Julia Elliott - The Wilds

Mom has refused to give me a home perm, which means I’ll be ugly for the rest of the summer, and one of my little boobies has grown an alien lump down in it that hurts. A massive zit festers in my nose like a parasite; I’ve spent the morning picking at it with a needle. I shaved my legs without Mom’s permission, and the tiny cuts where I sliced off my mosquito bites sting. The sour chunks of food I keep sucking from my braces symbolize something — I’m not sure what, but it makes me think of the night Dad told me about Turdus philomelos , the songbird that lines its nest with mud, dung, and rotten wood. Walling itself in a domestic prison of its own crap was how he put it. That could be a metaphor , Dad said, lighting his zillionth cigarette and scowling at my mother.

And now, exactly one hour and forty minutes before my scheduled beating, Dad splashes Jim Beam into his glass of Coke. If he gets drunk, he won’t be able to administer the beating. Then my mother will lash me with one of her colorful belts.

I’m thinking that this time I’ll run away. I’ll get my best friend, Cujo, to swing by on his moped, and we’ll ride all the way to the beach. We’ll build a fort and live off fish and candy. But my bathing suit is hideous, my boobs are deformed, my freckles have darkened into an ugly swarm, and I don’t feel like creeping out of the hot dark house today. So instead I slump against the desk where Mom’s bloated purse holds court among unpaid bills, an empty cheese puffs bag, a broken sandal she’s been meaning to have repaired, several of Dad’s prescriptions, a bottle of Mercurochrome, a catcher’s mitt, a corroded battery, and an empty basket adorned with dusty plastic magnolias.

One hour and thirty minutes before my appointment with the whipping expert, the twins come scrambling through the back door, Little Jack clutching a bulging Star Wars pillowcase spattered with blood, the Runt toting their BB guns. I wonder what it’ll be today, and Dad, into his second whiskey Coke, perks up at the smell of game.

“What you got there, boys?” he asks, pecking at the bag with his long gray nose, pinning it with his good eye, and licking his lips.

“Robins,” the ten-year-old twins squeal.

“Robins don’t have much meat, but we’ll cook up a huntsman’s feast.”

Sputtering happily with nervous tics, a fresh drink tinkling in his hand, Dad leads the boys out to the picnic table, just beyond the open kitchen window. As he spreads newspapers, he boasts about survival in the wilderness, how a true man must learn to live off the fruits of forest and lake, how he could gut a hummingbird with a toothpick before he was potty trained. I sit down at the kitchen table, light one of Dad’s butts, and suck the sweet smoke down. Poison frolics through my bloodstream. I drip some Jim Beam into my Kool-Aid and guzzle it. I eat a Tic Tac. Enjoying a second cigarette butt, spying on them through the window, I watch Little Jack pick at the pile of robins as emerald flies cavort and my baby brother, Cabbage, strolls over in his tinfoil loincloth to aim his laser gun at Dad’s head. Our obese Boykin spaniels have crawled from their holes. They waddle and grunt at Dad’s feet, drunk on the delicious musk of dead animal.

“Chew chew,” says Cabbage. “You dead, Daddy.”

A cat skull dangles from a filthy shoelace tied around Cabbage’s neck. He’s wearing Dad’s yellow jockstrap on his head, long gloves made of panty hose, and two plastic RC bottles strapped to his back with a Cub Scout belt. Born premature, Cabbage lived in a tank for three months, and he still looks like a bleached frog.

“I kilt you,” Cabbage says. Dad slumps at the table, then twitches back to life.

“I’m immortal,” he says, grabbing a bird.

Dad plucks feathers and demonstrates how to singe the remaining fluff off the scrawny carcass with his cigarette lighter. He decapitates a robin with one strong chop of his rusty hunting knife, then hacks off its wiry reptilian claws. He slits it open and picks out a wad of dainty guts, cupping the gleaming wine gem of the animal’s heart in his hand for the twins to examine. Cicadas pulse their mystical chants. The sun beats down, and my father’s great and noble nose gleams with manly oils.

“This is the heart, sons,” says Dad, “the pouch containing the animal’s soul. We’ll dice it up and put it in the gravy, and it’ll give us the keen eyesight of the bird. Indians said a prayer for the beasts they killed, thanking them for their sacrifice.”

Dad closes his eyes, and the idiot twins copy him; Dad mumbles something and then drops the giblet into a bowl.

“General Richard Heron Anderson lived an entire month in the wild on pokeweed salad and fried lizards,” Dad says.

“Gross,” says Little Jack. “I’d starve.”

“If we ever suffer a nuclear holocaust,” says Dad, taking a sip from his blood-smeared tumbler, “you might have to live off the flesh of radioactive dogs.”

“I would eat stuff out of cans first,” says the Runt, trying to saw through a robin’s neck with his pocketknife.

The twins make a mess of cleaning their robins. They can’t find the guts. They slump in the heat, glancing hungrily at the shrubbery. T. W. Manley’s go-cart engine revs up again. Dad hurls a cluster of intestines at the Runt’s cheek and scowls at him when he squeals.

Fifty-five minutes before my scheduled punishment, Mom’s still sleeping and Dad’s manning the kitchen in his red bathrobe, cooking up a huntsman’s feast of robins and grits and gravy, sloshing golden drink from his Jim Beam bottle without bothering to screw the cap back on. The grimy ceiling fan churns the muggy air. The twins hunch at the table, drinking pickle juice from shot glasses. Cabbage lurks in the dim roachy realm of the pantry, clanking metal cans together and muttering.

I’m eating stale cheese puffs while reading random snatches from Dad’s novel:

And so Merlin became a hawk and flitted through the green velvety forest. . When Sir Lancelot gazed into the deep pools of Guinevere’s eyes, fires flickered within him, terror and joy commingling in the hot cauldron of his soul. . From a shroud of white mist Morgan le Fey slipped naked and laughing, her alabaster breasts adorned with twin rosebuds, her long raven locks dancing about her taut buttocks .

Say what? With his huge hand, Dad snatches the pages just when the reading looks promising. He stashes his novel atop the refrigerator and stomps back to his pale pile of birds. The robins look fetal. They might be frogs or mice or fatty little moles. He rolls the dead things in flour and drops them one by one into the spitting skillet. Rich marrowy smells float from the pan, and Cabbage emerges to take a sniff. His rabbit nostrils quiver, and his eyes screw up with thinking.

“It smells like a rusty hamburger out here,” Cabbage says, disappearing back into the dark of the pantry. Dad chops a purple onion and sautés it in the charred grease, adding flour, pouring milk from the gallon jug, spattering Worcestershire sauce and bright red drops of Texas Pete. He piles the fried birds on a silver platter pulled from the dusty depths of the china cabinet and smothers them with gravy. He sets a plate of grits before each twin and positions the platter in the center of the table, beside Mom’s diseased cactus plant.

“Eat up, boys,” Dad says.

The twins pick at their robins, fidget, and take itty-bitty baby bites. They hold their noses and squirm. Into the stubble-fringed shredding machine of his mouth, our father slowly inserts a whole bird carcass, grinds it into gamy gruel, and swallows.