Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Benjamin Percy is the author of The Language of Elk and Refresh, Refresh. He has been awarded the Plimpton Prize and a Whiting Writers' Award, and has been included in Best American Short Stories. He teaches at Iowa State University.

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THE WILDING

GRAYWOLF PRESS

Chapter One

His wife, Karen, works as a dietitian for the school districts scattered throughout central Oregon. She spends her days designing new lunch programs for the cafeterias, sitting down with obese diabetics to ask them about their eating habits, and giving PowerPoint presentations to auditoriums full of bored children, telling them about the food pyramid and how they might incorporate it into their lives. At this time she is pregnant with their second child. She drinks orange juice every morning and what seems like gallons of water every day, but no soda or alcohol, not even to sneak a sip from Justin. She stays away from fish and red meat and spends the extra dollar on organic free-range chicken. And so on. Every precaution in the world—and none of it stops from happening what happens next.

Justin comes home from work to find a design of bloody footprints on the floor. He stares at them a long time as if to decipher their message. Only then does he pull out his cell phone. He shut it off earlier in the day so that it wouldn't go off when he was teaching. It reveals three new voice mails—one from the hospital, the next from his in-laws, the last from his wife.

He finds her in her hospital bed and she seems to have shrunk. Really, she has, her belly caved in, suddenly empty.

She is, she was, five months pregnant. The doctors tell her she has preeclampsia. Essentially her body came to recognize the baby as an allergen and expelled it from her. When she tells Justin this, her voice slurring from the Vicodin, she seems to be looking inward and outward at the same time, lost in dark thoughts in a too-bright room.

When the nurse comes to check Karen's vitals, she asks if Justin wants to see the baby, a baby girl. He does and doesn't. When his son, Graham, was born, he had looked so shiny, as if polished by Karen's insides, a precious gem they clutched to their chests and passed back and forth with the greatest care. That's how this baby looks, too, only smaller, bluer.

In the weeks that follow, Karen walks around as if bruised. She shrinks from Justin's touch—his, but lost to him. He finds her often in the office, the office they converted into a nursery. On one side of the room sits a rolltop desk stacked with ungraded papers—and on the other, the varnished pine crib, decorated with Winnie-the-Pooh bumpers and a mobile that plays "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," the song sounding so eerie now, when Karen turns the knob, filling the empty crib and seeping through its slats to echo through the house.

When they finally make love again, five months later, she starts crying and when he asks if he should stop, she says, "What do you think?" A line comes to run down the middle of their bed. Neither of them crosses it.

He can't remember if they were having problems before. He tries to remember the last time they went on a date—a real date, without their son—white linen, lit candles, wine in goblets, their feet touching beneath the table—and can't. He tries to remember the last time he bought her jewelry or flowers. He tries to remember the last time she took him in her mouth. He tries to remember the last time they read novels on the couch, their legs intertwined, sharing favorite passages. Years. It's been years, hasn't it? So much of his memory is hazy, chunked up by memories of work. He can recall her frequent headaches—her full-throated sighing—her desire to be alone. He remembers putting away laundry, finding an enormous pink dildo shoved to the back of her underwear drawer, and feeling somehow betrayed. Maybe these are only the warts that naturally grow out of a marriage moving forward. Or maybe he and Karen have been in trouble for some time and only now does he notice it. He wants to blame the baby, but maybe the baby has only turned up the volume on what was there all along.

She takes up running. Every morning she pulls on pink shorts and a white tank top and laces her Nike cross-trainers and runs five miles. All the fat she accumulated during her pregnancy melts off to reveal hard-plated muscle that looks like the exoskeleton of something that lives at the bottom of the ocean. Her feet develop thick calluses. Her calves jump when she walks. Her forearms are a lacework of veins. Even her ears look skinny.

Sometimes Justin sees her on his drive to Mountain View High School, where he teaches. Her hair will be pulled back in a ponytail to reveal a red and compacted face. Her teeth, bared in a snarl. She pumps her legs and swings her arms wildly. She looks like a madwoman. He always beeps his horn and waves at her, but she never sees him, lost in the heat and rhythm of her run.

Normally she is gone by the time he showers and dresses and comes down to the kitchen for breakfast. But sometimes they run into each other, as they do this morning, when he finds her standing in front of the sink, looking out the window and drinking a short glass of orange juice. He says, "Hi," and she says, "Hey." He asks her if she heard the news, and when she says, "What news?" he tells her.

Last night—on Z-21, the NBC affiliate—the ten o'clock news reported a bear attack at Cline Falls. These girls, two teenage girls from Prineville, left their food and cooking supplies out, rather than washing them and bagging them and hanging them from the highest branch of a juniper tree. In the springtime bears possess a terrible hunger, having slept through the long winter, and this one was no exception. One slash of its claws parted the nylon like a zipper. Their screams didn't scare it away, only encouraged it, as it fit its jaws around the head of one girl, chewing her, her scalp finally sliding off her skull. The other, in trying to save her friend, was hurled against the canyon wall, then mauled. They played dead or fainted in their pain and after so many minutes the bear abandoned them. Now both are in critical condition at St. Charles Memorial in Bend. "They say they think it's a grizzly."

"There are no grizzlies in Oregon."

"That's what the Forest Service guy said, but then this other guy said—"

"I gotta run." She sets her glass down on the counter with a click. Yellow bits of pulp cling to its inside.

"Okay," he says and opens the cabinet and pulls a box of Cheerios from the shelf to rattle into a bowl and splash with milk. "Have fun. Watch out for bears."

"Don't worry about me," she says, already running, on her way out the door.

He teaches English. Several years ago a sophomore named Jimmy Westmoreland, after downing a twelve-pack of Budweiser, flipped his Camaro and died. Everyone gathered in the gym the next day. The principal—a leathery-looking man who dyed his hair jet black and kept it styled in an "Elvis"—stood before them all and muttered a few kind words about Jimmy. There was a chair next to him and it had a boom box resting on it. "This one's for Jimmy," he said and hit the play button. From the speakers came the drawling voices and disorderly guitar licks of Lynyrd Skynyrd. They sat and listened to "Free Bird." Eight minutes and twenty-three seconds had never seemed like such a long time.

This is the kind of school they are. Wranglers and Levi's. F-10s and Firebirds. All of old Bend send their kids here—while the Portland and California refugees, in their tight designer jeans and...