by Krista Foss
At 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.
Stephanie watches her mother return to the stove and lift half a dozen expertly crisped heart-shaped waffles from the steaming pewter and dig a scoop into the butter. Here we go, Stephanie thinks. One generous soft sphere for the edge of Las’s plate, and now – whoa, didn’t see this coming! – a smaller one for Stephanie’s. She must know I’m watching her lowball both my appetite and butter-worthiness. So freakishly predictable, Stephanie thinks. Because I have hips. Like a normal fucking female!
But she doesn’t say anything. Her mother must have held back the guts gene from Steph’s DNA. Las slides onto the banquette opposite her with a belch. Stephanie surveys the outline of her brother’s deltoids under his tight T-shirt, the sun-bleached tips of his uncombed hair, his overall irreproachable hot-guyness. Stupid as shit, though.
How easy it would be to shock her mom, her dad, Las, if onl
y she had the nerve. She’d announce her intentions to see a drag queen show, chew qat with the high school’s two Somali kids, wear a headscarf in solidarity with the quietly courageous Nala Nahid, or hold hands with a girl and walk the length of downtown Dorkville. Yup, there’d be some jaws hanging open.
“Hungry?” Her mom’s laser-whitened smile beams at her brother.
He nods. Her mom slides a heaped plate in front of Las, who doesn’t acknowledge it.
“Ma, what’s going on with the barricade?” he says. “Fucking natives make us look like wimps.”
“Dad and I are working on it. Something’s close.”
“What’s the holdup? You own the property, they’re blocking it. It’s against the law. Drag the assholes off there. Christ, I’ll do it.”
Stephanie stares at the three small heart-shaped waffles on her plate, the half-dozen raspberries, teaspoon of sour cream, half scoop of butter, and two strips of bacon, cooked the way Las likes, a molecule this side of carbon. She feels the hunger that will outlast this breakfast and the humiliation of already wanting more before she begins.
“Whose law?” says Stephanie.
“Wha?”
“You said it was against the law. So I asked you whose law.”
Las chews a mouthful of waffle. As he pushes his food down, his face folds into a simian squint. “Our law, you idiot. The law of the land!”
“Steph, let your brother finish his breakfast.”
The glare she aims at her mother, who’s eating a bowl of muesli doused with vanilla soymilk and wiping the counter between bites, goes unanswered.
Stephanie feels wobbly in her conviction. Daryl Inksetter followed her around like a puppy dog all grade nine, and she had rushed to keep her distance from him, not because he wasn’t cool – Stephanie herself never made a team in Dorkville’s blood sport of cool – but because his hair was cut in a mullet and he wore a buckskin and bead choker that was, well, too native. In grade ten there was Nate Bastine. She’d caught him taking all of her in, up and down, in what her photography teacher, Mr. Ward, would surely call the “appraising gaze” or the look of the “surveyor.” At the beginning of grade ten it so flummoxed Stephanie that she thought she would burst into tears. But he was native, and she was already scrambling for friends. So she unthinkingly abided by the unspoken rule that you didn’t hang around with the native kids, that they roamed apart in no-entry-allowed packs, at the back of the classroom or on the periphery of the cafeteria or at the far end of the soccer field.
And if occasionally there was a kid like Phil LaForme, who as a fullback on the football team penetrated the inner circle of Dorkville popularity, it was largely because he cut his hair like all the other football players and preferred American Eagle shirts and jeans to the low-riding Iroquois gangsta vibe. Most of all Phil was appreciated because he did not make them uncomfortable, he did not remind them. Even when there was a protest or a blockade or it was National Aboriginal Day, Phil didn’t force people to recognize that he was native.
“It’s an important point, Mom. Since when are the Mohawks subject to our laws? Are they a conquered people? Did they sign a treaty giving away their sovereignty?”
Las stops eating, holds his fork in the air.
“What the fuck, Steph? When did you turn red? This is about your family, about our private property.” A spray of maple syrup and sour cream speckles the table in front of him.
Her mom clunks her bowl down on the counter. “Steph, really. Why do you have to be so provocative? It’s stressful enough, what we’re going through. Everybody has to obey the law.”
Stephanie feels her face burn. “You guys don’t get it. Most of the Mohawks were British allies. They never agreed to be subject to our laws. In fact, the British signed treaties protecting them from some of our laws. I can’t help it if I’m the only one in the family who knows something about history.”
Las stands up abruptly; his plate rattles away from the edge of the table. He glares at Stephanie. “You know what? You’re making me sick!”
“Las!”
Stephanie wishes her mother’s protest sounded stronger, wasn’t so easily ignored.
Her brother points his long arm at his mother. “And you and Dad are a fucking embarrassment!”
Her mother reels back. The beckoning cheep of a cellphone frees her; she runs to locate it, her face drained of colour.
Stephanie turns to the abandoned syrup-soaked waffle hanging over the edge of her brother’s plate. With a queasy mix of vengeance and self-loathing, she spears it. She doesn’t feel as if she’s scored any points. She is as much a hypocrite as they are. Perhaps worse.
Her mother returns to the kitchen, fist-pumping the air and yelling, “We got it! Las, Steph, we got it! We got the injunction!” Steph looks up with a weak smile, then shoves the last piece of waffle in her mouth.
CHAPTER 4
Mayor Peg Redhill sits in her plum-coloured SUV with the windows closed to keep the air conditioning in and the public out. The barricade is just temporary, she tells herself. A minor blip. Cooler heads will prevail. She takes a big gulp of coffee that scalds her throat, makes her eyes water. When she thumbs through the messages on her smartphone, everything blurs except a succession of capitalized texts from municipal budget chief Reid Wellings.
WAIT! Lawyers on phone NOW. Do NOT talk to press about injunction YET.
She fumbles in her purse. Damn, no reading glasses. It takes her a moment to focus on the words between WAIT, NOW, NOT, and YET. Even in his texts Wellings has a talent for sweaty condescension. She looks up at the Jarvis Ridge billboard. The giant legless couple with impossible good looks appear to be falling out of the photograph while gripping beaded glasses of Chablis. Across the road from it is a green flat-line of tobacco. Such a mixture of intransigence and hope in this place, she thinks. The barricade – its milling natives, scattered reporters, awkward sentry of cops – looks like an accident scene, jarring but temporary. Surely it can’t stand in the way of all Doreville’s recent good energy.
The sun presses its pink-umber belly into the horizon. She stops idling the car, afraid it is sending a message that she’s ready to bolt, though without air conditioning she will look as greasy as an Easter ham on camera. Interlake special constable Reggie Holland, newly arrived, walks into view with his nice, if tired, eyes. Peg Redhill feels better instantly. There is a handsomeness to his kind of burly, settled man that she is always ready to appreciate. She detects the oppression of middle age in him: a marriage that’s fleshy but reliable, two kids under the age of ten, a golden retriever that sits on command, and a debt load that wakes him up at three a.m. with panting existential panic. His blonde-helmeted wife with the Slavic jaw had better rub that man’s strong back. She cranks open her window, dabs at her forehead with a tissue, notices that her nail polish is chipped. Peg tucks a hand under her arm, checking for dampness on her favourite salmon-coloured silk-blend blouse. But Constable Holland is looking baked by the sun too. They’re all overheated, anxious.
“Mayor Redhill,” he says, and his large hand folds over the edge of the open window.
“Constable Holland, good to see you.”
Reg leans in. “Thought you should know there’s a special team from outside of Doreville they’ve put in charge of policing.”
“Yup, yup. Knew that.” She smiles, lets her eyes wander to his shoulders, the small scar under his chin.
“They will stick-handle the response to the injunction, but I expect it’s all going to be straightforward – getting the barricade down, peaceful dispersal of the crowd – you know the drill. Not too complex, even for these regional desk jockeys.” He winks. Peg wonders if he’s making an extra effort to seem assured, light-hearted.
“Okey-dokey, sounds good. Let’s get this done. I have no appetite for this, Reg. Every one of these little disturbances costs the town money, lots of it.”
“So, you talking to the press soon?”
“Just waiting for th
e go-ahead.”
As if on cue, Peg’s phone vibrates. Constable Holland ambles away. She wants to call him back, make a quip that will light up his smile.
Reid Wellings sounds as if he isn’t inhaling enough air. “We can’t support the injunction, Peg.”
“Oh Christ. You can’t be serious.”
“The lawyers say that because we have not assumed responsibility for the roads through the development, it’s not our issue. Can’t risk the liability.”
“Omigod. Do you realize the position I’m in? We’re going to look spineless.”
“Better not to say anything, Peg. Just leave.”
“Are you kidding? I’ve been here for an hour; they all know I’m here. I’m not scurrying away like some nervous ostrich.”
“Peg, I’m telling you—”
She clicks the phone shut, shouts, “Asshole!” into the emptiness of the car, and turns to see a petite brunette in khakis, a snug lavender blouse and a fresh application of lipstick moving towards the truck with an officious gait. Just as Peg reaches for the button to close her window, a manicured set of fingers grabs on to the glass.
“Mayor Redhill. We’re hoping to get you on camera before the injunction is served so we can catch all the action and meet our deadline.”
Peg wonders how she got so old that everyone looks younger than her own kid.
“Otherwise we’re going to have to say you were unavailable for comment and run a B-roll of you sitting in your truck.”
Where do they come from, these women? Girls, really. Playing dress-up, icing their eyes and lips in birthday-cake colours, asking serious questions that they themselves don’t fully understand. A college diploma, a microphone, and skinny, Stairmaster-hardened calves. And do they really expect her to speak plainly? If she could raise the money to move the reserve to the other side of the country, she’d personally pay business-class fares for every one of these Mohawk troublemakers. That would make the girl’s pretty little mouth pucker with surprise.
