The Wilds Read online

  Now the wolfman unscrewed the cap. My love potion filled the tree house with goats and tortured lilies. He shuddered and put the cap back on and turned his wet eyes away. His brothers groaned. According to the ancient recipe, just smelling the potion was dangerous, though I’d had to make substitutions with modern ingredients, and I knew this had weakened the brew.

  “That smell,” said the wolfman, turning to look at me. “It made me gag.”

  “It won’t hurt you,” I said. “It’s not really poison.”

  “Make her eat it then,” said the brother with the cowlick and bulldog eyes.

  I tried to squirm away but the Wilds were on me, this time binding my wrists with fishing line. The wolfman knelt near me, holding the bottle in his fist. I could smell his scalp. The snake on his neck lifted its head to look at me and opened its velvety pink mouth. Its fangs were too little to see, but I could imagine them—clear as diamonds, wet and sparkling sharp. The wolfman daubed a green droplet on his fingertip and pushed it toward my lips.

  “Lick it,” he said. “If it’s not poison.”

  I turned my face away, and the Wilds pressed around me, flashing their knives and grunting.

  “Lick it, lick it, lick it,” they chanted.

  My tongue felt parched and gross. It slithered out and tasted the drop. I closed my eyes to block their faces from my mind and tried not to swallow. I would hold the poison in my mouth and spit it out when they let me go. I thought of Brian, reclining in his lawn chair, but the image of the wolfman billowed up in my head. Hunched in his bathrobe, laughing his midnight-TV laugh, he staggered through the twisted branches.

  I kept away from the Wilds after that and did not spy on them and grew two inches and learned how to talk to birds. My father had ordered a Xeroxed copy of a book so ancient that a library in England had to keep it in a special tank. This book was full of useful information: how to communicate with animals, how to make your own cough medicine, how to keep the devil from visiting your bed at night. It also contained love potions, but when I came to these passages I skipped over them with a beating heart. When school started, I spent hours in fluorescent-lit classrooms, breathing disinfectant and chalk and the smell of warm, young bodies shut up. Two groups of girls wanted me as a friend, and I jumped between them, keeping my independence. Ben Wild was two grades ahead of me. At school he ran with bad boys and lurked under stairwells and slipped off to McDonald’s for lunch. Sometimes I saw him slinking down the hall in the silent in-school suspension line, guarded by Mrs. Beard, a mammoth woman with a face like a sunburned fist.

  Ben had a thick, pubic unibrow, and his mother couldn’t keep his black curls tamed. Tucked into the nest of his hair was a strange acne-scarred face with glowing green eyes and slick, pimento-red lips. Sometimes we locked eyes at school. He’d laugh at me and say, sarcastically, “There goes the fairy princess.” He was always making nasty remarks to his friends. People whispered that his mother was pregnant again—with twins, triplets, quadruplets, quintuplets, sextuplets. They invented terms for outlandish broods, like megaduplets, and referred to the Wild boys as “the litter,” “the pack,” or “the swarm.”

  In health class we watched creepy, outdated films on lice, scabies, menstruation, scoliosis, and drug mania. I saw cartoon bugs burrowing under the soft skins of children, leaving red maps of infection. I saw pretty girls transform into twisted, tragic creatures who hobbled down school hallways in back braces. I saw hippie chicks dance ecstatically in throbbing psychedelic light, only to hurl themselves out of windows. Womanhood was bound up with disease. Ecstasy led to bashed-open skulls and the apocalyptic wail of police sirens. Parasites lurked everywhere: little bloodsuckers hopping into your hair; big perverts with candy and needles. But the disease of puberty had already touched me. My right nipple swelled and turned darker, while my left was still small and pink. My mother laughed when I asked for a bra, and my deformity was visible beneath three shirts.

  One day Ben Wild called me Cyclops. The name spread through our school like lice. I vowed revenge and took to my spell books and started watching the Wild house again.

  I learned that Brian had an older girlfriend from the neighborhood, a dental hygienist, which was fine with me because I didn’t love him anymore. I learned that the rumors were true. Mrs. Wild was pregnant. And she had a nervous breakdown every Wednesday evening after picking up three of her sons from midget football practice and allowing them to gorge on ice cream. I learned that Mr. Wild sometimes lingered in his car for thirty minutes before venturing into the house. And most important, from the chatter of his brothers, I learned that Ben wore his wolfman mask every month on the night of the full moon.

  I had several theories: Ben fantasized about being a wolfman; Ben had told his little brothers, years ago, that he was a wolfman, and he kept up his ruse to control them with fear; Ben donned the wolfman mask as some kind of deep, ironic joke. But no one in his family seemed afraid of the wolfman mask. While out in their yard his brothers never said much about it, simply commenting, in September, when the full moon came, that it was “wolf night” again. And Ben went about his activities as though everything were normal: taking out the garbage, bumming cigarettes from Brian, shooting hoops with Tim.

  In October a hurricane swept through our town. Before the storm I saw Ben in his backyard, standing in the weird sulfurous light with wind whipping through his hair. Something flickered through me, and I wanted to join him, to snuggle in the hectic, stinking warmth of the Wild pack. But Mama screamed out the back door, and I ran inside our lonely house. Daddy made us sit in the pantry, where he told stories of green knights and enchanted ladies as Mama rolled her eyes and the storm lashed at our roof. My father was getting plump. His pale, clammy skin sometimes broke out into rashes. I knew all of his stories, word by word. I knew every sarcastic phrase in my mother’s repertoire, and the contents of her closet no longer fascinated me. I was sick of my parents’ faces and hungry for new life. Into the dark blinking windows of my dreams, Wild boys would sometimes scramble. They’d run howling through our house, kicking over end tables and smearing mud on our wall-to-wall carpet. They’d tear doors off hinges and let night storms fly through our house.

  Our power was out for four days. Houses glowed with candlelight. Children ruled the dark chaos, and the Wild boys prowled the battered neighborhood with guns and knives. On the third day Tim Wild came to our back door and told us his parents were having a cookout. Their freezer of meat was going to go bad; the whole block was invited.

  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 th
at 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.

  He clambered around on all fours, trotting toward me, growling and spitting, and I wanted to dissolve into the couch. He sniffed my sneakers and licked my left ankle and whimpered like a dog. I was wondering if I should run or try to pet him, when he stood up and loomed over me, the air behind him darkening as a cloud passed over the moon. He shook with demented laughter. Then the night went white, and he tore the mask from his face.

  His brothers shrieked and clambered to the top of the stairs. A door slammed, and I knew that I was alone with the wolfman, with all his fury and frustration.

  Ben’s acne had broken into bloom. His face glowed with an eerie bluish luster, and I thought that maybe his father had brought nuclear radiation home in his clothes. Zits swarmed like fire ants on Ben’s brow. Purple pimples glistened like drops of jelly on his cheeks. Fat whiteheads nestled behind the wings of his nose. Only his eyes and lips had escaped the infection.

  Ben sat beside me, holding his mask in his hands. “The moon controls the tides,” he said, “and brings poison boiling to the surface of my skin. But tomorrow I’ll be a normal boy again. I swear.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Some of his pimples were seeping yellow drops.

  “The family curse.” Ben winced. “My father had it, and his father before him. Whoever gets it always ends up having lots of sons.” He rolled his eyes again and forced a laugh. A complex blush lit up his zits.

  He took my hand and I let him hold it. His hand looked completely normal, warm and smooth and brown, pretty enough to bite. I could feel the moon licking at my skin with its magnetic light. I wondered if it was true that the moon moved the blood of women. I wondered if mysterious clocks, ancient and
new, had started to tick within me. Ben leaned toward me. I threw my head back and vamped for his kiss. I’d spent a hundred nights dressed up in gowns and makeup, kissing stuffed animals, and my lips felt fat and sweet. But the hot suction cup of his mouth hit my throat, and he bit me, digging his braces into the soft skin of my neck. When I swatted him off, he laughed like a hoodlum and scratched his chin.

  “I’m a wolfman,” he said sarcastically, as though that explained everything. He shrugged and lit a cigarette.

  Through the stinging wound on my neck, Ben’s slobber trickled into my bloodstream. I waited. I felt a slight burn when the poison hit my heart. Acid rose to the back of my throat. The taste of dead animals filled my mouth. Wild hope and withering despair tainted the meat, the craziness of animals shut up. The poison was in my body now, changing me, making me stronger and meaner.

  I reached for Ben’s cheek and stroked a mass of oily bumps. My fingertips drifted along his jawbone and tickled the triangular patch of downy skin under his chin. He closed his eyes like a lizard in a trance and swallowed. I pressed my lips to his neck. I tried not to laugh as I licked the tendon that ran from his collarbone toward his jaw. Ben groaned and grabbed my elbow. His ears smelled like cinnamon. When I stuck my tongue into the silky cranny beneath his left earlobe, he bucked. I could feel the pulsing of intricate muscles and secret glands. I could feel veins throbbing with fast blood. Finding the spot I’d been searching for, I gnawed it gently until breaking the skin and tasting copper. Then I bit him harder with my small, sharp, spit-glazed teeth.