Up in Smoke

by Ross Pennie

  “You know, misplaced cars? And other, shall we say, lost property?”

  “Oh.”

  “In fact, she was there this morning. Doing a little professional sightseeing. For our side.”

  “All I want to see is a smoke shop.”

  “She says meet her in Caledonia. The town, not the university.”

  “That much I guessed. But where, exactly?”

  “The Canadian Tire parking lot. On the main drag. A few blocks south of the Grand River. Think you can you find it?”

  “Sure.” He hit SEARCH on the dashboard GPS. “When?”

  “Half an hour.”

  “They take Visa?”

  Zol scratched his chin again and chuckled loudly into the phone. “Everything but Monopoly money, good buddy. Have at it.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Colleen spotted Hamish standing under a lamppost, polishing the front grill of his beloved Saab with a handkerchief. He looked innocently boyish. His perfect, not overly short, blond flat-top shone like a beacon of wholesomeness in the sharp glare of the Mercury lamplight. She honked lightly and turned into the parking lot. The Canadian Tire store was dark, the shoppers now home and parked in front of their TVs, their DIY resolutions postponed for another day.

  Hamish gave his car an anxious backward glance as he climbed into the passenger seat beside her. He was right to worry. This region lamented the highest rate of car thefts in the country. Somehow, vehicles got sucked into Grand Basin Reserve and were never seen again, or they were found as burned-out hulks, the good parts long gone. She’d done surveillance on a couple of the chop shops on the rez; funny how the cops studiously ignored them.

  “Thanks for coming,” he said. “I was expecting your Mercedes.”

  She glanced at the anti-theft club at Hamish’s feet. “Zol thought his minivan would be less conspicuous.”

  Hamish forced a half smile that faded quickly. “Not too many Mercs pull up at smoke shacks, eh?”

  “Well, not with their rightful owners behind the wheel,” she said and killed the radio. She steered onto Argyle Street and headed south. “I think it’s extraordinary that you’ve never set foot on an Indian Reserve. Especially with Grand Basin practically on your doorstep.”

  He was clearly uncomfortable, and more than the integrity of his vehicle was worrying him. “Wasn’t sure how to go about it. Or whether it was even kosher to visit it uninvited.”

  She felt unsettled too. But that had nothing to do with their shopping trip. “You may be disappointed at how ordinary it is,” she told him. “Except for the smoke shops, of course.”

  “They won’t mind us browsing?”

  “Why should they? I understand you’re armed with your Visa card.”

  “And the cops?”

  “Don’t worry, you won’t see any of those. The provincial police only venture onto the rez under the most extreme circumstances. And the Native officers on the Grand Basin force know that their presence anywhere near the smoke shops is bad for business.”

  The Canadian Tire was now a minute behind them. As always at this spot, she was apprehensive. But ready for it.

  Right on cue, her right foot lifted away from the accelerator. All by itself. As it did every time she drove along this stretch of the road out of Caledonia. It was a reflex she couldn’t control. Her body simply refused to let her whiz past this wretched intersection at high speed. She was compelled to slow down and let the sad story play in her mind like a tragic movie.

  “Look,” Hamish said, pointing to the flames leaping out of the oil drum that was always there beside the flags. “Are bonfires allowed so close to the highway?”

  “Depends on who you talk to.”

  He braced his right elbow against the door. “Why are you slowing down like this? I don’t like the look of those guys.”

  “They won’t hurt us. Not physically, anyway.”

  Hamish stiffened. “Those are Mohawk flags.” He pressed his arms against his torso, as if trying to make himself invisible. “I know where we are. All that brouhaha with the Natives. What was the name of this place? Something Creek Estates?”

  “Dover. Dover Creek.” Now the locals called it No Man’s Land, or Sovereign Indian Territory. Again, it depended on who you talked to, and on which side of the Great Divide they were born.

  There it was, in the darkness beyond the barricade, that desolate expanse of weeds and dirt and heartache at the edge of town. By now, it should have been a pretty bedroom community of single-family homes surrounded by proudly tended gardens. The Canadian parallels with the Apartheid legacies that still troubled her African homeland were nauseating. It seemed humanity’s tribalism was a fact of life in every part of the globe. Conflict between Them and Us was hardwired into us all.

  Two men, red bandanas hiding their chins, were standing between the flaming oil drum and a solitary pick-up truck. They were warming their hands. They’d parked their battered vehicle sideways across the potholed side road leading to the site. Did they realize how strange they looked defending a short dirt drive to absolutely nowhere?

  “Do they man that barricade 24-7?” Hamish asked.

  “Don’t know why they bother. No one’s going to take back the land from them now. The place is tainted with too much bad blood.”

  Six years ago, a developer had bought the acreage from a White farmer, apparently in good faith on both sides. Shortly after the developer erected his first couple of houses, a modern-day Mohawk war party seized the site at gunpoint and claimed the land as Indian territory. They cited a three-hundred-year-old treaty, which the federal government claimed was bogus and not worthy of a millisecond of discussion. With the feds officially ignoring the situation, and the provincial government too timid to send in its crackerjack Ontario Provincial Police, the Natives retained control of the land. No Native was arrested, though many taunted the police by openly committing assaults, weapons offences, property damage, and dangerous driving. Tempers flared, animosity smouldered into hatred, and heated clashes erupted between the Mohawks and Caledonia’s townspeople. Finally, the provincial government bought out the developer, but made no attempt to extricate the Indians from the land. And though the Mohawks had made a big show of claiming the few acres as their “sovereign territory,” they’d done nothing with it in six years. They just kept guarding their sad and useless trophy. Day and night.

  What bothered Colleen about the Dover Creek situation, and the chop shops on the rez, was the failure of the rule of law. Two levels of government stood idly by while a gang from Grand Basin Reserve behaved as they pleased and lived above the law. As a Native, you could try to seize your neighbour’s farm in a trumped-up land claim, steal his car for parts, and sell cheap cigarettes to his kids. Not the image that Canada liked to project of itself on the world stage.

  She felt a shudder pass through her shoulders as the oil drum faded from view and her foot pressed itself back onto the accelerator. The car regained highway speed, and a few minutes later she turned right onto Side Road 4, where a faded tin sign said GRAND BASIN INDIAN RESERVE.

  “And there they are,” she said, after they’d driven two hundred metres along the side road and into the rez. “The pride and joy of modern Native culture.”

  “And so many?” Hamish pointed through the windscreen and counted the smoke shops under his breath. “Five, six, seven. Practically on top of each other.”

  “Conveniently located for the smokers of Hamilton, Hagersville, Jarvis, and Caledonia.”

  Smoke shops crowded the rez’s northern and western entrances as well, providing ready access for the good people of Brantford, Waterford, Simcoe, Woodstock, and the four adjacent counties of farm country. Most sovereign nations posted border guards at their frontiers and checked your passport. Canada’s First Nations posted tobacco sellers and eagerly swiped your credit card.

  “Funn
y little buildings, eh?” Hamish said. He pointed at a beaten-up camping trailer that barely qualified as a shack, and a tiny but respectable shop made from a corrugated steel shipping container, the kind carried on cargo ships around the world. In Africa, she’d seen those abandoned containers strewn all over the place, housing everything from health centres to drinking dens. This one was painted bright pink and called itself Aunt Minnie’s Tiny Smoke Shop.

  “Don’t need a fancy place to sell smokes,” she told him. “A few shelves, some overhead lighting, and a credit card machine.”

  She drove twenty metres beyond Aunt Minnie’s and pulled up at Smoke Depot, a shop that had caught her eye on other trips to the rez. Constructed of two mobile homes side by side, it had white siding and fuchsia trim, and usually a seasonal decoration at the front door. Tonight it was a jack-o’-lantern carved from a large orange pumpkin. Real, not plastic. And as always, three flags were flapping on the same pole: the Stars and Stripes, the Maple Leaf, and the Iroquois Confederacy. Though she’d never been inside, the place looked about average size for a smoke shop, orderly, and most importantly at this hour, well lit.

  “We stopping here?” Hamish asked, looking more anxious than ever.

  “As good a place as any. I imagine they’ll have a full selection of what you’re looking for.”

  “I guess,” he said, glancing around suspiciously. He still looked worried about the cops.

  “Cold feet?”

  “’Course not. It’s just that . . . well . . . I’ve always been such a rule follower.”

  She couldn’t help cracking a smile. “You won’t get caught, Hamish. And you shan’t go to jail, even if you do.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Gee, thanks.”

  She opened her door and climbed out of the minivan. Hamish hesitated and looked pointedly at the anti-theft club still on the floor.

  She waved her hand dismissively. “The car is safe here. These are good, savvy business people. They don’t steal from their customers. And look at the flags. This establishment promotes harmony.”

  She led him inside and said hello to the two young Natives watching TV behind the counter. The boy — he didn’t look older than sixteen but he could have been twenty — flicked her an indifferent glance and went back to his show. A smile seemed to come naturally to the large round face of the girl standing beside him. She waved and said, “Lemme know if yous need any help.”

  Hamish scuttled to the far end of the trailer, out of earshot of the teens. In the process, he had to dodge the heavily loaded displays of potato chips, corn chips, candy bars, pork jerky, and Mexican salsa that crowded the front third of the store.

  “This is incredible,” he whispered, gawking at shelf after shelf piled with brightly coloured cigarette cartons. He swept the room with his gaze and relaxed a little, apparently relieved there were no other customers in the shop.

  They browsed together for a couple of minutes. Most of the cigarettes came from the same manufacturer, similar in style to the empty Hat-Trick packs she’d found behind Erie Christian Collegiate. They came as twenty-five cigarettes to the pack, two hundred to the carton, as Lights, Kings, Golds, and Menthols.

  Hamish glanced at the kids to make sure they weren’t watching him from their counter, then picked up a clear, resealable plastic bag stuffed with neat rows of individual cigarettes. “These are Rollies, eh? And look at the price. Only ten dollars. For two hundred? This many cigarettes should cost at least seventy or eighty bucks.”

  She spotted a discount table piled with more bags of Rollies. At first glance, they looked like all the others. “Look, these are seven bucks for two hundred.”

  “Only seven?”

  “The little notice says they’re seconds. Rejects, I suppose.” She loved the irony of some cigarettes failing the grade, being somehow worse than others. She lifted one of the bags, and together they examined it closely. “I’d say these don’t look quite as neatly rolled as those in the ten-dollar bags.” Some of the cigarettes were bent, others a bit crushed. But still readily smokeable.

  Hamish raised his eyebrows, then turned to another table and picked up a carton that was a different shape from the most of the others. It was long and narrow. “These look different. Got a different name. Trackers. Reminds them of the old days, I guess. Pre-contact.”

  “American-style,” she told him. “See — narrower packs of twenty instead of twenty-five. Still two-hundred smokes to the carton. And have a read of what it says.”

  He nodded and found the message printed on the side of each pack. “SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: QUITTING SMOKING NOW GREATLY REDUCES SERIOUS RISKS TO YOUR HEALTH.”

  After studying the warning, he turned the carton over several times and scanned every surface. His frown deepened. “There’s no French on here anywhere. And we don’t have a Surgeon General. That’s an American designation. These are totally illegal.”

  “That is the point, Hamish.” She spread her arms and did a half turn. “Everything about this place is illegal. Even the snacks, which they sell without collecting sales tax. What you are holding are either American cigarettes smuggled in from the U.S., or a product made right here on Grand Basin and made to simulate American smokes. Probably the latter. A lot easier and more profitable — no border guards or middlemen.”

  Hamish cocked his head toward the teens, who were now munching from giant bags of chips and clearly absorbed in their TV show. “Those kids are too young to be working here.”

  “Ya think?”

  “And in Ontario, cigarettes aren’t allowed to be displayed for sale on open shelves. Or sold to minors. Or sold without a Health Canada warning in both official languages. Or sold free of all kinds of federal and provincial duties and taxes.”

  “You’ve been doing your homework.”

  He looked pleased with himself, then handed her the Trackers and examined a professionally shrink-wrapped eight-pack carton of Hat-Tricks. “This one has a bilingual warning from Health Canada. And a thing like a postage stamp that says Duty Paid Canada Droit Acquitté. Are they legit?”

  “Zol says they’re semi-legit. The result of a deal between the manufacturer — that’s Dennis Badger who lives and operates here on the rez — and the federal government.” She explained how Zol had told her that Badger’s company, Watershed Holdings, was allowed to sell his excise-duty-paid Hat-Trick brand to Natives on reserves anywhere in the country without charging them extra taxes. And to export them overseas. And to sell them to non-Natives who were willing to pay the additional taxes.

  Hamish voiced the obvious conclusion. “But no one collects those taxes from non-Natives.”

  “Of course not.”

  “What would they total, those missing taxes?”

  “In Ontario, about fifty dollars a carton. Closer to seventy in some other provinces.”

  “No wonder Dennis Badger does such a booming business.” He held up the Hat-Trick carton and looked for the price tag. “So, how much are these anyway?”

  “Thirty dollars.”

  “For two hundred cigarettes? Still a good deal. One third the normal price.”

  “These American-style Trackers are a few dollars cheaper still, because they don’t have the Canadian federal excise tax on them.” She turned the carton over several times. “See . . . no stamp on this one anywhere.”

  The girl up at the cash had finished her chips and was scrunching her empty bag. She threw Colleen a puzzled look, as if wondering why this well-dressed White couple was spending so much time deciding which cigarettes to buy.

  She touched Hamish’s arm. “I think we should go soon. Have you decided? Which of these shall we take with us?”

  Hamish looked flustered, like a boy who couldn’t make up his mind at an ice cream counter. “We know the kids at Erie Collegiate smoke Rollies almost exclusively,” he said. “We better get a couple bags of those.
And . . . and the firefighters smoke mostly Hat-Tricks.”

  “Kings, Golds, Lights, or Menthols?”

  “Did anyone think to ask?”

  “Better take one of each,” she suggested. “And a carton of Trackers. In case some of them like the American-style brand.”

  “And a bag of the seven-dollar reject Rollies. They could be the whole problem if they’re in some way substandard or made of bad tobacco. Do you suppose Erie Collegiate kids smoke the rejects?”

  “I can’t see the firefighters putting up with them. Not when the other cigarettes are such a bargain.”

  “Still, I think I’ll get two bags of the rejects. That’s, um . . . five cartons and four bags. Sound about right?”

  She told him that sounded fine and helped him load them into the shopping cart.

  Halfway to the front counter, Hamish stopped dead. Pearls of sweat had broken out across his forehead. “Those kids will know we’re up to something,” he whispered. His tone bordered on frantic. “No one ever buys this many cigarettes at a time. They’re going to rat on us, for sure.”

  “You kidding? I understand the average order is twelve cartons per person. Between the two of us, we’ve got less than half that.”

  “Really?”

  “Zol says don’t forget to keep the receipt.”

  “Yeah, sure. Like the health unit is going to reimburse me the cost of almost two thousand contraband cigarettes.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Zol put down his book and glanced at the bedside clock. Ten-thirty. Colleen would be back any minute. It shouldn’t take her long to nip over to the rez and buy a few smokes. Of course, it would be Hamish’s luck to be caught in a rare OPP blitz against contraband tobacco leaving the rez. Or would he escort Colleen back to his lab for a longwinded lecture on plant viruses? Either way, Colleen should be home soon or checking in on her mobile.

  The floor outside the bedroom door creaked under tentative footsteps as an approaching shadow crept across the carpet. “Dad?”