Julia Elliott - The Wilds

Mama said she felt sorry for Mrs. Wild. Dressed in tight jeans and heels, Mama would invite the hunched lady to have coffee in our spotless living room. She made fun of Mrs. Wild’s dresses when the poor woman left, but sometimes she was sad, and I knew she was thinking about my little brother, who’d weighed three pounds when he was born and died in a humid tank of oxygen.

Mr. Wild always rolled in after dark, in a black Chrysler New Yorker, appearing briefly in streetlight, always shrouded in a suit. He worked in the secret depths of a nuclear plant, thirty miles away, a glowing futuristic fortress surrounded by high walls. The family was from way up north, somewhere between Pennsylvania and the North Pole, where the world froze into a solid block of ice for months on end and people lived half their lives indoors. But now, in the teeming Southern air, the transplanted boys were growing, faster and faster, so fast their mother reputedly had to keep two industrial freezers in the garage, one for milk, the other for meat — hot dogs, chickens, turkeys, and hams; pork chops, baloney, and liver; a thousand cuts of beef and strange bloody meats seldom eaten in our part of the world.

We were deep into summer and you could see the vines growing, winding around branches, sprouting bumps and barnacles and woody boils that would fester until they could stand it no more, then break out into red and purple. It was night and the Wild boys hooted in their shrubbery. They wore dirty cutoff jeans. They carried knives and BB guns and homemade bombs. I could smell their weird metallic sweat drifting on a breeze that rustled through the honeysuckle. The Wild boys had dug tunnels under the ground. They had filled the treetops with catwalks. They whirred from tree to tree on zip lines and hopped from attic windows out into the bustling night.

I crouched in the bushes in Mama’s green chiffon evening gown, wearing my crown of bird skulls. I’d collected the skulls for two years, spray-painted them gold, and glued them to a Burger King crown, along with fake emeralds and glowing shells of June bugs. Thin, long hair tickled my spine. My Barbie binoculars were crap, and I’d smashed them with a rock. I was on the lookout for Brian, the oldest Wild, who sometimes left his den to smoke. I was deeply in love with him. Every time I saw him, reclining in his plastic lawn chair, pouting in dark sunglasses, my heart twisted like a worm in the cocoon of my chest.

My father taught medieval history at the community college. I’d found a recipe for an ancient love potion in one of his books, and inside a purple Crown Royal pouch, buried under an assortment of amulets, I’d placed a fancy perfume bottle full of the magical fluid.

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.