Smoke River (5 page)

“You know, I don’t get him. Don’t get him,” says Joe. “Guy runs his business like a white man. Bottom line all the way. Lays people off so he can automate. Then sponsors lacrosse teams and
scholarships like he’s the friggin’ bank. Won’t even live on the reserve – too good for that. But he has no problem letting his factory runoff stink up the creek. Now in town he’s all native, all Warrior. Territorial rights! Fucking with ’em all the time. Don’t respect it. I don’t.”

Cherisse is not listening. She knows Joe. He’s only getting started; he’ll barely take a breath before they’re home. She imagines jumping out of the truck, running in the opposite direction, never looking back; all the while her father would still be talking to her, talking at her, his mouth a squeeze-box of outrage. If she snapped,
At least Barton has money!
that would shut him up. But there isn’t much point hurting his feelings; he’d only get all hangdog and drive her more crazy.

And now, on this summer day working itself into a remorseless heat, Cherisse has the cool weight of the atomizer to pin her in place, to get her through the hours in the smoke shack while she rings in the purchases and her father makes awkward chitchat with the customers that makes them leave sooner, buy less. It’s the inevitability of those hours ahead of her that sinks her lower in the truck. Some white person will want to know if there is Kentucky tobacco in the rollies – Jeezus, does she know, or care? – because Kentucky tobacco is too sharp for them or makes their head ache. And Cherisse might fake it, hold the Ziplocked bag up to the light and pretend that it’s all in the colour, muttering something about curing that she makes up but the customer might accept because she’s native and such knowledge is apparently inborn. But it’s just as likely the customer will persist, because even though they’re going to save $250 on their cartons, it’s not enough for them:
Would it be okay if I just light one up? I can tell right away
.

Cherisse will nod. And a person who would never smoke inside their own home won’t think twice about filling up the little plywood shack with the rollie’s acrid stink, because the
sun is beatin’ overhead outside –
hotter ’n hell, eh? –
and that will make him or her sweat. All she will have to keep her head cool is the atomizer, a piece of ice that never melts, a memory of what is gone.

Several years earlier, she’d been leaning against a tree across the street from one of the beautiful painted verandahs of Doreville’s grand homes that lined the riverbanks. It was November and Daddy Joe was late picking her up, when she felt something soft brush up against her shin and looked down to find a low-lying cloud of white fluff, a tail that was no more than a furry rudder. The little dog had come to her unbidden, so unlike the reserve’s strays with their hungry grins, worrying abandoned takeout containers in the strip-mall parking lot. She reached down and gently plunged her hand into the animal’s fur, half afraid that it would be as soft as it was. The dog turned up eyes of shining agate and licked her hand with a tongue warm and wet as an infant’s. And Cherisse was already telling herself how the animal would prefer its new life and its new home, that where the river wended through town, the rich folks had removed trees so they wouldn’t obstruct their view. They’d tamed the river’s banks with cement boat launches and retaining walls, and plucked reeds and dodder from its shores. It couldn’t be much fun for a dog, or a child. But on the reserve, the river’s edges were like the wind or summer sunsets, belonging to no one and everyone. There the Smoke’s banks were thick with a tangle of old pines and dogwoods, reeds and stooping willows, their hips half immersed in the water like grandmothers leaning over to rinse their hair.

By the time her father rolled up in the rusted truck, Cherisse had convinced herself the dog had asked to be taken, even begged a little.
It followed me, honest. It has no collar, Pa
, she said, holding the dog in her arms. She ignored his stiffness, his shaking head as she clambered into the rusty truck’s cab.

No baby, no baby. That dog belongs to someone. Look how clean it is. And well fed. We’re gonna catch shit for even looking at it sideways, much less having it in the truck
.

He sat there and waited. Even though Cherisse was then only thirteen, she understood there were greater fears working the twitch in Daddy Joe’s jaw. They both knew there wasn’t much he could do for her outside of frying a venison steak or reaching things in the top cupboard of the trailer kitchen, with its split vinyl benches and stained Formica counter. She held on to the dog and stared forward too, repeating,
It has no collar
. Minutes passed. She studied the dog’s fur, the changing scenery of its whiteness – bright and dull, like ice and snow.

Joe kept his eyes straight ahead, started the engine, and said,
Put it at your feet till we’re out of town
.

The truck turns onto the paved road that leads to Smoke Shack Row, and her father is still ranting and Cherisse is turning the atomizer over and over in her palms, letting herself fall into the cubes of light and shade. He doesn’t ask about it. He won’t. It’s as if he feels safer not knowing too much.

Her father wheels the truck in a wide, ragged arc up to the trailer behind Smoky Joe’s. It will be one p.m. before they get open. Joe rests his head on the steering wheel; he pants in the heat like a tired burro. Cherisse cups the atomizer in one palm and, with her free hand, lightly rubs his shoulder.

“It’s okay, Joe,” she says. “It’s okay.”

A
t Mitch’s behest, Ella jogs around the barricaded development all week, a detour that adds three kilometres to her route and has left her with a threatening twinge in her right ankle. Today she is too jazzed to run, too afraid of missing his phone call bringing news of the injunction. She finds herself in the kitchen instead, with unspent energy.

Waffles. She imagines lightly browned, buttered rafts delivering mounds of fresh raspberries, sour cream, strips of bacon to two incredulous teenagers. The prospect makes her smile. When Las settles into university life in the fall – after he recovers from the initial euphoria of freedom, female adulation, perpetual parties – he will certainly ache for all those special things only she can do. Lately she has been seized with short, sharp stabs of panic: Will he eat anything fresh? Keep track of all his assignments? Sprinkle antifungal talc on his shower shoes?

It is almost too much responsibility for a young man, especially one with the distractions of good looks and athletic gifts. Ella can barely believe that his three-year-old arms once clutched her neck so that his torso and legs coiled tensely against her ribs.
Mommy. Mommy
. Mitch had scolded her for breastfeeding Las after age two, but she couldn’t stop herself. Las was her first child. She wanted her little boy to take what he could get, to have the best of her, to be greedy in their earliest intimacy, and in doing so forge something between them that was unbreakable.

Her chest tightens. Arrhythmia? Perhaps she has been too lucky with her health, with her kids. She calms herself by visualizing. Las slicing through water, chasing a personal best. Las, dripping wet, a medallion hanging from his neck, waving to the crowd. Las graduating with honours.

Ella keeps an eye on the frying bacon, whisks the waffle batter. She raises her brows when Stephanie, groggy and pyjama-clad, slouches into the kitchen.

“Hmm, number-one-son breakfast. Smells good.”

“Still ten minutes away. You have time to dress, Steph.”

“Can’t. Golden Boy’s doing his ablutions.”

“Don’t call him that.” Ella looks up. “You could make an effort with that hair.”

Ella tries not to fret, but her worries build like a funky smell. The credit union manager called two days after the barricade went up. Two days, and already that woman was making mewling elliptical references to their future ability to pay the mortgage. Ella was reassuring, asked the manager about her kids as if there were nothing else on her mind, and ended the conversation with a throaty giggle about middle-aged husbands. Yet every day that passes without the injunction edges her nearer to thinking there is a
problem
. She plunges the whisk into the waffle batter for a final beat, clangs it against the edge of the metal bowl.

She is not a woman who cowers from the first prickle of trouble. Mitch is the one who teeters under pressure and suffers poor impulse control. He’s likely to swear
Damn natives!
in front of the soap-scented urbanites who are prospects for Lot 22 or 34, pound his steering wheel so that flecks of saliva hit the dashboard and the fragrant couple in the back seat exchange cringing glances.
Faith is such a tender thing
, Ella thinks. People have to look at mud and a billboard and somehow imagine their three-thousand-square-foot brick-veneer dream home with street hockey games out front, community corn roasts in the backyard. What is absent is supposed to be obvious and alluring – they’ll leave behind the whine of streetcars and expressways, the chafe of humanity and gritty air, the vulnerability to strife. She dribbles batter into her beloved Norwegian waffle maker and stares as if the spun yellow were a riddle. Surely Mitch understands the thin, easily bruised skin of his clients’ resolve. Surely he won’t fuck it up.

“You worried about the barricade?”

Ella looks up from the waffle maker, a bit startled, having forgotten that her daughter is there. Steph’s soft shape is spread over the banquette like a pile of laundry.
That hair
, thinks Ella. Its nihilistic shade. Inexplicable girl.

“No, not really. Just thinking. Lots on the go!” She flashes her daughter a smile, mimicking the steeliness of those
TV
correspondents reporting from war zones with smooth hair and flawless lipstick. “What is your brother doing in there?”

“Do you want me to get him?”

Ella closes the waffle maker’s lid; she has two minutes before they crisp perfectly. “No, I’ll do it, darling. Though seriously, Steph, you could come to breakfast a bit more put together. Are you watching the time?”

The smell of butter and bacon drifts up the stairway and creeps under the second-floor bathroom door, collects in the sweat on the walls, crowds the bathroom. Las sits, showered and naked, on the closed toilet seat, his head between his knees, listening to his mother in the kitchen. He imagines her slicing fresh fruit, juice bleeding into the crooks of her fingers, along her palms. He sees the bright vinyl sunflower placemat, the folded linen napkin, the glass of milk she has laid out. All for him. Sometimes he hates how much she loves him; it presses against his temples. If he stood up right now he could sprint downstairs, past her through the open patio doors, leap over the backyard fence, and listen to her pitchy humming turn desperate and warbly.
Las! Las!
Her beautiful boy, her star athlete.
Come back! You’ve got nothing on!

Las wipes away the steam on the bathroom mirror, stares at himself. Gordo got him drunk again last night. His mouth is gummy, his gut is tight, his head thrums. There’s a weird gash on the inside of his right calf. And man, if he could just puke up the whole mess of it, all the stupid asshole moves of his life, all the dullness of this shithole town, he would, even if it meant puking up part of his spleen, a kidney. Hell, he’d give up a lung. If anyone could get by on one lung it was him. Only he’d have to forfeit his swimming scholarship – don’t think he wouldn’t – his easy ticket to university.

And there’s his mother’s face again. How does she do that? Get into his head all the time. All those expectations, all those hours of trucking him to and from practices and meets – it’s a belt she’s looped around his throat.
Study economics
, she said, when all he could do was shrug his shoulders at the sight of the university application.
Don’t be like me
, she told him,
with a community college diploma but smarter than everyone else with their graduate degrees. And still people don’t listen to you. They want those letters after your name
. He doesn’t want the letters. He wants money. He
wants freedom. He said as much. She’d pulled the ballpoint out of his hand, wrote in the statement of intent herself.
Oh, Las
. He could see the little furrow in her forehead, like a dented spoke, her lips flat and bloodless, the grey eyes moist with fresh disappointment. And all his power gone,
phssst
. One day he won’t need her approval, won’t need her at all. But when. When?

There’s a
tap, tap, tap
on the door. “Las, your breakfast is ready, dear.”

He clenches his fists, stands and leans his head against the door. “Yeah, yeah. I’m coming.”

The shadows of her feet split the crack of light coming from the hallway. She stays by the door silently for another half-minute. He doesn’t move. Finally he hears the soft exasperation of her socks along the hardwood.

Las turns, flips up the toilet seat, jams his finger way down his throat and lets go.