Smoke River

Home > Other > Smoke River > Page 19
Smoke River Page 19

by Krista Foss


  The negotiator pushes her glasses up her nose, takes off her blazer to reveal a cap-sleeved blouse. Her arms look soft and pale. She forgets to thank the elder. She turns and whispers loudly for someone to fetch her a juice. A man returns empty-handed; the juice has run out. “What, no juice?” says the negotiator. She calls a recess to remedy her thirst.

  Helen finds Shayna and presses a paper bag into her hands, another care package from Ruby: two tuna sandwiches, a carton of milk, fresh strawberries, and yogurt. Shayna has felt her aunt watching her these past few days, making a meditation of what she eats, counting the calories and nutrients to herself as if they were rosary beads. Another woman with a child in her belly would not let herself go hungry, would not sleep outside half the week under stars muddied with barrel-fire smoke. She folds the bag closed, her appetite vanquished by worry, stores it in her satchel, and squeezes the older woman’s arm. “I have to catch someone first,” she says, and she is up.

  They can’t talk about Cherisse, not yet. Shayna wants her niece to come home to the reserve. She has no trust in the medical system, in any institution. Shay will wrap her in old hunter’s blankets. She will lie her in the sun by the window, sponge the young woman’s wounds with witch hazel, and feed her bowls of broth. Together they will beat the walls, burn her clothes, cut her hair. One day Cherisse will be strong enough to cast out the spirit of her tormentor. She will sing again. Her hair will grow back.

  Standing outside the hotel lobby with a cigarette drawn to his lips, Louis Greene, bronzed and vacant-eyed, straightens so his big chest stretches his dress shirt when Shayna approaches. She is not surprised by the trombone slide of his look, from her lips and down her neck to the first button of her fresh blouse. Her face feels tight from weeks in the sun. She offers a reluctant smile, clears her throat, tries to sound authoritative. “We need to talk,” she says. “Two of your men got drunk last night. They rode their ATVS over the lawns of residents out on County Road 13.” He nods his head but offers nothing.

  “The clan mothers forbade alcohol and drugs at the reclamation.” She retrieves a folded newspaper from her satchel, shoves it, headline first, into his pitted face. “That little incident made the newspapers. It makes us look bad.”

  His smile is more like a wince of pain. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes, holds it out to her.

  Shayna looks at the skin of his forearms, strangely scratched, as if he’s wrestled a frightened animal. She grabs his wrist, turns it over, and examines the marks. “You get into a fight with a wildcat?” she asks. “Or a girl?”

  Louis tips his head back and laughs. “Something like that.” He lets his hand be held like a hopeful boy, as if he were giving her a gift.

  Shayna lets go of the large fist, the white package falling with it. She recognizes the label. “You on Barton’s payroll?”

  Louis lights up his cigarette, leaves the question unanswered, his smile arching upward.

  “I need you to discipline your men. We already have an image problem,” she says.

  He laughs again, stretches his neck.

  Another small story in the Interlake Post that morning quoted a Doreville citizen who claimed to have seen two natives, their ball caps and kerchiefs replete with Warrior insignia, sniffing gasoline and torching a police car in the early morning hours on the day of the raid. She wants to ask Louis about that. A police spokesperson said they have fingerprints and footprints. She wants to ask Louis what else travelled with them from the Seaway besides tents and sleeping bags, ill-fitting dress shirts. Shayna imagines milled steel, cold as chromium plate, the colour of a moonless night. She wants to ask Louis about her niece. Did he see her? What does he know? Those scratches. But now more people from the negotiating room are outside; she senses Elijah Barton circling closer to them, curious.

  “This conflict will not be won with public relations,” Louis says. “It will be won with history, the history everybody forgets.” He reaches out to her and gently gathers a few strands of her hair in his large hand, rubs it between his thumb and forefinger, as if he has always done this, as if he needn’t ask.

  Her body springs to attention. She does not want to feel desire. She wills herself not to. “Guns,” she says, finding the right words. It is almost a whisper. “You can’t use them. You can’t bring them out. We’ll lose any goodwill we have.” If he places his skin against hers, a slight brush of his roughness against her fretful dampness, she will make him bleed. So it will be anger he remembers her for, not pleasure. “Even the rumour that you are armed, and all these poverty groups and unions and environmentalists will hightail it outta here.”

  “Panama, Estonia, Ireland, Persia … You know, they recognized our sovereignty in the nineteen-twenties,” Louis says. His eyes look beyond her. “We had our own passports.”

  “I need you to promise …” Shayna calculates. A swift kick to the nuts, a gouge to the eyes. She wants maximum pain with a minimum of time for him to react. She is surprisingly fleet under pressure. A jackrabbit. Just try, she thinks. Give me the excuse.

  “Since they started to take our land, since they started to impose their elections, control our money, we’ve resisted,” says Louis. “This reserve resisted! Since when did public relations matter more than peace, power, righteousness?”

  “But you don’t need guns.”

  “An enemy’s foot is in our country.”

  Shayna slams a heel into the ground, raising a small cloud of dust. Now heads have turned in their direction. She lowers her voice. “I know my fucking history. Guns aren’t our history.”

  Louis drops her hair. He looks at her sadly. “There are no guns, sister. What kind of fool do you take me for?”

  She feels her chest collapse. Her eyes fall to his forearms again. “You should have somebody look at those scratches.”

  The negotiations resume, but now the room is warmer, as if the government aides have cut the air conditioning in an attempt to hasten the proceedings. Jackets are abandoned, sleeves rolled up. The water jugs are passed around, depleted. No one comes offering refills.

  When the next elder gets up to speak, Antonia Taylor raises her hand to stop him. She pulls herself close to the microphone. She reads a long section from the Indian Act, then another from the Constitution and a select passage from the U.N. Charter. “We are bound by these charters, conventions, and legislation to negotiate with democratically elected governments. The band council is the only legitimate leadership recognized by the federal government. And so I must ask, is there a member of the band council here?”

  Disappointment, like a reprimand, makes the elders flatten their lips. Shayna turns. Chief White occupies one of the chairs designated for spectators, set up behind the half of the U-shaped table across from the negotiator and her team. He looks smug, expectant. She watches Clarence take off his glasses and wipe them, avoiding her glare. He is about to speak, to hijack the proceedings, to poach authority from the elders and her – this much is clear. Shayna stands up, walks to where he sits beside the chief, and blocks his view of those across the table. If he’s going to betray them, he will have to do it looking right at her. She hears uncomfortable coughs, legs crossing and uncrossing, whispers on each side of them.

  Clarence puts his glasses back on and she sees that his eyes are tired, his face puffy, his vigour paid out steeply to city living. He smiles at her, a smile that has remnants of love for her, a hint of the vulnerability he showed when they were at their best.

  Antonia Taylor leans into the microphone again and repeats, “Okay, folks, one more time for good measure. Is there a member of a democratically elected band council here?” The federal negotiator looks squarely at Chief White. He turns to Clarence with an impatient gape.

  “Shayna, you need to move,” Clarence says, leaning forward. “You heard her; they won’t negotiate with you. You can’t just keep standing in the way of things.”

  Off to one side, Shayna sees that Elijah Barton has also lef
t his seat. Now he is kneeling, whispering to the clan mothers as if he were one of them.

  “Standing in front of things can be very effective, Clarence,” she says, using the same half whisper he used with her. “You might try it sometime. Take a break from shuffling papers.”

  Behind her comes the sound of amplified throat clearing. Shayna turns to see Linda Goodleaf at the microphone again. Behind her is Barton, smiling, with his arms crossed. “I have a question for you, Miss Taylor,” Linda says.

  There is a moment when it appears that the negotiator will disallow this. An aide whispers in her ear; a reluctant nod follows.

  “Are you an elected member of the government?”

  The room becomes very quiet.

  “I was with a previous government,” the negotiator answers.

  “But are you now?”

  “No,” she says, the salt of resentment in her voice. “But I am the hired representative of a democratically elected government.”

  The clan mother smiles with kindness. “We too are representatives, Miss Taylor, but we won’t receive any payment for being here. We represent the peoples of the reclamation. And I suggest that we have arrived here very democratically. A vote was taken among all those involved, and they asked us to be their representatives. There is no one else in this room, or on the reserve, who can claim such support.”

  The negotiator forces a smile. Again she looks at Chief White, as if appalled by his truancy, his silence. Clarence whispers to him. The chief mutters, casts his eyes downward, and Shayna returns to her seat.

  A sharp sound exits from the negotiator’s pursed mouth – a tongue-flattened expletive. Then her hands are up and she calls for another recess, exiting to the lobby with a cellphone stuck to her ear, swatting papers at the aides who approach as if they were gnats. “Is there any juice in this godforsaken place or what?” she snaps at one.

  Linda Goodleaf clasps Elijah’s hands. He beams triumphantly. Shayna realizes she will have to congratulate him. It makes her nervous, his easy move into being their redeemer. She opens the paper bag from Ruby. Finally she’s hungry, as she hasn’t been in weeks. The tuna sandwiches are warm but the celery in them still crunches, and there is just enough mayonnaise, salt, and pepper. Shayna devours them greedily, one after the other, before anyone can approach her and she feels compelled to share.

  The break stretches into an hour. Then it’s announced that negotiations have ended for the day. The elders who did not get to speak put their names on tomorrow’s list, despite the entreaties of the aides to wait for the official agenda.

  Shayna finds Clarence sitting alone in the hotel courtyard, and she watches him for a moment. He’s waiting for her, she sees that. He is waiting not to say anything in particular but to restore some ease between them.

  During their marriage she had a talent for righteousness. Pete-Pete arrived on the fifth-floor maternity ward of the Pemcoe hospital, during a long summer night when her water wouldn’t break and the doctors and nurses became irritated with her stillness, her refusal to shout or even pant. The quietness she demanded for her son’s birth was stolen by the heart monitor, its tiny boops and infuriating whoosh like muffled waves. She was struck dumb by the epidural, the cold intrusion of forceps, the yank and the long tear, the blood that flowed and flowed, the bruised, dented head of her baby covered in the alien green of meconium. Her righteousness ripened, as red as the bedsheets became with her blood. Sick from the Demerol, she was barely able to hold up her head as the nurses brought in her swaddled son, pink-brown and already too strong for her, eager to suckle. How their lips curled with scolding at the sight of the blood-soiled bed, when the child they pressed to her veined breast was so soft and clean. The coldness of such a place: the way they eyed her skin and asked her where the baby’s father was – Clarence was in court, winning his first case – and cooed over the woman in the next bed, whose name was Kayla and whose side of the room was crowded with flowers, fruit baskets, stuffed bears holding Mylar balloons, and relatives who blocked the shared bathroom.

  After Pete-Pete died, she made a backyard heap out of the photo albums, his little overalls and T-shirts, books, stuffed toys and plastic trucks. She poured kerosene over all of it, thinking that what wouldn’t burn would melt beyond recognition. When Clarence came running out the back door, yelling at her to stop, she let the lit match fall from her hands. He grabbed her wrist too late: every photo of the little boy was pulled into the tarry cone of smoke, sent to the spirits scented with tobacco and sweetgrass. This was what their mothers and fathers had done with grief, and so this is what they would do. When Clarence was out of the house again, Joe Montagne came by to take away Pete-Pete’s dresser and grown-up bed, the one she had found Clarence curled up in, the mornings after the fire. The room was repainted a depthless shade before dinnertime.

  She didn’t say her child’s name for six months; she didn’t tell stories about him. But Clarence clung hard to his memories, and so forced her to remember too. And what she remembered most was how it had been her, not him, who’d turned her head – really, it couldn’t have been longer than a few seconds – on a spring evening made hopeful with early heat, the scent of chokecherry blossoms. A moment of inattention. It was the thing he wouldn’t say aloud: she’d looked away and their little boy had died. Clarence never weakened, never laid the blame she felt. Instead she took their dirty dishes outside and smashed every one on the patio stones. Clarence went silent, and silence became its own accusation between them. When she finally stopped trying to make him say something, it was too late. He didn’t come home.

  Shayna startles Clarence by kneeling at his feet in the empty courtyard. She tells him about Cherisse. She tells him that their pretty niece, their wild runaway, their fledgling pop star, was found in a tobacco field, hurt in ways that make her lower her voice. She doesn’t say that the tobacco farmer who found Cherisse is her lover. Or that she carries that man’s child, a child that may turn out queerly fair, blue-eyed, with hair the shade of indecision. Or that she can’t imagine such a creature toddling behind her on the reserve – not like Pete-Pete, who had her hair, Clarence’s eyes, their skin. Instead she wonders aloud if the protest made her less watchful over Cherisse. It is a relief to say, finally, how she wishes she’d paid more attention. “I’m sorry,” she says and wipes her nose on her sleeve, and she says it again and again. Then she lays her head on Clarence’s lap and he bends over, holds her close.

  CHAPTER 16

  Her laptop balancing on her knees, Stephanie is in her bedroom in the early morning, writing vertical lists to get a grip on all the things that need remembering. And forgetting. Last semester, her Careers teacher, Ms. Ellwood, emphasized the usefulness of a vertical list, with proper parallel construction, to convey a series of ideas in a job presentation or even a longish cover letter.

  The positive things in my life right now can best be described as follows:

  • I am love in with Nate Bastine

  • I am helping Nate with something meaningful

  • I can blow off all of Brittany’s shit-tastic remarks and attitude at the dairy bar because with Nate in my life, none of it matters

  • I am losing weight without even trying

  • I have never known my parents to care so little about meals and housekeeping and where their kids are; the blockade is working!

  Stephanie pushes back in her chair, reads her list and smiles. She thinks of Nate’s hand snaking under her top, his fingers sandwiched by her waistband, his palm resting in the small of her back. The gentle pressure of a claim on her.

  But she has another list to tackle. The scratch on her brother’s neck is now faded and insubstantial, but it made her curious; she couldn’t stop looking for it whenever he sat down to eat or passed her in the hallway. A week earlier, when Las had stormed off from the dinner table, she wandered into his room and lifted up the clothing on his floor a piece at a time, all of it off-gassing beer and sweat, a microbial guy-compost. S
ecure in her top desk drawer are a camouflage kerchief and a black baseball cap with an insignia: a sun framing the face of an Iroquois Warrior. Filaments of blond hair are stuck to the cap’s Velcro strap. The cap and kerchief were shoved under his bed, and both reeked of gasoline. A sharper boy might have burned or buried them. Or noticed them missing.

  The negative things in my life right now can best be described as follows:

  • I think Las has done something, maybe even a few things, that could put him in jail

  • I can’t tell Nate until I am sure, but I don’t know how to be sure

  • I think my parents will hate me if they find out about Nate

  • I think they will hate me even more if I am right about Las

  • I can’t talk to anyone about it

  • I think I will go insane if I don’t talk to someone

  She opens a new file, creates two columns, and labels them MOM and DAD. Then she divides each of these columns into PROS and CONS. Under her Mom’s cons column, she writes WON’T BELIEVE ME. She thinks about it for a while and then writes the same under her dad’s cons column. There is no splurge of type, as when she does a free association exercise or a mind map. After twenty minutes, all she has been able to add is WILL BE EVEN COLDER TO ME under her mom’s cons column and COULD HURT HIS BUSINESS under her dad’s. There really are no pros.

  Stephanie goes to the kitchen, wrestles a new filter into the coffee maker, and dumps two big handfuls of dark roast coffee into the filter. It looks like the amount her father uses. She pulls two mugs from the cupboard. Into one she pours two heaping spoonfuls of sugar and a splash of cream, just the way her father prepares his. Waiting for the coffee to drip through, Stephanie wonders if this is her turning point, her moment of courage. She takes the second mug, fills it with black coffee for her mother. There is enough left for her, so she grabs a third mug and finds a tray. She envisions how things will go down. She will sit on the edge of her parents’ bed. All three of them will drink coffee and they will talk in the calm, logical way adults do.

 

‹ Prev