“I must say, I admire your inquisitive spirit.” Joanie felt his gaze roving over her body, and turned her face to the window, rolling her eyes. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy. It didn’t matter, though, she told herself. She calmly stared back at him. He was the first to look away, turning his eyes back to the road. Joanie was satisfied when she saw him swallow with discomfort. She felt the Vine’s approval in this small flex of her power.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Lorena.”
“What a beautiful name.” It was a beautiful name, Joanie thought, the name she’d always given her imaginary mother. “I’m Ray,” the driver said, extending a hand out for her to shake. Joanie ignored it, and he dropped it back into the space between them.
“You know,” he continued. “The battle at Antietam was the bloodiest day in American history.”
“How did you know that?” Joanie asked, her voice wavering with suspicion. Perhaps she didn’t have the upper hand in the car, after all. This man could be a monster, too.
“I’m a history professor. I have to know that. It’s a pretty big one to know.”
“That’s what it says here, too,” Joanie said, tapping at the brochure resting on her knees. “But how can we really know? How can anyone really know? How many gallons of blood was it? A swimming pool full? A river?”
“I mean, in terms of volume, no one can say exactly.” Ray cleared his throat.
“Really? No one can say,” Joanie repeated.
Ray nodded. “Other than the people who were there, who died there, I suppose.”
Joanie leaned back into her seat. “Have you ever seen a dead person?” she asked.
“What?” Ray’s eyes widened, and he looked over at her, his gaunt, sunburned face broke open. “I mean, I must have. At funerals, perhaps. But I get the feeling that’s not precisely what you mean.”
“I have. My husband.”
“Your husband? You certainly don’t look old enough to be a widow.” Ray shifted behind the wheel, and he scratched a spot behind his ear repeatedly, like he was counting. “How did he die?”
Joanie set her hands on either side of her throat, trying to hold the skin together there. She was suddenly terrified that if she talked about it, she would break up into nothing, just dissolve right into the air inside of the Volvo. “An accident.” She felt the word floating on the stream of her voice, nearly saw it, glowing, out in front of her face.
“That’s terrible. I’m so sorry.”
“His mother blamed me. Thought I was responsible.”
Ray cleared his throat. “Were you?”
“Not exactly.”
“Are you, I mean, do you need help? Are you in some kind of trouble?”
Joanie shook her head.
“I see. Should we move on to sunnier subjects?” Ray asked as he crossed the dotted yellow line dividing the road and passed a Toyota Tacoma.
“No,” Joanie said. “Let’s be quiet for a while.” She concentrated on his flushed red face, and the blood that pooled under the skin there. She could feel the pattern of the platelets rushing, and reached out as the Vine might, to infuse herself with the driver’s vital blush. But she couldn’t catch hold of it, as though some slippery layer prevented her from finding a way in.
Ray looked at his watch and then back to Joanie. She felt his prodding looks, and felt her irritation increase with each one.
“Are we close?” Joanie asked.
He nodded. “Getting there. There’s a spillover lot a few miles up ahead on the left.”
“I can get out there,” Joanie said, pressing a finger to the glass of the passenger side window. The muscles in her face tensed into a grimace as she considered her next step.
“If you are in some kind of trouble, maybe I could help,” Ray said, moving his hand to signal before the turnoff. He reached across to where she sat and gave her shoulder what he probably meant to be a supportive squeeze. Joanie didn’t answer, but felt his hand there. He stroked down her arm in what some girls would have interpreted as reassurance. Not Joanie. She knew exactly what he was doing, what he was looking for, what mealy, pedestrian fantasy he nursed picking up a young girl off the side of the road. She narrowed her eyes at him and wanted nothing more than to use the new power growing inside of her. An undercurrent of encouragement from the Vine shuddered through her. She reached her own hand down through the space that separated them and grabbed ahold of his thigh.
“What do you want me to do for you?” Joanie asked.
“What do you mean?” Ray shifted in the driver’s seat.
“Nobody does anything for free. You’re a history teacher. You should know that better than most people.” Joanie looked at his miserable little goatee and felt a wild strength swell in her arms and hands and chest.
“That’s not always true,” he said, but he turned the car just short of the overfill lot under a dense spray of branches. He turned the key in the ignition and the engine fell silent.
“Do you want to fuck me?” Joanie said.
Ray jolted a little, and Joanie felt his discomfort shooting out at her, pushing her away. “Um, no,” he said, his eyes moving over the empty parking lot in the distance.
“No,” she said, and the rush of the Vine’s power beat in her ears. “I really don’t think you do.” She moved even closer, so that she was on her hands and knees, half of her body in the passenger seat and the other half on the driver’s side. She planted her forearm between his legs and felt him getting hard. She reached out again, the way she reached out to the Vine, and felt the driver spill open like an overripe melon.
“You do want something, though,” she said, tilting her head. She looked at Ray, his head pressed back against the glass, as far away from her as he could get while still sitting in the car, his breathing almost a pant.
Joanie closed her eyes and inhaled Ray’s scent of wool and patchouli, and with it, the nourishment her worship demanded. She felt another hand on her shoulder, a familiar one this time, almost like a push: Helen. There was some message here, some other thing she was supposed to collect.
Joanie looked closely at her driver and tried to match his wide-eyed terror and excitement with an act that would confound and distress him the most, to extract more of the power she desperately needed for the Work ahead.
When it clicked into place, she smiled. “I’m going to pee on you.”
“Young lady, I think you should get out of the car now.” Ray had squeezed his eyes closed tightly, but he was trembling and made no move to unlock the car, his erection through his pants now pitifully visible.
Joanie climbed over until she was straddling him. She unzipped her shorts and pulled them off one leg. She watched his labored breathing; she was thrilled and disgusted at the same time. The power she felt, though, overwhelmed every other sensation. It was difficult to get going, and Joanie realized she hadn’t had anything to drink in a while. She wondered if she should waste her limited fluids on Ray like this, and nearly laughed.
Ray had opened his eyes, and one of his hands had already reached between them, trying to open his pants. Joanie released a trickle of hot, pungent liquid. She felt the steam of it between her legs. He grimaced and tilted his head back. Joanie abruptly stopped, and moved her shorts back in place. She climbed back over to the passenger seat and opened the door, confident she had denatured something in the dull and grasping little man and siphoned it off for herself. He had deserved it; it was another simple act of balancing.
She separated herself from the car as though she were leaving another planet, a place with its own laws of physics. She felt better, bigger, charged with supernatural energy—fortified for what was to come.
* * *
The sun was at late-afternoon height. It was hot, and there was no breeze to cut through the stifling warmth. Joanie walked along until she reached a bus loading ar
ea. Packs of kids climbed on and off buses of various sizes, and Joanie watched them with consuming fascination. Ultimately, she lurked around a group of high school students finishing their lunches at a row of wooden picnic tables. She studied them, the girls and the boys, and wondered, sincerely curious, how their mouths moved like that—so easily around laughter and words and food. They were so obviously having a good day, and Joanie hated them. She experimentally widened her mouth in a smile, mimicking the laughing, chatting, crunching students.
She slid next to a girl in a yellow-striped T-shirt, one of the quieter ones. The girl’s face softened toward Joanie once she realized she had a seatmate.
“Anyone sitting here?” Joanie asked, the false smile already gone.
“Oh, no, please, go ahead.” The girl bobbed her head, and her light brown ponytail swung along with her head and neck.
“You must really like horses,” Joanie said as she picked up the girls’ mostly untouched sandwich.
The girl gave a muted gasp, and leaned back a little in her seat. “How do you know that?”
“Well, don’t you?” Joanie said as she chewed.
“I mean, yes, but how would—”
Joanie shrugged, and unscrewed the cap on the glass bottle of pink lemonade beside the girl’s horse-silhouette-flecked lunch bag. She drank nearly the whole bottle, jolted cool by the long, sweet drink. Joanie wondered if her son had eaten yet that day, if he had been changed and washed.
“I just...that’s weird. I didn’t think I gave off that kind of vibe—you must think I’m a baby.”
“What’s your name?” Joanie asked, too loud—elevated by the hydration and sucrose she’d stolen from this nervous, horse-loving girl.
Startled, the girl blinked several times before answering. “Amy.”
“You’re not a baby. There’s nothing wrong with liking horses.” Joanie smoothed her shoulder and swung her leg over the bench, heaving herself away to leave.
“Wait, aren’t you going on the tour? Which bus did you come on? Hampshire County?”
“Oh, yeah,” Joanie said, wishing she weren’t so dirty and sunburned, wishing for a brief moment that she could just get on the bus from the Hampshire County district and see what happened.
“They say the girls at Hampshire are bitches, but you’re so nice.” Amy tilted her head, her ponytail bouncing off the side of her throat.
Joanie laughed, and again felt powerful, just as she had felt with Ray. She let the laughter in, lining her insides. “Oh, Amy, that’s cute.”
“Want to walk with me on the tour?”
Joanie felt a little guilty—the girl in the yellow T-shirt had no idea what was going on. She understood nothing; she understood less of the world than little Emil, and suddenly Joanie felt a flash of tenderness toward her. “Of course. Let’s go.” Joanie picked up the other girl’s half-full baggie of apple slices and started to eat them as they walked toward the group congregating by the parallel lines of parked buses, not in the least surprised by how closely Amy trailed her.
Joanie reached back and threaded Amy’s arm through hers, so that they looked like a pair of young women in one of Letta’s magazines—smiling, sunning themselves in admiration. Amy flushed, and looked at the other clusters of students, a pleased little smile on her lips. Joanie knew she’d be found out, that she’d stick out by being on her own. She’d latch onto the girl and get to the right spot unobserved this way.
“So are you in AP History, too?” Amy asked.
“Oh, yeah, love it,” Joanie said, sighing over the glazed gold of the wheat fields. There is something in here, she thought. “I have a son,” she told Amy, turning to look at the girl’s shimmering ponytail. She couldn’t hold back saying it, compelled by the glinting crops.
“Wow, really?” Amy tried to pull back a little, but Joanie held her arm firmly. “Um, how old is he?”
“About four months.”
“Oh, wow. We should probably go over where people are gathering—you know, for the tour.”
“Yeah, I know.” Joanie looked at the girl beside her and wanted to snatch the ponytail off her head. How could a person be so nothing? Their feelings so easily pushed and pulled around? Was this what she would have been if her mother had been some nice, responsible Amy? She felt a rush of gratitude for her baby, and relief that she was his parent and somebody like Amy wasn’t. Even if their life at the garden fell short in some ways, at least it didn’t produce people like this. Joanie wondered if all of the clumps of students eddying around them were equally dull and impossible. Was she the only hot creature in this swarm of nothings? Joanie suddenly felt bored with the girl beside her, but couldn’t abandon the cover she provided. Instead, Joanie focused on the other girl’s body, collecting energy from her like the Vine would.
Joanie leaned into Amy a little, taking the warmth from her, making herself feel a little more golden. For what she was going to do, she needed all the strength she could gather. She imagined building a tower from the horde of young bodies and climbing to the top like a warrior. What could she do then? she wondered. Joanie gave Amy a cool smile. She imagined threading the girl’s limbs through the limbs of some other sweaty nothing. Amy shifted from foot to foot.
“Ready?” Joanie asked, her voice bright as she dragged the girl along to the meeting point where the guide stood on a large stone, waiting for the crowd of lunch-sated youths to settle down.
“Eyes on me, p-people,” the guide stammered into the wind. He swept his arms through the air, accidentally knocking into a tree branch shading Antietam’s visitor center. “Please,” he added, “keep it to a dull roar. What we’re about to see is some somber stuff. I’d hope you could all be a little more respectful.” The guide raised his eyebrows meaningfully at one of the teachers, a petite woman in a floral sundress.
“Settle down, everyone,” she said half-heartedly.
The guide looked up to the sky, as though asking for divine patience, and continued. “Almost 26,000 lives were lost here, in a period of twelve hours. Indeed, the bloodiest day of the Civil War. That’s more people killed in one day than were killed in the entire Revolutionary War and the Mexican-American War combined.”
Suddenly, Joanie needed to know, was consumed by the need to know. “Ask him,” she whispered to Amy. “Ask him where all the blood went.”
“What?” Amy released a nervous, little laugh.
“Ask him.” Joanie squeezed her arm, but only a little. She knew it would be enough to bully the other girl into speaking. Amy raised her hand, meekly, just barely clearing the top of her head with her fingertips.
“Yes, you there in the yellow.” The guide wiped the sweat from his upper lip.
“Um.” Amy looked at Joanie quickly and then back to the guide. “Where did all the blood go?”
“Where did all the blood go?” the guide repeated in surprise.
A murmur began to stir through the group of kids—they chorused, “Yeah!” and “Good question!” and Amy once again looked pleased, shining a smile out at Joanie.
Joanie stared hard at the guide as he tried to piece together an answer. “Well,” he said finally, looking around at the swells of the bright green and gold hills around them. “I suppose it was absorbed.”
“Like into the ground?” a girl shrieked. “Like into these crops?”
The guide paled and looked to the corners of the group where the chaperoning adults all seemed to be looking elsewhere.
Into the ground, Joanie thought. All of the elements of Helen’s recipe were there, burned in the sack she carried, or there beneath her feet. It was falling together better than she had imagined. It was all there in flawless balance. She felt a shimmer in the air, a blessing from Helen, she thought. The tour wound through a grassy path that sliced through a field of wheat. The guide stopped to speak, though the students were still in a frenzy over the blood i
n the soil.
“This is the location of the fight for the cornfield. It took place early in the morning, approximately between seven and seven forty a.m. Imagine—it was foggy, the two armies set up on either side of this cornfield, this thirty or so very acres where you children are standing. The Confederates fired, and here you have the Federals advancing toward their fire. Can you see it, children? Lines and lines of doomed men marching through the corn.”
Joanie could certainly see it, and for an instant it was as though shadowy figures clamored up and out of the earth. Joanie understood why Helen had scratched the crossroads into her notebook, why she had been so insistent; the power here, where the dead broke through, was undeniable. She could feel their decomposing hands clutching out at her living ones, and the echoes of their noises—retching, weeping, laughing, begging—rearranging her cells. All of their lives, compressed down into the earth, sang out at her. She fell back into their miserable wailing and closed her eyes—just like with Amy, and with Ray, she had the feeling that she was being charged with some essential energy. She waited toward the back of the group as the tour advanced, holding her arms around herself.
The guide led them to a bridge—the bridge on the pamphlet—another place where thousands of men had died. Joanie could see it, the bodies and blood in the water, turning the Potomac the muddy red of menstrual blood. She pressed her hands against her eyes—this...this was the place the Vine had shown her.
There was a little asphalt path just before the bridge that crossed a wide ditch—natural or manmade, Joanie couldn’t tell. As the group moved on, she dropped down into the trench. She huddled under the suspended path, pressing herself against the gravel and dirt, waiting to begin.
24
Cello woke up in the undisturbed room knowing he was alone. Still, he scoured it for Joanie. The dream was not like any dream he’d had before, and Cello was troubled. Had she been trying to tell him something? He sat up and opened the blinds, staring out at the forest that bordered the motel lot. It was not only that Joanie was gone. Everything was different.
Daughters of the Wild Page 24
