by Krista Foss
“If there’s something in particular you’re looking for, I can tell you right away whether or not I have it. Might even know somewhere else you could find it.”
When Cherisse asks to see the atomizer in the window, the shop-owner’s face tightens; she draws her shoulders up like a scarecrow, and in that half-second Cherisse can tell the woman might resist selling it – to her. But the woman exhales a lungful of stale breath, shuffles over to the window display. Instead of handing the atomizer to Cherisse to examine, she walks past her to plunk it on the counter by her cash register.
“It’s delicate,” she says.
Cherisse comes over and stares down at it, runs her finger along the glass, squats by the counter so she is eye-level with it. When she depresses the pumper, she sees the shop-owner flinch.
“Can I lift it up to the light?”
“Why?” says the shop-owner.
“The crystal – I want to see its quality, its colour.”
The woman sighs, flips her wrist, and Cherisse takes the atomizer into her hands. It’s cool and sharp against her skin, like ice. And for a moment she remembers a little white dog that nuzzled its way into her life several years earlier and stayed for a winter, the prettiest thing she’d ever possessed.
There is no price on the atomizer. Cherisse can’t help but wonder if it was removed in transit from the window to the counter.
“How much?” she asks.
Now the woman picks it up, lifts it to the light, wrinkles her brow. Her eyes flit from Cherisse to the atomizer and back, as if she is estimating both the object and its buyer. Finally she clears her throat. “Ninety-five dollars.”
The price sounds like a dare. Cherisse inhales, hangs her head for a second. Might as well make a production of it. She pats all her pockets in succession, yanks five- and ten-dollar bills from her jeans, and finally two twenties from the breast pocket of her jean jacket. She squints back at the shop-owner, in the way you do when you know someone is taking advantage of you. What was its price an hour ago? she wants to ask. Instead she lays her money on the counter like a magic trick and points at each bill with her finger.
“Five fives is twenty-five, plus two twenties is sixty-five, plus three tens. Ninety-five. There.”
The shop-owner slides the bills into her palm and counts them again. Cherisse picks up the atomizer, and when she feels the cool throb of the glass, the sting of its price recedes.
“I can wrap it,” the shop-owner says. Cherisse just shakes her head.
They stare at each other for a last long second – Cherisse holding a hunk of smoked ice crystal, the shop-owner sucking on the end of her eyeglasses – and though the summer air is hot and dry outside, she feels a shiver. I’m her only customer today, Cherisse thinks, willing it to be true, and the woman’s eyes flicker as if divining this. Neither of them say goodbye, thank you.
Joe usually takes the long route back to the reserve, along the banks of the river. Today he tells Cherisse he wants to hustle, open up the smoke shack a little earlier than he usually does, so they’ll cross the McKelvey Street bridge and boot along the highway through the suburbs and tobacco farms as if they were townies. Cherisse nods. But even as he feels enlarged by this ambition, he also knows the thinness of it, how just about anything will prick and deflate it. If he rushes back home, if he throws the grocery bags inside the trailer to empty later, if he just keeps moving, then it’s possible he could have the smoke shack open by noon and enjoy at least five hours of business. But he knows other operators are already open – solid women who’ll have the breakfast dishes done, fresh coffee in a Thermos and a ribbon dress hemmed and still have time to open their smoke shacks before ten a.m., or middle-aged dads who’ve shorn their lawns like a golf-course fairway before the sun got high, then roared up to their shacks on the back of an ATV. Smoky Joe’s, at the very end of the row, as the locals call Ninth Line, is always the last to open. Anyway, who would be buying smokes on a Saturday morning already heavy with heat? Still, the sense of missing out dogs him like his bad tooth.
Joe eases the truck over the McKelvey Street bridge, listening to the rattle of steel under his treads. He turns his head to see the panorama of the Smoke River breaking into foamy moustaches over the fast-moving shallows in the distance before slowing and pooling into sluggish greenish depths by the bridge.
“No … you gotta be kidding … no … Jesus.”
He slams his palm against the steering wheel. He can feel himself already adrift, already moving away from today’s target, because once he is over the bridge he is turning the car left, pulling it up to the river embankment, indignity making him gulp air like a drowning man.
“I thought we were going straight home,” Cherisse says. She’s turning something over and over in her hands, something he doesn’t recognize. When she does things like this, odd things, it is easier to see her as an extension of himself, as he did when she was an awkward preteen, with bones too long and heavy for her meagre flesh, green eyes so big and bright they startled people. He’d wanted her to stay that way. And maybe, just maybe, it’s because of her, and all those ways in which she is increasingly like her mother – long gone but for the desperate phone calls asking for money – that he wants to be the hero of this situation.
He stares out the truck window. “Unbelievable,” he says under his breath. “Un-fucking-believable.”
Cherisse looks up when he opens the door of the truck, still cursing. Her hand grabs his forearm. “Whaddya doin’ there, Joe?”
But she must know; she must recognize that the man wearing waders and standing in the middle of the warmed murk, casting flies as bright as jungle flowers in defiance of both community-mindedness and seasonal licensing, is Elijah Barton. It’s one thing for Barton to thumb his nose at people like himself – the man is richer than the whole alley of smoke-shack operators put together – but it’s quite another thing to be deliberately trying to piss off the townies, already made skittish by this barricade business at the development.
Joe doesn’t care that it’s going to embarrass his daughter; he has to say something to the guy. He has to let him know that it isn’t okay. That there are regular guys like Joe who need the townies for business, need them to feel comfortable driving out to the reserve. His boots hit the soil before Cherisse can catch at his shirt. He slams the door to her plaintive “Don’t” and then he’s standing on the bank, fists jammed in his jeans pockets, clearing his throat.
“What you catchin’, ’Lijah?”
The man submerged to his knees in the river is shorter, his face pockmarked from teenage acne, his eyes small and hard. When he turns his head, his smile is the smile of someone with means, the smile of a man who doesn’t give a shit and has the money to ensure he doesn’t have to. Cherisse’s mother, Rita, had a thing for him once. Joe could see how Barton’s fuck-you attitude must have been attractive to a wild thing such as her, a woman who could never outpace her demons. Elijah raises his arm, pulls the rod over his shoulder, then flings it forward with enough wrist that the showy fly flirts with the surface of the water, skipping beside sunken logs, a tangle of submerged bracken.
Nervy fucker, thinks Joe. He’s stalking a largemouth.
“Fish,” he hollers back to Joe Montagne. “I’m catching fish.”
Elijah shakes his head. That man, he thinks. While shrewder smoke-traders have built expansive homes with hot tubs and satellite dishes, Joe still lives in a trailer and drives a rusty GMC, its missing hubcaps and gnarled front fender broadcasting his money woes as surely as his bad teeth. Yet Joe gets some things right. The guy wouldn’t irritate him so damn much if he didn’t.
“You know the season hasn’t begun yet. You gotta licence?” Joe yells from the bank.
Elijah ignores the question. He knows the river’s differences and divides, its seasons and its tempers, with an intimacy he’s never shared with a lover or a friend. Wherever he is on it, it’s familiar, it’s home.
There’s a tug on hi
s line that has some heft to it, some girding for a fight. Elijah feels the tension and begins the tango of tightening and releasing to prevent a snap. The fish is ill-tempered and scrappy; it expected to be left alone in this stagnant bath, where it can ambush frogs and sunfish and exploit its terminal unpopularity to survive – qualities Elijah understands too well.
Thinking like a largemouthed bass brought him to this spot, kept him patient, helped him choose just the right fly. Now his fly is hooked into the fish’s flat lower jaw and a fourteen-pound line connects the animal to Elijah where he grips reel and rod; it turns them into a single entity, a hybrid of man and fish, at war with itself. Joe will have to wait.
You need to know who you are, his mother once told Elijah. She must have had enough of relatives and former friends from the reserve passing her on Doreville’s streets as if she were a stranger, some whispering witch under their breath. As the young boy holding her hand, Elijah felt the tremor of hurt run through her arm into the squeeze of her fingers against his palm. The year he turned twelve, she announced they were leaving his white father and the gabled Queen Street house with its balustrades and velvet wallpaper, its languid two-storey views of the Smoke River, to return to their people. But she’d lost more than her official status by then; she was unwanted, as if by marrying a white man she’d bartered away her own skin. So they squatted on the edge of the reserve in a rundown cabin on the piece of land now being fought over. She died a lonely woman, with few comforts and fewer friends. And except for the river, Elijah grew up belonging to no one and nowhere.
“Did ya hear me there, Barton? You making a statement, fishing this close to town?”
And there it is: the hiccup in his attention. Elijah loses the tension. The fish dives deep, dragging the line to where it risks being entangled in sunken debris. Elijah jerks hard. Hard enough or too hard, he can’t tell. The fish rockets out of the water, a ballistic of spines and bulldog jowls. It’s a beauty – four, maybe five pounds – and while he takes its measure, the fish slams its tail against the air, jerks its head, and the line snaps. A gleam of muscle noses into the water, disappears back into the murk, taking the exquisite fly Elijah tied himself into the depths.
He lets his arm drop so the rod is half submerged, hangs his head for a second. The sun is too high for Elijah to start again; that largemouth will sulk somewhere unreachable. He shrugs his shoulders. At least he knows where that bastard fish hunts – the river has only so many hideouts with water quiet enough for a largemouth. Another day, Elijah thinks. He gathers his line, wades out of the river, and climbs up the bank. Joe holds out a hand to yank him up, and Elijah takes it.
“Don’t need a licence, ’cuz I’m native. Remember, Joe? Territorial rights. If you don’t use ’em, you lose ’em, eh?”
“Yeah, but man, you could fish anywhere. Do you have to do it right in town? In a spot where everybody can see you? Especially now, with the barricade.”
Elijah unfastens his waders, lets them fall to the ground and steps out of them. “Yes, I do,” he says to Joe. He smiles and claps the other man on the shoulder. “Yes, I do.”
He makes for his own truck – bright red and meticulously shiny – already thinking about that first yank of a cold beer, the sizzle of grilled steak, succour for the lost fish, when he looks up for half a second and sees her, Joe’s daughter, sunk low in the cab of that godforsaken wreck of a vehicle, her eyes to her lap. He can tell that she wants to be anywhere but here. This is the part of Joe that trumps him – the fact of his daughter, the ties to others who buried Montagne’s prospects under the weight of responsibility. Elijah doesn’t wave at the girl, or even nod.
For years he’s caught glimpses of her haunting the places he haunted as a young boy, combing the river as if it were a constantly refreshed treasure hunt, first as a barely-there slip of a child, later a gangly girl with an awkward gait, then a teenager with a runaway’s eyes. In his head the sightings of her are fluid, intermingled with the first time he saw her mother, Rita, and learned how a wild, impulsive unhappiness makes some women even more beautiful. You have more nerve than any man I know, Elijah, she said to him on a hazy afternoon when they were lying half dressed on the riverbank, his hand lost in the silk of her hair. But I’m not sure you have the heart for the likes of me. So much truth in her laughing voice. And it’s because he had too much need for self-preservation, too little imagination, to take her on, to really love such a woman, that Elijah can’t feel superior to the man who did.
“You know, I don’t get him. Don’t get him,” says Joe. “Guy runs his business like a white man. Bottom line all the way. Lays people off so he can automate. Then sponsors lacrosse teams and scholarships like he’s the friggin’ bank. Won’t even live on the reserve – too good for that. But he has no problem letting his factory runoff stink up the creek. Now in town he’s all native, all Warrior. Territorial rights! Fucking with ’em all the time. Don’t respect it. I don’t.”
Cherisse is not listening. She knows Joe. He’s only getting started; he’ll barely take a breath before they’re home. She imagines jumping out of the truck, running in the opposite direction, never looking back; all the while her father would still be talking to her, talking at her, his mouth a squeeze-box of outrage. If she snapped, At least Barton has money! that would shut him up. But there isn’t much point hurting his feelings; he’d only get all hangdog and drive her more crazy.
And now, on this summer day working itself into a remorseless heat, Cherisse has the cool weight of the atomizer to pin her in place, to get her through the hours in the smoke shack while she rings in the purchases and her father makes awkward chitchat with the customers that makes them leave sooner, buy less. It’s the inevitability of those hours ahead of her that sinks her lower in the truck. Some white person will want to know if there is Kentucky tobacco in the rollies – Jeezus, does she know, or care? – because Kentucky tobacco is too sharp for them or makes their head ache. And Cherisse might fake it, hold the Ziplocked bag up to the light and pretend that it’s all in the colour, muttering something about curing that she makes up but the customer might accept because she’s native and such knowledge is apparently inborn. But it’s just as likely the customer will persist, because even though they’re going to save $250 on their cartons, it’s not enough for them: Would it be okay if I just light one up? I can tell right away.
Cherisse will nod. And a person who would never smoke inside their own home won’t think twice about filling up the little plywood shack with the rollie’s acrid stink, because the sun is beatin’ overhead outside – hotter ’n hell, eh? – and that will make him or her sweat. All she will have to keep her head cool is the atomizer, a piece of ice that never melts, a memory of what is gone.
Several years earlier, she’d been leaning against a tree across the street from one of the beautiful painted verandahs of Doreville’s grand homes that lined the riverbanks. It was November and Daddy Joe was late picking her up, when she felt something soft brush up against her shin and looked down to find a low-lying cloud of white fluff, a tail that was no more than a furry rudder. The little dog had come to her unbidden, so unlike the reserve’s strays with their hungry grins, worrying abandoned takeout containers in the strip-mall parking lot. She reached down and gently plunged her hand into the animal’s fur, half afraid that it would be as soft as it was. The dog turned up eyes of shining agate and licked her hand with a tongue warm and wet as an infant’s. And Cherisse was already telling herself how the animal would prefer its new life and its new home, that where the river wended through town, the rich folks had removed trees so they wouldn’t obstruct their view. They’d tamed the river’s banks with cement boat launches and retaining walls, and plucked reeds and dodder from its shores. It couldn’t be much fun for a dog, or a child. But on the reserve, the river’s edges were like the wind or summer sunsets, belonging to no one and everyone. There the Smoke’s banks were thick with a tangle of old pines and dogwoods, reeds and stooping willows,
their hips half immersed in the water like grandmothers leaning over to rinse their hair.
By the time her father rolled up in the rusted truck, Cherisse had convinced herself the dog had asked to be taken, even begged a little. It followed me, honest. It has no collar, Pa, she said, holding the dog in her arms. She ignored his stiffness, his shaking head as she clambered into the rusty truck’s cab.
No baby, no baby. That dog belongs to someone. Look how clean it is. And well fed. We’re gonna catch shit for even looking at it sideways, much less having it in the truck.
He sat there and waited. Even though Cherisse was then only thirteen, she understood there were greater fears working the twitch in Daddy Joe’s jaw. They both knew there wasn’t much he could do for her outside of frying a venison steak or reaching things in the top cupboard of the trailer kitchen, with its split vinyl benches and stained Formica counter. She held on to the dog and stared forward too, repeating, It has no collar. Minutes passed. She studied the dog’s fur, the changing scenery of its whiteness – bright and dull, like ice and snow.
Joe kept his eyes straight ahead, started the engine, and said, Put it at your feet till we’re out of town.
The truck turns onto the paved road that leads to Smoke Shack Row, and her father is still ranting and Cherisse is turning the atomizer over and over in her palms, letting herself fall into the cubes of light and shade. He doesn’t ask about it. He won’t. It’s as if he feels safer not knowing too much.
Her father wheels the truck in a wide, ragged arc up to the trailer behind Smoky Joe’s. It will be one p.m. before they get open. Joe rests his head on the steering wheel; he pants in the heat like a tired burro. Cherisse cups the atomizer in one palm and, with her free hand, lightly rubs his shoulder.
“It’s okay, Joe,” she says. “It’s okay.”
CHAPTER 3