The Wilding (25 page)

BRIAN

At the time the CSH-Baghdad was the only hospital that could handle level 1 trauma. Seventy-seven beds, three operating rooms, six general surgeons, three orthopedists, two neurosurgeons, two emergency medicine physicians, a vascular surgeon, a radiologist, a psychologist, a neurologist. A cluster of anesthesiologists and nurses. They worked on everyone—from U.S./coalition soldiers to Iraqi soldiers, civilians, and detainees—and they worked on everything—from toothaches to mass casualty events that ripped a body in half or tapped a hole in a skull, as it was with Brian.

Even once he got used to the shock of having a hole in his head, it remained a strange feeling, compounded by the strangeness of his surroundings, a white bed in a white room full of white beds on which lay soldiers blanketed in white bandages. At first, after waking from the red haze of surgery, he wanted to scream, to shut his eyes and refuse to accept his circumstances. That lasted for a few minutes, after which time he was still there and the whiteness and the blood soaking through the whiteness and the pain throbbing in his skull had not disappeared and in the end he just accepted it all because he was lying there and the doctors and the nurses were speaking to him—“Can you tell me what year it is? Can you tell me who the president is? Can you spell the word
dog
?”—and what else could he do except believe this was almost reality?

He was there for two weeks. During this time many men moved in and out of the beds surrounding him, but he remembered one in particular, a Private Mars from Louisiana who had lost his hand when the troop carrier he was riding atop as a gunner slid off a ravine and flipped on top of him.

They lay there, talking, while clear fluids dripped into them and dark fluids dripped out. They talked a lot—constantly, it felt like—because talking felt safe. Safer than being alone with your thoughts. They talked about how thirsty they were and when the nurse would come around again with Cokes and waters. They talked about their fathers, who had both served in Vietnam and who had opposed them enlisting. They talked about why Jif was the superior brand of peanut butter. They talked about college basketball. They talked about how hot Angelina Jolie was and how with lips like that she must give the most incredible blow jobs in the whole world. They only thing they didn’t talk about was their injuries.

Until one day when Mars told Brian a story about his grandfather, a WWII vet who had no legs. He was in the Philippines, on the island of Mindoro, when a land mine detonated beneath him. He was left with little below his knees, flaps of skin, chunks of muscle, broken bits of bone. His platoon had lost its medic in a firefight, so they did the best they could. Three men held him down while another sliced through his knees with a knife. Over a fire they heated a machete until it glowed orange. They used it to cauterize the arteries and then applied ointment and a protective plaster from a first-aid kit. They radioed in his coordinates and left him on a nearby beach and a copter picked him up a day later, feverish and with lines of infection creeping up his thighs.

“When I think of that story, I think I’m lucky.” When Mars spoke he gestured with his stump and Brian could almost imagine a ghostly set of fingers waving to the room all around them, a room oozing with blood and moans. “We’re lucky.”

Maybe for the first time Brian feels this way—he feels lucky—as he hurries through the night. Lucky enough to seek Karen out once more. Lucky enough to ignore the hunters who still wander the forest, looking for him. Though the shadows are thick, he still moves carefully, like a soldier in enemy territory, darting from tree to tree, huddling next to a bush now and then to listen to a faraway gunshot. He wears his hair suit and it makes him feel invisible, powerful.

The memory of her touch lingers—so vivid that her hand might as well hold his, pulling him through the woods, toward her. He does not repel her. This is what he keeps coming back to, to the way his injury brought her closer to him and creased her face with sympathy, warmth. It is as though he has discovered some principle of magnets—he does not repel her, he attracts her—and he rushes now to a point of assembly.

By the time he arrives, it is past midnight and her house is as dark as the forest, the windows offering no lamplight or the trembling, watery glow thrown by a television. He pauses where the trees run up to the lawn, listening for traffic along the road. Hearing nothing, he races across the grass to the garage and peers through the window of the side door, making certain that the husband isn’t home. In the gloom he spots only one car and then he heads up the steps and into the house, sliding the key in and out of the lock and pushing his way through the door.

Brian stands for a moment in the entryway. Here is the familiar sight of the shoes lined up by the door, the coats hanging from hooks. Here is the familiar smell of pasta and leather and paper. He knows this place. It is beginning to feel like home.

He takes a step forward, into that transitional space, with the hallway extending before him and archways opening to either side of him into the living room and dinette. Out of the corner of his eye he spots the clock on the VCR blinking—red, red, red, like an alarm—never reset after the storm blew through the other day and briefly knocked out the power.

He moves with such slowness—slowly pulling his feet forward, slowly depressing his weight, making sure he doesn’t thud his boot against an end table or scare a creak out of the floorboards—when touring the house. He sits down on the couch. He gently touches the needles of a cactus. He stands below a mounted deer and stares into its wide and glassy eyes and reaches up to tap one of them before running his hand along its neck, the fur dry and rough. He peers into the cold cave of the fridge. He runs his hands along the countertops. He picks up a lipstick-stained glass next to the sink. It has a rose in it that he sets aside before bringing the glass to his mouth, tasting it. He pisses in the toilet, sitting down so as not to make a sound. He smells the toothpaste. The boy’s room he peers into but does not enter. In the office he shuffles through a pile of papers, holding them up to the moonlight coming through the window, and then stands curiously at the wooden crib before moving to the master bedroom.

He remembers one occasion when his father repeatedly tried and failed to trap a beaver and finally in a rage kicked his way into their dam and clubbed the animals with a baseball bat while they hissed from their dank den. Now, at her doorway, surrounded by the dark, feeling at once weirdly strong and vulnerable, he imagines himself at once the club and the beaver.

A purple bra hangs from the doorknob. He rubs it between his fingers. He can see her shape beneath the blankets. He can hear the slow rhythm of her breathing. He takes a step into the room and notices a clock seeming to blink from the nightstand—but when he turns toward it, the light scuttles away from him, and then away from him farther when he tries to chase it, always at the corner of his eye, a red flashing.

“Oh no,” he says to the room. He brings his hand to his forehead and massages the crater there. The flashing deepens in its color. And now he can feel the first of many painful wires twisting down his cheek, his throat, his arm. The headache has snuck up on him. He didn’t notice it, tangled up as he was in the forest and then his thoughts—and now it is here, stretching itself, impatient to grow.

As quietly as he can manage, he retreats to the hallway and finds his legs suddenly heavy. He thuds against the wall and grips the doorway to hold himself up. He staggers down the hallway and tries to remember the way but his headache won’t allow it. There is only a pulsing red star, eating up everything with its light. He stumbles back into a room, the boy’s room. The ceiling glows with paste-on planets and stars, the constellations wheeling in his sight. He wants only to jump into the bed, to pull the covers over his head, but even now he knows better. He goes to utter darkness. He goes to the closet and drags the door shut behind him.

He grimaces and imagines an ugly black lacework working its way along his neck and arms, the tracery of his veins, as his surprise subsides and the throbbing hurt moves fully through him like an electrical current. Only one of his arms seems to work and he uses it to lift himself into a seated position, his back against the closet wall. Then he closes his eyes and lets the pain take him over.

JUSTIN

It takes him a half hour to climb the tree, but not nearly as much time to descend it. The view from his perch has renewed his energy, reminding him that another world exists outside the canyon. He drops through the branches, almost sliding between them, and when he reaches the lower limbs of the pine, he pauses in a crouch and scans the surrounding forest, peering into the dark doorways between trees.

Nothing moves. A stillness has descended upon the canyon. When he drops from his roost, his hand brushes across the spray-painted X and he feels the hard glob of sap that has bubbled from it. He realizes this is the same tree Graham shot—was that yesterday?—yesterday seeming so long ago.

Thirty yards away, in the circle of light thrown by the fire, Graham stands guard, his rifle ready. Everything seems, for the moment, safe. So Justin hurriedly digs a hole with his hand and sets the dirt aside until the bullet casing from yesterday sits in his open palm, and then Graham’s, when Justin returns to the fire pit and hands it to him.

“Still there,” Justin says. “Just like he said it would be.”

This seems to bring Graham some comfort. He smiles a closed-mouth smile and brings the bullet to his mouth and blows on it. “I wish this was a silver bullet,” he says. “And I wish I had a wooden stake. And a rosary. And a bazooka.”

“It’s easy to be full of wishes when you’re in a situation like this.”

“Did you call?”

Justin wearily shakes his head even as he smiles against the bad news. “No luck.”

Graham is still staring at the shell, his eyes dark-circled and his shoulders resting in a fatigued stoop. “So we’re going to leave?”

“We’ll wait a little longer. I’ve got a feeling he’ll be here any minute.”

“How long? How long will we wait?”

“Not long. Until he comes. Just a little longer.”

So they sit there, surveying the woods, waiting in aching inactivity. Graham reaches out to take Justin’s hand, and the contact feels good, reassuring, a way to fight the canyon, so deep and cold and dark, its towering walls bearing in as if poised to close around them like a mouth.

Justin snatches up another log and tosses it on the fire, a little too roughly, sending a gnat cloud of sparks into the air. The wood is dry and porous and a few seconds later the flames rise up in a gentle roar, playing orange light across the canyon walls and into the darker corners of the forest. Out of which steps the bear.

One minute it wasn’t there and the next minute it is, as if a trapdoor has opened in the ceiling of the night, depositing it at the edge of the clearing, twenty yards away. In the heat waves thrown by the fire, the bear shimmers, like something unreal. Before Justin can register his alarm, the bear begins to lumber toward them in a charge. It moves in a rocking way, its enormous triangular head rising and falling, and with each rock it moves alarmingly closer. Justin registers the grotesque hump rising from between its shoulders. Despite the thick coating of fat, its muscles are evident, shuddering beneath its fur like so many animals trapped in a sack.

Justin remembers what Graham said about a grizzly being able to travel one hundred yards in nine seconds. This seems a low estimate as the distance between them vanishes in an instant. There is a wailing sound next to Justin. He only vaguely recognizes it as a scream. Graham is screaming. Justin knows he ought to, too, but can only watch when the bear approaches the perimeter of logs and rises up on its haunches—becoming a broad brown column of fur.

Justin feels so small, and he shrinks down, pulling Graham into him, under him, waiting for a paw to come slashing down on them. But the grizzly turns at the last minute, falling into a four-legged position once again to circle away. Like a semitrailer, its enormous bulk has shifted the air in its passing and for a moment the fire leans sideways before righting itself.

They stand on the side of the fire opposite the bear. Justin has moved in front of Graham. He snatches his rifle and squares his shoulders against a second charge.

When the bear reaches the edge of the forest it again turns to face them. Here it sinks its head and rumbles low, a growl that sounds like the idling of an engine, the machine of which will be their undoing. When it starts forward again, it does so as a trembling curtain of cinnamon-colored fur. They do not scream. They are too enraptured by the sight of it to scream. In his silence Justin registers the force of its stride, every step like the blow of a rubber mallet, like the fierce beating of a heart with chambers as vast as a ballroom.

When it nears the camp, it lifts its paw—its claws long and yellow—swinging it against the log where Graham was sitting. A splintery gash opens up and the log goes rolling into the fire. They leap back just as the log hits the coals and sends a cloud of sparks swirling all around them. The bear again retreats to its earlier position. When it comes at them the third time, Justin knows it is in earnest as it lets out a growl that seems to suck all the light from the air and smear their faces with charcoal.

Only then does he remember the weight of the rifle in his hands. He gets off three shots, but his aim is wild and the bullets tear off into the night. The noise startles the bear. It slows and thrashes its head from side to side as if to bite the bullets from the air. And then releases a roar so powerful that the air seems to tremble. The bear is close enough for Justin to see the saliva swinging from its chops in long ropes.

He holds his rifle out before him, ejects brass, fumblingly reloads the chamber with a bullet from his pocket, and squeezes off another shot in such a hurry that the scope kicks back into his eye and cuts it open. For a second he sees nothing but white—and then a redness through which the world comes back into focus. The bear spins around wildly and heads off into the woods, struck by the bullet, though Justin doesn’t know where. Just before disappearing into a dark cluster of pines, it throws a glance over its shoulder. It seems to be trying to send them a message through its obsidian black eyes.

A thin stream of blood runs down Justin’s cheek. He wipes at it with his forearm and it smears away red. Already the skin has begun to swell around his eye so that he can see only half-lidded. He looks at Graham: his mouth is a big black O. Otherwise Justin doesn’t think he has moved, seemingly fossilized by what he has witnessed.

“You okay?”

Graham rolls his face toward Justin with his eyebrows knit together in confusion, as if he never really believed in the bear until now. An oily film covers his eyes. His tongue works around in his mouth, working something toward the front of it, a curse: “Fucking shit,” is what he says. It is the curse of the boy who feels overwhelmed by the world. He wipes at his eyes and makes the sort of face that normally breaks into crying, but doesn’t.

From the forest comes a series of grunts and woofs. The noise of sticks snapping. Noises that could be noises heard on any night, or not. A crack. A rustle. The fingers of firelight can only reach so far, and then the imagination takes over. “We better go now.”

“Without Grandpa?” Graham says, and then, more softly, “Without him.”

A sound rises up and spreads over them like the groaning of the earth itself. The bear. Fifty yards away, maybe closer, maybe farther. The sound of it like a subtle force pushing Justin back, making him want to fire his gun into the darkness.

“We’re leaving without him.” There. He has said it. He is not saddened because he is beyond sadness; it can come later. Right now there is only room for the need to keep his son safe. He is trying to steady his breath, trying to keep his face from contorting into a mask of anguish—to remain calm—but the fear, this black-spider-scrabbling-out-from-under-his-pillow fear, has found his blood, is in his blood. “Just come on.” When he waves his son forward in irritation, his hand looks like a claw savaging the air.

His fear hurries his heart into a fast beat that matches his feet upon the ground. They begin to run, but in the sluggish way you sometimes dream of running, where the ground clings to your boots and the air tangles around your legs and makes you feel as if you are moving in slow motion.

Above all else he feels the fear and then the stress of stumbling over stones and blundering into trees, as they hurry through the meadow and then follow the blur of the logging road with the big lodgepole pines rising above them, with the river hissing behind them, with the darkness swirling around their legs so they hardly know where to put them. All about them gather invisible threats, shadows.

Justin reaches out a hand for Graham so that their fingers twine and they remain together. It is his job to extract the boy from the canyon and he knows he must to do it swiftly, powerfully. They at first run—and then hike when unable to run anymore. Their boots feel full of lead. They breathe in huge sections of air as they ascend the steep grade of the road with the feeling that something is following them. At their backs, Justin cannot help but imagine, the bear capers along, maybe dancing some old bear dance, experiencing a kind of glee at having them so close at hand and bewildered by the dark.

Before them the trees part and make way, but when he glances over his shoulder the branches seem to knot together like so many fingers, giving them no choice but to proceed, no matter how badly he wants to return to the seeming safety of the fire.

In his chest he feels as if dust has gathered in the shape of a heart. That is how tenuous his courage is, so that a single breath could scatter it through his ribs and upon the wind.

When a great, thick flapping of wings announces itself from a nearby tree—no doubt an owl—he cries out, even as he tries to suppress his terror for the sake of his son.

Frogs drum. Crickets chirp. A small creek spills across the road and the moon makes a milky circle on it that they splash through. At one point his son trips and Justin grabs him and drags him along.

Every now and then he pauses—his head cocked, listening—as does his son. Not looking over his shoulder is impossible. Whenever he can, he shoots a brief glance to the forest, to the road behind, expecting a dark shape hastening toward them. But the woods are too black to tell him anything except run, run, run.

Where he moves, his son follows. They are in the grip of the forest. They lurk and watch and run and hide. Instinct has taken over.

When they finally reach the rim of the canyon, Justin hears a low sharp sound beside him, like someone drawing a blade across wood. He stops and leans into the noise and discovers that it comes from his son. He is bent in half, his hands on his knees, struggling to breathe. The air rasps in and out of him. “Where’s your inhaler?” Justin says and pats at Graham’s jeans, his pockets, trying to find it, finding only wetness as his son has pissed himself in fear.

“I don’t—” Graham pauses for a moment to suck in a few breaths. “I don’t have it.” He sits down in the middle of the road. He does not seem in charge of his breathing, his chest working according to its own will, wheezing the air in and out of him. He brings his hands to his throat as if trying to choke himself.

Justin looks over his shoulder for what must be the thousandth time that day. Nothing moves in the darkness. The road, he thinks, is empty. To follow it back the way they came seems impossibly far—not to mention insane—but so does pursuing it in the opposite direction, through the Ochocos, such a long distance until it first becomes asphalt and then branches into a highway with semis groaning along it.

It is then that he sees, in the blackened distance, the heavy machinery. A skidder. A bulldozer. A backhoe. A payloader. Two front-end loaders. The moon gleams across their windows and brightly lights their metal blades. He grabs Graham by the hand and they stagger toward them—Justin isn’t sure why. Perhaps because they seem, all crowded together, like a fortress they can lock themselves away in—or perhaps because they represent what he seeks so desperately—civilization, the very thing that promises to contain and annihilate whatever wildness pursues them.

They situate their bodies against a payloader. Justin sits on the ground, his back to the big tire, and Graham sits between his legs, his back to Justin’s chest. With every breath he makes a little growling noise. When Justin hugs him close, he can feel the growls against his own chest. “It’s okay,” Justin says. “It’s okay.” Graham’s body begins to shiver and twist in a way that reminds Justin of the snake. Even with a hole in its head, he remembers, it continued to turn over and over and craft itself into so many unusual designs. He prodded it with his boot and even picked it up and felt its hard cold muscle alive and dead in his hand. When five minutes passed and it had not stilled, he remembers feeling bothered and wanting to put it underneath a stone so he wouldn’t have to look at it or think about it anymore.

Which isn’t so different from the way he feels now, holding Graham and whispering
sh
and petting his hair, even as he glances around, wishing he was anywhere else. He tries to forget about his father, about the darkness and the threat that the darkness holds, as he cradles his son and whispers to him and coaches his lungs until so many minutes later he takes a deep, calm breath and Justin says, “Good. That’s good.”

He can breathe. And if he can breathe, he can live. That is something. In this instant, several images tumble through his head—his wife curled up on a hospital bed with a sodden pad tucked between her legs, his father positioned by the edge of the canyon with a faulty heart beating its ragged beats. The united losses and gains of the past and present stir up a groundswell of emotion that surges through him. He thinks for a moment it might be more than he can handle.

Then his son turns to look at him and Justin can just see his face, a dim oval shape. “Do you hear something?” he asks in a whisper.

He does not. Not at first. Then he strains to open up his ear to every sound in the forest and nearby hears footsteps that sound, very faintly, like shovels digging.

Both of them stand. Justin takes a deep breath to calm himself and the breath is full of the odor of Graham’s urine. He remembers how keen a bear’s nose is compared to its eyes—making the sharp, tangy smell equivalent to a trail of bread crumbs.