The Wilding (24 page)

PAUL

He looks out over the river with red-rimmed half-lidded eyes. His fingernails are broken and clotted with dirt from burying the dog. He feels empty, carved out. His heart seems to beat too sluggishly one moment, too hurriedly the next. Several times he had to sit down in the trail, dizzy, with what looked like black flies twirling around the edges of his vision. And now the river seems too, too wide and full of rapids, an impossible distance. He has never believed, not really, not even when waylaid in the hospital, in his own mortality—and the possibility of it these past few hours has finally disturbed his peace of mind. He is like a man who wakes from a nightmare and stares at the room around him in silence, wondering if the threat has passed, if the closet will bang open and reveal a glowing set of yellow eyes.

Walking upriver does not occur to him. Nor does firing his rifle to draw his son to aid him. There is only the riverbank before him. He sees it as if through a tunnel. His mind chugs through a slow series of calculations before he finally shrugs off his backpack and unzips it and pulls out two twenty-foot nylon ropes and fastens them into a sheet bend. His hands are clumsy and his mind foggy, so this takes time. His fingers can’t maintain their grip on the rope. He examines his left hand as you would a failed tool you’re considering tossing aside. It is red and peppered with bits of dirt and shaking slightly. His fingers look alarmingly swollen. He tries to flex them. They are at a loss. He closes his eyes. There is bile at the back of his throat and he swallows it down.

Around his waist he slowly, slowly tethers one end of the rope in an anchor hitch. Then he walks to a nearby tree and again ties the knot, this time around its trunk. He leans against the tree for a pained, breathless minute, then takes a deep breath, steadying himself, and goes to the river.

He glances over his shoulder, expecting to find the bear shouldering its way out of the woods. And then he enters the water, his boots and then his legs disappearing into it, until the river creeps up to his belly. Normally he finds the cold invigorating, better than a cup of coffee for waking him, but right now he begins to shiver. His pace slows considerably here, in the middle of the river, where the water rolls over white. He winds the rope around his wrists and allows only a little slack, ready for the worst to happen. All around him boulders peer out of the water, their surface as black and slick as sealskin. When his body hitches to the left and stumbles a pace downstream, he tightens his grip on the rope, ready for the river to swallow him up. But he finds his balance by bracing himself against a boulder, hugging it, gasping.

During this short period of time, he feels very alone, the river seeming more like an ocean; the boulder is an island and the surrounding reef is busy with the shadows of sharks and the riverbanks are thick with jungle that camouflage long-tusked boars and colorful, poisonous snakes.

He cannot imagine letting go of the boulder. It is more than his legs, so sluggish and rubbery. It is the ache in his chest, his heart feeling punctured, as if it were deflating. And it is his mind, thick with exhaustion and on the verge of collapse. Everywhere he looks he sees an echo, another hazier version standing next to it. The clouds have an echo. That tree has an echo. The canyon has an echo.

The shivers working through his body finally convince him to release the rock, to push forward, knowing he is growing hypothermic. He staggers forward and when more than halfway across the river his foot slides out from under him. He goes sprawling and slams his knee against a rock and cries out in pain but loses the cry in a garble as water fills his mouth.

The river sweeps him up and drags him several feet before the rope goes taut and he spins and struggles limply against the anchor of it. He thinks he can pull himself from the water, but the current’s force is too great. He thinks the rope will swing him toward the shore, but it has caught against a collection of boulders. He tries to find his footing, each time with no success. His feet hang downstream. He can feel the water pulling on his boots and thinks that they might come loose from him and float away like little boats. He knows now what the hooked fish feels. The weight of the water threatens to bend him backward, to snap him in half, against the rope, which has worked its way above his beltline and below his shirt, so that it digs directly into his skin with a burning pressure that matches the feeling in his chest, a combustion working toward a red explosion.

He imagines he can see Justin and Graham on the shore, can see them in flashes interrupted by the gray oblivion of the river. Graham is waving his arms and Justin is rushing into the water to save him. And then Paul heaves himself upward—he makes one last stubborn lunge—reaching for them, his mouth hanging open, his head sidelong like a fish resisting a hook. He reaches for his son.

And then he collapses into the water and the river boils over him for another minute until the sharp-edged boulder bites through the rope and sends his body wheeling downstream like a piece of driftwood or any other part of the forest. Aside from the rope anchored to the tree, you never would have known he was there, as the river continues to gurgle and hiss, hiding beneath its surface snags and rocks and creatures drowned and alive.

JUSTIN

There is a perimeter of light and warmth around the fire and they stick to it. The darkness is like smoke slowly settling over them, a black vapor ever-thickening. The trees begin to look less like trees and more like cloaked wraiths. While Justin sits in the twilight and watches for his father, he feels as though time is slowing, thickening. Seconds feel like minutes, and minutes like hours, and the thing he most wants to happen—for his father to step out of the forest with a wave—won’t happen. He wills it to happen and the effect is like willing yourself to sleep—any second now, yes, all right, soon, here it comes—in only making him more twitchy, overcome by a fatigued anger.

His father is out there. Justin shouldn’t have let him go. His father had been crying—like a lumbering child—had succumbed to a bracing hug. He had not acted like himself. Justin should have been stronger, louder, should have demanded his father return to camp. He has food and water in his pack, a first-aid kit, but a flashlight? Of course you don’t need any of those things if you’re dead, Justin thinks and immediately tries to banish the thought by shaking his head and grinding the heels of his hands into his eyes. He can’t be. Not dead, not him.

There is too much to think about. There is so much in his head. And all of it bad. At school, when he faced a pile of student papers, a faculty meeting, parent-teacher conferences, a basketball game, he would make a list, write everything down, and then check the items off as he completed them. That always made him feel better, made the chaos more manageable. He wishes he had a piece of paper now. Then he could go over everything.

There is food—they really ought to eat something. Food will help him think, keep his energy levels up. And there is his father, who ought to be back by now but who could not be dead, not like the skeleton out in the woods, not like the dog whose collar was left behind like a warning. There is Seth with his smile and his crowbar. And there is the bear. The bear and Graham. He didn’t want to think of them together, not in the same sentence, not in the same canyon, with night closing around them, but there you go, here they are.

As if that weren’t enough. What about his wife? Of course his wife, who might or might not be fretting about them right now, glancing at the microwave clock. He has done exactly what she bade him not to do. How long will it take before she calls his mother? And then 9-1-1? No, not Karen. She is too practical for 9-1-1. She won’t see this as an emergency, not yet. She will start with the Forest Service—but probably not until ten o’clock and only an answering machine will pick up—and then the John Day police—but only a patrolman will be on duty and after inquiring about their whereabouts he will direct her to the Forest Service. And when she says—in annoyance, more than panic, sharpening her voice—that she already tried them, damn it, the patrolman will chuckle and say not to worry, ma’am, boys will be boys, and sure as shit he can’t count the number of times a hunting trip has gone on a day or two longer than planned, when the beer is flowing, when the bucks are hiding in the big pines.

Karen will spend the next few hours pacing through the house, flipping the television on and off, staring into the fridge. And then what? He told her they might not be back until late. She might simply fall asleep. Or she might call 9-1-1, but even then it will take a lot of effort on her part to motivate any sort of action, to convince them anything is out of the ordinary. And even if, by some miracle of persistence, Karen badgers a ranger out of bed and sends him grumbling through the Ochocos in his green truck, it will be dawn before he reaches the canyon and by then the construction crew will have arrived anyway. How long are they from help? A long way. They have a whole night ahead of them. And he doesn’t think he can stand another night, not without his father.

Somewhere in the distance an owl hoots—followed by another. Their voices become a strange, sweet music. He imagines his frightened face seen dimly through the evening gloom and tries to harden his expression for the benefit of his son, grim and silent.

“Graham,” Justin says. “I’ve got one for you. Did you know that the Indians believe owls and whip-poor-wills and a few other birds—I can’t remember what kind—but did you know they believe owls are vessels that carry souls back and forth between the land of the living and the land of the dead?”

“Are they coming to take us away?” Graham says in a sober voice.

“No,” Justin says. “Of course not. I was just saying. . . .” He cannot look his son in the face so he focuses on his feet instead, where a soda can reflects the orange shimmering light of the fire. “Drink your Pepsi, okay?”

Graham nods and takes a sip and uses his knuckles to rub some wakefulness and good feelings into his eyes.

And then comes night. Stars blink to life and Justin studies them. When he was a child, his father frequently pointed out the constellations, their names so strange, like code words that might open a secret door. He tries to remember one of them now, fancying the idea that a great black door would open and they might all step through it—and into his kitchen, where sunlight would stream through the window, warming his skin. The coffeemaker would be burbling on the counter. Bacon would be frying on the stove. NPR would be playing from the faux-antique radio.

But he is still sitting here, staring into the fire. “You’re so stupid,” he nearly says, “look what you’ve done,” but doesn’t.

Instead he says, “What should we do?”

“What should we do?” Graham says. His face tightens into an ugly expression, revealing someone Justin doesn’t know. He hurls his Pepsi and it thuds and fizzes somewhere off in the darkness. “You’re the dad. You’re supposed to know.” And then his face melts, becomes soft again. He closes his eyes, his eyelids paper-thin. “I’m scared,” he says. “I wish Grandpa were here.”

The comment doesn’t wound him, but it gives him a shove and his vision shifts, abruptly, laterally. His father is not here. It is up to Justin to make a decision. He feels something inside him growing to fill the space where there was nothing. He tells his son not to worry. He looks around and his mind muscles its way around a plan. He explains it as it comes to him. He will climb up a tree, a tall tree, and see if he can get cell coverage. “And then,” he says, “if I can’t get a signal, we are going to hike out of here.” They aren’t going to try. They are going to do it. There is no sense sitting here, he says, like a couple of sitting ducks.

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.