Smoke River

by Krista Foss

  Kenneth’s voice screeches indignantly through the bullhorn. “Freedom from land terrorism! Freedom from government appeasement! Where’s the justice? Police protect the terrorists!”

  Signs rattle as they hit the ground. Peg watches as Will Jacobs, the pub owner, shoves an officer and starts to flail with his hands. He is pushed to the ground, a knee in his back to subdue him. Next the junk-shop owner – a slip of a woman with a large frizz of hair – takes a swing at a broad-shouldered officer with her TWO-TIRE JUSTICE sign. It makes a sharp crack against his helmet.

  Shit, Peg thinks. It’s a full dust-up, a melee. The old Peg would get right in there, instill some order, allow the citizens to protest and the police to do their job, and herself to look like a beacon of practicality. But this new Peg – sanctioned by her own council, humiliated in the press – is hobbled, second-guessing, jettisoning confidence. She is not sure anymore about what to do with her energy, her need to problem-solve. She scrambles back to her SUV.

  What? You did what? Reid Wellings shouted at her just that morning. His tone suggested she’d become a liability for his own political ambitions. She’d let it slip that she’d gone to visit the native girl in the hospital.

  When they were alone, the mayor had brushed her large hand over the girl’s forehead, a familiar gesture that belonged to a mother or an aunt. And this is what she is known for, being a leader with a soft touch. She shows up at important birthday parties and anniversaries, takes casseroles to the family when someone has died or got injured at work, clasps their hands and looks them in the eyes and says, “I’m sorry” in a way that people believe, in a way that takes on some of their sorrow. I’m so sorry, said the mayor, leaning near Cherisse’s face. This is a terrible thing that has happened to you in a good place. A good place, I promise.

  How could you explain such a thing to that Chicken Little Reid Wellings?

  She defended herself. Think about it. It will show I’m neutral, that I maintain my care for everyone in need, regardless of which side of the blockade they’re on.

  The man actually harrumphed at her on the phone. Harrumphed! You need to lie low, Peg, if you want to ride this out, save your career, he said. I mean, what if the assailant is white, a guy from this side of the blockade? Did you consider that? Do you realize what a tinderbox this place will be?

  She went silent, made an excuse to get off the phone. When he hung up, she regretted not thanking him. Later on she might need that pinch-faced little weasel in her corner.

  Now, watching her constituents – almost all of them avowed Redhill supporters – duke it out with the police while behind the blockade the protesters clap and egg them on, she feels punctured with doubts. She had assumed it was a native man who hurt the girl, left her face misshapen with bruises and a coffee-coloured crust on those pretty lips. Her ex-husband’s right hook could do that if his thumbnail was uncut; he’d catch the soft of her mouth so the gush would make an iron moat around her teeth. She never whimpered, lest it wake Gordon.

  They all had trials to bear. At the hospital’s information desk, she made a point of asking about the university-bound son of the clerk. She squeezed the shoulder of the ward nurse. Enough to be taken notice of, while still being the model of discretion.

  Peg puts her key in the ignition and is just about to reverse and pull away from the blockade, but she catches sight of something interesting in her rear-view mirror. The door of a black Buick Regal opens and a woman steps out. She would be mannish and hopeless, thinks Peg, were it not for the impeccable oxblood-coloured hair, the pricy-looking box-shouldered skirt suit, the owlish glasses. The woman lifts a pair of binoculars and sweeps them over the blockade and back again, taking in the horseshoe of police straddling or handcuffing ordinary citizens while those at the blockade whoop and cheer. She drops the binoculars, her chin pulled in like a surprised emu, and returns to the car’s back seat. A second later, Elijah Barton climbs out the other side and reaches back as if to shake someone’s hand. Barton, Peg thinks. What has he got to do with any of this? That man is always gaming trouble for his own profit.

  She is still watching the Buick through her mirror when Reggie Holland pulls up in front of it in his burgundy Crown Victoria, obscuring her view. A quick chat, he said earlier. Can we meet at the blockade? I’ve things to see to there. He hops out, gives her a little wave of recognition, and jogs in her direction. Peg makes a quick check of her lipstick, rubbing her finger along her teeth, opens the car window, and studies his approach from the rear and side-view mirrors. She wonders about that eyebrow tic of his, considers all the ways she might work that into the conversation.

  Constable Holland comes to the passenger side, dips his head, and gestures at the empty seat. “Do you mind?”

  She removes her purse and pats the passenger seat with an inviting smile. He slumps onto the umber-coloured leather, smelling of drugstore aftershave and spicy lunchmeat. He stares at his shoes for a moment; he’s worried. She has an impulse to run a finger along his temple. Instead she rests her hand on his shoulder in a way that shows concern but is above reproach. “Everything okay, constable?”

  He doesn’t answer. She is about to risk a hand on the back of his bent neck when he straightens and looks at her with his adorably tired eyes. “Peg, did you visit an assault victim in the hospital recently?”

  “The native girl?” she asks, shifting to face him. “Yes, I did. It’s something I make a habit of doing – community outreach. Terrible thing. Beautiful girl.”

  He nods his head and looks down again. “Did you know I’m investigating the assault? Just me. There’s no one else they can spare.”

  “Oh, I don’t envy you that, what with this blockade business. Will the reserve police at least let you into their jurisdiction to question suspects?”

  Constable Holland looks up at her. Then he squints his eyes in a way that makes her scalp prickle with warning. He takes a deep breath. “Peg, I need to talk to that kid of yours. Get a fix on his whereabouts. Pretty standard stuff.”

  Her next breath feels too big for her lungs. “Pardon me?”

  “Peg, there’s an eyewitness tip about a red truck seen in the vicinity of the assault the night it occurred.”

  “Oh, now, seriously?” A little rush of relief tickles the bottoms of her feet and she claps her hands. “Well, constable, you have your work cut out for you. There are at least four dozen red trucks in this town. And the reserve is lousy with them.”

  Constable Holland clears his throat, examines the backs of his hands. “Peg, we’ve got tire impressions. Still good. I’m not an expert per se, but I know a thing or two, and these tires have deep voids, large lugs cut for flex. They’re specialty tires, Peg. Expensive, and barely street legal.”

  His voice has morphed from friendly to phlegmy. She can see a grimy ring on his collar, a rogue nose hair tickling his septum. Up close, the man is unkempt, slightly repulsive. She straightens her spine to its full mayoral length.

  “Well, you don’t need my permission to contact him. He’s an adult. I’m pretty sure he has some run-of-the-mill tires on that ride of his, but of course it’s important that you clear him.”

  They both know it’s a lie. Peg bought the boy the truck as a gift, an extravagance. Gordo tricked it up like a Christmas tree, drove its special-order everything slow as a parade float through town, his arm hanging out the window. It took three months for his tires to arrive.

  “All right, then.” Constable Holland slaps his thighs. “Just wanted you to know.”

  “Sure thing.” She works to sound relaxed, as if the whole idea is too routine.

  But as she watches Constable Holland lumber away from her SUV in his ill-fitting pants, a slightly hunched quality to his posture, she is marooned by doubt. Her boy – the child who ran to her, trembling, every time his father raged – was he capable of such a thing? She thinks of the comfort she’s taken in Gord’s vagueness, their habit of merely orbiting around each other, indifferent and col
d as night stars. If his father’s violence is surfacing in him, she’s spared herself the opportunity of seeing it. She pounds the steering wheel with a balled fist. It’s a godless universe that would put a woman through that twice. Already she feels adrift in the vast, lonely ink of scandal.

  CHAPTER 18

  Mitch stands with his arms crossed in the corner of a curtained room, watching the tears in his wife’s eyes. They won’t spill; it’s not Ella’s style. The liquid will just wait on the reddened rims, brightening the grey irises, making her eyes look wider, flushing her skin pink, increasing her beauty. It has been so long since he has seen her like this.

  She has climbed onto the hospital bed where their son sleeps. The boy leans against his mother’s side with his legs pulled up, knees bent like a small child. One foot is wrapped in fresh gauze, already stained with yellow ointment and brownish ooze. Under the wrapping, he is missing three toes. An IV snakes from a pole to the wrist he rests on his mother’s forearm. The sepsis means he will be in hospital for a few more days.

  Mitch doesn’t know how three missing toes will affect a promising swimmer. He imagines some lost thrust, speed leaking through the peephole at the top of the boy’s left foot. Ella’s brimming eyes must mean that she comprehends the loss better than he. She rubs the boy’s shoulder as if lulling an infant to sleep, stealing looks at her husband with her glassy stare. Too much, Ella, he thinks. She is overripe with that boy.

  His wife whispers reassurances to their dozing son, and Mitch feels himself constrict with the need for such comforts himself. They can go home. Las will enjoy a long, drugged sleep. He wants his wife in his own bed, those eyes resting on his face, her long, slim hands strumming along his forehead, his temples, the way she did when they were first married and the troubles of establishing himself outside his father’s grocery trade robbed him of sleep. Now the stress of the blockade has spent any gentleness left between them.

  Mitch moves over to the hospital bed, grasps the boy’s legs to straighten them and allow Ella to disentangle herself.

  She leans forward, twisting her head, hissing. “Mitch! Careful. Careful!”

  He reaches to take his son’s arm, move it to his hip. The boy’s jaw points towards the ceiling, his lips slightly parted.

  Ella shoos off her husband. “Just leave him be. Poor kid, he’s been through so much.”

  Mitch stands back. Would he like Las more, feel more for him now, if he’d been more active in the shaping of him? He’s been content to think of him as Ella’s son – her boy, her project, her problem.

  “We’ll come back first thing in the morning, Ella.”

  She screws up her mouth. “I don’t think I can move without waking him.”

  “He’ll just fall back to sleep anyway.”

  Mitch waits by the end of the bed, massaging the cool metal of his keys as if he does not quite comprehend. And he doesn’t.

  Ella looks down on her son. Her eyes trace a faded scratch, like a ligature burn, on his neck. She is seized by a panic of doubt. Something is wrong with this boy, something more than this mark on his neck, the unexplained butcher-shop offal of his toes. It’s as if he has run very far from her and left behind a decoy. She no longer moors him, and she feels unmoored herself, spinning, vertiginous.

  Her husband slips his hand under her elbow but she resists. The idea of Las alone for hours in this room, under the accusatory red eye of the IV pump, makes her frantic. She imagines a riptide of infection pulling him away from her. “Let me stay with him tonight, make sure he’s okay.”

  She has failures to make amends for. Recently she has given up on the family meals. Their eating has become unstructured, loosely cobbled together. She makes salads, cold pasta dishes, grilled meats, and leaves them out like a self-serve buffet. Her children come and go like comets unbound to her gravitational pull. For the first time as a mother, she has not been able to say with any certainty where they are at different hours of the day. When did she last see Las, exchange a word with him? A day ago? A week?

  “No, Ella. You can leave him here. You could use a good sleep. Staying is totally unnecessary when we can come back first thing.”

  Ella brings her finger to her lips and shushes him, then waves away her husband and his unspoken reproaches. Her son is a rudderless boat. She stopped trying to fix his direction and now he is veering, listing. There’s always a point in any season when I get the feeling Las will pack it in, that he resents his talent, his swimming coach said once. That haunts her – it rang a little bell that won’t stop resonating.

  Mitch is angry with her. He kicks the empty bed beside the one Las occupies, so hard that it makes a metallic screech as the braked wheels scrape across the tiles.

  Ella gasps. Footsteps sound from down the hallway. Mitch winces, looks down at his foot, and she’s tempted to show concern. Instead she says, “Don’t forget to find Stephanie. Take her home with you.”

  He grunts and limps a little too dramatically out the door without looking back. She senses that the prospect of Scotch and a cigar is a siren song to him, pulling him away. He will have a nice little session of it. She imagines him keeping his office door open so the fragrance of the Fuentes will linger for hours afterwards in the halls and the curtains of the entire house, to infuriate her, to assert his command of their space.

  “You can hear me,” Elijah Barton says to the girl in the bed.

  “You’ve dug in pretty deep inside yourself, but you’re still there.”

  There is a shameful lack of security at the hospital. He just walked in. He had to see for himself before believing the wild, high buzz of rumour. She looks neither better nor worse than he imagined. Her bruises have yellowed. The imprint of recently removed stitches has left a treacly crescent under her cheek. The quirky, pretty girl from behind the smoke-shack counter is re-emerging in that battered face. Still, he feels lightheaded. There’s failure here, and it surprises him to realize he may have a part in it.

  He pulls up a chair. “The whole Indian princess thing, you know, is a load of crap,” he says to the unmoving face. “All the tobacco that’s up here today, making us all so much money, is because a starving John Rolfe saw a pretty Algonquian girl whose people knew how to grow food and tobacco. That marriage made the colonizers rich. But there was nothing in it for her. She died of tuberculosis in a cold, rainy city that was foreign to her.”

  The girl does not move. Her closed eyes do not twitch. But he sees the delicate flare of her nostrils and knows she is conserving her energy, surviving in her own way, in the old way. He wants to give her something, a way to get through this. But his emotions cloud him. There are two kinds of anger, and the kind that wells ups, crawls into a man’s belly and temples, is no good to him – it lacks cunning. Yet this is the feeling crackling behind his jaw, turning his fists into mallets. He waits for it to pass. He watches her breathe.

  Seven years earlier he plucked her from the river, from a piece of ice. The strangest thing – a girl on a piece of ice floating down the Smoke, drifting farther away from the edge, moaning for a certain, quiet death like some legendary Sioux princess. Had he been looking a different way, facing the direction of the current instead of against it, there would be no story to tell. He’d blinked, looked again, and then there was no time to think. He backed his truck down the riverbank until it hit water; he jumped into the truck bed, hooked up the rope, wrapped it around his waist, and waded into the river, his toes cramping painfully in the icy water, his legs instantly leaden and senseless, his fingers and forehead a palsy of chills. When he reached out and grabbed her by the ankle and yanked her towards him, pulling her off the ice into the river with him, the frigid water brought her to life, flicking some butane behind those green eyes. She flailed; the dark icicles of her frozen hair scratched his face. My dog! My dog! she cried.

  But he saw no dog. All he felt, with the weight of her resisting him, was that he knew this girl, that he’d known her forever, that Rita had used some kind of w
itching to put her in his path, an almost-baby floating through the frozen bulrushes. A rebuke. You are always choosing not to belong, Elijah, she’d said on the banks of this very river. And when he had wrapped that shaking, sobbing, wretched daughter of Rita in the hunter’s blankets from his truck cab, poured her tea from his Thermos, waved his own red knuckles over the vents blasting heat from his running engine, it didn’t matter that the girl was Joe Montagne’s. It didn’t matter that he himself had no wife, no offspring. Saving the girl made her a different kind of progeny – one with whom he had no legal, familial, or blood tie, yet a child of his no less.

  “Don’t be a martyr to anyone else’s system,” Elijah whispers into Cherisse’s ear. He pulls a wad of bills from his pocket, gives it a quick count, and slips it under her pillow. His hand brushes her forearm and he feels that it is warm. She is in there, listening.

  He leaves the hospital smiling. Now that he is calm, he will find a way to do something for her that matters. He feels no loyalty to anyone but her.

  One summer, for three happy months, Cherisse woke to hear her mother singing along to the radio in the trailer kitchen, with a voice as big and high-ceilinged as church. All her June days that year began with burnt sweetgrass and ended in long hikes. Sometimes her mother remembered to make them peanut butter sandwiches ahead of time, and other days they just set off walking through meadows for hours, counting the number of butterflies, picking handfuls of tickweed, patting the paddocked nags they encountered, flushing out crayfish from stream beds until they were dizzy with heat or hunger, and her mother would say, Don’t tell your dad, before sticking out her thumb to hitch a ride home. There were days when her mother talked and days when her mother did not speak at all. And one special day when her mother opened her mouth only to sing, nudging Cherisse’s shoulder so she would sing back to her.

  And then it was July. Heat settled over them like heavy cream, making their skin slip against the trailer’s Naugahyde sofa, their breath thicken in their throats. Too hot for long walks. Her mother took her down to the banks of the Smoke River instead, and they swung into its warm, olive-coloured waters from scaly tree vines that chafed their elbows and thighs. Her mother showed her how to lie completely still floating on the Smoke, so that the part of her above the river’s surface was heated by the midday sun and the part below cooled by its shadowy waters. They floated side by side, her mother telling tales of princesses and witches while the river slouched forward, slow and relentless, cradling them in a soft otherworld between dreams and wakefulness. It always stopped abruptly – her mother’s grasp on her forearm, the quick, sharp command, Up – and then they were both wading out of the river within yards of where it dipped into rocky shallows or the current quickened. Her mother laughed like a young girl at this trick of hers for knowing. In the afternoon when they had returned to the trailer, the heat pinned them into stillness and they fell asleep side by side.