Smoke River (4 page)

“Can I lift it up to the light?”

“Why?” says the shop-owner.

“The crystal – I want to see its quality, its colour.”

The woman sighs, flips her wrist, and Cherisse takes the atomizer into her hands. It’s cool and sharp against her skin, like ice. And for a moment she remembers a little white dog that nuzzled its way into her life several years earlier and stayed for a winter, the prettiest thing she’d ever possessed.

There is no price on the atomizer. Cherisse can’t help but wonder if it was removed in transit from the window to the counter.

“How much?” she asks.

Now the woman picks it up, lifts it to the light, wrinkles her brow. Her eyes flit from Cherisse to the atomizer and back, as if she is estimating both the object and its buyer. Finally she clears her throat. “Ninety-five dollars.”

The price sounds like a dare. Cherisse inhales, hangs her head for a second. Might as well make a production of it. She pats all her pockets in succession, yanks five- and ten-dollar bills
from her jeans, and finally two twenties from the breast pocket of her jean jacket. She squints back at the shop-owner, in the way you do when you know someone is taking advantage of you.
What was its price an hour ago?
she wants to ask. Instead she lays her money on the counter like a magic trick and points at each bill with her finger.

“Five fives is twenty-five, plus two twenties is sixty-five, plus three tens. Ninety-five. There.”

The shop-owner slides the bills into her palm and counts them again. Cherisse picks up the atomizer, and when she feels the cool throb of the glass, the sting of its price recedes.

“I can wrap it,” the shop-owner says. Cherisse just shakes her head.

They stare at each other for a last long second – Cherisse holding a hunk of smoked ice crystal, the shop-owner sucking on the end of her eyeglasses – and though the summer air is hot and dry outside, she feels a shiver.
I’m her only customer today
, Cherisse thinks, willing it to be true, and the woman’s eyes flicker as if divining this. Neither of them say goodbye, thank you.

Joe usually takes the long route back to the reserve, along the banks of the river. Today he tells Cherisse he wants to hustle, open up the smoke shack a little earlier than he usually does, so they’ll cross the McKelvey Street bridge and boot along the highway through the suburbs and tobacco farms as if they were townies. Cherisse nods. But even as he feels enlarged by this ambition, he also knows the thinness of it, how just about anything will prick and deflate it. If he rushes back home, if he throws the grocery bags inside the trailer to empty later, if he just keeps moving, then it’s possible he could have the smoke shack open by noon and enjoy at least five hours of business. But he knows
other operators are already open – solid women who’ll have the breakfast dishes done, fresh coffee in a Thermos and a ribbon dress hemmed and still have time to open their smoke shacks before ten a.m., or middle-aged dads who’ve shorn their lawns like a golf-course fairway before the sun got high, then roared up to their shacks on the back of an
ATV
. Smoky Joe’s, at the very end of the row, as the locals call Ninth Line, is always the last to open. Anyway, who would be buying smokes on a Saturday morning already heavy with heat? Still, the sense of missing out dogs him like his bad tooth.

Joe eases the truck over the McKelvey Street bridge, listening to the rattle of steel under his treads. He turns his head to see the panorama of the Smoke River breaking into foamy moustaches over the fast-moving shallows in the distance before slowing and pooling into sluggish greenish depths by the bridge.

“No … you gotta be kidding … no … Jesus.”

He slams his palm against the steering wheel. He can feel himself already adrift, already moving away from today’s target, because once he is over the bridge he is turning the car left, pulling it up to the river embankment, indignity making him gulp air like a drowning man.

“I thought we were going straight home,” Cherisse says. She’s turning something over and over in her hands, something he doesn’t recognize. When she does things like this, odd things, it is easier to see her as an extension of himself, as he did when she was an awkward preteen, with bones too long and heavy for her meagre flesh, green eyes so big and bright they startled people. He’d wanted her to stay that way. And maybe, just maybe, it’s because of her, and all those ways in which she is increasingly like her mother – long gone but for the desperate phone calls asking for money – that he wants to be the hero of this situation.

He stares out the truck window. “Unbelievable,” he says under his breath. “Un-fucking-believable.”

Cherisse looks up when he opens the door of the truck, still cursing. Her hand grabs his forearm. “Whaddya doin’ there, Joe?”

But she must know; she must recognize that the man wearing waders and standing in the middle of the warmed murk, casting flies as bright as jungle flowers in defiance of both community-mindedness and seasonal licensing, is Elijah Barton. It’s one thing for Barton to thumb his nose at people like himself – the man is richer than the whole alley of smoke-shack operators put together – but it’s quite another thing to be deliberately trying to piss off the townies, already made skittish by this barricade business at the development.

Joe doesn’t care that it’s going to embarrass his daughter; he has to say something to the guy. He has to let him know that it isn’t okay. That there are regular guys like Joe who need the townies for business, need them to feel comfortable driving out to the reserve. His boots hit the soil before Cherisse can catch at his shirt. He slams the door to her plaintive “Don’t” and then he’s standing on the bank, fists jammed in his jeans pockets, clearing his throat.

“What you catchin’, ’Lijah?”

The man submerged to his knees in the river is shorter, his face pockmarked from teenage acne, his eyes small and hard. When he turns his head, his smile is the smile of someone with means, the smile of a man who doesn’t give a shit and has the money to ensure he doesn’t have to. Cherisse’s mother, Rita, had a thing for him once. Joe could see how Barton’s fuck-you attitude must have been attractive to a wild thing such as her, a woman who could never outpace her demons. Elijah raises his arm, pulls the rod over his shoulder, then flings it forward with enough wrist that the showy fly flirts with the surface of the water, skipping beside sunken logs, a tangle of submerged bracken.

Nervy fucker
, thinks Joe.
He’s stalking a largemouth
.

“Fish,” he hollers back to Joe Montagne. “I’m catching fish.”

Elijah shakes his head.
That man
, he thinks. While shrewder smoke-traders have built expansive homes with hot tubs and satellite dishes, Joe still lives in a trailer and drives a rusty
GMC
, its missing hubcaps and gnarled front fender broadcasting his money woes as surely as his bad teeth. Yet Joe gets some things right. The guy wouldn’t irritate him so damn much if he didn’t.

“You know the season hasn’t begun yet. You gotta licence?” Joe yells from the bank.

Elijah ignores the question. He knows the river’s differences and divides, its seasons and its tempers, with an intimacy he’s never shared with a lover or a friend. Wherever he is on it, it’s familiar, it’s home.

There’s a tug on his line that has some heft to it, some girding for a fight. Elijah feels the tension and begins the tango of tightening and releasing to prevent a snap. The fish is ill-tempered and scrappy; it expected to be left alone in this stagnant bath, where it can ambush frogs and sunfish and exploit its terminal unpopularity to survive – qualities Elijah understands too well.

Thinking like a largemouthed bass brought him to this spot, kept him patient, helped him choose just the right fly. Now his fly is hooked into the fish’s flat lower jaw and a fourteen-pound line connects the animal to Elijah where he grips reel and rod; it turns them into a single entity, a hybrid of man and fish, at war with itself. Joe will have to wait.

You need to know who you are
, his mother once told Elijah. She must have had enough of relatives and former friends from the reserve passing her on Doreville’s streets as if she were a stranger, some whispering
witch
under their breath. As the young boy holding her hand, Elijah felt the tremor of hurt run through her arm into the squeeze of her fingers against his palm. The year he turned twelve, she announced they were leaving his white father and the gabled Queen Street house with
its balustrades and velvet wallpaper, its languid two-storey views of the Smoke River, to return to their people. But she’d lost more than her official status by then; she was unwanted, as if by marrying a white man she’d bartered away her own skin. So they squatted on the edge of the reserve in a rundown cabin on the piece of land now being fought over. She died a lonely woman, with few comforts and fewer friends. And except for the river, Elijah grew up belonging to no one and nowhere.

“Did ya hear me there, Barton? You making a statement, fishing this close to town?”

And there it is: the hiccup in his attention. Elijah loses the tension. The fish dives deep, dragging the line to where it risks being entangled in sunken debris. Elijah jerks hard. Hard enough or too hard, he can’t tell. The fish rockets out of the water, a ballistic of spines and bulldog jowls. It’s a beauty – four, maybe five pounds – and while he takes its measure, the fish slams its tail against the air, jerks its head, and the line snaps. A gleam of muscle noses into the water, disappears back into the murk, taking the exquisite fly Elijah tied himself into the depths.

He lets his arm drop so the rod is half submerged, hangs his head for a second. The sun is too high for Elijah to start again; that largemouth will sulk somewhere unreachable. He shrugs his shoulders. At least he knows where that bastard fish hunts – the river has only so many hideouts with water quiet enough for a largemouth.
Another day
, Elijah thinks. He gathers his line, wades out of the river, and climbs up the bank. Joe holds out a hand to yank him up, and Elijah takes it.

“Don’t need a licence, ’cuz I’m native. Remember, Joe? Territorial rights. If you don’t use ’em, you lose ’em, eh?”

“Yeah, but man, you could fish anywhere. Do you have to do it right in town? In a spot where everybody can see you? Especially now, with the barricade.”

Elijah unfastens his waders, lets them fall to the ground and steps out of them. “Yes, I do,” he says to Joe. He smiles and claps the other man on the shoulder. “Yes, I do.”

He makes for his own truck – bright red and meticulously shiny – already thinking about that first yank of a cold beer, the sizzle of grilled steak, succour for the lost fish, when he looks up for half a second and sees her, Joe’s daughter, sunk low in the cab of that godforsaken wreck of a vehicle, her eyes to her lap. He can tell that she wants to be anywhere but here. This is the part of Joe that trumps him – the fact of his daughter, the ties to others who buried Montagne’s prospects under the weight of responsibility. Elijah doesn’t wave at the girl, or even nod.

For years he’s caught glimpses of her haunting the places he haunted as a young boy, combing the river as if it were a constantly refreshed treasure hunt, first as a barely-there slip of a child, later a gangly girl with an awkward gait, then a teenager with a runaway’s eyes. In his head the sightings of her are fluid, intermingled with the first time he saw her mother, Rita, and learned how a wild, impulsive unhappiness makes some women even more beautiful.
You have more nerve than any man I know, Elijah
, she said to him on a hazy afternoon when they were lying half dressed on the riverbank, his hand lost in the silk of her hair.
But I’m not sure you have the heart for the likes of me
. So much truth in her laughing voice. And it’s because he had too much need for self-preservation, too little imagination, to take her on, to really love such a woman, that Elijah can’t feel superior to the man who did.