Smoke River (41 page)

Heading towards the stairway that leads to the kitchen, she hears a voice, small and plaintive, coming from her brother’s room.

“Las.”

Stephanie stops. The door is ajar. In the darkness, her brother’s misshapen foot dangles off the end of his bed. She
sees the silhouette of her mother: her bent elbow, a hip jutting into the shadows.

“Las.”

Her mother’s voice sounds wobbly. Stephanie feels a pang of pity. That boy is breaking the poor woman’s heart. It makes her mad. It makes her spitting mad at all of them.

“Las.”

He is sleeping, or pretending to. In the house of the emotionally undead, her brother is the oblivious lamb. What a fucker. What a complete ass.

“Las, we need to talk.”

She hates the beaten sound of her mother’s voice.
Don’t
, she wants to counsel her.
Don’t always prostrate before him
. She opens the door farther just as her mother launches at her brother’s prone body. It is so demented that Stephanie freezes.

“Talk to me! Did you do it? Did you do it? You owe me an answer!” Her mother is astride Las, shrieking and yanking his head by his hair, up and down. He moans but doesn’t fight back. She starts to slap his face. She starts to bawl. “You’ll wreck everything. Answer me! Did you do it?” His protests are indecipherable, gargled. Her mother pummels his chest with her fists.

I should do something
, Stephanie thinks. Her palms sweat. Her lips tremble.
Where the fuck is Dad?
She considers running to the stairs.

Her mother jumps off the bed, but she is still a fury of movement, using her heel to thump Las’s side. “Tell me you didn’t do it. Tell me! Tell me, you coward! You self-sabotaging prick!”

Then it happens. Her mother gives a hard, swift kick to Las’s injured foot where it hangs over the edge of the bed. His scream is high and girlish.

Stephanie launches into the room, grabs for the waistline of her mother’s pants, and pulls. All those years of running have made the woman’s body lean and wired for fury. Her
mother swings around, shadowboxing, one fist unfurling into slaps. Stephanie ducks, wraps her arms around her mother’s small hips, and pulls her into the hallway by falling backwards. Her mother’s other clenched fist opens and releases something, a metallic twinkle. It bounces off Stephanie’s cheek.

They both sit there saying nothing, inhaling shakily. Las’s moans go quiet. Stephanie can see dust in the shaft of light the bathroom sends into the hallway. It moves upwards, defying gravity. She stares at it, trying to understand. There’s a suck of air, the sound of a door opening on the main floor. The dust races towards it.

“Ella, where are you?” Her father, moving quickly up the stairs to them. The sound of his winded breathing gets louder. Her mother drops her hands, slouches. They both stare at the object on the carpet beside Stephanie’s hip. It is an earring, sterling and delicate. A dream catcher with dangling silver feathers, belonging to neither of them.

“Ella, there you are. Didn’t you hear me? We got it, baby. We got it!”

Her mother is slumped on the floor of the hallway, curling away from the light. Her father grabs Ella’s shoulders, pulls her to standing, looks into her eyes. His face is waxy with mania and he’s panting.

“Ella, the government is making an offer. A big one – all of our money back. Enough to pay off the debts, plus our expected return. And more. Are you listening?”

He pulls her into an embrace. She does not lift her arms. Her father is oblivious. He speaks into his wife’s coppery hair, kisses it wildly, whole mouthfuls of it sticking to his lips, and fails to register the woman’s inertness.

“It’s over, baby,” he says. His voice cracks. “This nightmare is over. There is some justice in this fucked-up place after all.”

The movement was like a flutter of wings, too fast to say for sure what it was – bat or bird, startled into flight. It was a happy surprise to be grabbed, to feel his hair pulling from the roots, the sharp anguish of his scalp, the uncomfortable crack in his neck as she pulled his head. The sheer physical strength of his mother has always been a wonder to him. Her slaps cut hard across his face; she had an athlete’s instinct for the physics of it, the tight weave of her fingers, the torque of her hips and shoulders, the way her hand connected with his flesh where she could deliver the greatest force. It would have been a relief if she’d just killed him. What a ride that would be – his mom beating him to death!

Las had heard his mother cry out, but he turned off her words. He was glad she was pissed off, that she’d finally seen through him. He was glad there was no going back. Where could they go, now that she’d pummelled him hard, now that he’d felt her sharp knuckles break skin under his clavicle?

It took him a half-second to realize that her weight was gone from his middle and the thumps along his side were from her foot. A thrill shot up to his throat – she really wanted to hurt him. She was going for it, that crazy bitch. When her foot connected with his injured one, he ceased to exist but for the pain. It broke him up. It shredded him. He deserved it, that much was true. He deserved every bit of it.

Then
splash
, he was back in the pool. There was the cool, enveloping embrace of water. His arms in front, opening, pulling him through. His feet like motor blades, scything, scything. How whole he was there, all power and beauty. And the silence. The way the silence relieved him of being anything other than movement.

C
herisse walks to the banks of the Smoke in a thin cotton nightie, the atomizer cool against her palms. Her feet are bare, and the soil, swollen with rain, squishes up between her toes, stains the edges of her soles. She hears murmurs all the time now. Now that Shayna comes to the house, the low throb of talking crowds out the sounds of midnight and late afternoon’s drowsy heat. It’s a small house. Discontent makes its thin walls hum. She hears words, fearful words, the held breath of Ruby’s sobs, the plosives of Shayna’s frustration, Helen’s quiet protest. Their murmurs fill her ears and she can’t shake them out. Money or justice. Money or justice. She won’t face the choice they would have her face, the one they can’t agree on themselves.

The way you float
, her mother said,
you lie on your back, spread yourself wide, and you trust. Let the river do the work
. The August she turned six, the last they spent together, her mother told her the story of a beautiful Mohawk princess captured by
an enemy and held in their camp. In her captivity, the girl collected glass and shells to bead an intricate belt.

Cherisse unties a headscarf from her wrist and lays it across a flat-faced boulder, places her atomizer on top, and searches the shore until her hands finds a rock with a beakish angle. Both her hands bring the rock smashing against the atomizer, again and again until the glass falls away from the gold-plated neck and puffer in small, ragged jewels with a fine, shiny dust underneath.

In the story, the best of the enemy’s warriors were about to portage across the river to ambush her people’s encampment, when the princess slipped into the great river, wearing her belt, and floated on her back. The sun reflected from the beads. Their dance of colour and blinding rays bewitched the warriors. Instead of crossing the river, they put their canoes in the water and followed the beautiful lights, the witching lights. The princess understood the river’s tempers, but the enemies of her people did not. She floated into faster-moving water, her belt glinting, and the canoes followed. The current pulled her to the edge of a waterfall and carried her over. Branches tore her belt and scattered the beads, while her body fell to the rocks. It was too late for the warriors to change course. They too were dragged over the waterfall. Her people were saved.

See the glint in the water, the way the sun makes diamonds in the river that are too bright for the eyes?
her mother said.
That is where the princess went to live; that is the princess’s unravelled belt
. Her mother would reach a hand into the river and sprinkle water over Cherisse’s neck as she floated.
Look at your pretty beads
, she’d say.
My princess
.

She pulls out the atomizer’s metal bits and tosses them into the forest, then wraps the broken glass in the headscarf, balls it in her hand, and wades into the water. The river in August is a warm brownish slumber that barely moves at the edges, so Cherisse side-strokes out to the middle depths, where there’s a weak current.

Did she have to die?
Cherisse asked her mother.
Couldn’t she have grabbed a tree branch hanging over the river just before the dropoff
? Her mother thought about it, but then she shook her head.
In order to become the diamonds in the water, to be part of the river forever, she had to do something pretty special, to give something up, don’t you think?

The cotton of her nightie sags and billows in the water, clings to her limbs. She stretches back her head, kicks up her feet, pulls her trunk straight. And before she spreads out her arms like wings, she empties the kerchief of glass across her neck and chest. She is floating. For a moment she reflects light. She is extraordinary.

For Elijah it’s a good day to be out in the sun and on the river, to be swinging around his rod like a sonofabitch whose lotto numbers have come in. He is feeling fine. It’s not every man who gets to be the hero of his own life, and it’s certainly not Mitch Bain.
Got his balls in a vise
, Elijah thinks.
He will get his money back, but not his pride, not his name, not a chance to start over in this town. And he’ll have to turn around and hand most of that money to Joe Montagne
. The cigar hanging from his mouth wags with his laughter.
Better, I saved that girl from the evils of the white man’s justice. I saved her, Rita!
He raises his arm in an arcing salute to a beautiful woman he’s never outgrown.
I saved her. I own him. And that surfer-boy shit of a kid of his … well, there are other kinds of justice
.

He is certain that today is the day he’ll get that bastard largemouth. It’s not even seven a.m. and he’s sipping a coffee and staring at the still kettle of water by the McKelvey Street bridge where he stalked the fish in June. The town is quiet. Another man might feel urgency, figuring the fish is more likely to feed before the sun chokes oxygen from the water’s surface.
But Elijah knows that the obvious is not always the most strategic, or the most fishlike. And it’s thinking like his enemies, sinking into their own murky depths, that makes him the man he is today. Everyone takes the bait – if it’s the right kind, arriving at just the right moment. Elijah smiles.

He starts to pay attention. There is a dusting of pollen on the river, a chartreuse dandruff over dark, sluggish water. A black-winged damselfly darns itself among tall plants at the water’s edge. Elijah watches the jewelweed’s orange blossoms tremble and lean; it tells him that cooler air is slipping by him unnoticed, because it’s lower than the banks. He begins to see thin streams eddying around the feeding spot, his clue that a soft current is mixing it up below, just enough to piss off a cranky, small-brained fish that likes its water unmoving, warm, nearly stagnant. The early morning sun is already making him sticky, and in two hours it will be stinking hot. Even such an animal with its uncomplicated circuitry would have figured as much and retreated upstream before light broke. A half-mile west along the river, three old willows hang over the riverbanks, cooling and slowing the edge water so the mayflies cling to their drooping branches and the frogs come into their shade, panting on the warm, wet earth beneath them. Elijah doesn’t imagine it; he
sees
the hungry largemouth there, its blunt olive snout obscured in the murk below the willows, its movements practised and imperceptible. Except to him.

Five minutes later his truck is parked at the new spot, on the outer edge of the reserve. He puts on his waders and ploughs into the middle of the river and its stronger current, so he is almost hip-deep before he turns towards the willows; there is a peephole there between the branches, which requires a deft cast. A small tremor of nausea shudders his body. He has forgotten his breakfast, and now the coffee has his heart pumping too fast. Elijah closes his eyes. He listens to the current and tries
to match his breathing to its lapping intervals. After a few minutes it seems to work; his hands feel steady again.