Empire of Wild

by Cherie Dimaline

  Wolff had now disappeared into the trees, and he wouldn’t come back to his room till morning. Cecile decided that she couldn’t wait that long to see him. She had been patient. Months of being at his side. Months of reading scripture with him in the evenings. Weeks and weeks of edging closer: making sure she sat beside him in weekly meetings, coincidentally showing up for meals at the same time as him, often ending up in the same elevator. She considered herself a godly woman. A patient woman. But she was a woman all the same. And she decided that tonight would at last be the night, even if she had to track him down in the woods.

  She sang upbeat hymns in the shower, then applied the Motel 8 body lotion she found on the bathroom shelf and dried her hair with the loud dryer attached to the wall. As she looked through her underthings, Cecile tried to summon a little of the old Cecile, the woman from before the Ministry of the New Redemption, before rehab, back when she was sexually free.

  At twenty, her hometown of Hamilton had felt stifling to her. Her mother was gone, things with her dad were complicated at best, and her grandmother—the only person who had really watched out for her—had died when she was fifteen. She spent hours locked in her room watching TV specials on Ken Kesey and his road trip with the Merry Pranksters, on the Beats and on Timothy Leary and all things psychedelic. She loved the freedom, the self-expression. These were people who understood the importance of truly being and not just existing.

  She read Siddhartha half a dozen times and could recite the first three pages of “Howl” from memory. Her father told her she was a throwback, but she felt brand new, part of a revival, part of a generation who were bored and done with the excess of the eighties, the embarrassment of the nineties, the brokenness of the two thousands. California was the place she had to be. So she socked away all her money from working the till at the No Frills, finished one year at Mohawk College like she’d promised her father she would, then bought a plane ticket to LA.

  She should have been terrified, or at least nervous, given that she knew no one in California and that everything she owned, or at least, what this new version of herself owned, was rammed into a blue IKEA bag stuffed in the overhead. But she wasn’t. She was excited. She wore sandals and two shimmery skirts layered one on top of the other, and a cropped top from grade eight with “Beat It” written in bubble letters across her breasts. She’d wrapped necklaces around her ankles and sewed their metal links together to make them fit, then looped two hemp braids around her big toes and connected them. She’d flown with really dirty hair: she’d promised herself to get dreads once she landed and had started the process by not washing her hair for three weeks.

  That first day in LA, sitting in a café social media said was sympathetic to gutter punks and New Agers, she met Sage, a man with glorious, blond, sun-bleached dreads that hung to his waist. She had no idea how old he was, maybe somewhere between twenty-one and forty-nine. His face was all cheekbones and freckles around an easy smile that showed a childhood of dental work and an adulthood of neglect. His bare stomach reached into board shorts in an impressive V that brought your eye down. He stopped to order a kombucha with extra bacteria culture from the bald girl at the counter and then slid onto the bench beside her.

  Sage told her she was a vision. He claimed that he had literally foreseen her coming, hence his ease at approaching her. Since they were not strangers, he felt comfortable laying a drink-chilled hand on her forearm, which he slid to the small of her bare back as they talked. Soon he had convinced her that she should stay with him and his wives in a caravan in what he said was the last true free community in the world—Slab City.

  “It’s on public land. There’s no fees, no rent, no worries. I mean, no utilities and no sewage, but no hassle either. It’s a self-made town, the way things are supposed to be.”

  “Sounds perfect,” she said.

  “What’s your kick, anyways?”

  She leaned in close. “Ram Dass, polygamy and organic mind expansion.”

  “Oh dude, you have to come with me. Stay in LA and you’ll be panhandling and prostituting in no time.”

  His truck smelled like cat piss. Empty Red Bull and Listerine bottles rolled around the floor when they took corners. She paid for enough gas to get them out of LA and he lectured on the downfall of capitalism into the desert. When she sucked his dick in a gas-station bathroom near Joshua Tree, she realized he wasn’t kidding about not having running water. Finally, they pulled off the highway onto a dirt track, passing a rusty trailer and a man in a mobility scooter smoking a giant spliff. Sage honked his horn twice and called “Hey, Jetson” out the window. The man waved back. They passed chicken coops and a mangy donkey tied outside a shelter built out of crates, its roof a green awning. That first day he toured her through the settlement, where magicians and artists lived in trash-built homes where you could drop acid or write poetry. He took her down to the hot springs, where they took bum baths.

  Sage’s wives were vastly overweight or underweight and were preoccupied with scratching themselves in various places and rolling cigarettes they smoked down to ash. Soon, Cecile knew the magicians were mentally ill and the artists more interested in scoring fentanyl than painting.

  By her second week in the caravan, she was smoking meth on special occasions—concerts and poetry readings held in the courtyard, the stage delineated by dollar-store candles. By month two, she had a bad habit, smoking even on days when the heat pushed the residents out into the communal living rooms of broken furniture and plywood floors and people could see what she was doing. She became less discriminating. She hitched rides on Jetson’s scooter, the seat replaced with a beer cooler, to the trailers where she knew she could score. She did odd jobs, like washing dishes, running errands for the diabetics who had lost limbs and giving hand jobs to the elderly, for cash.

  After a forced miscarriage presided over by the wives, who dosed her with raspberry tea and performed a kind of massage that was really just two tweakers pushing her stomach to her spine, Cecile decided she had to leave. She called her father, who bought her a ticket, and then she was back in Canada and straight into a rehab centre. It took several rounds of penicillin to clear her of the gifts she’d received in her time as a Slabber. Not to mention the crabs and dog bites, and the black eye she got when Sage decided she had taken a bigger share from the baggie than was right.

  Some people say they didn’t know what they were looking for when Jesus came and found them. Cecile knew. She knew the moment she picked up the Bible from the rehab centre’s library shelf that Jesus was what she had been searching for. She threw out the beads and the mandala print shawls, replacing them with simple, long skirts and blouses, and a rosary she found on a day trip to a second-hand store. When her counsellor suggested she was trading one addiction for another, she firmly disagreed. After she was out of rehab, she fought her father when he arranged weekly visits with a psychologist and then fought with the psychologist herself when she brought up the possibility that Cecile’s rapid shifts of direction might be due to borderline personality disorder. No one could see that what was happening to her was not mental illness, it was her being called.

  She’d gone back to her father’s house, but she could not return to the life she’d had before California and rehab and Christ. There would be no more college, no more movies and certainly no books that weren’t written by the Lord Himself. She went from church to church, looking for a sign that this was where she fit, that this was where she was needed. And then the ministry came through town.

  It was a smaller operation back then. No tent. Instead they held meetings in community-centre basements and handed out literature at church bazaars. She’d volunteered right away and began to travel to each meeting, working hard to become indispensable: organizing the other volunteers, designing and printing up posters and pamphlets that helped deliver news of a better way to the First Nations people the ministry served. Mr. Heiser was as impressive as he was inspirational. Here was a man who wore five-t
housand-dollar suits but ladled out macaroni and cheese at the soup kitchen. He always had time for volunteers and worshippers alike. One time she’d asked him how he found the time and energy for it all. “God had time to create the world in seven days,” he said. “I guess after that, nothing looks impossible.” Of course.

  At last Mr. Heiser recognized how invaluable she’d become by assigning her the role of congregational coordinator. That was also the day she packed up her belongings and left home for good. She’d been travelling with the ministry ever since.

  A year later, the Reverend Wolff appeared. He was charismatic and of the people and soon their congregation grew and their circuit expanded. Suddenly they weren’t just showing up, but were being invited into communities. They purchased a second-hand tent from a wedding rental store and bought stacking chairs with a loan from Mr. Heiser’s company. It was clear as the sweet morning light on that first day the tent was erected, all peaks and posture, that Cecile truly had found her calling.

  And in the handsome Reverend Wolff, Cecile saw a second sign—one she hadn’t ever expected to receive. Now she knew at whose side she was meant to stand. God bless Mr. Heiser and wherever he had encountered Eugene (a name she only dared call the Reverend in her head). What glory it would be to be the wife of such a powerful minister!

  And so she put on her best underwear and one of her long dresses, modest yet flattering and, more importantly, easy to slide a hand under. She pushed crystal hearts on silver hooks through her ears and applied enough makeup to highlight her best features. She brushed out her hair and gave the top volume with some hairspray, leaving the rest loose. Then she put on her long, beige cape, slid the key card for her room into the front pocket and rushed down the hallway, her door banging shut behind her. She took the stairs to avoid running into anyone from the ministry in the elevator.

  In the dusk she crossed the parking lot, then picked her way across the litter-strewn ditch and slipped into the trees. He wasn’t hard to find. The woods were sparse and he had lit a small fire.

  He was lying on top of his sleeping bag, a cushion under his head and a blanket pulled up to the neck. It looked like he was already asleep. She stood over him, watching the small shadows cast by the flames move over his face. They painted and erased his features so that his very person seemed to change: from long hair, five o’clock shadow, defeat and sadness, back to the groomed perfection of her Reverend. The shift disturbed her in a way she couldn’t quite grasp, given that it was all a trick of the light.

  Finally, she took a deep breath, kicked off her shoes and lay down in the space to his right. She propped her head up on her hand, supported by an elbow, careful of the placement of her hair.

  “Reverend?” she whispered.

  No response.

  She laid her other hand on his chest and applied a bit of pressure. “Reverend Wolff.”

  Then she dared it. “Eugene?”

  Nothing. How could he sleep so soundly out here? What if a bear came along? His leg would be chewed to the knee before he stirred. She slipped her cape off and lifted his blanket, slipping underneath. The heat from his body was alarming, but his breathing was regular, untroubled. Maybe he just ran hot at night. She’d consider that when buying their sheet sets.

  She edged closer, resting her head on his chest. When he still didn’t stir, she lifted a thigh over his belly, then pushed it lower than that. As she moved it up and down, her eyes closed and her lips parted, as she was seduced by her own movements under the wool blanket.

  * * *

  Memories live not just in the brain but also in the muscle and tissue where they are created. They sleep curled in cells and platelets, until the right touch wakes them. When a man kisses his wife, it’s not necessarily the fresh contact that unsettles his heart rate, but the memory of her wet mouth on his neck and the click of her wedding band against his fly three decades earlier. Sometimes a familiar hand on a shoulder can shiver song into your spine and make you dance.

  And so when the good Reverend Wolff—who indeed believed Cecile was an excellent candidate for a wife and companion, who loved her corn silk hair and considerable piety—opened his eyes and saw her eager face, heard her soft moan and felt her heavy thigh, he was unmoved in the way she sought. Still, he allowed her hands to search out the plane of his stomach and did not protest when they moved to replace the weight of her thigh.

  The Reverend was not so much a man as the outline of one—a chalk drawing on a sidewalk. This is why he needed the solitude of the woods and the light of the moon, why he needed his sessions with Mr. Heiser: he had to be redrawn on a regular basis, so that his edges could contain the words of the Lord, could move with purpose, could serve. All his will and whims were for the church. He waited to see if God would allow Cecile’s movements to stir him. God did not. The Reverend wasn’t troubled. He knew this was His bidding.

  He shifted and she rolled onto her back, waiting for him to move over her. Instead, he gazed up at the architecture of the sky and shook his head.

  “No,” he said.

  She reached for his zipper, moving her lips to his neck.

  “Cecile, no.” The Reverend pushed her hand away gently and flipped on his side, putting his back to her.

  The rejection paralyzed her for a long moment. Then she edged out from under the blanket and stood on bare feet. The ground was colder than it looked. She picked up her sandals, wrapped her cape around her and ran out of the woods, rocks, shards of glass and broken sticks piercing her soft soles.

  * * *

  Back in her room, Cecile turned the shower as hot as she could stand it and stood in the stream in her underwear. When she was done, she dried off with a thin towel that left her skin raw. Then she pulled on her longest white nightgown and crawled into the queen bed. She’d forgotten to switch off the overhead light and when she turned toward the window, she was faced with her own reflection, alone in bed. What did she do wrong? Had she misread the signs? She closed her eyes but she didn’t sleep.

  * * *

  The next morning Cecile couldn’t face seeing the Reverend, so she feigned a stomach virus and stayed in her room. Humiliation is a kind of sickness, after all—acute and self-pitying. That night she saw Ivy walk the Reverend under the parking lot lights toward the woods.

  What in the hell?

  Her breath had steamed a circle on the window, her hand clutching the burnt orange drapes that framed her face. There was Ivy, helpfully carrying the Reverend’s bedroll, gazing up at him as he spoke. When he took the sleeping bag from her at the ditch and placed a hand on her head in joint blessing and dismissal, Cecile laughed. She hoped Ivy would look up on her long walk back alone and see Cecile in the window looking down at her. But Ivy didn’t look up. And at least that night, Cecile was able to sleep.

  She woke to a summons to a breakfast meeting with Mr. Heiser, the Reverend and the other senior members of the ministry in the Motel 8 coffee shop—likely to discuss heading farther north where all godforsaken things grow: pine trees, Precambrian rock, reserves. She hated north: too cold, too empty. Maybe once she’d taken over more of the overall planning from Mr. Heiser she could steer them back down south, even across the border into the States. For a moment as she got ready to face them all, she imagined a triumphant return to Slab City, bringing Jesus into the trashy Flintstone huddle like a winged stallion of destruction and rebirth—stomping over greasy tents, scattering noxious gas-fed fires across litter-strewn pathways, as the scrawny maniacs fell to their scabby knees on the splintered pallets they used as front porches. Even the bedbugs would be transformed, maybe into butterflies, or moths at least, with large eye prints on dusty wings to keep them safe from Satan’s crows.

  She made her way across the lobby slowly, the holes in her soles covered in Band-Aids. Each step hurt, but that was good—it reminded her that she was walking alone, just herself and Jesus, another martyr with wounded feet. When she pushed open the heavy glass door into the coffee shop, only the ch
ain at the top clinked to announce her arrival—no cheerful bell. A row of puffy, ripped booths cut the room in two. On one side was a counter that was no longer used for diners, and instead held stacks of plates and napkins, newspaper sections, a sweater and a handful of pens. The other wall was reserved for window booths looking out over the parking lot and the highway beyond, edged by half a dozen tables with wooden chairs. Everything looked sticky.

  The others were already here, seated in a booth with cups of coffee. Everyone but Mr. Heiser and Cecile, who’d decided to go with a long, white dress, was wearing the blue MNR polo shirt. They all looked up at her as she walked toward them and she gave them a small wave. Greg waved back. Was she late? She checked the slim watch on her wrist. Yes, by a few moments. She blamed her consecrated feet. Then she noticed Ivy, perched on the end of one vinyl bench. What was she doing here? She wasn’t a senior member.

  “Hi all, sorry I’m late.” Cecile waited at the end of the bench for Ivy to move out and let her slide in beside Mr. Heiser, her usual position. “I guess I’m still a little wiped from this stomach bug. But I’m here now, so we can get started.”

  But Ivy didn’t slide out. Instead she moved closer to the boss, leaving the edge for Cecile. She smiled down into her cup, refusing eye contact.

  What the good Jesus hell? Cecile lowered herself to the bench, where the jagged edges of the torn seat cover had been duct-taped smooth. Surely someone would point out that Ivy should move.