Julia Elliott - The Wilds

As Bill guts the fish on a concrete block, Possum hunkers down beside him. Wobbling like a manic Weeble, he watches Bill scrape off scales and slice each trout from anus to jaw. Bill chops off heads, pulls dainty wads of guts from cavities, tosses the scraps into a plastic bucket. He rinses his hands and tells us that grits are simmering in his solar oven, which is down in the clearing behind his chicken coop. His beer can is flecked with silvery scales. His patched khakis, held up with a strand of twine, look adorable. And when he takes us to see his chickens, four coppery hens strutting behind a split-sapling fence, I want to kiss him again.

We gather eggs and pick arugula and carry the pot of grits back to the patio. Bill puts the trout on the grill and makes a salad of baby greens and wild blackberries. He has a little raw cheddar. He has cilantro from the garden, a nub of organic salami, some bread from the bakery.

As Bill makes scrambled eggs with cheese and salami, we have another round of warm beers. Birds flit through the woods in search of food. Birds scratch at the black forest floor. They peck bark for larvae and snap up glittering dragonflies. They thrust their beaks into the throats of flowers and suck.

It’s after two. Tim and Possum have gone on a beer run. Bill and I sit at the picnic table gazing down at his garden, which isn’t getting enough sun.

“I spend five hours a day grinding through scrub trees with a chainsaw,” he says. “But one day, I’ll have a view. One day, I’ll be able to see the Blue Ridge Mountains from here.”

“You’re turning into your dad,” I joke, remembering stories from his youth, how his father, who suffers from obscure sinus issues, became obsessed with mold and waged war against the woods. After working eight-hour shifts at a chemical plant, he’d drive thirty miles home to his rustic property and fight the encroaching brush until dark. That’s why he surrounded their house with flocks of goats.

“Now I know exactly how he feels,” says Bill, “though I’ve only got three acres of unruly wilderness to control.”

“But you seem to be doing okay.”

Bill shrugs. “How’s Atlanta?”

“The same filthy sprawling mess it’s always been. I sit in my apartment grading papers most of the time, making the occasional excursion to the neighborhood bar. But I’ve got Tim and Possum to entertain me.”

“You don’t have to live that way. I think you know that.”

“A temporary solution.”

“Solution to what?”

“I’m still figuring some things out.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“My bowel situation is getting too dire for specificity.” I smile. “Now where is that composting toilet I’ve heard so much about?”

Bill has a nonelectric, waterless composting toilet in his garden shed, sitting right beside the tiller we bought four years ago.

On a giddy September day, just when the weather was starting to turn, we’d driven to an area outside Asheville where an old homestead was tucked between a Target and a Bank of America. The farmer’s family had owned the property for five generations, and over the last twenty years, the world had crept up to his door. High on a hill where his grandparents’ house was collapsing into ruins, the farmer told us about the time his aunt shot a goat that stank so bad it kept her awake at night. He told us about the first time he walked into a supermarket, at age nineteen. From our vantage point, we could see an Applebee’s sign rising beyond the farmer’s double-wide. We could see the carbon haze hovering over the paved valley like swathes of mist.

I find Bill in the cabin, stretched out on his bed with The Goat Handbook , the room awash with forest light. I crawl in beside him and rest my head on his shoulder. I can see myself drifting into this life, doing garden chores and reading in the afternoon, learning to hunt and churn butter, creating strange music at night. But then I imagine the stuffiness of the cabin in winter, the smell of pelts, the funk of wool-swaddled bodies sponge-bathed with bowls of heated water. I imagine the endless snow. I see myself pacing around the woodstove, chattering as Bill sits in silence, burrowed deep in the mystery of himself like a hibernating mammal curled nose to belly.

But still, we kiss. Still, I peel off his ancient T-shirt. I run my fingers over his abdomen, which is covered with chigger bites. I reach into the humid darkness of his boxer shorts and feel the familiar scruff with my fingertips. I glance up at the rows of skulls and laugh.

“When the Chinese are buying American mail-order brides,” says Possum, “blond and luscious and sweet sixteen, we’ll be the ones riding our bikes everywhere.”

We’re on I-85, leaving Commerce, Georgia, kingdom of the outlet malls. We’re exhausted and rumpled and our mouths are smeared with grease. Stopping to grab a pizza an hour ago, we’d smelled middle-class aspiration in the air, faint and acidic like burnt plastic. We’d seen it in the hungry-eyed families, hauling shopping bags, slurping corn syrup from soggy paper cups.

I need things (new sheets and a decent set of cookware), as does Tim (a stroller and a better car seat), but we’re too hungover to make sense of the staggering abundance — to choose from among twenty different types of skillets without reading the consumer ratings first. So we’re back on the road in the exurban hinterlands, which, Possum insists, will fall into wilderness when the oil runs out.

Like a lover with a pure flame of passion in his heart, ready to burst into a tiger-orange blaze, Possum speaks of peak oil with wistful longing. When we pass a gated community called The Hollows, Possum falls into a rapture of speculation. Tim, waking from a nap, fires up a cigarette and joins him. The End of the World is something they can toss between them like a fraternal football, a prosthetic appendage that enables them, two troubled men, to touch each other.

By the time we reach the blighted outskirts of Atlanta, they’re both giddy, speaking a notch louder, finishing each other’s sentences, the way Bill and I used to do.

Traffic is slowing. The air is smoky with the smell of fresh-laid pavement. And they keep on dreaming up new nightmare worlds.

We haven’t moved for ten minutes. I see a twist of smoke rising beyond an overpass, probably from a wreck, and I wonder what Bill’s doing. When we left him this morning he’d calmly descended into his garden with a tray of pepper seedlings. I noticed that his left tennis shoe had been repaired with duct tape. I noticed that his hair was thinning. I noticed that the sight of his thin, childish neck still made my heart feel sprained. In less than a month, I’ll see him in Columbia, South Carolina, our old stomping grounds, where we’ve agreed to shoot the lame video for Loser Bands of the Nineties .

“I’ll do it,” he’d said last night at his cabin, which had surprised us all. As we huddled together in the depths of drunkenness, Bill had played our mountain music for Possum and Tim. Steeped in its strangeness, they sat smiling. A sweet flicker of something moved between me and Bill, and then all four of us, and we started talking about the lost days of Swole, when we were all glowing idiots with youth to burn.

“Imagine dosing a whole city,” Possum says, “with some neuropharmaceutical a thousand times more potent than LSD.”