The Wild Things

CHAPTER XI

“Arooooooo!”

The howling was a good start. Animals howl, he had been told, to declare their existence. Max, standing in his white wolf suit, stood at the top of the stairs and, using a rolled-up piece of construction paper as a megaphone, howled again, as loud as he could.

“ARRROOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

When he was done, there was a long silence.

“Uh oh,” Gary finally said.

Ha! Max thought. Let Gary worry. Let everyone worry.

Max pounded down the stairs, triumphant. “Who wants to get eaten?” he asked the house and the world.

“Not me,” Claire said.

Aha! Max decided. That only puts her higher on the menu!

He strode into the TV room, where Claire was pretending to do her homework. He lifted his claws up, growled and sniffed at the air. He wanted to make sure that Claire and everyone knew this terrible fact: There was a bloodthirsty, brilliant, borderline-insane wolf in their midst.

Claire didn’t look up.

At least she’d spoken to him. It was a window to reconciliation, so Max had an idea. He removed a wooden dowel from a nearby curtain. It was about three feet long and bore magic marker lines across its width. Claire, seeing Max approach with the dowel, rolled her eyes.

“You want to play Wolf and Master?” Max asked.

Claire had already gone back to her book, strenuously ignoring him. She didn’t even need to say No. She could say No a thousand ways without ever uttering the word.

“Why not?” Max said to the back of her head.

“Maybe because your wolf suit smells like butt?”

Max quickly sniffed himself. She was correct. But he was a wolf. What else would a wolf smell like?

“You want me to kill something for you?” he asked.

Claire thought a moment, tapping her pencil against her lower teeth. Finally she looked at Max, her eyes bright. “Yeah,” she said, “go kill the little man in the living room.”

This idea had a certain appeal. Max smiled at Claire’s description of Gary as a “little man.”

“Yeah,” Max said, getting excited. “We’ll cut his brains out and make him eat ’em! He’ll have to think from his stomach!”

Claire gave Max a look she might give a three-headed cat. “Yeah, you go do that,” she said.

Max walked around the corner and found Gary lying on the couch in his work clothes, his frog-eyes closed, his chin entirely receded into his neck. Max gritted his teeth and let out a low, simmering growl.

Gary opened his eyes and rubbed them.

“Uhh, hey Max. I’m baggin’ a few after-work Zs. How goes it?”

Max looked at the floor. This was one of Gary’s typical questions: Another day, huh? How goes it? No play for the playa, right? None of his questions had answers. Gary never seemed to say anything that meant anything at all.

“Cool suit,” Gary said. “Maybe I’ll get me one of those. What are you, like a rabbit or something?”

Max was about to leap upon Gary, to show him just what kind of animal he was — a wolf capable of tearing flesh from bone with a shake of his jaws — when Max’s mom came into the room. She was carrying two glasses of blood-colored wine, and she handed one to Gary. Gary sat up, smiled his powerless smile, and clinked his glass against hers. It was a disgusting display, and became more so when Gary raised his glass to Max.

“Cheers, little rabbit-dude,” he said.

His mom smiled at Max and then at Gary, thinking it was a wonderfully clever thing that Gary had just said.

“Cheers, Maxie,” she said, then growled playfully at him.

She picked up a dirty plate and hurried back toward the kitchen. “Claire!” she yelled, “I asked you to get your stuff off the table. It’s almost dinner.”

Max entered the kitchen with his arms crossed, marching purposefully, like a general inspecting his troops. He sniffed loudly, assessing the kitchen’s smells and waiting to be noticed.

His mother said nothing, so he brought a chair near the stove and stood on it. Now they were eye to eye.

“What is that? Is that food?” he asked, pointing down to something beige bubbling in a pan.

He got no answer.

“Mom, what is that?” he asked, now grabbing her arm.

“Pâté,” she said finally.

Max rolled his eyes and moved on. Pâté was a regrettable name for an unfortunate food. It seemed to Max a good idea to get up from the chair and to leap onto the counter. Which he presently did.

Standing on the counter, he towered over everything and everyone. He was eleven feet tall.

“Oh god,” Max’s mom said.

Max squatted down to inspect a package of frozen corn. “Frozen corn? What’s wrong with real corn?” he demanded. He dropped the package loudly on the counter, where it made a wonderful clatter.

“Frozen corn is real,” Max’s mom said, barely taking notice. “Now get off the counter. And go tell your sister to get her stuff off the dining room table.”

Max didn’t move. “CLAIRE GET YOUR STUFF OFF THE DINING ROOM TABLE!” he yelled, more or less into his mom’s face.

“Don’t yell in my face!” she hissed. “And get off the counter.”

Instead of getting off the counter, Max howled. The acoustics where he was, so close to the ceiling, were not great.

His mom stared at him like he was crazy. Which he was, because wolves are part crazy. “You know what,” she said, “you’re too old to be on the counter, and you’re too old to be wearing that costume.”

Max crossed his arms and stared down at her. “You’re too old to be so short! And your makeup’s smeared!”

“Get DOWN from there!” she demanded.

The sting of what she had said about him being too old to wear his wolf suit was just hitting him. He felt his anger focusing. There was a weakness in her voice and he decided to seize on it.

“Woman, feed me!” he yelled. He didn’t know where he’d come up with that phrase, but he liked it immediately.

“Get off the counter, Max!”

Max just stared at her. She was so small!

“I’ll eat you up!” he growled, raising his arms.

“MAX! GET DOWN!” she yelled. She could be very loud when she wanted to be. For a second he thought he should get off the counter, take off his suit, and eat his dinner quietly, because the truth was he was very hungry. But then he thought better of it, and howled again.

“Arooooooooo!”

At that, Max’s mom lunged for him, but Max, sidestepping, was able to elude her grasp. He leaped over the sink and then back down onto the chair. She lunged again and missed. Max cackled. He really was fast! She grabbed at him again, but he was already gone. He jumped down, landed on the floor, and executed a perfect shoulder-roll. Then he got up and fled from the kitchen altogether, laughing hysterically.

When he turned around, though, he found that his mom was still chasing him. That was new. She rarely chased him this far. When they raced through the living room, Gary took notice of the escalating volume and urgency. He put down his glass of wine and got ready to intervene.

Then, in the front hall, a surprising and awful thing happened: Max’s mom caught him.

“Max!” she gasped.

She had his arm firmly in her hand. She had long fingers, deceptively strong, and they dug into Max’s bicep. In her hand all his muscle and sinew turned to soup and he didn’t like it.

“What’s wrong with you?” she screamed. “You see what you’re doing to me?” Her voice was shrill, corkscrewed.

“No, you’re doing things!” he countered, sounding meeker than he’d intended. To offset this sign of weakness he thrashed around in her grip. He kicked and squirmed and in the process, he knocked everything off the bench — the change, the mail, and his delicate blue bird, the one he’d made in art class. It broke and like quail the pieces darted to every corner of the foyer.

This gave them both pause.

They stared at the broken bird.

“See that? You’re out of control!” she said. “There’s no way you’re eating dinner with us. Animal.”

Now, because he was angry at breaking his bird, and angry at having Gary in the house, and angry at having to eat pâté and frozen corn and angry about having a witch for a sister, he growled and squirmed and — the idea flooded him so quickly he couldn’t resist — leaned down and bit his mom’s arm as hard as he could.

She screamed and dropped him to the floor. She stepped back, still holding her arm. She wailed like a beast, her eyes alive with fear and fury.

Max had never bitten her before. He was scared. His mom was scared. They saw each other anew.

Max turned to see Gary entering the foyer. He was clearly unsure what he was supposed to do.

“Connie, are you okay?” he asked.

“He bit me!” she hissed.

Gary’s eyes bulged. He had no idea what to do or say. The sheer number of things happening was overwhelming him. He opened his mouth and did the best he could: “You can’t let him treat you that way!” he said.

Max’s mom gave him a bewildered look.

“What are you talking about? This is about me? What do you want me to do?”

“Something! Something needs to be done!” Gary said, taking a few quick strides toward Max.

“He’s not allowed to talk here!” Max yelled, pointing to the frog-eyed man.

Claire stormed into the hall at that second, and seeing Claire and Gary and his mom, everyone looking at him like he was the problem — it sent Max tumbling over the edge. He screamed as loud as he could — a sound between a howl and a battle cry.

“Why are you doing this to me?” his mom wailed. “This house is chaos with you in it!”

That was it. Max did not have to stand for this, any of this, all of this. He threw open the door and leapt down the porch and into the night.