Smoke River (29 page)

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.

T
his 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 more 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.