The Wilds (38 page)

“Here comes somebody,” says Tim.

But it’s not Bill. It’s the Donkey Man in his fat white truck, carting a trailer of exotic asses: miniatures, albinos, and shaggy Poitous. The Donkey Man waves, smiles as though he might remember that time he gave me a lift to town.

“I like to fool with donkeys,” he’d said, gesturing toward his empire of slapdash barns.

I’d climbed into his truck for the experience—to ride with an authentic old-timer in the rich fall light. I expected yarns and tall tales to stream from his ancient lips. I expected advice on planting by the phases of the moon. But the Donkey Man had said nothing the whole way to town. He seemed to be shrinking as he drove, scrunched down in his Carhartt coveralls.

“What the hell?” says Tim.

“Donkeys,” I say.

“More like mutant poodles,” says Possum.

Possum is also preparing himself for Bill, cooking up extreme survival schemes. What started off as a game last winter has become a key obsession for him. In the thick of a dystopian-film marathon, after Tim had fallen asleep during the endless last stretch of
Zardoz
, Possum started speculating about apocalyptic scenarios and what each would mean for particular friends of ours. It was fun to imagine Tim, for instance, in the trembling throes
of Xanax withdrawal, hurling a hand-whittled spear at a cat. It was hilarious to picture Tim skinning the tom and roasting its carcass over a fire of burning trash. It was fucking sidesplitting to envision Tim sprinting though a blighted urban landscape with the last bag of Cheetos clutched to his chest, a mob of starving mutants hot on his tail.

Tim and Possum used to maintain a constant stream of abusive banter, but Tim has grown quieter ever since he had a kid. And now Possum, who’s neck-deep in law school debt and who financed three ghetto properties with credit cards during the height of the real-estate bubble, never sleeps.

“Superviruses,” says Possum. “Postmodern plagues. Rogue nanobots that tinker with your neurons and turn you into a raving lunatic.”

He flashes a cryptic grin, lights his hundredth cigarette. The clouds above the mountains are turning pink. Possum regards their softness with bloodshot eyes.

I wonder if Darren the landscape painter is out in some meadow with his easel. I wonder if his wife, Willow, the grief therapist, is meditating on their fifty-foot deck.

The night we moved to Saluda, Bill and I were still hauling boxes into our rented cottage when Willow and Darren showed up with an asparagus quiche. Their dog
snapped at me. And Willow, in her aggressively gentle therapist voice, explained that Karma was working through some issues. They’d researched dogs to find the sweetest breeds, settling on a golden retriever/lab mix for its loving docile qualities. But Karma turned out to be vicious. She once chased me into a creek and nipped my calf.

Our house, designed as a summer cottage for our landlords’ parents, perched on the dark side of the mountain. We had a ridiculously pastoral view: Angora goats and llamas milling about in a green valley, their picture-book barn poised on a hillock. I was writing a dissertation on female mystics. Bill got a job at a bakery in town. That winter, as I pored over microfiche printouts of medieval manuscripts, Bill read books like
The Permaculture Bible
. He dreamed of lush gardens as snow blanketed the mountains and valley. From late November to early May, our world was frozen. All day I sat cocooned in a comforter, drinking green tea and reading about the visionary fits of my mystics. Every night, after Bill came chugging up the slushy dirt road in the truck, we’d start up with the red wine.

One morning a blizzard curled around our house like a great white beast. The light was a an eerie pink. Bill stood in the doorway, holding our old four-track recorder.

“Look what I found,” he said.

We had a vintage Wurlitzer, three guitars, a cheap violin, and a broken flute. Bill could play anything, while I could get by on the Wurlitzer. But I could do things with my voice that he couldn’t. At 11:00
AM
we opened a bottle of wine and embraced the delirium of winter. Crouched by the woodstove with his guitar, Bill strummed demented Appalachian riffs.

“Gronta zool nevah flocksam lamb,” I sang, half joking, half ecstatic.

We chanted nonsense like snowed-in half-starved monks. Howled like Pentecostals. We layered shimmering harmonies and attempted authentic yodels. After three or four glasses of wine, we couldn’t stop laughing at the exquisite absurdity of it all. We stripped off layers of thermal fleece and wool. We groped on the couch, the woodstove ablaze, combining our selves in yet another way.

All winter we made plans for the summer, where the garden would go and what we’d plant and how sweet and abundant our organic vegetables would be. In the spring, mammals would crawl from their musky holes. Insects would hatch. The landlords would shave dirty wool from their sheep, and pregnant goats would drop steaming kids into the straw.

It’s that weird time between day and night when lightning bugs sway out from the woods. Possum has driven off to replenish his arsenal of cigarettes and power bars. Tim’s talking about his infant daughter, about the skull-splitting rage he sometimes feels when she cries all night. When he sees the dainty spasm of her yawn, his exhausted nervous system surges with the purest love he’s ever felt. But then the fatigue after that is even more intense. And she’ll start screaming again, an amazing roar for such a small person, with her moth-sized lungs and tensed fists.

“Does Bill even know that Violet exists?” Tim asks.

“When I spoke to him last Christmas, I told him Jenna was pregnant.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing, really. You know Bill.”

Tim has known Bill the longest, since high school, when they were both pimply creatures learning to play guitar. Bill had mastered the instrument in two months, with astonishing proficiency. Tim had switched to bass. They kept up this arrangement all through college and formed Swole their junior year. Then Possum and I stepped into the picture. As Bill regarded me through silky black bangs, I thought him the most attractive boy
I’d ever seen. I loved his huge eyes and the acne scars on his cheeks, which saved him from being too pretty.

We played dense frenetic music, a rabid mutant of punk and prog, each of us striving to worm in a quirky rhythm or micromelody. I had to howl like a manic monkey just to be heard. When I listen to our old seven-inch, I’m amused by our naïve arrogance but impressed by our relentless energy—the essence of hormonal youth, splooged and shrieked.

“Remember when Bill didn’t speak for a week?”

“I’m very familiar with that tactic of his.”

“He’d come to practice, do his thing, but not utter a single word. I think that was right before you two started dating. He thought Possum and you were some kind of thing.”

“He was an only child,” I say, “raised in that house surrounded by goat pastures.”

I gaze down the road again, see a billow of dust. But it’s only Possum.

“What if he’s dead in there?” Possum says. His grin tenses into a grimace. He scratches his head as we stare him down.

Tim squints at the cabin and shakes his head.

“But then again, his truck
is
gone.” Possum’s voice quavers into damage-control mode. “Which means he’s not dead, that he’s off gallivanting somewhere. Fucking frolicking. Full of happy Bill thoughts about sweet potato harvests and apple cider.”

“What if he parks his truck behind the cabin?” I say. “Or it could be back by his garden, full of manure or something. And then he might be, you know, in the cabin.”

“But we’ve yelled for him more than once,” says Tim. “Wouldn’t he come out?”

“Maybe he can’t come out.”

“Let’s scale the fucking fence.”

Possum has already inserted his left foot in the chain-link mesh. Now he’s almost at the top, where barbed wire lies coiled, ready to tear his tender lawyer hands or disembowel him. But he somehow hoists himself over in a single maneuver that resembles a movie stunt. Lands like a ninja, dusts himself off, and smirks. Possum strolls over to the gate.

“Ha!” he says. “He left it unlocked.”

“That doesn’t sound like Bill,” I say.

But Bill has indeed left the padlock open, which makes me think he’s on the premises, down in the pit he cleared for a garden or holed up inside, perhaps peering out at us, perhaps chuckling, perhaps scowling and twitching at the threshold of craziness.

It’s almost dark. The cabin, I know, has no electricity. But I have a penlight in my purse, and we slip onto the porch like thieves. I point my thin beam of light: at a basket of kindling, at a dusty box of canning jars, at
Mushrooms Demystified
, splayed on the seat of his plastic chair.

“The door’s unlocked too,” Possum whispers.

“Knock first,” says Tim. “He might go Rambo with his air rifle.”

Possum knocks, a loud knuckle-rap on the door.

“Yo, Bill!” he yells. “Open up.” But Bill doesn’t answer.

When we step into the cramped darkness of the cabin, I’m overcome by the inexplicable smell of Bill: a clean animal odor tinged with cinnamon and dust. A hint of cumin. A vague plastic smell like Band-Aids.

I remember Bill’s letter about digging out a tree stump. The earth had collapsed onto a fox’s den, a nest of keening pups. According to Bill, their lair had smelled of milk and piss, something dark and sweet like overripe yams. He didn’t touch them. He sat in his camp chair drinking beer, waiting for the mother, who appeared near dusk, a jolt of gleaming red fur, to move her pups one by one. When she snatched the puling creatures up with her teeth, they went limp and silent. Every time she darted off into the woods, she’d look back at Bill, meet his eyes to make sure they had an understanding.

“Imagine all the middle-class dog walkers,” says Possum, “gentle eaters of Sunday brunch, roasting their radioactive pets on spits.”

“Or eating them raw,” says Tim. “Tearing frail Chihuahuas apart with their hands.”

“We would resort to cannibalism,” says Possum. “How could we not?”

We sit on the dark porch, waiting for Bill. Katydids and crickets signal frantically for mates. I’m pretty sure Bill still has the insect recordings we made our second summer on the mountain. I’m pretty sure he still has that box of cassettes and CDs in chronological order, spanning from the early days of Swole all the way up to our third summer, when I left in a silent rage. And perhaps he has other recordings, brilliant and mysterious, that he made after I went away.