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 Ink in my Blood (prose edition)
Boy with the Bones

S. William Hepner

    When they finally find Jake, he’s on all fours, savagely snarling, and clawing at the earth. His clothes are torn and dirty. And when they put the trap on him, the seven-year-old starts to howl.
    Like he’s taught to do.
    Child-care services say that trapping is the only option in these types of cases. Jake’s putting up a fight, swinging his arms wildly and kicking at anyone that attempts to get close to him.
    And then the dog comes to the defense of the boy.
    It takes child-care services three tries to snare Jake. They finally manage to separate the dog from the boy by laying down bait for the fifty-pound grey and white Siberian husky.
    Still, Jake howls.
    And barks.
    Days later, Jake sits on the floor in an observation room. A man and a woman hover above, talking about him in low voices. Jake can speak, albeit not very well, and he can understand language since he wasn’t entirely abandoned before the critical period, or what some call the sensitive period. This is the time in a child’s life where if he isn’t exposed to language, he’ll most likely lose the ability to learn it.
    If you lock a child in a room for his entire childhood, make sure you leave a television in there with him.
    For his own benefit.
    The man in the observation room calls Jake a feral child and a wolf boy. Affectionate terms for children who grow up isolated and confined, with very little human contact. No social interaction with other people.
    Oh, and, of course, raised by animals.
    It’s not all that uncommon, really. Throughout the world there have been dozens of cases of feral children. Raised by dogs. Raised by wolves. Raised by monkeys. Some children were even brought up by sheep and gazelles. Jackals and panthers. Bears and goats. Leopards and cows. Hell, in the 1940’s a boy in North Africa was even raised by ostriches.
    Remus and Romulus getting a tongue bath by the mythological she-wolf.
    The man in the observation room says that Jake is still aggressive and showing signs of depression.
    It looks like he has rickets and several wounds that are infected, the woman says.
    Obviously, he’s malnourished, the man says. And he has fleas.
    All Jake wants to do is go back to his family. His real family. His real mother. The one who raised him, that protective grey and white husky named Paddy.
    Jake demands: Where’s my Paddy?
    Jake insists: Paddy is my family.
    Jake pleads: Let me go back to my family.
    When they find Jake, his parents are nowhere to be found. The neighbors say that it has been quiet in that house for several months. No car in the garage. A heap of weeklies piled at the front door. But some barking, they say. Some barking.
    Before the silence, the neighbors say, it was quite a different story.
    Jake remembers this, too.
    When Jake is born, his mother, Aimee, is only sixteen-years-old. She demands to be emancipated and gets her wish. She’s an adult now, she insists. She moves into a run-down apartment with Jake’s father, but he leaves shortly after. Something about not wanting to be tied down.
    Aimee collects her welfare checks routinely. She waits tables at the Village Inn. She’s let go because she asks for too much time off to take care of Jake.
    Aimee collects her welfare checks routinely. She answers the phone for a crooked bail bondsman. She’s let go because she asks for too much time off to take care of Jake.
    Aimee collects her welfare checks routinely. She sells her body a couple of times so that she can work from home.
    But hides Jake in the closet while she works.
    When Jake is three-years-old, Aimee meets Rex, nearly twice her age. He’s a local ex-con working in construction, the only job he could get after being released from prison after serving a three-year-stretch for killing a guy while driving a boat with a blood alcohol count of point two-four. After work, Rex drinks heavily at a local dive bar with no windows, video lottery machines, and old people with lots of stories. This is where Rex meets Aimee while she’s trying to get a pack of Kool’s out of the cigarette machine.
    Aimee and Jake move into Rex’s house before the month is up because she can no longer pay the rent. It’s a trashy two-bedroom in north Portland, Oregon. Its plastic siding is cracking and covered in soot. Its carpets are covered in beer stains and dirty bong water. Its walls are yellowed from nicotine.
    It’s in the back yard of this house where child-care services find Jake, four years later—on all fours.
    Aimee doesn’t abandon Jake immediately. For the first couple of years, she makes what, at most, could be called, an effort. She doesn’t pawn him off just yet. She’s still aware that Jake’s in the room, half the time. But then one day Rex brings home an eight-ball of cocaine—and a puppy.
    Rex lets his friends stay at the house until all hours of the night. Smoking cigarettes. Drinking. Drugs. Sometimes a beer bottle soars across the room and shatters against a wall. Sometimes a fight breaks out. Sometimes a couple just starts having sex in front of everyone. Sometimes Rex lets his friends take a turn on Aimee—depending on who brings the drugs.
    Jake sits in the corner with Paddy.
    As Jake grows, Paddy grows. Within a year, Paddy is full grown. She growls and shows her fangs at any one of Rex’s friends that try to get near her or Jake. When she growls, Jake follows suit. Rex’s friends sometimes flick lit cigarettes at the two of them. And they howl until Rex comes over and uses his foot to shut them up.
    While Jake becomes completely forgotten, he watches Rex close-fist Aimee’s face several times a week. They scream at all hours at the top of their lungs. They hurl at each other anything that they can get their hands on. Jake and Paddy’s barking doesn’t even register.
    Jake recalls hearing Rex screaming at Aimee late at night. “You goddamn whore! I’m going to kill you, you slut bitch!”
    But just as quickly as night turns into day, Jake hears Aimee’s screams from the bedroom. Those satisfied screams. Those religious screams. Those screams asking for Rex’s forgiveness.
    When it’s time to eat, Paddy is at Rex’s heels. Rex always too preoccupied to care.
    He’s rolling.
    He’s cutting.
    He’s baking.
    He’s on the phone setting up a coke buy. Or, he’s talking to one of his many other women. “I don’t care, baby,” he says into the receiver. “I’ll make it happen.”
    Paddy’s barking because she and Jake are hungry. “Shut the hell up, you goddamn mutt,” Rex yells. He kicks Paddy with full-force, and she yelps, running back to Jake.
    “I swear,” he says into the receiver. “One more time and I’m gonna bury that bitch in the backyard.”
    Eventually, the dog and her pup stop asking to be fed. They learn to root through the trash. They learn to catch birds. Rats and squirrels. Cats and raccoons. They learn to shake their catch until the neck breaks. They tear into the pelt with their teeth, peeling it back and biting into the meat inside. They toss the bones aside, in most cases.
    Sometimes, like with mice, they just gnaw on the animal whole.
    Rex and Aimee continue to fight regularly. But Aimee’s screams, eventually, become nothing more than background noise. Rex’s friends are nothing more than a muffled memory. Like listening to someone trying to talk underwater. So Jake doesn’t even notice it when there is no more noise at all.
    They all forget about him, and he forgets about them, too.
    He just continues to lay in the shade with his mother, with Paddy. Catch his breakfast. Snare his lunch. Trap his dinner.
    Sniff the yard.
    After Aimee and Rex’s disappearance, Jake and Paddy are left to fend for themselves. The absence is old news. As far as the boy and his canine mother are concerned, Aimee left them a long time ago and Rex, well, was never really there in the first place.
    After several months, a curious neighbor finds Jake in the backyard chewing on the long coil tail of a rat. A seven-year-old who looks the size of a four-year-old. The neighbor tries to communicate with Jake, but he just snarls and grunts and chomps on the tail. Finally, the neighbor gives up and calls the police.
    So child-care services bring Jake to their facilities and begin to go to work on him. Child-development experts are called in to help return Jake to that of a normal functioning boy and to rear him into a man. Experts who all have different opinions. Experts who all want a piece of the boy. Experts who all want to be published.
    Jake is closely monitored for months. It’s over a half year before Jake finally starts to communicate with the staff. He slowly becomes receptive and starts to accept the human attention that he never received at home. He starts to speak again but has trouble with syntax and grammar. He’s a fast learner, but he still huffs and grunts and growls when he gets frustrated. And he still lifts his leg a little when he pees.
    Because Jake’s onset development was stunted, he absorbs information slowly at first. However, his immature, under-developed mind seems the need to catch up with the age of his body. In two years, Jake covers the stages of learning that would normally take six or seven years. By ten-years-old, he’s beginning to interact and play with other children. At year twelve, Jake hasn’t talked about his mother—his dog mother—in over two years.
    Child-care services make a minimal effort to locate Aimee. And since he wasn’t Jake’s biological father, they don’t even bother looking for Rex. Deep down, the only interest in finding either of them would be to file formal charges of neglect. But, really, from the first sign that Jake is showing progress, the state begins looking into foster care.
    They never even do a follow-up at the house to see if Aimee or Rex ever returned home.
    The state looks for years—ever since Jake begins speaking—to find the best suitable candidate to act as a foster family. One that has experience working with children who have special needs. One that knows how to attend the needs of children who were raised in an unpleasant environment, a product of abuse and neglect. One that is loving, caring, attentive, supportive, drug-free...
    And, especially, one that doesn’t have a dog.
    But it doesn’t really matter where he’s placed. Jake’s got other plans. He’s played their game. But now he’s ready to go home. Just because he hasn’t talked about Paddy, doesn’t mean that he hasn’t been thinking about her. Jake’s been secretly plotting for years. He wants to know what happened to his mother, his Paddy, and he’s planning on finding her.
    When Jake is finally placed, a month shy of being a teenager, he immediately scans his new surroundings for ways to escape. He pretends to settle into his new room. He politely sits at the dinner table with the rest of his new family. He hides his disgust—still having not acquired the taste of cooked food. He waits for someone to look the other way. He waits for someone to leave a door open. He waits for everyone to fall asleep.
    He waits.
    He waits.
    He waits.
    When Jake finally escapes, he doesn’t just bolt through an open door and race down the street. He causally unlatches the lock and leisurely disappears from the foster family’s home. He doesn’t know where he’s going, but Jake’s instinct takes over. Somehow, he just knows. He knows.
    Jake’s stride is long at first. He turns a corner and hikes four blocks.
    Jake’s slowly starting to lower his torso as he moves down the street. He turns another corner and hikes six blocks.
    Jake’s left hand touches the ground every dozen steps. He turns another corner.
    He can feel Paddy’s eye watching him, that one sharp blue eye. He can feel her hot breath on his skin. He can feel her soft, comforting coat. Jake can also picture Rex on the phone, kicking Paddy hard enough to make her cry out. He hears Rex’s callous voice clearly:
    One more time and I’m gonna bury that bitch in the backyard.
    When Jake reaches the house, he’s regressed back to seven. Snarling and growling. He heads straight for the backyard, hopping on all fours, chimp-like. Purely animal.
    He’s howling and frantically sniffing at the dirt and the grass. The backyard is vacant—a mirror of what it was over five years ago. The property is completely abandoned. Probably, a neighborhood ghost story. Cursed. A dirty memory.
    Jake picks a spot like he is intuitively drawn to it. He’s down on all fours and starts to dig. He rips and pulls at the weeds and what’s left of the sod. His fingernails scratch the dry dirt; the topsoil is rock-solid but doesn’t slow him down. Jake breaks through the top layer of earth quickly and tosses the bits and pieces, the clops of dirt, aside.
    The deeper Jake gets, the softer the soil. The softer the soil, the faster Jake can work. Jake pauses between scoopfuls of earth only to sniff at the hole—to make sure he’s still on track. And keeps digging and digging. He’s looking for...
    What he’s looking for...
    When Jake finds the first piece, his heart is racing. He dives head-first into the pit, and when he emerges, Jake’s face is black like a coal miner, dust and mud caked on top of sweat. And in his teeth, locked in his jaw, is a large bone.
    Looks like a femur.
    Jake spits out the bone clear from the hole and dives back in. Within minutes, he appears again with what looks like a half of a cantaloupe. And then follows with the other half. The skull, cracked in half. Jake places it near the femur and continues to dig.
    The mandible—also in two pieces—are found near the skull. Jake places the bones on the ground accordingly, below the cantaloupe.
    The more Jake digs, the more bones he finds. Always climbing out of the tomb, bones in his teeth.
    He surfaces with a humerus bone between his teeth, dangling from one end is the flat, triangle of a scapula. He drops them on the ground.
    Jake retrieves more bones and lays them with the rest, setting each in its proper position, like building a model. Like he’s following that song: The neck bone connected to the shoulder bone; the shoulder bone connected to the arm bone...
    Like he’s trying to resurrect the dead.
    From the hole, in his teeth, Jake has a handful of ribs. He tills the ground and bites down on, on... a clavicle?
    Again and again, in the hole and out, the boy with the bones.
    The other scapula. The other humerus.
    Both ulnae and radii, one fractured. The long, studded, spinal column: cervical, thoracic, and lumbar vertebrae.
    The crude, dull dagger of a sternum—its handle, the manubrium.
    Jake finds the pelvic girdle and the other long femur. And he begins to whimper. Still on all fours, Jake assembles the body, moving each piece into place with his mouth. Head bone connected to the jaw bone. Jaw bone connected to the neck bone.
    On and on. This bone connected to that bone. On and on.
    Jake whines like a scared pup as he builds the skeleton. All the memories of his past flood into his head. Again, Rex is screaming:
    One more time and I’m gonna bury that bitch in the backyard.
    Jake finishes laying down the bones, the framework not quite complete—lower legs missing. He crawls to the edge of the hole and stares down into the dark plot. Slowly, he descends and eventually returns with a tibia—the fibula still attached like a violinist’s bow. At the body, the bones drop from Jake’s mouth into his hands, and he gently places them in their proper place.
    Thigh bone connected to the shin bone.
    Full skeleton before him, sans the hands and feet and lower left leg. On his knees, Jake stares at the body—a body that’s not quite right. Its skull a little too small. Its arms and legs a little too long. Spread out, overall, much too tall.
    And no tail.
    Jake’s eyes swell. His face, camouflaged in dirt with lines of clean trailing down his cheeks. He gapes at the skull and the jawbone, chopped in half. The hollow eye sockets look darkly back at him. Jake shivers and feels as if he’s being seen for the first time. He rises, little by little, off his knees and works his way to his feet.
    Jake stands. Erect. Staring at the body. Her body. From all fours to upright. He’s a boy becoming a man. A boy becoming a dog becoming a boy becoming a dog becoming a man.
    The skull, his skull. Rex’s voice resonates:
    One more time and I’m gonna bury that bitch in the backyard.
    The skull, her skull. Jake can still hear Aimee’s screams from the bedroom.



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