Julia Elliott - The Wilds

“Shit,” says Cabbage, dropping his tweezers. He removes his dust mask and thrusts his thumb into his mouth. He tries not to cry.

“You fool!” I shriek, jumping up and down for emphasis. “What the hell are you doing sticking that filthy thumb in your mouth? Do you actually want to die?”

“Damn,” hisses Cabbage. He pulls his thumb from his mouth and spits on it.

“Here’s an old Indian cure that might just save your life,” I say solemnly. “You’ve got to wash your hands in milk and peroxide. You’ve got to eat an ant and pray to the god of the underworld and the god of the moon. Then you’ve got to find a toad with orange eyes. Lick the toad belly six times while chanting prayers to the stars, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll live.”

I follow Cabbage inside. In the kitchen he pulls the milk jug from the refrigerator and fills a large steel bowl. He sets the bowl on the floor and sits Indian style over it. He mumbles some creepy baby gibberish and plunges his little hands into the cold, white, animal fluid. Leaving the bowl on the floor, Cabbage heads for the bathroom, where he finds a brown, economy-sized bottle of peroxide under the sink. I stand in the doorway watching as he splashes the sizzling medicine into his palm and rubs it over both hands, making a face and muttering. He dries his hands with toilet paper, sniffs his fingers, and runs outside. I follow him around as he lifts bricks and rocks in search of ants.

“Don’t want no fire ant,” he says.

“It’s got to be a fire ant, or the spell won’t work, and you’ll die and go down under the ground.”

“What gon’ happen down there?”

“Little slimy creatures are always fluttering against you, nibbling you and sticking their needle teeth in your skin. And there’s nothing to eat but canned spinach and nothing to drink but cough syrup, and the place smells like the devil’s farts, which is like burning plastic and rotten catfish and Mr. Horton’s denture breath all mixed together. And there’s no windows and there’s bright fluorescent hospital light and nothing to watch on TV but the news.”

“Shit,” says Cabbage, dashing for the anthill at the edge of Mom’s okra patch. Squatting, he sticks a twig in the hill, gathers a few furious insects, and lifts the utensil to his grimacing lips. Cabbage mashes an ant between two fingers and pops it into his mouth, screams, swallows, then flings the stick far from him. He drops to his knees. He thrusts his nose into the grass and gabbles a prayer to the underworld; then he lifts his head up and scans the sky.

“Ain’t no moon up there,” he says, fixing his harrowed frog eyes upon me.

“The devil has the moon down in the ground. It’s like a helium balloon. He lets it go each night, and it floats up into the sky.”

“He got a string tied to it?” Cabbage asks.

“Yep.”

“Thought so.”

“The moon is made of green cheese, which stinks, and that’s another bad thing about hell. There’s no one to play with down there, except babies with vampire teeth.”

Cabbage shudders and starts digging a hole in the ground with his knobby tree-frog fingers. Then he lowers his face to the mouth of the hole, cups his lips with his palms, and in a deep croaky voice recites his prayer to the moon.

“Jibba jibba, regog mooga, onga poobah, salong teet.”

“In hell you don’t have a family,” I tell him, “but sometimes, when the devil’s bored, he’ll make a fake family with the skins of dead animals and old hair he’s pulled out of hairbrushes, just to trick you. You’ll think you have your family back, but then you’ll notice that the puppets are hollow and filled with dust, and when the devil laughs at you he sounds like TV static and screaming rabbits.”

I look up to see my father standing on the back stoop, eating a Little Debbie Star Crunch and staring up into the trees. He looks like he wants to sprout feathers and a beak and fly up there to romp in the branches with some sexy medieval witch who’s turned herself into a hawk. A warm breeze flutters his hair, and longing oozes from him, but all he can do is chomp a huge bite out of his Star Crunch and close his eyes as he chews the sticky sweet gunk. When he opens his eyes, he catches me looking. He winces. He grins. He tries to look sober.

“Upstairs, young lady,” he says in his professional voice, “on the double.”

The moment has come. The underbellies of sluggish clouds glow a sickly green. My boxing brothers, who are now trying to kill each other, look like poisonous elves. All around them, half-naked boys with bent spines hoot and leer.

“Good left hook, Bill,” yells Dad. “You better watch out, Little Jack.”

Dad slips on his glasses to watch the boxing match, and I trudge upstairs.

Unlike the rest of our house, my parents’ bedroom is cold. The window unit, going full blast, leaks picklish chemicals; the room smells like boiled peanuts and Listerine. My parents’ bed looks damp and lumpy, as though stuffed with dead rodents, the mattress battered and drenched by the throes of my father’s gigantic, nightmare-wracked body. A crusty plate sits on the dresser, between two perfume bottles, reflected in the stark sadness of the mirror.

My parents like to keep us waiting in the alien chill for at least five minutes to heighten the horror of the punishment. I usually use this time to pick through their drawers and closets. Behind a dusty vaporizer and several cartons of Dorals, I discover an old pack of Pampers from Cabbage’s babyhood. An idea so brilliant I slap myself in the face for not thinking of it sooner pops into my head. My heart gets that belchy feeling as I hop out of my shorts. I take a Pamper from the plastic package and unfold it. I pull it up to my crotch and fasten the adhesive tabs. The Pamper fits tight like puffy bikini bottoms. I examine myself in the mirror, and the sight of my scrawny, diapered frog body is like a sip of vinegar. I turn my stinging eyes away and pull on my shorts. After checking my figure for conspicuous lumps, I try out different facial expressions until I settle on a Joan of Arc scowl, the haughty look a beautiful virgin tied to a stake would give her bitter old executioner when he struck the match.

Mom strides in at this moment, trying to look businesslike. She’s changed into a matching floral shorts-and-top set and curled her limp bangs into two crispy cylinders that frame her little cat face. My lips tremble with a burning smirk as Mom fishes through her belt collection, choosing a pink leather number with fake rubies encrusting the big brass buckle. Mom doubles the belt and lashes at a pillow to test its power. She gives me a firm look, and I bend over the bed, gripping the bedpost hard.

The worn bedspread smells of sweat and dust and fabric softener. Chill bumps prickle my limbs. I close my eyes and listen to Mom’s slight grunting as she whips me. The lash striking my butt is a mere flick of pressure on the puffy padding of the Pamper, but I scream and flinch as though I’m about to fall into a seizure.

“Quit exaggerating,” Mom hisses. “It doesn’t hurt that much.”

“It does,” I bellow, realizing that I’ll have to make myself cry. I try to think of sad things — my parents dying, for example — but generic fantasies don’t cut it. I picture little Cabbage struggling to breathe in the humid tank of his incubator, his lizard rib cage rising and falling in the acidic light of the hospital. I think of T. W. Manley, waving the little fish-fin hand he was born with, driving by on his beloved go-cart. I consider Duncan, a fat neighbor with Down syndrome, whose mother always dresses him in brown polyester slacks. I recall the night that Dad, upon receiving a phone call informing him that his mother was dead, shook the house with the earthquake of his weeping. I remember the day our neighbor’s daughter drowned, and the drunk old woman spent the afternoon winding through her rose garden in a slip, cutting roses until she had nothing left but tangles of thorny vines. I think of hungry African children and Hiroshima body shadows and Soviet teenagers who spend their whole youths in hideous jeans. I think of filth-packed vacuum cleaner bags and closets crammed with ugly Christmas sweaters and the way the inside of a church smells when a hundred bored people with bad breath open their mouths to sing.