Smoke River (37 page)

Coulson reaches past the nearly empty pint, the quart of blackberries, and wraps his hands around Shayna’s smaller, lighter ones so his thumbs rest in the delicate clefts of her wrists. They stay like this for a few minutes, each staring off into space, smiling weakly, with a small acreage of their skin fused.

The barmaid appears suddenly at their booth, a greyish cloth scrunched in her hands. She grabs the unused paper coaster behind Shayna’s elbow and reaches for Coulson’s pint glass. He encircles it with one hand.

“Whoa, there’s a good half swallow left in that.”

She pulls back, rests her hands on her hips. “Well, you folks ready to settle up?”

“I’ll just pay at the bar when I’m through, like always, thanks.” He tries to hide his irritation. The barmaid leans back towards the table, unfolds the cloth on its surface, and pushes its sour smell close to where Coulson’s fingers are again entwined with Shayna’s. Shayna loosens her grip as if to pull her hands away from his, but Coulson hangs on and shakes his head slowly. The barmaid leaves with a scowl.

“I think we should go,” says Shayna, her glance wheeling around the filling tables.

“I want you to hold off,” he says. “About the baby. You can’t be far along.”

“Three months. Four, tops,” she says.

“Let’s talk some more.”

Will Jacobs appears at their booth wearing a stained, faded T-shirt stretched like a leotard over his belly. He looks bilious and flushed. His hands move in front of him, play-fighting nervously,
and his eyes are trained on where Shayna’s fingers intertwine with Coulson’s. “You’ll have to leave. You’re upsetting my patrons.”

Coulson laughs heartily. Over Will’s shoulders he can see a half-dozen sets of eyes fixed on their booth. Shayna wiggles her hands free, slides them across the table, and hides them along her thighs.

“Do you always throw out your quietest customers?” Shayna is already getting up, moving out of the booth.

“I don’t know what your game is, Stercyx, you being a landowner and all. But I don’t appreciate it. Your point’s made. Now go home.”

Coulson stands up quickly. He towers over Will. Shayna puts a light hand on his arm but he resists. He wants to test her, see if her mettle is a match for his. Once a hailstorm laid waste to his entire tobacco crop in twenty minutes and he didn’t turn away, just watched the green plants tremble and rip under a drum corps of ice pellets. Cruelty, even the kind delivered with glee, can be endured. Love is harder to take.

She nods in the direction of the bar. Among the slump-shouldered regulars there’s a small knot of bald-headed young men he doesn’t recognize, their eyes trained on him like underfed dogs. She instinctively places a hand on her abdomen, and he looks down, sees something there, the subtlest swelling. He grabs her wrist, pulls her close, wraps his other arm around her shoulders, and leads her to the door, sheltered by as much of his body as he can muster.

As he is about to step out, a beer bottle grazes his calf and shatters on the tile beside his boot. Coulson jumps; a shard flies up and bounces from his knee. He jerks around, and Shayna slides away from him out the door. The pub has gone quiet, become a horseshoe of watchful figures, including the barmaid, with her crossed arms and bitter smile, and others he could greet by first name, many he’s known for years. Reflexively he
flips his middle finger to them before stepping outside, calling out for Shayna. He hears jeering laughter, sharp, then muffled as the door closes.

He stops. Ahead of him in the fading light, Shayna is a small moving shadow pulling him towards a future he’s unsure of. For a moment he feels a terrible thirst and wishes he could turn around, go back into the pub, and order another steadying pint.

Ella bends at the waist as if she is in pain. Mitch watches her pick at the kitchen floor with the focus of a hungry pigeon. When she straightens, her face is pulled into a point. “So, let me get this straight. You believe Las is guilty based on a scratch that Stephanie saw, a stupid baseball cap, and Gordo’s truck tires? You’ve got to be kidding.”

Mitch shifts nervously. Las lies in his bed only a floor above them. He doesn’t know if Stephanie is home. Ella’s voice is about to crescendo. A
quiet down
gesture – that one with his hands – will only set her off. She’s the kind of woman a man dare not shush.

“It can’t be true,” she says, shaking her head, becoming more shrill. “It can’t be true. Stephanie hates her brother. She’s jealous of him. And Peg is getting back at me.”

“Stephanie does not hate her brother,” Mitch says quietly. “And what’s true or not true doesn’t really matter, Ella. We have to act or lose everything.” Mitch feels his throat, still tender, and wonders if there will be an opportunity to mention it to Ella.

“It
does
matter what’s true, Mitch. It’s the
only
thing that matters.”

He looks at her angrily, his right arm extended. “Out,” he says, pointing, pushing her towards the patio door with his left hand. “I won’t have this conversation here.”

When she steps under the pergola, he keeps pointing, past the backyard gate, beyond the earshot of neighbours at their barbecues or weeding around delphinium borders. Ella marches away from their property into the rows of tobacco. The dusk-lit sky is worthy of a Flemish painter, Mitch thinks. And he yearns for a moment of repose, a quiet walk with his wife under its mauve and smoke. When she turns, he sees that she belongs in the painting: a flame-cheeked fishwife with a cudgel-like tongue. Beautiful and ferocious in the same moment.

“You, this is your fault! You spoiled Stephanie. You let her feel victimized by Las’s achievements. She took up with that native boy to spite us. And now these unseemly accusations, this fantasy!”

Mitch grabs his wife’s shoulders so they are eyeball to eyeball. He has never understood how a mother could not adore her own daughter. It’s the single thing about Ella he finds repulsive. “Do you have any idea how insane you sound? Stop talking about her like that or I will shut you out, Ella. I will deal with Peg and her silent partner myself. And I will keep you a hundred miles from the action. Do you hear?”

Ella slumps into the tobacco, her face in her hands.

“This is about Las,” Mitch says.

“You’ve never been kind to him,” she says in a biting whisper.

“Whether he has done something or nothing at all, we can’t let people talk, Ella. We won’t have a future in this town. Those boys are always together. The fucking tires on that cretin’s truck—”

She starts to sob. The tobacco plants beside her shiver. Mitch searches his mind for a soothing blandishment, something that will make this day end sooner. “I’m going to make everything okay,” he says.

A cricket lands on her shoulder, and when he reaches to brush it off, Ella wraps her arms around his knees so tightly that
the wetness on her face soaks through his cotton pants. “I don’t know anymore. I don’t know my own kids.” She reaches her hands up to his thighs, grabbing handfuls of his pants’ thin, inelastic fabric, yanking the waistband to his hips. “Have I been a good mother, Mitch? Tell me I’ve been good.”

She is pleading, and Mitch’s eyes well up with his own doubts and regrets. “Yes, Ella, you’re a good mother. You’re too good. Nobody could have done better, could have given more.”

She pulls him down to the ground and he is dizzy, feeling anew the rawness of his throat, the hugeness of what lies ahead. What he didn’t expect was desire, but here it is, an untimely gift. His wife helpless in his arms, her body ransacked by emotion, the violet sky and the balm of loamy smells rinsing him of sweat and soured Scotch, his own long hours of desperation. His hands slide up the outside of her thighs. He kisses her hurriedly, fumbles sloppily with her buttons, as if the smallest hesitation will make him stop. Her skin is clammy and pimpled in the evening air.

“You are the best part of my life,” Mitch says. He holds his breath, and then Ella holds on to him, with her pelvis, her mouth, her hands. Mitch makes her pant and cry out for him, for the idea of themselves that neither can give up.

J
oe Montagne thinks the guy walking towards his smoke shop looks like a federal spook, or one of those plainclothes
RCMP
officers who think that a shiny suit is going to make you blend in, look like a regular freakin’ Joe. Nice car, that’s for sure. Snub-nosed and silver, convertible top; Joe thinks maybe it’s an Audi. But shit, he can never get those city cars right. The guy, though, he’s got him figured. Something about his face that’s already working overtime. Man’s gotta be five metres away and already his smile is blazing like a casino entrance.
Wants something
, Joe thinks,
and I don’t suspect it’s smokes
.

“Hey, there,” the man says. A large palm, bright as the inside of a seashell, slices through the air towards him.

Joe stays put in his lawn chair. He doesn’t reach for the extended hand but lifts his coffee cup in greeting. “How’s things?” he says.

The man gestures towards the lawn chair that Coulson has been sitting on for a week of sunsets, now folded and leaning against the back of the Ford.

Joe shrugs. “I’m guessing you’re not here for rollies.”

The man in the shiny suit unfolds the chair and laughs a bit nervously, then sits and leans forward. “You’re a smart man,” he says.

Joe doesn’t even lift his eyes. “No. No, I’m not,” he says. “What can I do for you?”

“My name is Saj Vinay,” he says. “I’m with a law firm called Krantz, Russell, Simpson.”

“I didn’t do nothing,” Joe says, raising the pitch of his voice in mock defence.

“Are you able to talk privately, Mr. Montagne?”

“You see anybody else here but us?”

The lawyer wears a gold chain bracelet on one wrist, an expensive watch on the other. Light bounces off the man. It makes Joe’s eyes smart.

“I was so sorry to hear about your daughter,” he says.

Joe stands abruptly. The lawn chair falls back hard, makes the sound of a crunched pop can. He drops his coffee and it splashes the lawyer’s shiny shoes. “What the fuck do you know about my daughter?”

He looms. His shadow dulls the lawyer’s sheen. But the shiny man is not rattled. He stands too, picks up the fallen chair, and places it so that it’s facing his.

“Sit down, Mr. Montagne. I have something to say that might be very profitable for you.”

Joe does not like this perfectly groomed person. Still, the word
profitable
has a sound he cares for and that makes him curious. The man is too calm, too certain he has something Joe wants. It can’t hurt to find out whether he’s right.

Ten minutes later he’s holding Mr. Vinay’s business card so
tightly it’s already damp and creased.
That’s some kind of Indian
, he thinks.
And that’s one shitload of money he’s wanting to give away
. The amount makes Joe jumpy. He repeats it over and over his head. Even as he folds up the lawn chair the lawyer helped himself to, he’s dividing the money, quartering it like a freshly felled buck, a season’s worth of meat. One piece to pay off his loan from that asshole Barton. One piece to Helen Fallingbrook, because she’s bailed him out more times than he can remember. A trip to the dentist – he’d get a whole mouth of new teeth. A big chunk for Cherisse. He could send her away to an aunt across the border, maybe even put her through school – she’d make a good nurse. Pays well. Or she could record an album; that would make her smile. They could take a trip to the Dakotas, have a house that’s not a trailer, a big-ass four-by-four … hell, he could lease a Hummer for that coin. Never have to sell another rollie again, and he’d still have money for Rita when she called, her voice ever huskier and more remote. He’d do right by his women, for sure.

But some of it is meant for him, the lawyer made that clear. If he gets an agreement. If he gets on it fast. Oh man, he wishes he hadn’t spilled that coffee. He feels like he should just take a second, a moment to get it all sorted out.

We’ll need to hear from you no later than the end of this week, after you’ve talked to your daughter
, the lawyer said.
I’ll deliver the money order myself. But it’s time-sensitive, you understand. And we’ll need papers signed by both of you
.

Joe nodded his head, his thoughts shooting in a hundred directions like a video game.

I could drive you to the hospital right now, Mr. Montagne, even wait in the lobby while you discuss matters with your daughter, bring up the papers and the money straightaway. Git ’er done, as they say
.

Joe didn’t like that. Who the hell says git?

I’ve got my smoke shack open, mister. I’d have to close up for the day or get somebody to take over for a few hours. Not likely. Plus I got
my own ride right here
. Joe patted his truck as if it were the flank of a strong horse.

The lawyer squinted, surveyed the vehicle in a manner the older man didn’t appreciate. And then, with a bounce of his head, a point at his cellphone, Mr. Vinay turned and left so fast the gravel dust curtsied behind his shiny silver car.