Julia Elliott - The Wilds

“Well, well, well,” he says.

If I could see his face it would show only the faintest quirk of shock, I’m sure — an eyebrow twitch, a shifting of frown lines — the same look he used to get when he spotted yet another millipede gliding across the damp linoleum of our basement bathroom.

“It’s us,” I say, shining my penlight at Possum. “And watch out for Tim. He’s creeping around your property somewhere. Please don’t shoot him.”

“I’ll try not to,” says Bill. “I’ve upgraded to a Savage Mark II, a big improvement on the old Beeman.”

“Killer,” says Possum.

“Been doing a little hunting.” Bill steps onto the porch, puts down his groceries, stands warm and humming a foot away from me. “Though I do keep it under my bed at night.”

During our second winter on the mountain, on a sunny day after the first snow, alone in the house, I’d gotten caught up in a three-hour frenzy of vacuuming. With fierce efficiency, I’d vacuumed the walls and the baseboards and every square inch of floor. I emptied closets and cupboards and drawers, probed with my sucking wand under furniture and behind appliances. I vacuumed until I reached the ecstatic state of a fasting medieval nun, feverish with holy purpose.

When I squatted beside our bed to peer beneath it, I saw a dried roach, floating balls of filth and hair, a wool sock coated with dust. And I saw Bill’s machete, the one he’d bought to harvest heirloom grains, stashed under his side of the bed. He’d never mentioned that there was a weapon under our bed, poised within easy gripping distance.

I cleaned the machete with a damp rag and placed it exactly as I’d found it. I went to my office and dug a box of Camel Lights from a drawer. I smoked only one, out on the front porch, as the iced branches near our chimney dripped.

Possum’s pacing out in the front yard, in light as crisp and tart as a Granny Smith apple. His black boots gleam. His goblin grin has erupted in its full glory, thanks to two cans of Red Bull and a half-dozen cigarettes. He walks circles around Tim, who’s reclining in a broken lawn chair he found stashed under Bill’s cabin.

“Why not directly into their nervous systems?” Tim yawns. “Computer-calibrated microdoses for intricate mood adjustment, released by nanobot teams in the brain.”

“Not drugs per se,” says Possum, “but drug technologies. They might use bacteria, or viruses, or bioengineered parasites, for example.”

Bill has disappeared again.

This morning, in the dark chill of the cabin, I’d heard him getting dressed. As a bird warbled outside the window, I thought I was in Atlanta, waking up to a car alarm. But then I smelled Bill, the cedar of the cabin, the glandular odor of small game animals. He actually sells their pelts on eBay, drives to the local library to check his account and upload pics. The walls of his cabin are soft with patches of fur.

Last night he told us that hipsters in Brooklyn will pay sixty dollars for a coonskin cap. That the Etsy crafting crowd can’t get enough of his bones. That’s why his industrial shelves are lined with the bleached craniums of foxes and coons. That’s why he has tackle boxes packed with the delicate skulls of birds. Some girl in Philadelphia dips them in silver and strings them on vintage chains.

“But I only kill what I eat,” Bill said, describing the taste of fox as wild, with a hint of brassy urine. “You have to soak the meat in vinegar.”

“Trap or shoot?” Possum asked.

“Both.” And then Bill told us about the ingenious bird traps he’d made of bamboo. He described the thrill of hooking brook trout, the sadness he’d felt when he shot his first rabbit and heard it scream.

In the guttering light of kerosene lanterns, we drank warm beer on the porch. Our cooler had run out of ice and Bill has no refrigerator. Sometime after midnight, Bill dug out the shoe box of old Swole cassettes and played them on his boom box. The music was ridiculously fast, as though calibrated to a hummingbird’s nervous system. And we marveled at the thrill we’d felt back then, when we were enmeshed in every last bleep and sputter.

Though we could get no drunker, we drank more beer. Possum and Tim finally swayed off to sleep in the car. And Bill put on a CD of our mountain music, the stuff we’d concocted in the midst of a blizzard three years before. We sat on the porch as psychedelic crickets pulsed over a moaning Wurlitzer. And then: six meticulously layered violin tracks, silver smears of flute, and our voices — so many different versions of both of us. Moans, howls, hums, grunts. Lots of chanting. We circled each other, overlapped, fused, and retreated. We cleaved and melded and darted away.

“How are your mystics?” Bill asked me.

“I don’t ever get to read them. Too busy grading freshman essays.”

“Do you miss them?”

Of course I missed my scrawny passionate mystics, who starved themselves until their brains caught fire and Jesus stepped down from the ether, right into their freezing cells, his pink flesh so warm it almost burned their crimped fingers.

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

How could we help falling together in the darkness? How could we help giggling as we tripped over each other on the way to his futon? I still hadn’t gotten a decent look at him. But as we rooted in the dark, I could smell pure Bill, his hands musky from the little animals he killed. Eating meat had changed the taste of him. And he seemed denser yet lighter, stronger yet somehow more nebulous, Bill and not Bill.

This morning, as he moved around the room getting dressed, making small domestic noises that were painfully familiar to me, I felt self-conscious and faked sleep, burrowed down under the blanket so that he couldn’t see my face. When he finally left, and I emerged from the covers to take a deep breath, I saw neat rows of animal skulls, white as industrial sugar, eyeless but somehow staring right through me.

“Lisa is lucky,” says Possum. “Within ten years she might be able to clone herself, implant the embryo in her own uterus, and give birth to herself.”

“And when my old carcass finally wears out,” I say, “I could put my half-mad brain into my daughter’s exquisite twenty-year-old body.”

Bill’s still gone, and our hangovers have reached such a nasty pitch that we’ve popped open our first round of beers. My stomach’s empty, and the first five sips translate into instant giddiness. The woods look ethereal, the perfect medium for frolicking elves. Birds twit and fuss. And Bill comes strolling through the speckled light with four gleaming trout on a string. He’s even whistling, absurdly, and I wonder if he’s rehearsed this scene in his head. I wonder if he’s imagined that moment when he, the handsome outdoorsman, emerges from the woods bearing game he’s caught with his own clever hands as his decadent urban companions laze around drinking, our faces pasty from last night’s debauch.

But Bill himself looks a bit green under the gills — way too skinny, I see with a catch in my heart — so skinny that his pants hang from his pelvic bones, his eye sockets look deeper, and his neck resembles a delicate stalk, hoisting the overlarge bloom of his head. I note eye bags, the kind he used to get when he couldn’t sleep. I see flares of gray at his temples. And he seems pretty eager to crack open a pale ale himself.

“Rainbows?” says Possum.

“Just brook trout,” says Bill. “But they’re tasty grilled.”

We walk around back, where a stone patio overlooks his garden. He’s got a hand water pump set in a square of concrete, a hibachi grill, a Coleman camp stove. His kitchen is protected from the elements with a tin-roofed shed and furnished with a salvaged picnic table.