Empire of Wild Read online

  And then she heard it. A low growl leaking out of the dark.

  Zeus’s eyes opened wide.

  It came again—a long, deep rumble resonating in a large chest. She pointed to the woods. Was it coming from the trees? Zeus shook his head and lifted a shaky hand to point.

  Joan slowly turned, using one arm to tuck Zeus in behind her. Just where the tent turned the corner into the dark stood a hunched figure, head riotous with knots and tufts of hair or fur, its chest heaving in another growl.

  Zeus turned and ran.

  Joan stood her ground for a minute, trying to make out the creature’s face in the dark. “Mr. Heiser?” she managed to say, trembling. “Is that you?”

  She was answered by a snarl so shrill and hard it was like spit landing on her cheek, and she, too, turned and ran. She could hear it galloping after her, feel its heat as it got closer.

  She caught up to Zeus and the two of them burst into the light of the parking lot, just barely avoiding bowling over a group of old women gathered under a string of white lights.

  “Fuck me,” Joan shouted, as she skidded to a stop, frantically searching the night behind them. Someone tsked over her language. A couple of grannies giggled at it. Zeus was shaking so hard, she grabbed his hand and walked the boy quickly past all the cars and trucks, both of them panting.

  Once they’d crossed the parking area, they picked up the pace and ran, Zeus’s hand tight in Joan’s, all the way to the road.

  “What are we gonna do now?” Zeus gasped when they got there.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.” She’d actually forgotten about the Jeep. “Dammit!”

  Zeus bent over, his hands on his knees. “Maybe…maybe we can hitchhike?”

  She massaged a cramp out of her side and nodded. “Good plan. Let’s head toward town.” They walked up the road, toward a white vehicle parked on the gravel verge.

  Joan was close enough to read the licence plate before she realized it was their Jeep. The doors were unlocked and the keys were on the driver’s seat.

  “How?” Zeus said.

  “I don’t know. And I don’t care.”

  They scrambled into the car, scanning the shadows around them for movement. At first, she missed the small, cream card tucked under her wipers. She got out and grabbed it, waiting until she was back inside and the doors were locked before she looked at it.

  On one side, in raised letters, was Thomas Heiser, CEO, Resource Development Specialists. On the other, in careful blue script: Joan, go home.

  * * *

  They drove in silence, pulling into the parking lot of the New Star Motel without having said a word to each other. Joan turned off the engine and they sat there a moment in the quiet. Then Zeus’s phone dinged. He unbuckled his seatbelt and dug it out of his pocket. His lips moved as he read, his face lit blue by the screen.

  “Ajean says we have to get back. Now.”

  Joan lowered her forehead to the steering wheel, resting it on the cool moulded plastic. Not that it would matter if they stayed, since it was obvious they were grossly unprepared to rescue Victor.

  “She says she has something that will help.”

  “The cure for amnesia?” Joan felt tears behind her eyes.

  “Here’s exactly what she wrote: Come home now. There’s things that can help. We’ll go get some. So’s you can trap the dog.”

  “Great.” Joan opened the door. “Just fucking fantastic.” She got out and slammed it behind her while Zeus scrambled out the other side. “That’s what I want to do, catch a fucking rogarou. Let’s get our stuff and get out of here.”

  VICTOR AND SUDDEN WEST IN THE WOODS

  For the first time in God knows how long, Victor saw the sun. He didn’t think it was the actual sun, but rather the suggestion of the sun, just enough so you could believe the sun was there.

  Under this newly lit sky, Victor held his hands up in front of his face. It was reassuring to see where he began and ended. To be certain that he was more than breath and heartbeat and longing and loss.

  Here were his fingers, a shade of burnt ochre in the dim light, with half-moons of maroon under each nail. Blood? Had he been bleeding? Was he lying in a hospital bed, having been shot by a careless hunter; was the prison of woods only monitors and morphine?

  He splayed his hands on his chest and felt around for wounds. Nothing. Then he remembered falling and that his chin had bled. He touched that too. But there was no cut to feel, no bruise to worry. Had he dreamt it?

  So why the blood on his hands? And where the hell was his rifle? He scanned the ground around him. Nothing but dirt and scrub and the varicose veins of old tree roots. He checked the trunks themselves, hoping to find the gun leaning on one of them. It wasn’t there.

  Then it occurred to him that if the sun was indeed setting somewhere, that somewhere had to be west. West. He had a direction. If he kept aiming steadily toward the light source, he could avoid the circles he’d been turning in. He might just find a way out.

  He took off running toward the light, which began dimming as if it were a special effect on a sped-up film. He ran harder. He jumped felled logs and trampled ground ferns, hearing his own footsteps from a distance. The darkness behind him was absolute, the same darkness he’d existed in for his indeterminate internment. He could feel it on his heels like the velvet muzzle of a large dog.

  Up ahead, the smudge of sun lowered itself gracefully somewhere behind the trees. He chased it, pushing low branches out of his path with blood-stained hands as they caught at his jacket and his braid.

  Under the panic and the burn and the sprint was a swarm of excitement. Just ahead, maybe, or just behind, there was a familiar scent. Smoke, lotion, rose lip balm, peach and cotton. And the image of the curve at the bottom of her breast.

  Joan.

  Stitch by stitch, loop over loop, Victor was made for Joan. He knew that the day he met her in Montreal, in the bar, with her quick mouth and face flushed with drink, standing with a hip thrown forward, rubbing her eye to a grey smoke of mascara and bourbon. He could feel her now the same way he felt her that night—as inevitable, as necessary. His job was to exist so that she could keep running that mouth, keep kissing him with a thousand little kisses in the oddest spots: inside of the elbow, back of the neck, above the belly button, on the exact spot where the zipper on his jeans began. There was no other reason for him to exist. And it was enough.

  Where had she gone? What had she done while he’d been trapped here? How long had he been here?

  He ran.

  Finally, at the end of his strength, he burst through the trees.

  No. No! NO!

  He turned in a quick circle, a mad movement with no purpose.

  What the fuck?

  He was back in the clearing where he began.

  He screamed into the space, fists at his sides, leaning forward to project, to place blame or find release. And there, in the middle of the clearing, before the dark became complete, he saw it. A wingback chair, moss green velvet on a dark wood frame.

  And then the black swallowed them both.

  10

  GO HOME

  They pulled up to the house in the deepest dark of night. Joan prodded Zeus half-awake long enough to stagger inside and flop down on the living room couch. She pulled the uneven blue blanket off the recliner, one that Zeus had knitted for her as a Christmas present, and tucked him in. Then she dragged herself to the bedroom.

  She was still awake as the birds began singing in the soft dark, their chorus growing louder as the sky lightened. She watched as a ladybug crawled across her window screen. Ladybugs loved wood, so they were always around while her family was working. She learned young that they liked to bite. They would land on her father and he would cup them in his callused hands and throw them into the wind or off a roof. But her brothers liked to crush them, releasing their distinctive metallic reek, and she would always cry out, “Leave them be!”

  They’d laugh and smoosh the sma
ll, red bodies as close to her face as they could get.

  One summer she decided to build a ladybug colony near the back shed where they would be safe and multiply. She collected as many as she could, depositing them into a Mason jar stolen from her mere’s canning supplies, which she prepared by punching holes in the lid with a screwdriver and filling the jar with leaves crusty with aphids. The ladybugs were like pony beads in there, rolling around when they lost their grip, climbing stems.

  The last week of that July, she and her family went to her uncle’s island in Honey Harbour. She made sure her bugs had extra leaves and set the jar in the shade cast by the shed roof before she left.

  When they got back on a Sunday evening, she ran through the house and straight out the back. Halfway down the lawn, she felt a shadow of panic that made her pick up the pace. She rounded the shed and was relieved to see the jar sitting in the long grass under the overhang, exactly as she’d left it. She sat down beside it, already determined to let them all go.

  She picked up the jar. It felt heavier than usual. Raising it to eye level, she saw that it now contained three inches of murky water. It had rained while they were away and the air holes had turned into faucets. The bugs didn’t have a chance. Two dozen round bodies floated on the top, clumped together and motionless. She’d killed them.

  * * *

  Joan fell into sleep at last with tears in her eyes, which was normal for this room these days.

  * * *

  “Auntie, wake up.” Zeus shook her shoulder.

  She sighed into her pillow and rolled over to find him standing over her, his arms crossed like a disapproving parent.

  “What, for godssakes?”

  “It’s almost noon. You said we should get an early start.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, his hair standing out on his head in sleep spikes. When she looked confused, he said, “Remember? The text we got in Hook River? From Ajean?”

  She yawned. “So noon is early?”

  “Not my fault, man. Someone tucked me in with a rad blanket with great sleep properties. I had to fight my way awake.”

  She had to smile at him. “Right, so let’s pour some coffee into me and head over to the old woman.”

  * * *

  Ajean was down at the shore when they arrived, sitting at the picnic table eating a slice of baloney straight from the package while three of her grandkids threw rocks off the dock.

  When she heard them coming down the path, she turned and said, “Holay, you guys just get in?”

  Zeus lowered himself onto the picnic table bench beside her and grabbed a slice. Joan lit a cigarette and sat opposite. “Sorry. We got in late and slept in.”

  Ajean pinched Zeus’s cheek affectionately, then surveyed Joan. “You look like shit.”

  “Thanks. You look old.”

  The woman cackled. “Did you find Victor?”

  “Kind of,” Zeus said.

  “Hmm. Did you find the rogarou, then?”

  Zeus again answered, “Kind of.”

  Ajean grabbed the lunchmeat and tossed it back into the grocery bag. “Kendall, Kylie…er…the other one, let’s go,” she shouted to the kids. “Zeus, you okay to watch them for a while this afternoon? Me and Joan gotta go on a mission. No kids allowed.”

  “I’m not a kid,” Zeus protested, but Ajean stared him down and eventually he nodded.

  * * *

  Ajean pulled a long skirt over her jogging pants and talked while she laced up her moccasins. “I don’t know much about that magic from over there.” She pointed with her lips randomly to the east, which Joan took to mean Europe. “But I don’t trust it. I believe it, but I don’t trust it.” The old woman was bundled against the chill with a peculiar layering of sweaters. The top one was a child’s crewneck with a faded Daffy Duck on the front, his beak open and fist swinging as if in the middle of shouting Tthantasthic! Her braid was tucked in but was so long it hung out the bottom of her sweaters, making it look like she had a wispy, grey tail.

  “Wonder if the old white people in town know anything?” she mused, then answered her own question. “No, that’s the problem, them—no connection, no living in their old stories.”

  She chewed her lips and paced the kitchen, clasping and unclasping her hands. Joan sat at the table. Zeus was in the living room, sprawled out on the couch while the three little girls danced wildly in front of the TV, which was turned to the top-ten video countdown.

  “You heard of the salt bones?” Ajean asked at last.

  “Salt bones? Is that what you put in soup to make stock?”

  “What? No. Jeez, you can’t cook, can you? Your mom shoulda spent more time inside the house instead of on damn roofs.”

  “Ajean, what about salty bones.”

  “Salt bones, moron. Salt bones. Angelique never told you about them?”

  Joan shook her head.

  “And you never grew nothing?” She lowered her voice, stroking her own arm. “Like, in your body?”

  Joan sighed. “I swear, first my cooking and now with the lack of kids. I get it, I’m a bad woman.”

  “Dieu, no. I don’t mean kids. Jesus, anyone can grow those.” Ajean threw her arm out in the direction of her granddaughters, each one concentrating on matching Nicki Minaj’s twerking, each one falling far short of the mark. “I mean things, like new parts, bones, kind of.”

  “What the hell? No, I’m pretty sure I just have the usual amount of the bones.”

  Ajean stroked a single long hair that grew out of her chin, like an evil genius in need of a better goatee, as she considered. “I don’t think your mother ever grew one, neither.”

  At last, she handed her tote bag, in which things rattled, to Joan to carry and pushed the screen door open, calling to the little girls, “You kids be good, you.”

  They were past St. Anne’s Church and halfway to Dusome’s before Ajean said another word. Since she moved at a pace that stole Joan’s breath, Joan was fine with the silence.

  “Angelique, she took me with her to bury hers. That’s where we’ll go. Should be hers, anyways, if you don’t have one of your own.”

  Joan was too winded to ask for more explanation.

  They walked between the paved road and the dusty grass. Only one car passed them, driven by Sven, the Swede who’d bought the Jug City store up near the elementary school, by the last beach before you hit the gated community that used to be the halfbreed settlement before the land got expensive. He honked twice and gave them a wave out his window.

  Ajean raised her middle finger. “Damn capitalists.” She clucked her tongue. “Sure hope these jack-offs haven’t built over the spot. If they have, I hope those scary movies have it right and building over old Indian stuff makes your kids disappear into televisions.”

  They walked up the hill and around the bend, and didn’t stop until they got to Dusome’s Garage. This was where Joan had run that afternoon of the rogarou, but it was also where she stopped for Popsicles with her cousins on long bike rides around the Bay, depositing their quarters into a plastic container that Dusome set out by the white freezer. He never monitored the kids. His attention was saved for those seeking his skills on troubled engines, the older the better. After he passed away, the garage was locked up. It had sat unused so long it now looked like a cardboard box left out in the rain, almost melted into the cracked asphalt. Ajean headed around to the back where the grass was scabby with gravel.

  “Where in hell—” Joan said.

  “Shh. This is holy land now.”

  “Dusome’s Garage?” Joan had lowered her voice nonetheless.

  “No, no, moron girl. Something has been left here. Something that can’t forget itself.”

  Whenever the old people got quieter in their volume and more precise in their words, Joan had learned to shut the hell up. So she did.

  They walked up the driveway, past a chair and standing ashtray, both rusted to sculpture, to the edge of a small woods saved from development by a rare owl who nested th
ere. Ajean was bent over scanning the ground. She stopped between a huge willow and a greying birch, and knelt on a spot where the braid of shallow roots had left a hollow. “Hand me that shovel there.”

  Joan reached into Ajean’s tote bag and pulled out a woodhandled garden spade.

  “We just need the right hands to free it. We need the right words to sing it back. Magic is patient like that.”

  Ajean made the sign of the cross with the small shovel, her eyes closed. She bent over and extended her hand, dangling the shovel from the very tip of the handle. The breeze scattered ancient litter across the rocky ground—tin cans with old pop logos, crunchy papers, bleached cigarette butts like tiny scrolls.

  “Amen,” Ajean said when she was done, and she let the shovel drop. The pointed tip found purchase in the earth. She pushed herself up and then dusted her hands off on the front of her long skirt.

  “Okay then,” she said to Joan. “Dig.”

  Joan sighed. She should have known she was here for manual labour.

  “What am I looking for?”

  “Just shut up and dig, you.”

  She dug. The ground was hard and she had to chip away at it, pulling small clumps out and stopping to examine every rock. When Ajean said nothing, she’d continue.

  She chopped through two smaller tree roots, releasing a meaty scent that made her feel a bit murderous. Then, when the hole was about a foot deep, she hit something different. Carefully shovelling away a little more dirt, she spotted a piece of old cloth. She stopped and Ajean peered in.

  “That’s it. Careful now. Don’t yank it all crazy and spill it.”

  Spill it?

  Joan gently dug around the wadded fabric until she had enough room to pry up the whole bundle. It was crusted and stiff, almost fossilized in places from groundwater and pressure, but it was definitely a tea towel. And it had belonged to her mother’s family—she could tell by the distinctive crocheted loop with the broken button on the top edge so that it could be hung off a stove handle.