Smoke River

by Krista Foss

  Near midday the steam was out of the soil, the sun bearing down on them hard, and Coulson, who was too proud to stop to pee, let urine slide down his leg and into his shoes. It didn’t matter if he stained his pants; all of him was damp and reeking by then, numbly borne forward by the rhythm of the work – pick, step, pick, step, pick, step. With each plucked leaf, he felt the periphery of his vision wobble and his eyes sting from the saltwater streaming from underneath his cap. With every new row, he thought, I’m not going to make it through the first day. Coulson imagined the pressure of his father’s work-swollen knuckles on his shoulders, the way it felt as if the older man were pushing him down into the earth in order to root him there.

  That night he lay on his cot in the barn while men moved about him, smoking and talking, and he wondered how he’d got there. There was a dull complaint at the base of his back and his knees; the rest of him was sun-whacked, buckling with a tiredness that was gravitational, sucking him towards the centre of the earth. Being a tobacco grower’s kid would have consumed him in a fever of resentment, if Big Junior hadn’t come along, shaken his shoulder, and offered him a sweating beer as if he were just another tired man. Nice priming, kid, he said. Coulson groaned in response, pulled himself up to sitting.

  The beer rinsed him clean; it was cooling and delicious. Big Junior leaned back and told him things: the tricks to picking sugar cane and bananas, how good rum can turn friend into foe, the fish he’d caught in water bluer than Coulson’s eyes, until the boy fell asleep, the step, pick priming rhythm sloshing against his ears as if he were doing laps in the swimming pool.

  There are five bikes leaning against the bunkhouse; three are brand new, the other two Coulson pulled from the barn and tuned up in the spring. Five bikes for five primers – the first rite of harvest. Leaving the farmhouse to join his crew already out in the fields, Coulson restrains himself from retesting the brake pads, adjusting the tire pressure, re-greasing the chains.

  There’s a bike for each of you this year – you won’t have to share, Coulson said to his first three primers, the veterans, when they arrived on a direct flight from Mexico City to the small regional airport a week ago and walked the tarmac to his truck, a rucksack of clothes slung over each of their shoulders. It means you can go into town together. Anytime I head out with the truck, you’re welcome too. But driving into town is a bit complicated lately …

  Ramirez, whose English is strongest, is from a small village near Palenque, in Chiapas. James and Diego are also Mayan but from the cities. On the ride home from the airport, Coulson told them about the barricade. They nodded their heads. Ramirez’s smile was wry, a bit weary. He looked out the window and muttered at the passing landscape like an old acquaintance.

  They all have families waiting for them. Coulson never asks to see photos: he doesn’t want the responsibility such intimacy demands. But this year Ramirez insisted. He had to look: a boy, maybe nine or ten years old, holding his younger sister’s and brother’s hands, all of them tentative and half-smiling. The image puts pressure on Coulson’s temples.

  He walks through his fields, stops, and tops a tobacco plant. The head of trumpeting pink flowers gives a shudder, falls as lightly as a child’s hand into Coulson’s palm. Ahead of him on the harvester, the three men have become a topping crew. The two younger ones have stripped to singlets in the mid-month heat. But Ramirez wears long sleeves and doesn’t perspire. Coulson figures it will take a few days to finish removing the blossoms, which even now still impress him with their delicacy, a balance of wildflower and hothouse exotica. His mother counselled him against this kind of romance – she must have seen it in him. Farming is a showdown between us and nature’s spite, she’d say. So you best be spiteful in return. When the tobacco shoots were newly planted, she’d sweeten huge tubs of bran with molasses, then mix in lead arsenate. It tricks the cutworm grubs. They think someone’s left them dessert. His mother would laugh like Hecate as she spread her concoction over the fields on early spring evenings.

  Still, Coulson can’t resist the alchemy of sun and flowers. He selects the seed heads with the most open blooms to later plunk in a Mason jar of water on his kitchen table. Beyond the rows of shoulder-high tobacco, the grade of the land rises at the highway, where there’s a blur of movement. Overnight the barricade has morphed from a small protest against the development into a carnival crowd spreading over a blocked highway, carrying banners for poverty action groups, trade unions, urban Métis. There are first-aid and food stations and a crazy quilt of tents. It looks like some apocalyptic ruins on the horizon; parked vehicles catch sunlight in short sparks as if the air around them is overly ionized, ready to combust. This morning he dug out his father’s old binoculars, telling himself it was okay to be curious. He could not find Shayna in the crowds. By noon there were at least a thousand people milling around the blockade. He knew she’d be the one navigating the logistics of food, fuel, toilets, and trash. Her cellphone was busy every time he called, until he lost the heart to try again.

  The last time they were together, he flipped her on her stomach, pulled her up on all fours, knelt behind her with one fist dug into the flesh of her hips, the front of his thighs slapping the back of hers, his free hand pushing into the small of her back, then twining her hair with his wrist. When he was done, he fell to the bed panting, and a confession of feeling burst from him. He can’t remember his exact words, only that she stayed silent, her head on the pillow, eyes staring past and right through him. When he woke in the dark hours before sunrise, she was gone without a note or a brush of her lips against his cheek.

  He wishes he were more like his parents. Such a singularity to a life centred on plants and earth and sky. It spoiled them for love. The old man never raised a hand to Coulson’s mother, but neither did he place one tenderly on her neck or shoulder. She was, like his land, something inextricable, a constant: sorrows and joys mixed in her like the temperaments of sun and rain. To have made her special would have been to doubt her inevitability.

  Coulson doesn’t notice that the harvester has stopped ahead of him until shouts pull him from his thoughts. James and Diego have jumped off their seats, pulled out water bottles and cigarettes as Ramirez marches forward, investigates. He sees the three of them circle, hears nothing, and then Ramirez turns, his arms up in the air, his mouth flared. Coulson drops the topped flowers and runs.

  It was the dog, mewling and scratching at the barn door, that led him to a patch of uncultivated field that harvest season when Coulson turned eighteen. He’d slept in his underwear, his waking belly empty and tight, the sun not yet fully risen. The other primers were still snoring as he snuck out into a half-lit dawn. He stopped after crossing the highway, followed the dog with his eyes. There was something about the way Big Junior’s body was twisted, the clothes torn, the blood candied over his grey-lipped gape. Coulson knew. He ran towards him, lifted the man’s head into his lap, touched his cool skin, pressed his fingers into the pulse-less neck; nothing of his friend was left inside that casing. Coulson tried to carry the body, but in death the powerful man had even more heft. So he grabbed the dented bike thrown to one side, because he had to carry something.

  His parents paid for Big Junior’s wife to come and take his body home. The woman sobbed with an ancient grief full of spit. She jammed the heels of her palms into her eyes. No, she didn’t want to press the police for more answers. She pushed a dog-eared photo of her children, their faces small and afraid, across the table, and Coulson saw the wasted beauty of their trusting eyes.

  For years after he woke up in a sweat at night, cradling the bloodied, swollen face of their father, the weight of heartbreak, anger, stigma pinning him to his bed. He knew from the way Big Junior had been thrown. He knew how it had happened. And this knowledge added to the wreckage of that summer: a skilled worker, a good man, a parent, had been tossed off the road like jetsam. The whole town, even the farm, was tarnished for him. He left eagerly for university that fall and stayed
away as long as he could.

  Coulson’s mouth dries. Before he arrives at Ramirez’s side, he can feel it already, something as light as a dented bike in his arms and himself running, running towards the farmhouse, Ramirez already yelling behind him, The harvester! Take her back on the harvester! In his imagination, his feet serve a master outside him. He is moving; that’s what matters. He won’t know if he is doing the right thing or if he is making things worse, but certainly his truck will reach a hospital faster than waiting for an ambulance.

  He can picture the farmhouse getting closer, and when Coulson makes out the shape of the kitchen door, he sees his father there, waiting on the stoop with a morning cup of coffee in his hand, his expression hardening into denial as Coulson nears, carrying something queerly broken, the dog whining and yipping behind him. And Coulson sees again how his father, for whom action and thought were fused, in whom there was no muscle for hesitation, freezes instead of running forward to help.

  His mother bursts through the door, takes something from his arms, and recognizing it, seeing the blood on his forearms, yells at them both to fetch cloths, blankets, water while she calls the police. It is she who charges into the fields: a woman fierce about accepting the sorrows of a place along with its gifts. His father remains still for seconds more, staring at his fields, his face painted with disbelief.

  There’s a large oak in the middle of a southern field. Coulson never had the heart to cut it down; he’s arranged the tobacco to frame the tree so none of the plants languish in its shade. Underneath it are a broken Scotch bottle, a fieldstone firepit, heaped ashes, and cigarette packages flattened into the earth. The workers murmur. They stand back from an abandoned heap of clothes tucked into a furrow of earth surrounded by trampled tobacco plants. Coulson’s eyes catch the gloss of remarkable hair fanning across the dirt, reflecting sunlight. A girl. Swollen face, ripped shirt, jeans yanked down to the ankles, thighs striated in red, a stiletto heel torn from her boot, tossed liked a used wishbone. Ramirez is bent over her, his fingers on her neck.

  “She’s alive.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Nate says, “Close your eyes,” and he grabs Stephanie’s hands, pulls her forward. “Take a step up.” She moves forward tentatively, letting each foot hover as if she could suspend this dependence on him for judgment, for safety. His hands are warm and firm around hers. His lips brush against the crook of her neck. “Not yet,” he whispers. “Just stand still.”

  Stephanie is wearing new flats. The blockade is three days old. During the thirty-minute walk from their rendezvous south of it to a destination Nate won’t name, the shoes dug painfully into the backs of her heels, squeezed her toes. Now she can’t admit that her feet sting, she’s thirsty, and the screw-top bottle of wine she swiped from her parents’ rack is making her backpack purse sag, its thin straps abrading her shoulders. But she says nothing, just stands and keeps her eyes closed, because he asked. Love has turned her into someone she barely recognizes.

  He moves away and she deflates a little at the loss of his proximal warmth. She hears rustling amplified in a large space, imagines field mice nesting in a tunnel. Then there’s a strike, a hiss, the whiff of sulphur. He’s lit a match. The idea of a fire starting somewhere nearby, while her eyes are shut, excites and unnerves her.

  Her world is all combustible of late: Nate, the dairy bar, her family and home. The sharp way her parents talk to each other and to her. The tight suffocation of the house at night, in the morning. And worst of all, the family dinner table, when the few words spoken are dry sparks. Just this evening her brother reappeared at the evening meal after taking two days to sleep off an epic drunk. She watched his blond tendrils move as he ate, hiding, then revealing an angry sickle-shaped scratch, starting under his earlobe and curving along the side of his neck, stopping before the clavicle. The scratch had two parallel ridges: one raised, from something deep and sharp, and the other dragged alongside, breaking the skin in a ragged line. She couldn’t stop looking at it, was surprised that her mother’s eyes, which usually scanned the boy like a raptor’s, had failed to notice. But lately her mother ate staring down or off into space.

  She debated mentioning it aloud, just to fuck her brother up and watch her mother’s eyes widen with alarm as she took in the breach of her son’s July-brown skin before running off in search of Polysporin. But before she could decide, Las pushed away from the table with a grunt and a Gotta go and was out of the house within seconds. Her mother looked up helplessly in the direction of the slammed front door, as if newly resigned to her children’s unexplained comings and goings. Before sneaking away herself, Stephanie noticed that her brother’s bedroom door was ajar. She couldn’t help herself. She slipped inside.

  “Nate?”

  “Soon,” he says. “One more thing.”

  He comes back to her. She feels him gently lift the knapsack off her tender shoulders, pull the straps off one at a time, so that his fingers glide along her bare arms and her skin rises to his touch. Then one palm is in the small of her back, the other pressed gently against her eyes, and he guides her as if she were a blind dance partner, a few more steps. “Kneel,” he says. “But keep your eyes closed.”

  She bends until her shins hit something thin and soft over a harder surface, and finally she topples onto her bum with a little yelp of surprise. His hands are there to steady her, to keep her from falling on her back, and when she is sitting up straight, his fingers encircle her ankle. He removes the left flat, then the right, and the cool night air is a salve to her flayed skin.

  “Now,” he says, and she opens her eyes, at first to a mottled darkness and then, as she adjusts to the light of the candles he has lit around them, she sees that they are inside a cathedral-sized building. Liquefied colours move across the walls, up to the ceiling, with the dim candescence of stained glass. She looks down. The softness underneath them is an opened sleeping bag.

  Stephanie puts her hand to her mouth, tries to focus. “Are we in a church?” she says.

  Nate smiles. She stands up barefoot and turns slowly to survey the space. The walls reveal themselves: they are covered in dark adumbrations of figures that are realistic but half-finished, as if the night has eaten them away. Trees that bleed like severed limbs. Huge winged birds. A hideous child emerging from a woman’s armpit, another between her legs. A gallery of monstrous faces that are bug-eyed, their mouths twisting up grotesquely, framed with ropy hair – black or gold – that floats seaweed-like out from them. The colours are flat, saturated, comic-book bright. And connecting it all are words, a scrawling wild-style, up and over and under the images like some funhouse helix. She thinks it’s graffiti, though it’s unlike any graffiti she has ever seen. It hurts her eyes; it exhilarates her. How could this be here in small, fusty, unworldly Doreville?

  “I don’t understand. What is this? What is this place?” Stephanie asks finally.

  Nate sits with his hands wrapped around his knees, surveying the work. “Studio, gallery, laboratory.” He shrugs. “Secret society. The building’s an old cheese factory, abandoned.”

  “So is this your work?” She wants his hands, so easy with kindnesses for her, to be the instruments of this wonder.

  “Yes, but not all. There’s a crew of us from the rez. We started coming here about eighteen months ago. And you know, everybody just found their thing – oil-based chalk, Krylon, Montana, acrylic. We worked out a manifesto. No stencils, no stickers, no copycat work. We look at the stuff from São Paulo, Berlin, L.A., New York. Find it on the net, in magazines. But then what we do is ours, all ours. We’re working out something that’s all our own, y’know.”

  He nods his head at the work as if meeting a group of friends. Stephanie imagines the hours he’s spent here, laughing and collaborating with others, losing all sense of time. And what a space – how its bigness, its cold warehouse air, would quicken his lungs. She prickles with envy, the shame of her own evenings driven by boredom to television or the internet.
/>
  “Those are mine,” he says. “The Sky Mother, the Twins, the false faces.” He points to the largest depictions, disturbing and beautiful.

  “They’re amazing. Too good for here,” she says, falling back to the ground beside him. “This fucking small-minded town.”

  He moves closer and draws a finger from behind her ear, down along the side of her neck, to where her clavicle meets the top of her shoulder. “Thank you for saying that,” he says. “Someone will find us soon enough. Tear it all down or paint over it. But for now, it exists.”

  “No!”

  “It’s the risk you take; makes the work better. This idea, you know, that it may be temporary.” His hand slides down the side of her arm and then his fingers circle, ever so slightly, at her elbow, and she realizes how very quiet it is, how alone they are.

  Stephanie reaches for her knapsack purse. She has to pull out her camera to free the bottle of wine and the two plastic cups she pilfered. The wine is lukewarm, slightly sour, but after tapping their glasses in a toast she is suddenly nervous, eager to feel a buzz. She gulps hers down. Her hand falls to the side with her empty cup and brushes along the camera, which makes her start.

  “My camera,” she says, and he looks down at it. “I can document all of this. Put together a portfolio. I’m good at that. I’m good with a camera.”

  He considers it for a moment and then says, “I believe you.” His lips are travelling over her chin, down her sternum, towards the lowest ebb of her scoop neck. “I believe you’re good. We’ll help out each other a lot. We’re a team now.”