Smoke River

by Krista Foss

  When Ruby left, Shayna unfolded the rug over the kitchen table. She traced her finger along the tightly braided coil at the centre as it wound outwards, following one strip of printed cotton as it disappeared into the next and imagining the frocks her aunts had worn as youngsters, tired bedsheets, summer pyjamas, Lena’s old housedresses, curtains. All their florals and checks faded by sunlight and repeated washings, memorialized into a soft blur of pinks, yellows, blues, and browns. Shayna tested the stitches that held the coils together in a large oval. There was little give. Still, she laid the rug by the kitchen door, where it would be trampled by fewer visitors. She wanted it to last forever.

  The next morning she dragged a garage-sale iron table from the back shed and set it under a large yew tree just outside the kitchen. She propped the door open and, with the sun on her shins, she made herself a plate of eggs and toast with jam, her appetite growing apace with the brightness. The food was placed on the iron table and Shayna went back to grab a full pot of freshly brewed coffee and a chair to sit on. Just as she stepped onto the rug at the kitchen door, a large crow swept under the yew, grabbed her toast soaked with runny yolk.

  No! Shayna thrust forward, but the foot of the chair grabbed the rug, causing her to tip and release the carafe. It bounced at the threshold and spilled its entire contents on the old rug. The crow alighted with a series of scoffing cries. The best of her breakfast was squished in its beak like a bright yellow grin.

  She fell to her knees. The rug had absorbed every drop of the black liquid; its delicate pastels were swollen and brackish. She grabbed a handful of clean dishtowels, pressed them hard into the old coils, one after the other. Despairing, she emptied a can of soda water, and then another, over the oval to lift out more of the offensive colour.

  By the time Ruby arrived for a mid-morning cup of tea, the rug was drying in the sun, all of it stained brownish yellow, the colour of nicotine. Well, Lena did enjoy her smokes, she said.

  But Shayna was contrite. Should I machine-wash it?

  Not sure it’s worth risking that half-century-old hand stitching. Ruby rolled her hand along the rug and chuckled. You know, your granny was silly for runny eggs on toast.

  Before she left, her auntie added, I think you should put that rug where everybody’s sure to step on it. Lena’d want as much – a little reminder that history’s underfoot. That coffee stain? Just another story it has to tell.

  It has lain by the eastern door ever since. It raises up a perfume of burnt sugar and old leather with every foot it encounters, filling her front hall with an odour people don’t forget. There are other smells that greet Shayna as she wanders through her rooms – thyme and sage drying in the kitchen, maple ash gone cold in the woodstove, summer pollens drifting in the unscreened bedroom – but that rug is the smell of home.

  She flops on her bed and is overcome with lethargy, the seductive pull of the familiar. The rest of the evening could sort itself around a cup of tea, a book, the eleven-o’clock news, and the quiet breezes. She wants to build a warming fire in the outdoor pit – the night is cool enough – wrap herself up in a blanket, plug in her headphones to late-night radio, and lie in the hammock strung between the yew and the spruce. But Helen’s words come back to her and Shayna shivers. Always another fire needs tending. She sighs, gets up and showers.

  An hour later she parks again at the barricade and crosses the highway on foot. Once she enters Coulson’s fields she finds herself rushing. The tobacco plants slap at her playfully. She sees his kitchen porch light on, and the idea of its vigil, its constancy, reassures her. She has missed him.

  And then he is there, a dark silhouette coming out of the kitchen, the aluminum door slamming shut behind him. He lights a cigarette and its ember moves like a distracted firefly from his hip to his mouth and back again. Shayna hurries. She wants a taste of that cigarette still damp from his lips. He takes two extra-long drags, drops it, and crushes it under his boot. She is about to emerge from the plants, to call out, when he turns. She expects him to go back inside.

  Instead Coulson makes a diagonal away from her. In five big strides he is in his truck and the engine growls into the cool night. Where is he going? She changes her direction too, makes a hard left through the tobacco to his gravel lane. Now she is running, roughly shoving away the leaves; a few snap brightly, dismembered from their tender stalks. She launches onto the gravel, straightening herself with her arms up, landing in the crossfire of his truck headlights. The truck tires skid and then the vehicle is still, its engine idling.

  Shayna stands like scared game, dazzled by the high beams’ brightness, wondering why the rules of engagement are so unclear with this man. He nearly begged her to come to him a week ago; now he doesn’t get out of the truck. Shayna shakes her head, walks alongside the Ford, and opens its passenger door, blinking to adjust her sight.

  “That’s a dangerous way to get a guy’s attention,” he says. She feels a slipstream of coolness chasing his usual friendliness.

  “Where are you headed?”

  “Beer’s all gone and I’m thirsty. Thought I’d have a few at the pub in town.”

  There is a moment of quiet between them. Shayna climbs into the truck. She feels out of breath and a bit foolish. But she’s resolute; she’s forfeited the quiet of her home, even blow-dried her hair for him. The scent of crushed peonies is dabbed on her wrists and temples.

  “I could use a cold beer,” she says, and she slams the passenger door shut as if that decides the matter. His eyes are on her in the dark. She wants him to reach out and touch her. But he puts the truck in gear and they drive onto an emptied highway, an indigo-drenched night. Fresh air from the open window fattens Shayna’s lungs. The horizon simplifies into dark saturations: earth, trees, sky. She smells the berms, sprung with wildflowers, and the spruce, their great, sap-thickened throats respiring heavily into the dark. She is so happy – to be moving; to be away from the barricade; to be doing something other than chairing meetings and talking and worrying about Porta-Potties and bottled water, high-heeled nieces and men with cloudy intentions; to be sitting next to this man with his palpable desire; to entertain the inevitability of sex – that it doesn’t really register, until the truck slows and pulls into a parking lot, that they haven’t said a word to each other during the twenty-minute drive.

  She uncurls herself in the seat a bit drowsily, stretches her arms, and looks through the truck’s front window to see that they have come to the back of the pub, its alleyway entrance. When she reaches for her door handle, Coulson’s palm is on her left shoulder, pressing gently. “We can’t go in there,” he says.

  She looks at him blankly. Already humiliation, like an ill-behaved child, is taunting her. “I don’t understand.”

  Coulson turns in his seat, grabs her hands. She lets them go limp.

  “Shayna, your picture was on the cover of the local paper. Burning an injunction, a legal document, part of a process that most of the folks in that pub right now believe in. And they’re two or three hours into their cups already. How is that going to be comfortable for you? For us?”

  Shayna takes a deep breath and swallows a mix of comprehension and disappointment. “So, comfortable is something we care about?” She smiles to make it easy for him, for all the toughness he projects.

  He drops his head in thought. “I have an idea.” He holds up a finger, jumps out of the truck, and runs into the pub, emerging a few minutes later clutching two bottles of beer in each hand and wearing a big smile. “Barmaid’s a friend of mine,” he says with a wink, handing her the beers to cradle.

  They drive to the river, slump back into their seats, and drink in silence. The beer tastes cold and delicious and she feels unburdened, not of desire for him but of something more confining: the hope, the expectation that he’d be a better, bigger person than she is.

  Back at the farmhouse she bites his shoulder, yanks at his clothes. She can tell he’s surprised, aroused by the sting of her fingernails in hi
s flanks, her push and pull, not understanding how it will end: with her slipping out into his fields when she has exhausted him, letting him wake alone, braided in sheets, with no one to claim, while she sleeps alone in her own space under the shadows of yew and spruce. With her going back to the barricade, washed with dawn, her head held high, her face sheepish and thankful as a returning runaway’s.

  CHAPTER 8

  Peg Redhill’s own mother had demons – long afternoons spent alone in a room with the shades drawn, warm chamomile and rosemary compresses over her eyes, her body shaking with an epilepsy of sobs. Yet every morning the woman had breakfast ready, the radio turned to a morning show, a pot of coffee brewed for her husband. Peg remembers this, remembers how her mother said, Always get up. You can’t know if it’s going to be a good one or a bad one, but the odds are better that it will be a good one if you’re out of bed.

  Still, Peg can’t pull herself from under her comforter. She knows that out there in a bright puddle of daylight wait two newspapers, a local and a national, both referring to her as “Doreville’s controversial mayor.” There are land disputes all over the country. Ho-hum. But she’d opened her big mouth, said something that in private company wouldn’t rate a snort but in public was considered scandalous and newsworthy.

  At five-forty-five a.m. Reid Wellings rang with a tipoff. An emergency meeting has been called for this afternoon; there is a motion to sanction Peg, prohibit her from speaking to the press for the duration of the protest. Reid assured her someone will vote against the motion, but Peg knows it will be like throwing a pebble at a bulldozer. The council is populated by the wholly spineless and the mealy-mouthed. She’ll leave the papers unread.

  But now, damn it, her eyes are open and she can’t go back to sleep. Not like this, with her flesh sponging up dread like an ugly spill. She doesn’t have the energy to guess which ferret-like councillor brought forth the motion against her. But there isn’t one among the half-dozen on whom she can count for fealty or a principled defence.

  She rolls over, pulls open the drawer of her nightstand, and scoots her hand through its contents, hoping for the thin plastic oblivion of a pill bottle. Her mobile whirrs on the table like a sparrow in a birdbath, and by habit it’s in her hand before she’s thinking clearly.

  “Peg Redhill?”

  The voice is young.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “My name is Trudy LaVette and I’m a producer with CJYT’S Big Bob’s Tell It Like It Is Hour. We’re national. And well, Big Bob himself loved your comments in the papers and wants you on a call-in segment. We’re calling it ‘Why don’t natives have to obey the law?’ His show starts at two p.m. We’d call you about one-fifty p.m. and the segment would run from five after until the news break at the half-hour. Are you available?”

  Peg looks at her clock. It isn’t yet seven a.m. Her first reaction is that it’s a joke, and she can’t afford another misstep with the media. She affects a considered tone. “I have a very busy day today, Miss, uh … Perhaps you’d prefer to speak to one of the other councillors or the federal spokesperson who’s handling the barricade communications.”

  “No, no, Big Bob has asked for you specifically, Mayor Redhill. Over the past few weeks dozens of callers have left your name on the Who’s Telling It Like It Is Today Hotline. That’s how we pick our guests.”

  “Big Bob asked for me?”

  With the phone pressed to her ear, Peg pulls herself up in bed until she can see reflected in the dresser mirror her own furry head, its skin a grid of bedsheet creases and wrinkles. A post-menopausal Muppet. Now there’s a woman who looks like she tells it like it is.

  “Okay,” she says, realizing that her council will be voting to sanction her while she’s doing a radio interview. “Why not? You can reach me at this number.”

  And with that she swings her feet to the floor, takes a deep, solidifying breath, searches for a missing slipper, hobbles to the bathroom, and splashes water on her face. It would be nice to have a close friend to call up, to commiserate about her misstep at the press conference and ask, Whaddya think? about the radio show. Ella Bain, for instance, who has a genius for understanding what looks good to others.

  They were friends once, she and Ella. Shared bottles of wine and recipes for low-fat brownies and summer salads. They had long conversations, sometimes on the phone with sobbing (Peg’s) or over coffee in one of their kitchens (Ella’s, most often). They’d meet in the park behind the United Church, both of them chasing after young boys who walked early, those first steps morphing instantly into running, climbing, and throwing rocks, toys, their bodies at the world and each other. Ella, pale and pretty and already pregnant with Stephanie, never seemed to break a sweat. Peg had smarted at their differences – her new friend’s fine bones, orderly modern home, enterprising husband. Peg felt she was all flesh, disorganized, suddenly conscious of the abandoned cars on their property outside of town. Brad was still around then, hollering at her late into the night.

  Husbands. The dull anguish of marriage. Little boys who couldn’t distinguish d from b. The cost of leaking roofs, and the neighbour’s hot-tub shenanigans. They talked about everything. But mostly, really, she talked while Ella had nodded like a social worker, sometimes using lines such as How did that make you feel? – which made Peg suspect, if only for a fleeting second, that Ella’s sincerity was an act.

  It was success that spoiled things between them. Brad died, and instead of crumpling, Peg blossomed. She found herself a businesswoman and then a city councillor. There was less to cry about to her friend and more to laugh at. But even though Peg’s calendar was busting with new responsibilities, it was Ella who became impossible to pin down for lunch or a cup of coffee. Too busy with Las’s swim meets. Renovating the kitchen. Big tobacco diversification project. By the time Peg was first elected mayor, her friend’s retreat was complete. Ella would wave to her in passing, then, a few years later, barely wave at all.

  By seven-fifteen a.m., Las is underwater. All the voices in his head – his mother’s, the new coach’s, the old coach’s, people cheering from the stands. Don’t let yourself get out of shape over the summer. He’d thought the scholarship would eat up pressures, make him feel free. Instead the university swim team sent a program of recommended summer workouts: swimming, running, weightlifting, stretching, more swimming. There is a website to track personal bests.

  He prefers the outdoor community pool to the Olympic-sized indoor one. There, at least, he knows it’s summer. His mother had tsk-tsked. You can’t work on your times if you’re not using a regulation-sized pool, she said as he brushed by her in the kitchen. Even in the early morning there is no shade on the pool’s surface. The reflected light makes his eyes squint. The water is tepid, sliding off him like oil. His arms windmill, his legs kick, and he can’t get far enough fast enough. The drills are memorized, but on each lap he argues with himself about the math. This pool is fifteen metres shy of Olympic length. It is easier to calculate in his head if he rounds the difference down to ten.

  Water is supposed to be the place where he can’t be reached. The way his body slides is a kind of flying, getting him above and beyond the things he can’t say aloud: how he has no hunger for any of the things his parents, his teachers, the other kids at school expect – a good job in a big city, car, condo, girlfriend, investment portfolio. The wetness tricks his body, cools him as he works, distances him from his own exertion, allows him to go farther than he should. Submerging his head in the pool’s bell-jar protection, its muffled noises, its Bimini blue, its softened light, he can outpace them all.

  But something has shifted. His rhythm is off, and when his head dips below the surface, all the noises are still there, his new worries slipping under the water’s surface with him, edging past, reaching the wall before him. He isn’t halfway through the drills when he stops adding in the extra laps to compensate for the shorter pool. Just today, he tells himself. Tomorrow I will start doing the entire thing. When he pu
lls himself from the water at eight a.m., slinks into the dressing room, he’s already a cheat, wringing concessions from the next day’s workout.

  His hair still wet, Las arrives at the back of the Redhill house from the alley, locks his bike, presses his nose against the basement window, and taps lightly. “What the fuck, Gordo. Wake up, man.”

  During the last week of classes the humidity crawled inside the school walls and everything clung – shirts to skin, girls to boys, girls to girls, all of them to the chairs, the walls they’ve spent the past four years despising. And the chatter about grad dates, summer jobs, moving into residence, and buying shelves from IKEA elongated horribly into student loans, career tracks, making real money. It made Las itchy. He couldn’t pretend he was happy or excited about anything other than getting away from his parents. And now he wants only to get fucked up.

  Las straightens and walks around the house to the carport Gordo built himself to keep the bird shit off his truck. Think my ma the mayor could swing a place in the burbs with a garage? No, we gotta live in a gingerbread house with nowhere to fuckin’ protect my ride. But the carport is empty. Two bundled newspapers lie on the step, from a throw that fell shy of the porch. Las picks them up to slip inside the screen door. NATIVES DEFIANT: MAYOR FACES SANCTION reads one headline through its plastic wrapper. His thumb presses down, creases the page. Defiant was a word for fast cars, marines, raunchy rock.

  Where the fuck is Gordo?

  There weren’t many places to hide out in this town. Las hoofs it from the Redhills’ to Doreville’s small civic square, at the end of its downtown strip. The early heat is like steel wool against his lungs. He dips into the alleys, works the rears of buildings until he comes to the back lot of the library. Sure enough, he spots his friend’s distinctive red truck with its gleaming chrome grill and the oversized tires with custom rims that seem goofy to Las, though he’d never say as much. Metres away, Gordo leans against the yellow Tyndall-stone building, smoking a joint to its nub. Las watches him for a moment, the picture of a small-town loser, before walking into the deserted parking lot.