Smoke River (38 page)

Now Joe watches it become a silver termite nibbling away at the horizon and he thinks,
I should have asked for more money. Fuck! I could have asked for way more money
. There was something too smug about the way the coffee-coloured man turned on his heel, jabbed at his phone, made his wheels fishtail on the embankment as he sped away. Yeah, the bugger was probably having a big old laugh at Joe’s expense right now.

His tooth starts hurting again. Joe kicks the tires of his truck. There’s something he hasn’t put together. According to the lawyer, there are things his daughter can never talk about. Such as who messed her up. He looked hard into Joe’s eyes as he said it, as if he were simple, couldn’t understand. Joe just nodded.
Of course, of course
, he said. But now he sees the lawyer’s advantage: that little man from the big city knows who attacked his daughter, while he doesn’t. And
who
is certainly important,
who
has to be someone with connections and money for a lawyer sleek as this dude.
Who
is the price setter.

Joe isn’t a bad man. The image of his daughter’s face, dented and split like thrown fruit, is all he can see when he closes his eyes at night. It makes him sad. It fills him with rage, makes him want to kill someone. Yet her beauty has been both bounty and burden to him. Certainly it’s sold more cigarettes than he could alone, but every time he looks at her, he feels anxious. She is almost too much for this place, her quicksilver spirit too hard to contain. The two beautiful runaways of his life – his wife, his daughter – have unmade him, turned him into a man with no dreams other than keeping them at home. A
little broken, a little frightened, even perhaps a little less pretty, Cherisse might at least stick around for a while, need him close. He feels bad for thinking it, even if its truth is plain.

And now there could be money. Joe starts to load his cigarette inventory from the stand into the back of the truck. The thing he hasn’t told the lawyer is a niggling detail: Cherisse is no longer in the hospital. She is sequestered with strong women, and that’s a harder set of doors to get through than what the hospital can throw between them. She won’t want to see him. He’ll have to find the words to unlock Ruby’s bolted heart.

Something good waits for you
, he’ll yell out to Cherisse.
Just give me five minutes
. She and him aren’t given to talking personal, but he’ll find a way to get it out of her.
Who did this to you?
He practises asking it straight like that in his head. Part of him doesn’t want to know. But that information means freedom. They’ll come up with a figure together. They’ll create a different life for themselves.

Joe hums to himself, pats the pockets of his jean jacket, and looks over to the tobacco fields. He sees the backs of men leaning off the harvester, the sweat on their bare shoulders catching in the sun. The harvester moves like a hungry slug through the east fields, which means it will be another few days before they’ll be working up the rows to where his shack stands. He’ll be long gone by then.

As he surveys the green tremble of the plants, the beginning splashes of harvest sepia on their lower leaves, the sun feels good against his neck. The money might change everything, he thinks. That has to be a possibility. He packs away the smokes in the back of his truck and drives off, leaving behind two empty lawn chairs turned towards each other.

Federal negotiator Antonia Taylor’s Buick Regal is parked beyond the sightline of the blockade, where the highway gently curves. Shayna looks over her shoulder, feeling traitorous as she walks towards it. It felt odd to get the message from the negotiator, and more so when she called back and Ms. Taylor herself picked up on the first ring.

Private tête-à-tête. Friendly and unofficial. Can you give me twenty minutes? Keep it under wraps?

Shayna hasn’t told anyone about the meeting, especially Helen, who wouldn’t approve of its terms.
A negotiator who hand-picks whom she negotiates with is a colonialist
, she’d say.
Or a terrorist. You choose
. Shayna passes Joe’s temporary smoke shack at the edge of the tobacco fields, smiles at this evidence of Coulson’s good nature, and notes that it’s deserted, Joe’s truck gone. She’s relieved there will be no one to witness her slipping into the back seat of the negotiator’s car.

I looked you up, Ms. Fallingbrook. Impressive start to your law career
, the negotiator said at the end of their phone call. Shayna could tell the comment was bait, an appeal to her vanity, which made it no less satisfying. Earlier that morning she slipped home for a quick shower. She painted her fingernails, a habit she’d abandoned after Pete-Pete was born, because it seemed impractical and fussy. In the very back of her closet hung what remained of her lawyer clothes. She fished out a scoop-necked white cotton blouse that was shirred along the placket and button edges. Paired with her new jeans and ankle cowboy boots, the blouse made her feel uncharacteristically pretty when she saw her reflection. There was a half-second in which she hesitated. Then she rummaged in a drawer and pulled out Rick’s old watch, wrapped it around her wrist, using the last hole to fasten it, before she drove back to the barricade. The watch hasn’t worked for years, but it doesn’t matter.

Ms. Taylor’s driver hops out and opens the back door for
her, and Shayna ducks her head inside. The negotiator’s expensive perfume, the sodium glow of her titanium-coloured laptop command the space. Shayna regrets her girlish blouse.

“Thank you for agreeing to meet,” Antonia Taylor begins. She snaps shut her laptop and slips it into a bag at her feet. Her tone is warm but authoritative. “I know you are a woman in a position of leadership, so I won’t waste your time.”

She draws in a long breath, and Shayna sees that, up close, she is more feminine than her boxy jackets and long face suggest from a distance. Her fingers are exquisitely thin, breakable even; one is encircled by a showy cluster of diamonds. The crinkles around her eyes, the deep commas at the corners of her lips hold some kindness, the tension of private sufferings. Shayna wonders how many compromises she’s made to survive in a world governed by rules that are broadly interpreted and wildly manipulated, and always in flux.

“The blockade has to come down,” Antonia says with a loud exhale. “It’s as simple as that. The negotiations won’t restart unless that blockade is dismantled. My bosses are digging in their heels on this one.”

Shayna smiles. “So this tête-à-tête is not so friendly after all, eh?”

The negotiator twists in her seat; her body turns, makes soft little ripples in her cream silk blouse. She looks powdery up close, as if she could easily disintegrate.

“Can we talk frankly? Woman to woman?” Antonia says. Shayna wonders if there is more than one way to answer that question. She stares back wordlessly.

“You strike me as someone who’s taken a bit of a detour from a promising career. Love, loss … doesn’t matter. You’re still young. And you clearly have a lot of respect in your community. My guess is that you can leverage this bit of celebrity to do something important, to really make a difference on these land claims issues. And in the process relaunch yourself, your own dreams.”
She takes in another breath and looks directly at Shayna. “If you want to make a difference, Ms. Fallingbrook, as you know, good intentions are no substitute for results. Whatever you do next will be easier, more productive, vastly more meaningful if you walk away from this protest with a victory.”

She looks down, and then smiles as if sharing a joke with herself. Her eyes soften. “If I’m being perfectly honest, I too need a success. My bosses are a little less than pleased with the headway I’m making here, especially now that the opposition are having a field day in the press about my fees.” Antonia Taylor reaches out one of her delicate hands to Shayna and lays it on her forearm. “But, unlike you, I cannot relaunch myself after this. This is the wind-down of my career. I wouldn’t mind making a difference myself, getting some results. And if you can trust me, I can use my experience to ensure that we do achieve something important here.”

Antonia lifts her fingers and Shayna pulls her forearm away.

“And that starts with me telling my people to go home?”

“Not home. Off the highway. Get them off the highway, keep your protest within the boundaries of the development for now, and negotiations can start again. In return we will drop the requirement about negotiating with elected officials, deal directly with your group – I have secured Chief White’s support for you – and dive right into the issues of treaty disputes, broken covenants, and so on. No waiting. No delays.”

The car goes silent.

Antonia Taylor sinks back into her seat, pulls a bottle of water from a polished leather valise. “Would you like some? My driver has a cooler in the front seat.”

Shayna shakes her head.

“We have the potential to set a precedent here – for the kind of negotiating we do, the agreements we make,” Antonia continues between sips. “I’m excited by that. As women, there’s
so little turf left to call our own, and yet the things we get done are extraordinary.”

Women
. Shayna feels collected on the term’s mantel, like some prize from a fall fair. They are both women for sure, but she feels no
us
with Antonia. Shayna wonders if the negotiator has any children.
Pregnancy has a way of interrupting extraordinary, precedent-setting acts
, Shayna thinks. She considers her own ring-less fingers, the inexpertly applied nail polish. At the pub she was aching to have Coulson relieve her loneliness. Yet the minute he wrapped her protectively in his arms, she wanted that loneliness back for just a little bit longer – an unclaimed universe that was all her, the planet of her body, whatever grew inside.

“How much time have I got?” she asks.

“They will pull me from this role by the end of the week if I don’t have an announcement to make about the blockade.”

“That’s four days.”

“Three days,” says Antonia. “We’ll need one day to get people on the phone, write the communiqués—”

“Three days,” Shayna repeats, and she reaches for the door handle.

“The talk is that my replacement will be a business-as-usual type,” Antonia says, offering a cool, dry hand to shake. “More interested in placating than setting precedents. He will push for the kind of compromise that will shut things down, make people forget, stall the process.”

Shayna gets out of the car. She cradles her belly with her palms, turns towards the blockade, and a familiar loneliness bears down on her again.

At twilight, when he comes upon Joe Montagne’s empty smoke shack in his south field, Coulson wonders if he has offended the
man. He’s taken to moseying out here at the end of the day with two mugs of fresh coffee brewed up in the farm kitchen. They talk about nothing in particular or don’t talk at all, just watch the twilight clouds jostle like spawning trout, a wet shimmer of colour.

Without Montagne there, Coulson hesitates, then resigns himself to honouring the ritual alone. He sits on a rickety lawn chair, watches a grasshopper bend and unbend its legs on the toe of his boot, and sips one of the coffees he brought.

His father spent a life making fretful assessments of the sky’s cast and the wind off the lake, divining which trick of climate would steal the promise of abundance from the loose, light loam. Would his father trust the season his son is enjoying? The sand leaves he and his crew harvested a week ago were the colour of pale lemons, flat as sheets of paper. They loaded into the racks beautifully. The cutters look just as fine – big, broad leaves with few buckles. He should be buoyed. It is a rare season that works out better than anticipated.

But two mornings ago he awoke to a large, angry scrawl of graffiti on the side of his barn.
FUCKS NATIVES
it read in a pugnacious red, the letters as tall as any one of his primers, who were asleep in the barn while it happened. Then last night the phone started ringing minutes before midnight, greeting him with a click every time he picked up. At one a.m. he unplugged the kitchen phone, the one in the upstairs hallway too. Shortly after two his cellphone started ringing. Since the barricade began, he’s kept it on at night in case Shayna needs him. It felt like a shameful capitulation when, around three, he powered it down so he could grab a few hours of sleep before sunrise.