Smoke River (39 page)

He awoke rattled, with fear not for himself but for everyone he might not be able to protect. He insisted on driving the primers to town after their shift, rather than letting them ride their bicycles, then sat in his truck and waited for them as they did their errands.

“You’re like a lady chicken today, boss,” Ramirez said, his eyes twinkling.

How to keep Shayna safe? He phoned her twice before noon. “I’m okay, Coulson,” she said each time, and begged off to attend to something else. He’s brought binoculars out to the field with him, a flask of Scotch in his back pocket to keep him steady. Now Joe Montagne’s absence makes him clench his jaw. He tells himself to get a grip.

He pours Scotch into the remaining coffee, lifts his mug to sky, toasts the worry of tobacco growing and all its charms too. Funny what you can love – and whom – with a bit of living under your belt. “This will be a good one, Ma, Pa.”

While he drains his drink, a breeze spreads rumours among the tobacco plants and a gull makes a high, hoarse plaint overhead. The sounds obscure others approaching from behind, the slamming of car doors, the contrapuntal chatter of men excited by purpose, the crunch of gravel.

“Dismantle it!”

Coulson jumps from his chair just as a half-dozen men in pastel golf shirts, creased shorts, and unfaded jeans reach for the splitting planks of Montagne’s hastily constructed smoke shack. He raises his arms, yells. “Hey! Hold up there, folks. This is my land you’re on.”

The men stop, open-mouthed. One of them is a smiling, red-cheeked fellow, a mortgage broker named Ted who advertises himself as “Dr. Dream Home.” He steps forward. “Hey, Coulson, didn’t expect you here. You got a problem if we get rid of an illegal smoke shop and squatter? Thought perhaps you hadn’t noticed it, ’cause one call to the police would have taken care of this.”

Coulson laughs. He takes a look at the faces in front of him, their pleasant outrage withering in the twilight’s drying heat, and tries to remember which of them was at the Squeaky
Vicar the other night. He looks wistfully at his aluminum lawn chair, the undrunk second cup of coffee with its jigger of Scotch, and he wants them gone; he wants them all to disappear. “Joe’s not here,” he says finally. “See, there’s nobody here. Nobody to arrest.”

“You don’t need him on site to take definitive action,” Ted continues. He adopts an avuncular voice, and it grates Coulson to be addressed like a boy who can’t understand a civics lesson. “We’ll dismantle the smoke shop – you’re fully within your rights to have it removed from your land – and the police can put out a warrant for Montagne.”

Coulson stares at the laundered men in front of him, their faces unweathered by the elements, and he wonders if this is the cut of man he’d be now if he’d stayed with Marie. He tries to imagine Ted wielding a can of vermilion spray paint or staying up late to make hang-up phone calls. He’d almost like him better if it were plausible.

“Tell me,” Coulson says. “How’s this helping matters at all?”

Ted’s brow creases. “The town’s bleeding lots of money, Coulson. Damn blockade. Nobody’s doing anything – not the police, the government. Do you have any idea how many people are at risk of losing their businesses entirely? What this could do to real estate values? Aren’t you concerned about the value of your land?”

“I’m not selling this land anytime soon,” Coulson says. “The price will recover.”

The mortgage broker drops his hands to his sides. There is a murmur of disapproval from the waiting men. “Well, that’s all well and good for you Mr. Stercyx. But what about Doreville’s other hard-working folks, who don’t have a valuable crop in the field?”

Another man moves forward. He is younger than Ted and wears hiking pants and a tight nylon T-shirt that shows off a weightlifter’s definition. “Mr. Stercyx,” this new spokesman
begins politely, “I think your property shelters you from the effects of the blockade. You don’t hear the noise at night.”

The man turns and gestures towards a row of brand-new homes sitting slightly west of the Bains, closer to the highway where the blockade is situated. “That’s my neighbourhood over there. We bought a few years ago. Since the blockade started, nobody sleeps anymore. All night, trucks race up and down our streets, native men standing in the back, holding flags, hollering.”

He stops for a moment, looks down. “My oldest girl – her name is Maya – she’s an anxious thing. And, um, this sound of the flags at night? She thinks we’re being attacked by large birds. Every night I try to put her to bed, she refuses. ‘The birds are coming, the birds are coming,’ she says. She won’t sleep for fear of the sound. We shut the windows, put a fan on. She can still hear the screeching of the tires. There are dark circles under her eyes – a little girl. I hate being helpless. We all do. We have to do something, take action where we can. Send a message to these people that they can’t get away with whatever they want.”

They have gathered around him now. Ted pats the younger man’s shoulder. Coulson wants to feel kindred to his suffering the way the other men clearly do. But the young father has pointed to a new development, part of the sod-and-asphalt tsunami laying waste to the country of Coulson’s memory, its tobacco-stained dirt. And he can see that this guy has a wife, perhaps not unlike Marie, with whom he must have lived happily in a cramped semi-detached in the big city, until one of them fell for the dream of small-town living accessorized with a brick-veneer turret, a robber baron’s square footage. Coulson thinks of Cherisse, of carrying her broken, violated body through the tobacco plants, and wonders if these men know how they might square her suffering with that of a sleepless child in a home whose bathroom taps cost as much as a mortgage payment.

“You’re right,” he tells the man. “I am sheltered from what’s going on in your neighbourhood. But here’s the thing. See this chair? It’s for Joe Montagne. He’s not ‘these people.’ He’s a person. See this coffee mug, and that one too? Montagne and I, we’re talking. We’re working things out. And while we’re working things out, he is a guest on this land. That’s my decision. That’s
my
right.”

Coulson wonders if he’ll regret declaring his allegiance to Joe Montagne. But all he feels is impatience and a reckless buzz in his fists. “Okay, folks, you need to vamoose, get off my land.”

There is a moment of disbelief and immobility. Coulson raises his arm, shepherds them towards the road like wayward ewes. The eyes that turn to his are humiliated and hurt. Soft pink rings the younger man’s neck. They shuffle out of the field, over the highway, back to their shiny cars. For a moment Ted stands in the middle of road, turns again to him with a scolding stare.

They will forget
, thinks Coulson. They will have a good jaw about it, sure, but their forgetting will begin the moment they uncork their bottles of Shiraz or settle into the oblivion of an air-conditioned snooze. Coulson readjusts his lawn chair to sit alone in his cathedral of evening light.

More than once, as a young boy, he’d come into the farmhouse kitchen at the end of the school day to find a clean-shaven man in a dark suit sitting at the table, a polished valise placed beside the fresh cup of coffee and plate of warm biscuits his mother had set out. His father would return from the fields or the barn, slam through the screen door, and barely give the stranger a nod before he’d grunt,
Not interested
, and start scrubbing his hands at the sink with his back to the guest.
Let the man speak, André
, his mother would say, and the man would hurriedly rhyme off the particulars of the offer – who wanted to buy their land and at what price, the number of new homes
they would build here. It never occurred to Coulson that his mother was being anything other than hospitable, that she might pine for a life different from one of assured toil and worry. To the boy it was all a kind of entertainment. If the man pushed too hard, threatened to delay his father’s dinner, there was sure to be an eruption, a sudden growl –
Out!
Then his father would hold open the kitchen door and follow the man so closely to his car that his gritty farm boots would catch the heels of the visitor’s polished brogues. From the front step, Coulson would watch the retreating car churn up a dust storm on the farm laneway. Before he took his place at the dinner table, he’d imagine all the ways to spend the impossible-sounding amount of money that was leaving them behind.

H
elen washes the dishes while Cherisse sits at her kitchen table, drinking tea and staring at the door.

“I liked him,” she says to Helen’s back.

“Liked who?”

“The boy.”

Helen does not turn.

“He came to the shack just once before, with his ugly friend. Didn’t even smoke. I liked him right away. He had the kind of face that’s never seen trouble. You know how some of those rich white kids can look, Auntie. As if they’ve only ever slept in beds with clean sheets. As if they’ve never had a cavity. He didn’t say much or stay long that first time. But I wanted to know what it would be like to be close to someone like him. As if his luck could rub off on me. I imagined being his girlfriend, having dinner with his mom and dad, getting a puppy with him. Then he shows up out of the blue one night when I’m
packing up the shack. It was late. Still, I was relieved to see him. If it had been just his ugly friend, I would have been creeped out. And we got rid of the greaseball pretty fast. The ugly one was so drunk, and he went behind the shack to pee. The keys were in the ignition and the cute one winked at me, slid behind the wheel. ‘Let’s play a joke on that asshole,’ he said.”

Helen wraps the dishtowel around her wrist, picks up a rinsed mug gingerly, afraid a sudden noise or sharp movement will make Cherisse retreat into silence again.

“Oowee, you should have seen that ugly boy curse and run, his fly still open. We laughed and laughed, me and the cute one, and just took off. Left him there. I was glad. He was so crude, so sketchy.”

The dish Helen places in the rack makes a distracting
clang
. But Cherisse looks forward, addressing the kitchen’s middle distance.

“I thought I finally had some luck. Driving down the highway in a big-ass truck with the prettiest boy I’ve ever seen. So pretty, Auntie. He was such a beauty.”

Helen hears Ruby wrestle the front door. The border collie howls to be fed.
Shit
, Helen mouths. There’s a wasp caught between the screen and the pane of glass above the kitchen sink. It bumps its body along the glass, buzzing its wings. She nudges it gently.
Hang on
, she whispers and resumes drying dishes, telling herself not to expect too much. The story has started and stopped so many times – the phone’s unexpected trill, a honking car corking the words back into Cherisse’s throat.

“Ooh, Auntie, I drank too much. He wouldn’t tell me his name. I kept asking. I tickled him. He said, ‘Let’s go for a walk.’ He stopped the truck by the tobacco fields. We both jumped out. I wanted him to kiss me.”

Ruby rumbles into the kitchen, the dog nipping at her heels, a metal leash slipping from her grip to the floor. Helen
raises her palm to her sister, holds her breath.
Shhh
, she signals. She forms a prayer with her hands. The wasp offers its own buzzing invocation.

Cherisse stares trance-like, unmoved by the commotion. Ruby grabs the dog’s scruff, wheels it back outside, then slips back into the kitchen and leans into the door to muffle its closing.

“He did. He took me in his arms and kissed me. It tasted of liquor and was a bit rough, I thought, but not horrible. I reached behind, slipped my fingers into his back pocket, and pulled out his wallet. Daddy Joe always said I’d make a good pickpocket. I just wanted to know his name, Auntie. I did it for fun.”

She stops, tears at a broken fingernail until it peels away. “I was afraid he’d never tell me. One night and he’d be gone. He went for a pee and I opened the wallet, flipped through, looking for
ID
. Used my lighter so I could see. Don’t remember much after that. Except the blows.
Thieving cunt
, he called me.
Stealing native cunt
.” Cherisse starts to cry a little.

“
No, no, I just want to know your name. Honest!
Him swinging at me. Pulling my hair. I tried to fight back. I tried to run away. Stupid boots. He went apeshit on me, Auntie. I never knew a guy to go so apeshit. Wanted to grind me into dust. Like dirt.”

Ruby moves forward but Helen shakes her head.
Wait
.

Cherisse smears snot and tears along her forearm. “The way he hurt me, I wanted to die.”

Ruby draws in a breath. The wasp exhausts itself, falls silent.

“Cherry, do you remember his name?”

Helen is surprised that Ruby asks just like that. But it is better coming from her – soft and direct.

“It was a funny name.” She pronounces it.

Ruby straightens, turns towards Helen with eyes wide. Her chin begins to tremble.

“Come again?” says Helen.

Cherisse repeats the name, and her face, framed in shorn
hair, is ageless, is a child’s face, but for the gemstone eyes and their anguish. She lays her head on the table.

Helen holds her stomach, tries to calm her racing pulse. The dog clamours indignantly at the kitchen door. Ruby walks over to Cherisse, crouches beside her, and rubs circles on her back. Helen lets the dog in and feeds her. She’s not sure what to do next, how to act with this new information, so she fusses at the sink, stares out the window.

There’s no time to consider: Joe Montagne’s truck comes bullying down the drive to the house. “Oh, Jeezus, not now,” she says under her breath, and nods to her sister.

Ruby hears the choking engine, wraps her arms around her niece, and says, “I think your dad’s here, hon. Do you want to see him?”

Cherisse shakes violently. “No! Not today. I can’t.”

“It’s okay, you don’t have to. Helen will visit with him.”

Ruby pulls her niece up from the chair and leads her out of the kitchen to the back hall with its small bedrooms, just as Joe begins pounding at the door of the small clapboard home.