Smoke River

by Krista Foss

  Then she slips out, leaving the report on his table. Coulson watches her through the kitchen window. At first she teeters through his fields in her high-heeled shoes, then she reaches down and slips them off.

  And in that movement he sees again his ex-wife’s similar slim-hipped polish, and he remembers how much pleasure he derived from simply watching her, sitting in a small café on a Saturday afternoon. He remembers white linen napkins, the gleam of polished cutlery, his fingers looped around a tulip glass of Duvel, a book on his lap – often his well-thumbed copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Two hours of quiet, surrounded by assurances that he’d done well for himself: the cool pressure of a fine watch on his wrist, the wild tobacco and bergamot drift of his cologne, the waiter bending to refill his water glass. And finally Marie, arriving with shopping bags, dropping into her chair with a slight flush on her cheeks, sweeping back her auburn hair with hands moving excitedly at her throat like startled doves, telling him about misadventures in the market and the wine store. Her laugh as pale and delicate as the rest of her. Every moment of those afternoons was such a relief to him for its distance from a childhood scoured of leisure and good taste.

  The thought of Ella’s primrose-polished fingers denting the folder she clutched reminds him of the things he left with Marie: his mother’s porcelain dishes, passed down by generations in her family; the antique set of leather-bound Shakespeare works bought on his first trip to London; his swimming trophies; a closet full of Savile Row suits. When a year passed without hearing from him, Marie had taken all his things and given them to Goodwill. I had to do it in order to move on, she said over the phone a month later. Sorry. It was this act of disposal that stung him most. He hung up, laid his head on the kitchen table. He’d always assumed she’d keep something of him – a neatly packed carton stowed away – the way he held on to the scent of her hair, the cream of her skin, the dry effervescence of her voice.

  Coulson looks again towards the departing woman. With her sandals wound about her fingers, Ella starts to trot through the tobacco before breaking out in a full run, her bright hair flapping against the back of her neck. He picks up the report she left behind and reads every word.

  CHAPTER 11

  “The cops are coming tonight,” Gordo says. He’s made a habit of listening in on his mother’s phone calls, scanning her emails. “A riot squad from the big city and tactical units from three different counties. They’re gathering at the river. A tidy little massacre – should be fun.”

  They work up an agenda for the evening: get drunk in Gordo’s basement, stay up until the sleepy lawbreakers at the barricade hit their pillows, head out to mess things up just as the cops arrive. Las goes looking for gear in his parents’ garage and stumbles upon three forty-ouncers of Dalwhinnie tucked among a subterfuge of caulking tubes and bottled mineral spirits. The idea of his old man hoarding liquor like some amnesiac squirrel cheers him. He swipes the bottles and shows up at Gordo’s basement door for six, holding out the Scotch as appeasement for all the ways their friendship has been weird of late.

  Gordo’s eyes widen greedily. “Let the games begin!” he says.

  They make their way through a whole bottle, then start the second one, mixing it with water, then Coke, and, as they get more drunk, chocolate milk.

  There’s a pile of hockey sticks stacked in a corner of the room. Gordo was serious once but didn’t make the cut. Las knows not to bring up the subject. Still, the Scotch makes him feel strangely loose, incautious. Suddenly he’s up, grabbing a stick, pushing the old coffee table away with his shins. “Basement shinny! Let’s do it!’

  “You giggle like a girl,” Gordo says, but he’s up too, moving chairs and boxes against the basement walls, picking his own stick. There’s no puck to be found, so Las grabs his friend’s plastic deodorant container from the bureau, drops it, and thwacks it with his stick so it sings across the laminate floorboards and hits Gordo’s socked feet.

  The sight of his friend hunched over, coddling the deodorant with his stick, looking so small and serious, makes Las laugh. Gordo launches towards him, elbows first, pushing him back against the wall as the deodorant flies past his ankles.

  “Goal!” Gordo shouts. He raises his arms in the air.

  “All right, Fleury, I’m on it!” Las kicks off his flip-flops, gathers the makeshift puck, and charges for the old refrigerator on the other side of the room, holding the stick in front of him inexpertly. He senses that the purchase of his bare feet on the laminate is an advantage. He’s still laughing, but the mood in the room has changed.

  Las is moving forward, but just as Gordo lunges at him, he dekes sideways. Gordo’s feet slide out from under him. He lands hard on his right hip. Las pushes the puck around the coffee table and takes a long, sloppy shot that makes the deodorant slide past the refrigerator nonetheless.

  Las hoots. “One-one!” He turns and offers a hand to Gordo, who is still laid out like a beached sea lion. Then he fetches the deodorant, holds it out to his friend. “Face-off at the crease.”

  Gordo grabs the deodorant. “It’s cracked, you asshole. You’ve fuckin’ wrecked it.”

  Las shrugs. “It’s not like you buy the good stuff.” He’s thirsty again. He drops his stick, falls onto the couch, and twists to reach his drink, resting on a milk crate.

  “So, Las, my friend, you still keen on hurting something?”

  Las has one hand around the plastic cup while the other pours a generous refill from the second Scotch bottle. He chuckles. That’s more like it. He feels lighter.

  Then Gordo swoops towards him, holding his stick high and swinging it hard against Las’s side at kidney height. “Theo Fleury? I’m goddamn Marty McSorley, asshole.”

  “Jesus fuck!” Las lets go of the Scotch bottle. It splashes, urine-bright, against the wall behind the lamp. He reaches his hands behind him, discovers the patch of hot, tender skin on his lower back, and groans.

  Gordo laughs. “Stop being such a girl.” He pulls Las erect by his hair, looks into his face. “It’s easier to hurt something if you’re hurtin’ first.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Gordo’s truck careers wildly up the lonely county road that avoids the barricade, heads north along the reserve’s western boundary, and turns east on Ninth Line. The last bottle of Scotch is clenched between Las’s knees. He lifts his shirt slightly to press the coolness of the vinyl seat into the long welt on the small of his back. There’s a sting, followed by an amplified beat of pain. He closes his eyes. C’mon, man, it’s not that bad. The worst of it is being suckered by Gordo, never seeing it coming.

  When they approach the smoke shack, Las glances through the passenger window at the long, flat land south of Ninth Line. In the distance, the barricade is lit up like a bush party. He makes out the shredded carcass of the model home in silhouette. Smoke hovers on the southern horizon like a swarm of dark gnats. “Fuckers,” he says under his breath, imagining the model home’s studs and subfloor fuelling the barrel fires. Las twists open the Scotch bottle, takes a large swig.

  The truck slows and turns into the driveway of the last smoke shack. “Leave some of that for me,” Gordo snaps.

  Ahead of them is the slight figure of the green-eyed girl, a cash box tucked against the lovely curve of her hip, as she cuts across from the shack to a nearby trailer. Las laughs at the sight of her. He doesn’t know why.

  “Hey, girlie!” Gordo shouts. He hops out of the car, leaving the keys in the ignition, to cajole the girl into selling him cigarettes. Las follows.

  She looks at them warily. “Kinda late to come here for smokes.”

  “It’s okay,” Las says with the hunk-with-a-heart-of-gold voice he uses to offset his friend’s whiff of felony. Las points to Gordo behind his back, mimes guzzling a drink. “He gets like that.”

  This seems to relax her. She smiles. “Whaddya smoking?” she asks Gordo and he holds up his empty package. When she turns back to the shack to open it, Gordo punches Las hard on the shoulder.
But Las doesn’t care. He’s already moving past his friend towards the shimmer of perfect hair on a girl whose name he can’t remember.

  Gordo pays for his smokes and slips behind the shack to take a piss. Las grabs the girl’s wrist lightly, leans into her with his best varsity athlete smile, the flash of his suburban teeth, and says, “Let’s play a joke on that asshole.”

  And just like that they are wheeling down Ninth Line, Las behind the wheel and she shyly pressed against the passenger door, watching through the rear-view mirror as Gordo runs out to the road, one hand hitching up his fly and the other wagging a fist. It’s a joy ride. Pure and simple.

  Shayna thinks of crows and the way they wait. She thinks of tree branches filled with birds like thick black leaves, silent on a breezeless night. How the quiet of their trespass belies the calamity of their flight. The hoarse irritability, the heft of wing. Sometimes she wants to be such a bird, to wear the wedge of onyx tail feathers, raise the fused wing bones, take her sustenance through a curved beak. Blink with the eyes of a thief. Helen once said that Shayna was like a crow, the blue-purple gloss of her hair, the intelligence of her eyes, how she’d become a messenger for their people. She’d groaned. And aren’t they also tricky and unreliable? They both laughed, dropped the subject.

  But black birds are perching in the station between rest and waking. She feels them watching her. They know she aches to lean into the warm breast of sleep. Yet the cool, sunless air can’t be stamped out of her clothes, her skin, her sleeping bag’s thin layer of down.

  She senses these dark birds gathering around her, waiting for the barricade fires to burn down; for the young boys to slump forward; for the older men and women to lean back with their eyes closed and mouths open; for the Warriors who have hung around the margins for two weeks but now moved in with their serious tents, their nylon revolution, to go quiet too. The crows are silent on the subject of whom to trust.

  Forty minutes later, Las abandons Gordo’s truck midway between the highway and the development entrance. There is still time to keep the plan in play. Gordo will be pissed, but not enough to bail entirely. It’s an easy hike on foot from where Las left him on Ninth Line.

  A hundred metres in the distance there are dying fires, figures bending, sitting, curling up, everyone fighting sleep except Las, who feels awake, more awake with his growing sense of outrage. His parents’ property … his property. He crawls through the dark, drops low to his haunches, and tries to locate Gordo among the shadows.

  Is he imagining movement, a brief, glinting conspiracy, within the low, dark cloud south of the development? He feels a thrill but can’t trust his night vision, so he unfolds himself, stands, and refocuses his eyes. Suddenly there’s a tightness around his calf, a sharp thumb pressing into his skin, and then something sharp hitting the back of his other knee, making him topple sideways over the shoulders and back of a crouched, sweaty body. Gordo. The vaguely unwashed reek of cigarettes and kerosene gives him away.

  Las lands heavily on his elbow, and his chin bounces off the hard dirt. “Fuck!”

  “No standing up, remember?” Gordo punches into the darkness, but excitement has sharpened Las’s intuition and reflexes. He rolls easily out of his friend’s swinging range.

  “That was a shithead move, taking my truck,” Gordo says, lighting a cigarette. “Leaving me with my pants down. You parked it like a girl, by the way. Hope you got what you wanted, fuckface.”

  Las chuckles. He feels as cruel as, even crueller than his friend. He wonders if Gordo smells it the way an animal does, this recalibration of fearlessness. “So, is that it in the distance? A line of cop cars, vans?” he asks.

  “Yeah, they’re waiting,” says Gordo. He takes a long drag. “I have it on good authority that by now some politician has been pulled out in his jammies. Once the cops get the legal green light, bam! Let the good times roll.”

  “So what’re we doing, man? Moving in closer to watch the show?”

  “No, you thickhead,” Gordo says, as if Las’s transgression earlier in the evening is forgotten, as if the plan was never threatened. “Once the cops pounce, there’ll be a dozen empty squad cars. We’re just going to trot past the raid to that parking lot down there. Think how much fun we could have in one of those babies! And who do you think is going to catch shit for it?”

  He pulls out two camouflage kerchiefs, shoves one towards his friend, then wraps the other around his nose and mouth.

  “Shit,” says Las. He ties on his kerchief and raises a closed fist into the night.

  Gordo hands him a black baseball cap emblazoned with a gold sun, inside of which is the profile of an Iroquois Warrior. “Now cover up that blond hair, asshole.”

  Helen wears her tiredness like a heavy coat. She cannot sleep, so she walks around the makeshift camp, collecting empty coffee cups and tossing them into the barrel fire, its cooling embers purring back at her with each offering. Suddenly the porch lights of houses beyond the river go off, then come on, go off again, like fireflies. Ga’hai, she thinks at first, witch lights. At the edge of the barricade encampment she focuses her old eyes to see what witching is before her, and it is then that she hears the soft crunch of feet dropping in unison on dry earth.

  When there are a few metres between her and the line of advancing dark-clothed bodies, she catches the dull glint of eyes, the cream of young skin washed in the pink of excitement and fear. Shoulders moving in front of the distant lights and out of the way again. Out of the shadows come dozens and dozens of cops, marching close together. They reach the edge of firelight, and the line breaks up. Helen sees another wave of them following behind.

  “Wake up! Wake up! Raid!” Helen’s old voice wobbles and pitches into the dark.

  Las and Gordo watch the south horizon and it begins to move forward, a long, deep blur hurrying towards the barricade, silent as spilling ink. A single thin cry sounds from near the protest site. And just then the blur pixelates over the barricade, churning up a panic of wails and shrieks. Las wants to move closer, to see it in all its ruthless glory. Dark figures, their many shadows crossing the barrel-fire’s light, fall sharply on the sleeping protestors like obsidian chess pieces.

  “There’s gotta be two hundred of them,” he says. A rock pings him on the cheek and he looks over.

  Gordo is standing, his body pointed in the direction the police marched from. “Now,” he says and he sprints past the protest and its cries of betrayal.

  Las follows, his eyes focusing on what’s taking shape in the murk: neat rows of squad cars parked on the riverbank at the southern end of the development. “This is fucking crazy,” he whispers under his breath. But fucking crazy helps him forget what he is becoming.

  When they descend, a great cloud of shadows and movement, Shayna is surprised at how real they feel. For a moment she hopes she will be taken into flight. Something comes sharp at her side and she is awake, her heart quickening, her sleeping bag ripped so the night’s cool air alerts the surface of her skin. Then comes a superhuman pull. “Get up!”

  Not a bird. A man. Shayna struggles to stand but her bare feet slip on the sleeping bag’s lining, so she can’t get purchase. She is wrenched upwards again. Her shoulder pops. She smells the heat of this man, hears his animal grunting and tastes the ozone burn of his urgency. She scissors her legs wildly, kicks them free; her toes grab the earth, but he pushes and she slides. His strength seems huge as he pulls her away from safety, into the darkness. Shayna hollers. She bends her knees, tucks her legs under to slow him down. He stops. The grip on her shoulders loosens, and with her one strong arm she elbows behind her, hitting the plush of his groin. There is a groan, a hissed “Fuck,” and the offending arm is dropped. Shayna scrambles to a standing position, turns around, and becomes a twister of one-armed scratches and punches. She kicks his shins. Then he catches her free hand again, with a clasp that crunches her wrist, and she starts screaming with the high notes of a bird whose nest is being pillaged.

  S
he expects her cries to cut through the dark, but they don’t, because all around her there is yelling. All her people are screaming, clawing, flailing. Before she takes her knees to her ribs to make herself curl, Shayna peers back at the man who has immobilized her arms. He is dressed entirely in black, the leather of his gun holster and boots gleaming like feathers, his face as pale as new corn.

  Helen will not stumble in front of them. She stops. “Move to the road,” the cop chants over and over. “This is private property. Stand on the highway. Comply willingly and you won’t get hurt.” Let them shove an old lady. Thump come the boots. A chest pushes up against her back, propels her forward. She keeps her feet steady, walks ahead with her head held high. And then she is among a dozen or more protestors, half stooped with grogginess, standing out in the middle of road in the tawny rose of sunrise. Six others, handcuffed with their hands behind their backs, are face down in the dirt of the ditch, an officer kneeling into each back as if over a felled buck.

  Helen turns to see Nate Bastine jump on the back of a flushed officer with massive arms who has pinned a small figure, spread-eagled under his weight. “Get off her! She’s a woman! She’s our leader.”

  Two other officers come running. One grabs Nate’s arms, the other kicks his knees hard, so that he lurches forward.

  Helen moves over to them, pushes herself between Nate and the officer now winding up to boot him in the stomach. “That’s not a good idea,” she says, and she points to the half-dozen protesters who have pulled out cellphones, aiming them at the officers. “Let them go. He’s right, she’s our leader. And she’s pregnant.”

  The officer subduing Shayna looks up at Helen, and she sees alarm register in his face. “She didn’t comply peacefully,” he says. His voice is unsure.

  “Did you hear me? She’s pregnant.”