Aria had also met Wolf. In truth, they had been introduced to one another by Robert and had only shaken hands. He didn’t sleep in a car or in a tent or beneath a tarp like everyone else at the lot. Except for when it rained, he would sleep out underneath the open sky, preferring to have nothing between him and the world. His real name was James, but everyone called him Wolf and it was the only title that was fitting. Out of everyone at the lot, Wolf intrigued Aria the most. He seemed to hang around the lot less because it was a home base and more because it offered a poor substitute for a missing sense of tribe. Aria watched him disappear into the woodland for hours and even days, as if on some sort of solitary vision quest. When he returned, he would sit with Robert and talk for hours, or throw a stick for Palin until she was too tired to fetch it anymore. And more than a few times, she saw him sitting with EJ in his car.

On one of those days, Aria had thought they were smoking weed. But, after watching them long enough, she realized that Wolf had gathered a tiny bundle of sage and was smudging EJ with it. Whether EJ was open to Wolf’s guidance or not didn’t seem to matter to Wolf. He appeared to be heavily invested in EJ’s recovery. He had imposed himself as a mentor to usher EJ out of his lost-ness.

Aria loved the feel of Wolf. He had a distrustful way of being. But his poverty and his ill-fitting clothes could not conceal what was truly magical about him. Aria could hear the pulse of the earth itself in his footsteps. She could hear its rivers in his veins. He seemed to carry both the earth and sky within him. His skin was the color of coffee. His 40 years upon this earth had only just begun to trace chicken-foot wrinkles from his eyes to his temples. He wore his long black hair in a ponytail that was tied just above the back collar of his shirt. His hands and arms were covered in tattoos, most of them representing some part of his life that he considered to be a rite of passage. Some of them, spiritual messages to himself, were etched into his skin so he couldn’t forget them. There was no way of telling where the black of his pupil ended and his iris began. The whites of his eyes were yellowed. Palin’s eyes looked more human than his did; and the consciousness behind them, more familiar.