Smoke River

by Krista Foss

  “Where you been, shithead?”

  Gordo grins, takes a last, long drag of his butt until it is just an ember between the hard skin of his thumb and forefinger. He puts it out with his tongue. “Here and there. You?”

  “Looking for you.”

  “No shit.”

  Gordo slides down the wall into a squat and Las joins him.

  “Oh man, my head feels like it’s going to explode. My mom’s on my case constantly. Everyday there’s another email from the university. Register for this, pay for that. I can’t get a—”

  “I’m not your therapist, faggot.”

  Once, while they were sitting together drinking beers at the Legion, Gordo hit Las hard, right on the temple, knocked him out for no reason at all. Las missed a major swim meet while in the hospital waiting for test results to rule out a concussion. The lie he told never fully satisfied his mother, who thereafter stepped up her campaign for him to find better friends.

  “What you got going on today, Gordo?”

  “I’m doing it, dumb-ass. Shouldn’t you be in training, varsity-arse?”

  “Done for the day.”

  Las grabs a stick and starts skewering ants with it. He can’t imagine ever hitting Gordo first or even returning a punch. One counterstrike from him would be just the invitation his friend needed to go apeshit. And Gordo was a guy just one push away from apeshit. That boy has no impulse control, his mother said once. He’ll go too far one day. And Las remembers thinking she’d finally got something right.

  Gordo saunters back to his truck. Las takes a deep breath, tries to stop the spinning in his head. He should leave. He should tell Gordo to go fuck himself. But, as always, there is some place his friend can take him that he can’t get to on his own.

  Cherisse is pacing in the woods behind the smoke shack with her earbuds in. For the tenth time she focuses on the way Susie Stonechild’s voice breaks, lingering on the phrase “her pain that no one knows” before her voice sails upward, floats into the refrain, “gravel dust ’tween painted toes.” It’s the cracked quality, the slight imperfection in Stonechild’s delivery that’s the heart of the song. Cherisse turns down the volume, replays it, and hears herself match the singer’s voice right up to “knows.” But what follows is not the same, nowhere near. She has the note right but not the ability to breach the note, to deliver its heartbreaking hitch. The song ends one more time and she punches the air in frustration.

  She pulls out her earbuds and hears the door of the trailer slam shut. Joe Montagne shuffles from the trailer to the smoke shack, holding his aching jaw where there’s a molar he’s not dealing with, scratching his stubble with the other hand, and he doesn’t see her. “Cherisse. Cherisse, where are you? I can’t find the cash box.”

  Cherisse pops in her earbuds and listens to the song again. She could get away with singing the note straight, but then what good would that be? All it would mean is that Susie Stonechild is an artist and she is a weak imitation, a pageant singer. Her father’s head bobs up like a prairie dog in front of her. The toothache must be getting to him; there are bluish pouches under his eyes, his lower lip droops. She’ll have to get a cup of coffee, a few Aspirins into him if he’s going to make it through the day.

  “Cherisse, you drop-ass princess, get over here. It’s past nine. Where’d you stow the cash box? Day’s a wasting.” He turns and shuffles over to the smoke shack. She hears him discover the cash box, locked, on the third shelf. His head pops out. “Stupid, stupid! Cherisse, if Bobby Horse was sniffing around, he’d have this nicked for sure. Damn shack door is so flimsy.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” She didn’t lock up properly the night before. She never does. All the cigarettes – cartons and boxes of them – are still neatly stacked on the shack’s counters. It’s a pain dragging them back and forth to the trailer.

  “For fuck’s sake, nobody wants to buy damp smokes. They have to overnight in the trailer, Cherry.”

  Joe comes out of the shack carrying the cash box, plunks it on the picnic table outside.

  Cherisse laughs. “Even you can’t smoke that throat-scalding shit. Aren’t those du Mauriers tucked in your back pocket?”

  Cherisse makes to reach for them. Her father slaps her hand away. He opens the tin box stuffed with yesterday’s so-so sales, curses her again for leaving it in the shack all night, then counts the money, compares it to the piece of paper with his inventory list and does the math – twice. Cherisse considers simply telling him outright that she helped herself to a little something, but she hates to waste the possibility that he won’t figure it out.

  His eyes narrow, his lips curl. “Thieving sow!”

  She hoots. He taps his foot, lights up a smoke, appears to direct all his energy into sucking it ferociously. Already trucks are chewing up the highway; as they whiz by, she knows he is suffering a tremor of panic because she’s not waiting for them behind the smoke-shack counter, her long hair brushed out against her bare shoulders, a breakfast cigarette curling smoke between her shower-wet lips, her green eyes flashing, her bright teeth catching customers’ glances. She brings in business. She knows it. He knows it.

  “Jesus Christ, Cherisse, you’re robbing me blind. What for this time?”

  Cherisse smiles, leans down, and pulls up her pant leg, revealing a knee-high patent leather boot with a gold-tipped stiletto heel. “Makes me look like a rock star, huh?”

  “How much?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  She throws her head back with a taunting laugh, and then he’s yelling at her as if he’s stepped on a rusty nail. Cherisse slips inside the smoke shack and starts singing the Susie Stonechild line over and over again as she sets up for a day of charming money out of strangers.

  “You’re bolder ’n shit,” Joe Montagne says, following her. “Like a pine marten. But scrawnier.”

  “But with a pretty voice, nah?”

  Say it, she wills him. Tell me I can turn a green peach gold with my voice. Tickle the dollars out of an old man’s fist. Get the fuck out of Dodge on the strength of my talent.

  “Your voice is a beauty, Cherry.”

  She laughs, fills a jug with water – “I’ll make you coffee, Grumpy” – and she sees him smile despite the ache in his jaw.

  Gordo pulls his truck alongside a ditch near a massive pin oak at the edge of Stercyx’s tobacco fields. He jumps out, reaches into the back for a grimy cooler, nods at Las to take a handle, and they climb down the small earth slope, carrying the beer-filled box to a spot that’s within spying distance of the barricade. That’s the plan so far: watch the natives, get shit-faced and even more pissed off.

  “Here.”

  They plant the cooler. Gordo lifts its lid, pulls out two beers, throws one at Las, then worms up the slope on his belly and digs his elbows into the dirt. “Can see the fuckers perfectly from here.”

  Las steals a moment to press the coolness of the can into his forehead. Lately he feels anger in new places: the back of his head, crammed under his scapulas, tightening his hip flexors, his jaw. It’s a cramping, lactic acid kind of anger, numbing and queerly alive. He imagines kicking the neighbour’s yappy Westie, pissing all over the banded cigars in the bottom drawer of his father’s desk, jumping that wannabe white boy Phil LaForme and hearing the satisfying crack of a nose, a wrist. He closes his eyes and guzzles the beer quickly for its analgesic effects.

  The second and third, the same. It’s just past noon. The beer runs through him and he is up, fumbling among the young tobacco plants for a place to take a piss. He’s working a nice buzz, his neck already browned in the sun, his mouth clammy with alcohol.

  Down at the end of the row of plants he sees a figure, bending and rising, stretching out a length of arm, drawing it back in sharply. Las steadies himself, focuses, and realizes he is looking at the back of Coulson Stercyx, planing a rectangle of wood steadied on two sawhorses.

  His mother calls Stercyx a cautionary tale: someone who had promise once becaus
e he went to university, left Doreville at eighteen, landed a big city job and a classy wife, and vowed never to come back. Drove a sports car, his mother would say. Wore beautiful suits. All on a swimming scholarship, she’d add and arch her eyebrows. Could have made a fortune if he sold that land. Now he’s stuck here. Wife left him, and he’s growing tobacco. What a waste. Can you imagine?

  She always repeated that last question with high-pitched disbelief, as if Las couldn’t be counted on to judge the man harshly enough. And even through the haze of beer and from a distance, he sees she was right – he won’t judge him. Stercyx is all muscle and sinew, lean as a mule. What he notices now is how the man moves around the wood. Las wonders what it would feel like to build something. He imagines being Stercyx, standing on his front stoop at the end of a workday, surveying the measurable impact that his hands, his sweat have made on his environment.

  Las holds his own strong arms out in front of him. After he finishes a swim practice or a race, he can only stare at the blank, unblinking pool, its water calm and unchanged by him. What is the point? he wonders. What the fuck is the point? His father is a wet-eyed man who spends his life making phone calls, faxing contracts, scribbling numbers on the margins of newspapers while his body turns flaccid, his breath sour. Other men feel the give of wood under their saws, their hammers. Other men build. Las looks at his palms. He wants to be Stercyx. He wants to work with wood in the high heat of the day. He wants to be a person who makes things, not the one who hires him and runs away at the first whiff of trouble.

  He returns to the ditch, flops down beside his friend, stares at the barricade. He finishes another beer and then the sun flattens him like roadkill. An hour later, Gordo’s rough palms chafe against his sun-beaten skin.

  “Wake up, asshole! I’m outta smokes.”

  Cherisse fools with the radio’s dial. It has been a slow day, so slow Joe hightailed it after lunch. It’s a bit of a waste too that she feels better about herself than usual, her hair shiny and full, her face rested, and her new boots paired with her skinniest jeans. When she feels pretty like this, her regulars almost never ask for change back from a twenty. She twists the dial for music and catches a familiar word from a faint signal.

  “Welcome back to CJYT and Big Bob’s Tell It Like It Is Hour. We’ve got a switchboard full of callers wanting to congratulate Dotville mayor Peg Redhill for telling it like it is when some natives put a barricade in front of a new development.”

  “Doreville.”

  “Uh, sorry, Mayor Redhill?”

  “Doreville. The name of my town is Doreville.”

  Cherisse turns up the volume. All these strangers who clearly don’t live in Doreville want to speak to the mayor. She claps her hands together. Dowdy Peg Redhill, a woman who wears pocketless jeans with elasticized waistbands, is getting attention from a big city radio station for saying some dumb-ass things. Surely that means anything is possible – and many more things are possible for a green-eyed beauty who sings like a cross between Emmylou Harris and Shania Twain.

  “You rock,” one caller salutes the mayor. The next practically begs, “Please run for mayor in our town.” Cherisse smiles at the mayor’s embarrassed thank-yous, her exaggerated folksy twang. So when an angry-sounding man tells the mayor, “It’s time natives face up to the fact they gotta live under our rules,” Cherisse fist-pumps the air and says, “Holla!” to no one in particular. She isn’t about to piss off the white folk – farmers, cottagers, Doreville locals – whose dollars financed her first guitar, the distressed leather jacket, the sexy boots, and soon her first professional demo CD.

  Before the show ends, a sleek buff-coloured sports coupe pulls up to the smoke shack. Cherisse feels her shoulders stiffen and she turns off the radio. Elijah Barton steps out of his car, opens the shack door with an authoritative shove, and barely looks at Cherisse. He comes only if her father is not there – the rusted truck an easy tell – and he doesn’t say much at all before buying a carton of Warrior cigarettes. Usually she says nothing much back. Maybe it’s the mayor being on the radio, maybe it’s her growing confidence about her voice, but today she feels bold.

  “Don’t you have a factory full of these smokes five minutes from here?” she asks.

  Elijah’s head snaps up in surprise, as if she’s broken an unspoken rule. They both know he’s not here for the smokes. “I like the way you display them,” he says.

  “You mean stacked up and shoved against the wall.” She snorts. “Yeah, I’m a genius with that.”

  He looks at her for a moment, and she doesn’t like the way he searches her eyes. It’s as if he’s looking for something that belongs to him, as if one of the diamonds from his watch has popped out and landed in them.

  “Those ones over there in the plastic bags are cheaper.” Cherisse points to the Super Sack of rollies. She has nothing to lose.

  “The quality is better in these, thanks.” He holds up his factory-made cigarettes. Then he pays, as he always does, with two twenties; after she gives him change, he leaves another twenty on the counter before walking away. The first time he did this she followed him out, holding the money towards him. He shook his head. And she saw that he was a man who got his way, that refusing the tip would be uncomfortable for both of them.

  Now every twenty of his she keeps only adds to her urgency. One day, Cherisse thinks as she watches the sports coupe drive off, I will do better than this guy who leaves money as if he owes me.

  When Elijah’s car is a fading moan, Cherisse turns the radio dial again in search of music. She finds a Top Forty station, pulls out her compact, wets her lips, and steps out of the shack to practise her choreography. Susie Stonechild may be a great artist, but too few people hear her music. Cherisse won’t make the mistake of getting stuck in the aboriginal artist rut, consigned to rotation on specialty stations with small audiences, playing healing centres and bingo halls. Nope, you have to have the whole package in today’s market. And so she will do it all – sing, play an instrument, write her own music, dance, and look super-effin’-hot. That’s how you bust out of the reserve, the small town, your own skin.

  A red truck with flashy custom work approaches. Cherisse is in mid-swivel, her arms folding in and out from her chest. She stops, her hair lands on her shoulders and slides down her back, and she turns her face towards the vehicle with its specialty grille and fender vents. Uh-huh, she thinks, sizing up the two passengers. Grade-eight faces pasted on men’s bodies. One ugly and one cute. Ugly is familiar; he’s been here before. But Cute is new, and she likes the look of him. Surfer-blond hair, lips stretched over perfect teeth. A baby with a bruiser’s bulk.

  Ugly jumps out of the truck, holding a beer. “Hey, Pocahontas. How’s it be?”

  “The name’s Cherisse,” she says, then laughs too wildly, hearing her name sound as tart as the best kind of trouble. “I wouldn’t mind a beer, if you’ve got extra.”

  “Las, get this fine young lady a beer, will ya.”

  Cute throws a beer to Ugly and opens one for himself.

  “So, what’s your clan, princess?” Ugly asks. “Are you Wild Potatoes, baby? Pigeon Hawk? Opposite Side of the Hand? Painted Turtle?”

  Oh, this one is an asshole, Cherisse thinks. He holds out the beer and lets her tug so that her hand slips, touches his, before the can is released.

  “Those aren’t Mohawk clans.” Cherisse steps back inside the shack, moves quickly behind her counter. “You buying smokes?”

  “Get over here, Las. We got a real businesswoman on our hands.”

  Las shuffles over, dizzy now from heat, lack of food, dehydration. His head thrums as they climb the steps into the smoke shack. He has never been here before. He’s made a practice of avoiding the reserve, and coming now feels reckless. Still, up close this girl is startling: long legs in skinny jeans and high boots, pretty hips, and onyx hair that swings out like a gleaming thrill ride when she tosses her head. A face that’s high-boned and brown, with eyes shining like brigh
t jade. He’s never seen such an oddly beautiful native girl before.

  Gordo buys a plastic bag of fifty cigarettes, stows them in the truck, and returns with three more beers.

  “Hey, princess,” he says. “You’re not going to keep those sexy boots stuck out here in Nowheresville on a fine summer afternoon, are ya?”

  He slides a beer across the counter towards the girl. Las pops open the one shoved towards him. His friend knocks the lip of his can against it with a nod of his head and an exaggerated wink. “Salut!”

  The girl takes a thirsty pull. Las studies her raised chin, the way she arches her elegant neck towards the sun. His fist tightens around his beer can and he crushes it.

  Gordo lifts his arm for another toast. “Here’s to pain and pleasure in equal measure.”

  Las wishes he were back in bed, able to redo this day from the start. He bends over and tries to get more oxygen into his lungs, his blood, his brain. He’ll be leaving in a few months. And what will happen when Las comes home to visit? Surely he and Gordo will be embarrassed to be seen with each other, Gordo with his small-town loser’s puffiness and Las all prepped out and lean from a season of meets. He can imagine the awkward half nod from across the street and the comment Gordo will sneer under his breath. He’ll have a new friend by then, perhaps another high school senior with a promising athletic career who’ll be a magnet for the girls Gordo can’t quite seem to attract, despite his bad-boy status.

  “Can’t do it,” Las says.

  “Can’t do what?”

  “Whatever we’re doing here.”

  “Are you shitting me?” Gordo hisses and windmills his arms, but Las dodges.