Empire of Wild

by Cherie Dimaline

  “Well now, that’s nice,” Jimmy said. “Maggie here took first today over on the Island. Youngest in the Junior category too. She’s a champion, this one.” He put his hand on her shoulder as she let Zeus go, beaming pride bright in her face like the goddamned sun.

  “The island?” Zeus asked, the first thing he’d said. The island was a ten-minute ferry ride away. They’d been ten minutes away for the whole weekend?

  “Yeah well, once you’re over there, you know how it is. And the contests go late. And the ferry is unreliable. But anyways, next year, maybe you’ll come with us, eh?”

  Zeus nodded slightly. He felt his guts roll over and lie heavy. He put both hands there. When he got upset, his stomach was the first place to know it. He squeezed his butt cheeks together, humiliated and confused in front of his father and his beautiful sister.

  “I better go,” he said. It was barely a whisper, but his father pounced on it.

  “Oh yeah, okay then, son.”

  This was the worst thing of all: worse than the fact that his stomach was now carbonated by burning bubbles, worse than the fact that they had been so close for an entire weekend and only bothered with him now, worse than the absence of his father itself. The worst thing was that Jimmy Fine looked relieved when he said it, like he agreed that Zeus really had better go. It would be the best thing for them all.

  “Anyways, your mom just told me I missed your birthday last week. Sorry about that. But here.” He opened the back door and rummaged around in a cardboard box behind his seat. He picked out an old flashlight, then threw it back in and fished out an old Discman held together with a piece of masking tape and attached to a pair of foamy earphones. “Take this, son. It’s important you always have music. Get some of those big drum CDs. That way, next year when we come get you, you’ll know all the songs.”

  Zeus took the broken gift and then stood and watched this fragment of his family pile back into the car. When Jimmy turned the key, the music blared and they drove down the street and out of the community to Northern Cree singing a round dance song about beautiful women they couldn’t ignore. Heya, heya, ho.

  * * *

  Joan had come to a potluck dinner that night—potluck was Bee’s style. Zeus wasn’t in the front room when she got there and, since he was the main reason she came by for meals, she went to find him. She walked past the bathroom with its mountain of towels on the floor, past the twins’ bedroom with the bunk beds wrapped in duct tape and padding so they wouldn’t kill themselves or each other, and finally stood outside his closed door, hand raised to knock. But she paused, because she heard soft sobbing. She opened the door slowly, hoping he was watching TV, wondering who, if anyone, was in there with him. Instead she found him cradling a shitty old Discman to his chest like it was a person and crying, his eyes shut tight.

  She closed his door quietly and went back to the kitchen, where Bee told her about the visit. She waited for him to come out on his own. When he did emerge, Joan took him down to the docks for ice cream and promised him she’d never let anyone make him cry like that again. She’d cut off Jimmy Fine’s nuts and hang them from his rear-view mirror with all the other crap.

  * * *

  Since they got back from Hook River, he and Joan hadn’t been able to find any sign of a tent-up. So Joan had gone back to work and Zeus had distracted himself with school, both of them checking online every time they stopped for a meal. Now it was Friday afternoon and he was hiding out in the library, checking everywhere he could think of, but still no luck. He really wanted to get out on the road again.

  His phone dinged. Joan.

  Dinner at Ajean’s? I’ll pick you up at 6

  He texted back.

  K. I’m at the library.

  K

  He opened Facebook on his phone and went to the ministry’s group page again, like he had every day since they came home. The page had the same images from the pamphlet they got in Hook River. There wasn’t much posted: some quotes, small articles on the founder, Mr. Thomas Heiser.

  “Dammit.” The most recent still only gave directions for the Hook River meetings. Nothing since. He went to the members section and a list of profiles lined up down the screen. Who were all these people? He began browsing.

  * * *

  Joan picked him up an hour later and they drove over to Ajean’s, who fed them tuna sandwiches and beet salad. A cold rain began, plinking on her windows like impatient fingers. Zeus watched it collect in the rutted driveway in untidy pools shining in the street lights.

  After dinner, Ajean set cups of sweet tea and a small saucer of hard oatmeal cookies on the table. “Any news on the travelling Jesus show?”

  “Nope.” Joan went to the front window and slid it open a crack, then lit a cigarette. “Nada.”

  “I found their Facebook page when I was at the library,” Zeus said around a mouthful of cookie. “No upcoming meetings. But I got looking at some of the individual profiles.”

  “What do you mean?” Joan asked. “Show me.” She flicked her smoke out the window and slid in beside him on the bench seat.

  He fished out his phone from his pocket and opened Facebook, clicking on the ministry. “See, you just go to their members list and then click on the one you want.”

  “Her.” Joan stabbed her finger at Cecile’s listing.

  “Okay.” He clicked. A profile picture beside her name, which was Cecile Ginnes. “Hmn,” Zeus said. “Her posts are set to private.”

  “Fuck.”

  He scrolled back. “What about this one? The one with the red hair who stopped us from going to see Victor.”

  He clicked on the small, pale face. In the picture, she looked serious, her red hair gathered into a high bun that emphasized the roundness of her face.

  Ivy Johanssen

  Dedicated to My Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ

  Birthday August 17, 1998

  He started scrolling through prayers and motivational sayings she’d typed in curlicue fonts with glitter effects.

  “Good job, my boy,” Ajean said, giving him a little congratulatory rub on the shoulder.

  Joan was leaning so far into the screen her head was in front of Zeus’s face. He gently pushed it back with a finger.

  “Does she say where they’re headed?” Joan asked.

  “No. But we can see where she’s been.”

  “How the hell is that going to help us?”

  Ajean clucked her tongue. “Simmer down, there. Give him a chance.”

  “Thank you, Ajean.” Zeus cleared his throat dramatically. “To answer your question, Ivy Johanssen likes to post pictures.” He went to one of her photo albums and began flipping through a series of black-and-white images.

  “Are there clues to where they’re headed?” Joan could barely keep her bottom on the bench.

  “Not exactly. Her photos are mostly art shots.” He clicked through them, one by one. They were not very good.

  A deflated balloon still attached to a string like a celebratory umbilical cord.

  A field with a decaying fox in the foreground.

  A ditch filled with discarded pop cans.

  A stormy sky that reflected nothing.

  Joan almost growled. “There’s absolutely nothing here! A dead fox? How are we supposed to figure out anything from this shit?”

  Zeus tapped a photo and turned it so she could read the text at the top. “She’s tagged them with location markers.”

  “Genius!” Joan jumped up and paced the kitchen. “You, sir, are a friggin’ genius!” She pointed at Zeus, who smiled with his full face.

  “Here’s the last two,” he said. “Hook River and then Sturgeon Falls. Looks like they’re heading north.”

  “Okay, we need to leave as soon as we can,” Joan said. “I don’t know about you coming, though. You have school on Monday.”

  “I can take a few days off. My marks are good and my mom won’t care. Less for her to worry about.”

  Joan pulled a fresh ci
garette out of her pack and went back to the window. “I’ll think about it.”

  * * *

  After they left, Ajean put the cookie plate and the teacups in the sink and used the damp rag that hung over the faucet to wipe everything down. Something wasn’t right. The wrongness draped over her like a blanket, making her tired, making her slow. Yet it also cut into her like sharp sewing scissors so she couldn’t sit still. It was fear, she finally realized. Ajean was not accustomed to dealing with fear. Not anymore. She’d spent years pruning and nurturing herself so that there was nothing left for her to be scared of. But she had grown complacent, had forgotten that there was always room to be afraid. All fear had to do was let doubt do the dirty work and then it could move right in, past the rubble of a person’s defences.

  She thought about grating some salt off the bone still in the tin on top of her fridge. She even grabbed it, the contents rolling around inside.

  “Not yet, you,” she told herself. “Don’t go jumping to no conclusions, wasting Angelique’s medicine.”

  She put the tin back and went into her bedroom. She picked up the small Virgin Mary figure from her dresser and kissed it on the face, at the spot where the paint had long since worn off. By now her Mary had one eye and just a bottom lip remaining. She tossed the figure on the bed. Next she grabbed the square ceramic jewellery box that held her best rosary and put it beside the statue. Back in the kitchen she got a blue plastic Canada’s Wonderland tumbler, a silver serving spoon and a broken watch she’d been meaning to get fixed and brought them all back to the bed. She retrieved seven more items from around her house: a spool of thread, an empty beer bottle she’d kept because she drank it on the night she beat old Elsie Giroux at euchre, a pocket Bible with gilt edging, a toothbrush she used to clean her shoes, a picture frame with no picture in it, a beading needle and a hundreddollar casino chip she’d found on a walk one day, so scratched she couldn’t read the casino name and cash it in. Then she grabbed a plastic bag from the shelf under the cupboard that exploded plastic bags when you opened it, packed all her items into it and went out onto her porch.

  The rain was still coming down hard. She watched it, bag in hand. Someone told her once that chickens could drown, mesmerized by the rain, heads turned up to the leaking sky, beaks open and taking on water. She imagined that slow, stupid death. She’d prefer to have her head chopped off: clean, easy, even with the indignity of the after-death jog around the yard. Ajean placed the bag on her welcome mat and upended it, the random things rolling until they settled.

  No matter which community claimed them, rogarous were known for some specific things. They smelled odd, like wet fur and human sweat. They were men turned into beasts for any number of reasons—each one unique to the storyteller. They were as notoriously bad at math as they were obsessive. A rogarou, try as he might, could only count to twelve. Put thirteen things by your door and he would be inclined to stop and count them. But since he could only get to twelve, he could never count the entire pile, so he was doomed to start again and again, stopping at twelve and returning to one. Eventually, he’d give up and go away, forgetting he’d ever intended to enter. At least that was the theory.

  She pointed to each object on the mat, as she counted them. Then she counted again. “Une, deux, trois” to “treize.”

  She clapped her hands together when she was done. Her wolf alarm system was set. She hummed the alarm company jingle again as she went back inside her small, warm home.

  Ajean was glad for all the ways she knew to keep herself alive. She’d learned how to flip a man who was trying to get into her pants and kick him right in the nutballs. She’d been taught that at the Friendship Centre self-defence class. The flyer said to wear athletic clothes, so she’d tucked her best long johns into wool socks, put on the Molson Canadian T-shirt she got in a two-four box last summer and wore her sportiest kerchief. Boy, could she ever flip and kick by the end of that class.

  She also knew the old ways, things some people called superstitions. Pfft. See who they all come to when someone gets medicine put on them or when they need to know how to cure an infection. Ajean knew how to survive.

  Still, she was worried. She could smell the doubt that hung around Joan like a sickness. (Bronchitis smelled like clay, pneumonia like wool.) Joan wouldn’t get Victor back if she went at him with any doubt in her—about him or herself. She had to forget any doubt if she was going to get past that rogarou to get to her man.

  “Damn wolf.” She opened the door to spit outside. She looked once more at her thirteen objects and then closed both the screen and the wooden door against the night.

  She turned off the kitchen light and headed for her bedroom. Then she stopped. Just to be safe, she went back to the door, slid home the deadbolt and crossed herself.

  “Name of the Fadder, the Son, and that Holy Ghost.”

  14

  ALL THE POSSIBILITIES

  Flo’s truck was in the driveway. Junior was parked behind her and George’s SUV leaned on a flat tire in the front yard now covered in fallen leaves. Indian summer was gone.

  Joan almost drove by. She wasn’t sure she wanted to deal with her family tonight. But at the last minute, she decided to pull in. She really needed to tell them all she was about to take off again in search of Victor.

  “Hey,” she said, opening the door.

  “Well, well, if it isn’t Noodles McGee.” Junior waved his own arms, teasing her for her back-to-work soreness. She never should have mentioned it or, worse, admitted she needed an extra break.

  “Who needs two breaks for one shitty roof?” George, who was sitting on the couch with a cold beer, pointed a finger at her and laughed.

  Flo came out of the kitchen and snapped both sons in the leg with a twisted dishtowel. “Enough, enough. You two were more than happy your sister was back on the job. Don’t be bugging her about it.”

  “No, I deserve it.” Joan flexed. “I mean I can still take you both, but go ahead, take your jabs now, while Mom is around to save you.”

  George went to the fridge and grabbed her a beer. She settled on the couch beside him to watch a round of Jeopardy with her brothers and kicked their asses on the trivia front.

  Afterwards Junior carried their empties to the kitchen. When he came back, he said, “Georgie and me were talking. We’d feel better if you let us put some traps at your place near the edge of the woods. They never did catch that wolf.”

  This was the second time traps had been brought up since their grandmother’s death. “I don’t want anyone’s pet getting caught,” Joan said. “That’s the last thing I need.”

  “No one should let their pet go loose, especially not now,” Junior said. “Your safety is more important than anyone’s cat, anyways. You’re out there all on your own.”

  “I know you mean well,” Joan said, “but I can’t stomach the idea of traps.” She got up from the couch and went to sit at the dining room table.

  “Anyone want tea?” Flo flipped on the kettle. She wasn’t ready to go anywhere near the subject of Mere’s death.

  “What’s on the schedule this week?” Joan asked.

  “Gotta finish Longlade’s before winter,” Junior said. “Frost is already here.”

  “That’s not a very big job,” Joan said.

  “Big enough,” George answered. “Especially for you.”

  She returned his smirk. “Babies could do that reno, so should be about your speed, Georgie boy.” Then she took a deep breath. “Okay, well, I wanted to tell you I have to be somewhere this week.”

  Junior, so concerned a minute ago, gave her a death stare. “What the fuck, Joan? More time off? This is why we’re behind!”

  “It’s about Victor.”

  “It’s always about Victor.”

  “Junior, you’re not my boss.”

  “Someone has to be,” George chimed in from the couch.

  “No, but I am,” her mother said, giving her a meaningful look.

  “Fuck
, forget it.” Joan stood up from the table. “Thanks for the beer.” She walked to the front door and grabbed her coat from a hook on the wall.

  “Is this about that religious group?” Flo asked. Joan turned back. She saw pity on her mother’s face. She’d rather deal with her brothers’ exasperation—she wasn’t sure she could handle pity.

  “What religious group? Joan, did you join some sort of cult?” Junior asked. He pushed his hand through his hair. “Frig it, Joan, that’s not gonna help you.”

  “I think I found Victor.”

  Her mother sighed, dropping her chin to her chest. “Here we go…”

  “Where?” Her brothers spoke in chorus.

  “Remember when you came to get me after Mere…when I’d been at Travis’s? The day before I’d gone into a church tent set up at the Walmart and Victor was there.” She left out the part about him being the preacher.

  “What the fuck?” Junior said. “Why didn’t you say? And why didn’t he come home with you?”

  “He didn’t know me. He couldn’t remember anything. He has amnesia or something.”

  “Amnesia? Is that even a real thing?” George asked. “I thought that was just for movies and shit.”

  “It’s real—he really didn’t know who I was. And he had a different name, different friends, a different…job. He even looked different. His hair was cut.”

  “Are you sure it was him?” Junior asked.

  “Pretty sure.”

  “How sure?”

  She made eye contact with him. “Pretty sure, Junior.”

  Flo cleared her throat. “Joan, dear, I’m going to say something here that you’re not going to like, but I’m just going to say it, because you need to look at all the possibilities.” She softened her voice, as if that would make what she had to say less of a blow. “If it was him, maybe he isn’t lost and maybe he doesn’t have amnesia. Maybe Victor just left you.”