Wild Things Read online

  Copyright © 2016, 2009 by Clay Carmichael

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  Designed by Helen Robinson

  First edition, 2009

  First e-book edition, 2016

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, please contact [email protected].

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Carmichael, Clay.

  Wild things / Clay Carmichael. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Stubborn, self-reliant eleven-year-old Zoë, recently orphaned, moves to the country to live with her prickly half-uncle, a famous doctor and sculptor, and together they learn about trust and the strength of family.

  ISBN: 978-1-59078-627-7 (hc) • ISBN: 978-1-59078-914-8 (pb)

  ISBN: 978-1-62979-293-4 (e-book)

  [1. Family life—Fiction. 2. Self-reliance—Fiction. 3. Trust—Fiction. 4. Orphans—Fiction. 5. Uncles—Fiction. 6. Sculptors—Fiction. 7. Cats—Fiction. 8. Human-animal relationships—Fiction.]

  I. Title.

  PZ7.C21725Wil 2009

  [Fic]—dc22

  2007049911

  This book includes an excerpt from

  The Boy Who Drew Cats, a Library of Congress facsimile produced in 1987 through the Daniel J. and Ruth F. Boorstin Publications Fund.

  P1.1

  BOYDS MILLS PRESS, INC.

  815 Church Street

  Honesdale, Pennsylvania 18431

  With love to Mike, who graciously lent Henry his winged heart, and to Mr. C’mere, wild thing and best cat ever

  Love is a religion with a fallible god.

  —Jorge Luis Borges, “The Meeting in a Dream”

  Baby, we can choose you know, We ain’t no amoebas.

  —John Hiatt, “Thing Called Love”

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Acknowledgments

  Questions for More Thought About the Story

  About the Author

  Humans were diggers and buriers, the cat thought, like dogs.

  The day the girl came, men were digging again in the woods below the house. The cat waited patiently on the rise, hoping a mole might be unearthed for his supper. Once the hole was dug, the long black car would slink like a rat snake up the drive, winding through the wildflowers and the man’s contraptions in the field, and men dressed black as crows would slide a long box from the back, shoulder it down the wooded hill, and plant it in the little garden of stones.

  The cat had watched this doggy ritual before: first, long ago, as a kitten, when the old couple lived in the farmhouse. The old woman had left him saucers of milk on the porch, but the saucers stopped once the first box was buried. Later, the old man disappeared when the crows buried a second box beside the first. Then the man who lived in the house now had come, and the digging and burying stopped until last summer, when the crows came back and helped the man put a third box in the ground.

  The cat turned to the sound of crunching gravel and watched the black car snake across the field. As before, dark-clad men wrestled a long box down the hill and sank it into the earth with ropes, then left the diggers to fill the hole like dogs burying an enormous bone.

  Once they’d all gone, the cat crept down the hill, squeezed under the fence, and leapt onto the dirt mound. Overhead a redbird sang for a mate and a squirrel hurled itself from branch to branch in the canopy of trees. The cat breathed in the rare quiet.

  The man—big, growling, a noise with dirt on it—had driven off before dawn. Years ago, when the man had arrived with his screaming machines and piles of metal clattering in the trailer behind his truck, the cat had fled to the woods. Now, older and slower, he found advantage in the man’s odd ways.

  True, the man daily drowned the quiet, hammered and pounded in his shop, made fire and sparks, forged huge twisted creatures that chased their tails when the wind provoked them. He barked and swore as he worked, hurled his tools across the yard, went silent only when he slept, and that seldom.

  But the man kept clear of the woods the cat loved, shunned the creek, cold and thirst-quenching, to the south, and left the high weeds where the cat hunted and hid when raccoons, hunters, or the wild boy trespassed on the land. Best of all, the man left the crawlspace under the house open, and the cat slept by the furnace in winter and lay in the cool earth there on hot summer days. But since the last moon the man and his helper had begun to fix, mow, and prune the place, and the cat sensed that his life was about to change.

  He heard the roar of the man’s truck in the drive, and soon after, the rustle of leaves above him. He ducked behind a stone. A child—small and wild-haired with big, curious eyes—stood on the rise, haloed in a blaze of sun. She lingered, staring, but hearing the man call, she headed back across the field toward the house.

  The cat followed her at a distance, keeping hidden in the weeds. She waved at the man on the farmhouse porch and startled a flock of goldfinches feeding atop the wildflower blooms. The birds rose skyward in a chittering burst, and her astonished gaze followed their flight. She took in the landscape as the cat would: the rising wind, gathering clouds, a change in the air. The outward signs that she noticed these things were subtle, but he caught them: a flare of nostril, the twitch of an ear, a slight shift of her wide eyes. She looked like a stray, alone in the world, as he was. He liked how she acknowledged the man but kept apart. How feline of her, he thought, how cat.

  The man took himself sweating and panting into the house. Explosions of rapping, tapping, whirring, and buzzing poured from the open upstairs windows, irritating the day. The man crossed back and forth in front of the windows, huffing, puffing, and cursing, shouldering lengths of wood, as if he were felling a whole forest inside the house.

  The girl called up: You okay, Uncle Henry? You want me to call 9-1-1?

  The man snapped back: I’m fine! This house is an ancient piece of junk! Hardly fit for a man, much less a child!

  I could help you if you want. I know about fixing things.

  Don’t be stupid, the man shouted, and went back to work.

  The girl stomped into the field, ripping wildflowers off their roots with both fists, muttering: Stupid! Nearly twelve and still I got to deal with grown-ups too dumb to see I can do for myself! Did fine with a crazy mama and no daddy, and I don’t need him!

  The cat took in her meaning through every pore and trailed her back across the field, drawn as a thirst to water. The wind was picking up, and her hair blew about her angry face. She stormed over the rise and down the hill into the woods, but once inside the little fence she grew still and solemn. She set one fistful of flowers on the mounded dirt and the other against a carved stone beside it.

  Hey, Daddy, she told the stone. Sorry we never met. And to the fresh-dug earth she said: Bye, Mama. You got your wish.

  The air was heavy and cool and smelled of rain. Winds tossed the treetops, thunder sounded, and lightning veined the sky. Unafraid, the girl roamed the open field and scowled at each of the man’s makings while the cat followed in secret. Near the house she stopped and lifted her nose, as though she caught his scent on the air. She stared straight at his hiding place, then turned sudde
nly and ran inside. The screen door slammed, and that instant it poured.

  1

  I’d hoped for better, Henry’s being a heart doctor. A job like that, you’d think he might actually have a heart.

  As usual, I pushed the cart down the aisle myself, taking what I needed off the shelves, the new grown-up as useless as those before him. Negative help, as Mama’s friend Manny used to say, negative being less than none. No big deal. Grocery shopping and I were old friends, along with toilet scrubbing, vacuuming, and wash.

  Said grown-up—my before-last-Monday-never-heard-of uncle Henry—trailed behind, scowling and muttering, not seeming to know what to do with himself, alternating between keeping five or six paces back like I was contagious and breathing down my neck in the unlikely event I needed him for something. I wondered why he’d claimed me at all.

  At first I thought he’d been charitable to adopt me just shy of a foster home and kind to bury Mama, seeing how she wasn’t even his kin. I mean, isn’t that what every orphan dreams of? A big, strong, important man to swoop in at the last hour and say, “Don’t worry, darling girl, I’ll be your new daddy. I’ll take care of every little thing.” Yeah, right.

  For the two days I’d known Henry Augustus Royster, my half-uncle on my daddy’s side, he’d been irritation in the flesh—fidgety and frowning, taking his big, grimy hands in and out of his even grimier jeans pockets, rubbing his red-gray beard or the red bandanna tied around his bald head, adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses, eyeing the exits and looking sore when I caught him. Plotting his escape already, I could tell. No different from Lester or Manny, Charlie, Harlan, or Ray. None of them had stuck. Neither would he.

  “Be sure to get whatever you want,” he said for the forty-third time. At least he was buying, unusual in adults of my acquaintance. “Anything at all.”

  “Okay,” I said, testing him. “Run get me a twelve-pack of beer and a carton of cigarettes. Lights,” I added. “I need to cut down.”

  “You don’t smoke or drink,” he scoffed. “You’re only eleven years old.”

  “Sneaking up on twelve. And I’ve cut way back,” I said, studying the cereal shelf. “Used to be a real chimney when I was six.”

  I suspected he had a good laugh inside him, but it was hidden under an outside as prickly as a cactus. He just glared.

  I glared right back. “You wouldn’t know a joke if it bit you on the butt.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Bet you’re a Cancer.”

  “What?”

  “Your astrological sign. Sign of the crab.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Like I said.”

  He was big-chested, muscular, and okay handsome for a fossil of fifty-some. He dressed strange for an old man, though: muscle shirts, dirty jeans, heavy boots, a bandanna or rag tied around his bald head, and a ruby stud in one earlobe like a pirate. His upper arms were as big around as fence posts, and he could’ve picked me up easy with one catcher’s-mitt-sized hand. He had a belly, but it looked good on him, made him seem sturdy, like he could stand a storm. He’d be better looking if he laughed, though, and I decided to make it my personal mission to loosen him up.

  “I got to be a regular chain-smoker by the time I was eight,” I said, switching the subject back, “but it was cutting my wind, hurting my kickball game.”

  Henry smirked.

  “Reach me one of those raisin brans on the top shelf,” I told him, pointing up at the cereal boxes. He was more tolerable when he had an activity to distract him, something to do with his hands, like when Mama’d made potholders and ashtrays at the hospital to keep her mind off being mental.

  “What else?” he said impatiently.

  I headed down the health and beauty aisle toward the shampoos, and felt him take in my scrawny self: jeans, T-shirt, flip-flops, the major mane of curly red hair that no amount of conditioner ever tamed. It was the exact same color as the red parts of Henry’s beard. Okay, so we had one thing in common.

  “I’m getting the good kind, since you’re buying.”

  “Whatever.”

  I took down the pricey brand and glanced back. He’d tossed six or eight more boxes of cereal in the cart, all the raisin bran on the shelf. I’d read artists were weird, but Henry was starting to worry me. Last thing I needed was Mama all over again.

  A woman shopper came down the aisle and smiled flirtatiously at him as she passed. He snarled, I swear.

  “Regular meat market in here,” I said, loud so she’d hear. “That’s the fourth time that’s happened.”

  Like it or not, Henry drew people’s attention. He didn’t have to try. I saw it first thing when he picked me up at the social worker’s office at the hospital in Farmville. Something drew people to him whether they wanted to go or not. And not just women, everybody. The minute Henry walked in, even the two doped-up patients watching Oprah turned to stare at him. The feeling in the room changed, became kind of exciting, like something important and a little dangerous was about to happen. When he spoke, his deep voice made you listen, even if he was just ordering a cup of coffee or asking where he might find his niece, Ms. Zoë Royster. Ms.—I liked that. Thing was, his power mixed in with his cranky nature made me think of a ticking time bomb, and more than once since yesterday I’d thought to run and hide.

  “I saw in People magazine that good-looking doctors rate number one on the list of best catches,” I said, trying to lighten the conversation. But Henry’s expression darkened, told me it was the wrong thing to say.

  “I don’t practice medicine much anymore,” he said, like he was spitting out something rotten.

  “Too bad. You’d be good at it. A disease would take one look at you and fly out the door.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “That look alone might cure cancer. I read that a person’s moods can kill or cure, depending.”

  His eyes narrowed like I’d hit a nerve. “Is there anything you don’t know or haven’t read?”

  “I read a lot. But most of that magazine stuff’s bogus. Junk food for your brain. You know, ‘Hubble Telescope Sights Elvis on Mars.’ That kind of thing.”

  “So why do you read them?”

  “Oh, I don’t read them,” I said, trying to decide if I wanted jasmine body lotion or honeysuckle. “I look at the headlines while I wait at the checkout. They’re funny and they pass the time and tell you about people.”

  He looked doubtful. “For instance?”

  “Oh, what makes people happy. What worries them. What they’re scared of.”

  “So what makes people happy?”

  “True love.”

  “What worries them?”

  “That they won’t ever find it.”

  “And what scares them?”

  “That maybe they will.”

  I picked the jasmine lotion and looked back over my shoulder. Henry was studying me like adults do, like I was smarter than he’d thought, like I knew too much for a kid. I remembered what I’d overheard the hospital social worker tell him.

  “Zoë’s street smarts are a kind of armor she wears to protect herself,” she’d said, making me sound like an armadillo. “She’s taken care of herself since she was old enough to walk. Her mother spent more time in mental hospitals than not, and Zoë’s father—your half-brother, I gather—left right after conception. Over the years, Zoë’s lived in the neglectful and permissive care of one or another of her mother’s boyfriends, or, occasionally, alone. Under the circumstances, she’s an extraordinary child.”

  Imagine that. Me, extraordinary.

  “You look funny,” I said to Henry. I was tired of everybody scrutinizing me like something under a microscope.

  “I was just trying to decide if there’s a tiny, smart-mouthed grown-up zipped inside your sneaking-up-on-twelve-year-old body.”

  “Yeah? You gonna look inside my ears with your doctor flashlight when we get back?”

  “I might.”

  He followed me to the pet-food aisl
e, and started eyeballing me again while I was deciding which kind of cat food to buy. I chose the one with four different flavors and set it in the cart. He looked at me like I was touched in the brain.

  “What?” I said, with as much attitude as I could muster.

  “What’s the cat food for?” he asked, as though I was planning to eat it myself.

  “Oh, gosh, let’s see.” I drummed my cheek with my fingertips and rolled my eyes toward the ceiling. “What would cat food be for? That’s a hard one. Cat food. Oh yeah, it’s for the cat,” I said, flashing a fake smile, trying not to let my voice show what a doofus he was.

  “I don’t have a cat.”

  I studied his face. He really didn’t know. An animal slept, hunted, and ate not twenty yards from his front door and he didn’t have one clue. What was it with grown-ups, anyway? Life zipped right past them. “Oh, he’s out there all right,” I said. “Big as life.”

  “Out where?”

  “In your yard,” I said. I could not believe that the President of the United States had actually let Dr. Henry Royster cut him open. The article I’d read about it in the library was old, but it said that Henry graduated first in his class at the famous Johns Hopkins University Medical School, was a distinguished naval surgeon, and even operated on the President before leaving medicine “to become one of America’s preeminent artists”—things your average moron did not usually do. Henry was looking at me funny again, probably wondering if, after everything I’d been through, my mind had snapped. The way people used to look at Mama. I didn’t like this look. I didn’t like it at all.

  “You’ve actually seen this cat?”

  I wheeled the cart into the paper-product aisle, trying to think how to explain it—the way I sometimes felt the presence of living things without actually seeing them. It would be impossible to explain to somebody this clueless. “He’s there, all right. Betcha fifty dollars,” I said. Adults take things more seriously when money is involved.

  “What?”

  “I’m good for it!”

  “That’s not what I meant.”