The Wilding (12 page)

For a long time the only sound is the rushing of the river and the occasional
crack
of a Coors can being opened. “I thought Dad told me your doctor said you weren’t supposed to drink anymore,” Graham says and his grandfather says, “That doesn’t mean I’m going to drink any less.” He settles into his own separate silence and appears like a still-life painting, his hand on Boo’s head, motionless and watching the fire with a detached expression.

Justin collects the dishes and carries them to the river and goes to work scrubbing with sand and a dash of biodegradable soap that goes frothing downstream. Back at camp, he packs the cooking materials into a large canvas bag they will later hang from a tree.

By this time the air has grown heavy with the shadows that come with early evening, earlier each day now that fall is deepening into winter. A great bunch of honking draws Justin’s eyes skyward where he observes a flock of geese, arranged in a capital V, headed south. One of them appears drunk, swooping and circling away from the rest who continue along their determined course. He realizes it is an owl, snatching moths from the air.

And then he spots another. And another still. He takes his beer and wanders away from camp and in the deepening gloom watches the owls as they fly in and out of the high branches where they make their roosts.

His father appears beside him. “What are you doing?”

“Just looking. At the owls and the trees and everything else.”

“You always liked trees,” he says. Justin can smell beer in his breath and can hear it in his voice, the friendlier, looser tone of it. “I remember when you were a baby. One night you wouldn’t stop crying. So I took you outside and we stood underneath a tree and you fell right asleep.”

Justin looks at him as if for the first time. “I’ve never heard that story before.”

“You always liked trees.”

“I did?”

“Sure.”

The darkness comes right up to the fire. Justin’s father sits on a lawn chair while Graham and Justin take to the logs they dragged earlier from the forest. The pyramidal arrangement of firewood glows yellow at its top and orange in its middle while the charcoal at its bottom gleams with the black, glassy quality of obsidian. The flames throw shadows upon the willows surrounding them and toss sparks into the air and the night becomes a flickering vision of orange gleams and shifting black shapes. From way off in the distance comes a mournful scream that interrupts all other sounds in the canyon.

Graham stands up. “What’s that?”

“That’s an owl,” Justin says.

“It sounded like a dinosaur. I mean, like the dinosaurs in the movies.”

Boo moves to the periphery of the camp and huffs once. Having proved himself, he hurries back.

Graham lowers himself to the log. A few minutes pass before the screeching begins again. From the forest sounds another owl, then another, some of them with voices like a metallic rasp, others a twittering hoot. Graham looks over his shoulder, perhaps wondering if later tonight he will wake to find some phantom looming over him. “They sound sad,” he finally says.

His grandfather nods and pulls from his beer. “That they do.”

For a time they sit there, listening to the owls sing, their remote wailing.

“If I could sing a song like that,” his grandfather says and pokes at the fire with a stick and the sparks float up and grow smaller and smaller until the darkness encloses them. “A song about the way I feel. Well, it would be quite a song.”

From his belt he pulls a Gerber buck knife and flicks open its seven-inch blade, the blade stained and chipped from so many years of skinning animals and gutting fish and carving wood. With it he begins to whittle his stick down to a point. “You got any stories, Graham? Scary ones?”

Graham thinks about it for a while and then launches into a story he heard at school. It’s about an old hunchback who lives underneath the city and pulls boys down when they reach into sewer grates to fetch their runaway baseballs. “You know how Pepto-Bismol turns your poop black? Well, this guy is so evil, he poops black even when his poop doesn’t have Pepto-Bismol in it.” He goes on another minute, and then his grandfather interrupts him, saying, “I’ve got a story.”

A moth flickers by and vanishes.

“Go on then,” Justin says.

“A long time ago,” he says, as slow as breathing, “something terrible happened here.” He studies Graham and Justin, making sure he has their attention. “It was the summer of Red Morning’s fifteenth year, and like every Indian boy, he went on a vision quest.” At this point he has had six beers and from the sound of his voice they are beginning to affect him. “In this very canyon.” He aims his knife at the ground for emphasis before lazily returning to his whittling.

“Now when you go on a vision quest, you’re not supposed to eat or drink or sleep. You’re supposed to just sit there—on your buffalo hide or whatever—and get in tune with nature and eventually, supposedly, your spirit animal will shuffle out of the forest and tell you something you won’t ever forget, at least not for a little while. And then you’ll go back to your village a man. So this Red Morning, he finds a nice meadow and he waits for the spirits to call, maybe two weeks, before—”

“You can only last four days without water,” Graham says. “Then you die.”

“Indians are made of different stuff. They’re tougher.” He aims the knife at Graham. “And if you interrupt me again I’m going to throw you in the river.”

Graham smiles and then covers up the smile with his hands.

“So he waits there three weeks. Lips cracking. Skin blistering. Spiders and ants and mosquitoes biting him. And finally his spirit animal comes. When it first comes out of the woods, he thinks it’s a man, draped in furs. But it isn’t. It’s tall and naked and covered fully in coarse, black hair. It smells like spoiled meat. And it has long yellow claws. But Red Morning doesn’t feel afraid. He knows it’s going to tell him something important. It says only one word before returning to the woods: ‘Kill.’ ”

He falls into a reverie, speaking softly, telling them how Red Morning stands up then and stretches his aching muscles and is about to gather up his buffalo hide, when he sees in the near distance, just around the bend in the canyon, where his village is, tentacles of smoke rising into the sky.

He runs home as only a fifteen-year-old Indian boy can run, so fast that his feet leave the ground and he is actually flying. He no longer feels hungry or thirsty. There is still a pain at the bottom of his stomach, but it’s a different kind of pain, as if all the blood in his body is pooling hotly there.

Near the village, he climbs up an embankment so that he can see what the trouble is before he faces it full-on. He stares in disbelief at the scene below him. The smokehouse is burning. The sweat lodge has been kicked in. Several wickiups have been kicked open, slashed apart. Bodies lie strewn about everywhere, his mother and father among them, with holes the size of fists in their chests and stomachs. Then he spots the soldiers. They wear gray pants and blue coats that fork in the back like a devil’s tail. There are five of them and they stand in a half circle, smoking rolled cigarettes and laughing quietly.

These are the white men he has heard rumors about but never really believed in. The ones who kill elk and deer only for their antlers, sawing them off and leaving their bodies to rot. Here, they have killed everyone and filled their leather satchels and saddlebags with dried venison and bone necklaces and carefully carved pipes and blades and arrowheads. Anything that shines prettily or promises to fill their bellies, they take. They are led by a hawk-faced man wearing a white hat.

At that moment Red Morning remembers the word the creature whispered to him.
Kill.
His pulse takes to the rhythm of it like a drumbeat.
Kill.

Justin’s father pauses here to wet his throat with another sip of beer. His face is red and hollow-eyed from the fire. He has whittled his stick down to a splinter. Shreds of wood decorate his thighs.

He continues, telling them how Red Morning cups his hands around his mouth and howls a war cry, opening up his throat and bouncing his tongue, so that his voice fills up the canyon, echoing off its walls and trees, making it sound as though the whole world is full of Indians hungry for the scalps of white men.

The soldiers throw down their cigarettes and look in every direction. They seem ready to fight at first, but what are they fighting for? They have taken everything there is to take. So they leap onto their horses. When the hawk-faced man urges his horse into a gallop, the strap of his satchel breaks and it comes loose from his shoulder and disgorges itself upon the ground. The food and the jewelry and weaponry fall as a mass that breaks into many pieces that roll and bounce among the hurrying hooves of his horse. It stumbles and kicks and throws him from his saddle. His men continue a good thirty yards and stop haltingly because all around them the canyon still vibrates with Red Morning’s war cry.

The shadows on Justin’s father’s face move when he talks. But that’s it. That’s the only thing that moves. His body stays absolutely dead still. Even his voice is a level drone, so slow you can pick each word from the air and examine it.

“Stop!” the hawk-faced man cries to the men, scrabbling across the ground to where his rifle has fallen. “Come help!” He is about to yell for them again when an arrow strikes his neck and takes away his voice and sends him reeling. His hat falls off and soaks up a jet of arterial blood that escapes from him. He struggles to right himself. Another arrow shaves him narrowly. And then another, this one finding its mark and dropping him.

“The other men leave him there, but each in his own turn meets death, some with their throats slit, others brained by rocks. He finds all of them.” Justin’s father’s voice rises and falls and levels once more. “And then he skins them and guts them and eats their meat and breaks their bones and sucks the marrow from them. And with every bite he takes, his skin grows hairier and his nails grow longer, as long and sharp as talons.”

Graham laughs and his grandfather gives him a severe look before his attention drifts off toward the dark forest and the less dark sky. “If you’re walking through the woods and if you see a tree with scratches on its bark?”

They follow his gaze, expecting to find such a tree. “The Indian once known as Red Morning has been there, sharpening his claws and teeth. He wanders the forest, still hungry for revenge, searching for men with rifles, someone to blame for what happened to him and his family.”

Graham makes big eyes even as he grins to prove he isn’t afraid.

For the next few minutes they sit quietly. Then an owl swoops near the fire, its wings arched against the warm updraft, exciting the flames with the air it displaces. Justin shifts his legs. His feet have needles in them, having fallen asleep. And the log beneath him feels suddenly cold and hard and unwelcome.

Justin awakes with a full bladder and ventures out of the tent and into the evening stillness. The moon is gone, the canyon lit only by the glow of the stars. He pauses after a few paces, his last breath and footstep the only lingering sound. The hair on his arms prickles as it does when you feel you are being watched. He thinks of his father’s story, able to believe in it for a moment, his mind drugged with sleep. Then he shakes his head and in doing so shakes off his fear like a cobweb. He moves hesitantly forward, away from the campsite, to the place they designated their toilet.

When he lets loose a steaming arc of piss, his eyes wander the sky. An owl banks and wheels, its silhouette blacking out the stars in the shape of a mouth. He follows it until it vanishes against the backdrop of a fast-moving collection of clouds. They come from the west. He stands there awhile—half-asleep, entranced by the gray mystery of the night—and for five minutes, maybe more, watches the clouds become a thunderstorm crisscrossed with wires of lightning. Soon the canyon will darken with rain. He shakes off and hurries back to camp and observes nearby the abandoned tent. Its black hump makes it appear like the huddled remains of a beast that has run and run only to collapse exactly there, perishing where it lies, like the shadow-filled skeletons of cattle in John Wayne movies.

He lies awake until the night fills with the dull, even noise of rainfall. The entire world seems to hiss. The wind flares up for a moment and the canvas rattles and flaps, joined by a sound like the crack of whips as branches break off trees. He clicks on his flashlight, revealing their four bodies crowded into a tent that droops and breathes around them with many damp spots dripping and pattering his sleeping bag.

When you put your head on your pillow and listen—
really
listen—you can hear footsteps. This is your pulse, the veins in your ear swelling and constricting, slightly shifting against the cotton. He hears this now—an
under
sound, beneath the rain—only his head is nowhere near his pillow. He has propped himself up on his elbow.

There it is. Or is he only imagining it? The rasping thud a foot makes in wet grass—one moment behind the tent, the next moment in front of it, circling.

The front flaps billow open with the breeze, the breeze bearing the keen wet odor of rabbitbrush, a smell he will always associate with barbed-wire fences, with dying, with fear. Outside, thousands of raindrops catch his flashlight’s beam and brighten with it. He imagines something out there, rushing in—how easy it would be—its shape taking form as it moves from darkness into light.

His father releases a violent snore. Justin spotlights him with the flashlight, wanting to tell him
shh.
His father’s fingers twitch like the legs of the dreaming dog he drapes his arm over. His mouth forms silent words, his eyeballs shuddering beneath his eyelids, and—not for the first time—Justin wonders what is going on in there, inside him.

Morning, a sneezing fit wakes Justin. He wipes his nose and then the gunk from his eyes to see that his father has already risen, his sleeping bag left crumpled and empty on his cot like a shed skin. Justin can smell wood smoke and hear the crackle of the campfire made from the wood they kept dry by storing it in the tent.