The Wilds Read online

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.”

  Brunell flashed her cryptic possum smirk and then she looked solemn. We watched the clock in silence, listening to the house creak as Uncle Mike paced upstairs. On the stroke of nine, we heard Meemaw get up and walk to the bathroom.

  We tiptoed up the narrow stairs.

  In the eerie silence of Meemaw’s room, which smelled of White Shoulders dusting powder and seemed to belong to another century, we stood before a kind of shrine. On a small carved-wood table tucked behind a chest of drawers, Meemaw had placed Uncle Mike’s high school picture dead center, encircling it with black chicken feathers and painted bones. In the photo, a pimpled young hippie who refused to meet the camera’s eye appeared to be gazing down in bewilderment at what looked like a withered alligator foot, which Meemaw had positioned just beneath the silver picture frame. The old woman had sprinkled salt and some kind of dried herbs around the edge of the table. She’d glued various magazine shots of Uncle Mike onto a piece of notebook paper and taped the collage to the wall. Two bowls of water stood on either side of the gator claw, a weird tidbit of flesh afloat in the middle of each.

  “Chicken hearts,” Brunell whispered. “The most magic of the giblets.”

  Bonnie, standing there in her Garfield nightshirt, couldn’t help but giggle, even though she was scared shitless.

  “What’s up, ladies?” a deep voice asked.

  It was Uncle Mike, leaning against the doorframe in a black bathrobe, his hair slicked wet and glowing in the light. From where he stood, he couldn’t see Meemaw’s freaky shrine.

  “Nothing,” said Brunell. “We were gonna say good night to Meemaw.”

  “Ah, youth,” said Mike, looking us over, “so effortlessly ethereal. When you reach middle age, you try to look nubile. When you get old, you struggle to pass as human.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” said Brunell.

  “Nothing, Tinker Bell. Don’t pay attention to your uncle’s depressive rambling.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “A mite tipsy. Now really, what’re you girls up to?”

  “Tell him,” Bonnie whispered.

  “Shhh,” hissed Brunell.

  “Don’t worry.” Uncle Mike sneered. “I know all about Mama’s little art project.”

  “Aren’t you scared?” said Brunell.

  “I’m terrified, actually, but not of her.”

  Uncle Mike tittered and walked over to the shrine. He pulled something from his robe pocket and waved it in front of our eyes like a magician: it was a Smurf pencil eraser. He placed the object smack dab in the center of the magical objects, right between the gator claw and the picture frame.

  “Ogligattavato gucci Smurf,” Mike chanted.

  Chuckling, he regarded us with his beautiful, exhausted eyes.

  “See, girls, the spell has been broken. Now, don’t worry about me. Go back downstairs and have your slumber party. Gorge yourselves on cake while you still can. Stay up giggling until your abs ache.”

  “We will,” said Brunell, “but . . .”

  “Shhh,” whispered Mike. “I hear the matriarch gargling her Listerine, which means we have exactly three minutes to make our escape.”

  It was 10:10 PM—at least eight hours to go until the sun came up. We were cocooned in our sleeping bags, Brunell scanning The Rainbow Study Bible for the juiciest passages, namely those highlighted in gray (Sin) and brown (Evil). In her croaky voice, Brunell read choice bits aloud:

  “Leviticus 20:16: ‘And if a woman approach unto any beast, and lie down thereto, thou shalt kill the woman, and the beast.’

  “Deuteronomy 25:11–12: ‘When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets: Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her.’

  “Ezekiel 23:19–20: ‘Yet she multiplied her whoredoms, in calling to remembrance the days of her youth, wherein she had played the harlot in the land of Egypt. For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.’”

  “Excuse me?” said Bonnie.

  “This is boring,” said Brunell, snapping the Good Book shut. “Let’s watch a movie on Uncle Mike’s VCR.”

  Uncle Mike had a stack of videotapes we’d never heard of. We narrowed it down to the three most titillating titles—Blade Runner, Liquid Sky, and The Elephant Man—and after debating the potential of each, finally settled on The Elephant Man.

  “Great,” said Bonnie when the film started up, “it’s black and white. Was this shit made in the 1950s?”

  “Shut up,” I said. “Just watch the movie.”

  And we did, remaining speechless as the gut-wrenching tragedy of John Merrick unfolded. Because he had a weird disease that made his head look like a giant piece of cauliflower, the world treated him like a freak and an idiot even though he was a regular nice guy inside. Underneath that cloth sack he wore over his head, underneath the deformed skull and the huge bunions that grew upon it, John Merrick was a poetry-reciting sophisticate, sensitive and gentle. Just like the rest of us, all he needed was love.

  By the time he exclaimed “I am not an animal” to the homicidal mob that had unmasked him at the train station, we were all sniveling. When he collapsed in exhaustion and was carried back to his room at the hospital, we cried harder. When his best friends took him to the opera and the poor, dying man stood in the royal box to receive a standing ovation, we wept with our whole bodies. Even after the Elephant Man had died, and his soul had soared up into the starry heavens, where a woman’s floating face informed him that he would live forever, we wept. We sobbed as the credits rolled on a black background and eerie space music played. We cried after the tape had ended and the screen had turned to fuzz.

  Burrowed deep in our sleeping bags, we lay in the half dark, nestled in the exquisite sadness the movie had mustered, a kind of moist emanation that hovered in the room. No one spoke. We didn’t need to: our minds had fused into a single entity.

  My tears were just starting to dry when I spotted something moving in a dark corner, a small figure in fluttery clothes. I thought our strange mood had summoned some supernatural creature, and I was scared. As much as I pitied the poor Elephant Man, as much as I loved him, I wasn’t ready to look into the face of whatever being rustled in the darkness. It stood there, making a sound like crackling cellophane, which blended with the TV static. And then the creature stepped into the gray light of the television—hunched, clad in flowing nylon, lumpy-headed, its mouth open in a toothless snarl.

  It was Meemaw in her nightwear, her skull mummy-wrapped in toilet paper she’d secured with a hairnet to protect her wash-and-set. Meemaw, her face shiny with cleansing grease and spotted from countless cruel summers. Meemaw, right fist lifted in wrath, clutching a rubber Smurf.

  She sat down on the couch and placed the Smurf beside her on the cushion.

  “Harlots,” she hissed.

  Her small frame shook. She reached into the pocket of her housecoat and pulled out a penny candy, unwrapped it, and popped it into her mouth. She frowned as though butterscotch were bile.

  “You don’t know what you’re messin’ in,” she said. “Powers bigger than you.”

  “We didn’t do nothin’,” Brunell rasped, but Meemaw didn’t seem to hear her.

  “Twelve generations,” she said. “Twelve generations brought over the sea. My daddy gave it to me and now it’s time to give it to Michael. I ain’t got long.”

  “You ain’t go die,” said Brunell.

  “Shush, child. Your flesh will melt like dirty snow.”

  “But we didn’t do nothin’.” Brunell sat up in her sleeping bag and crossed her arms.

  Meemaw groaned. She clutched her bosom and gazed up at the ceiling fan. A great shudder contorted her body. Her little feet kicked, sending one of her
purple bedroom slippers flying.

  “Aw crap,” said Brunell. “She’s got the Holy Ghost on her. We’ll never hear the end of it now.”

  From the depths of Meemaw, a strange voice came bubbling up: the voice of a primordial masculine spirit, the voice of Darth Vader.

  “Roboto bulch,” said Meemaw. “Booboo kakopygian bog.”

  The TV light cast Meemaw in a ghoulish glow. Eyeballs rolled back, she swayed and twitched and vomited her guttural language, words scraped up from her ancient guts. Dark fumes spurted from her. She seemed to be summoning things. I glanced around the room, thought I saw bats flitting in corners. My sleeping bag was damp with sweat and I couldn’t move.

  Meemaw stopped babbling on the stroke of one, just as the clock on the shelf above their space heater emitted a single moan. Her eyeballs resumed their customary position. She sat on the plaid couch panting, and then wiped a strand of brown dribble from her chin. She reached into her pocket, pulled forth a Tootsie Roll, opened the sweet, and set it on her tongue to melt.

  Sucking her candy, Meemaw grunted softly. She smoothed her housecoat and patted her hairnet. She looked us over as though she’d forgotten we were there.

  “Jezebels,” she mumbled.

  Her voice sounded normal now, albeit scratchy and faint, worn down from whatever thing had rocked through her, scaly and slimy, born through her prehistoric throat.

  “‘And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet,’” said Meemaw, “‘decked with gold and precious stones and pearls.’”

  Meemaw ate another Tootsie Roll and told us about the Whore of Babylon, who laughed like a monkey and slurped fornications from a golden cup. The Whore rode a seven-headed dragon bareback and caressed the beast’s spine with her private parts.

  Meemaw leaned into the TV light. She told us she had a secret that was about to bust her heart wide open. She grinned.

  “I’m a prophet,” she whispered. “And every single night Jesus gives me dreams.”

  She told us the Messiah would arrive this December in a spaceship so big its shadow would darken the entire state of South Carolina. He’d land in the Blue Ridge Mountains and set up his golden scales on top of Caesars Head. He’d take away the righteous, leave the sinners to wallow in the dung heap they’d made of planet Earth.

  Meemaw leaned back on the couch, tucked her legs up under her bottom like a little girl.

  “Covered in festering sores,” she said, “the sinners will suffer one thousand plagues.”

  According to Meemaw, locusts would devour all crops. The seas would turn to blood, a trillion dead fish afloat. And the great Beast of the apocalypse, a kind of Tyrannosaurus rex with thirty-six heads and three hundred horns, would roam the earth, blasting fiery halitosis at every sinner he stumbled upon, scorching their bodies with third-degree burns. Flesh would fall from their bones. Skeleton people would run howling across the ashen fields.

  “People will eat each other,” Meemaw said, “mothers will eat fathers and fathers will eat mothers. Children will gnaw upon the rancid hides of their parents. Parents will eat the sweet fat boiled from their babies’ bones.”

  Meemaw teetered forward and her whiskers caught the light. Her eyes were bright, swimming with fever.

  “Dragons,” she croaked, “will burrow in the poisoned seas.”

  Meemaw went on and on, prophesying until she was hoarse. She filled the room with horrific visions that left us deeply freaked, though we didn’t want her to stop. Drunk on sweet terror, shivering in our sleeping bags, we followed her every word, delighting as the tales grew stranger.

  She described the filthy, outsized lusts of the Beast, who had a member like an oak trunk and who copulated with his harem of stinking she-dragons. Though the dragons were vile reptiles, they possessed the fatty teats of sows. Their young sucked blood from their mothers. They smacked their lips and had incestuous intercourse with each other until the world was full of dragons, so many dragons that swarms of flying serpents blotted out the sun.

  Eyes squinted in the dim light, we saw them—the pterodactyl flocks darkening the sky, the hordes of naked people running helter-skelter upon the barren earth, their scorched hides festering with open sores. We smelled the sad acrid scent of burnt hair, the turnip-green stench of unwashed bodies, the blunt black reek of smoldering tires, for there was no wood left upon the planet, and the sinners sat around fires of trash, roasting the radioactive carcasses of dogs.

  “Meanwhile,” said Meemaw, “the chosen will walk in robes of flowing satin, rose petals strewn upon the pure diamond floor of Christ’s spaceship. Their beds will be stuffed with doves’ feathers and covered in satin quilts. Upon each bed, a snow-white baby lamb will rest, its eyes as blue as summer skies. And angels will bring the chosen little cakes to eat and nectar in golden cups.”

  Meemaw smacked her lips. She could taste the nectar, she said. Sweeter than all the best drinks put together—Dr Pepper and Pepsi-Cola, Mello Yello and Mountain Dew, grape Kool-Aid with five cups of Dixie Crystals sugar. Each room on the spaceship would be equipped with a whirlpool Jacuzzi. And behold—when the aged and infirm dipped their withered limbs into these fragrant holy waters, washing them clean with the Lamb’s blood, they’d pull those limbs out, young and radiant again.

  Meemaw retrieved a Hershey’s Kiss from the pocket of her robe and held the twinkling sweet up to the light of the television.

  “Lovers will be reunited,” she said, peeling foil to reveal the fat droplet of chocolate. “They’ll revel in their rosy flesh. Amen.”

  She popped the candy into her toothless mouth, closed her eyes in reverie as the morsel dissolved upon her aged tongue. Meemaw moaned and swayed, and then, in the faintest of whispers, just a scratch of voice that floated like a dandelion seed upon the air, Meemaw described heaven, a warm green planet wrapped up like a birthday present in white mist. The streams were clear and sweet as Sprite, with goldfish flapping in the bubbly waters. Lush trees grew, velvet-leaved and heavy with glowing fruit. A zillion colorful birds darted in the fragrant air. Soft fluffy animals tussled in dappled shade. The lion lay down with the lamb. And shining insects buzzed in the air, no mosquitoes among them, no wasps or hornets or other stinging pests. The bees had no poison in their bodies, freely offering their honey up to man. And the cows and nannies and mares gave suck, sweet flowing milk that tasted like melted ice cream.

  Her mouth wrenched open in a beatific grin, Meemaw rocked on her haunches. She said Christ’s spaceship would land in a flowering field. The angelic bodies of the chosen would be personally escorted by Jesus to paradise, where there was no sickness, no aging or bodily wounds. If you cut yourself, the flesh mended in seconds, no scabs or scars left behind. You could chop off your head one hundred times with a machete and it would always grow back, more beautiful than before. There was no hunger, no thirst, no wrath, no jealousy. There was no lust, for each would have his perfect mate, a beautiful fair creature shining with celestial light. Meemaw’s husband would be there, of course, looking like he did at age nineteen, his hair thick as a stallion’s mane, his lips sweet as summer plums.

  “Naked like Adam and Eve,” rasped Meemaw. “Wives with husbands young again, in the pleasant afternoon shade.”

  She closed her eyes and sat there smiling. Her cragged hand skittered like a crab to the pocket of her housecoat to pluck a sweet—a piece of hard candy. Meemaw pulled forth Starburst Fruit Chews, Rascals and Pop Drops, Sparkies and Skittles and Dots. She smacked and she smiled and she beamed. And then, as dawn broke and lavender light came gushing through the polyester sheers, Meemaw’s skin glowed through her nylon nightwear. For about ten seconds she floated, her harrowed buttocks hovering one inch above the stained sofa cushion.

  And then the old woman fell to Earth. She sank into the couch. Her head wobbled on her neck as she fell asleep.

  The sun was coming up. We could see the brass-framed portrait of Jesus. We could see the pink wall-to-wall carpet and Brunell’s mother’s collection of
Care Bears lined up on a mounted shelf. We could see Meemaw, by all appearances an ordinary grandmother, innocently napping on the plaid couch, and it was hard to believe that this tiny little woman in a housecoat and bedroom slippers had just described the end of the world.

  Still drunk from her visions, we left Meemaw crumpled on the couch, for we could hear Brunell’s mother clattering pots and pans. We drifted toward the primal sweetness of frying bacon, toward the bright kitchen, where Uncle Mike sat weeping at the Formica table, his hair slicked back in a tight ponytail. Our first impulse was to rush in and pet him all over with our small, silken hands. We wanted nothing more than to kiss him on his wrinkled brow and stroke his hair, the gray roots of which were clearly visible in the morning light. But we hung back in the darkness of the dining room to watch and listen.

  “What most disappointed me,” said Uncle Mike, wiping his eyes with a dish towel, “was that he ran off with that rich asshole, that he wasn’t the boy I thought he was.”

  “You’re better off without him,” said Brunell’s mama, hunching over the stove.

  “And to come home to find Mama off her rocker,” said Uncle Mike, “after not sleeping for a week. That was just too much.”

  “It might be that Alzheimer’s.”

  “It’s not Alzheimer’s. Just old-fashioned craziness, aka mental illness. Whether it’s biological or cultural, I don’t know, but either way . . .”

  “She’s had a hard time lately, what with Daddy gone and all. Plus, Reverend Dewlap took away her Sunday school class. He never would let a woman preach, and that’s what she’s always wanted to do.”

  “And you’re baffled by the patriarchal oppression of the church?”

  “Reverend Dewlap’s a good man. You should come to church with us today. He might be able to help you.”

  “Help me?”

  “Make life a lot easier for you.”

  “If you’re implying what I think you’re implying, then I’m disgusted with you.”

  “Don’t take it personal.” Brunell’s mother turned from the stove, waved her spatula in the air fairy-wand-style. “We all have our crosses.”