Smoke River (17 page)

A teenaged boy rides his bike through the blue water, splashing the grey sides of the plastic structure, flecking it with soiled tissue and a shaming yellow-blue stain. Prepubescent bystanders cheer. Another contender mounts his bike to do the same. With her phone still pressed to her ear, Shayna marches over to them, one arm waving for them to stop. The next boy pedals wildly, a peacock tail of effluent churning behind him. She recoils to avoid the spray. The kids shriek in delight.

Shayna pulls the phone away from her ear and starts yelling.
“Stop it! Right now! You’re making a mess!” She pushes the watching kids back from the growing mess and grabs in the air for the cyclist.

There’s a faint “Hello, hello” coming from the cellphone clutched in her hand. Shayna slaps the phone back against her ear, holding a small boy’s collar in her free hand, his bicycle balancing against her hip. “Yes, hello. Are you still there?”

There is just dial tone. She screeches in frustration, lets go of her young captive. He tears away, turns so she can see him laughing at her. She has stepped into the moat up to her ankle. “Fuckin’ hell!” she yells at the top of her lungs, and this delights the little gang of spectators even more. Disgusted, she winds up and pitches the cellphone, watches it skid into the dust by Helen’s approaching feet. The older woman bends to pick it up.

Shayna can’t look Helen in the eye as she offers an arm, pulls Shayna from the moat, gets her to shake her foot free of clinging detritus.
You and Rita are three mamas worth of work
, her aunt had said the one time Shayna asked why she and Ruby weren’t married, didn’t have kids of their own.
Bertie needs all the help she can get
.

“I’m getting Jim Maracle to drop a load of fill on this mess. He’ll empty and move the washroom this afternoon,” Helen says.

“But we’ve paid the company for that service. They’re ripping us off.”

“Well, their service’s a load of crap.” Helen grins.

“We shouldn’t just take it.”

“At least this way it gets done,” Helen says. “That’s better, isn’t it?”

Shayna’s jaw tightens. The year her mother moved them back to the Smoke, an upstream chemical company spilled malathion into the river. Dead fish floated on the water’s surface for weeks. And within a month, all the well water coming into the Eighth Line homes lining the Smoke’s banks began to smell of charred toast and pine-scented disinfectant. The company issued
a statement claiming the spill was insignificant, that “remediation had been swift and effective, but as a temporary precautionary principle, homeowners may want bring in their drinking water.” Bertie read aloud the statement in the paper and soon after began buying gallons of bottled water for her daughters to drink, continuing to make her tea from the well water right up until she got sick. Everybody just carried on, just accepted the river’s befouling, the poisoning of their own aquifer, as if the water on that part of the reserve had always been undrinkable. The temporary situation became permanent.
One good thing
, Bertie said again and again with a light chuckle,
there’s a lot fewer skeeters around, haven’t you noticed?
But Shayna knew what was missing; she remembered scooping handfuls of well water into her mouth on a hot summer afternoon, its lightly mineral taste cooler and sweeter than any she’d drink again.

Helen leads Shayna to a large plastic cistern, tips it so she can rinse her foot, grab a drink. “Joe Montagne’s around. Jumpy as a terrier. Says the council chief wants to have a chat with you.”

“The chief?” Shayna raises an eyebrow. “What’s that about?”

“Don’t know. Can’t hurt to check it out. It’s quiet here.”

“Yeah, but it’s tense,” says Shayna. “Don’t you feel it? As if everyone’s waiting for something to happen, someone to make a move. And those Warriors – here all day and then gone. Someone’s putting them up at night. But who? Where?”

Helen shrugs. “Well, my guess is there’ll be nothing much happening in the next few hours. Might as well find out what the chief is after. Strikes me as the smart thing to do. Though you might consider fresh socks first.”

“Smart,” Shayna repeats. “Smart is good.”

Helen and Ruby were visiting Big River the summer Bertie announced she was sending Rita to a Catholic school that fall, in the small French suburb outside the Seaway reserve. The
aunties howled. Shayna’d never heard either raise her voice. An argument raged into the night, the indignant slap of their palms making the china tea caddy on the kitchen table jingle like wind chimes.

At one point Bertie stood up, her face slick with tears, her cheeks splotchy. She reached into her ample cleavage, pulled up a silver crucifix, and kissed it.
I’ve always believed. I’ve always been a good Catholic. I married a Catholic
. She pointed to Rick’s chair, the one he’d vacated when the yelling first began.
And I will have my girls raised in the faith and get a decent education
.

If Lena were alive it would kill her
, Ruby said quietly.

Shayna, tucked inconspicuously into the space between the ash pail and the woodstove, worried that her mother was risking unsettling a sleeping ancestor, bringing bad luck upon all of them.

A month after her eleventh birthday, Rita left for Sainte-Thérèse-de-Lisieux’s Holy Martyrs Catholic Elementary School in the suburb of Île d’Or, wearing a crisp white shirt and a blue and yellow plaid kilt, her hair pinned back with plastic barrettes, pink as cupcake icing.
You look beautiful
, Shayna whispered to her.
You’ll be the prettiest girl there
. Secretly she was jealous that Rita was being sent to the white kids’ school, a place that required such an important-looking get-up, while she’d be stuck in the funky-smelling portable on the reserve in hand-me-down jeans and sneakers. Rita left the house singing that first day, and Shayna watched her as if she were a luna moth or a gazelle – some creature that was beautiful and unknowable and didn’t belong to the same world she did. The feeling persisted even when Rita returned from school sullen. Her sullenness grew over the next months, the way the great river flooded, sweeping away what was pretty and familiar.

One day Shayna waited for the bus to drop off her sister at the edge of the reserve. Rita tripped off the last steps. As the
bus pulled away, gap-toothed boys and pigtailed girls threw apple cores and balled-up chip bags from open windows, their mouths stretched grotesquely around words Shayna didn’t understand.
Maudits sauvages! Maudits sauvages!

Rita grabbed Shayna to shield her and they sprang into the ditch.

What happened? What are they yelling? Why are they throwing things?

Rita straightened. Her eyes were wet with shame.
They think I’m a stupid savage
.

Why Rita? Why?
Shayna asked again and again. But her sister didn’t answer. Rita’s face became grey and hard as she hustled home.

It confused Shayna. Her older sister spoke three different languages – French, English, the Mohawk Helen had taught them. There wasn’t a birdsong she couldn’t mimic. She had a genius for scouting out foxholes, warm with squirming pups in spring, and nests of baby snakes. Second only to Rick, Rita was the smartest person Shayna knew.

That night she crept closer when Rita declared to Bertie,
I won’t go back
.

You have to go back. I paid for that uniform
.

Rita pulled out a Hilroy notebook, folded to a page where there was a great big X in red ink in the margin.
We’re studying saints. I wrote in my daily reflection that Saint Francis was a Mohawk
. She pointed to the Île d’Or Holy Sepulchre Catholic Church calendar picture of the rope-waisted friar tacked to the kitchen wall.
Mom, you told me he must be Mohawk. You said it again and again. “Saint Francis is just like us. He calls the sun his brother, the water his sister. He makes a sermon to the birds. Mohawks are the true Catholics!” How many times have you said that? So I wrote that in my reflection. The teacher, she grabbed me. She dragged me to the front of the class and made me read it aloud. Then they all
laughed at me. She laughed, and all the kids laughed with her. There are no Mohawk saints, the teacher said, and there never will be. And they laughed more. Stupid girl, they called me at recess. Stupid, stupid, maudit sauvage
.

Joe opens the truck door for Shayna. He knows he should ask her a question first, he should let her speak, that there’s something uneven in the way he leans on her level temper and good sense. He drums the fingers of his left hand on the steering wheel, chews on his right thumbnail until it is shredded and gristly against his tongue.

She lifts herself into the seat, a smaller, shorter woman than her older sister. Hers is a different kind of beauty, Joe has long observed, concentrated like a fuse, while Rita was a brush-fire, someone you noticed from a distance, couldn’t safely get too close to.

“Since when do you do the grunt work for band council, Joe?” she asks.

“Chief’s brother’s a dentist,” Joe says, cupping his jaw and winking to suggest that he’s shrewder than expected. “I want him to owe me a favour or two.”

She looks out the window and he feels it coming – the thing she always asks, the only thing that matters, as if she’s checking up on him. “So, how’s Cherry?”

Because money is a weathervane with his kid, Joe’s made a point of knowing where Cherisse hides her cash: an empty club-sized tampon box shoved at the back of the bathroom vanity, on the side where the cupboard door hangs off its hinge. She must have figured he’d scrounge for money in her private spaces, rifling through her bedroom drawers, all the containers atop her dresser, every pocket, purse, and boot. Too easy. But a
space they shared? That was a fuck-you hiding place. And it would have worked, it would have outwitted him, had he not already lived with her mother, had he not come to anticipate the hoarding that preceded her tendency to bolt. And the wiliness too – there was plenty of that. So when he found Cherisse’s cash months earlier, he left it alone, knowing she would check it daily. He took to checking it too. The day he finds it empty, he’ll know she’s going. Maybe he’ll get a chance to talk her out of it, or at least to say goodbye, remind her he loves her – a moment her mother never allowed. He checked for her cash this very morning. It was there, and there was a lot of it. That was money for a different kind of leaving: the permanent sort.

“Well, to be honest, I got a bad feeling. Think she might be getting ready to go again, you know. But a big kind of going this time.”

Shayna straightens. He thinks of Lena, then of Helen, and of all the stiff-spined ferocity that runs through their clan’s women the way some families are riddled with diabetes or double-jointedness.

“Why, Joe? What’s she saying? What’s she doing?”

He feels the accusation in her voice.
Are you watching over her? Are you doing a good job?
There’s a tremor of guilt, of sadness, unsteadying her uprightness. Like him, Shayna has got some things wrong in her life, failed to read the signs. It joins them, this fear of fucking up again.

“Dunno, dunno.” He swats at her questions as if they’re gnats. “Just want you to keep an eye out, ear to the ground kinda thing.”

“I’m at the barricade, Joe. She won’t come near it.”

He pulls in at the council offices, a boxy building of glass and dolomite. The trip is over, and he’s uncertain if he’s accomplished anything. He wishes he felt better. Rita would sit up in bed, her tongue clicking, her arms windmilling against the walls that held
her, beyond the reach of the moon and its calming shadows.
This place, this place
, she’d cry.
I’m penned in. Can’t breathe
. Joe would use his firm voice:
You stay. You stay, baby. We belong here
. But she’d shake her head so hard she’d stripe him with snot and tears.
No, we belong there. And there. And there
. She’d lance each direction beyond them with her finger.
We belong on all of it
.

Shayna places her small fingers on his forearm. “I’ll do what I can, Joe. In the meantime, sit her down, talk to her. Just ask her what’s going on. Take charge.”

He nods his head. She jumps out of the truck. “You coming in?”

“No,” he says. “Chief wants to speak to you alone.”

Her forehead wrinkles. Then she straightens again, and walks into the building with the bearing of a much taller woman.