Smoke River (16 page)

His mother calls Stercyx a cautionary tale: someone who had promise once because he went to university, left Doreville at eighteen, landed a big city job and a classy wife, and vowed never to come back.
Drove a sports car
, his mother would say.
Wore beautiful suits. All on a swimming scholarship
, she’d add and arch her eyebrows.
Could have made a fortune if he sold that land. Now he’s stuck here. Wife left him, and he’s growing tobacco. What a waste. Can you imagine?

She always repeated that last question with high-pitched disbelief, as if Las couldn’t be counted on to judge the man harshly enough. And even through the haze of beer and from a distance, he sees she was right – he won’t judge him. Stercyx is all muscle and sinew, lean as a mule. What he notices now is how the man moves around the wood. Las wonders what it would feel like to build something. He imagines being Stercyx, standing on his front stoop at the end of a workday, surveying the measurable impact that his hands, his sweat have made on his environment.

Las holds his own strong arms out in front of him. After he finishes a swim practice or a race, he can only stare at the blank, unblinking pool, its water calm and unchanged by him.
What is the point?
he wonders.
What the fuck is the point?
His father is a wet-eyed man who spends his life making phone calls, faxing contracts, scribbling numbers on the margins of newspapers while his body turns flaccid, his breath sour. Other men feel the give of wood under their saws, their hammers. Other men build. Las looks at his palms. He wants to be Stercyx. He wants to work with wood in the high heat of the day. He wants to be a person who makes things, not the one who hires him and runs away at the first whiff of trouble.

He returns to the ditch, flops down beside his friend, stares at the barricade. He finishes another beer and then the sun flattens him like roadkill. An hour later, Gordo’s rough palms chafe against his sun-beaten skin.

“Wake up, asshole! I’m outta smokes.”

Cherisse fools with the radio’s dial. It has been a slow day, so slow Joe hightailed it after lunch. It’s a bit of a waste too that she feels better about herself than usual, her hair shiny and full, her face rested, and her new boots paired with her skinniest jeans. When she feels pretty like this, her regulars almost never ask for change back from a twenty. She twists the dial for music and catches a familiar word from a faint signal.

“Welcome back to
CJYT
and
Big Bob’s Tell It Like It Is Hour
. We’ve got a switchboard full of callers wanting to congratulate Dotville mayor Peg Redhill for telling it like it is when some natives put a barricade in front of a new development.”

“Doreville.”

“Uh, sorry, Mayor Redhill?”

“Doreville. The name of my town is Doreville.”

Cherisse turns up the volume. All these strangers who clearly don’t live in Doreville want to speak to the mayor. She claps her hands together. Dowdy Peg Redhill, a woman who wears pocketless jeans with elasticized waistbands, is getting attention from a big city radio station for saying some dumb-ass things. Surely that means anything is possible – and many more things are possible for a green-eyed beauty who sings like a cross between Emmylou Harris and Shania Twain.

“You rock,” one caller salutes the mayor. The next practically begs, “Please run for mayor in our town.” Cherisse smiles at the mayor’s embarrassed thank-yous, her exaggerated folksy twang. So when an angry-sounding man tells the mayor, “It’s time natives face up to the fact they gotta live under our rules,” Cherisse fist-pumps the air and says, “Holla!” to no one in particular. She isn’t about to piss off the white folk – farmers, cottagers, Doreville locals – whose dollars financed her first guitar, the distressed leather jacket, the sexy boots, and soon her first professional demo
CD
.

Before the show ends, a sleek buff-coloured sports coupe pulls up to the smoke shack. Cherisse feels her shoulders stiffen and she turns off the radio. Elijah Barton steps out of his car, opens the shack door with an authoritative shove, and barely looks at Cherisse. He comes only if her father is not there – the rusted truck an easy tell – and he doesn’t say much at all before buying a carton of Warrior cigarettes. Usually she says nothing much back. Maybe it’s the mayor being on the radio, maybe it’s her growing confidence about her voice, but today she feels bold.

“Don’t you have a factory full of these smokes five minutes from here?” she asks.

Elijah’s head snaps up in surprise, as if she’s broken an unspoken rule. They both know he’s not here for the smokes. “I like the way you display them,” he says.

“You mean stacked up and shoved against the wall.” She snorts. “Yeah, I’m a genius with that.”

He looks at her for a moment, and she doesn’t like the way he searches her eyes. It’s as if he’s looking for something that belongs to him, as if one of the diamonds from his watch has popped out and landed in them.

“Those ones over there in the plastic bags are cheaper.” Cherisse points to the Super Sack of rollies. She has nothing to lose.

“The quality is better in these, thanks.” He holds up his factory-made cigarettes. Then he pays, as he always does, with two twenties; after she gives him change, he leaves another twenty on the counter before walking away. The first time he did this she followed him out, holding the money towards him. He shook his head. And she saw that he was a man who got his way, that refusing the tip would be uncomfortable for both of them.

Now every twenty of his she keeps only adds to her urgency.
One day
, Cherisse thinks as she watches the sports coupe drive off,
I will do better than this guy who leaves money as if he owes me
.

When Elijah’s car is a fading moan, Cherisse turns the radio dial again in search of music. She finds a Top Forty station, pulls out her compact, wets her lips, and steps out of the shack to practise her choreography. Susie Stonechild may be a great artist, but too few people hear her music. Cherisse won’t make the mistake of getting stuck in the aboriginal artist rut, consigned to rotation on specialty stations with small audiences, playing healing centres and bingo halls. Nope, you have to have the whole package in today’s market. And so she will do it all – sing, play an instrument, write her own music, dance, and look super-effin’-hot. That’s how you bust out of the reserve, the small town, your own skin.

A red truck with flashy custom work approaches. Cherisse is in mid-swivel, her arms folding in and out from her chest. She
stops, her hair lands on her shoulders and slides down her back, and she turns her face towards the vehicle with its specialty grille and fender vents.
Uh-huh
, she thinks, sizing up the two passengers. Grade-eight faces pasted on men’s bodies. One ugly and one cute. Ugly is familiar; he’s been here before. But Cute is new, and she likes the look of him. Surfer-blond hair, lips stretched over perfect teeth. A baby with a bruiser’s bulk.

Ugly jumps out of the truck, holding a beer. “Hey, Pocahontas. How’s it be?”

“The name’s Cherisse,” she says, then laughs too wildly, hearing her name sound as tart as the best kind of trouble. “I wouldn’t mind a beer, if you’ve got extra.”

“Las, get this fine young lady a beer, will ya.”

Cute throws a beer to Ugly and opens one for himself.

“So, what’s your clan, princess?” Ugly asks. “Are you Wild Potatoes, baby? Pigeon Hawk? Opposite Side of the Hand? Painted Turtle?”

Oh, this one is an asshole
, Cherisse thinks. He holds out the beer and lets her tug so that her hand slips, touches his, before the can is released.

“Those aren’t Mohawk clans.” Cherisse steps back inside the shack, moves quickly behind her counter. “You buying smokes?”

“Get over here, Las. We got a real businesswoman on our hands.”

Las shuffles over, dizzy now from heat, lack of food, dehydration. His head thrums as they climb the steps into the smoke shack. He has never been here before. He’s made a practice of avoiding the reserve, and coming now feels reckless. Still, up close this girl is startling: long legs in skinny jeans and high
boots, pretty hips, and onyx hair that swings out like a gleaming thrill ride when she tosses her head. A face that’s high-boned and brown, with eyes shining like bright jade. He’s never seen such an oddly beautiful native girl before.

Gordo buys a plastic bag of fifty cigarettes, stows them in the truck, and returns with three more beers.

“Hey, princess,” he says. “You’re not going to keep those sexy boots stuck out here in Nowheresville on a fine summer afternoon, are ya?”

He slides a beer across the counter towards the girl. Las pops open the one shoved towards him. His friend knocks the lip of his can against it with a nod of his head and an exaggerated wink. “
Salut
!”

The girl takes a thirsty pull. Las studies her raised chin, the way she arches her elegant neck towards the sun. His fist tightens around his beer can and he crushes it.

Gordo lifts his arm for another toast. “Here’s to pain and pleasure in equal measure.”

Las wishes he were back in bed, able to redo this day from the start. He bends over and tries to get more oxygen into his lungs, his blood, his brain. He’ll be leaving in a few months. And what will happen when Las comes home to visit? Surely he and Gordo will be embarrassed to be seen with each other, Gordo with his small-town loser’s puffiness and Las all prepped out and lean from a season of meets. He can imagine the awkward half nod from across the street and the comment Gordo will sneer under his breath. He’ll have a new friend by then, perhaps another high school senior with a promising athletic career who’ll be a magnet for the girls Gordo can’t quite seem to attract, despite his bad-boy status.

“Can’t do it,” Las says.

“Can’t do what?”

“Whatever we’re doing here.”

“Are you shitting me?” Gordo hisses and windmills his arms, but Las dodges.

Sensing the change in mood, the girl tosses her beer can into a pail and hooks her fingers into the waistband of her jeans. Las notices where the fabric of her shirt has lifted, revealing a slender brown hip bone. “Yeah, you two better shove. I’ve got things to do,” she says.

“A fuckin’ waste. I fucking wasted my day, my beer with you, man,” Gordo says. “You’re walking home, asshole.”

There it is
, thinks Las. He feels a worrying flame of hate inside of him. It’s burning up his biceps, fists, groin, shins. Las turns around, quits the shack. It will take him at least an hour to get back to the suburbs and he’ll have to cut through Stercyx’s farm in order to avoid the barricaded development. The whole day feels like an insult now. He doesn’t wait to see if Gordo leaves.

Las crosses the road and marches down Ninth Line in his flip-flops. A minute later the hard consonants of the girl’s anger cut through the late-afternoon heat. He hears Gordo’s truck tear out of the smoke shack’s gravel drive. Las thinks his friend will surely pick him up after all.

The engine slows and then it’s beside him, Gordo leaning towards the open passenger window and leering in that way of his that doubles for an apology. Las pivots. He is reaching for the passenger-door handle when a gob of spit lands on his cheek. The truck’s tires churn and it screeches away, trailing the sound of Gordo’s taunting glee. Las shakes the dust from his eyes. The globule of phlegm crawls towards his jaw and he brushes it off with his knuckles, then wipes them on his shorts. He looks back and sees the girl from the smoke shack standing at the side of the road, watching. From this distance she seems small and breakable. He can’t remember her name.

A
moat of electric blue surrounds the barricade’s single Porta-Potty. There’s an odour of sewage tented over it, heating up in the sun. Shayna listens to the rings at the rental company that won’t answer her. They’ve taken her cash deposit and dropped off the toilet, but now she can’t make them do the promised maintenance. The rings switch to voicemail and Shayna clicks off, dials again. She wants to speak to a human.