Smoke River

by Krista Foss

  The cop lifts his knee from Shayna’s back, but she remains lying on the ground, like a swatted bug. Nate is freed with a shove that leaves him sprawling in the dirt; he springs to his feet, his face inflamed. Helen raises her hand. “Thank you for your courage,” she whispers to him, and he brushes the dirt from his chin, his thighs, and backs away.

  She turns to the officer who’s pinned her niece. “I hope you didn’t hurt this woman. You better get those handcuffs off.”

  Helen squats by Shayna, sees the dirt that rims her niece’s mouth and wipes it with her sleeve. The officer looks sheepish and unlocks the cuffs. Helen helps her to stand, brushes the dust and grit from her clothes.

  Shayna grabs Helen’s neck and leans in, her eyes round as suns. “I am?” she asks shakily. “Am I?”

  Helen doesn’t answer. Instead she draws Shayna back towards her people, who have gathered in a protective oval on the asphalt, blocked from moving back into the development. To a one they have all fished in their pockets for cellphones. They thumb in the numbers over and over. “They’ve cut the mobile service,” somebody yells out.

  Suddenly two teenagers bolt. They run across the empty mud, past the development with its fires gone cold, its ragged sentry of police, towards the creek. An officer swears under her breath, but none make chase.

  Fifteen minutes later, Helen sees what the police officers didn’t anticipate. Already far, far in the distance beyond the highway, on the outer reaches of the reserve, are pinholes of light from a convoy of cars, trucks, motorcycles headed in their direction. It grows in length. Within minutes of running away, the teenaged girls had reached the reserve and the nearest house with a phone. And that phone call fell like the first of a domino run.

  Elijah parks himself by the side of the road across from the barricade. What he sees is a failure of pragmatism. At the entrance of the development is a riot squad formation of police: blank faces, no shields or helmets. He imagines the plan being hatched in the cop shop and subsequently molested by several layers of hand-wringing bureaucrats. There’s only two dozen protesters. We’ll send two hundred cops. Somebody there signed off on that, believing numbers would do the work of actual strategy.

  The cars and trucks are rolling in now. This is where it gets interesting. He jumps out of his pickup and marches into the crowd. He yells, and they yell too. “Who’s in charge? Who the fuck is in charge here?”

  More vehicles arrive. Whole families from the reserve are running, running towards the line of cops, who push them towards the road, farther from the development. Moms, kids, teenagers, and men, some already kerchiefed. The traffic spilling out of the reserve doesn’t let up. Elijah sees that some of those front-line cops look pretty worried now, wondering what their superiors have set them up for. The numbers have been reversed; now there are easily four times more natives than cops. It’s as if the top of an anthill has been sheared off: the whole reserve could empty onto this patch of land in a few hours. And the TV cameras have arrived.

  “This is an illegal raid! These cops have assaulted women, old ladies!”

  There is a hiss of outrage. Any second now, Elijah thinks. And sure enough, he sees a rock arc towards the line of cops. More vehicles arrive. More rocks are scooped from the ditch, hurled into the sky. The morning showers bruises.

  Elijah turns. He won’t be immortalized in a photo with rocks flying overhead. He slips back to his truck and drives away.

  Las wants to piss himself laughing. They just walk right up to it, slip into the seats, touch the radio and computer. And there is the big yellow plastic key ring hanging from the ignition. Seconds later they are gunning that baby through the main streets and around the burbs, then cutting up the county roads like they’re in a chase scene, flinging gravel, the windows open, leaving a war paint of tire rubber on the asphalt.

  “Neeed for speeeed,” Gordo yells.

  Las laughs. It’s all funny. In a matter of hours he has done the worst things of his life so far. There’s no going back. Yet it doesn’t feel so terrible – it’s fuckin’ hilarious.

  Gordo presses his foot onto the brake, the car doughnuts, and the gravel makes a glockenspiel of the car doors. They slide into the ditch by fallow fields of rye grass and alfalfa.

  “Time to burn, baby.”

  Along with flares, folding pylons, and a locked shotgun box, there’s a can of gas in the trunk. Las hungers to keep the sensation stoked. “Let’s sniff the shit first.”

  “Why the fuck not?” Gordo says. “We’re native, aren’t we?”

  They both laugh, pull their kerchiefs off their chins, stick their noses in the gas can, laugh again. Gordo giggles like a girl as he splashes gas on the car seats and in the trunk and tosses the match in with no warning.

  Las falls into the sweet-smelling tangle as the blast of flame muscles him backwards. He is floating, floating on the alfalfa, which is green and runny and as cool as menthol. It’s all funny and pain-free, and even when he actually starts to feel kind of wet, he is dry-heaving with giggles. His focus pushes through the blue. Gordo stands above him, pouring gas from the can into the palm of his hand and then flicking it at Las as if he’s a farmer sowing seeds, except what’s sown dissolves into damp stains on Las’s shorts and T-shirt. And even in his elation, Las recognizes the game his friend is about to play.

  Sure enough, Gordo has one last sniff and tosses the empty can. Then, with his best slasher-film laugh, he takes out a matchbook and lights one match after another, tossing them so they fall at Las’s feet, then by his arm. And because it is such an asshole move, this too is for Las the funniest thing, the idea that Gordo thinks he’s going to light up his buddy like a Victoria Day bonfire.

  Shit, Gordo never stops. Man, is he ever a prick. Las quits laughing. He comes up on his elbows, lifts his hips for leverage, and kicks out one leg so that his heel mashes Gordo’s nuts. A second hard kick nails his doubled-over friend on the side of the face, so that he falls. Then Las jumps up, panting. He wants to boot Gordo in the head hard enough to hear his skull bones crack, feel a piss of cranial fluid on his toes. But Las is wearing flip-flops, so the worst he can do is take a heel and pound it into Gordo’s ribs.

  Then he is flip-flopping through the field. Its plants are soft and light as a girl’s hands against his thighs and ankles. And he is laughing, laughing into the magenta sunrise.

  Joe pulls up in his truck just as the police decamp and the sun makes a rosy crest on the horizon. He imagines what was said to bring about this retreat: We’re dangerously outnumbered. The situation is not under control. He feels badly for the guy who had to make that call. A line of black backs moves away from the development, just quickly enough to outpace the jeers that follow. Only a few protestors make chase; the rest swarm the development once again, while others refuse to leave the highway where they’ve been corralled for hours.

  Joe watches a hydro tower fall onto rain-softened earth, attached by jerry-rigged cables to two pickups. Seven storeys of galvanized steel are dragged through the ribboned mud of a not-yet-finished hydro cut intended to bring electricity to the sprawl of new homes, out onto the highway. Against the asphalt, the steel makes one long complaint. And then it is left to rest. An abandoned trailer home, delivered from the reserve by another truck, is unhooked behind the tower. Gravel, lumber, garbage become a tangled bricolage behind, around, and under the tower and trailer.

  Joe scans all the people he sees, the insides of moving vehicles as well, for the daughter who hasn’t come home. He chews the rough skin of a knuckle until it cracks and stings. From a simple protest, a full blockade animates itself, goaded into place by the ill-considered raid. To Joe it looks like the loneliest place in the world.

  Then a car speeds down Highway 3 and brakes to a whinnying stop before the fallen tower, the trailer, the junk that obstructs its passage. The driver doesn’t get out. One of the protestors, a tall man with a broad chest, clambers atop the heap and stands with his legs apart, the morning sun high behin
d him as he waves a flag back and forth, a flag that’s not for a country but for a people, for an understanding of place. Against the sun he is dark and powerful, a winged messenger.

  CHAPTER 12

  He bit her ear as he landed hard on top of her. His hot breath pressed against her cheek. Who gives a fuck about a ten-dollar Pocahontas? Her nose twisted on the sand. I will lie here forever, she thought, never open my eyes again, and when he is done with me, I will shrivel up in the sun like deer gut.

  Her cigarette had flown from her grip, its ember, its little fire bright as the eye of something small and scared. She watched its fire, watched its fire. Then she closed her eyes and slipped away from the heat, from the cigarette’s hot eye, from the pain of what was happening to her. She closed her eyes and it didn’t have to be summer. It wasn’t summer. She went looking for ice. And found it in the memory of a cooler season, years ago, when an uncharacteristic plummet made the leaves surrender early, the light grow dismal. Daddy Joe bellowed in the afternoons. He kicked things because the trailer was damp and drafty and there was no relief from grey skies and worrying about money.

  But she didn’t care. She had the dog, a little furnace of white fur. It curled up inside a tent of blankets on Cherisse’s bed, or it chased pieces of string. The games set the dog yipping and Joe yelling at them to stop, so they’d leave the trailer and wander for hours along the banks of the Smoke. The dog’s legs were short but it had the heart and lungs of something bigger, and better, than both of them. Cherisse and the dog – which she dared not name – already knew all the trails by their balance beams of fallen trunks, beaver dams, and marshy inlets where wood ducks mated and where, in that first winter, the river narrowed and froze into acreages of ice.

  The problem with ice is that its dangers are so obvious, so clear. Its beauty too. She was a girl who liked beauty, things that shone, their voodoo of desire and reprisals. Just like the dog, the ice was scoured of hue, of colours, so it held light like a fuse. And she couldn’t resist; all that winter Cherisse went down to the frozen river bend and dared herself out farther and farther, even as the little dog stayed on shore, running and scolding her. Then one day she was standing in the middle of the river’s bend, and in the distance she could see a scalloped edge where the ice gave way to dark, oily water that slunk into the horizon. The view was vast and dizzying. And she had the urge to do something beautiful, to pirouette and glide like the ice skaters in spangled bodysuits she’d seen on television. She stuck out one leg backwards, airplaned her arms for balance, and lifted her head to the sky. A cold February wind shook the brittle trees on the shore; the sound that reached her in the middle of the river was like a low gasp of wonder, followed by hurrahs from the little dog.

  When she looked down, one leg still stretched out behind her, she saw how the ice bubbled, crude glass underneath which the river slid incorrigibly. She didn’t know how long she had held her balance, her heart beating with the subterranean flow, but a sudden high inhale from downriver pulled her forward. Her fall was a hard thump, bringing her to hands and knees. She imagined that a satellite broke apart in the atmosphere the way that ice did – with loud sighs instead of explosions. Suddenly she was on a large puzzle piece cleaved from the rest. It moved ever so slightly. The little dog was a white blur, scuttling along the bank, its panicked yips insisting she return to safety. Cherisse crouched on hands and knees, pulled herself over the cracks. The ice was like a baby’s skull – held together but not fused. She moved gingerly from one piece to the next, towards a long frozen tooth that still clung to the riverbank. But the instant her full weight was on that frozen peninsula, it shuddered wickedly, tore away from the edge.

  The ice pieces crowded up against each other at the bend, split into ever-smaller chunks. Once the jostling mass turned the corner, the pieces scattered in the faster-moving width, chased by the dark serpent of water. Cherisse lay on her belly and inched towards the edge of her ice, waiting for the riverbank to be within jumping distance. She would have made it too, but her little dog, half-mad with panic at seeing her close and moving, leapt from the safety of earth to the moving ice. It fell just shy of the edge, scrabbling its little feet and nails against the frozen raft, trying to get purchase. No, no! Cherisse yelled. She stretched out her arm to the wet animal, her ears full of its frightened clawing. And this beautiful dog, unnamed because she knew it wasn’t hers, was no longer beautiful, but all bone and sinew, bulging eyes and strange freckled skin, drenched and shaking. In the half-second when the scratching stopped, the ice slipped out from under the dog’s paws, and the dark water sucked it under, she realized it had loved her more than its own survival.

  She lay her cheek on the floe, which began to move faster, and she watched the water ahead, praying the dog would reappear. There was no going home without it.

  “No!” Cherisse says again. And now the heat is back. She is lying in the dirt, smelling strawberries. The light behind her lids is tinted with the berries’ bleeding juice. There’s earth under her shoulders where she fell, running. Running away. Running home. The ground as giving as a mother’s lap. How long has she been here? She remembers a darkness in which all the birds were awake, filling the night with strange cries. A rock landing at her side, close to her ribs.

  She is hurting, her whole body mapped with soreness, and now she has a thirst greater than pain. She concentrates, and one eyelid opens to the rosy blur of morning and then its stripes of green, pale and porous. The green of life, of plants. She feels the back of her head leaning into a thick stalk. Tobacco sprung from the grave of the Creator’s mother, she thinks. Dead would be good; dead would be cool as clay, cooler still.

  CHAPTER 13

  When Coulson was fourteen, his father said simply, This is what we do. For the next six weeks he was sentenced to picking tobacco in the day and sleeping in the barn at night. You’re not really part of a priming crew unless you eat and sleep like they do, his father told him. At four-thirty a.m. on the first morning, Coulson quit his soft bed reluctantly. The farm kitchen was already distended with frying, baking, and percolating. Every burner was in use, the oven light glaring, trays of fresh baking stacked on the table, his mother already damp and beaded with exertion. Coulson tore open a warm biscuit, slathered it in butter and apricot preserves, and ate painstakingly, until his father grabbed his shoulder, pushed him out into the wet morning and away from his comforts.

  Outside, men lined up on the picnic table benches under the laneway’s pin oaks. In those days, primers were drifters from Quebec or Kentucky and seasonal migrants from Jamaica. The hardest workers were not necessarily muscled and were often sallow and thin. All of them wore rumpled clothes and greasy caps, wiped their coffee-wet lips along their sleeves or bare arms, ate their eggs and biscuits with their heads low to the table, as if condemned. Angel, a Mohawk woman who worked afternoons on the tying line, filled tin cups with coffee, wordlessly swatted away impatient hands as she moved down the tables. Beyond them the fields hung with a tight mesh of tiny droplets that slid off the tobacco leaves, dripped into the sandy loam. For the rest of the harvest, Coulson would work, eat, and rest with the hired men and his father wouldn’t look sideways at him. He was orphaned, with his parents in full view. Keeps the primers honest and my boy humble – that was the way the old man explained it.

  He wouldn’t have stood a minute of it had it not been for Big Junior. His father had first hired the man the summer Coulson turned eight, after the government relaxed regulations so farmers could bring cheaper seasonal farm help from outside the country. Big Junior had returned every year since. For the nearly two months he spent at the Stercyx farm, the man laughed; he drank every drop of his evening beer as if it were a grace; he lampooned the other workers with a mix of affection and astute mimicry that would make Coulson’s mother tear up in an anguish of giggling. The family began waiting for him, though none would admit it to the other; they waited through the long winters of quiet suppers, dim lights, and the parsimony
of their affections. When he arrived late July, Big Junior would wrap Coulson in his arms and hug him in a way that was too demonstrative, too liberal for his father to ever consider. Then he would laugh, and Coulson would feel as if the man had lifted a heavy canvas off the top of the world to let the sun in.

  I can’t teach you how to pick with talk, Big Junior told him the summer he joined the crew. Just follow me and do what I do. And do it the way I do it, or else you gonna be hurting bad.

  Within the first hour of priming, Coulson’s shirt lay flat and wet along his back because of the dew-beaded leaves. His fingers were numb. He heard the staccato of other men’s grunts as they bent to snap ripe young leaves at the base of the plant stalk. Coulson made a science of Big Junior, following him through the rows, copying his position, noting the angle of his knees, the precise way he folded his body at the waist so that his spine was almost perfectly parallel to the earth but for the slightest arch in the small of his back. He listened to the man’s slow rhythm of breath, visually estimated the length of the gait that took him from one plant to the next. Big Junior bent at the hips and softened his knees to reach the sand leaves at the base of the tobacco stalk. Along the length of a row, 650 plants deep, he used one hand to pick and the other to hold the leaves. In the next row he switched hands. Big Junior didn’t stand up until the arm farthest from the plant clutched so many leaves to his side that he risked dropping one. Then he used his picking hand to secure the leaf bundle, and in one smooth movement that left him bending again, scooped them into the tobacco boat that followed the primers.

  Don’t straighten too much, kid, Big Junior warned him. Or you’ll never get yourself back to bending.

  Before finishing his first row, Coulson felt the pull in his calves, in his buttocks, the armful of fresh-picked leaves making his right shoulder throb. The sun had burned off the fog by then, baking dry the back of his shirt. His socks were still damp, his cheeks flaming from heat and mounting despair. Sips, honey, Angel reminded each man as she handed out cups of water at the end of the row. You sip for a drink out here, or you’ll piss yourself dry and keel over.