Half Wild Read online

  “No reason,” I said, swallowing, thinking of that poster on Jack’s wall.

  “You look like trash,” Annie’s mother had said to her one day, glancing up from the pile of laundry she sat folding. Mine had squinted her eyes and said, “Clare, you could be so pretty. And Annie, she used to be so pretty too.”

  My mom taught second grade and raised me alone. In her free time she made beautiful gardens with neat edges around our white house and was the captain of the bowling team in Nelson. Since Jack left, Annie’s mom had stopped cleaning or cooking or leaving the house. She reached two hundred pounds and sat out on the porch crocheting doll-size American flag blankets to give to the American Legion. Loony as the bird on North Pond, Annie said. Her dad had gone on with life as usual: rising at dawn to milk their two worn-out cows, going to the lumberyard at six, coming home twelve hours later to milk again. Annie was getting by doing what she and I did: skipping school, smoking what we could scavenge of Jack’s tobacco, imagining the places we would go if that car would only drive: Mexico, Arizona, California.

  Jack had been all those places. He used to send Annie postcards from the road, which she had taped to the dashboard. One showed a roadrunner crossing a two-lane highway, a saguaro cactus waving in the background, the sky the orange of varnished pine. Another showed a white sand beach in California, grass ablaze with wildflowers, BIG SUR swirled in neon-pink cursive across the top. On the back of the card the names of some of those wildflowers were written: sticky monkeyflower and baby blue eyes. Baby blue eyes reminds me of you, the prettiest sister in the state of Vermont, Jack wrote to Annie in handwriting as restless as a ten-year-old boy’s. In the last few years when Jack came home for apple season he would take Annie and me places: the quarry in Dorset, the Northfield Drive-In, once, in early December, sledding by moonlight on Whiskey Mountain. On that ice-covered hillside he had put his lips next to my ear and whispered something that sounded like beautiful, before flying down that hillside with a blind whoop and holler.

  Annie leaned her head back against the leather seat and started picking at the loose stuffing that exploded from the cushions. “If you’re going to San Francisco,” she sang, then hummed a bit. California was where we wanted to go most: a place our mothers had never been and would never go, a place where we thought no one believed in war.

  “Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair,” I finished the line.

  “California dreaming,” Annie said, scratching frost off the window with her fingernail. Earlier that week Mr. Davis, the new history teacher, had shown us photos of people sticking flowers into the barrels of rifles in Washington, DC. “Not everyone believes in war,” he had said. Mr. Davis was young and from elsewhere, with sandy blond hair. Most girls were in love with him.

  I was in love with Jack. When we were kids he taught us how to light fires without matches, how to do wheelies, how to build forts in the woods by the creek. “Like this,” he said once when I was nine, taking my hands and showing me how to bend a sapling and hook it into another to make a frame. I could feel his breath on my cheek, could smell his unwashed clothes. His best friend, Trevor, a big kid with a spongy face who lived in a cabin down near the river, would say, “Dumb girls,” when Annie and I were around, but Jack would just shrug and wink at us. “Wildcats,” he said with a blue-eyed, innocent grin.

  “Fucking winter,” Annie said, and started to shiver. She took another drag of the cigarette and coughed.

  “We could go back,” I said.

  “No way,” Annie said. “I’m driving this thing to California. That’s why we’re so cold. We’re driving through the plains of Nebraska.” Her thin fingers gripped the wheel until her knuckles turned white. Her gray eyes blazed.

  “Look at them buffalo,” I said.

  “Indians,” she said.

  “Bucking broncos,” I said. We weren’t smiling.

  In December Annie got a letter from Jack. It was midweek, morning. We sat in Karmann watching snow skitter across the frozen fields. No one seemed to care if we skipped school—worse things were happening all over: three kids had crashed and died on their way home from the Five Flies outside of North Bennington; a selectboard member’s son had disappeared into Canada; a girl had gotten knocked up and tried to kill herself by drinking a bottle of Lysol. Snow blew in white gusts across the silver grass and drifted toward the frozen-over creek. Annie read the letter out loud.

  Jack didn’t say much about Vietnam. Instead he told her all the things he missed about home: driving up to Indian Love Call and diving off the deep end into cold black water; the smell of hayfields at night in June; driving across the US of A with its flat, open spaces; going into the woods and feeling safe there. He said he never felt safe where he was. Never. He told Annie to live boldly, to not end up like their parents: ghosts on a farm with a couple of dried-up cows, or like Trevor, stuck in a town that would never change him. He told her when he got back he would take her on a long road trip to somewhere exciting. Light up your eyes, he wrote.

  Annie folded the letter and stuck it in the back pocket of her jeans. “Jesus,” she said. “I wish we had rum.”

  “At ten A.M.?”

  She shrugged. “Why not?”

  A nurse from the state had started checking in on Annie’s mom; her house was smelling like cat piss and unwashed clothes; she needed diabetic wraps on her legs. Her dad spent more and more time in the barn where he used to milk forty Jerseys when he was a boy, just standing quietly now in the empty stanchions.

  Annie looked down at her hands. “You think he’ll make it?”

  “Who?”

  Annie rolled her eyes. “Jack.”

  The wind had let up, and the field was still except for the snow’s settling sheet of white. One of the two cows lumbered around the corner of the barn. It looked our way, then back toward the fence. The ground of the paddock sponged black mud under its feet. “Yes,” I said.

  “Me too,” Annie said, picking at the rip in the knee of her jeans. “But I can’t fucking wait. I fucking hate waiting. We’re all just fucking waiting.”

  “Everyone here is waiting,” I said.

  “Flipping their wigs, waiting,” Annie said. It was true: we were all waiting for the people we knew and loved to disappear, or die, or not.

  Annie squeezed her knees together tight and grabbed the steering wheel. “You ever want to go somewhere so bad you’ll do anything just to get there?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  Annie nodded, then reached into her pocket and rolled us each another cigarette. It didn’t burn so much going down; our throats were toughened. A gust of wind picked up and blew a piece of stray scrap metal across the yard.

  “This place is going to hell,” Annie said.

  “Aren’t we too?”

  Annie laughed. It was like a streak of sunlight in that car. “Guess so. Yes. Hell.”

  A warm January day, snowmelt in the ditches and patches of bare dirt by the side of the road. We walked back toward school, kicking our boots into the blackened snow. Trevor drove by in his Dodge pickup, then pulled onto the gravel edge in front of us. A year ago Trevor and Jack had pinky sworn that if either of their numbers got called, the other would go too, but Trevor’s number hadn’t been called, and he hadn’t enlisted. It was something the whole town knew. Now he had a job at the sawmill and a cabin of his own down by the river. Since Jack left, he kept his big shoulders pitched forward and his eyes on the ground.

  He rolled his window down as we got near, sat looking out at the road in front of him.

  “Trev,” Annie said. I had only seen her talk to Trevor once since Jack left. She had called him a phony bastard and a ball-less wonder.

  He glanced at Annie. “Hi,” he muttered, blinking, then turned back toward the road.

  Annie grabbed the truck’s door handle. “Where you going? Anywhere fun?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. Back to work. Want a ride?”

  “Nah. Hey,
Trev,” she said, digging her boot into gravel. “Take us somewhere fun sometime. Take us somewhere Jack would have taken us.”

  Trevor looked at Annie for an instant, then at his hands on the wheel. He picked at the scab on his left hand, and it started to bleed. “There’s a party Friday,” he said.

  Annie nodded. “That’ll do.”

  That afternoon Mr. Davis showed us pictures of blind and burned kids in Hiroshima. He showed us a picture of a baby who had no eyes. “Imagine that,” he said, shaking his head. Annie took a jackknife out of her pocket and whittled a peace sign into the plywood top of her desk. Below it she wrote, “Fuck.”

  The party was down Auger Hole Road at a house with red asphalt shingles and balsam-green trim, tucked into the far end of a field. Old hatchback Saabs and Volkswagen Bugs filled the driveway; a motorcycle perched near the door. Annie tugged at my coat sleeve. “Jack’s kind of people,” she whispered. “Far out.” Ski bums and college dropouts and remnants from the communes near Brattleboro had started moving into places like this in the woods; the selectboard and my mother were worried about it.

  Inside, people sat on couches and crammed into the small kitchen. The room smelled like beer and wet dog and pot. Trevor went over to a corner and started talking to a woman I recognized from behind the register at the IGA. I recognized a couple of other people too, people I had seen with Jack at baseball games or the Northfield Drive-In. One wheezed into a Jew’s harp; one plucked a banjo. The song appeared to have no tune.

  Annie squeezed my hand and went to the gas fridge, where people were getting beers. She pulled two out, handed me one, and nodded toward a guy with blond hair pulled back into a greasy ponytail who I hadn’t seen before. He looked about thirty. “Come,” Annie said, looping her finger under my belt and pulling me over to where he stood leaning against a door.

  “Hi,” she said. The guy passed a joint to the friend he was talking to, looked us up and down, grinned.

  “Hi,” he said. “Who are you?”

  “Annie. Jack’s sister. This is Clare.”

  “Oh,” the guy said. “Jack. Yeah. I can see him in you.” That grin was still smeared across his face. He handed Annie the joint. “Hit?”

  “Sure,” Annie said. She took a hit, then another. She started nodding her head and moving her shoulders to the music. “Thanks,” she said. “That’s good.”

  “Laced,” the guy said, winking at Annie and passing the joint to me. I shook my head. He shrugged and told the friend he was talking to that he rode an Indian, said something about spark plugs in winter. Above our heads a clock in the shape of a dog stuck its tongue out and made a licking motion every time the second hand hit 12. Annie watched the guy, sipped her beer, smiled. I didn’t want to stand there; I hated the guy with the ponytail. He was nothing like Jack. He was lacking joy.

  I went across the room and sat down on a yellow couch near a wood stove that puffed little bursts of smoke. Paintings of wolves and deer looked out from the pine-paneled walls. A guy with a red bandana tied around his head put Otis Redding’s “Love Man” on, and two women started dancing. I leaned back against the couch and watched the way they shook their knees and elbows, the way they tossed their heads back and made their bodies loose. I thought of Jack dancing: those shaking skinny hips, his sad, buttery grin, how if he were here, I would get up and dance too. I would shake my small breasts and my big butt. I would close my eyes and wouldn’t think a thing.

  The last time I’d seen him was in April, a few days after he’d blown Karmann’s engine. He stood bent over the open hood with a socket wrench in his hand. He banged at something and swore and kicked a tire of the car. I had come to see Annie, but I stopped there in the driveway behind him. The air was damp; little white snowflakes came down every now and then and melted as soon as they hit the ground.

  “Hi,” I said.

  Jack straightened up and turned. “Clare,” he said, smiling a beam of light right at me. “What’s up?” It wasn’t a question. A woodpecker made a racket on the roof of the barn.

  “Here to see Annie.” I pulled my jacket up around my ears and squeezed my arms against my chest. I knew he was leaving soon but wasn’t sure when.

  Jack looked at the woodpecker on the barn and then at the line of trees near the creek and then at Karmann. “She’s a goner,” he said, nodding toward the car.

  I nodded.

  He shrugged and glanced up at the tarnished silver sky above us. “Goddamn,” he said, quiet, then looked down at his boots and rubbed the toe of his left one into the ground. I thought of that night in that moonlit snow-covered field and the word he might have said: beautiful.

  Then he looked at me. His voice was little more than a whisper. “It’s terrifying, you know?”

  “I can imagine,” I said. I felt like I might cry, but kept it down there in my throat.

  “I never really thought it would be me.” The woodpecker made a racket again. “I just never thought.”

  I nodded and looked at the ground. More flurries came down. One landed on my hand, and in the split second before it melted I could see its crazy symmetrical flower design.

  “Hey, Clare, you know something?” I looked up. His eyes were Annie’s silver-blue color and wet. I started to shiver and couldn’t stop.

  “What?”

  He smiled. “You’re a cool girl. Real cool. I’ve always thought that.”

  I felt my cheeks go hot, and then the heat went all the way through my body. It settled in my feet, where it turned cold.

  “All right,” he said, nodding once, then picked up his wrench again and bent back over the car.

  I started for the door. “And so you know,” he called out. I turned around. “I’m not gonna die.” He grinned then, and I believed him. He couldn’t die. I waved once and turned and went through that kitchen door. A few days later he left on a bus from Nelson.

  Annie and the ponytailed guy were alone now, passing a bottle of whiskey back and forth. A strand of her dark hair had caught in one of the buttons of his leather vest, and she was trying, halfheartedly, to tug it loose with her fingers. He put his hand on her shirt over her breast, then put the joint between her lips, grinning.

  A skinny guy with acne sat down next to me and started talking about farming. He said it was the wave of the future. I nodded and sipped my beer and looked away. The guy in the red bandana put a Led Zeppelin record on, and half a dozen people started dancing. I thought about California—sunshine and ocean and wildflowers and white sand beaches. Not this closed-in dark room that smelled like wood smoke and the damp, mildew odor of wool and sweat.

  The room grew louder, blue with smoke and noise. I looked around for Annie but couldn’t see her. Another song came on. The guy next to me said farming was the farthest-out thing since the advent of electricity. I looked at my hands. Then the door of the house burst open. Cold air flooded in and a little woman in a parka stood there gasping. “Whoa!” she called out. “Fucked-up girl out there.”

  A group of us rushed to the door. Out in the dark field people called out Where? And What happened? And then someone shouted UFO! and suddenly everyone was pointing up at the sky saying, Cool, man, and sticking out their thumbs like hitchhikers and laughing. I looked up too, but all I saw was a little bit of the Milky Way straight above me. The woman in the parka came toward me in the dark and grabbed my arm. She was tiny and the parka came down past her knees. “Your friend,” she said.

  I stumbled across the dark field after the woman. In the grass at the edge of the field a motorcycle had tipped over and Annie lay sprawled on her back. Her eyes were closed and the guy with the ponytail was bent over her saying, “Wake up, wake up,” and then, “She’s breathing. She’s breathing.”

  The woman in the parka started crying. “She was just sitting on it,” she said. “And then she closed her eyes and fell over.”

  I got down on my knees and brushed Annie’s face with the back of my hand. From behind me I heard the door of the house
slam and felt Trevor next to me. “Oh fuck,” he said, picking her up and carrying her across the field to his truck. “I’m driving. You hold her, ’kay?” So I got into the passenger seat and held her.

  Her breath was steady and smelled sweet like marijuana and whiskey. The stars were sharp and bright, and I watched them as we drove and all the other things too that were lit up by the headlights as we passed: rusted train bridges and tipping silos and vacant barns and the cool streak of Silver Creek. He and I didn’t talk, just cranked the heat and listened to the sound of the air coming out of the fan and to the gravel under the wheels and to the motor, and for a moment I thought I might fall asleep there with Annie in my arms, the hot air on my face, Trevor next to me, shaking, muttering Fuck, fuck fuck, Annie breathing, and me thinking Thank God. Thank God. And also: Stupid, Annie. Stupid.

  March and April were cold that year. Ice storms brought trees down; snow fell into the late part of the month. Annie’s mom went to a hospital. Her dad tapped all the sugar maples for the first time in ten years and stayed up till midnight tending the fire and watching steam.

  Annie and I didn’t talk about that night at the party. She stayed home more, skipped school without me. Mr. Davis moved on to the Korean War, which I didn’t care anything about. I got some new records: Neil Young’s Harvest, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, and John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band. I sat in my room listening to them over and over while filling out college applications. Every time John Lennon’s “Love” came on I would close my eyes and breathe deep. There weren’t any new letters from Jack. Every now and then Annie and I still missed a class or two together, made our way to Karmann.