Empire of Wild

by Cherie Dimaline

  Zeus got on his BMX and pedalled out of the parking lot, heading to Ajean’s. She was the oldest person in the community—the one everyone would look to for what they were supposed to do now. She was the one who gave tobacco to the hunters. She was the one who prepared her old friend Angelique for burial. She was the one who told Zeus he had to keep a close eye on his auntie Joan now.

  When he got to Ajean’s place, without him even asking, she sat Zeus at her table and set a baloney and jam sandwich in front of him.

  “She needs you, boy,” Ajean said. “No one else can reach her.” She waved a gnarled hand in front of her face. “She probably can’t even see the rest of us. We’re just ghosts to her.” She waved her arms in the air as if she were floating around the kitchen.

  He had his orders. So he finished the sandwich, left his number with Ajean in case she needed anything, and got back on his bike. He carefully clipped his old Discman to his waistband and clicked play. By the time he crunched up the gravel of Joan’s driveway, the back of his T-shirt was soaked through with sweat.

  He walked in the screen door and called, “Hello?” No answer.

  He went to the kitchen and got a glass of water from the tap, gulping it down so quick he struggled to catch his breath. Then he leaned against the counter and looked around. The house was small by most standards, just a living room crammed full of one-off furniture, a kitchen clattering with columns of china teacups and porcelain mixing bowls, one bathroom and a bedroom. The mudroom attached to the front doubled as both a laundry area and storage for camouflage snowsuits, fishing poles, boots and toboggans. Outside, the house was surrounded by a coven of birches pointing branches to the sky, their thin fingers linked in supplication, bark white as new dentures. The creek that ran behind them whispered eight months out of the year, telling anyone who would listen the best way to sit still. This was where Mere’s trailer was. That’s where he decided to head, refilling the glass with water to take with him.

  The screen door bounced in the frame behind him as he stepped onto the back step. “Auntie?” he called.

  He heard a constant swishing noise that didn’t sound like the creek and followed it. The silver trailer glinted through the trees like a big fish, the water sparkling beyond it. He held the glass aloft and carefully made his way down the incline. He found Joan in front of the trailer with a bucket of soapy water, scrubbing the rocks around the firepit with a wire brush. The water in the bucket was pink.

  “Hey, Auntie.” He stood over her, his wide shoulders blocking the sun.

  She looked up, still pushing the brush. “Hey.”

  “Can I help?” He did not want to help. He was exhausted from his bike ride. But he was a helper so he felt he had to offer.

  She shook her head, dipping the brush and rinsing it.

  “I can go get the hose?”

  “No.” Pink scum floated on the surface of the bucket.

  He walked to the picnic table on the opposite side of the pit and climbed up to sit on the top. “Want me to call my mom? She can come over.”

  “No.”

  Zeus wondered whether the blood would ever come off. Mere loved these rocks. She’d picked and placed them herself. She called them grandfather rocks, round and grey with stripes of dark and lots of sparkle.

  He jiggled his legs. There was a quiet panic in the movement. It made him feel exposed to see his auntie this broken. She was the one adult he knew who always stood in front of him, keeping bad things away as best she could. His mother wasn’t much in the way of protector, and his father? Well, he wasn’t really in the picture.

  Bee was always stressing how she didn’t abort any of her four kids. Then she’d tell you about the sleepless nights and the state of her nipples after six years of breastfeeding. She’d say, My whole life is for those kids and I’ll never fit into another pair of jeans as long as I live. That she’d given everything she had to give. Zeus had heard this more than anyone else.

  Joan was not a mother, but she seemed to understand that it was all fine and good to give everything, but being a mother also meant sometimes you had to create more just so you could hand it over. Find meals in the dust, build solutions out of napkins, conjure worlds from blood memory and then hand it all to your children as if it came easily. So you wouldn’t burden them.

  He knew his mother wasn’t a bad person. She was funny and loud and made Christmas into Disneyland. But she had limits. Zeus lived in a small camp on the other side of Bee’s limits. This had a lot to do with his father, Jimmy Fine.

  * * *

  Zeus had been told, time and time again, that Jimmy Fine was Bee’s first real love. She already had Artemis with a guy from town. Art was about three when she met Jimmy, old enough to shit on the pot and eat a sandwich by himself, and so, old enough to go to a sitter’s overnight. Art was quiet, content, a good sleeper, one of those first babies who trick their mother into having more kids. Later on, surrounded by his three brothers, all squalling and needy, Bee would call him the original con man.

  The year that Art was old enough to be babysat and Bee had her boobs back, the reserve that sat on the island just off their bay hosted its first competition powwow. Indians of all shapes and sizes flooded into the territory. Corporate types who worked for the federal government showed up in their suits, shiny around the knees and elbows so you knew they were policy advisers at best. Teenagers with braids so tight they couldn’t manage a complete blink and athletic wear two sizes too big crowded the ferry. Old women in long skirts and the kind of fingernails that were both rounded and ridged like tree bark found each other under the shade of trees. Married couples, carrying new babies in fully beaded cradle-boards, dragging wild toddlers with broken sandals and runny noses, parked their jam-packed cars near the powwow grounds. And then there was Jimmy Fine.

  He drove a burgundy 1979 Impala with the seat cranked way back so that he manoeuvred from a reclined position, arm straight out to grip the wheel. Beaded ropes, three faded pine air fresheners, an eagle feather on a leather string, a cheap white rosary and a baby picture of himself all dangled from the rear-view mirror. He had a big forehead that shone like a freshly greased pan and thin hair pulled into a narrow braid that fell to his waist, split ends like eyelashes exploding out of it. He might have been handsome if not for his teeth.

  He had generous lips and a wide smile. But his teeth? It was like God put a bunch of potentials in a Yahtzee cup and tossed, thinking, Fuck it, let’s just hope for the best. Vain hope.

  But none of that mattered because in the trunk of Jimmy’s dented Impala was the most beautiful, fully beaded traditional regalia the Ontario powwow trail had ever seen: side drops emblazoned with spirit bears and deep slashes of lightning; a vest, heavy with geometrics in glass beads, that closed with silver Indian-head nickel buttons; moccasins Jimmy resoled every fourth week so that the aphrodisiac scent of buffalo hide wafted when he passed by, copper ankle bells singing his steps like a goddamn wedding march. All this and the biggest, fullest eagle bustle you could imagine, plucked from the kind of eagle that hadn’t existed since dinosaurs two-stepped the Earth.

  When Jimmy swayed by during Grand Entry, raising his dance stick strung with bear claws in her direction, Bee, sitting on the bleachers, a scone-dog in one hand, a du Maurier Light in the other, felt her eggs vibrating in her ovaries.

  In maudlin moods, Bee insisted that she had tried hard to be the kind of girlfriend Jimmy Fine wanted. She let him park the Impala in her driveway and wash it twice a week, even when he left the hose out afterwards along with the buckets of brown water and used sponges. She left Art at her mom’s place for days at a time because it was hard to get romantic with a three-year-old demanding you examine each blade of grass and every flyer that was shoved through the mailbox. She cooked meat the way Jimmy liked it—overdone—and tried her best to appreciate powwow music in the car, on the living-room stereo and on his iPod when they lay in bed at night. She couldn’t bead but she threaded his needles and bo
ught him the things he needed to keep his legendary outfit crisp—tri-cut beads and sinew and hide and replacement bells when he danced them off. Sometimes she drove to Six Nations, two and a half hours away, to pick up supplies. She travelled with him to a new powwow every weekend, meeting his friends, making coffee runs for him and his cousins, chain-smoking in a lawn chair under his awning. She made sure his registration number was pinned on his regalia so that it wouldn’t obstruct the best parts of his beadwork and that his bustle was tied up safely on the awning when he wasn’t wearing it, staying nearby to keep passersby from handling it. She became smaller, quieter—living for Jimmy Fine and the ways she could be a better Indian through him. This was important for a halfbreed born of other halfbreeds.

  Then winter came. Jimmy stayed on at Bee’s, when he wasn’t in Manitoba taking care of his mother. He slept late and then left the bed to move to the couch where he could watch TV and eat plates of fried spaghetti and bread balanced on his offseason belly.

  Bee was seven months pregnant with Zeus when she met Jimmy Fine’s wife.

  Clarice showed up on a Sunday afternoon when Jimmy wasn’t around. She told Bee that Jimmy already had a son, Jimmy Jr., who had been born with a malformed spine and would never walk. Clarice told Bee that this was why he was with her now, a baby on the way. All Jimmy wanted was a child to dance with him in matching regalia as he travelled the open road. Clarice said she didn’t blame Jimmy and she certainly didn’t blame their son. She was too busy caring for them both to cast blame.

  The two women confronted Jimmy that night. He cried, then got angry at them, then cried again. At last, he told Clarice he wanted to stay in Ontario with Bee, that he felt like he needed to be here for the new baby. When Clarice drove off in her old van retrofitted with a wheelchair ramp, Bee felt that she had won. That she was actually grateful, and not on her way to jail for attempted murder, spoke to her diminished state.

  By the time Zeus was two, though, Jimmy realized that his new son would never dance. The boy was deathly afraid of the drum. What his father didn’t know was that after nine months in utero, hearing the drum echoed by his mother’s anxious heart, the sound caused him acute claustrophobia. Bee did everything she could to persuade Zeus to dance, bribing him with food, with love, with her attention, and when he still refused, smacked his ass red.

  Four months after his second birthday, Jimmy Fine sent Bee an email from Manitoba, where he’d been for the week visiting his first-born. In it, he explained that Clarice was pregnant with a little girl and that he’d had a dream about her being a champion jingle dress dancer. He told her he needed to stay there for the new baby. And that little girl did dance, like she was created for that very purpose. Jimmy Fine never came back.

  Bee was humiliated as much as she was devastated. Humiliated by both losing her man and actually still loving the fuck. And she never forgave Zeus, even though she moved on from Jimmy, marrying Rocky, a kind, quiet man she’d grown up with. They had twin boys, Hermes and Hercules, and Bee turned all her attention to them. Her love for Zeus was a painful thud at the bottom of her broken heart—still there, still strong, but surrounded by a rattle and wheeze that made it difficult to hear.

  And so Joan became the person Zeus needed to survive. Once, he heard his mother describe the ideal partner as a soulmate, someone who knew what you needed before you did and provided it. Someone who was happy you were there, even on the bad days. Joan was his soulmate.

  * * *

  And now she needed him. He put the glass down on the picnic table and stood up. “I’ll go change the water.”

  He carried the sloshing bucket to the side of the trailer, careful not to get any of it on his grey jogging pants. He poured it out in the tall grass, watching red rivulets dash toward the bank of the creek looking to rejoin the stream. He made the sign of the cross. Amen.

  He scooped up clean water from the creek and carried it back to the firepit. Joan was sitting back on her heels like a robot on pause with the brush still in her hands, her head down. Then she started her work again. He stayed by her side, quiet and observant, until she was done and the sun had moved to pull the trailer’s shadow over them like a sheet.

  “Wanna head to Flo’s with me?” Joan asked him.

  “Is she cooking dinner?”

  Joan shrugged. “Probably.”

  “Let’s go, then.” He dumped out the bucket without being asked. The water was clear enough that this time he poured it directly into the creek.

  * * *

  They let themselves in and took a seat at the kitchen table. Flo was in the living room not really watching a rerun of MASH. She got up without a word and joined them, stopping to put the kettle on. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her hair was messy. She wore a T-shirt with the company logo and a pair of pyjama bottoms.

  “Zeus, you been by Ajean’s?” she asked.

  “Yeah. She was headed to get Mere ready for tomorrow.”

  She sighed. “I know. I took her to pick out clothes and jewellery this morning.”

  “Mom,” Joan cut in. “I really need to talk to you.”

  Flo and Zeus exchanged a look. Flo was right there at the table. Joan picked up a cardboard coaster and started bending the corners.

  “When George and Junior came to get me, I was at the Walmart near Travis’s place.” She spoke fast, breathing hard, like she was running down a hill. “I found this tent there, a preacher’s tent. The gathering was over but I went in. I don’t know why, but I did. And there was a man there, and it was Victor. It was him—his eyes, his body, his voice.” She sat straighter, refusing to look her mother in the eye, to see her doubt. Not yet. She had to tell the story, to get it all out first. “Except he was a reverend. And his hands, the way he walked—he moved different. I kept calling to him, talking to him, and he kept telling me he didn’t know who I was, or even who Victor was. But it was him!”

  She was growing frantic with how impossible it was to describe everything.

  “And then he left me and there was this other man, a horrible man who told me Victor was dead. How would he even know? I mean, who says that? And he kind of laughed at me. He also called the ambulance and the cops.”

  She told her mother about being taken to the hospital, how she’d spent the night there and had been released the next morning. And then about taking a cab to find her car, and the tent was gone, and then finding out about Mere, and her voice hitched to a stop.

  Flo listened all the way through in silence. Normally, she was one of those people who would stop a story to tell you the outcome it should have had if you’d done things right, which was always the way she would have done things. So the quiet was unusual.

  Now she stretched once, running her hands through her short hair, which was still dark on top, though the sides had silvered. Then she leaned across the table and patted the backs of Joan’s hands. There was a small pile of ripped coaster bits beside them.

  “Ahh, my girl. There is too much on you right now.”

  It was clear her mother was more comfortable with the idea of Joan’s irrationality than any kidnapping and brainwashing theory. Joan didn’t blame her. Zeus stayed quiet.

  Flo pulled her hand back and wiped the corner of her eye. “First Victor leaves you and then Mere. It’s too much. It’s just too much. There’s no way to make sense of everything.” She wiped her eyes again. “You know, it’s not like everything was perfect with you and Victor.”

  “We had one fight!”

  “Sometimes that’s all it takes. Especially about something as big as this.”

  It was something big. But nothing could be big enough to tear them apart. Victor was the one person Zeus knew mattered as much to Joan as he did.

  Flo had started in a few months ago with the subtle hints about how Joan had to move on—that “burying an empty coffin doesn’t mean you need to jump in it yourself.” Joan hated it every time her mother got onto that idea.

  Flo softened a little at the look on Joan’
s face. “Love, do you really think your missing husband has somehow changed everything about himself and taken to the priesthood?” She folded and refolded the faded red-striped dishcloth beside her placemat. “And in a revival tent, no less? Jesus, at the very least he’d end up at the shrine proper and not in a parking lot.”

  It was so like Joan’s mother to call Victor a hallucination and then criticize the hallucination’s choice of career.

  “Walmart? Victor? No way.” Flo slapped the wooden table-top with the dishcloth. That was her halfbreed gavel—decision rendered. “Let me make some sandwiches. Then we should all have an early night. Funeral’s tomorrow and we need the rest.” She got up and went to the fridge.

  Joan looked like a balloon with a leak, slouched in her chair. Zeus wanted to hold her, restore her shape, but the air was too heavy with words said and unsaid.

  “And love,” Flo said over her shoulder, “maybe don’t talk about this, uhh, episode, to anyone else. It wouldn’t be the best thing for your love life or the company. No one wants a crazy woman building their house.”

  Later, Zeus and Flo ate their ham sandwiches in silence. Joan picked at hers. They heard Junior drive up and Flo got up to take their plates to the sink. “Nothing about this to your brother, eh?” she warned. “He has enough to deal with right now. We all do.”

  “I have to get going, anyways. Lots of cleaning up still to do.” Joan stood and Zeus did too and followed her out the door. They passed Junior on the porch and they all nodded at each other. The drive home was silent. Zeus didn’t even listen to his Discman but kept his headphones in his lap. When Joan took the corner onto her dark street, Zeus glanced sideways at her. She looked tired, the kind of tired that comes with sick. Her shoulders were slumped but her hands were white-knuckle gripped on the wheel.