The Wilds (9 page)

Suddenly I’d found myself past thirty, shacked up with a fussy bald man nine years my senior who enjoyed monitoring every facet of our household—finances,
thermostat, hot-water heater, water and electricity usage, lawn maintenance, and pest control. His brain had become a grid of interlocking systems. His eyes were shrinking into beads as the years went by—he who had once been a luminescent lover, a beautiful, pale trembler with long, flowing hair. I didn’t know how this had happened. But now he sat by our sliding glass door, clutching his Beeman air rifle, some of his old pluck surging back as he scanned the yard for curs.

“The bastards,” as he called them, had chewed our plastic garbage cans to shreds, had consumed every edible morsel in our trash, had strewn the remaining filth far and wide. The hunger-crazed beasts came in the night and gobbled up anything vaguely organic—sprouting potatoes, blood-smeared butcher paper, old leather slippers—and then they puked; they ate their own warm puke; they ran in crazy circles, pausing to deposit steaming mounds of crap onto our green lawn—usually a masterpiece of emptiness now polka-dotted with yellow nitrogen stains.

The previous week the dogs had sprayed our garage with their spicy pee and sent my husband into a tizzy. He removed every object, pressure-washed the area with bleach water, and then slathered key spots with Get Serious! pet odor and pheromone extractor. At night he slid his recliner close to the sliding glass door to keep
his vigils. While consuming exactly three Budweisers, he’d brood in the dark with his gun, waiting for that moment when the brutes would come whirling into his floodlit territory, rearranging the molecules of air with their yipping and fried-egg stink. BB pellets did not kill the dogs, who did not seem to remember from one night to the next that they’d been shot, but the yelp of a struck dog made my husband smile. And he, a passionate advocate for gun control, kept threatening to buy himself a serious firearm.

I watched TV alone. Each night the news spouted facts about dog packs. Feral dogs, fast becoming a worldwide menace, dwelled in condemned buildings, junk-car lots, sewers, and abandoned strip malls. They invaded human territory to scavenge and hunt. They killed in teams, herding livestock, cats, and rodents into corners, where they tore them into bite-sized chunks. The American pet craze had led to an epidemic of abandoned dogs. A rash of dog-fighting rings had flared in rural ghettos. And the repressed wolfish instincts of domestic dogs had been coaxed out, had transmogrified into weird new breeds.

The fighting champions of packs naturally ruled over the ex-pets, also over the bait dogs—smaller, wimpier dogs once bred to rile the fighters. You could recognize a bait dog by its shabby condition, its downtrodden vibe and
crippled state: etched with scars, half-blind, riddled with abscesses and often lacking a limb, it slunk and whined around the glorious, snapping fighters—sinewy beasts with bear claws and yellow shark teeth. Some of the more splendid alphas had long incisors like baboons’. Others had needle claws that retracted into their toe pads like those of cats. Legions of freakish specialists had stepped out of the woodwork to describe these evolutionary quirks of reverted dog species, and they, along with innumerable dog-bite victims, bewildered farmers, and owners of dismembered cats, were always being interviewed on TV.

My favorite dog specialist was an evolutionary ecologist who’d written his dissertation on the mating habits of wild primates that had forgone foraging to scavenge human food. He’d made his mark with a documentary on a troop of hamadryas baboons who spent their days picking through the rubble of a Saudi garbage dump. And now, back in the States, Dr. Vilkas had become interested in what he called “de-domestication.” He wore army fatigues. He shot his own footage with a digital Minicam. Half artist, half scientist, he looked a little wild himself, peering through unkempt black hair with an unnerving set of mismatched eyes—one blue, one green. Though an American citizen, Dr. Vilkas had a trace of an accent, trilling and growling, and the way he pronounced his
z
’s made me blush.

He sported bite-proof arm and leg bands and drenched himself with special pheromones to keep his beloved dogs from attacking him. He skulked among them, filmed them eating and coupling and suckling their scraggly young, filmed them squealing in the throes of birth and barking with joy as they sabotaged a dumpster or disemboweled a rat.

Dr. Vilkas followed dog packs as they migrated among urban dead-zones, blighted farm belts, and dying towns. Our own town fit the usual profile: failing schools, rinky-dink chicken farms, and closing plants, an obese and debt-strapped populace who fed on processed food, their offspring suffering new configurations of hyperactivity disorders and social dysfunction, children who gobbled generic methylphenidates and performed miserably on standardized tests.

Dr. Vilkas gave no instructions on how to deal with the dog epidemic. He eluded authorities who solicited advice on how to hunt down and exterminate the dogs. Though he seemed to know something about the dogs’ roaming and sleeping patterns, he remained tight-lipped on these subjects while talking about the social habits of the dogs: their complex hierarchies, mating strategies, and choreographed hunting tactics; their territorial urination, sensitivity to pheromones, body language, and variations of barking.

Howl, growl, yowl, snarl, yap, yip, woof. Each vocalization meant something, and domestic canine pets could pick up some of these messages. When a reporter asked Dr. Vilkas how frequently pets were tempted away from domestication into wildness, the specialist warned dog owners to keep their animals secured. And though he encouraged them to invest in sturdier leashes and to read books on canine psychology so as to recognize signs of restlessness, he couldn’t disguise his excitement over the thought of tame animals lured from their lives of monotonous sycophancy by the siren calls of ferals. His strange eyes shone. He gazed longingly at the horizon, where a chemical plant huffed filth into the sky.

Outside, the autumn afternoon swelled golden, and the children squirmed in their desks. They looked grubby, their clothes rumpled, their hair greasy. I assumed their parents were distracted by the dog epidemic—everyone was. Because the students gabbled of nothing else, most teachers had given in to their obsession. We designed dog-themed lesson plans. The principal arranged for specialists to speak in the auditorium. Some even made classroom visits. Earlier that day, in my world history class, we’d
watched a film on the history of canine domestication, learning that around a hundred thousand years ago, the first dogs had split from wolf species, emerging from forests to lurk near human territories—not put off by Homo sapiens’ decadent stink, eventually creeping up to human fires, dazzled by smells of roasting meat. In a time-lapse sequence, a wolf morphed into a German shepherd, which morphed into a collie, which morphed into a teacup Chihuahua, sending the children into howls of laughter.

But now in English class a warm miasma of boredom settled on my students. Eyelids fluttered. Heads drooped. The restless among them jogged their knees, tapped their pencils, and glanced toward windows. Tammy Harley, swatting the air in front of her frown, said that Bobby Banes had cut one. A sly smile smoldered on Bobby’s freckled face—poor little Bobby, whose father hosed down the gut room at the poultry plant with scalding bleach water. And then three football players blasted long farts, timing their stunt with hand signals. Children covered their noses. They gasped and pretended to faint. Several cheerleaders scrambled from their seats to the air-conditioning vent, stood panting over it, screaming “Pigs!” and rolling their mascara-crusted eyes.

My heart beat faster. I shivered. I felt a tingling sensation in my spine. Suddenly, I could detect the salty, rank smell of dogs and I wondered if some of the animals had
been sleeping under my portable classroom. Seconds later, Tonya Gooding spotted a dog pack leaping from the trash-strewn copse that separated our school yard from a Burger King parking lot, splitting the day wide open with its barking and feral verve.

“Damn!” she cried. “Looks like they flying.”

Though I motioned for the kids to keep their rears glued to their seats, all but Jebediah Jinks, a preteen preacher with eleven siblings, flew to the windows. I took my usual station at the door, sniffing what was now almost palpable in the air.

“Does anybody smell that?” I asked my students.

“Smell what?” said Tonya Gooding.

“‘As dead flies give perfume a bad smell, so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor,’” Jebediah preached from his desk. “A sign of the end times. A plague like frogs or locusts, except only with dogs, or like them swine Jesus put the demons in. We got war, we got
AIDS
and hurricanes, we got terrorists and obesity and homosexuality and dogs. You think God’s trying to tell us something?”

The other kids just tittered.

And the dogs came romping and snarling, tussling and woofing: mongrels big as panthers and little as squirrels, balding curs with skin like burnt cheese, mutts with lions’ manes, canines with dreadlocks matted over their eyes. Short dogs waddled on stumpy legs. Tall dogs
loped like spooked gazelles. And the big, rangy fighters led the pack, nipping their inferiors.

“‘The dogs shall eat Jezebel,’” croaked Jebediah, ogling Tammy Harley’s leopard-print miniskirt. “‘He that dies of Ahab in the city the dogs shall eat; and he that dies in the field, the birds of the sky will devour.’”

Then I saw Dr. Vilkas sprinting from the woodlet after the pack, camera hoisted, lank hair streaming. My heart lurched. My ears burned. I stepped out onto the porch and locked the children inside. I could barely hear their muffled screams, so loud was the clamor of dogs. The air smelled of Fritos and urine. And hot winds blew, as though the mongrels had brought their own weather. I gripped the railing and watched Dr. Vilkas creep up on a skirmish between two alphas.

In the middle of the playground, two gape-mouthed fighters were hurling themselves at each other—a liver-colored pit bull against a spotted mastiff. I could hear the clack of their teeth. The dogs growled, retreated, and flew together again, lifting a cloud of orange dust. Dr. Vilkas stood two yards from them, squinting into his camera. When the dust cloud dispersed, the triumphant pit bull was dancing around the fallen mastiff. But then the creature stopped cold, sniffed the wind, and looked right at me. As though fired from a cannon, it flew toward my portable, leapt over a stunted juniper,
and landed in the sad little place right below my porch where my children had spit a thousand loogies.

The dog snarled at me. When it opened its rank maw, I gasped at the sight of its jumbled teeth. Its slimy bug eyes watched me. Breath flowed from the beast in thick wheezes. The animal growled. I fingered the keys in my pocket, backing toward the door. The children, watching this spectacle from within, yelled and pounded on the windows. And Dr. Vilkas scrambled toward me, holding some object in both hands, his camera, I thought, figuring he’d film my disembowelment.

I dropped my keys, heard them clatter against the wooden porch and bounce onto the ground. The pit bull’s neck hackles shot up. Its gums quivered. The creature sprang three feet into the air, then fell on its side, flopped around in the dust, and rolled into a motionless heap.

“You okay?” Dr. Vilkas stood beside the dog.

“Did you kill it?”

“Stunned it with a portable electrode dart.” Dr. Vilkas waved his newfangled aluminum gun. “The animal will revive in five to ten minutes.”

“I’m glad you didn’t kill it.”

“Really?” He smiled. “You know it’s illegal to shoot them with real guns.”

“I know. Actually, my . . . I mean, someone I know bought a tranquilizer gun.”

Dr. Vilkas fixed me with his mismatched eyes. His gaunt cheeks were scruffed with faint stubble. He had a beautiful mouth, wide and full. He stooped to pluck my keys from the ground.

Sirens took the air again and the dogs started howling. The pack scrambled east, as though fleeing the sun. The fallen pit bull let out a little croak and twitched its hind legs.

“Better get inside your classroom,” said Dr. Vilkas, “before this beast revives.”

I slipped back into my portable, where the children had turned off the lights to see better.

They cheered for me. Girls pressed in to hug me, wet-eyed, smelling of french fries and imitation designer perfumes.