exact location, he has blaze-marked a pine with his hatchet. “Keep an eye out,” he says now—and then yells, “There!” indicating the tree with the wound scabbed over by hard orange sap. They pull off the road and park under its branches.

Justin climbs from the Bronco—followed by Graham and the dog—and pauses. It is the air. It feels, it tastes, so good to breathe. Whenever he comes here, he can’t get used to it: how the air somehow seems older than other air, like the breath of a stone drawn from a glacial stream. It seems to carry sounds farther, more sharply. A pinecone falling. The whisk of an owl’s wings when it leaves a branch. The wind sighing through a spiderweb. A coyote gnawing on a bone.

A deer. Justin can hear it coming from a long way off, pushing its way through the trees. And then it appears at the edge of the road and steps cautiously onto the gravel. None of them moves and the buck doesn’t see them. It has a heavy, lengthy throwback rack that forms a crown. Its eyes and its snout are black and damp. Even from a distance of thirty yards, they can see its muscles tightening and loosening beneath its hide.

They stand like this for some time, and then his father tires of the reverie and bangs shut the driver-side door. The buck startles at the sound, stepping clumsily backward, before trotting away, back into the forest, vanishing between the trees midleap, as if its antlers fit just so. Justin watches his father watch it go. His expression carries a mixture of envy and hunger. Even as he dreams a bullet into its hide, he admires the beauty of its architecture, its speed.

He comes around the front of the Bronco and joins them. In the way of fathers on 1950s television shows, he brings his hand to Graham’s head and messes his hair. “Maybe we’ll run into him tomorrow, hey?” he says.

Graham plays the dutiful grandson, smiling even as he tries with his fingers to comb his hair back into its proper place.

Before they set off into the woods, Justin glances back at the Bronco. Anyone who drives by will see it and will be able to find them, if they wanted to, something he might have once found reassuring. But not today, not with Seth’s hateful face lingering in his mind.

They tramp along, loaded down with rifles and poles and tents and backpacks, his father casually listing off every piece of vegetation, the wild white onions and yarrow and Queen Anne’s lace. He knows the name of everything. When Justin was a boy, his father would quiz him regularly. Doing so brought order to a wilderness that would have otherwise appeared swarming and impenetrable. Now Graham has his book out and is frantically leafing through its pages, following up on everything his grandfather tells him.

The trees open up. Justin expects to find the vast bear grass meadow that runs up into the thatch of willows growing along the South Fork, and next to it, their old fire pit, probably with a few weeds growing through its ashes. They find something else entirely.

A hundred yards away, at the far edge of the meadow, near the old logging road, stands a backhoe holding in its scoop a block of dark earth it extracted from the neat hole beneath it. Nearby squat two diggers, a payloader, and a bulldozer, their broad metal shovels gleaming dangerously in the sun, like sabers lifted before the charge of a squadron. Next to them stands a bright blue Porta-Potty. The grass of the meadow has been spray painted in great hieroglyphic designs that predict what will become of the canyon.

Normally they would veer right, toward the nearby river, but without a word Justin’s father continues forward, flattening a path in the grass. Justin and Graham follow while the dog wanders around, sometimes ahead and sometimes behind, always panting. His whole body seems to wag along with his tail as he sniffs at a clump of lupin and pees on a molehill and pops his jaw at a grasshopper and barks at a yellow-bellied marmot that chatters its warning from a nearby burrow.

They tour the work site silently. All around them the grass is trampled down and decorated with trash. A crumpled-up bag from McDonald’s. An empty Skoal tin. Cigarette butts. Justin’s father picks up a crushed Coke can, examining it as if it were some curious artifact, before tossing it over his shoulder.

Justin’s wife often teases him for the way he blinks rapid-fire whenever taken aback. And he is aware of the habit now, when his eyelids shutter open and closed repeatedly, as if to remove some grit from his vision. Blinking is all he can think to do. He has always thought of this place as the very definition of wild. To see all this human evidence overlying it seems wrong, mismatched, like green grass poking through a snowdrift.

A tall stand of pines edges the meadow and each tree has a pink X spray painted across its trunk. A dozen have already been sawed down—their stumps pulled from the ground, leaving behind gaping cavities a man could lie down inside—to accommodate the passage of the equipment from the road to the meadow. Justin can smell sap and damp soil. Sawdust, nearly white, decorates the ground like freshly fallen snow. Survey markers are planted here and there. It is difficult to imagine what will happen within the next few weeks, months, years.

This coming Monday a legion of men in Carhartt jackets and steel-toe boots will swarm the canyon, logging and brush-clearing. Bobby wants the entire canyon cleaned out before Christmas, beginning the project before the year turns over for tax purposes. And then, come spring, after the snow melts, roads will be laid down on a primitive basis, followed by utilities. As soon as electricity hisses beneath the forest floor, Justin’s father and his crew will tap into it and begin work on the lodge, which Bobby wants to house a pro shop, a restaurant, a bar, a banquet hall, and fifty rooms. By next fall the spec homes will go up and retired Californians wearing polo shirts will begin buying up the lots.

Graham approaches a spray-painted pine. He reaches his camera to his eye and snaps a photo.

“What did you do that for?” Justin’s father says.

“What for?” With the camera still poised to shoot, Graham rotates on his heel and takes another photo, this one of his grandfather hooking his thumb in his belt.

“What kind of picture is that?”

Graham lets the camera hang loose around his neck and shrugs.

“You want to be working for the
National Geographic,
you should be taking a picture of an elk on top of a mountain or something. Now
that
would be a picture.”

Graham stands there another moment, waiting to see if his grandfather has anything more to say, and then asks what the X means.

“It means it’s marked,” his grandfather says. “Like a buck in the crosshairs.” He kicks vaguely at the shovel of a tractor. The impact creates a dull
bong
that sends Boo into a barking fit. “Shut up, Boo.” By some trick of the light he looks ten years older. There is a distant expression on his face that betrays feelings of regret or sadness or something else. Resignation, perhaps.

The pine doesn’t know what will happen to it. It will remain unsuspecting, pumping its sap and stretching its roots farther and farther into the soil, until the saw hits its bark. And when that happens, when the saw screams and the wood chips fan from the cut, its future will disappear. The wind will no longer run through its needles like fingers through hair. Birds will no longer roost in its branches. Hunters will no longer pause in its shade to pull from a water bottle or a cigarette. Instead the tree will be felled, its branches sliced off. The log will be collected, stacked on a flatbed, and choked with chains, driven to a mill and sectioned into boards that will end up part of somebody’s dining room or fence or pool cue or gun cabinet or maybe the dresser drawer where they keep their socks rolled into balls. And isn’t that the real mystery of life: who you’ll end up being consumed by? Or what you’ll end up consuming?

Justin’s father looks around him as if the canyon has been made suspect, as if he will never see it correctly again. It bothers them both to think of the canyon as a hazy memory that they’ll struggle to organize a year from now:
Where was that place we used to camp? That bend of the river that offered the best trout?

“Fuck,” he says.

“Dad.”

“What?”

Justin jogs his eyes at Graham. “Language.”

His father dismisses him with a wave. “Nothing wrong with dropping a cuss here and there, so long as you keep your mouth clean around the girls.”

“You never let me swear growing up.”

“Look what happened.” Again he messes Graham’s hair, and this time, when Graham goes to neaten it, his grandfather snatches his hand and shakes his head, no. “This little guy could use some roughness about him.”

Maybe it is the builder in him, the way he determines the weakness of things, looking at people the way he might look at houses, noting water intrusion or uneven flooring. It certainly informed his parenting. Justin remembers when his father took him to a slaughterhouse. At the time he was a little older than Graham. He had left out a package of hamburger that spoiled and his father saw their field trip as a remedy for such carelessness.

He remembers the smell of the slaughterhouse—of animal sweat and shit mixed up with the minerally sourness of blood. He remembers the clattering of hooves and machinery, the high-pitched screams of the dying—all of it echoing throughout the vast chamber like a horrible music played from red-lunged accordions and drum sets constructed from bone.

BRIAN

His first few weeks back in central Oregon he spent much of his time changing bandages, applying salve to the wound that continually dried out and cracked and sent a trickle of blood into his eye so that his vision went red, and then with a blink, clear.

Every day he would crawl into the Jeep he had bought thirdhand in high school and drive around, needing the speed, the distance between him and the rest of the world. He kept the windows down and let the air bully its way into the cab, down his throat, hot and dry and flavored with the familiar taste of sage and juniper. The world tasted the same but looked different, the plateaus and buttes stacked up like slabs of meat, the ponderosas scabbed over with bark the color of dried blood. The bandage that patched his skull would flutter against the wind and one time tore off entirely, sucked out the window, into the day, where a clump of rabbitbrush caught it and june bugs and fire ants and bluebottle flies drank of the red wetness collected in it.

During this time it was difficult to shop for groceries and order a burger and get mail from the mailbox and even speak to people—about weather, politics, the price of gas—those things that seemed so irrelevant. Being ordinary was difficult, almost startling. He felt as he used to, as a teenager, after a long day of skiing Mount Bachelor, when sprawled out on the couch or lying in bed, his thighs would seize up, his knees would bend, imagining the rise and fall of snow-groomed trails. His body couldn’t realize that it had slowed down, that the white huddled shapes of trees weren’t rushing past.

This was why he drove and stomped his foot against the accelerator: to maintain his speed. And then his father died and slowed everything down again.

He found his father in the driveway, in the truck, the engine still running. He had backed up into a juniper tree and remained there long enough for the tailpipe to scorch the bark. His body slumped against the door. Slowly Brian approached the truck. Through the window he could see first his hair, the color of cigarette ash, and then below it, the emptiness of his face, and knew him to be dead. His mouth was open and his tongue hung from it. His left eye was a tiny red planet. A rope of blood ran from his nose. An aneurysm, the doctor said.

His father had put the truck in reverse and turned around in his seat to eye the long curve of the driveway and a vessel at the base of his brain burst. Just like that. Something he had done a thousand times before—the safest thing in the world—had killed him. It was like getting lung cancer from pouring cereal or choking to death when checking e-mail: it didn’t make sense or seem fair. Especially considering what Brian had walked away from, dented and spoiled, but alive. At the funeral many people said his father was with God, which meant God was death. Afterward he did not cry. He only felt profoundly lonely and staggered around the house, peering into rooms, trying their doorknobs to see if they were locked.

JUSTIN

When they approach the river, Boo freezes. “You see that?” Justin’s father says, nodding in the dog’s direction. “He’s sighted something. Maybe a ptarmigan or a grouse.”

It is another thirty yards to where Boo points, his body black and rigid, his snout indicating something hidden along the edge of the meadow, where the bear grass gives way to willow thickets. “At ease.” The dog relaxes his pose and wags his tail but keeps his eyes focused ahead of him.

Here is a stand of willows, and beyond it, their fire pit. A tent crouches next to it, a brown vinyl dome tent, the kind that might have been purchased from a hardware shop in the late seventies. Its front flap is unzippered, gaping and fleshy and trembling, like an old man’s mouth.

The tent appears to be empty, but they can hear a scritching sound from inside it. “Hello?” Justin says and then says it again, this time raising his voice to make sure he is heard over the river, its waters hissing. The scritching stops.

They set down their gear and slowly approach the tent and draw aside the flap to peer into its shadowy interior. A dark shape comes at them and takes to the air shrieking—a crow, he realizes when his senses overtake his alarm.

The dog barks wildly. His son runs off a few paces before turning around with his hands raised protectively before his face. His father simply stares after the bird—still visible but departing from them like a curl of ash blown by the breeze—before regarding the tent once again.

“Should we camp somewhere else?” Justin asks when his heart settles. “Is there somebody else staying here?”

His father continues to stare at the tent for a minute and then lays a hand on it, as if checking for a pulse. “No,” he says. “There’s nobody here.”

“How can you be sure?”

He raises his hand. Its palm is coated with pollen.

“Why would they just leave their tent?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Right now Justin hears silence. It’s like a mistake in music—the way it makes him cock his head and listen—like a finger losing its place on a guitar, the wrong note so much more striking than the right note. The steady sigh of the wind, the intermittent birdsong, the chipmunks rustling for pine nuts, has stopped. There is only the river, murmuring in the background.

Then, from the nearby forest, a mass of swallows starts up into the sky, frightened by something. They wheel overhead and their shadows speckle the meadow and their frantic chirping fills the air. With that the spell is broken.

His father wipes his hand on his thigh and inspects the palm.

By this time Graham has returned to the campsite. “Did you know pollen never deteriorates?” He is always saying things like this, listing off trivia he has committed to memory when surfing the Internet or reading the encyclopedia. “It’s one of the few naturally secreted substances that lasts indefinitely.”

“Indefinitely,” his grandfather says and snorts, amused by the word.

“Do you know what that word means?” Graham says, not condescending, but eager to explain.

“Do you know what it means to be a know-it-all?”

“Did you know that certain types of plants can eat meat?”

“Where do you get this stuff?”

“I read it.”

“Where?” The beginnings of a sneer grow beneath his grandfather’s beard. “On the
Internet
?” He enunciates it like a foreign dish that once gave him indigestion.

“No,” Graham says. “The back of a cereal box.”

“Oh.” The sneer turns into a smile and his grandfather lifts his arms and lets them fall, defeated.

They make their camp fifty yards upstream from the other tent. Even though they understand it to be empty, there is something about it that makes them uneasy, so that camping beside it is a little like picnicking downwind from the rotting husk of a beached whale.

While Boo splashes along the banks of the South Fork, chasing the silvery flashes of fish, Justin sets to work digging a new fire pit. His father and Graham make another trip to the Bronco, carrying the cooler and a duffel bag and lawn chairs and his old army-issue canvas tent. It leaks and smells like mothballs and mildew. Every night Justin has ever spent in it, he wakes up swollen and sneezing.

Last Christmas he bought his father a new tent from REI—one of those fancy waterproof, windproof four-man deals with a lifetime guarantee and a screened-in moonroof. “What happened to the new tent I bought you?”

“This has been a good tent for us.” His father pats it fondly. “I like
this
tent.” He does not look at Justin but sets to work unfolding the canvas and planting the stakes.

His voice goes high and he tries to control it. “That tent cost me nearly three hundred dollars. You’re just going to let it rot in the attic?”

Paul finishes hammering a stake into the ground and stands up and straightens his posture to accentuate his six-foot frame. Beneath his stare Justin feels as if he has shrunk a good five inches, as if his chest hair and muscles have receded—and he becomes twelve all over again.

His father eyes Justin with a hand resting on his belly. “I didn’t ask for the thing. And I didn’t want it.” He begins to rub his belly as if to summon his anger from it like a genie. “And when are you going to learn that quality doesn’t always come with a price tag? Just listen to you. You’re as bad as a Californian.”

“Graham has allergies, you know. I hope they don’t get set off by the mold.”

“Graham has allergies.” He sniffs his amusement. “More like you’ve got allergies.”

“We’ve both got allergies.”

Paul sniffs again. He has never suffered from the watery eyes or shortness of breath that come with fall and spring, so he always views allergy symptoms with suspicion, as though they were invented for sympathy. He passes the hammer to Graham forcefully enough to make him stagger back a step. “Here’s a job for you. Pound in the rest of the stakes.”

Along the banks of the South Fork, willows crowd together. The world tries to reflect itself in the water but can’t. The clouds and trees and sun fall into the surface and vanish, swept away by the white water, along with their faces when they stand at twenty-yard intervals along the rocky bank and plop their spinners in the water. They have to be careful not to tangle their lines in the branches, snapping their wrists with short sidearm casts.

Justin watches his son. He can see in his face a certain excitement he recognizes. There was a time when, upon entering the woods and following a game trail to the river, with the sun falling through the trees in angled shafts, with the air cool and pine-smelling, with his fishing pole in one hand and tackle box in the other, he would dream about trout with freckled backs and bright white bellies and feel his heart turn over with excitement.

He feels something similar now. The dark forest. The green meadow. The pitted, unscalable walls of the canyon surrounding them. Seeing it, he realizes he has actually longed for this place. It is like hearing an old song on the radio. One you loved but forgot existed. Rediscovering it made you happy.

He wonders what his wife is doing. Maybe crunches on the living room floor while watching a DVR recording of
Survivor.
He has not thought of her since they left that morning, when she hugged Graham tightly to her chest and then gave Justin a quick squeeze that felt more like a handshake and said, “Take care of our boy.”

There had been an argument earlier. He can’t remember exactly where the anger came from—something trivial—maybe his carelessness with his bowl, chipping it in the sink when he went to splash the milk from it. But before long each of them was slamming cupboards, heaving sighs, looking for a way to cut the other with a sharp word or glare. “Fucking excuse me,” he can remember saying as he pushed past her with the cooler.

He hadn’t wanted to leave like that—with their anger unresolved. He remembered their wedding day, when the line of family and friends had exited the sanctuary to tearily offer them hugs and handshakes in the breezeway, his grandmother had whispered to him, “Never go to bed angry. Best advice I can give.” That’s what driving away this morning felt like, like going to bed with their backs to each other, anger spoiling their dreams. He had thought about calling from the road, had even fingered the phone. But then he thought of his father listening in on the conversation and slipped the phone back in his pocket. He was ashamed to call because there was something to be ashamed about. There was history here: no matter what the situation, even if he felt completely innocent, he would always apologize, always, just to end it, to put a stop to the tension that made him so distracted and headachy. Not this time.

There was a time when they would make up with sex—no, fucking was the word for it. In the middle of a screaming match, one of them would get a hungry look and shove the other against a wall or to the floor, ripping off clothes, enough to bare a breast, to bite a thigh, their kissing more like eating. Any bared skin would go red from carpet burn and the crosshatching of fingernails. And then their grunts would rise into mewls and their mewls into the best kind of screams and they would collapse, emptied, satisfied, breathing heavily. He missed those days.

His attention drifts to the river, from which he pulls three rainbow trout, each the size of his forearm. When he stares into their pearly eyes and rips the hook from their mouths, he cannot help but feel a strange pleasure even as he recognizes a thing yanked from its home into a cold white space it did not know existed until that very second. They gut the fish and throw their heads in the river.

When they return to camp, Graham goes to the tent to get a jacket. From inside comes a fierce buzzing, like a dozen maracas violently shaken. He jumps away with a scream and Justin hurries toward him.

“There’s something in there,” Graham says. There comes a sound like the thump of a stick against the canvas.

“It’s a snake,” his grandfather says. “It’s a goddamned rattler is what it is.”

His father retrieves a long stick from the forest and with his knife hurriedly whittles its end into a yellow point. With this he beats at the outside of the tent. “Hey! Hey, snake! Get out of there, you snake!”

Eventually a western rattler slides from the tent, pausing to taste the air with its tongue, and then begins its fast slither through the ankle-high grass. Justin’s father chases after it, hooting with excitement, and Justin chases after him, certain someone will be bitten. At the sound of their footsteps, the snake coils up like a pile of rope to face them. Its tail buzzes out another warning that Justin’s father silences by whipping the spear forward as though it were an extension of his arm. It pierces the rattler cleanly through the head and tacks it to the ground.

He gives Justin a big grin before uprooting the spear and holding it out before him. From its tip hangs the rattler. It twists into an S and slumps into a diamond-backed line more than five feet long. Its beaded tail drops down to zigzag a trail in the dirt.

Justin must look spooked—he is spooked—because his father laughs a little when he toes the snake off the end of his spear, its head now a peculiar saddle shape with a hole through its middle. A lot of blood and clear fluid comes out of it.

Graham says, “If that isn’t the biggest rattler in the entire universe, I’d be surprised,” and his grandfather smiles at him like a big dumb cat with a mouse in its jaws.

The snake refuses to die. It does a dance instead, twisting and knotting itself into calligraphic designs, its tail rattling, its mouth sometimes closed, sometimes open and as bright as bubblegum. Justin believes it is staring at him. As if it can open its mouth
that wide.

Minutes pass and the snake continues to knot itself into an ever-moving tangle. Every now and then Justin’s father pokes it with the spear. “Can I try?” Graham says and for a while he and his grandfather trade the spear back and forth, stabbing, prodding.

Watching a snake die is like watching a campfire, a controlled menace. A long half hour passes and then it is done moving, no matter how hard Justin’s father pokes it. The sunlight has begun to retreat from the canyon when he carries the snake to the campfire and lays it out on a log and goes to work with a boning knife, chopping off its head and setting it aside. Then he pries open the body to eviscerate it and strip off its skin and dice its meat into cubes and put them in a pan to cook with a slice of bacon.

They stand around the campfire and watch the meat hiss in the bacon fat. It smells fungal.

“Did you know,” Graham says, the initial nervousness of his voice giving way to an academic tenor. “Did you know that when you see a dead snake you’re supposed to bury it, because the yellow jackets and wasps will eat the poison and when they do it becomes their poison so that when they sting you they sting you to death?”

“You read that on the back of a box of cereal?”

“No.” He purses his lips, terribly serious. “I saw it on the Discovery Channel.”

His grandfather picks up the head, a soft jewel, with his thumb and forefinger and squeezes. Its mouth opens. Little clear beads hang off its fangs’ tips. “Did
you
know the Chinese believe venom is an aphrodisiac? And that the Indians believe it has healing powers?”

“Indians?” Graham says. “Or
Indian
Indians?”

“Both.”

With his knife Paul widens the snake’s smile and removes the poison sacs. A see-through whitish yellowish color, they appear made from spider filaments. He drops them into a bottle of Jack Daniels. “A snack for later.”

Once cooked, the meat turns bright pink, like plastic. He seasons it with salt and pepper before forking it onto a dish. “Dig in.” They fill their mouths with the snake and the snake is so good—like a rougher sort of pork—it creates in them an appetite. They feel it uncoiling in their bellies and rattling and asking for more. So they feed it.

They throw the trout filets in the pan where they sizzle as if angry. Justin’s father turns them with a telescoping spatula, cooking them through in less than five minutes, serving them up on tin plates already dampened by the snake. They eat the crumbly meat with their fingers and spit out the splinters of bones while the canyon darkens all around them.