Julia Elliott - The Wilds

It was a warm day and autumn mange patched the ragged trees. Smells of charred meat floated through the neighborhood; a million gnats had hatched in the muggy air. It was weird to see Mr. Wild out in daylight, cooking on their rusty grill, so tall, so skinny and pale, his shiny square of hair gone bristly like the coat of a dog. He hunched over the spitting meat, grinning with long teeth. He wore glasses. His ancient jogging suit had faded to a strange purple, and sweat dripped from the stubbled point of his chin. Children whispered that he was too smart to talk, that nothing he said made sense, that he had false teeth and a robot eye and a creepy vampire accent. His wife looked worn-out, fussing with paper napkins that kept blowing all over the yard, mustard stains blotting her massive poly-knit bosom. The boys looked exactly like Mr. Wild. Children said he’d planted his evil clones directly into her belly, and now another one was growing down in the warm, dark wet.

The Wild boys looked like they hadn’t bathed since the storm, and they ran around the yard with gristly bones in their fists. They had been gobbling meat all day, and their mouths were slick with blood and grease. They’d darkened their faces with charcoal. They whizzed through the treetops; their heads popped up from secret holes. Immune to their mother’s screams, they cackled and smacked, lunged at heaped platters, stabbed morsels of flesh with the tips of their knives. White cats jumped on the picnic table and carried whole pork chops into the trees.

There was nothing to eat but meat and white bread that turned to pure sugar when it hit your spit. There were no forks left. I fixed myself a plate and took it to Brian’s lawn chair. I had a blistered wienie and a steak, black on the outside but raw and oozing inside. I had a hot dog bun infested with ice. I ate the steak with my hands, and warm blood dripped down my throat. Gnats landed on my cheeks to lick sweat with their invisible tongues. I ate more meat: crumbly, dry hamburger and fatty pork loin and chunks of bitter liver; gamy lamb and slippery lumps of veal. I gnawed at the stubborn tendons of turkey legs and savored sausage that melted like candy on my tongue. I nibbled minute quail with edible skeletons and sucked tender feathers of flesh from roasted ribs. The sky flushed pink and I ate as the boiling sun sank. I ate until my paper plate dissolved in my hands. When I finally came out of my cannibal trance, the moon was up, rolling like a carcass on the spit of its axis. And Ben Wild was staring at me through the sliding glass door that led to his brother’s den. He was wearing his wolfman mask, as I should have expected, though I’d forgotten all about the full moon, and he startled me with his goofy monster face.

Adults murmured near the dying grill. They were drinking beer. My mother’s sarcastic laughter drifted across the sea of withering honeysuckle, and I knew my father had already skulked home to bed. I peered through the door of the den and saw shapes moving in candlelight. A boy barked. The door slid open all by itself, and I suspected that one of the Wilds had pulled it with a string. Or maybe the little smart-asses had rigged up something more complicated.

I walked into the room and the door closed. There were animals in there, filtering the air with their strange lungs, pumping out musk and farts. Ben sat on a small velour couch in the corner, wearing his karate ensemble. A ferret dozed on his neck. White cats eyed the weaselly beast as they slunk around. Three Wild boys stalked the room with knives, obsessed with being near their older brother. They’d made a pile of bones on Brian’s dresser. Candles flickered on the floor, bleeding wax onto ancient shag. I took a deep breath of moldy air.

“Where’s Brian?” I asked.

“With his girlfriend,” said Ben, and his brothers snorted and made kissing noises.

“We’re taking over his room,” said Tim. He threw his knife at a cat and metal clattered against the dark paneled wall.

“I’ve got to go,” I said, though it would have hurt me to leave the room.

“Wait,” said Ben. “I wanted to tell you something.”

“What?”

“Get out of here, you assholes,” he said.

“Make us,” said Tim.

Ben stood up, and the boys ran toward a corner. In the dark, I could just make out a flight of steps with a wrought-iron banister. The brothers crawled up and down the stairs, neither leaving nor staying, snickering and coughing and slapping each other. The ferret leaped from Ben’s shoulder and slithered under the bed.

“I wanted to tell you I was sorry about the thing, you know,” Ben whispered. “The name I called you. I didn’t mean for it to get around like it did.”

“Whatever,” I said. My cyclopean breast burned above my mortified heart. I pulled my jean jacket tightly around me. “Forget it. Don’t say another word about it.”

The wolfman’s stupid expression didn’t change, but his eyes, wet behind the plastic, fluttered over my chest.

“I was just having a bad week,” he said. “You don’t have any brothers or sisters, do you?”

I told him I didn’t.

“You’re lucky,” he said. “All that privacy. Sometimes I think I’m going crazy. They never leave me alone. But when Brian goes to college next year, I’m moving down here.”

“It’s a cool room,” I said. “You can come and go whenever you want.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Want a cigarette?” He pulled a pack of Marlboros from his robe pocket. He made room for me on the couch and I sat down. The couch was small and I could feel his body, hot beside me. I could smell the dark yellow musk of the ferret that had been sprawling on his neck. When I leaned in to light my cigarette, I caught the tang of wine on Ben’s breath, and I wanted to drink wine too, from a silver goblet, deep in the secret tunnels the Wild boys had dug under the ground, or high in the treetops, where clouds oozed through prickly branches.

“Give me some wine,” I said.

“What?” The wolfman cocked his head.

“I smell it, and I want some.”

“No problem.” He produced a jug from a laundry basket overflowing with dirty socks.

We sat drinking wine and smoking. White cats paced. We didn’t speak, and a beautiful, sweet evil grew between us.

“How deep do your tunnels go?” I whispered to him.

“To hell,” he said and laughed his television laugh. “One of these days I’m going to take my little brothers down there and sell them to the devil.”

On the staircase a Wild boy gasped, but the others giggled.

“I wish I had brothers — or sisters.”

“Oh no.” Ben shook his head. “You don’t.”

“I do. At night, when my parents fall asleep in their chairs, I feel so lonely I wish a spaceship would swoop down and kidnap me.”

“I feel exactly the same way.” Ben’s voice broke. He cleared his throat. “Only worse, more desperate, with a swarm of little gnats always bothering me. And my mother. . sometimes she calls me Brian, sometimes Tim. I know it’s just a slip of the tongue, but still. And now she’s going to have another one.”

His eyes rolled behind the plastic and I felt the damp meat of his palm resting on my hand. Our fingers intertwined and the air pulsed around my ears. This was what it was like to hold hands with a boy. I’d never done it before. There was a film of sweat between our palms and the position I was frozen in felt uncomfortable.

The sliding glass door opened by itself, and the smell of dying charcoal drifted in from the night. The full moon hung over the Bickles’ rotten roof, spilling its silver.

“Where are all the parents?” I asked, but Ben didn’t answer me. He dropped my hand and let out a deep moan that made my stomach clench. He shot up from the couch and staggered around on the carpet, fingering his wolfman mask and groaning. Ben Wild fell to his knees. He lifted his head to the moon and barked. Then an ancient, afflicted howl rocked through his body and ripped the quiet night open.