Empire of Wild Read online

  Then she cocked her arm back as far as it could go and threw the fucking thing. The covers opened and the pages flapped a frantic kind of applause until it landed with a light thud, gold-lettered front face down. Just a book. She locked the door behind her.

  She had the best sleep she’d had in a year, eleven months and twenty-eight days to be exact.

  VICTOR AND A NEW SOUND IN THE WOODS

  Victor was thinking of his uncle. Etienne Boucher had been a large and quiet man, who moved like a ship on open water. He wore double socks even in the heat of summer, especially when he was puttering around in moccasins. In the winter his boots left snowshoe-sized footprints in the snow. Young Victor had had to jump from one to the next when he trailed along behind him. The year he could match his uncle’s stride was the year he decided he was a man.

  Victor remembered his uncle and tried to make his footsteps just as steady and quiet as he walked in the bush. Because he was being hunted. He was sure of it. There was a new smell in the woods, wild and refined at the same time, like body odour on silk. Something was watching him.

  And then he heard her voice from far away. There was no mistaking her.

  “Joan!” he called.

  The voice paused, but then the muffled lilt began again, somewhere above or maybe below him. He strained to hear and caught the maddening sound of music, too far away to recognize the tune. He ran a small circle in the space he knew to be the eastern clearing, slowing every few feet to listen, to see if he had come any closer to her. Then he tripped and landed so hard on his chin his jaw shifted.

  “Joan!”

  He scrambled to his hands and knees, and then leaned to press an ear to the ground. Her voice was no clearer. He scraped handfuls of dirt out of the way, then stuck his ear in the hole. She wasn’t down there.

  He got to his feet and turned his face to the sky. Her voice was still far and small, but he could tell she was upset. He’d been with her long enough to know it was best to stay quiet when she was upset. But not now. Now he would take a verbal headlock just to feel her curses on his skin, to stop her words with his own mouth. He’d swallow them all.

  He leaned against a tall pine and sighed. How long had it been since he’d seen her? How long had he been here on the land, walking the same twenty-six acres? No matter how long he walked, he never found the road. Never came across his four-wheeler or the adjacent tract of sugar bush or the wreck of old Dusome’s Garage. There was just grey light and black dark.

  Fuck.

  When did he sleep last? Why wasn’t he tired? He thought maybe it was time to bunk down, anyway, and he slid to the ground. His chin hurt and he wiped at it, feeling a thickening clot of blood. He must still be alive if he could bleed.

  Joan.

  He couldn’t hear her voice anymore, and the music had hiccupped out of range. He felt half erased. Except for the longing for Joan, there was only the new fear cutting through his cloud of confusion. Because as sure as he knew it was Joan’s voice, as sure as he knew the blood on his face was red without being able to see it, he knew that something was in the woods with him. Close by. He made his breathing quiet. At the base of the pine, he curled up to make himself small, less of a target. To become a part of the tree. To disappear.

  Twigs snapped in the dark to his left, scaring small animals into the higher branches. And now a knock, as if on a door, on a nearby trunk.

  He opened his eyes as wide as they could go and willed sight into the stew of black. If he reached out, what would his fingers find? He made fists instead and jammed them into his coat pockets, pulling his face down inside the collar.

  Joan better find him soon. Before the something else did.

  8

  REWIRED

  Joan woke up when Zeus turned on the TV.

  “Looks like rain today,” he reported.

  She rolled over. The light coming through the sheer curtains was grey. “Better not go out. You just might melt since you’re so sweet,” she said in a high-pitched voice. A pillow hit her back and she laughed.

  “It’s ten thirty. Can we go for breakfast?” he said.

  She yawned and pulled herself up against the headboard, trying to organize her thoughts. They had hours before they had to get to the tent for the next revival. “Sure, why not.”

  She threw the blankets off. “Need the bathroom? I’m getting in the shower.” He shook his head.

  She carried her makeup bag to the bathroom and set each item on a folded towel on the counter. She turned on the shower and made the water nice and hot. Her favourite thing about motel rooms was all the hot water, not like at home. She used the shitty motel shampoo but her own peach-scented conditioner. Then, with the conditioner still slicked on her head, she shaved her legs.

  She turned off the water, dried off and wrapped herself in a thin towel. She blow-dried her hair, then plugged in the straightener, smoothing her dark hair until it gleamed. With any luck, she’d be bringing Victor here tonight before they drove home together. She’d better get an extra room for Zeus, she thought, because she and her husband had a lot of time to make up for. “Prepare for the outcome you want,” she said to her reflection.

  Getting dressed with the anticipation of sex is a different experience than just getting dressed. She smoothed the lace band on her underwear against her hips so it was without a fold or wrinkle. She snapped her bra on the last hook, then reached into each cup to jiggle her boobs upwards so that they sat together, making that nice line under her clavicles. She turned in front of the mirror to admire herself and then applied her makeup. It was exciting, after a year of mourning and regret, to be beautiful in panties and red lipstick.

  She pulled on tight black jeans and an oatmeal-coloured, loose-knit sweater whose neckline draped low and wide. The skin was a little much, so she threw on a necklace, the one with the silver handgun charm that Victor had given her one Christmas. She held it in her hand for a moment to warm it up as she checked the time on her phone. Eleven forty-seven.

  There was a Denny’s just up the road. She’d take Zeus there, come back to the room for a final once-over, then get to the tent nice and early to grab a seat near the front. She wanted to be able to maintain the kind of eye contact with the good Reverend that was impossible to ignore. She glanced one more time in the mirror, then came out of the bathroom, grabbed her purse, her coat and the room key on its blue plastic tab.

  “Ready?”

  “Yup.” Zeus turned off the TV and scrambled off his bed. He was putting on his shoes as she opened the door.

  With a soft thud, a book, heavy with condensation, fell at her feet. It was the Bible she’d tossed—it must have been propped up against the door. Adrenaline pushed into her blood, cold and fast. She looked around the parking lot. Most of the cars from last night were gone, except for the Jeep and a sad hatchback leaning to one side.

  Zeus was behind her now. “Let’s go, Auntie.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Auntie?”

  She used the toe of her sneaker to push the book to one side. She stepped out of the way so Zeus could get around her and closed the door, double-checking that it locked. Maybe it was housekeeping. But there must be forty rooms here over the two floors. How would housekeeping know which room the Bible belonged to? Unless someone saw her throw it.

  She put a hand on Zeus’s shoulder and kept her head up, scanning their surroundings on the walk to the vehicle. She looked in the window before she unlocked the passenger side door. The seats were empty except for his black hoodie. “Buckle up,” she said after Zeus climbed in, slamming his door shut. She checked the top-floor balconies and the metal stairwell as she went around to her side. She slid in and pushed the door lock back down. She felt safer in the small space.

  Zeus was watching her anxious movements. “Everything okay?”

  “Of course.” She set her purse at her feet, glancing at their room, where the soaked black book lay on its back under the window.

  She put
the key in the ignition and turned. Nothing.

  She turned the key again. Click.

  “Fuck.” She took the steering wheel in both hands and shook it.

  “What’s wrong with the car?”

  “No idea. I just got the damn thing serviced.”

  The Jeep was old, but it was reliable. And last month she’d had it fixed up, replacing the brake pads, changing the oil, repairing a small crack in the windshield. What could be the issue?

  She watched the wind flip the cover of the Bible open so that the pages jumped and snapped.

  What if someone had done this on purpose? The cab of the Jeep was too silent, like a breath being held. What if they were still in here? She pulled her seatbelt slack and craned around to check the back, as Zeus watched her curiously. Empty.

  “Ridiculous,” she said.

  “What is?”

  She shrugged and dug her cellphone out of her bag and called roadside assistance.

  * * *

  “Well, here’s your problem right here.”

  Barry, the CAA guy who’d shown up in a flame-painted tow truck, held up the ends of two wires. “Your battery connection has been cut.”

  “Cut? How would that happen?”

  He scratched his ginger beard. “No idea, lady. You piss someone off?” He snort-laughed and dropped the ends.

  She was glad that Zeus was back in the room, flaked out on the bed and preoccupied with a game on his phone. It was almost two o’clock—it had taken far too long for Barry to show up.

  “So can you replace them?”

  He leaned on her fender, like they had all the time in the world. “Nope. But I can tow you to a garage in town.” He pushed the dirty brim of his baseball cap up and down as he spoke, as if fanning his overworked brain. “I’m just the knight in shining armour who can get you there.”

  Yes, because Joan’s knight would wear jogging pants and a windbreaker that kept pulling up when he moved his arms, revealing the bottom slice of a hard, round belly. But what choice did she have? She nodded and he dropped the hood and headed to the tow truck to hook her up. She went to collect her bag and her nephew from the room.

  As they were about to climb in, Barry moved aside his cooler and a stack of clipboards, newspapers and empty chip bags. He patted the bench. “There’s more than enough room for you,” he said. “Your boy can ride shotgun. Seeing as how you’re so slim, you can squeeze in beside me.” She ignored his flirty tone as best she could, careful not to kick the open juice box on the floor, pretending not to see the weekly paper on the dash folded open to the escort section. The Bible waved goodbye in the wind as the tow truck pulled out of the motel parking lot, her Jeep hanging from the back like a field-dressed deer.

  The town was ten minutes down the road, one of those ugly clusters of gas stations and fast food restaurants that pop up on the side of the highway. They took a residential street lined with houses that looked condemned, yards littered with children’s plastic slides and ride-on toys, to Sunny’s Garage.

  “I can’t believe people live here.” She hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

  “Yup. Just a couple hundred now. Not for long, though. They’re extending the natural gas pipeline, so there should be some new jobs coming this way.”

  “Oh yeah?” It was 2:26 now. She started biting the skin around her nails.

  “Yup. The company was here last month. Had one of those town hall meetings. Just need to get some permissions and then it’s a go. I might give up driving for one of those jobs. Good pay, great pension. I’m pretty much a free man and can make that kind of change. You know, seeing as how there is no Mrs. Barry.” He took his eyes off the road to look at Joan over the top of his mirrored glasses, which had bright red frames and looked like something a race-car driver or a douchebag would wear. She pretended not to catch his drift.

  The clouds were pulling together and splitting back apart like a fist clenching across the sky. Joan’s stomach mimicked the movement. She had to get to the tent. She refused to think about who might have cut the battery wires; that was for later, once she was back on the road and headed toward her husband.

  Sunny’s was a double garage with missing siding under a broken yellow sign. It was run by a diminutive man wearing overalls dark with grease and sweat, one leg rolled up to show the mottled shin of an underfed bachelor.

  “Listen, honey, you got another problem here.” He was on his tiptoes, head in the engine.

  “What?”

  “Well, basically your system is shot.”

  In her growing hysteria, she pictured a bullet hole. “Shot?”

  “Well, not actually shot.” Sunny giggled. “That was what you call a figurative speech.”

  “You mean a figure of speech.”

  “No, figurative.” He snorted at her ignorance. “Looks like someone popped out some fuses. Straight up took ’em.”

  She shook her head. “Missing fuses? How in the hell does that make the system shot? Just replace them. It’s not complicated—and not expensive.”

  “Ho ho.” Sunny gave her an appraising look. “I love a little lady who knows cars.”

  She frowned. “It’s common sense…”

  “Listen, I’m not here to pass judgment,” he waved her off with a greasy bandana in his hand, “but I think you made an enemy, eh? Foolin’ around with someone’s old man, maybe?” He giggled again, wiping his tiny hands on the bandana.

  Joan leaned against the driver’s side door and sighed. “I’m not even from here. And my car was fine last night.”

  “Well, I can replace the fuses but I may have to order in the wire. And there’s people ahead of you in line.”

  Joan looked around the parking lot. Besides the tow truck and the Jeep, there was one ancient Beetle and a massive four-by-four with Sunny’s logo on the side.

  “So you’re looking at tomorrow afternoon at the earliest.”

  The clouds pulled over the sun like a thread had been run through their edges. The wind grew colder and debris skidded across the lot. Joan kicked some small rocks by her foot, thinking hard about the fact that someone wanted her to be stuck and who that might be.

  “There’s no way to hurry this up?”

  Sunny shook his little head, the tendrils of his comb-over shooting straight up in the wind.

  Barry was still lurking, pretending this was the perfect time to clean out the cab of his truck and do some paperwork. Zeus stayed with him, somehow withstanding the heavy metal coming from Barry’s radio even though it sounded like a bagpipe in a hay baler. Joan knew what she had to do. She told the mechanic to go ahead and dragged her feet over to the tow truck.

  “Hey, Barry, what are you doing right now?”

  * * *

  She paid for the ride to the tent site with conversation. She learned that Barry was a Sagittarius, that he was allergic to garlic and that he preferred TV to Netflix. (“I don’t like some robot suggesting what I might like next. The TV doesn’t tell me what to like.”) She listened. Barry told her he liked Indians okay, at least he liked their tobacco and casinos. And his mother had raised him by herself, which is why he felt inclined to stay in the area until she croaked, as he put it.

  He droned on, the sound of his voice the background track to the smear of yellow line, blur of ditch and browning field out the window. The earth was not yet frozen, but Mere’s bones would have begun to sing their terrible ache of cold; you couldn’t fool them with false summer. You couldn’t fool any part of Mere, not even her damn bones, which lay in St. Anne’s cemetery now, shrouded in a floral print SAAN dress of impossible blues, the kind of blues that could only exist in climates where cold made no dent in the air.

  They pulled into the makeshift parking lot at 5:26.

  “We really appreciate you taking the time to get us here,” Joan said, turning to face him. Zeus, still wearing his headphones, gave him a quick nod and climbed out of the truck.

  “See ya, little buddy,” Barry said, and leaned forwa
rd to look at the tent out the windshield, whistling through the gap in his front teeth. He glanced back at Joan. “I never would have pegged you for a Bible thumper.”

  “Oh, I’m not. But I have to meet my husband here.”

  “Your husband?” Barry’s posture changed, one shoulder at a time. He dropped the small Tow-to-Tow business card with the handwritten number he was holding onto the chip-strewn floor.

  “Yeah. Thanks for the lift!” She slid across the seat and climbed down, then slammed the passenger door behind her. She waved him off with a smile. It wasn’t until she watched him turn back onto the road that she realized that now they didn’t have a ride back to the motel.

  Shit.

  She’d worry about that later.

  9

  JOINING THE FLOCK

  There were already people inside, the front half of the tent full. They wore black T-shirts with tour dates of country music artists fancy-lettered across their backs. They wore jeans or long-sleeved dresses from Reitmans circa 1986. They had non-ironic overlarge glasses that magnified their dark eyes enormous, and they tapped Reeboks with support soles and Dollar Tree jelly sandals on the temporary floorboards of the tent. They were freshly washed in their uncomfortable best and buoyed by something Joan could not see, their brown cheeks gold under the string lights. They struck her as beautiful.

  The white chairs, the white canvas roof and walls, the white lights, the white handlers all conspired to illuminate your chipped nail polish or uneven sideburns, yet at the same time, forgave you for them. They would overlook your shortcomings because they were so much better than you.

  “Excuse me, miss,” said a man in a cowboy hat, who smiled as he pushed past Joan and Zeus where they stood looking around.

  “Sorry about that,” she said, elbowing Zeus down the aisle toward a row.

  He pulled his headphones down and pocketed his phone. “This place is insane.” There was actual worry on his face.