Read Online The Wilding by Benjamin Percy - Free Book Online

and into alfalfa fields, his brother and his brother’s friends, and they take Dave with them. They spotlight the coons and the coons freeze and they jump out of the truck and kill the coons with baseball bats.”
    Karen’s hand falls to the table and makes the plates clatter.
    Graham’s voice gets faster; he is excited by her disgust, she can tell, like a boy handling lizards, worms, things that make her shriek. “In shop class, Dave was making this bat with nails in it. It was totally medieval-looking and Mr. Steele asked him about it and Dave told him and that’s how he got busted.”
    “That’s disgusting. That’s like, serial killer in the making. You’ve heard about how they torture animals when they’re young?” Her tone is at first almost amusedly horrified, but as it grows more severe, the smile on Graham’s face fades. “I don’t think you should be anywhere near that kid, that Dave—”
    “Karen.” Justin gives a half wave of his hand. “Don’t overreact.”
    “I don’t think I’m overreacting. I don’t think I’m overreacting.”
    “It’s disturbing, I know. But boys do crazy stuff. I’ve done crazy stuff.”
    That’s rich. Her husband, who scolds her for leaving out her shoes, who folds his socks into tidy little balls, thinks he’s a wild man. She crosses her arms and gives him a bitter twist of a smile. “Like what ?”
    “Thrown frogs under the wheels of cars. Shot squirrels and rabbits with BB guns. When I was in high school, a few of us used to kill marmots for money. Ranchers would pay us two bucks a marmot. We’d fill the back of a pickup. I’m not saying I look back on that fondly. I’m saying it’s the nature of boys.” He has his knife out before him. Its point is aimed at her.
    Graham takes a drink of milk and says, “I had this—I—”
    “I’m saying that Dave Jasper did something stupid, but one day Graham will probably do something stupid, because boys do stupid things, and you don’t want people labeling him a psycho.”
    “Graham is not that kind of boy.”
    “I had this dream last night,” Graham says, almost yelling. Karen goes quiet and turns her attention to him, trying to smile and not quite pulling it off. But she’ll listen. He’s trying, after all, to salvage their dinner, to turn the conversation. “It was a crazy dream.”
    “Let’s hear it.” Karen neatens her silverware.
    “I dreamed about us going hunting.” He nods at his father. “About when we go to Echo Canyon. I dreamed I got shot. Some man was hunting me through the forest and I kept trying to outrun him but he was always there, around every corner. At one point I looked down and noticed I was naked.” He blushes here as if imagining them imagining him stripped of clothes. “And my body was totally covered in fur. Not hair. Fur. ”
    “That sounds more like your grandpa.” Karen’s joke has an edge to it. She does not like, not one bit, the idea of her son away for the weekend with his grandfather. She believes him to be more than a bad influence, someone who finds the faults in everything, who makes fun of organic food and fair trade and liberal pantywaists, who speaks of blood and weaponry with smiling relish. He is those things, and those things are bad enough, but he is also half bent with the same kind of madness that would send someone into the night with a baseball bat jeweled with nails. She doesn’t trust him. And around him she doesn’t trust her husband, so easily cowed.
    No one laughs at her joke. If anything, Graham’s voice grows more earnest when he says, “Finally he got me.” He indicates where, right beneath his left breast. “When I woke up it hurt.” He rubs the spot. “It still hurts.”
    At that moment something drops down the chimney and onto the fire. There is a terrible screeching, the noise a nail makes when drawn harshly across metal. Something moves there, a black thing surrounded briefly by flames—an owl, Karen realizes—a great