The Wilds (11 page)

“You know, detection. Symptoms. Vaccination. Rabies is a virus.”

“Duh.”

“And we’ve got something this Saturday, something on crowd control.”

“I thought you were going to help me install the electric fence.”

“An electric fence won’t keep them out.”

“How do you know? Intuition?”

“No. Actually, a dog expert who spoke at school said so.”

Suddenly I felt very alert. Wind blustered through the trees, shaking drops from leaves. Something zinged up my spine. I thought I smelled Fritos.

“I know you think I’m crazy, but I feel like they’re coming,” I said. “I really do.”

“It’s too early. They always come at dusk.”

“At school they usually come in the afternoon. I’m going inside.”

“Plus, they’ve never come when it’s this wet out,” my husband called after me.

I was jogging toward our house. The mist felt good on my skin. I thought I heard my husband laughing at me, or maybe I heard a braying dog. By the time I reached the back porch, they were already streaming into our yard. My husband yelled, ran around the side of the garage, scrambled into the closet where he kept his
power tools, and shut the door. He was safe, so I could laugh triumphantly on our back steps, one foot from the door but still outside in the electromagnetic air, my head thrown back, my neck muscles rippling, a long liquid howl shooting out of my throat.

The dogs didn’t plunder or linger, but tumbled right through, a stinking river of fur and clamor that flowed around our side yard, dipped down into the gulch that had just been cleared for a vinyl-sided mini-McMansion, and disappeared. I couldn’t tell whether they’d gone west or east, and with my heart still thudding, I ran inside to e-mail Dr. Vilkas.

“A fluid progression?” said Dr. Vilkas.

“Yes, beginning at the crown, dropping to the top of my nape, moving down my spine, and then, well, from the coccyx to the pubic bone, an, um, quivering in between.”

“In between?”

Dr. Vilkas was smirking. I’m not sure if he believed me, and perhaps I did exaggerate, but he was also tipsy, slurping exotic liquid from something called a Scorpion Bowl—gin, rum, vodka, grenadine, orange and pineapple juice—a drink that’d arrived with a flaming crouton
afloat in the middle of it, making him giggle and rub his palms together. There was a straw for each of us, and I’d taken more than a few nervous sips. We sat alone, deep in the interior of the Imperial Dragon, a strip-mall restaurant with several windowless rooms, the inner room a jungle of plastic vines with two golden bulldogs cavorting by a miniature waterfall. We dined in a gilded gazebo. Pentatonic lute tunes flowed from speakers. The air-conditioning, set low, smelled moldy.

Dr. Vilkas tore a chicken wing apart and gnawed gristle from bones. The way he hunched over his food reminded me of a praying mantis, his face an uncanny blend of ugly and beautiful. He had long eyelashes and greenish temple veins. Soft lips and sunken cheeks. And then there were his eyes—one a crisp arctic blue, the other a woodsy green—burning above his receding chin.

“It could be a reaction to the overwhelming flurry of pheromones the dogs put out. Have you always been this sensitive?”

“Sort of, but this is different—like something in my brain’s opened up.”

“Is there any chance you’re pregnant?”

For some reason, in this red-lit, windowless room, with Dr. Vilkas’s head hovering two feet from mine, the word
pregnant
, applied to my own body, evoking
my invisible husband, uttered with a guttural dip toward the word’s heavy, eggy letter
g
, brought a hectic flush to my face.

I wondered if Dr. Vilkas would’ve asked this question in the businesslike bustle of a coffee shop, or at school, in the fluorescent brightness of my portable.

“No,” I mumbled. “I mean, probably not. I seriously doubt it. Though I guess it’s not impossible.”

My cheeks felt hot. I vaguely remembered having sex with my husband once in the last month, late one night on the couch, struggling to concentrate, fidgeting to achieve a comfortable position, the television buzzing on mute.

“I don’t mean to pry into your private life, but pregnancy would explain an intensification of olfactory perception.”

Dr. Vilkas smirked again. He smiled at the oddest times, undercutting the professionalism of his words.

I imagined him scrawny and naked, moving toward me with the purple heat of his erection, his chest narrow, hairless except for a few wisps around his nipples, his thighs shaggy, his fingers splayed to clamp my shoulders, to hold me steady for a proper mount. I saw myself drawing my knees up. I could smell the bleach in the motel sheet. And there would be other smells, intimate and bodily, pumped from his glands and blending with odors of feral dog.
His breath would also have an odor, a mix of food and toothpaste and the health of his mouth, bacterial colonies, his tongue and gums seething with organisms, infinitesimal animals bursting with the drive to swarm. The room would reek of his equipment, plus the ghostly effluvia of inhabitants past—layers of eagerness and disappointment, ecstasy, bitterness, rage—feebly radiant but there, almost pulsing.

His wallet on the nightstand. His underwear on the floor.

“I’ve got to go,” I said, pulling cash from my purse, stacking it in front of me, wrinkled and grubby with the sweat of a million human hands.

“What?” said my husband, for I had kissed him on the mouth; I had probed with my tongue until tasting the animal depths of him, hoping to pull this part of him out into the waning day. But he fiddled with his electric fence, which had a short, and I was tipsy, my heart getting ahead of itself, red leaves fluttering down from the maple trees.

“You’ve been drinking,” he said.

“Just a cocktail,” I said, “with a few of the teachers, after the workshop. But look at me now: I’m home.”

I was pacing in little circles around him.

“And we should do something,” I said. “Go somewhere, maybe?”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. A walk?”

“What about the dogs?”

“Take your stun gun. That would be fun.”

“I don’t feel like it,” he said. “I’m kind of involved with this. And it’s about to get dark.” He turned back to the manual that had come with his electric-fence system.

“Well, I’m going,” I said, taking big strides away from him. I was crossing the street now, dipping into the gulch where the mini-McMansion had sprouted up overnight. I looked back, half expecting to see my husband scrambling after me, but apparently the idea of wild dogs tearing me to pieces didn’t bother him, or perhaps he hadn’t even seen me stalking across the street with my fists clenched.

I started to run. I jogged into the scrap of woods where a doe had been killed by a dog pack just last week, hunted and cornered and stripped of flesh, her bones cracked open and scattered. It was getting dark, and the terror I felt was like a ringing in my blood, an addictive stirring of something I hadn’t felt in a long time, ancient feelings pouring from deep nooks of my brain. I could run forever, I thought, and I kept going, scrambling up a
weedy hill until I reached the top. I watched the sun sink into the pond of an empty golf course, and then I sat in the dark for a spell, wondering what to do.

The next week a cold front came, and my students arrived bundled, their winter things musty from summer storage, their eyes lit with the false promises of different weather. The old heat pump groaned. Smells of burnt dust floated up from the vents. The children were squirmy. And my mind kept going blank. The words on the pages of my books would blur, and I’d squint up at the children’s faces, forgetting why I was confined with so many restless young mammals. Each day I turned off the lights. I showed them films about dogs—
Benji, Lassie, Cujo
—making their minds converge into a single entity—gray, staticky, amorphous—and their bodies sit still.

I saved
Cujo
for after lunch, the most difficult period, and it seemed that the reign of terror held by the crazed slavering dog would never end, that Cujo had always ruled the endless afternoon with his fury and red snapping mouth. But then, by two o’clock on Friday, the dog lay dead. His exhausted hostages were finally crawling from their dusty Ford Pinto into the harsh summer sun. My students were finally filing out into the cold bright
day. And Dr. Vilkas was finally standing outside my portable, hunched in his army jacket, his face freshly shaven and vulnerable looking, like the skin of a baby mouse. The wind flapped his hair, and I could see the crow’s feet that etched the corners of his eyes, a sprinkling of dandruff in his dark hair, two cuts on his chin.

“I called you,” he said.

“Oh, yeah. We were . . . I mean . . . installing an electric fence. All week.”

“About the experiment, of course.”

“Experiment?”

“Your preolfactory neurological sensations and detection of canine activity.”

“Right.”

“Whenever you’re free, we could set something up.”

“People tend to romanticize so-called wildness,” said Dr. Vilkas, who did not drink so much as open his mouth and splash wine down into his dark, gurgling throat. “So when a dog joins a feral pack, it does not, in any sense, break free—it simply exchanges one set of rules for another.”

“Yes,” I said, sipping my wine carefully. I could feel dark vapors dancing up from what was probably the reptilian part of my brain.

We were in his room at a Hampton Inn, the butter-yellow curtains drawn, sitting at a little breakfast table beside the window in a cone of lamplight, two beds floating in the darkness beyond, one of them rumpled, the other pristine. The vinegary smell of our sub sandwiches hung in the air. And I thought I could detect a faint, sulfuric whiff of dog lurking beneath the food odors and the sick fruity tang of an air freshener.