Smoke River

by Krista Foss

  Maybe there should be something to eat too. The refined carbohydrates of toast might distress her mother. She will bring fresh fruit. In the refrigerator there is a honeydew melon. She shouldn’t have poured the coffee; with the time it takes to prepare the melon, it will be too cool to drink. Which of her parents needs it piping hot? Stephanie starts to perspire, worries she will lose her nerve if one of them complains about the coffee or, worse, leaves to make a better batch. She is cradling the honeydew in her palms, propping the fridge door open with her shoulder, when her mother comes into the kitchen in her sweats and no makeup, her hair pulled back into a messy ponytail.

  “Stephanie! What are you doing with that melon?” Her mother’s voice breaks with agitation.

  Stephanie cringes. She is more tired than she realizes.

  “No, no, no, sweetheart.”

  With two strides and one bend, her mother advances, grabs the fruit, places it gently back in the crisper as if it were a baby’s lost head. She knocks the refrigerator door shut with her hip. “You can’t eat that. I have plans for it.”

  Her mother looks at the three mugs, wrinkles her brow. “Did you have friends sleep over? And when did you start drinking coffee?”

  Stephanie’s gut gets heavy. She wants to do the right thing. She grabs the mug closest to her, takes a swallow. It scalds her throat.

  “Mom,” she says, sounding hoarse, rushed. “I have to tell you something about Las. Something’s wrong.” A pearl of water rolls from the side of Stephanie’s nose to the crook of her mouth. Is she crying?

  “Where is he?”

  Please don’t cry, she tells herself.

  “Where is he, Stephanie?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. That’s not the point. What I’m—”

  Her mother moves, shoves past Stephanie and the cups of wasted coffee to the stairs, which she takes in twos. There is a single knock on the door of Las’s bedroom at the very top. Stephanie hears it yank open and climbs the staircase with dread.

  The sight of her brother is as terrible as it is beautiful. Las lies across his bed sprawled out on his back, as if his body has been tossed there. The bedsheets are thrown. One arm is flung over his head, his nose nestles in the crook of his elbow, all of him is naked but for a pair of cotton shorts. Stephanie can’t help but be struck dumb by him in such moments – the toasted mallow of his skin, the firm swells of his thighs and pectorals, the slender ridge of his jaw.

  Her mother rushes to the window, pulls up the blind, and leans into his face to confirm that he is breathing. Stephanie follows her mother’s gaze as it trails along the length of him, until she sees his feet dangling over the edge of the bed, caked with mud along the arches, his flip-flops abandoned on the floor below. Something about the top of one foot looks strange – as if he has stuck his toes into the carcass of an animal.

  Stephanie moves closer and sees it is Las’s flesh that has curled and darkened like a fatty brisket, burnt on the outside and with a pulpy centre of blood and gristle.

  Her mother looks up at her. What comes out is a weak rasp. “Get your father.”

  Mitch can’t hear his family when he’s in the office, an advantage he wouldn’t do without. It is the one room in the house where he feels that all the disparate litter of his life is gathered and sorted, made tidy and manageable. Despite Ella’s preference for barely perceptible colours, the walls are painted golden brown, the medium dark shade of an Arturo Fuente cigar’s broadleaf wrapper. Mitch still has a dozen left from his most recent purchase – there is one smoke shack that specializes in cigars – and it is a continuing source of antagonism between himself and his wife that he smokes in the privacy of the study, which he’s gone to the expense of having separately ventilated to appease her prickliness. There’s a long wall of windows with wooden blinds, another wall of bookshelves – he isn’t a great reader, but Mitch is comforted by the smell and heft of leather-bound sets – and in the centre is the ponderous oak desk, solid as a favourite uncle. He stashes his humidor in the bottom left of its six capacious drawers. He would keep his Scotch there too, were he able to lock the drawers against his plundering son.

  Mitch rubs his forehead. His eyebrows feel rammed into his hairline, as if paralyzed in a state of perpetual alarm. He is withered and underslept. He reaches into the humidor, plucks out a Cañones Natural, slides the cigar under his nose, breathes in hints of the Spanish cedar it was aged in, and wills all the day’s tasks already over so he can pull its peppery heat right into his lungs. He will have a good-sized Scotch with it. But that is hours and hours away. First there are more calls to be made to lawyers, mid-level bureaucrats, creditors, builders, clients. Nervous or evasive – ten days after the blockade stoppered the highway in front of the development, these were the only two responses he could count on.

  When he hears a short knock, he half hopes it’s his wife, arriving at his office door with a piping hot cup of coffee, her face free of accusation, knowing that he needs the relief of a small kindness, unspoken recognition of his doggedness in fighting for the development and their future. He feels a slight twitch in his mouth, a swell of love pushing against the acid reflux in his chest.

  But there is no wife. There is no cup of hot coffee, though its aroma sneaks into his office. There is only Stephanie.

  “Dad?” she says. It’s a voice that melts him every time.

  “Yes, sweetheart?”

  “Mom needs you because something’s wrong with Las.”

  “What’s up with your brother?”

  “It’s serious. You better go now. They’re in his room.”

  A sneeze has been twitching in Mitch’s nose; it bursts out of him loudly. The papers on his desk dot with moisture. He looks up to see his daughter recoil. She could be a little more understanding, that one.

  “Steph, honey,” he says. “I desperately need a cup of coffee. Will you make me one?”

  She doesn’t move.

  “Pronto?”

  Mitch puts the cigar back in the humidor and stares at it for a second with the longing of a man who knows what he deserves, and then he closes his bottom desk drawer.

  Las is laughing, laughing. And fuck, fuck, fuck, if this wasn’t the worst day ever, getting all this backwash of noise in his head from nights and days before. Pants and whimpers and the sensation of his fist against a small face, knuckling plump lips, the slick of blood against a cheek and a delicate hand. Release. So wild, so disturbing – the sensation kept cutting through the fog of booze and gasoline. The smash of a brick on his exposed foot, slicing open the buzz from Gordo’s strong weed. And now there is the soft, light touch of hands on his legs and his ankles, the tickle of something cold against the throb that has gone dead in his foot. He is laughing because it is his mom and dad lifting him off his bed as if he is a little boy, slinging his arms around their shoulders, talking in whispers. He is laughing because this too is fun, unexpected. They are going on a car ride again, and he hopes they go fast. He never wants to stop laughing. He never wants to slow down.

  Stephanie puts the cup of coffee she made earlier for her father in the microwave. Pronto, she hears. Fucking pronto. Both her parents are in the bedroom with Las. She hears their hushed voices. She has taken out two travel mugs. She saw the foot – they’ll have to take him to the emergency room. Such a guy move to ignore an injury, let it fester until it becomes a drama. She wonders how long he has been walking around like that, and she can’t help a tinge of admiration for his pain tolerance. The microwave dings and she throws the other cup of coffee in to heat. It’s sacrilege to microwave coffee, according to her father. But this is a pronto situation. Stephanie is all about pronto right now.

  Her parents emerge from the bedroom, her brother draped between them. Las Pietà, she thinks. Stephanie follows, with travel mugs in place of palm fronds. Her mother stays in the back seat with Las. Stephanie hands her dad his coffee as he gets into the driver’s seat. She knocks on the window to alert her mother to the coffee she�
��s offering, but her mother doesn’t acknowledge it.

  “Mitch, let’s go! He’s in pain.”

  It’s a thin, high bark. Her father backs out of the driveway, and Steph is left holding the travel mug as they pull away.

  CHAPTER 17

  This one won’t give him any trouble, Joe Montagne thinks as he watches Coulson Stercyx approach him through the tobacco field. Yup, Coulson may be a tough-looking dude, but his eyes are the colour of water, not flint, and the skin around them puckers with good humour. So even though the crosshatch of Joe’s tire tracks has flattened two dozen of the man’s mature tobacco plants closest to the highway, and Joe has added insult to injury by erecting a small structure of unsteady joints and peeling paint atop the desecrated plants, the farmer is sure to let him be.

  Joe stops chewing up a plank counter with bad nails and cackles hello. Before Coulson says a word, Joe drops his hammer, reaches into the back of the truck, and hands him a still-hot takeout coffee. He then produces one for himself and raises it in a salute of friendship and peace. For the moment there is nothing to do but sip and size each other up: two men for whom worn denim and wariness are like a second skin. You don’t take a man’s peace offering before swinging a fist or calling the cops, Joe thinks.

  He needs cash flow. Cherisse has been in the hospital for two weeks, and he wants her to stay there. The sight of her makes him cry, reminds him of all the things he has not properly fixed: the trailer’s toilet tank that never refills after flushing, the crack crawling across the kitchen window like a stick insect, the bum leg on the pullout couch. He wants the doctors to mend her, believes they have the magic to return her to exactly who she was before. He will give them time. If she comes home to the trailer now, she will be the most broken thing there, the one he can’t ignore or put back together.

  Still, a big wad of cash will help him make some things right. The barricade has stopped white folks from coming to his smoke shack, so he will bring it to them, at the elbow of Stercyx’s field that juts out before the blocked part of the highway. It’s a quick drive from the suburbs, and after they’ve made their purchases, a one-eighty on the deserted road will take them home in minutes.

  “Funny, eh?”

  “What’s that?” says Coulson.

  Joe lifts his paper cup. “The white man brought this habit to my people.” Then he nods towards the expanse of green and yellowing tobacco. “But we taught your ancestors how to grow tobacco, didn’t we?”

  Coulson looks over the bent-up tab on his drink. “You did.”

  They both take sips and stare into the fields, and a moment of quiet hangs between them.

  “Lot more money to be made growing tobacco than drinking coffee, huh?”

  Coulson smiles. “I suppose you’re right about that.”

  Joe lets that sink in.

  “Nobody’s coming to my smoke shack with the blockade. And it’s just a corner of your field. I need the business.”

  Coulson doesn’t answer, and Joe watches him take another sip as if he’s weighing the pleasure of the drink against the insult to his property.

  “My girl is hurt.”

  The mess of Cherisse’s face makes him crazy, makes him want to flatten something, someone. His back molar is throbbing and his saliva tastes faintly of rot. He’s been thinking a lot about whisky, and that won’t help. He has to keep his head screwed on. Having a place to go, customers to serve, will help.

  “I know,” says Coulson. “I was the one who found her.”

  Joe’s heard as much. They both look down, go quiet.

  “She’s not talking yet. Barely awake at all. Surgeries. They’ve got her on a bunch of drugs. Hallucinating.”

  “I called the cops about the tire marks under my oak. Took their sweet time to collect evidence. Good thing it hasn’t rained until this morning.”

  Joe turns abruptly, starts to poke around in the back of his truck. He’s not ready for too much more of this kind of conversation. The who, the how, the why, what next. He pulls out a lawn chair, unfolds it, and plunks down in it.

  Coulson stands in front of him. “You gonna offer me a seat too?”

  Joe gets up, pulls out a second lawn chair, and unfolds it for Coulson. Why not? There was a bonfire of midday sun. Something ’bout this guy might be as sorry as me, Joe thinks. He watches Coulson sit down, a coffee in one hand and in the other a thumb-smeared cellphone.

  Peg Redhill moves through the blockade from Doreville’s emptied downtown. She left early for her scheduled rendezvous with Constable Holland and drives at a relaxed pace. Lately she wakes up with her head spinning, as if she’s in a helicopter on a cloudless day, looking down upon the interlake basin, a green-brown bridge between the dancing blue of two great lakes. Through it runs the silver band of the Smoke River. It would be a beautiful, peaceful image but for the traffic. Nose-to-back vehicles wend their way down the highway that connects one lake to the next. But just before the two-lane bridge spanning the Smoke, the blockade forces the cars off the road. The line of vehicles beetles horizontally towards the west and the east, crawls over smaller bridges that span the river in other towns before moving back towards the highway again, joining it farther south. In her dream state, from her sky-high vantage, their movement is viscous and painfully slow, making a ragged box bisected by a stripe of empty highway. And that empty ribbon of asphalt runs the length of Doreville’s downtown. The caravan of little specks in Peg’s imagination includes compact cars with kayaks strapped on top and GO VEG bumper stickers; RVS; trailers; SUVS with tidy Yakima roof racks; long-haul semis transporting tanks of flammable chemical, fresh off a boat from Pennsylvania, or stacked with new cars, treated lumber, or frozen food products. All of them mobile crucibles of economic vitality, moving away from and around Doreville, isolating it, blaming it, holding it responsible. It leaves her head vibrating like a grasshopper wing just as the day begins.

  Now Peg looks out the window at the passing downtown and considers the limestone buildings with their quaint Victorian flourishes. Without the leaf-blower hum and spew of highway traffic, Doreville looks and sounds lovelier than ever. Through her car window she smells the richness of rain-wet tree bark. She hears birdsong. She tastes the air – it’s light, mineral-fresh, sediment-free. Still, it infuriates her. Such an idyllic town deserves prosperity. She hits the gas.

  Twenty minutes later she pulls in behind several cars parked on the side of Highway 3, in time to see a sign-wielding horde of citizens advancing towards the blockade, chanting. Facing them is an assortment of natives and day-tripping liberals, unemployed students, and harem-panted poverty activists have lined up in front of the overturned hydro tower and its foothills of detritus. Peg notes that the police have taken up a position on the highway thirty metres from the piles of gravel, the hulk of the tower and trailer in a kind of imposed neutral zone between the town and the stalled development and the reserve. Cops with helmets and shields assemble and link arms to face the placard-wavers, dividing them from the people in front of the blockade.

  A television van churns up dust as it passes Peg. It stops ten metres from the line of police and a man with a camera hops out, starts to follow the skinny activist named Kenneth who leads the sign-wavers.

  As if on cue, Kenneth yells through a bullhorn hanging from his neck. “This is a march of emancipation! Who wants to be free from land terrorism?”

  Behind him are about fifty townspeople. Peg recognizes the pub owner, the auto mechanic, the florist and his wife. All of them have signs with awkward grade-school printing. More than one sign protests TWO-TIRE JUSTICE. Peg would giggle if it weren’t her town, her constituents with the poor spelling being recorded by the TV crews. They answer Kenneth in a tentative call and response. It’s watery outrage, trailing off in its end notes. Not quite the bristling threat to inequality Kenneth promised with his citizen counter-insurgency. Still, Peg is concerned. She hops out of her truck.

  As their leader, the imported Kenneth looks even m
ore like a jerry-build of awkward angles than he did at the church: pointy knees and elbows, the swallowed egg of his Adam’s apple, a thin, sharp nose. When he marches up to the police line, not stopping until he is toe-to-toe with a hulking officer, a few of the cops openly chuckle.

  “Non-natives have rights too!” he yells, his voice high and thin. Kenneth rolls his arms, signalling his supporters to create a shadow line in front of the police. The townspeople scuttle forward as if learning the steps to a dance. The sign-wavers’ voices gradually grow louder and shriller as they repeat Kenneth’s chant. Behind them, two more cars drive up with photographers. One man jumps out, instantly rolls to the ground, and points his camera upwards. The other clambers onto his car rooftop, snapping his shots looking down and across the parallel lines of police and citizens, their chafing solitudes. The sign-wielders, energized by the cameras, yell even louder, thrusting their bodies aggressively around the upright police. The chanting becomes more frantic and uncoordinated. The townspeople are so close that their spit dots the visors of the police helmets.

  And then a plane goes by pulling a banner: DOREVILLE FALL FAIR FUNFEST! AUG. 30–SEPT. 2. The twin-engine whine cuts through the chorus of yelling. Somebody points, and half the crowd crane their necks skyward. For a few long seconds there is silence, followed by a collective what next? A radio crackle breaks the impasse. The police move forward in lockstep, a coordinated march that shoves the parade back down the highway towards the town. Cheers and whoops sound from the blockade.