The Wilding (13 page)

His son still sleeps, an arm thrown over his face, so Justin rises as quietly as he can, pulling on his jeans and the Patagonia longsleeved crew he paid way too much money for the other day, when he and Graham went shopping at REI and got carried away, spending over four hundred dollars after an overeager saleswoman wearing a green vest bullied them into a family membership while dragging them rack to rack, talking at a fast clip about how important gear was—that was the word she kept using,
gear
—emphasizing, among other things, dry-core weave as an essential component in any shirt, the way it wicked moisture away, etc. He wishes he had spent the money instead on an air mattress. He hasn’t been camping in years and he’s not used to the time away from his bed. His spine feels like the hinges have gone stiff, like the oil has leaked out of them.

He steps outside and pops his back and takes in the morning—the trees that remain in shadow down low, while sunlight ignites their upper branches. He then notices the dewy grass trampled down in a path that leads around the tent. He follows it, slowly, as if expecting something to leap out at him around every staked corner, until he has made a full circle. Then he steps out of the ring of trampled grass and stares at it for a long time, the memory of last night surfacing in his foggy brain. He does not feel the fear he felt before, but a mild discomfort brought on by this observation: whatever has visited them—whether deer or bear or coyote, he wonders—hasn’t simply prowled near for a sniff. The wide path of tramped-down grass indicates a continuous circling that reminds him of vultures wheeling in the sky.

A pitch pocket pops and draws his attention to the campfire, left unattended.

He looks around for his father, looking to the east, where the last of the clouds move slowly away from him, seeming to drag the blue weight of the sky behind them. The rain has left behind a dampness that creeps from the ground as a milky mist. A quarter his height, it covers the meadow and makes everything farther than ten yards away gray and indistinct. As he peers into it a red-winged blackbird darts out, flashing past him, toward the river, where he hears a dog bark.

He walks a few paces from camp, toward the hum of the South Fork, until it becomes visible. Along it the mist drifts thickly riverward. He spots his father, naked along the shore. He appears as if upon a cloud. A sudden whirl of mist hides him for a moment. And then, while running his hands through his wet hair, he emerges from its dense vapors as if throwing off a shroud.

The cold water has tightened and pinkened his skin and his dampened hair looks completely black, flattened like seaweed against his head. Justin sees him for a moment as he was, so many years ago. The picture of health. He remembers how his father used to lift weights in the basement and how the house would shake when he swung 250 pounds over his head and then back to the floor in a power lift. He remembers how his father once broke a wrench when wrestling with a rusted-over bolt. How, one winter, after his woodpile receded faster than he knew it ought to, he drilled a hole deep into a piece of firewood and filled it with gunpowder and sealed it with putty—and when the living room of his neighbor, Mr. Ott, exploded several days later, Justin’s father called FTD with a smile on his face and ordered flowers to be delivered to the hospital.

In this way he is like a force of nature, moving through life with reckless abandon, wiping away any kind of opposition as a storm would wipe away a village, the low growl of his voice like a distant shout of thunder that makes you pause in whatever you are doing and look up.

Now he dries off his body with a towel and then spins it into a whip to snap Boo, who barks eagerly and runs a few paces away from him and back. He drapes the towel over a boulder where his clothes lie in a pile. He pulls on a well-worn pair of Wrangler blue jeans and a thermal shirt whose long sleeves he pushes up to his elbows. And then wool socks, Browning boots whose laces he double-knots. Once dressed, he tosses the towel over his shoulder and moves toward Justin. As he does, he seems to grow older, the wrinkles fanning out from his eyes and the yellow creeping into his teeth when he smiles his hello. Age spots dot his skin. Plum-colored pouches bulge beneath his eyes. He says nothing but lays a damp hand on Justin’s shoulder. The chill remains after he takes it away.

Boo follows the circle around the tent, his nose to the ground, sniffing excitedly. He pauses now and then to press his snout fully into the grass, his tail wagging. And then he stiffens and whines and regards the woods a moment before returning to whatever invisible tendrils of scent he discerns.

“He was doing that earlier.” Justin’s father rubs his head and beard with the towel before tossing it over a log near the fire. “Something prowled close for a sniff last night. That right, Boo?” He squats down next to the dog and pulls him into a headlock and kisses him on the snout. “What do you smell, Boo Boo? You smell a raccoon? You smell a possum? You smell the big bad wolf?”

He hikes to the edge of the forest, twenty yards away. Here he hung a red canvas bag shaped like a huge sausage. It contains their dirty clothes and cooking supplies, anything that might carry the smell of food. There is a handle on the hind end of the bag and he has run the forty-foot rope through it and made a slipknot that he choked tight. He then threw the free end of the rope over the lowest branch, twenty feet above the ground and yanked at it until the bag hung suspended just below the limb, like a massive cocoon. The free end of the rope he secured to the trunk in an anchor hitch he undoes now, lowering the big bag until it impacts the ground with a metallic clatter as the pots and pans and plates readjust themselves.

Justin’s father asks him to fetch some water for coffee. He unzips the bag and rifles around in it until he finds the kettle and throws it at Justin, who catches it fumblingly. There is a cold spring in the nearby forest. From it bleeds a marshy stream, one of so many that trickle to the bottom of the canyon and feed the South Fork. Justin pushes his way through the woods. By this time the mist has mostly burned off, only a few skirts of it surrounding the trees and billowing in his passage. A swarm of tiny brown toads hops away from him when he approaches the spring.

Here it is—the size of a hot tub—surrounded by willows and sun-sparkled stones. And there, next to it, a pair of tattered boots, one of them lying flat against the ground, the other pointed skyward, like a gravestone. He has paused without realizing it. Now he takes several hesitant steps forward to see beyond the boots, where a strewn puzzle of bones and cartilage come together and form a body.

The kettle falls from his hand to the forest floor with a
thunk.

The man has been dead a long time. So long Justin can only identify him as male by his clothes and even then he cannot be certain. His jeans and flannel shirt have been torn open and scattered in pieces as though he has exploded and left the shrapnel of his person lying here and there among the weeds. The vultures and the coyotes and the flies and the worms have had their way and licked the skin clean off his bones. His bones are the color of old paper, a yellowish black, their surface scored from the gnashing of teeth. Justin imagines the coyotes howling when they ate his remains, fighting over the juiciest cuts of meat.

His ribs look like the legs of a dead spider, curled upon itself. Crab grass grows through his knuckles and around his skull like hair. He seems to have grown out of the soil and is now receding into it. A moth lands on the skull, flexing its wings and tasting from the black pool of an eye socket, before taking flight.

At that moment the world seems to stop. The moth ceases flying, frozen in midflight. A tree limb, bowed by the breeze, stills. A pinecone falling from a branch hangs motionless in the air and an immobile chipmunk watches it not fall.

Justin feels a fist-sized pressure in his chest that comes from holding his breath. With a gasp, the pressure vanishes and the world unlocks and resumes its flow, as the moth flutters away and the pinecone crashes to the ground.

And then he runs. He runs and probably makes it fifty feet before he stops and finds his cool and steadies his breathing and returns to the spring, slowly. There is a taste like salty pennies in his mouth and he realizes he has bitten a hole in his cheek. He swallows the blood and calls for his father. And then again, before a voice faintly calls back to Justin from the campsite, “What?”

“I need you to come here. Come here right now.”

Something in his voice must alarm his father because a moment later Justin can hear a crashing in the woods and then breathing beside him. Boo trots forward and Justin’s father grabs the dog by the collar before he can disturb the corpse.

“This is bad,” he says. He is wearing a John Deere cap with a chewed-on brim. He removes it now and stares into its hollow. “This is a hell of a thing.” He looks like a man who has woken from a nap and cannot find his bearings.

Justin takes his cell phone from his pocket and hits the power button. It chirps to life and the screen glows with greenish light. No surprise: there is no service here, far from any tower. “If we drive to the top of the canyon,” he says, “if we get a little higher, I might be able to get a signal. It’s worth a try anyway.”

“No.” His father puts his hat back on and straightens it.

“Excuse me?”

“No.”

“He’s dead.”

“People do that. They die.” He lifts his hand and lets it fall and slap his thigh. “I tell you something:
he’s
in no rush.”

Justin understands this completely and not at all. “Dad?” he says.
“No.”

There is concern on his face, but Justin genuinely believes this has more to do with having to abandon their hunting trip than with the dead man sprawled before them. His father puts a hand on his shoulder and squeezes just hard enough so that Justin knows he means business.

“Look. It turned out to be a beautiful day, didn’t it?” And he’s right—it is—the kind of bright blue day that bleaches everything of its color. “How about let’s enjoy it?” He regards the dead man and Justin notices his cheek bulge, his tongue probing the side of his mouth. “Probably died of a heart attack. Nothing to be done about something like that. Tomorrow evening, when we leave, we’ll drive to John Day and tell the police. But not today.”

His father releases Boo then and the dog creeps toward the dead man, his muscles tense, his body low, as if certain the blackened pile of bones and sinew will leap up at any moment and attack. When it doesn’t, his movements loosen and he begins to pant happily and wades into the spring to drink.

“Okay, Justin?”

Justin looks at his feet—something he does when gathering his thoughts—and there discovers a weather-beaten pack of Marlboros, the cigarettes that could not kill the dead man quickly enough. Next to it sits something shiny. It has the look of a mud-encrusted marble. In mindless curiosity, Justin picks it up and wipes the dust off and turns it over. A faded green pupil stares at him. An eye—he realizes—a glass eye. There is a chip in it where a coyote clacked it between its teeth or a crow pecked at it in the hopes that it would burst. When he shouts his disgust and drops it, it bounces a few times and rolls to a stop with its pupil upright. With no fleshy pocket to retreat into, it does not blink, ever watchful.

“Justin?” his father says again, his voice calm, as if he finds none of this unusual.

Justin wipes his hands on his pants and wishes for a handful of soap. “Okay,” he says in a voice he recognizes as the voice of his childhood. “Fine.” This is what his wife was talking about, he now knows, his father’s ability to bend him into whatever shape he wants. Justin has grown so used to following his direction, he does not think to question, except briefly, whimperingly, such a gruesome decision.

They go silent and side by side stand watching for a time. The way they are standing there, with their spines so stiff, they must look like part of the forest, a stunted group of trees. Finally Justin kicks a mass of dirt over the eye. It does not lessen the feeling of being watched, as he hoped it would. He remembers the feeling from last night and imagines the eye rolling toward him in the moonlit meadow.

From faraway comes the sound of a diesel horn, a logging truck rocketing along a distant highway, reminding him that no matter how much this feels like the middle of nowhere, it isn’t.

When they return to camp, Justin checks on Graham and finds him staring blankly at the ceiling of the tent, his chest rising and falling with a faint wheeze. Already the sun has soaked into the canvas, making the air inside the tent warm and humid; he feels as if he has stepped into a mouth.

“Graham?”

His son lifts his head to look at Justin with eyes that are red-rimmed and watery.

“Feeling all right?”

“I think I need my inhaler.” His voice has that dreamy quality that comes from not getting enough oxygen.

Justin digs around in his backpack and finds the Albuterol alongside his toothbrush and soap. Justin hands it to his son, who sits up and shakes the inhaler and breathes deeply of it when it spurts into his mouth. He keeps his chest puffed out and holds the medicine inside for thirty seconds before letting it escape with a winded pant.

Justin rubs his back. “Better?”

He nods before taking another puff.

Justin holds back the desire to tell him about the body, to tell him to pack his things. Another minute and the boy dresses, pulling on a white waffle-print thermal, stepping into a pair of khaki-colored nylon pants with many pockets and a zipper around each knee so that you can pull off the legs in hot weather. They step outside to find Justin’s father adding a log to the fire. Last night he set up a grill and now the flames rise through it to warm the kettle. From its mouth comes a line of steam.

“I hope you’re happy,” Justin says.

His father keeps his eyes on the fire, poking the coals with his boot. “Something the matter?”

“Graham woke up feeling sick.”

He more grunts than says, “Flu season.”