The Wild Girls

Pat Murphy

Part One

Chapter One
Don’t Call Me Mouse

I met the Queen of the Foxes in 1972, when my family moved from Connecticut to California.

I was twelve years old. I had just graduated from sixth grade, and I didn’t want to move. But my father got a new job in San Francisco. My mom said California was a great place to live. Nobody asked my brother or me what we thought about the move. So that was that: the movers came and packed up all our stuff, we drove across the country, and there I was, in a new place where I didn’t know anyone.

We weren’t actually in San Francisco. We were in Danville, a little suburban town about half an hour’s drive from San Francisco. The town was surrounded by rolling hills, and the grass on the hills was dead and dry and brown. My mom kept saying they were the “golden hills of California,” but they were really just brown.

It was a summer day, and the air conditioner wasn’t working. My father was at his new job and my mom was unpacking boxes while she waited for the air-conditioner repairman to come. My brother was out somewhere, trying to avoid helping Mom, I think.

We were in the kitchen. When I dropped a glass tumbler and it shattered on the linoleum floor, she told me that I’d helped quite enough.

“Joan, why don’t you go out and explore the neighborhood,” she said, looking up from an open box. There was an edge in her voice.

While we were packing to move and while we were driving across the country, my mom kept talking about what a great place California was, about how we would really like it there. She kept acting cheerful, like this was a wonderful adventure. But that was completely fake. I didn’t believe any of it.

Now we were in California and it was too hot and there were too many boxes to unpack. At least now she wasn’t pretending to be cheerful all the time.

So when she told me to go out and explore, I didn’t argue. I went through the family room and out the sliding-glass door into the backyard.

Our yard in Connecticut had lots of places to sit in the shade and read. There was a mulberry tree with a tire swing hanging from it. My mom had had a big garden filled with flowers and vegetables.

This yard was nothing like that. It was a square of tired-looking grass bordered by a high wooden fence that blocked my view in all directions. From next door, I heard a splash and some kids shouting: one of our neighbors had a swimming pool.

If my mom had been there, she probably would have told me to go over and introduce myself to the kids — maybe we could all play together. But my mom wasn’t there, and I didn’t feel like meeting anyone new.

Our new house was on the edge of a development on the outskirts of town. I opened the gate in the back fence and looked out at a dirt road that ran alongside a set of old railroad tracks. On the far side of the tracks was an orchard — rows of trees with dark, rough trunks and smooth, pale branches. The real-estate agent had told my mom it was a walnut orchard.

If I turned right, the dirt road would lead me into the main part of town, which was about a mile away. If I turned left, the road would lead away from town, into unknown territory.

I stood by the gate for a moment, and then heard another splash from our neighbors’ pool, off to the right. I turned left.

For a hundred yards or so, the dirt road ran parallel to our neighbors’ back fences. Then the road left the housing development behind. To my right were the railroad tracks and the walnut orchard; to my left, another orchard and an open field. A little way farther along, the road and the railroad tracks crossed a small bridge over a creek.

I walked down the dirt road, kicking at stones. The road was deserted; I hadn’t seen anyone since I had left the backyard. But I felt exposed on the road — I could see a long way ahead of me and a long way behind, and I knew that anyone else walking on the road could see me. I didn’t want to be seen. So rather than crossing the bridge, I clambered down the embankment to walk along the creek.

It was cooler by the water. Soft-leafed green trees shaded the gully. Moss grew on the rocks, and jays shrieked at me from the trees. Used to city parks, with their paths and neatly tended flowerbeds, I felt like I was entering the wilderness.

The creek turned, and a tiny path led up the bank, through a tangle of bushes and vines. I climbed up the path into an overgrown woody area. The path continued, leading through weeds and bushes that were taller than I was. There were some walnut trees here and there, but smaller trees and brush had grown up around them.

Through the trees and brush, I caught a glimpse of something orange — a brilliant, unnatural, Day-Glo color. I followed the path toward the color and found a small clearing where the weeds had been cut down. A large easy chair, upholstered in fabric that was a riot of orange daisies on green-and-turquoise paisley patterns, sat under a twisted walnut tree. In front of the chair was a flat-topped boulder, and on the boulder was a teapot with a broken spout. Boards had been wedged among the branches of the tree to make shelves of a sort. Haphazard and not quite level, they supported an odd assortment of items: a jar of peanut butter, a battered metal box, a china cup with a broken handle, two chipped plates, a dingy teddy bear, a metal box of Band-Aids.

I stopped where I was. This looked like someplace out of a book — like a troll’s living room, like a wizard’s retreat in the woods, like a place waiting for something to happen.

“What the hell are you doing here?” a kid’s voice asked.

I looked up, startled. A girl dressed in ragged jeans and a dirty T-shirt sat on a low branch of the tree to my left. She was about my age. Her face was methodically streaked with red-brown clay — vertical stripes on her forehead, horizontal stripes on her cheeks. Her hair was a tangle of reddish curls, held back with a rubber band and decorated with a blue-jay feather.

“I . . . I was just looking around,” I stammered.

“Who said you could come here?” she asked, her voice rising. “This is my place. Private property.”

I felt my face getting hot. “Sorry. I just — ”

“You think you can come poking around anywhere?”

“I said I was sorry. . . .”

“You kids from the development think you own everything.”

“I didn’t mean — ”

“Why don’t you just go back where you came from?”

“That would be fine with me,” I managed to say, just before my voice broke. I turned away, feeling tears on my face. I immediately tripped over a rock and fell hard, catching myself on my hands and one knee. When I scrambled to my feet, the girl was standing beside me.

“Who the hell do you think you are, anyway?” I snarled at her, trying to cover my tears with anger. “I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”

She was studying me, her head cocked to one side. “You haven’t been here before, have you?” she asked, her voice calmer.

I shook my head. “My family just moved to this lousy neighborhood.”

“Your knee is bleeding,” she said. “And so’s your hand. Come on and sit down. I’ve got some Band-Aids.”

I sat in the easy chair, and she washed my cuts with water from the creek, carried in the china cup. While she dabbed at my scraped knee with a wet bandana and put Band-Aids on my injuries, she explained that some kids had been there a few days before and had messed with all her stuff, pulling down the shelves and tipping over the chair. “There are some really mean kids around here,” she said. “You’re lucky I didn’t just start throwing rocks at you. I can hide in the trees and nail a kid with a rock from thirty feet away.”

“Why didn’t you?”

She shrugged. “You were by yourself. I didn’t want to.”

“I’m by myself a lot,” I said.

“Yeah? So am I.”

She sat back on her heels, studying my bandaged knee. “Well, I guess you’ll be okay now.” She smiled then. “You asked who I am, so I guess I better tell you.” She met my eyes with a steady gaze. “I’m the Queen of the Foxes.”

“The Queen of the Foxes,” I repeated.

“That’s right — the Queen of All the Foxes.” Suddenly she was on her feet. “Come on. I’ll show you something cool.”

There was no time for any more questions. She was following a narrow path through the trees, and I had no choice but to follow.

“Something cool” was a place by the creek where you could catch orange-and-black newts that had thoughtful eyes. The Queen of the Foxes caught one and handed it to me. The newt felt like cold rubber in my hand. It didn’t struggle to escape. Instead, it blinked at me and then started walking with high, slow steps, as if it were still moving through water.

The Queen of the Foxes was floundering in the water and getting thoroughly muddy. At first, I stayed on the bank. I said I’d be in trouble if I got my clothes too dirty. Then she pointed out that my bleeding hand had already left smears of blood and mud on my shorts. I would already be in trouble, so I might as well have all the fun I could. So I got into the creek, too, and released the newt that she had caught for me and caught another.

Then we sat on the bank and dried out. While we were there, she painted my face with clay from the bank. War paint, she called it. I thought it was goofy, but fun. Back in Connecticut, some girls I knew had started experimenting with makeup — painting their fingernails and wearing lip gloss. They spent a lot of time talking about which boys were cute and what was on sale at the mall. I liked catching newts and wearing war paint a lot better.

We went back to the clearing with the easy chair, and the Queen of the Foxes showed me how to make a squawking noise by blowing on a blade of grass held tight between my hands. A couple of blue jays sat in the walnut tree and scolded us for making such a racket.

“Hey, what’s your name, anyway?” I asked her.

“My name?” She leaned back and looked up at the branches of the walnut tree. “You can call me Fox.”

“That’s not a name.”

She shrugged. “Why not?”

“I can’t tell my mom that your name is Fox. She won’t believe it.”

“Why do you have to tell her anything?”

“She’ll ask.”

She shrugged. “So make up something she’ll like better. You call me Fox and I’ll call you Mouse.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Then what should I call you?”

“Call me Newt,” I said, thinking of the slow-moving amphibians with their thoughtful eyes. “That would be okay.”

Somehow or other, the afternoon went away, and I realized that I was hungry. “Hey, I got to get going,” I said. “My mom will be really pissed if I’m late for dinner.”

“Ah,” she said, lying back in the grass. “I don’t have to worry about that. I don’t have a mother.”

“Yeah?” I squinted at her, but her eyes were closed and she didn’t notice. As I tried to figure out what to say, I heard a man’s voice calling in the distance. “Sarah! Sarah, are you there?”

She frowned. “That’s my dad,” she muttered. “I better go see what he wants.” She ran down a different path, heading toward the sound of the voice. After a minute, I followed her.

The path led to an old white house on the edge of the woods. It wasn’t like any house I’d ever seen before — there was no driveway, no yard. A dirt road that led off through the trees ended in front of the house, where a battered old sedan was parked beside an enormous motorcycle. Weeds grew in the flowerbed beside the front steps, and there was all kinds of junk near the door: a cast-iron bathtub half-filled with water, a barbeque built from an oil drum, a pile of hubcaps. The paint on the house was peeling.

Fox stood on the front porch, talking to a burly man wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt with the sleeves torn off. They looked over and saw me standing on the edge of the woods. “This is Newt,” Fox said. “Newt, this is my dad.”

He didn’t look like anyone’s father. He needed a shave. He had three silver studs in his left ear. His dark hair was tied back with a rubber band. On his right shoulder was a tattoo, an elaborate pattern of spiraling black lines.

“How’s it going, Newt?” Fox’s dad didn’t seem at all startled at my strange new name. “Where did you come from?”

“Uh . . . my family just moved here, Mister uh . . .”

“You can call me Gus,” he said. “I don’t answer to ; ‘Mister.’”

I nodded uncomfortably. He didn’t look like anyone’s dad, but it still seemed strange to call him by his first name.

“I found her in the woods,” Fox said. “Showed her where the newts live.”

“That’s good. I’m glad you found your way here.” He seemed genuinely pleased. “Be nice for Fox to have some company.”

I kept looking at the tattoo. I couldn’t seem to keep my eyes away. I had never met anyone with a tattoo before.

He grinned, watching my face, then walked down from the porch and sat on the bottom step. “You interested in tattoos? Take a look.” I studied his arm. “You can touch it if you like. It’s okay.”

Gingerly, I traced one of the spirals. I couldn’t feel the lines on his skin: it felt like warm skin, nothing more.

“It’s an ancient Celtic symbol,” Gus said. “It represents constant change — transformation and rebirth. It’s been good luck for me. Right after I got it, I sold my first novel.”

There was a little too much there for me to absorb, but I nodded as if I understood.

After a minute, he stood up and said, “Well, it’s just about time for dinner. Do you want to join us, Newt? Nothing fancy — just canned chili.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’d better go home.”

“Don’t forget to wash your face,” he suggested.

Fox and I used the hose outside the house, and then I headed home. “See you later, Fox.”

“Later, Newt. Come back tomorrow, okay? Come and have lunch.”

That was how I met the Queen of the Foxes.

I got home right when my father got back from work and he was telling my brother that he shouldn’t be sitting around watching trash on TV. I snuck up to my room and changed before anyone noticed my muddy clothes and wet shoes.

When I got downstairs, my father was complaining to my mother that it had cost too much to fix the air conditioner. My brother was watching TV again. I set the table and we had dinner.

My mother and father did not like one another much. Dinner was just about the only time they sat down together. A vague sense of tension always hung over the table, centering on my father. He was always angry — not about anything in particular, but about everything, all the time. But he pretended he wasn’t angry. He was always joking, but the jokes weren’t very funny.

“I see you’ve decided that meat is better if it’s black around the edges,” he said to my mother that night. The London broil was well done, though far from black. “That’s an interesting theory.”

My mom laughed in a brittle way at my father’s comment, ignoring the edge in his voice.

He glanced at me. “Your mother thinks that charcoal is good for the digestion,” he said.

I didn’t say anything. My own strategy for dealing with my father was to keep my head down. I tried not to call attention to myself. I said as little as possible.

My father turned to my brother. “So what educational shows did you watch on TV today? I’m sure you can learn a great deal from watching The Price Is Right.”

“I didn’t watch TV all day,” my brother said sullenly.

“That’s right,” my mom said. “Mark was out all morning, exploring the neighborhood.”

“I see — out looking for trouble instead of broadening your mind with television. Well, that’s just fine.”

Mark was three years older than I was. Once, in Connecticut, the police had picked him up for being out after curfew. My father brought that up whenever he was annoyed with Mark, and he was often annoyed.

“I’m sure there just as many young hoodlums in this town as there were in Connecticut,” my father continued. “I’m confident you’ll find them.”

“I met some kids down the block,” Mark said. “They all belong to the country club. Can we join the country club so that I can go swimming with them?” This last question was directed to my mom.

“Swimming at the country club?” my father said. “Now isn’t that nice? Maybe we need to get you a job so that you don’t have so much time weighing heavy on your hands.”

Mark didn’t say anything. My father was talking about how young he had been when he had his first job. I noticed that Mark was staring at me, and I could feel it coming. He was going to say something to get my father off his case and onto mine. When my father paused, Mark said, “Hey, Joan, how come you always hold on to your glass when you eat? It looks stupid.”

I looked down at my hands. My left hand was gripping my glass of milk tightly.

“You look like you’re afraid that someone’s going to try to steal your milk from you,” my father said, chuckling. “Just relax. You’re not living in a den of wild animals.”

Chapter Two
A Great Place to Hide

The next day, my mom asked me where I’d been the day before. I told her I’d met a girl my age who lived nearby. I said that her name was Sarah and that she was interested in biology, just like I was.

I didn’t bother to mention that she said she was the Queen of the Foxes, that she threw rocks at people, or that she called me Newt and I called her Fox. I figured my mom didn’t really need to know all that. I said that my new friend had invited me to join her for lunch.

Just when my mom was starting to ask a bunch of questions I didn’t want to answer, the phone rang. It was one of my mother’s friends in Connecticut. I stood there for a minute, like I was waiting for my mother’s attention, until she waved me out the door — which is what I had really been waiting for.

I went down the dirt road, along the creek, and up the little trail to Fox’s clearing in the woods. Fox was curled up in the easy chair, reading a book. I had forgotten how ragged her clothes were. She had washed her face and hands and she was wearing a clean T-shirt, but the same pair of torn and grubby jeans.

“Hi,” I said.

“It’s too bad there aren’t any hedgehogs around here,” she said, as if she were continuing a conversation that we’d begun earlier. “They have them in England. They live in the gardens and the hedges.” She tapped her finger on the book, and I looked over her shoulder at a picture of a spiny animal with round black button eyes. It looked kind of like a cross between a mouse and a scrub brush. “That’s a hedgehog. We don’t have them around here.”

“It’s cute,” I said hesitantly.

“Foxes eat ’em,” she said, grinning.

I gave her a dubious look.

“Okay,” she said. “Not really. Hedgehogs have too many spines. But foxes would eat them if they could, I bet.”

I didn’t have a chance to reply to that. She had set the book aside. “Hey, I wanted to show you something.” She was out of the chair. “Let’s go.” She led me off into the woods to show me where a branch of the stream ran into a culvert, a concrete tunnel that was so big that when I was standing in the stream I could barely reach the top with my outstretched arm. We waded in the stream and went into the culvert, walking through the algae-scented darkness until the mouth of the tunnel was a tiny spot of light in the distance.

“Isn’t this great?” Fox’s voice echoed from the cement walls.

I looked into the darkness, black and velvety, silent except for the delicate music of trickling water. It was simultaneously terrifying and inviting. In books, kids were always finding secret passages to other worlds. I didn’t really believe in secret passages, but the culvert felt like it could be a secret passage if there were secret passages. “Yeah,” I said. “It’s great.”

“Even in the middle of the afternoon, it’s cool in here,” Fox said. “It’s a great place to hide. I don’t know where it goes, but one of these days, I’m going to bring a flashlight and keep going. Then I’ll find out.”

I glanced toward the glimmer of light at the mouth of the culvert, then stared into the darkness again and shivered. “Okay,” I said. “We could do that.”

“Great. Let’s go see how the newts are.” She splashed in the direction of the opening and I followed, grateful to return to the heat and the light of the day.

The newts were fine, and we lay on the bank of the creek and watched squirrels run in the branches, playing what looked like an endless game of tag.

“I’ll show you some secrets,” she said, and she showed me a maze of tiny paths that ran through the underbrush, just big enough for us, no bigger. “Tag,” she said, touching my arm, “you’re it.”

Then she ran away into the maze and I had to chase her, ducking under a branch, running around a corner, always staying on the path because trying to plunge through the bushes was scratchy and painful. I tagged her and then she chased me, whooping and shouting as she ran. Around and around, up this path and down that. Sometimes, I could catch a glimpse of the clearing with the easy chair. And sometimes I was deep in the bushes, concealed from the world. Around and around, like the squirrels in the branches, until I knew that the path by the broken branch led back to the clearing and that the one by a pile of rocks led back to the creek and so on.

Fox was chasing me, and she had fallen silent. I didn’t know where she was. I stayed still, listening, then crept back toward the clearing. I was almost there when I heard a sound behind me. Fox dropped from a branch of a walnut tree and tagged me from behind. “You’re it,” she said. “Let’s have lunch.”

We went back the clearing for lunch — it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to eat peanut butter on crackers under the old walnut tree.

“Are there really foxes around here?” I asked her.

“Of course.”

“Can I see them?”

“Maybe sometime,” she said. “They’re never around during the day.” She glanced down at our lunch. “They like peanut butter.”

I frowned, trying to imagine a fox eating peanut butter. “So how did you get to be the Queen of the Foxes?”

She was sitting in the easy chair, and the sun shining through the leaves of the walnut trees dappled her hair. I squinted my eyes in the lazy afternoon heat, and the bright spots of light looked like jewels; the battered chair, like a throne. She tipped her head back regally, looking up into the leaves. “It started a long time ago,” she said slowly. “Back when I was just a little girl.”

Then she told me this story.

Once there was a woman who did not like who she was. She felt uneasy with herself, as if she did not fit inside her own body. When she looked in the mirror, she did not recognize herself. Was that her nose? Were those her eyes? They didn’t seem quite right, though she could not have told you what the right nose or eyes would be.

The woman lived with her husband in a house near Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. She had a little girl who was old enough to go to school. Sometimes, the woman looked at the little girl and wondered if this little girl was really hers. She couldn’t tell.

One day, when the woman’s little girl was at school and her husband was at work, the woman left the key to the house on the kitchen table and walked out. She walked along a trail that led into Golden Gate Park. Even though it was in the middle of a city, Golden Gate Park was really big with lots of woods and wild places. When the woman was deep in the park, she left the trail and walked between the trees where there was no trail.

She was far from the trail when it started to rain — gently at first, and then harder, raindrops hammering against her and soaking her shirt and her jeans. She looked for a place to take shelter and found a hollow log that was large enough to crawl inside.

She crawled in on her belly. It was dry inside the log — snug and warm. She waited for the rain to stop, closing her eyes and listening to the water rattle against the leaves overhead, drip to the forest floor, and trickle through dead leaves to reach the thirsty ground. Listening to the rain, she fell asleep.

When she woke, she had changed. For the first time, she felt at home in her body. The smells around her were intense and inviting — the delicious scent of rotten leaves and grubs; the warm smell of the squirrel that lived in the tree overhead. As she listened to the squirrel in the branches, she could feel her ears moving to follow the sound. When she looked at her body, she saw that she was covered with fur. She nuzzled the long, bushy tail that curled up around her paws.

Somehow, as she slept, she had changed into a fox.

Fox shifted in the easy chair, looking at me for the first time since she had started telling the story. “That was my mother,” she said. “I was the little girl.”

I was lying on the ground, drowsing as I listened to Fox’s voice. Listening to the story about the woman turning into a fox, I had forgotten why Fox was telling it. I sat up, staring at Fox.

“You’re saying your mother turned into a fox?”

She nodded. The sunlight still dappled her hair, but it no longer looked like jewels. She was a ragged girl sitting on a battered easy chair, watching me with a strange intensity.

I hesitated. Maybe she was joking. Maybe she was crazy. “That can’t happen.”

She shrugged. “It did. I left one day to go to school. When I came back, my mother was gone.”

“Maybe she just went off somewhere. Why do you figure she turned into a fox?”

Fox leaned her head against the frayed back of the chair. “About six months after she disappeared, my father and I went walking in the park just after dark. We were walking along a trail, and I saw a fox, sitting under a tree and watching us. I knew it was my mother.”

“How did you know?”

“By the look in her eyes. I just knew. I asked my dad and he said that it was as good an explanation as any.” She frowned, looking down at her hands. “Things weren’t so great then. Dad was drinking and stuff.” She looked up. “He quit that now. Then his uncle died and left him this house and this land. So we moved out here. And after we’d been out here a month, I was sitting on the porch and I saw a fox. It stopped and looked at me.”

“It wasn’t the same fox,” I said. “A fox couldn’t get out here from San Francisco.”

She shrugged. “How do you know? What do you know about foxes?”

“Not much,” I admitted.

“Then how do you know it couldn’t happen?”

“I guess it could,” I said at last. I didn’t know much about foxes, but it sure sounded like a crazy story. And I couldn’t figure out if she was serious or not.

It seemed like talking about her dad might be safer than talking about her mother. “What does your dad do, anyway? How come he’s at home in the middle of the day?”

“He writes stories and books. Mostly science fiction. Stuff with rockets on the cover, even when there aren’t any rockets in the story.”

I was silent for a moment, trying to absorb this information. I was figuring out what to say next, when Fox sat upright. “Listen,” she said, her voice suddenly urgent.

In the distance, I could hear voices — some boys talking and laughing. “Come on,” Fox said, jumping out of the chair. “We got to hide.” I followed without question.

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Copyright © 2007 by Pat Murphy

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