Smoke River (40 page)

“I need to see her. Let me just talk to her.”

Every day for the past three, Joe has charged up to their little house with the same percussive urgency.
Money like we’ve never had. Opportunity. Just let me talk to her
.

“Joe, stop it!” Helen hisses through an open crack of the window. “You can’t talk to a girl in her state about money, Joe. She needs to get better. She needs quiet.”

“Five friggin’ minutes is all I need. You have no right to keep me from her!”

There’s a tense silence; Helen hopes he has left. But what comes next is a sharp sound. She sits down and watches a split cleave the entrance’s dry wood. Suddenly, sunlight spears through wrenched hinges. Her door falls with a clatter, coughing dust onto the kitchen’s pretty black-and-white tiles.

That man
, she thinks,
has come unhinged himself
. “She’s not ready, Joe.”

He drops his crowbar, pulls up a chair, cups his sore jaw with his hand, and asks for a beer.

“You’re going to have to fix that,” Helen says, getting up and reaching into her refrigerator. She slides a bottle across to him and Joe tells her about the lawyer’s offer, about all the relief the money will bring, about his desperation as time ticks away.

“You don’t think that’s a bit off? Selling your kid’s right to speak for a wad of cash. Nothing about this situation strikes you as fishy?”

He drains his beer. For a second, Helen doesn’t blame him for wanting some relief from trouble, for wanting the pot of gold for his daughter, for wanting a chance to escape.

“Promise me you’ll tell Cherisse. I only got so much time.” He wipes his mouth on his sleeve, just like his kid, gets up, props the fallen door against the outside wall. “I’ll be back tomorrow with some new wood for the frame.” Before stepping off the small porch, he turns again to her. “Promise?”

Helen looks at him with a blank face. He’s a kind man who married a woman ill-equipped for happiness or motherhood. There is little she can guarantee him. Helen stands, watches through the kitchen window as Joe leaves, then picks out the wasp from between its panes, grabbing it delicately by its leg. She places it on her palm, where it lies on its back, kicking. “I can’t decide for you,” she says. But she blows ever so gently so it can get back on its feet again.

Las is not sure where he is at first. It is dark. There is pounding. His temples. His foot. The sheets and pillowcases seem fresh, perfumed with fabric softener, still crisp from drying in the sun.
But the air closes in around him, stuffy with the odours of antibiotic ointment and perspiration. The throb of his head, the throb of his foot, the familiar must of his room, the whispering coolness of the sheets make him want to cry. He feels a flutter under his palms, a frightened heartbeat that’s not his. Crying would only make the throbbing worse, would make it tighten around him like a chokehold.

With the big toe of his undamaged foot, he explores the bandaged surface of the wrecked one. There is little feeling but he can tell that it is newly misshapen. There is a gap, and the gap is really an ending. He senses that the swelling has retreated to just below his knee, where it is hot and tender. He thinks he should feel sicker, but he doesn’t. Nothing can crawl all the way through to his insides.

But there is something else that keeps him still, that makes him lie heavy on the bed. The shadow in his room. If he opens his eyes just a slit he can see it, smell it – faintly soapy, floral, and electric. His mother.

“Las.”

She has seen the small opening of his eyes. That acute vision so attuned to the smallest movement; even when he was a little boy, her awareness, her perceptiveness frightened the shit out of him.

“Las.”

He hates that she sounds so harmless, so trustworthy. Because he wants to believe that it’s that simple, giving himself over to the comfort of her protection.

“Las, we need to talk.” Her voice wavers slightly.

He is throbbing and numb, so he makes her into the mother he dreamed about as a boy, a double agent or the Queen of Darkness, a bird with a terrible wingspan. He puts her in line behind the numbness, the pain, the fading sensation of queasiness. She is just another shadow in a room crowded with them.

Ella feels sick. She stands in her son’s room watching his prone body, and she sees a damaged work of art, something once beautiful that she had a hand in.
There’s just no way
, she thinks.
There’s no way this boy did anything wrong
. It’s circumstantial. A noose of inferences, weak associations, overactive imaginations. He got a little drunk with Gordo. The girl found her own trouble.

“Las.”

Her stomach is hot and acidic. A long shower has left her feeling dehydrated and she just wants to lie down. She wants to lie down beside her beautiful boy and forget what she has heard. Beside his bed, she leans towards him. Her eyes catch a small glint on the carpet.

“Las.”

Less than a week has passed since they brought him home from the hospital, Las half awake, his arms slung around their shoulders. Her husband could not look at her; she could not speak to him. They laid their son on his bed. She pulled off his top and shorts and brought in a bowl of warm, soapy water, washed the hospital’s chlorhexidine and iodine smells from his face, his limbs, while Mitch watched from the doorway. When she came to the boy’s injured foot, she started to cry softly, her tears dropping into the towel she was dabbing on his skin. She leaned and kissed her son’s foot at the ankle, above the gauze swaddling. Then Mitch was at her shoulder, yanking.
That’s enough! He’s not fuckin’ Jesus
. But he
was
innocent. He
was
misunderstood.

“Las.”

First impressions
, the short brunette public relations professional said at a meeting with her and Mitch days earlier.
You have two main issues and we’re going to get out in front of both of them right away – one publicly, one privately
. She drew a rough flowchart,
ripped it from a clean yellow pad, and handed it to Mitch.
He didn’t do it
, Ella interrupted.
Just for the record
. She wanted this woman in her prim summer shift and sling-back pumps to know she’d raised an exemplary young man, a good son. Mitch’s eyes blazed. The woman didn’t blink.

What can a mother do but attend and hope? She’s done more. Too much, perhaps. But a woman such as she loves through action, through movement, through tossed car keys and extra bacon strips and credit cards, reassuring touches, and overindulgence. She doesn’t know what it means to withhold, to mete out praise or buy birthday gifts with parsimony. Still, what has her way wrought?

“Las, we need to talk.”

There is only silence.
What has he done? Really, what?
asked Mitch. They’ve stopped and started the conversation so many times under their breath, Mitch talking as if their son’s guilt is both assured and inconsequential.
He had a few beers. He and a friend took a girl to a field. A native girl with a reputation bigger than the reserve she lives on. You don’t ruin a boy’s future over that. You don’t ruin ours
.

Ella bends beside the bed, kneads her fingers in the weave of carpet, where an object blinks at her. She pulls out something small and metallic and presses it into her palm. The pinch doesn’t register.

Stephanie sprawls on her bed, wide awake, listening to murmurs down the hall. She touches the cheek that met her mother’s hand a week earlier. The morning after the slap, she’d gone back and forth to the mirror, waiting for the colour of crushed violets to seep under her skin, hoping for a lifted welt below her eye. But there was nothing, not even a redness that compared to rubbing her cheek hard with a hot washcloth. Her mother had a talent for getting away with bad behaviour.

I see it, baby
, Nate said that night. He smiled, traced his fingers under her eye.
How dare she? How dare she touch my beauty’s face?
They were naked on the soil between the tobacco stalks. The sand scratched her shoulders, the flesh of her hips. Night dew dripped from the tobacco leaves. Their bodies brushed up against the gummy stalks. Panting, Nate laid his head across her belly. Stephanie stroked his damp, matted hair, his skin the colour of earth against her paleness.

You’re glowing again
, he whispered in her ear. And she told him. The words crawled out of her like a parasite, something that didn’t belong inside her. Gordo in the basement. The scratch on Las’s neck. The girl’s broken nails. The kerchief and cap. Gordo’s custom tires. And the mayor gathering up her confessions like tinsel for a nest, ferrying them away before Stephanie came to her senses. That is why her mother slapped her, she told him. That is all of why.

Nate’s skin cooled underneath her touch. His body went still. There was a cricket near her head, bleating like an alarm clock. Then Nate was on his feet, diving through the pockets of his pants, searching for a cigarette, leaving Stephanie’s skin damp where his warmth had been. She pulled herself up slowly, found her bra necklacing a tobacco plant, her panties underneath. He smoked and stared towards the blockade, then into the sky. And sometimes he pulled his hands to his head, as if he could keep it from breaking apart by squeezing and squeezing.

You should have told me sooner. Fuck, you should have told me
.

She started to cry, and her tears bewildered her. Why had she told him at all?
It’s not proof. It’s just suspicion and a few little details
, she said.

It’s worse than that, Stephanie, and you know it
.

He fell to the ground in a sprawl, then pulled up into a squat with his face right by her knees. Like a wrestler. She moved away from him.

It’s okay
, he said.
I’m pissed, baby. Oh, I’m pissed. And I’m not going to lie – I want to kill those boys. I could fuckin’ run over there right now and strangle that bleached blond varsity champ asshole brother of yours. And enjoy watching him go blue
.

She crawled farther from him, still crying, and grabbed her T-shirt, her leggings, and yanked them on, the fabric dragging sand against the flesh of her underarms, her thighs. She got up.

Steph, Steph
, Nate said. He had his arms around her, tightening.
Don’t go. Please don’t
.

The embrace loosened. He stepped away to finish his cigarette. Then he laughed. His head fell to his knees and he laughed. The tobacco leaves shook in the breeze with him, his mirth falling on them like hailstones.
What are you doing?
she said.

He straightened again and she could see that he too was crying, or sweating, something shining his face like vegetable oil.
It’s awful, but it’s better. You gotta see that. It is so much better. For my people. For the reclamation. For everything. It’s so much better that a white guy did this
. His arms widened. He gestured her to come to them, to be enclosed, but Stephanie was frozen. He dropped his cigarette in the sand.
It’s not better
, Stephanie said.

Now her hand is on the once-slapped cheek, kneading the skin for something lost. Her stomach fills with a clawing hunger. She’s been eating like an opossum, at night, whenever the chance to forage announces itself. Stephanie stands up, pulls at the waist of her pyjama bottoms, shakes them out, feels for extra roominess. There is that swoon again, that slightly blurry feeling that makes her lean on her desk for balance. She can’t think straight.