Smoke River

by Krista Foss

  Sensing the change in mood, the girl tosses her beer can into a pail and hooks her fingers into the waistband of her jeans. Las notices where the fabric of her shirt has lifted, revealing a slender brown hip bone. “Yeah, you two better shove. I’ve got things to do,” she says.

  “A fuckin’ waste. I fucking wasted my day, my beer with you, man,” Gordo says. “You’re walking home, asshole.”

  There it is, thinks Las. He feels a worrying flame of hate inside of him. It’s burning up his biceps, fists, groin, shins. Las turns around, quits the shack. It will take him at least an hour to get back to the suburbs and he’ll have to cut through Stercyx’s farm in order to avoid the barricaded development. The whole day feels like an insult now. He doesn’t wait to see if Gordo leaves.

  Las crosses the road and marches down Ninth Line in his flip-flops. A minute later the hard consonants of the girl’s anger cut through the late-afternoon heat. He hears Gordo’s truck tear out of the smoke shack’s gravel drive. Las thinks his friend will surely pick him up after all.

  The engine slows and then it’s beside him, Gordo leaning towards the open passenger window and leering in that way of his that doubles for an apology. Las pivots. He is reaching for the passenger-door handle when a gob of spit lands on his cheek. The truck’s tires churn and it screeches away, trailing the sound of Gordo’s taunting glee. Las shakes the dust from his eyes. The globule of phlegm crawls towards his jaw and he brushes it off with his knuckles, then wipes them on his shorts. He looks back and sees the girl from the smoke shack standing at the side of the road, watching. From this distance she seems small and breakable. He can’t remember her name.

  CHAPTER 9

  A moat of electric blue surrounds the barricade’s single Porta-Potty. There’s an odour of sewage tented over it, heating up in the sun. Shayna listens to the rings at the rental company that won’t answer her. They’ve taken her cash deposit and dropped off the toilet, but now she can’t make them do the promised maintenance. The rings switch to voicemail and Shayna clicks off, dials again. She wants to speak to a human.

  A teenaged boy rides his bike through the blue water, splashing the grey sides of the plastic structure, flecking it with soiled tissue and a shaming yellow-blue stain. Prepubescent bystanders cheer. Another contender mounts his bike to do the same. With her phone still pressed to her ear, Shayna marches over to them, one arm waving for them to stop. The next boy pedals wildly, a peacock tail of effluent churning behind him. She recoils to avoid the spray. The kids shriek in delight.

  Shayna pulls the phone away from her ear and starts yelling. “Stop it! Right now! You’re making a mess!” She pushes the watching kids back from the growing mess and grabs in the air for the cyclist.

  There’s a faint “Hello, hello” coming from the cellphone clutched in her hand. Shayna slaps the phone back against her ear, holding a small boy’s collar in her free hand, his bicycle balancing against her hip. “Yes, hello. Are you still there?”

  There is just dial tone. She screeches in frustration, lets go of her young captive. He tears away, turns so she can see him laughing at her. She has stepped into the moat up to her ankle. “Fuckin’ hell!” she yells at the top of her lungs, and this delights the little gang of spectators even more. Disgusted, she winds up and pitches the cellphone, watches it skid into the dust by Helen’s approaching feet. The older woman bends to pick it up.

  Shayna can’t look Helen in the eye as she offers an arm, pulls Shayna from the moat, gets her to shake her foot free of clinging detritus. You and Rita are three mamas worth of work, her aunt had said the one time Shayna asked why she and Ruby weren’t married, didn’t have kids of their own. Bertie needs all the help she can get.

  “I’m getting Jim Maracle to drop a load of fill on this mess. He’ll empty and move the washroom this afternoon,” Helen says.

  “But we’ve paid the company for that service. They’re ripping us off.”

  “Well, their service’s a load of crap.” Helen grins.

  “We shouldn’t just take it.”

  “At least this way it gets done,” Helen says. “That’s better, isn’t it?”

  Shayna’s jaw tightens. The year her mother moved them back to the Smoke, an upstream chemical company spilled malathion into the river. Dead fish floated on the water’s surface for weeks. And within a month, all the well water coming into the Eighth Line homes lining the Smoke’s banks began to smell of charred toast and pine-scented disinfectant. The company issued a statement claiming the spill was insignificant, that “remediation had been swift and effective, but as a temporary precautionary principle, homeowners may want bring in their drinking water.” Bertie read aloud the statement in the paper and soon after began buying gallons of bottled water for her daughters to drink, continuing to make her tea from the well water right up until she got sick. Everybody just carried on, just accepted the river’s befouling, the poisoning of their own aquifer, as if the water on that part of the reserve had always been undrinkable. The temporary situation became permanent. One good thing, Bertie said again and again with a light chuckle, there’s a lot fewer skeeters around, haven’t you noticed? But Shayna knew what was missing; she remembered scooping handfuls of well water into her mouth on a hot summer afternoon, its lightly mineral taste cooler and sweeter than any she’d drink again.

  Helen leads Shayna to a large plastic cistern, tips it so she can rinse her foot, grab a drink. “Joe Montagne’s around. Jumpy as a terrier. Says the council chief wants to have a chat with you.”

  “The chief?” Shayna raises an eyebrow. “What’s that about?”

  “Don’t know. Can’t hurt to check it out. It’s quiet here.”

  “Yeah, but it’s tense,” says Shayna. “Don’t you feel it? As if everyone’s waiting for something to happen, someone to make a move. And those Warriors – here all day and then gone. Someone’s putting them up at night. But who? Where?”

  Helen shrugs. “Well, my guess is there’ll be nothing much happening in the next few hours. Might as well find out what the chief is after. Strikes me as the smart thing to do. Though you might consider fresh socks first.”

  “Smart,” Shayna repeats. “Smart is good.”

  Helen and Ruby were visiting Big River the summer Bertie announced she was sending Rita to a Catholic school that fall, in the small French suburb outside the Seaway reserve. The aunties howled. Shayna’d never heard either raise her voice. An argument raged into the night, the indignant slap of their palms making the china tea caddy on the kitchen table jingle like wind chimes.

  At one point Bertie stood up, her face slick with tears, her cheeks splotchy. She reached into her ample cleavage, pulled up a silver crucifix, and kissed it. I’ve always believed. I’ve always been a good Catholic. I married a Catholic. She pointed to Rick’s chair, the one he’d vacated when the yelling first began. And I will have my girls raised in the faith and get a decent education.

  If Lena were alive it would kill her, Ruby said quietly.

  Shayna, tucked inconspicuously into the space between the ash pail and the woodstove, worried that her mother was risking unsettling a sleeping ancestor, bringing bad luck upon all of them.

  A month after her eleventh birthday, Rita left for Sainte-Thérèse-de-Lisieux’s Holy Martyrs Catholic Elementary School in the suburb of Île d’Or, wearing a crisp white shirt and a blue and yellow plaid kilt, her hair pinned back with plastic barrettes, pink as cupcake icing. You look beautiful, Shayna whispered to her. You’ll be the prettiest girl there. Secretly she was jealous that Rita was being sent to the white kids’ school, a place that required such an important-looking get-up, while she’d be stuck in the funky-smelling portable on the reserve in hand-me-down jeans and sneakers. Rita left the house singing that first day, and Shayna watched her as if she were a luna moth or a gazelle – some creature that was beautiful and unknowable and didn’t belong to the same world she did. The feeling persisted even when Rita returned from school sullen. Her sullennes
s grew over the next months, the way the great river flooded, sweeping away what was pretty and familiar.

  One day Shayna waited for the bus to drop off her sister at the edge of the reserve. Rita tripped off the last steps. As the bus pulled away, gap-toothed boys and pigtailed girls threw apple cores and balled-up chip bags from open windows, their mouths stretched grotesquely around words Shayna didn’t understand. Maudits sauvages! Maudits sauvages!

  Rita grabbed Shayna to shield her and they sprang into the ditch.

  What happened? What are they yelling? Why are they throwing things?

  Rita straightened. Her eyes were wet with shame. They think I’m a stupid savage.

  Why Rita? Why? Shayna asked again and again. But her sister didn’t answer. Rita’s face became grey and hard as she hustled home.

  It confused Shayna. Her older sister spoke three different languages – French, English, the Mohawk Helen had taught them. There wasn’t a birdsong she couldn’t mimic. She had a genius for scouting out foxholes, warm with squirming pups in spring, and nests of baby snakes. Second only to Rick, Rita was the smartest person Shayna knew.

  That night she crept closer when Rita declared to Bertie, I won’t go back.

  You have to go back. I paid for that uniform.

  Rita pulled out a Hilroy notebook, folded to a page where there was a great big X in red ink in the margin. We’re studying saints. I wrote in my daily reflection that Saint Francis was a Mohawk. She pointed to the Île d’Or Holy Sepulchre Catholic Church calendar picture of the rope-waisted friar tacked to the kitchen wall. Mom, you told me he must be Mohawk. You said it again and again. “Saint Francis is just like us. He calls the sun his brother, the water his sister. He makes a sermon to the birds. Mohawks are the true Catholics!” How many times have you said that? So I wrote that in my reflection. The teacher, she grabbed me. She dragged me to the front of the class and made me read it aloud. Then they all laughed at me. She laughed, and all the kids laughed with her. There are no Mohawk saints, the teacher said, and there never will be. And they laughed more. Stupid girl, they called me at recess. Stupid, stupid, maudit sauvage.

  Joe opens the truck door for Shayna. He knows he should ask her a question first, he should let her speak, that there’s something uneven in the way he leans on her level temper and good sense. He drums the fingers of his left hand on the steering wheel, chews on his right thumbnail until it is shredded and gristly against his tongue.

  She lifts herself into the seat, a smaller, shorter woman than her older sister. Hers is a different kind of beauty, Joe has long observed, concentrated like a fuse, while Rita was a brush-fire, someone you noticed from a distance, couldn’t safely get too close to.

  “Since when do you do the grunt work for band council, Joe?” she asks.

  “Chief’s brother’s a dentist,” Joe says, cupping his jaw and winking to suggest that he’s shrewder than expected. “I want him to owe me a favour or two.”

  She looks out the window and he feels it coming – the thing she always asks, the only thing that matters, as if she’s checking up on him. “So, how’s Cherry?”

  Because money is a weathervane with his kid, Joe’s made a point of knowing where Cherisse hides her cash: an empty club-sized tampon box shoved at the back of the bathroom vanity, on the side where the cupboard door hangs off its hinge. She must have figured he’d scrounge for money in her private spaces, rifling through her bedroom drawers, all the containers atop her dresser, every pocket, purse, and boot. Too easy. But a space they shared? That was a fuck-you hiding place. And it would have worked, it would have outwitted him, had he not already lived with her mother, had he not come to anticipate the hoarding that preceded her tendency to bolt. And the wiliness too – there was plenty of that. So when he found Cherisse’s cash months earlier, he left it alone, knowing she would check it daily. He took to checking it too. The day he finds it empty, he’ll know she’s going. Maybe he’ll get a chance to talk her out of it, or at least to say goodbye, remind her he loves her – a moment her mother never allowed. He checked for her cash this very morning. It was there, and there was a lot of it. That was money for a different kind of leaving: the permanent sort.

  “Well, to be honest, I got a bad feeling. Think she might be getting ready to go again, you know. But a big kind of going this time.”

  Shayna straightens. He thinks of Lena, then of Helen, and of all the stiff-spined ferocity that runs through their clan’s women the way some families are riddled with diabetes or double-jointedness.

  “Why, Joe? What’s she saying? What’s she doing?”

  He feels the accusation in her voice. Are you watching over her? Are you doing a good job? There’s a tremor of guilt, of sadness, unsteadying her uprightness. Like him, Shayna has got some things wrong in her life, failed to read the signs. It joins them, this fear of fucking up again.

  “Dunno, dunno.” He swats at her questions as if they’re gnats. “Just want you to keep an eye out, ear to the ground kinda thing.”

  “I’m at the barricade, Joe. She won’t come near it.”

  He pulls in at the council offices, a boxy building of glass and dolomite. The trip is over, and he’s uncertain if he’s accomplished anything. He wishes he felt better. Rita would sit up in bed, her tongue clicking, her arms windmilling against the walls that held her, beyond the reach of the moon and its calming shadows. This place, this place, she’d cry. I’m penned in. Can’t breathe. Joe would use his firm voice: You stay. You stay, baby. We belong here. But she’d shake her head so hard she’d stripe him with snot and tears. No, we belong there. And there. And there. She’d lance each direction beyond them with her finger. We belong on all of it.

  Shayna places her small fingers on his forearm. “I’ll do what I can, Joe. In the meantime, sit her down, talk to her. Just ask her what’s going on. Take charge.”

  He nods his head. She jumps out of the truck. “You coming in?”

  “No,” he says. “Chief wants to speak to you alone.”

  Her forehead wrinkles. Then she straightens again, and walks into the building with the bearing of a much taller woman.

  When Elijah Barton’s mother realized she could not get land on the reserve, she moved with her son into an abandoned vinyl-sided cottage on the edge of the o’tá:ra. It had an arabesque of carbon on the wall behind the kitchen’s wood-fired cookstove. She nailed sheets of plywood to rebuild the floor’s sag; she sewed curtains from frayed bedsheets; she knit long tubes and stuffed them with newspapers to shove against winter’s drafty door jambs. They turned a toolshed into their outhouse, snuck water from the wells on nearby properties or boiled creek water. His mother believed she was returning to a life she remembered from her childhood, where a large kitchen garden, generosity, and the dexterity of her skills – the ability to sew, bead, weave, cook, can, cure, grow, gather, barter – were enough for a good existence. But her people were gone, others were mistrustful of a woman who’d lived so long in town, lying next to a white man, and what she knew how to do could not cushion her against their new privations. Still, she never wavered; she bore the hardships as if they were a change in the weather.

  But Elijah felt trammelled. For the first six months he’d go to bed, turn his face to the thin wall, and sob without making a sound. Then one day, from the stoop outside his mother’s shack, he heard a distant singing: a female voice for sure, but an alto with a soprano’s soar. He wandered across the creek and into the forested southern tongue of the reserve in search of its source, imagining a broad girl with a large chest and a throat like a hollowed tree stump, enough body to cradle such big notes. What he found, at the edge of the Smoke River, was Rita, thin-limbed and lanky in her cut-off jean shorts and bathing suit top, shiny hair reaching to her hips, lungs holding up the sky. She had pulled together long willow vines and was braiding them into a swing while she sang.

  He stepped back, watched her, until she swung around in mid-refrain and pointed in his direction. You! If you’re g
onna stare, you might as well help me. She continued to sing, and though he hovered closer, Elijah was unsure what to do. Finally Rita drew the braided vines to the river’s edge, threaded her leg through the loop, grabbed up high, and kicked off with her free leg, then cinched it tightly against the other one. She swooped down, pendulum fast, as the vines strained to their full length over the water, where she let go, her foot slipping free of the willow noose like a princess casting off a slipper, her whole body outstretched towards the sun. He opened his mouth to call out as she fell into the water and held his breath until she broke the surface, throwing her head back so her wet hair slapped her shoulders. Her laugh was full-throated and reckless, huge, like her singing.

  Elijah wasn’t one for big words. But later in his life, whenever he heard someone say they had been enchanted, he remembered that first encounter with Rita, and thought, Yeah, I know what that’s all about.

  Driving home early from the cigarette factory, Elijah notices Joe Montagne pull into the council office driveway. He slows down, cranes his neck just as a woman walks away from Joe’s shambolic truck. Something about her is familiar. On an impulse, Elijah pulls his red pickup into the same driveway, tucks it between two SUVS so he faces away from Joe. His hand shakes as he adjusts the rear-view mirror. Rita, he whispers. Could it be?

  At the door, the woman turns and waves in Joe’s direction. Facing outwards, her pretty face is lined with worry, every ligament of her petite frame clenched, determined. Elijah slumps. Never before has he mistaken Shayna for her older sister.

  Joe backs up his truck, tears away from the council building. Feeling sheepish, a bit foolish, Elijah is about to do the same, when he hesitates. There’s a reason for everything, his mother would assure him when he was a miserable young man. She refused to leave the old cottage on the o’tá:ra, even as its bones sank into the ground. She died before he turned twenty. To the outside world, she was poor and friendless when her work-weary heart misfired and her soft body crumpled into the folded faded linens under the clothesline. By then Elijah was making enough money to ensure that she was never cold, never hungry, and that there were plenty of beads and broadcloth for her clever hands, seeds for her garden, and just enough ease that she could sprinkle suet on the kitchen window ledge to coax the crossbills and vireos from their branches on a crisp October evening. She was as happy as she could be for a woman who understood happiness as a kind of frill, an invention foisted upon her quietude by an unquiet world. Or so she led him to believe. Possibility is more interesting to me than happiness, Elijah, she said once.