Smoke River (8 page)

The paper burns fast, leaves a ragged twining of smoke. The women walk back to their people at the barricade and begin to talk and laugh.

Nothing else happens.

“What the hell?” somebody from the crowd of townspeople yells at the cops. “Do something!”

Then they are moving forward, two dozen law-abiding Doreville citizens who have come to see justice served, and all of them are yelling, screaming at the cops and then at the natives, who begin to taunt them back. Somebody picks up a rock and tosses it towards the barricade. It is answered by a dozen rocks, all of them rookie pitches, none drawing blood.

The man in the dress pants turns on his heel and does a half lope to the black car, which accelerates away once he clambers in. Las’s father pivots in the back seat, and for an instant their eyes meet. Las holds his gaze, but the old man looks down quickly.

“No, don’t run away!” Las shouts. But the car is an onyx blur.

The police fan out to separate the townspeople from the natives. Somebody yells, “They have their backs to the lawbreakers. They’re protecting them!”

They all start yelling after that. They yell in disbelief and outrage. “Get off our land,” the natives yell back. The police remain in a stiff-necked line and say nothing, do nothing. And then, after forty minutes, the voices become raw and they fade out slowly, like all the songs Las hates. Close by, two men start talking about a motocross race in the next town, and whether
they can reach the beer store before it closes, and the futility of staying here in the dark, wasting this good summer evening, when they could be watching the prospect of a decent crash. The crowd drifts away until there is a just a single pickup, the same colour as Gordo’s, at a remove from where the action had been. Finally, it too leaves.

Las’s voice is ragged from the strain of yelling. His fists are curled and he does not want to go home, cannot go home, where the lawyer’s gleaming black car sits in the driveway.

“I need to hurt something,” he says.

Gordo snickers.

When the reporters have scattered, Shayna feels a caffeine flush, triumphant. She turns to look for Helen, to see her good work reflected in the older woman’s eyes. But her aunt is nowhere in sight. The barricade supporters have wandered over to behind the development entrance, where a new urn of coffee has arrived and blankets are being handed out to those staying the night. Her elation loses its ballast. She was expecting pats on the back, some parsing of the scrum’s to-and-fro, even being ribbed for having tidied up for the cameras. She’s been looking forward to it.

Now only one figure waits for her in the dusky light, his thumbs tucked into his belt. Coulson’s shirt looks fresh, even new. For her? She feels a flash of irritation. There is only so much of her to go around. And this stuff between a man and a woman requires some effort, initially at least. She is out of practice. If she leans against him, surely he will bend and kiss the part in her hair, tell her she has done well. But those smiling eyes of his are bright, a measure too intense. She feels the urge to turn and run.

It’s only a year since she got a first impression of him, literally – a large bootprint in the mud among the
o’tá:ra
’s prolific black raspberry bushes. She didn’t presume the berries were only hers to pick, but they were small and seedy, not as popular as summer’s later arrivals: raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, elderberries. She could usually assume that it was just her picking, and perhaps a few grannies who understood the sweet magic of black raspberries lightly stewed with mulberries or tossed with a teaspoon of sugar and the season’s first strawberries. But the bootprint maker had been sloppy, stripping some vines bare and crushing others, still hung with unready fruit. It was greedy, expedient behaviour.

Shayna preferred going to the patch in the coolness of dusk, but the prints had dried by then, having been made in early morning’s dew-soft ground. The next morning she was up early, arriving at the bushes with a Thermos of tea just after the emerald flash of sunrise. He was already retreating. It surprised and somewhat delighted her to see the back of a tall, broad-shouldered figure holding a dainty basket, when she’d expected an old man with a coffee tin or a teenaged boy with a grocery bag and more energy than sense.

“Hey,” she said, and the man turned. His whiteness gave her a small shock. Even if the
o’tá:ra
wasn’t technically on the reserve, everyone knew that her people made use of it without interference.

“Hello,” he said. “How can I help you?” This interloper’s face would have been boyish had it not been cut by the blunt axe of hard work and hours outdoors.

Shayna hadn’t really thought out what she was going to say. If he were one of her own people, her authority as a berry picker, a keeper of the patch, would have done most of the work. But this man, whom she recognized now as the tobacco
farmer from across the road, would want something like an explanation. She hesitated.

“I like these berries,” he said, holding up the basket. “Put them on my breakfast cereal just like my ma used to. This is her basket.”

“Yeah, but you’re … um … kind of like a rutting moose the way you stomp all over the bushes. Lots being wasted because of you.”

His face flushed, but the laughter that followed was only vaguely apologetic. “Well,” he said, “that won’t do. Forgive me. This was going to be my last basket anyhow.”

He nodded his head and turned to walk across the road, then stopped, put his basket on the ground, and returned. “Excuse my manners. My name’s Coulson,” he said, sticking out his hand. “Coulson Stercyx.”

His big palm, cooled by the dew of raspberry leaves, swallowed hers entirely. She felt calluses press into her knuckles.

“Shayna,” she said.

“Just Shayna?”

“Shayna Watters,” she said, using her former married name. He let her hand go, and she noticed that the tips of his fingers were berry-stained, just like hers.

As the only white person on this side of the barricade, Coulson is starting to feel damn awkward.
So much quiet fury for a woman
, he thinks as he looks at Shayna’s unmoving figure. Still, he can’t go home without her. Two weeks have passed since they last woke up together. How unexpected it is to be middle-aged and filled with toppling desire.

“Shayna.” He steps forward, reaches for her hand. “You look like you could use a shower, a good meal. A firm bed.”

He wants to quit this scene, have a drink, get out of this stiff new shirt, feel the slide of her skin against his. But she shakes her head, slips out of his grasp.

“We have to make some strategy decisions. I have to stay,” she says.

“It sort of looks like your strategy’s decided.”

There’s heat in her face and her eyes. He’s not used to chasing women; he’s unused to asking.

Are you coming home with me?
Marie had petitioned him in the end, it must have been a dozen times. He lying silent in his parents’ bed as she packed, tears streaming down her face.
Are you coming home, Coulson?

“The meeting’s important. I’ll stay,” Shayna says. “You can go.”

Her dismissal rankles. He can’t face his empty bed. “C’mon,’ ” he says. “They’re not going to miss you for one night.”

Marie was holding her suitcase. Wet drips, sooty with mascara, slid from her chin onto her white blouse. She’d wiped her nose with her sleeve. He’d never seen her do such a thing, not in nearly a decade of marriage. She asked one more time, her voice cracking like fine porcelain.
Are you coming home with me?

Shayna looks at him as if he’s an alien, beyond comprehension. He feels impatient. The barricade seems a kind of hijinks to him, injunction-burning a rash tactic to gain attention. The real work would happen in somebody’s office, the sorting through of titles and surveys. He is about to say as much but thinks better of it.

“Well, after you’re done with strategy, you can just slip through the fields. The kitchen door is always open. The light will be on.” He hates the entreaty in his voice. He wants Shayna to choose him. Women always have. Why, all of a sudden, do things have to be different?

He’s risked embarrassment for her already. A month after that first encounter with Shayna, he baked a crumble, using the
last of the frozen black raspberries and a recipe smeared with buttery thumbprints, handwritten by his mother. He covered the crumble with a red-striped tea towel and delivered it, still warm and smelling of brown sugar and oats and musky cobbled fruit, to the archives department of the reserve’s cultural centre, where she worked. His note said:
Enjoy. – Coulson Stercyx
.

He’d thought that was recklessly romantic. There was no reply. He started taking more trips to the new grocery store outside town, where everyone from the reserve shopped, hoping to bump into her.

Helen Fallingbrook, who worked in his kitchen from late August into September to feed his harvest crews, must have known, must have smelled the yearning on him.

“My niece borrowed my truck earlier. She’s going to drop it off here so I can pack up my stuff,” Helen said on the last day of last year’s harvest. “Hot day out there. You might offer her a cold beer.”

So she came to him after all, on a beautiful September afternoon, and sat at his picnic table with curious eyes and a beer in her hands while Helen packed up her big steel cauldrons, muffin tins, twenty-cup percolator. Then he made them both dinner: grilled steak, potato salad, homemade beet slaw, more beer. He poked fun at Helen, got her niece laughing.

Still, it would be months – including all of a cold winter – before Shayna would come to his bed. It was never a certainty. But after he’d studied her inscrutable face in the waning autumn sun, he’d known he wouldn’t stop trying. He couldn’t help himself.

“Good night, Coulson,” says Shayna. She raises her arm and gives him a wave. She walks towards Helen, who has emerged from among the coffee drinkers behind the entrance.

He looks around to see who has witnessed this rebuff. There’s just the indifference of sky and highway. He kicks the
dirt and smacks the back of his fist against his forehead. Already she infuriates him in a way no other woman has.

Coulson checks his watch to calculate the hours before closing time.
No point wasting a new shirt
, he thinks.

M
itch Bain drives to the liquor store. It is a Wednesday, before lunch, and he feels sheepish. He sits in his car and inspects the parking lot for familiar vehicles.

There are two things he wants to avoid. He does not want to be questioned about the barricade.
Hey, what’s your next move? Will it delay construction?
He does not want to listen to a tirade about the police’s failure to protect a respectable, hard-working, law-abiding citizen like himself, a businessman who just wants to make Doreville a better place.
Can you believe the cops, those friggers in government?
People’s outrage on his behalf has worn him out.

And now, four days after the injunction was set aflame, his bottom lip is numb from hours spent on the phone with lawyers and political aides, none of whom can agree on whose jurisdiction the barricade falls under. He has barely left his office since, excusing himself from family meals, sneaking about like some furtive, light-shunning rodent for snacks and bathroom visits. But
it’s not just the calls that keep him there. The prospect of encountering Las alone, seeing again his son’s look of contempt and disappointment, fills him with parental dread.

Today he awoke with a thirst – a thirst for Scotch that couldn’t be exorcised by deep breathing or by shoving handfuls of smoked almonds into his mouth. He wants a drink. And he wants to be able to purchase a very nice single malt without being seen by a neighbour or friend who will force bonhomie with a wink and a nudge at his brown bag.
Betcha been needin’ a lot of that lately
.

Thirty minutes earlier he hiked himself up on the kitchen counter and, balancing on his knees, reached into the very top cupboard, where Ella kept herbed vinegar, Thai fish sauce, pickled mango – a variety of gifts and impulse purchases exiled for being frighteningly exotic, a little too outside their palates. This was where he hid a bottle of twelve-year-old Scotch, a showy thank-you from a grateful client. It was the one place that had eluded Las and his ne’er-do-well friends, who consistently ransacked the house’s other booze supplies. He ran his fingers along the glass shapes on the shelf, searching for the squatter, rounder prize, and managing to ignore that his knees were wet from a spill left on the counter – Las’s handiwork, no doubt.