Wild Things Read online

  Fred asked Lillian six times not to smoke her little black cigarettes in the house, but she lit up anyway and tapped her ashes into her hand. “Who in blazes does she think she is?” he groused, then muttered in stronger language under his breath.

  Lillian was skinny as a stick and dressed all in black. She had long, red-lacquered fingernails and wore her dyed black hair pulled so tight off her face it looked painful. She had a bossy way of talking that made me want to slap her pasty-white face. Sid, light-years away behind sunglasses, agreed with whatever she said.

  She called everyone sweetheart, though I overheard her call me “that cracker child” when she was talking to Sid. When I told that to Fred, he called Lillian a word I won’t write here. He wanted to say it to Lillian’s face, but I stopped him. “Sticks and stones,” I told him. “As Manny used to say, ‘Don’t get mad, sugar boots, get even.’”

  Having Lillian around was hardest on Henry. She followed him everywhere like a black cloud, hanging on his every word.

  “Artists are gods,” she told me, “and Henry Royster is the modern Zeus. I worship at his altar.” She actually said that, I swear.

  “Beg pardon?” I replied, rolling my eyes. Not that she’d notice. She never looked at people when she talked to them.

  “Zeus, sweetheart,” she said, like I was dumb. “Greatest of all Roman gods.”

  If she didn’t know Romans from Greeks, I wasn’t going to set her straight. Later, while she was haunting Henry in his studio, spacey Sid wandered upstairs to use the bathroom and stopped in my doorway afterward.

  I glanced up from my independent study. “Done worshipping at Henry’s altar?” I said.

  Sid snorted. “I may know beans about art, kid, but I know which side my bread is buttered on, and so should you.” He lit a special cigarette of his own, breathed the smoke in deep, then exhaled it my way, like Ray used to do. He pointed out my windows toward the sculptures in the field. “We look out there and see junk. She sees art worth a million bucks. Guess who’s right?”

  I didn’t like Sid presuming to know what I thought. “What’s this we stuff?” I said. “Got a rat in your pocket?”

  Sid just smirked and slithered downstairs. After he went outside, I slid down the banister and locked myself in the study—the only room in the house with a bolt on the door—to read the art-magazine articles about Henry. They weren’t written in anything like plain English and sounded a lot like Lillian. One talked about how Henry was “formed” as an artist (“by tragedy”), how he “developed” (in “inspired isolation,” whatever that is). Another described his work as “monumental, elemental, and masterly” and Henry as “one of the great living artists of this century and the next.” Well, la di flipping da.

  The one with Henry scowling on the cover was as straightforward as any. It talked about how he’d worked successfully at two careers, sculpture and cardiology, until he quit medicine to sculpt full time. But after his wife, Amanda, died of cancer, he disappeared, like he’d fallen off the earth. The art world lost track of where he was or what he was doing, and after a few years most people thought he’d died too.

  When Fred came back from the store, I kept him company in the kitchen while he tenderized a rump roast. He said every time he poked it with a fork he imagined it was Lillian’s behind. That made me laugh. I asked him about the articles.

  “Art manure,” Fred said. “That’s what Henry calls it.”

  I smiled. “So it’s not true?”

  “Oh, it’s truth of a sort. A high-toned, hot-air version of truth. But I wouldn’t want ’em telling my life story.”

  “Henry’s awful cranky today,” I said.

  “It’s those New York bloodsuckers.”

  “Why does he even talk to them?”

  “It’s how he makes his living. Henry had a contract with their father, but now his contract’s with Lillian and Sid. Henry owes their art gallery a fifteen-sculpture show by year’s end, and they’re holding him to it.”

  “That’s less than two months away!” I said.

  “And if Henry doesn’t deliver, Lillian says she’ll sue. She’ll have her pound of Henry’s flesh one way or the other.”

  I felt for Henry. It frosted my grapes when people tried to pull my strings like I was some kind of puppet. Mama had done that to me. When she couldn’t sweet-talk her way to what she wanted, she’d say I was contrary, plain and simple, that if she said run, I’d walk, and if she said walk, I’d stand still as stone to spite her—which, come to think of it, was probably true. She liked to tell about the time when I was three and we were about to cross a busy street. She snapped, “Give me your hand,” and I snapped back, “No, it’s mine!”

  When the art vultures flew off around three o’clock, Fred went home to Bessie, and Henry stomped out to his studio. I heard his grinder going and I let him be. He was clearing Lillian and Sid out of his system. The rain had eased up enough for me to do the same, bad cold or not. I put on my boots, coat, and a rain slicker and headed up to the cabin.

  By the time I got there, though, the rain and wind had started up again. I didn’t even try to light a fire. Gusts whistled down the chimney and blew ashes and rainwater all over the floor. The woodpile outside was soaked through.

  I kept my coat on and sat shivering at the table, trying to record the day in my journal. But the damp pages curled, my writing hand got stiff with cold, and my head filled up with snot. I managed just half a page before I decided to read instead. I lit both oil lamps and lay in the bed fully clothed with all the old quilts pulled over me, but it was so dark outside that even with the lamps going I could barely make out the words on the page. I was cold to the bone.

  It struck me then how much good light and warmth mattered to me. If I lived in that cabin all the time I’d be stuck with whatever wretchedness the weather brought. There’d be no heat when the wood got wet, and even if I managed to keep it dry, that pile wouldn’t last. I’d have no warm, dry clothes when mine got wet. There’d be no home-cooked meals hot in the oven when I got home. And there’d be precious little light, especially on winter days.

  I looked at my little cabin and saw it for the shack it was. The unchinked cracks in the log walls that let in the bitter cold. The floor still so filthy it might as well have been dirt. The skin of ice in the bottom of what passed for a sink. Could I really live like this? All the time? And not just one or two hours a day, but day and night, spring, summer, fall and winter, year after year? I might not miss TV, but wouldn’t I miss hot and cold running water or clean clothes? Heat that I didn’t have to generate myself? Electric light? Could I go without a flush toilet or a bath? Would I want to even if I could? And what would I eat? Would I steal what I couldn’t grow or kill with my own hands? Could I actually kill an animal? Then skin, cook, and eat it? Would I get lonely? Would I miss having other human beings to talk to? And what if I got sick, like now? Or needed help?

  I was a tangle of questions as I sniffled and shivered in that miserable bed. In my sorry state, the answers were distressingly clear. I looked up at the shelf with the sad woman’s picture on it, some pitiable child’s woebegone mama, and it seemed to me that even the roughest lives I’d read about in books were warmer and softer than theirs must’ve been.

  And that’s when I saw it. It was set in casually among the others, shoulder to shoulder with the squirrel and the deer. I stood up to look closer. There on the shelf, beside the picture of the woman and the six small animal carvings, was a seventh creature, a tiny wood carving of a cat, no bigger than half a walnut shell. The cat was curled up, sound asleep, in every detail like my own cat, down to his oversize head, raggedy ears, and the splotch on the right side of his tiny, perfect nose. It was beautiful. I knew at once that it was meant for me.

  I picked it up and cupped it in my hands, marveling at the likeness, but then it hit me. Whoever had made it and left it there had to be watching everything I did. I whirled around, half expecting someone at the window or door, but
there was only wind and rain.

  I slipped the carving into my pocket and hurried back to Henry’s, fingering the little wooden cat all the way. I was actually glad to see Henry’s sculptures spinning in the yard to greet me and relieved to hear his welder running out back. I switched on all the downstairs lights and set the supper in the oven on warm, then sat turning the little cat in my hands, running my fingers over the curve of his back and the points of his ears. I wasn’t scared, exactly. No one who meant me harm would carve me such a beautiful thing. What unsettled me was that whoever had carved the cat seemed to know me, know my daily habits and secrets, things nobody could know unless they were watching me day and night.

  I heard the front door open and Henry kicking off his boots in the hall. I slipped the carving back into my pocket.

  “How’re you feeling?” he asked, coming in the kitchen. He scrubbed his grimy hands in the sink and put his palm to my forehead in his doctor way. He lifted an eyebrow, noticing my damp hair and clothes. “You were supposed to stay in bed.”

  “It was a weird day,” I said.

  He nodded like he thought so too, then took the roast out of the oven and set it on top of the stove. He carved off two small slices, put them on a plate with carrots and potatoes, and handed the plate to me. He made a bigger plate for himself and sat down. “I’m sorry about those people,” he said.

  “I’m sorrier for you.”

  “The exotic life of the artist. Now you see why I live where I do.”

  I rested my head on my hand and picked at my food. Pot roast and vegetables, my favorite. It all looked delicious, but I couldn’t smell or taste a thing. My head felt like it was stuffed with stones. “I can’t eat.”

  Henry set down his knife and fork. “What say I put you to bed?”

  He carried me up the stairs, helped me into my PJs, and tucked me in. He brushed back the damp strands of hair stuck to my forehead, then put one hand under my head and held a glass of water so I could drink. Nobody had ever tended to me like that before. And I let him. I let him sit next to me till I drifted off.

  I had a troubled, stuffed-up sleep. I woke in the night and slipped the little cat under my pillow, hoping it might sweeten my dreams. But all night long, wild scenes swirled in my stuffy head. The strangeness of the day shredded and churned my memories, then spun them like a tornado in my brain. Mama swept by on a flying hospital bed, and Ray ran past with a rifle after the white deer and the cat, Maud chasing after Ray. The cat was stalking a rat bigger than he was, Fred was telling Bessie and the Padre that he’d known all along that something bad would happen to me, and Lillian and Hargrove Peters were pointing at me, laughing, calling me trailer trash. Sid put one of his special cigarettes to my lips, saying, “Try this, kid, and you won’t care what anybody thinks,” after which Henry appeared in a white coat, shined a bright light in my eyes, and said, “She’s completely crazy, like her mother; there’s nothing I can do.”

  I woke up suddenly after that, hardly able to breathe, but when I finally fell back to sleep, I had the oddest dream of all.

  This dream wasn’t agitated like the others, but peaceful. And that alone was strange, because it was about my daddy. At least I thought it was him at first. I couldn’t make out his face in the darkness. Like the dream before, in the woods, I just knew it was him. He stood over my bed, watching me sleep. He seemed thoughtful and curious and not in any hurry. Once, he started to reach out, but then he drew his hand back, like he was worried I might wake. He stood over me for the longest time. And the most peculiar thing was how the dream eased my mind and led me, finally, into a deep and restful sleep.

  That’s how, in the end, I knew it wasn’t Daddy. It couldn’t have been him. Because whoever it was actually cared.

  Once the horrible people left with their mutt, he began to venture closer to the house, to be there waiting as soon as the girl got home in the afternoon.

  When the weather was good, he even trailed her closer and closer to the cabin. Each day she coaxed him a little farther with bribes of roasted meat or fish from the previous night’s supper. She took care not to force or frighten him, moving slowly and speaking in a low, quiet way, waiting for him to decide to move farther on.

  Eventually, against his better judgment, he was shadowing her most of the way there, as far as the underside of the silver house. From there he watched, kept his eyes open, but saw no sign of the savage or his son.

  Near sunset each day, he followed her back to the man’s house, and after dinner, when the man returned to his shop, the cat climbed onto the man’s porch. The girl sat with him there—she on the porch swing at one end, and he on a soft, dry cushion she’d put down at the other. It was just the two of them then, the cat’s favorite hours.

  C’mere, she would call from the house doorway or the yard or her window high up in the house. The sound of her voice was musical and sweet, and if he could hear it, wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he would come. I’m going to name you Mr. C’mere, the girl said to him one day. Mr., for respect, and C’mere, because that’s what you come to. And he understood those sounds were his and his alone.

  When the weather turned wintry, the girl kept closer to home. The man’s helper made a small, swinging door beside the main one. The helper put a window in the little door so the cat could see in, and the cat began to lie in front of it, watching the girl’s movements inside the house. The girl, on the inside, tried to urge him through it. The helper chuckled. The cat stayed stubbornly outside, though once when she was gone a long time, he pushed his head through to look around.

  The days passed swiftly and began to seem much the same. The two men began early and worked late. The girl rode off with one of them most mornings and came home midafternoon. The cat stopped wondering where she was or if she would come back. She went and came back and it was simply so. He napped in the yard or under the house, and sometimes he even hunted in the woods near the cabin. It pleased him to stalk and creep and pounce again in his old haunts, to mark the territory as his.

  One day, when the girl was gone, he wandered all the way to the cabin. He scratched his back against the rough-hewn porch and warmed himself in the last rays of the sun. The air was still, and he listened with pleasure to tomorrow’s breakfast rustling in the woods, the squirrels chattering in the trees, and even, far in the distance, the man and his helper hammering and grinding. But as the sun sank behind the treetops he heard another sound, familiar to him yet forgotten, from a time long ago. He sat up and pricked his ears, scanning the forest. And he was dimly aware of dark presences lurking, something that was not right.

  11

  When Fred and I pulled in the drive, Sheriff Bean’s cruiser was parked in front of the house. He and Henry were standing in the cold down by the studio door, in serious conversation. Mr. C’mere wasn’t waiting for me on the porch as usual, either. Since yesterday, he’d been cross with me, and extra wary. He flat refused to go up the path to the cabin, though he’d been following me there for a couple of weeks. He sat down stubborn as glue at the edge of the yard, refusing to move, even for Fred’s corned beef.

  I’d been out of sorts since yesterday myself, because somebody stole my journal from Ms. Avery’s desk. I’d hardly filled twenty pages. Ms. Avery and I turned the classroom upside down without any luck. I knew who’d taken it, just didn’t have proof.

  The sheriff waved in our direction.

  “You been speeding?” I said to Fred as we walked over.

  “No, have you?” he said.

  The sheriff and Henry looked serious, and when Fred and I got close enough to eavesdrop, they cut their eyes toward me and lowered their voices, the sheriff speaking urgently and fast. Henry nodded at what he said, then glanced at me worriedly.

  “Afternoon, afternoon, my good friends,” the sheriff called out. “All ready for Thanksgiving tomorrow?”

  “I am!” I said.

  He smiled his tobacco-brown smile.

  “How’s Henry trea
ting you?” he said to me, whipping out a fat pack of Juicy Fruit and offering everybody a stick. I took one and so did Fred. The sheriff unwrapped two sticks, folded them together, and stuck them in his cheek like a chaw.

  “Fine for now,” I told him.

  “Well, keep me posted. After this weekend, Mrs. Bean and I will have four empty bedrooms again. You keep an eye on this one, too,” he said, nodding at Fred.

  “Oh, I do,” I said, giving Fred an if-you-know-what’s-good-for-you look.

  Henry tossed down his greasy rag and said, “Let’s all go inside where it’s warm.”

  He cleared spaces in the studio for us to sit. Three roaring heaters made the studio toasty. He propped his foot on the first rung of a step stool and rested his elbow on his bent knee. I called it his Thinker pose, after a famous statue by the French sculptor Rodin. I’d seen a picture of it in one of Henry’s books.

  “As I was telling Henry,” the sheriff said to me and Fred, “yesterday two boys stumbled on a rusty old still in the woods about a mile due north, near Henry’s property line. They were hanging out there after school drinking beer and fiddling with it.”

  “Never knew there was a still up there,” Fred said.

  “What’s a still?” I asked.

  “For homemade liquor,” he said. “A still’s what you make it in.”

  The sheriff nodded. “The boys claim they were up there checking out an old cabin they’d heard about when they just happened on the beer and the still.” He gave us all a skeptical look. “They say they caught sight of an albino deer hightailing it off into the woods, and then somebody shot at them with a bow and arrows. I wouldn’t believe one word of this inebriated fairy tale except that one of them—Mayor Peters’s boy, Hargrove—had a good-sized gash in his arm, and there was blood all over both of them.”