The Wilding: A Novel Page 3

  “Look.” Bobby glances at the reporter and says in a voice that tries to communicate his reasonableness, his tolerance, “You realize this is all going to be very natural, very much a tribute to the landscape. An improvement even. And do you have any idea what it will do to property values in Prineville and John Day?” This last part he says to the Planning Commission—and the old men nod their heads and raise their eyebrows and purse their lips.

  Tom looks as if he might rush Bobby again to offer another blow to the face. Then his mood seems suddenly to brighten and he sidles toward where Paul still stands with his hands clenched, a few paces from the head of the table. Two of the commissioners lean away as Tom leans between them and peers at the blueprint for a moment. “There’s a trick the timber industry plays. It’s a good trick. They clear-cut thousands of acres of pines and firs, but along the roads they leave the trees real thick to camouflage the baldness. Makes everybody believe those Weyerhaeuser ads when they say, ‘Oregon will never grow out of trees.’ But you climb up a mountain and you take a look down and you know what it looks like? It looks like shit.” He thrusts his chin at the map of the development. “Like shit.”

  He turns to the reporter, whose pen hurries across his notepad. “Don’t write that down,” he says. “Write this down. You ready?”

  The reporter nods even as he keeps his eyes on the notepad, the words bleeding blackly across it.

  “Now I’m going to say some proud Indian nation stuff they can put in the paper. Okay? Here we go.” His voice takes on the timbre of a dream as he tells everyone, “It took fifty years for white people to nearly wipe out the Tasmanians. About the same for the bison. And when you look around at Warm Springs, when you look at the Cree and Sioux and Chippewa and all the rest of us, what you see is the carcass of a once proud Indian nation. And the white establishment continues picking at our bones, chewing up what’s left of us until there’s nothing left of us. That canyon’s what’s left of us. But not for much longer.” He looks at the reporter and his voice returns to its normal tone when he says, “You got that or you need me to say it again?”

  The reporter brings his finger and thumb together in the perfect sign.

  Bobby checks his watch and then looks to the Planning Commission. They have the dazed look of children who have just suffered through a parental lecture. They have heard all of this before. With respect to Native complaints, Bobby had hired on a group of UO archaeologists for a two-month survey that failed to turn up anything more than a few broken projectile points and a single petroglyph chipped into the basalt wall of the canyon.

  In the end, the commission votes in his favor and when Bobby removes the coffee cups from the map, it slowly curls up on itself like a fist.

  His father never took Justin to Hawaii or Disneyland or Mount Rushmore. Instead, he would load up the bed of his pickup with camping gear and they would drive to Christmas Valley or the Umpqua River or the Malheur Preserve, some still-wild place where they would hike dry-mouthed across a desert flat or fish a snake-shaped river or scour the forest floor for mushrooms to cook. It was in Echo Canyon—high in the Ochoco Mountains, among the big pines and bear grass meadows—that they hunted every November. Though Justin hasn’t been there in years, he feels a strong connection to its woods, as does his father.

  Which was why, a year ago, when Bobby tried to contract Justin’s father’s company—the Paul Caves Hand Hewn Log Cabin Company—his father said, “Yes,” but with a red line of frustration underlining his voice.

  Justin first learned about this in his father’s backyard, where with a longbow his father shot arrow after arrow into a polyurethane buck he had arranged where the lawn met the woods, twenty yards away. He wore a leather quiver on his back. It was crowded with arrows carved from a Norway pine he imported from a Baltic Sea forest, where the cold stern weather made for slower growth and splendid spiny wood, or so he said. He fletched them with red cock feathers.

  In a fluid series of motions he reached behind him to pluck an arrow, fitting its hardwood notch onto the bowstring, drawing tight and firing without hesitation, again and again, the arrows all hissing across the mowed space of lawn to find their target with a satisfying series of whizzes and thunks. For a big man, whose hands were so leathery and broad they looked like tools, he could move quickly and with a kind of grace.

  Justin cannot remember where his mother was during this. possibly in the kitchen, doing dishes. Or maybe at the table, carefully cutting her asparagus into bite-size pieces. When he thinks of her he often thinks of her through the window of his father. She remains indistinct in many of his memories, backgrounded by his father’s loudness, his hairy massiveness.

  Justin said, “You don’t have to do it, you know.”

  His father loosed another arrow, this one missing its target, rattling off a pine tree as it entered the woods. He sighed his frustration and lowered his bow and plucked at the string as if seeking out the first note of a sad song. “And then what? Then another company gets it and the job gets done anyway. The other guy gets money in the bank, gets his name out there, gets the call the next time a job comes up. And where does that leave me? You don’t know politics.” He withdrew another arrow from his quiver and examined its broadhead. The metal caught the sun and a thin gleam played across his face. “You think I want to see that nice country ripped up?”

  “There’s a lot of nice country out there. We can find another canyon.”

  “Is that how you feel?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, parroting Justin in a singsong voice, then again, “I don’t know.” He pointed the arrow at Justin, bringing its razor point within an inch of his chest. “You should get that tattooed across your heart. I don’t know. No, you don’t know. You don’t know much at all.”

  Paul is not the sort of father who goes to church and plays golf and whistles Christmas songs year-round. He is the kind of father who enjoys saying things like, “Pain is weakness leaving the body,” and “Knowing you could die tomorrow, don’t buy any green bananas.” He smells like motor oil. His huge hands seem capable of tearing phone books in half and uprooting trees with a tug. His fingernails always carry dirt and bruises beneath them. He often keeps a sandwich in his pocket and withdraws it intermittently for a bite. His idea of a good time is to go price pistols at Bi-Mart.

  Paul doesn’t need to work so hard. Business is good. Justin knows this because he has taken care of the company paperwork since college. His father could easily hire more men, could spend his days sipping coffee and negotiating contracts and letting his hands go soft, but if his name appears on the letterhead, he ought to be the one dangling from a thirty-foot ladder, driving home the first and final nail—or so he insists. It’s a general-on-the-front-lines sort of mentality.

  And so right alongside his crew he pilots the cement truck and lays a concrete foundation. He uses broadaxes and table saws to hew down logs on all four sides until they are square. He chisels notches. He cuts lap joints. He uses an auger to bore holes.

  For him, every day is a mechanical storm of chain saws snarling and sandpaper sizzling and hammers cracking. Sawdust hangs in heavy clouds. When Justin was a boy, his father would sometimes take him along. Justin would spend the day uselessly hammering nails into planks of wood, darting in and out of doorways, and climbing onto the roof and imagining the cabin as his own. He remembers everything smelling like the memory of a sawmill. He remembers watching his father as he worked, shirtless, sometimes with steam rising off his body in the cold mountain air.

  His father lays floors. He stacks walls, cutting dovetail notches for the corners. He cuts the rafters, he cuts the joists. He bolts down a steel roof to shrug off the snow. He cuts out the windows and the doors, and his blacksmith digs a hole and fills it with pinewood and burns it down to an orange bed of coals and sets up his forge to bang out some wrought-iron hinges, doorknobs, banisters. Then comes the paneling, the chinking, the sanding,
the varnishing, the caulking, the masonry, the plumbing and electricity.

  And Paul does all this while maintaining a mostly meat diet and drinking his way through a six-pack almost every evening. To Justin, the heart attack comes as no surprise.

  His father later tells him what it felt like. He says a belt seemed to tighten around his chest and the world darkened abruptly. He ran slantingly and stumbled with a half-fascinated terror at what was happening to him, at the way his body seemed at once to constrict and expand. When his legs gave out beneath him and he pitched forward, he tried to stop his fall with his arm but it had gone numb and he crashed to the ground unguarded and opened up a gash in his forehead.

  This happens in late spring—a few months after the meeting with the Planning Commission—when Justin moves through the electronic double doors and into the emergency room at St. Charles Memorial. The air smells of disinfectant and tapioca and old fruit. When the doors whir closed behind him, the noise of traffic falls away, replaced by hushed voices and gurney wheels and heart monitors and Muzak pouring softly from the sound system. In the waiting area, people lie sprawled out in chairs with dazed looks on their faces as if they have been dropped from a great height.

  At the reception desk, the nurse takes a long time in acknowledging Justin, finally raising her eyes from her clipboard when he clears his throat. “You hurt?” she says. “Or you here to see somebody who’s hurt?”

  “Do I look hurt?”

  She gives him a bitchy half smile and says, “Name?”

  “You want mine or his?”

  “His name.”

  Outside, somewhere far off, a siren wails. He tells her his name and she taps a few keys at a computer terminal and directs him down a long buttermilk-colored hall lined with stainless steel tables on wheels. He hurries there and the noise of the siren follows him, growing louder, rippling through the town, through the concrete and the metal and the glass like a quick breeze over water, to settle on him with shocking volume. He passes a doctor with a brown mustache. The doctor moves at a quick trot toward the emergency room and whistles along with the ambulance, as if summoning it.

  When he visited the hospital for his wife, he felt fear. When he visits for his father, he feels hate. He hates this place that keeps trying to take people from him. He wants to splash black paint all over the too-white walls. He wants to rip out the throat of an orderly who pushes a gurney one way, then the next, as he tries to get past him.

  And then, just like that, the siren stops, as Justin arrives at room 343.

  He pokes his head in the door, and just as he is about to withdraw it and continue on, the man on the bed raises his hand in greeting. “Dad?” Justin says, hesitating in the doorway. “I didn’t recognize you.”

  His father does not look like his father. He looks like a pear that has begun to darken and collapse. Upon Justin’s entrance he picks up the remote control and turns off the TV and then immediately turns it on again. It hangs from the ceiling corner and shows on its screen a weatherman standing on a Florida beach with twenty-foot waves crashing behind him.

  At a wedding, Justin once heard Bobby Fremont tease his father, saying he looked like a beast trapped in a double-breasted suit. And this seems especially true now—hairy and brown-skinned and so large every corner of him hangs off the bed—the vision of him offset by all that antiseptic whiteness. Once, when Justin and his father stood side by side, his mother pointed out that they were the same height. It was true, but Justin never believed her. It has something to do with his father’s build—so much broader than his own—but even more to do with his personality, which even now seems barbed to a gleaming point.

  Above his bed hangs a black-and-white photograph of a dead juniper tree. Its trunk appears twisted, each bare branch straining up toward the sky.

  “Where’s Mom?” Justin asks.

  “I told them to call you. I didn’t want to worry her.”

  It is hard for Justin to look at him. His eyes are ringed by heavy shadows. His nose has a pinched look to it. His lip trembles a little when he speaks, as if he needs to cry but won’t allow it. He turns his head from Justin and looks out the window where the sun is setting. Justin watches his face change from red to pale in the fading light, as if, having colored with embarrassment, he has composed himself.

  A few minutes later a doctor enters the room. He has a domed forehead and silver hair and wears a white lab coat with an assortment of pens in the breast pocket. He withdraws one of them now and holds it like a weapon. “How do you feel?”

  “I feel great.” Paul claps his hands together. “Ready to go home.”

  “That won’t be happening anytime soon, I’m afraid.”

  “Says who?”

  “Me. You’ll need to spend the next few days with us.”

  “But I need to get back to work.”

  “You’ll have to take some time off.”

  “Quiet.” He says it like a curse. “I’ll do no such thing.”

  “You will.”

  A conflict plays across his features and he heaves a great sigh.

  An hour later Justin’s mother arrives, crying out from the doorway and knocking over his IV as she rushes to his bedside. “I’m fine,” he says. “The doctor said I’m fine. He said I’ll be up and out of here in no time.”

  Justin says, “Let’s hope anyway.”

  His father holds up his hand, its index and middle fingers twined, and then the hand continues upward to his forehead, touching the bandage. For the next three weeks the bruises will linger there, eventually shriveling into a red pucker that he will often finger and remark that he can feel his heart beating along it.

  BRIAN

  Brian haunts this stretch of the river to learn the passages the beavers travel between their lodge and seed caches. He places the trap in a black, glassy section where the water runs deep and where the bank is slick from their bellies and tails slithering along it and where the beavers heap little piles of mud with castor secretion beneath them. The trap—a double long spring jumper—looks like some metallic species of moth. He baits it with willow twigs basted with musk sacs that smell of a vinegary unwashed groin. He places the trap a foot beneath the water and attaches it to a drowning line.

  Normally he is patient. He knows he should wait until late winter, early spring. He knows their pelts are glossiest and thickest then. But he has a project—a sewing project—he is working on that cannot wait.

  This morning a cool wind blows steadily and shakes the pines and looses from the birch trees golden leaves that scatter across the surface of the river and glitter like coins on their way downstream. The sky is ghost-gray, thick with clouds that carry rain in them. From where he stands along the bank, his boots sinking slowly into the mud, he can see the trapped beaver, a black shadow the size and shape of an oversized football. A twenty-five-pounder, he guesses, its hind leg seized by the trap, its body floating in line with the current. The water bulges over it, making a small rapid.

  His father taught him how to trap, how to skin and gut the animal, how to cook its meat and boil its tail, how to prepare its pelt and sell it at auction. Every winter they woke together before dawn and pulled on their insulated coveralls and trudged through the snow and chipped through the ice to check or set their traps. He remembers the chimneys of steam rising from the holes in the river, the hot coffee splashed from a thermos, the blood looking so bright in the snow.

  In his pocket his cell phone chirps to life, its ringtone the song of a chickadee. He digs it out and studies its screen and sees there a number he does not recognize. He has not spoken to anyone yet this morning and the coffee he drank earlier has not fully crawled through his system, so he takes a moment to clear his throat, orienting himself in the human world, which feels so far from this choke of woods and rush of water.

  “This is Brian at Pop-a-Lock Locksmith.”

  He stands only five feet three inches but his combat boots cheat him some height. He wears black jeans a
nd a matching denim jacket. His face is squarish, his eyes large and ghostly turquoise, his mouth regularly downturned in a construction of seeming gloom or discomfort. He keeps his hair in a high-and-tight buzz—a habit maintained from his time in the service—that draws attention to the dent in his forehead, a pinkish saucer-shaped place that looks like a third eye socket sealed with skin. He has a nervous habit of tracing its outline with his finger, as he does now, when the voice on the other end of the line belongs to a woman.

  Her name is Karen—she feels so stupid, she knows she ought to keep a key hidden outside—her name is Karen and she just came back from a run to find the door locked. It was her husband, the idiot. She can’t believe he has done this to her. He drives her crazy sometimes. Now she is at a neighbor’s house. She has to get to work soon. She asks Brian to hurry, if he can.

  “I can,” he tells her, “but I’m in the middle of another job.” He wonders if she can hear the clean rush of the river, the wind sighing through the pines. “As soon as I finish up, I’ll be right there. Maybe twenty minutes?”

  She gives him the address. “I’ll be across the street, so I’ll see you pull into the driveway.” She comes from someplace else, he knows. Her voice is flat-toned, without the clipped consonants, the long vowels, the almost brutal rhythm that inflects the speech of a local. He imagines, from the soft pop her lips make at the end of a sentence, that she is wearing lipstick. A woman who wears lipstick to run. Maybe this is why he leaves the beaver dangling in its trap, knowing the glacier-fed water will preserve its carcass until he returns.

  He is parked along the edge of a Forest Service road west of town. In square black lettering the name of the company runs along the sides of his Ford F-10, along with its motto: “Who has your keys?” The brochures show his father—clean-shaven and muscular, someone Brian hardly recognizes—handing a blond woman and her blond-headed boy their freshly cut keys. Everyone is smiling because they know the house is now safe, a fortress. No one will trespass. This is what Pop-a-Lock emphasizes more than anything: fear and trust.