Empire of Wild Read online

  Zeus’s steady breathing was peaceful, and in that comforting silence, Joan remembered how much she liked the road. There were so many things to see and not enough time to overthink them. Out of the corner of her eye, as they passed a rundown bar with a hand-painted sign of a misshapen boar, she caught two women in sundresses slow dancing in the parking lot between a pile of firewood and a rusted-out pickup. Just as the sky swelled to the kind of deep blue that is velvet, a shooting star took its time swooning over the ragged dark of the trees. A family of deer on the side of the highway watched traffic with reflective eyes.

  But the road also made her long even harder for Victor. Over the years, road trips were an excuse for them to be neither here nor there, free from their daily lives. Fucking in the back seat behind a Tim Hortons; tipping lamps off desks in motels that still had smoking rooms; enjoying the smell of themselves on each other’s hands and faces while ordering breakfast at four o’clock in the afternoon at Denny’s. They once parked on the side of the road just to run into a field tilled like corduroy. They drank red wine out of paper cups on the hood of the Jeep, watching waterfalls carve profiles into rock. And they stopped at every roadside attraction they came to, from a mystery hole in the mountains of West Virginia to a massive gunfight depicted by wooden cut-outs along a strip of dusty New Mexico highway.

  She pushed the heel of her palm against the seam of her jean shorts, but that’s not where the ache was.

  * * *

  Hook River wasn’t a river at all. It was a small community surrounded by patchy woods and rolling hills of grass and shrub, which had grown on the side of the reserve like a tumour. They arrived just after nine and she followed the posterboard signs to the gathering. When she parked the Jeep, Zeus stayed asleep. And so she got out on her own, closing the door quietly behind her. She lit a cigarette and took stock.

  In the upturned palm of the valley sat the tent from the parking lot. Christmas lights had been strung around the door and along its seams. The whole thing glowed from the generator-fed spotlights that illuminated its insides—she could hear the hum from here. Vehicles from the reserve were parked outside, the passenger door on one F-150 left open so that the inside light wavered with the draining of its battery. She finished her cigarette and flicked it into the ditch, then crawled into the Jeep to change. She emerged in a tight skirt, heels and a low-cut sweater, and with a long, red coat draped over her arm. Rummaging in her bag for her knife, she found the bundle of sage. In the angle of her open car door, she lit the medicine. The flames undressed each stem in the bundle to thick smoke, which she pushed over her face and head, praying for whatever the hell it was going to take to get this done. She closed the door carefully, locked up the car so no one would sneak up on Zeus, pulled on the coat and lit another smoke.

  She could hear the congregation singing from here, sounding like a circle of wolves under the moon. Joan exhaled, listening for his voice among all the others.

  Hallelujah…

  The singing stopped and there was a burst of applause. The tent started to empty. She inhaled, allowed the smoke to roll over her tongue and fill her chest, then exhaled into the navy night. She ducked her head to stare into the passenger window to check on Zeus. He was still out. She started across the field as people reboarded their cars and trucks and pulled out of the makeshift parking lot in smears of light. As the last of the cars swung up the road to her left, headlights sweeping over the field, crickets replaced the choir. She heard someone shouting: “Leave the chairs stacked at the back for tomorrow.” Then another voice: “Get those Bibles into the bins.”

  As she drew close, Joan saw two men in blue shirts drag the pale green velvet chair she’d seen on the stage at the Walmart into a clearing at the side of the tent. They set it down on the ground, then shifted it until the legs sat even.

  And then the Reverend emerged from the back of the tent and stared around the quiet expanse. He walked over to the chair and settled himself, crossing his legs at the knee. He wore a white suit and shirt, its stiff collar pushed together by the clean knot of a black tie. He tilted his dark head back against the worn velvet seat and seemed to be watching the moon blow clouds from its full face. He lit a cigarette and put it to burn in the crystal ashtray that rested on the wide arm, its small light winking like a buoy. He was clearly illuminated in that light suit under the full moon, but she couldn’t do more than glance at him yet. She was trying to keep her guts from roiling.

  If he saw her approach, he didn’t let on. She hoped she could hold it together. She wouldn’t try to persuade the Reverend that he was her husband, not straight on, anyways. If he was Victor and not her own madness, she didn’t want to spook him. She searched the perimeter for signs of wildlife, especially those who could masquerade as man. He was alone.

  He spoke first. “There are whole societies who based their science on the stars.” He lifted a hand to gesture above his head. “As if these points were a manual of some sort.”

  The words and intonation were all wrong, but the voice…

  She was so close that she could smell the good smell of his sweat, though it was mixed with something artificial, like cologne from a bathroom quarter machine. His dark hair was carefully combed, parted and oiled. There were no earrings in his ears, no tiny crucifix dangling from his neck, only a silver watch chain that stretched across his tailored vest.

  She said, “And what’s the better story? Some white guy on a throne held up by cherubs and weather?”

  He pushed air out of his nose in a kind of laugh, tapped ashes off the end of the unsmoked cigarette and regarded her in the glow of the tent lights.

  She fought to stand still under his gaze, then shifted her weight onto one leg and pushed out a hip. That’s right, she thought. Take it all in. But if he appreciated the view, she couldn’t tell.

  “So nice to see you again. Joan, right?” He was being conversational. It hurt like hell. “What’s it been, a month, maybe two? I’ve thought about you since that day.”

  Her rebellious heart leapt and she put a hand on her chest to hold it in. “You have?”

  “Well, it’s not every day someone comes into the tent claiming I’m her long-lost husband. Don’t be ashamed, though, Joan. Addictions can be demon enough without the heat and lack of sleep. I hope you’ve been feeling better.”

  “I’m not a drunk.” She reached into her coat pocket and fingered the tin of cigarettes, then the well-worn edges of softened playing cards. The other pocket held her Zippo. And her knife. She felt the weight of both but made no move toward either. She nodded toward the ashtray. “You smoke now?”

  He looked down, almost surprised to see the lit cigarette there. “I enjoy the smell of smoke. I don’t much care to inhale, but there’s something about the smell.”

  She watched his hands, the way his fingers still looked callused even though the nails were neatly trimmed. She wanted to push those hands inside her blouse. Instead she spoke, struggling to keep her voice even.

  “Maybe it reminds you of something. Or someone.”

  He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he crushed the cigarette out and placed the ashtray by his feet.

  “Could be.” He smiled to himself, not her, then met her eyes. “Did you come to service tonight? It was a good one.”

  “No. I stay away from things that make me feel hopeless.”

  “Hopeless? How can a place of hope make you hopeless?”

  It was her turn to half laugh. “A place of hope? How do you feel any shred of hope for humankind around a herd of sheep?”

  Easy, Joan. Easy does it. What if he got up and left?

  “Sheep?” He pointed upwards with both index fingers. “It’s not such a bad thing to be sheep when you have such an excellent shepherd watching over the flock.”

  “Are you talking about Jesus here, Reverend? Or yourself?”

  “I am a mere instrument, and lucky to be so. It’s always Jesus.”

  She looked around in the dark,
a slice of pale light from the open tent illuminating the space between them. “You have anything to sit on out here, I mean, besides your fancy chair?”

  “Afraid not, I don’t usually have company this late.”

  “Well, it might be a good idea to have another chair or two out here.” She struggled to find a way in, then said, “Me, for one—I am a little shy of the crowd, but I like the idea of some private time with…God.”

  He checked her face for humour and found none. “I guess I could ask that a folding chair be brought outside, in case you continue to materialize out of the night.” As he waved a hand, she noticed that Victor’s gold wedding ring had been replaced by a wide silver band etched with the outline of a dove. Blood rose in her cheeks. He was looking up at the stars again, a slight smile on his lips. She decided to tell him a story. She needed to break his composure, remind him he had a cock or draw blood, as Ajean had insisted.

  “The very first year my husband and I were together, we went south on a summer road trip.”

  He refocused on her. She shivered, having forgotten just how fixed a person felt in that stare. She was expecting a reproach, maybe a Bible quote to head her off at the pass, but none came, so she carried on, pulling the memory out into the night like a siren song.

  “It was a hot summer to begin with, even here. The kind that makes you wish you could peel your skin back. By the time we got to Alabama, we were damn near crazy with it. I took off my pants and rode in my underwear and a tank top, with my bare feet stuck out the window. God, I remember my panties felt so tight in that heat, just a strip of cotton holding back this painful swell.” She laughed low in her throat. “Victor was so distracted he almost drove us off the road. I was desperate to crawl onto his lap and kiss him.”

  The Reverend shifted in his chair. She reined the story in a bit. She couldn’t get him to unforget if he refused to listen.

  “We’d bought this ridiculous tent at a second-hand store on the way south, an old army pup tent.” She laughed at the memory of it. They barely fit lying side by side and Victor couldn’t stretch full out. “We had a twelve-pack of Pabst and a couple of bags of chips, so we were totally prepared to rough it for the night.”

  They’d headed for the abandoned set of a Tim Burton movie she’d read about, built on an island in a brown lake in the middle of the Alabama backwoods. Twice the GPS led them astray, but they got there just before dusk. An old man sitting in a basket-weave lawn chair by the bridge charged them five dollars for a camping pass and hand cranked the gate open so they could enter.

  They’d found a secluded spot behind the gingerbread church, which was now a night pen for the goats that wandered the island. They set up their majestic tent and snapped a couple of Pabsts. It must have been forty degrees Celsius.

  Joan lit another cigarette, watching the Reverend watch her lips as she did. She moved a little closer.

  “We were so sweaty from the drive, we stripped down to our underwear and waded out into the lake. Victor was nervous because there were dead trees sticking out of it like skeletons, and he was worried their roots would be a haven for alligators, snapping turtles, anything. I mean, we were in the South. I swam out to the trees and climbed one of them. Above the water line, the wood felt baked, all dry and chalky.

  “I looked back at Victor and it was clear he wasn’t going to come to me, so I swam back to him. He was chest-deep in the water, so I just wrapped my legs around him where he stood, and pushed myself against him under the water.”

  Joan crossed the remaining distance between them and perched on the arm of his chair. He kept his eyes on her, watching her smoke. When she placed the cigarette in his ashtray, he watched her hand.

  She had his attention now, but she had to go slow. She ran a hand along her skirt, smoothing the material over her thigh. She heard his breathing change.

  “I felt like we were being watched out there.” She lowered her voice so that he had to listen closely. “I could feel eyes on us but saw no people, just the skeletal trees and the brown lake. Victor, he had these big hands, you know. He held me up so that my face fit into that spot on your neck, just by your collarbone. My auntie Dorothy told me that spot was made specifically for women to rest their heads. That’s how she knew Creator was a woman.”

  She took a risk here and reached for his collarbone to show him the exact spot. When he didn’t flinch at the touch of her fingers, she laid her palm flat against his chest.

  “So there we were, making out in the middle of a cemetery lake, in the absolute heat and quiet of an Alabama July, and I see a large, grey goat, real fat. Behind him, farther up the hill, are four more, probably his wives, though I don’t know much about the romantic lives of goats. They’re not moving, not even chewing. They’re just standing there, watching.”

  She turned, hand still on him, and hooked her gaze into his eyes, trying to find her husband. She edged her fingers toward the buttons of his shirt. She just needed to undo a couple, to see his skin, to see the familiar lines of Victor’s tattoos so she knew it was him for sure.

  “The thing about goats is their eyes. They’re all geometry. They remind me of cameras and screens, not living things. I know it’s weird but that small audience, well, it made me kiss him harder, made me move against him a little more.” She was whispering now and his head tilted toward her mouth, so he could hear her. She bit her bottom lip. “Just a little more—”

  “Reverend?” The woman, Cecile, walked out of the tent. When she caught sight of the chair they both now shared, disapproval squeezed into her voice. “Oh, I thought you were alone.”

  Frustration made Joan’s chest ache. She had to consciously push it down, find the seam and fold it into a small enough shape so that it wouldn’t burst out of her. She didn’t want to scare him off. But Wolff stood up in one quick, smooth movement. Her hand fell back into her lap, a bird shot out of the sky.

  “Cecile.” He walked over to the girl, who worked quickly to erase the hurt on her face. “I was just checking in with Joan here—our visitor from the Orillia meeting, you remember?”

  “Who could forget?” Cecile said, staring at her. She glanced at the Reverend and sweetened her tone toward Joan. “We were worried about what happened after you went to the hospital, given the delusions you were suffering. How are you now?”

  “Not delusional at all.” Oh, this was torture. “Less delusional than most, I would say.”

  Joan stood, taking care to let her coat fall open to show how her heavy breasts wrecked the lines of her good blouse.

  Cecile’s smug face fell. She said, “Well, we’re headed out for the evening. Reverend, let’s get you back to the motel so you can rest. This is only day one here.” She laid a hand on his wide back and turned him toward the tent. “Mr. Heiser doesn’t like us to keep you out too late.”

  Joan’s throat tightened at the name. She watched them walk away, trying not to run after him. Then he called over his shoulder, “You should join us tomorrow, Joan. I’d love to see you at service. We begin at six tomorrow evening.”

  Cecile was quick. She stopped and turned to Joan. “Yes, we would love to see you. We always welcome new worshippers.”

  Joan smiled, slow and wide. “I might just come see you, then, Reverend. Save a seat for me.” And with Cecile watching, Joan lowered herself back down on the arm of the plush chair, as if the Reverend were still there, swinging her leg so that a good length of thigh dangled in the light from the tent.

  * * *

  When she got back to the car, Zeus was playing a game on his phone.

  “Jesus, took you long enough.” He sighed. He was never good after naps. “Next time wake me up so I can go with you. Anything happen?”

  Joan didn’t answer, just shook her head. She drove thirty minutes back down the road and checked them in to the New Star Motel. She paid a hundred for the night in cash and parked in front of room seven. She unlocked the door and Zeus went in. Then she went back out to the Jeep, unloading her b
ag and locking up. Back inside the room, she heard the shower running. She was exhausted. She stripped down to her panties right away, pulling on one of Victor’s old work shirts as a nightie, the grey one with the peeling eagle on the front and the cut-off sleeves. She went online on her phone until Zeus was done in the bathroom and had climbed into his double bed, then she went to clean up. It wasn’t until she was washing her face that she realized she was smiling, hard. It made it difficult to get the makeup out of the lines around her eyes.

  Tomorrow. Tomorrow she’d try to yank him free. She didn’t need to see his tattoos. She’d seen her husband’s eyes behind the Reverend’s facade. She still didn’t understand what had happened to him, or what a white man with a rogarou in him had to do with all this, but at least now she figured she could get him back.

  She did a quick check behind the headboard then, between the mattress and the boxspring, for bugs. Finding nothing but cobwebs and an old Penthouse magazine, she slipped into bed. The sheets were cold and she had to punch the thin pillows into comfort, but still she was happy—or at least, happier than she’d been since Victor walked out of the house.

  Lying under the popcorn ceiling, listening to traffic on the highway wheeze metal and smoke, she tried to imagine what was going through Victor’s mind right now. Was he with Cecile? Were the memories she’d shared with him beginning to take on colour? Was he touching himself at the thought of her? Or was he sitting in that ridiculous chair reading his stupid Bible?

  She threw off the scratchy blankets and rolled onto her side. From the drawer in the nightstand she removed the paperback King James version stowed there, with its onion-skin pages and a crisp, unopened cover. She got up and walked quickly over the questionably squishy carpet in her bare feet and yanked open the door. The parking lot was illuminated by weak lamps affixed to the motel wall, shining like dull coins in grey water. She stood there for a minute holding the unread Bible. The moon was a perfect hole in the sky, bleeding the edges of the night to silver.