The Wild Things (10 page)

“And you know what I say you do with a problem? Eat it!” she said, and started toward Max.

“Yeah,” Alexander said, “he’s the problem!”

Now Judith and Alexander were making their way to Max. Ira hadn’t been paying attention.

“What are you guys doing?” he asked.

“Oh, we were just gonna eat that,” Judith said, pointing to Max, as if picking out a lobster at a restaurant.

“Okay,” Ira said, shrugging and beginning to drool.

Max was very quickly in the shadow of the three of them, and soon Douglas and the bull had joined the throng, and it was very dark and warm with beast-sweat. Max backed up until he found himself against a mess of sticks and mud where a home used to be. There was no escape. The beasts seemed to notice this, too, and were grinning. Max looked from one to the other, as the four of them grew closer.

“He looks tasty,” Ira said.

“Does he?” Judith said, “I don’t know. I’m thinking gamey.”

“Gamey?” Douglas mused. “Really? I say succulent.”

“Succulent?” Judith said. “I don’t know. I’ll give you tasty, but not
succulent
.”

Alexander chimed in: “All I know is I’m getting hungrier just looking at him.”

“He’s an ugly bugger, though, isn’t he?” Judith said.

“Close your eyes then. I’ll feed him to you,” Ira said.

“Oh, that’s so romantic!” she said.

“Hold on!” a voice yelled from across the camp. It was Carol. Max felt some relief, and yet the creatures were still closing in on Max. It was too late to stop them. Max could feel their hot wet breath on his face, he could see their enormous teeth, each incisor as big as his foot. They could kill him long before Carol would have time to intervene.

Again the big one sent his voice from afar. “Wait!”

Ira licked his lips. The bull snorted, his hands reaching.

Max knew Carol couldn’t save him in time. He had to save himself -- somehow. He arched his back and with a voice far louder and more commanding than he ever expected, he roared, “Be still!”

The beasts stopped. They stopped moving, stopped talking, stopping raising their arms to claw Max to death, stopped salivating profusely. Max couldn’t believe it. He didn’t know what to do next.

“Why?” said Judith. “Why should we stop?”

This was a tricky question, Max knew. If
he
were about to bite into, say, a strawberry, and it told him to stop, he too would want a good explanation.

“Because … Uh … Because …” he mumbled. The beasts stared, waiting, blowing roughly through their nostrils. Max knew he had to come up with something immediately, and to his surprise, he did. “Because,” he said, “I heard about this one time that they weren’t still and they …”

“Who?” said Judith. “Who wasn’t still?”

Now Carol arrived, standing behind the others. He had been impressed with Max before, but now he seemed in awe of this small creature’s presence and power.

“Um … The hammers,” Max explained, making it up as he went along, “they were huge ones and they didn’t know how to be still. They were
crazy
. They were always shaking and running around and they never stopped to see what was right in front of them. So this one time the hammers were storming down the mountainside and they couldn’t even see that someone was coming up to
help
them. And you know what happened?”

The beasts, enthralled, shook their heads.

“They ran right over him and
killed
him,” Max said.

There were a few gasps, but there were also a few sounds that said “Well, what
else
would they do?”

“And the thing is,” Max added, “he
liked
them. He was there to
help
.”

“Who was he?” asked Douglas.

“Who was who?” Max said.

“The guy coming up the hill,” Douglas said.

“He was …” And again Max fumbled in the velvet darkness of his mind and found, impossibly, a gem. “He was their king,” Max answered.

Max had never told a more bizarre story, but the creatures were just floored by it.

Carol stepped forward. “Do
you
like
us
?”

This was a tough question. Max wasn’t sure that he liked any of them, given they were, moments earlier, about to devour his flesh and brains. But in the interest of self-preservation, and because he had been liking them a lot when they were all breaking things and lighting trees on fire, he said, “Yeah. I like you.”

Ira cleared his throat and said, with a hope-filled catch in his voice, “Are you
our
king?”

Max had rarely had to do so much bluffing in his life. “Sure. Yeah,” he said. “I think so.”

A ripple of excitement spread through the beasts.

“Wow, he’s the king,” Ira said, now seeming very happy.

“Yeah,” Douglas said. “Looks like he is.”

“Why is
he
the king?” Alexander said, full of sarcasm. “
He’s
not a king. If
he
can be king
I
could be king.”

Thankfully, as usual, all the other creatures ignored the goat.

“He’s very small,” noted Judith.

“Maybe that’s why he’ll be good,” suggested Ira. “That way he can fit in small places.”

Douglas stepped forward, as if he’d just thought of a stumper of a question that might decide it all: “Were you king where you came from?”

Max was getting good at the fibbing, so this one was easy. “Yeah, I was. King Max. For twenty years,” he said.

A quick happy murmur spread through the creatures.

“Are you going to make this a better place?” Ira asked.

“Sure,” Max said.

“Because it’s screwed up, let me tell you,” Judith blurted.

“Quiet, Judith,” Carol said.

“No, really, I could tell you stories …” she continued.

“Judith, stop,” Carol snapped.

But she wasn’t finished: “All I’m saying is that if we’re gonna have a king, he might as well solve all our problems. It’s the least he can do, after knocking over all our houses.”

“Judith, of course he’s here to fix everything,” Douglas said. “Why else would a king be a king and a king be here?” He turned to Max. “Right, King?”

“Uh, sure,” Max said.

Carol smiled. “Well, that settles it then. He’s our king!”

They all moved in to hug Max.

“Sorry we were gonna eat you,” Douglas said.

“We didn’t know you were king,” Ira said.

“If we knew you were the king, we almost definitely wouldn’t have tried to eat you,” Judith added, then laughed in a sudden, mirthless trill. She lowered her voice to a confessional tone. “We just got caught up in the moment.”

Max was swept up and lifted high in the air and finally set down on the shoulders of the Bull. The Bull -- that seemed to be his name -- followed Carol into a cave under an enormous tree. Inside the cave, there were two torches illuminating a golden oval of a room.

The Bull put Max down and rooted around in a small pile of rubble on the ground. He soon retrieved a scepter, copper-colored and bejeweled, and gave it to Max. Max inspected it reverently. It was heavy, but not too heavy. It was perfect, with a hand-carved handle and a crystal orb at the top.

The Bull continued to dig through the rubble. Curious, Max peered around the Bull and saw that it wasn’t a pile of sticks and rocks but a pile of what looked to be bones. They were yellowed and broken, the remains of what seemed like a dozen different creatures. Twisted and spotted skulls and ribs in sizes and shapes Max had never seen in any book or museum.

“Aha!” Carol bellowed. “There it is.”

Max looked up to see that the Bull had pulled a crown from the heap. It was golden, rough-hewn, and the Bull turned to place the crown on Max’s head. Max pulled away.

“Wait,” he said, pointing to the pile of bones. “Are those … other kings?”

The Bull glanced quickly to Carol with a look of mild concern.

“No, no!” Carol said, chuckling. “Those were there before we got here. We’ve never even seen them before.”

Max was unconvinced.

“What are those, anyway?” Carol asked the Bull.

The Bull shrugged elaborately.

Then Carol and the Bull did a quick jig atop the bones, reducing them to dust.

“See?” Carol said, grinning, his eyes nervous and alight. “Nothing to worry about. Just all this dust.” He turned to the Bull. “Make sure you dust in here next time!”

Sensing Max’s apprehension, Carol stepped forward and spoke with great solemnity. “I promise you have nothing to worry about, Max. You’re the king. And nothing bad can happen to the king. Especially a good king. I can already tell you’ll be a truly great king.”

Max looked into Carol’s eyes, each of them as big as a volleyball. They were the warmest brown and green, and seemed sincere.

“But what do I have to do?” Max asked.

“Do? Anything you want to do,” Carol said.

“And what do
you
have to do?” Max asked.

“Anything you want us to do,” Carol said. He answered so quickly that Max was convinced.

“Then okay,” Max said.

Max lowered his head to receive his crown. Carol gently placed it on Max’s head. It was heavy, made of something like iron, and the metal was cool on his forehead. But the crown fit, and Max smiled. Carol stood back and looked at him, nodding as if everything had finally fallen into place.

The Bull lifted Max and placed him on his shoulder, and as they made their way out of the tunnel, there were deafening cheers from the rest of the beasts. The Bull paraded Max around the forest, as everyone whooped and danced in a very ugly -- drool and mucus spraying left and right -- but celebratory kind of way. After a few minutes, the Bull placed Max atop a grassy knoll, and the beasts gathered around, looking up to him expectantly. Max realized he was supposed to say something, so he said the only thing he could think of:

“Let the wild rumpus begin!”

The beasts cheered. Then they waited for Max to tell them what to do. They knew how to rumpus, but they wanted to make sure they did it to the pleasing of their king.

Max shimmied down the Bull’s torso and began to spin around like a dervish. “Do what I do!” he demanded.

And they did. The beasts were terrible dervishes, clumsy and slow at spinning, but this made it all more entertaining for Max. He watched and laughed as they spun themselves into a mass of dizzy fur and feet, each of them crumpling to the ground.

For the next five or six hours, Max thought of every fun thing he could possibly think of, and he made sure all the beasts did these things with him.

He sat on Ira’s back and made him act like a horse (though Ira had never heard of a horse). He lined them all up like dominoes and ordered them to knock each other over. He made them assemble themselves into a giant pyramid, and he climbed on the top and deliberately caused the pyramid to fall. The beasts were extraordinary diggers, so Max made them dig dozens of holes, huge holes, for no reason at all. Then it was back to knocking down trees -- the ten or twelve that remained. It was Max’s task to think of as many ways as possible to knock them down, and to do it as loudly as possible.

Next Max thought it would be good to run up to the closest hill and roll down like giant furry earth balls. So he ran and the beasts followed him up the hill. At the top, he demonstrated how it should be done. He somersaulted down the grassy hill and when he was finished, he saw that Douglas and Alexander had already followed his lead and were rolling down after him. But their speed was about triple his, and they were headed directly for him.

He jumped out of the way just in time, and made a mental note to remind them to be more careful next time they rolled down the hill with him nearby. But just as he was dusting himself off, Carol and Judith barreled down the hill even faster than their predecessors, again directly toward Max. Again he had to jump out of the way, but this time his foot was clipped by the Judith-ball, and he yowled in pain.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, unspooling herself at the bottom of the hill.

“You rolled over my foot!” he said.

Judith looked at him blankly. “And?”

“You shouldn’t do that!” Max said.

Judith gave him a look like he’d just said by far the most insane thing. Max had the momentary thought that he should bash her over the head with a stick or rock. He looked around for something that would do the job. But before he could, Carol stepped in.

“Judith, did you roll over the king’s foot?” Carol asked.

“I don’t know what I did,” she replied dryly. “I have no memory of any of it. Wait, where am I?”

“You know very well what you did,” Carol said, stepping closer to her. “And if you do that again, I swear I’ll eat your head.”

Max, flattered that Carol would come to his defense but startled by the threat, patted Carol on the arm. “That’s okay, Carol. But thanks.”

Judith was aghast. “‘Thanks?’ You say ‘thanks’ for threatening to eat my head?
That’s
what you’re thanking him for? What kind of king thanks someone for threatening to eat one of his subject’s heads?”

While Max tried to concoct a response, Ira was trying to figure out the king’s point of view.

“So we should try
not
to run over your foot when we turn ourselves into balls, but then if we
do
run over you, we get our heads eaten?”

“Yes,” Carol said, relieved that someone had finally figured out the obvious.

“No!” Max wailed. “No. There won’t be any running over feet, and no eating of heads. No eating any part of each other. That’s just the main rule, okay?”

“But what if we
want
to?” Douglas asked.

“What do you mean?” Max asked.

“I mean, we shouldn’t eat heads, and that makes sense. But what if we find ourselves in a position where we really
want
to eat someone’s head or maybe arm?”

Again there was a wide murmur of approval over this worthy question.

Max was having a hard time controlling his exasperation. He took a number of deep breaths and explained, as slowly and carefully as he could, the rules under which he wanted his subjects to live. There would be no eating of each other under any circumstances -- even if they wanted to -- and no running over each other in any way at all, and no ...