Dave Eggers - The Wild Things

Max nodded. “Wind and weather, yeah. And speed.”

“What about me?” Alexander asked.

“You can be the lookout,” Max said.

“No, I don’t want to look out,” Alexander said. “Or maybe I would if the ship was different and I was the captain instead of you.”

Max didn’t know how to answer Alexander. He made a note to try to avoid him altogether in the future.

“Psst. Hey King!”

Max turned to see Katherine hiding in the hollow of an enormous tree. She beckoned him over. Relieved to be away from the goat, Max jumped off Douglas’s shoulders and over to her.

“I need to talk to you,” she said.

“Really?” Max said. “About what?” He didn’t want to leave the parade, so he tried to lure her into talking while walking with the group.

But she didn’t want that.

“We need a little privacy,” she said, pulling him from the path.

Max really didn’t think he should be leaving his own parade, but there was something so intriguing about Katherine. They wouldn’t miss him for a little bit.

“Grab here,” Katherine said, indicating the fur on the back of her neck. “Hold tight.”

Max did, and immediately his feet left the earth. With Max on her back, and with incredible speed, Katherine climbed the tree she’d been hiding in. She climbed so fast, chipmunk-style, that he could barely hold on. In seconds they were at the top of a fifty-foot tree, its leaves a pale purple, and Katherine was resting on a platform she had arranged between the tree’s two highest boughs. She placed Max on his feet, and he found himself standing atop a ten-foot square wooden perch.

“You like it up here?” she asked.

He nodded, awed. From the platform he could see the whole island — the cauliflower forests, the burnt-red desert, the black and blue ravines, the ever-grinning ocean. He looked down, where Katherine was laying on her stomach on the narrow platform.

“Oh man, that climb got me sore. Can you walk on my back?” she asked.

Max didn’t know what she was talking about.

She looked up to him and rolled her eyes. “It’s sore. You think you could walk on it?”

Max had never been asked to walk on someone’s back before.

“What, like actually step on you?” he said.

“Yup, step on me, and then walk around.”

Max couldn’t wrap his head around this.

“C’mon, just step on,” she said.

He aimed his foot toward her torso.

“King, do it!” she said, grabbing his foot.

He gingerly began to walk on top of her. She was soft in some places and in others he could feel the ropes of muscle underneath the heavy fur.

“Oh, that feels good,” she said.

Max was trying not to hurt her, while also trying hard to keep his balance. Any slip and he would fall off Katherine, off the platform, and down fifty feet. Katherine didn’t seem to be concerned at all about the danger.

“Now jump up and down really quick, like you’re walking on fire,” she said.

He did so as best he could.

“Good, good,” she said. “That’s the only way to get rid of the knots.”

Max slowed his jumping, hoping that he could be finished as soon as possible. “Done?” he asked.

“Sure. Thanks, King,” she said, and quickly rolled onto her back, forcing Max to step quickly, log-rolling-style, until he was standing on her stomach.

“Please go slower,” he asked.

Katherine looked up at him, as if assessing whether she should ask him what she wanted to ask him.

“Hey Max, you ever feel like you’re, like, stuck under other people?” she said, squinting up at him, seeming immensely relieved to have said it. “Sometimes I feel like I’m trapped under people … like in a bad way. You know what I mean?”

Max began to formulate an answer but she didn’t seem to need one.

“I don’t know,” she continued, “I feel like I’m constantly burdened by everyone’s issues . You know?”

Max thought he knew. Or did he? He wasn’t sure, but it didn’t matter. He just liked being with her, alone with her. She seemed interested in him, in being only with him and talking only to him, and he was having trouble breathing.

She smiled at him. “I was about to go crazy before you showed up. You’re different, you know? You’re …” She seemed on the verge of saying something very serious but then retreated. “You know, you’ve got less hair, you’re cleaner … You smell better. You don’t smell great, but better.”

Max laughed.

“King?” It was a distant voice, maybe Carol’s, from far below. “Max?”

Max jumped off Katherine’s stomach and tried to peer through the treetops to find the parade. He knew he needed to get back.

Katherine sighed. “Yeah, I know. You’re the king and all. I’m sorry for taking you away from your kingly subjects. Hold on. I know a shortcut.”

Max again held onto the scruff of her neck and immediately Katherine leapt from her platform — thirty feet up, a hundred feet forward, and then descended into what seemed like a mess of trees twenty feet down. But as they fell closer, another platform became visible, and Max realized they would be landing on it. He braced himself for painful impact but at the moment they touched the platform, they were high in the air again. Katherine had managed to touch the platform’s surface the tiniest fragment of a second before bounding off again, onto the next tree and the next platform. She leapt and bounded this way, more agile than any kangaroo or frog, for six more trees, each journey more thrilling than any roller coaster or bungee jump Max had ever known or seen and the only problem was the barf on his wolf suit. He threw up twice, yes, but it was a good kind of throwing up.

Finally Max felt them descending farther, down, down. He could see the lagoon ahead, a green body of water in the shape of a sleeping dog, and just before the lagoon he could see the group of beasts making their way there.

They came to earth slowly, as if tied to a hundred parachutes. They had beaten the group to the lagoon and Katherine made sure everyone had taken note of their entrance. No one was impressed, and Carol did not seem pleased at all. His face was twisted into a scowl.

Max ran over to him.

“Hey! You ready to swim?” he asked.

Carol shrugged.

“What’s the matter?” Max asked.

“Where were you guys?” Carol asked.

“Who? Me and Katherine? We just took a different route.”

“But you were supposed to lead the parade.”

“I did.”

“And then you didn’t.”

There was a new sharpness to Carol’s tone that Max couldn’t figure out. Was he really mad about something?

“Well, that’s when I had to see something with Katherine. Now let’s swim. Do you like the water?”

“No,” Carol said flatly. “And I don’t like sailing, either. Remember?”

Max didn’t remember.

“I heard you were talking about building a ship with everyone else. Why would you do that?”

“How do you mean?”

“Why would you need a ship, Max? You’re thinking of leaving already?”

“No, no,” Max said. “This would just be for fun. Or emergencies.” Carol’s face had darkened and his eyes had gone small. His expression scattered Max’s brain so much he started babbling: “It’ll have a trampoline. And a big aquarium. An aquarium under the water, inside the ship, where we keep the fish and squids and stuff we like …”

The explanation was doing no good.

“But I thought we said we were bored by sailing,” Carol said. “Isn’t that what you said just this morning? We talked about killing anything boring but now you want to sail ? The most boring thing of all?”