Smoke River (10 page)

Elijah watches Mitch Bain hustle out of the liquor store, fondling his piss-water Scotch as if it were his pretty wife’s ass. He chuckles, grabs a bottle of Laphroaig for himself, and then, on a whim, a bottle of Dalwhinnie.

Around the same time that Elijah forsook mainstream education, a simple poster, the masterwork of some zealous public health bureaucrat, was whittling away at the fortunes of Doreville’s white folks. On it were two photos: the first was of a healthy lung, wetly pink and blue-veined; beside it, a shot of the blackened, necrotic lung of a smoker. All across the country, the poster was being hauled out near the end of phys. ed. class and hoisted for the benefit of squeamish preteens, sitting on the gym floor, still recovering from laps and jumping jacks. It was posted in the waiting rooms of doctors’ offices and Planned Parenthood centres. A few renegade public health nurses tacked it up in the bathrooms of local bars. Damn poster was everywhere. Lots of people kept smoking, for sure, even if the poster was burned into memory. Nobody wanted to be associated with that ugly ulcerating lung on the right. Politicians – who for decades had regularly invited Doreville’s biggest tobacco growers on trade junkets to Europe and Asia – stopped visiting the region for photo opportunities. Subsidies dwindled. Cigarette taxes climbed. Doreville, and its hallmark crop, had become a political liability.

At seventeen, Elijah had made two important discoveries: it was surprisingly simple to make cigarettes, and there was a surplus of tobacco to make them with. He borrowed money to buy a small rolling machine that fit in the back of a friend’s
truck. A pocketful of cash bought him tipping and rolling paper, filters. Stung by the depressed prices the big cigarette producers were offering, and shut out of owning a crop quota by the clubby marketing board, the local independent tobacco growers were willing to drive a load into his laneway, just outside the reserve, at night in exchange for thick envelopes. In his first month of business, Elijah sold out all of his product – harsh, unsophisticated rollies in freezer bags of fifty or a hundred that were 50 per cent cheaper than the highly taxed name brands. He didn’t spend all this new flush of money on himself; instead, he expanded.

To his fellow Mohawks, making and selling untaxed cigarettes represented economic sovereignty. Everyone else, even those who piled into minivans and pickups to buy their discounted smokes on the reserve, considered it illegal. The more money Elijah made, the more he craved respect outside the reserve and beyond the town’s tight fists and small minds. So he decided to make nice with the feds. He started to pay taxes. He built a gleaming new cigarette plant on the reserve’s main road, using a nice dollop of federal business grant money. Suddenly he was the reserve’s largest employer, even though the entire native population was pissed at him for selling out to the oppressors. He started exporting his cigarettes to Europe and Asia as well as supplying the smoke shacks. He joined the Rotary Club and sponsored softball teams, on and off the reserve. He began construction of a ten-thousand-square-foot ranch house on prime river frontage. Within a year he was a “force for change,” according to the
Interlake Post
. His move into legitimacy, its speed and deftness, conferred upon him a trickster’s duality: everyone respects him; nobody trusts him. It is a contradiction Elijah is happy to abide.

Ten minutes after his encounter with Mitch Bain, he is driving down Tenth Line, listing the different home styles like
hockey cards. Trailer. Trailer. Shabby bungalow. Modest side-split. Trailer. Ah, there’s a keeper: a brand-new four-bedroom Cape Cod–style home with an
SUV
parked in the circular drive. Smoke shack? Smuggling? Or one of those back-to-the-rez liberals with a fat-paycheque job in the city? He makes a game of guessing. Several thousand reserve residents without drinkable water, their cisterns and wells polluted by upriver agricultural runoff and industrial wastes, but this guy’s got a Jacuzzi and home theatre. “And why not? Why the fuck not?” he says aloud. He passes two other similarly new and jarringly luxe homes before he reaches Industrial Line, where the gleaming headquarters of Flint ’n’ Feather Tobacco Incorporated is located.

On days like these, he just wants to smell the future. The plant is divided into two factories; Elijah walks into the primary processing facility, where a load of flue-cured Brazilian is being puffed and sweetened like breakfast cereal. There is a good amount of reclaimed tobacco from spoiled cigarettes and enough stems and factory-floor offal for reconstitution. His great-grandfather trapped beaver, hunted deer using the same principle: nothing goes to waste. He’s the real deal now; a recent investment means the actual amount of tobacco he throws out has decreased. Just like the big boys. Except he won’t add diammonium phosphate to the mother liquor. He won’t strengthen people’s addictions with ammonium hydroxide either. A clean, chemical-free smoke at a sixth of the price.

He sinks his hands into the tobacco rag that comes off the cutter, ready to be turned into cigarettes. There is a slight newness to its odour, but when he breathes in more deeply he can smell the ameliorants – a little bit of glycerol, a hint of butterfat – that will make his higher-end Warrior brand of cigarettes taste smooth, a bit grassy and sweet. Just like a good Scotch. Or at the very least, better than a rollie. Business is
good, and if it stays that way, if his export markets build, soon he will have to build another plant. That requires land, and there’s not much available.
You can fret about these things
, thinks Elijah,
or you can just wait
.

I
n late June’s heat wave, Herman’s Dairy Bar reeks of souring cream and artificial caramel. Parents, their crabby children in tow, roll in from the hot and breezeless outdoors to be greeted by a whiteboard scrawl of sold-out favourites. The sight of each new customer after four o’clock on a Sunday makes Stephanie swear under her breath. Her apron is gaudy with Gumball Surprise and Rainbow Sherbet smears. She feels yeasty and sticky. And now there’s a line snaking along the counter, while her relief, Brittany, a jock-tacular girl with a terminal grin, has yet to show up, though it’s fifteen minutes past the start of her shift.

Half submerged in a bucket of Naughty Monkey, rooting around for remnants still frozen enough to hold the shape of the scoop, Stephanie hears the front door’s
whoosh
signal more customers. “Christ almighty!” she seethes, and for a horrible, unexpected moment, the shop becomes quieter. Half her body is still bent inside the ice cream freezer, but she could swear she
heard somebody hiss, with the fleeting sibilance of a punctured hose.
So many Jesus Crispies in this frickin’ town
, she thinks. So quick to take offence.

Brittany finally arrives at the back entrance with a series of bumps and crashes, ploughing her mountain bike through the narrow, tub-stacked hallway before stowing it in the tiny lunchroom, where it obstructs the staff washroom. Stephanie, eyes down, keeps working, though she has already loosened the ties on her apron, ready to quit the fetid sweetness the second the other girl’s volleyball-champion legs appear behind the cash.

The line along the counter crushes inwards, leaving a gulf between it and the most recent customers. Stephanie, who won’t admit her nearsightedness, has to focus to make out Nate Bastine, his hands on the shoulders of a young boy who may be eight, standing adrift at the back of the shop. The singlet he’s wearing shows off his good shoulders; he is darkened by the sun and his hair is longer. She can’t tell if Nate is looking at her with recognition or to avoid the glare of the sneering father she has just served. She smiles. He smiles back, and everything that was already sticky on her is stickier still.

The young father, his face soft and florid, whispers under his breath and shoves his three-foot charge, gooey with melting Naughty Monkey rivulets, towards the cash register. Stephanie drops her gaze and rings them in. Brittany emerges, ablaze with Friesland genetics and a clean apron cinched tight at her small waist, her white-gold tresses pulled into a ponytail. Nate moves forward so the little boy’s chin is level with the end of the counter.

The young father, now exiting, turns and addresses their backs. “Fucking nerve.”

The words land like overturned tables; everyone stares into empty space. Stephanie waits for another adult to censure the man. But all have cast down their eyes, except for Brittany, who glares at Nate.

He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t look in the direction of the man. His eyes continue to scan the menu board, even when the shop door slams with an insulting suck. Brittany’s eyes gleam. She scrutinizes Stephanie’s dishevelled hair, the butchery of cartoon colours on her apron, and grins. “You can count out your tips,” she says. “I’ll serve them.”

And at that Brittany lines herself up with Nate’s shoulder. “So, what do you want there?”

Nate reaches for the young boy, pulls him closer to his hip.

“What’s it going to be? I’ve got lots of good citizens to get to.”

Nate leans and the boy whispers. He points. “The orange one.”

Brittany doesn’t ask what size or type of cone. She opens the ice cream freezer as if she were mad at it and assaults a bucket of sherbet with her scoop.

Stephanie wants to move but can’t. Ahead of Nate, the other customers clear their throats, shift their feet impatiently. A few seconds later, Brittany holds out a cone to Nate’s young charge that is half the size of their smallest order. The scoop is lopsided, mushy, with trails of electric orange running down the cone.

The boy hesitates. Nate’s face darkens. Brittany pushes it farther in his direction, her pelvis flattening against the ice cream fridge, her bum in the air, and the sherbet dripping onto the boy’s sneakers.

Stephanie takes a big suck of air, grabs Brittany’s shoulder hard, and wrenches the girl’s arm back over the counter. The melting cone welts the varsity athlete’s face with a bright orange swipe before hitting the wall behind the counter and slithering to the floor.

Now Brittany and Stephanie face off behind the counter, Brittany looking ferocious with her sherbet-gashed cheek, ready fists, and Christian predestination, while Stephanie, with her loose, filthy apron, waxy bangs, and non-belief, is less so. The
whole of Herman’s Dairy Bar is hushed but for the beleaguered chug of the air-conditioning fan.

Stephanie senses the other girl’s calm heat, all the twitch fibres of her muscular legs tensed and ready to spring. The shakes move up from her ankles and threaten to topple her at the knees. The sharp tang of adrenaline is on her tongue. When she manages to speak, her voice is high and uncertain. “Just quit it, okay?”

Brittany’s lips curl like some sort of roused serpent. Her body relaxes.
What the fuck
, she mouths.

“I’m taking these customers, Brit. Then I’m leaving,” Stephanie says with more authority. She breathes again, recognizing that somehow, miraculously, control has shifted back to her, and it will take a while for Brittany to figure out that she has not, for once, come out ahead.

Stephanie won’t look at Nate because her eyes are watering and she’s trying to control her trembling hands. She remakes the younger boy’s ice cream with an extra scoop and hands it to him. Their fingers brush on the waffle cone, and she has to resist the urge to grab those little hands and beg for forgiveness. Not just for her failure to do the right thing sooner but for everyone else’s, the whole mess.

“It’s on the house,” she says. She’s not allowed to comp, but she does it anyway because she won’t risk sending them to the cash register, where Brittany has planted herself. Now she just wants them to leave, for their sake and hers.

But when Nate holds open the door for the young boy and exits without looking back, Stephanie feels a constriction in her chest. She throws off the apron, grabs a napkin, and scrawls her cellphone number in large print across it. Underneath she writes,
Call me – Stephanie
, in script. Let Brittany take her tips for all it matters. She hustles out the back of the shop and around it, just as Nate is putting the truck he’s driving in gear.
Stephanie shouts, “Hey!” and hurries to his open window, her eyes wide, manic in her new fearlessness.

His jaw softens as he reads the napkin, but all he does is nod quietly before engaging the clutch. Stephanie’s eyes linger on his bare shoulder, the long, muscled slope of his arm, the wisps of his dark hair, and she feels uncharacteristically indifferent to her own overheated, unshowered wretchedness.

At the back door Brittany awaits, the cash register abandoned. Her arms are crossed, her eyebrows bullying her hairline. “Like, don’t your parents own the land they’re having their little circus on? I mean, what’s your fuckin’ problem? You want them to break the law? Can’t find another way to rebel?” Her mouth hangs open in a sinkhole of disbelief.

Determined to enjoy this singular moment of her own invincibility, Stephanie brushes past as if all the Brittanys of the world have been wiped from the planet.

Nate Bastine had upset all of Stephanie’s expectations about native kids, ones she didn’t know she had. Sure, he had an eagle feather tattooed on his neck, wore a black jacket emblazoned with “Native Pride,” walked with a swagger. But he did not sit in the back of the class, plunk himself down at a peripheral cafeteria table for lunch, or drift beyond the soccer field before or after the bell rang. He took his sketch pad to every subject in grade ten, and it was the first thing he opened when he sat down, regardless of whether the subject was Math or Chemistry or Civics and Society.

It wasn’t so remarkable that Nate knew many of the answers when teachers made a point of interrupting his doodling to ask him about cosine law, chemical nomenclature, or
MLA
citation style. What made Stephanie uncomfortable was how surprised she herself was that Nate knew the answers. In North American history he actually put up his hand and
corrected the teacher, firmly but persistently, not caring that the whole class had gone silent as Mr. Bigelow stammered something about “evolving interpretations.” It was the only subject Nate put his hand up in, the only time Stephanie noticed a native kid offering an answer. And Nate Bastine looked everybody directly in the eyes. He did not avert his gaze, ever.