The Wilds (16 page)

Lightning bugs bobbed in the rich air. Crickets throbbed. A fat, bloody moon hung over the house of the neighborhood alcoholics. I heard the click of the sliding glass door that led to Brian’s lair, and he came out into the night, pulsing with beauty and mystery. His hair was long, wild, and black. He’d shaved his beard into a devil’s point. You could tell by the way he sighed and flopped around that he dreamed of better places—glamorous and distant, with a different kind of light. Because of him I’d taken up smoking. I stole butts from my mother and kept them in a sock with a pink Bic, Tic Tacs, and a tiny spray can of Lysol. I fantasized about smoking with Brian: Brian
leaning over to light my cigarette, our sensuous exhalations intertwining, Brian kissing my smoky mouth. My longing pulled me over the invisible boundary into the Wilds’ honeysuckle-choked yard. I was in their habitat, sniffing ferret musk and a thousand flowers, when a hand slipped over my mouth. It smelled of onions and dirt. A small, hot body pressed against my back.

“Don’t make a sound,” said a boy.

“We’ve got knives,” said another. They snatched my wrists and twisted them behind my back. Other boys came out into the moonlight, and Brian slipped inside the house, tossing his cigarette butt behind him.

“Stand up,” a boy said.

Their chests glowed with firefly juice. They had steak knives strapped to their belts and some of them wore goggles. White cats strolled among them, sometimes sniffing their bare feet. “Move,” yelled a small Wild, no older than six, a butter knife dangling from his Cub Scout belt. They pushed me toward a crooked magnolia. In the sweet, knotty dark of the tree, they’d nailed boards for climbing, and they forced me up, higher and higher, the gauze of my skirt catching on branches, until we reached their tree house, a rickety box with one window that framed the moon. Two boys squirmed around me to climb in first. They lit a stinking kerosene lantern that sat on a milk crate. They flashed their knives at me. One of the boys
prodded my butt with a stick and said, “Get in.” I climbed up into the creaky orange glow of the tree house.

Five Wilds surrounded me with glares and grimaces. A cat poked its white head through the window and stared at me. Birds fluttered and fussed in the branches.

“Give Ben the signal,” said the biggest boy in the room, whose name, I think, was Tim. “He knows how to deal with spies.”

“Spies?” I said.

“Shut up. Don’t talk. You’re on our property.”

One of the boys opened an old medicine cabinet that was mounted on the wall beside the window. Inside were several ordinary light switches and a doorbell. He pressed the doorbell.

“What are you?” said the little Wild, staring dreamily at my crown.

“Shut up,” said Tim. “Don’t speak to the prisoner. She’s got to be interrogated.”

Something heavy jumped in the branches then and shook the tree house. A flashlit mask of a wolfman appeared at the window, sputtering with evil cackles. He was copying somebody on television, though I couldn’t quite place the laugh.

“What have we here?” said the wolfman. “A princess?”

Two boards beneath the window opened and the wolfman squeezed through a primitive secret door. He
closed the narrow door behind him and stood before me in karate pants and a black bathrobe too big for his skinny body. He wore no shirt under the robe, and a live garter snake twirled around his pimply neck. I thought I knew which Wild he was but I couldn’t quite remember the face under the mask. He sat on an overturned plastic bucket, elbows on his knees, and gazed down at me through his mask, a cheap Halloween thing with molded plastic hair. The wolfman had a silly widow’s peak, a hard fat beard, and vampire fangs that looked like buck teeth.

I sat on the floor, feeling dizzy in the press of boys. They smelled of stale biscuits and fermented grass. Their hair was oily, and Kool-Aid stains darkened their greedy mouths.

“We’ll have to search her,” said the wolfman, plucking a cigarette from his robe pocket. There was a small mouth hole in the mask, and the wolfman inserted his cigarette into it. His brothers licked their lips as they watched him light it with a silver lighter. The wolfman took an awkward puff.

“Gimme one,” said the little Wild, but no one paid him any attention.

“She’s got something hidden under her skirt,” said the wolfman, pointing with his cigarette at one of my secret pockets.

They stuck their filthy, gnarled hands into the soft film of my skirts, snatching my treasures from me: my lipsticks, my notebook, my voodoo doll of mean old drunk Mrs. Bickle. The wolfman tried to read the notebook, but he couldn’t understand my special language. He pulled objects from my purple pouch and picked through my magic things.

“Quit squirming,” hissed Tim, pinching my nape, looking for the nerve that would paralyze me.

The wolfman examined my amulet for night flying, a big gold medallion with a luna moth Shrinky-Dinked to the front. He opened my power locket and dumped the red powder onto the floor. I think he was smirking under the mask. His eyes gleamed, wet and meaty behind the dead plastic.

He found my love potion buried deep in the pouch, wrapped in a gauzy violet scarf, and held the soft bundle in his palm, squeezing it and cocking his head. Slowly, he unraveled it. He examined the perfume bottle in the lamplight, mouthing the word on the label:
Poison
. I don’t think he understood that it was the name of a perfume. And the sight of this word, printed so precisely on an old-fashioned bottle filled with dark algae-green liquid, as though packaged by goblins, must have unsettled him. Poison was my mother’s perfume. When she dabbed it on her pulse points, she made a mean face
in the mirror, as though going out into the night to kill. The summer after my brother died, I’d seen my mother flee a noisy neighborhood party to rush into the arms of a strange man; they’d fallen into uncut grass. The man had moaned as though he’d been poisoned.

Now the wolfman unscrewed the cap. My love potion filled the tree house with goats and tortured lilies. He shuddered and put the cap back on and turned his wet eyes away. His brothers groaned. According to the ancient recipe, just smelling the potion was dangerous, though I’d had to make substitutions with modern ingredients, and I knew this had weakened the brew.

“That smell,” said the wolfman, turning to look at me. “It made me gag.”

“It won’t hurt you,” I said. “It’s not really poison.”

“Make her eat it then,” said the brother with the cowlick and bulldog eyes.

I tried to squirm away but the Wilds were on me, this time binding my wrists with fishing line. The wolfman knelt near me, holding the bottle in his fist. I could smell his scalp. The snake on his neck lifted its head to look at me and opened its velvety pink mouth. Its fangs were too little to see, but I could imagine them—clear as diamonds, wet and sparkling sharp. The wolfman daubed a green droplet on his fingertip and pushed it toward my lips.

“Lick it,” he said. “If it’s not poison.”

I turned my face away, and the Wilds pressed around me, flashing their knives and grunting.

“Lick it, lick it, lick it,” they chanted.

My tongue felt parched and gross. It slithered out and tasted the drop. I closed my eyes to block their faces from my mind and tried not to swallow. I would hold the poison in my mouth and spit it out when they let me go. I thought of Brian, reclining in his lawn chair, but the image of the wolfman billowed up in my head. Hunched in his bathrobe, laughing his midnight-TV laugh, he staggered through the twisted branches.

I kept away from the Wilds after that and did not spy on them and grew two inches and learned how to talk to birds. My father had ordered a Xeroxed copy of a book so ancient that a library in England had to keep it in a special tank. This book was full of useful information: how to communicate with animals, how to make your own cough medicine, how to keep the devil from visiting your bed at night. It also contained love potions, but when I came to these passages I skipped over them with a beating heart. When school started, I spent hours in fluorescent-lit classrooms, breathing disinfectant and
chalk and the smell of warm, young bodies shut up. Two groups of girls wanted me as a friend, and I jumped between them, keeping my independence. Ben Wild was two grades ahead of me. At school he ran with bad boys and lurked under stairwells and slipped off to McDonald’s for lunch. Sometimes I saw him slinking down the hall in the silent in-school suspension line, guarded by Mrs. Beard, a mammoth woman with a face like a sunburned fist.

Ben had a thick, pubic unibrow, and his mother couldn’t keep his black curls tamed. Tucked into the nest of his hair was a strange acne-scarred face with glowing green eyes and slick, pimento-red lips. Sometimes we locked eyes at school. He’d laugh at me and say, sarcastically, “There goes the fairy princess.” He was always making nasty remarks to his friends. People whispered that his mother was pregnant again—with twins, triplets, quadruplets, quintuplets, sextuplets. They invented terms for outlandish broods, like
megaduplets
, and referred to the Wild boys as “the litter,” “the pack,” or “the swarm.”

In health class we watched creepy, outdated films on lice, scabies, menstruation, scoliosis, and drug mania. I saw cartoon bugs burrowing under the soft skins of children, leaving red maps of infection. I saw pretty girls transform into twisted, tragic creatures who hobbled
down school hallways in back braces. I saw hippie chicks dance ecstatically in throbbing psychedelic light, only to hurl themselves out of windows. Womanhood was bound up with disease. Ecstasy led to bashed-open skulls and the apocalyptic wail of police sirens. Parasites lurked everywhere: little bloodsuckers hopping into your hair; big perverts with candy and needles. But the disease of puberty had already touched me. My right nipple swelled and turned darker, while my left was still small and pink. My mother laughed when I asked for a bra, and my deformity was visible beneath three shirts.

One day Ben Wild called me Cyclops. The name spread through our school like lice. I vowed revenge and took to my spell books and started watching the Wild house again.

I learned that Brian had an older girlfriend from the neighborhood, a dental hygienist, which was fine with me because I didn’t love him anymore. I learned that the rumors were true. Mrs. Wild was pregnant. And she had a nervous breakdown every Wednesday evening after picking up three of her sons from midget football practice and allowing them to gorge on ice cream. I learned that Mr. Wild sometimes lingered in his car for thirty minutes before venturing into the house. And most important, from the chatter of his brothers, I learned that Ben wore his wolfman mask every month on the night of the full moon.

I had several theories: Ben fantasized about being a wolfman; Ben had told his little brothers, years ago, that he was a wolfman, and he kept up his ruse to control them with fear; Ben donned the wolfman mask as some kind of deep, ironic joke. But no one in his family seemed afraid of the wolfman mask. While out in their yard his brothers never said much about it, simply commenting, in September, when the full moon came, that it was “wolf night” again. And Ben went about his activities as though everything were normal: taking out the garbage, bumming cigarettes from Brian, shooting hoops with Tim.

In October a hurricane swept through our town. Before the storm I saw Ben in his backyard, standing in the weird sulfurous light with wind whipping through his hair. Something flickered through me, and I wanted to join him, to snuggle in the hectic, stinking warmth of the Wild pack. But Mama screamed out the back door, and I ran inside our lonely house. Daddy made us sit in the pantry, where he told stories of green knights and enchanted ladies as Mama rolled her eyes and the storm lashed at our roof. My father was getting plump. His pale, clammy skin sometimes broke out into rashes. I knew all of his stories, word by word. I knew every sarcastic phrase in my mother’s repertoire, and the contents of her closet no longer fascinated me. I was sick
of my parents’ faces and hungry for new life. Into the dark blinking windows of my dreams, Wild boys would sometimes scramble. They’d run howling through our house, kicking over end tables and smearing mud on our wall-to-wall carpet. They’d tear doors off hinges and let night storms fly through our house.

Our power was out for four days. Houses glowed with candlelight. Children ruled the dark chaos, and the Wild boys prowled the battered neighborhood with guns and knives. On the third day Tim Wild came to our back door and told us his parents were having a cookout. Their freezer of meat was going to go bad; the whole block was invited.