Smoke River

by Krista Foss

  He drains his beer. For a second, Helen doesn’t blame him for wanting some relief from trouble, for wanting the pot of gold for his daughter, for wanting a chance to escape.

  “Promise me you’ll tell Cherisse. I only got so much time.” He wipes his mouth on his sleeve, just like his kid, gets up, props the fallen door against the outside wall. “I’ll be back tomorrow with some new wood for the frame.” Before stepping off the small porch, he turns again to her. “Promise?”

  Helen looks at him with a blank face. He’s a kind man who married a woman ill-equipped for happiness or motherhood. There is little she can guarantee him. Helen stands, watches through the kitchen window as Joe leaves, then picks out the wasp from between its panes, grabbing it delicately by its leg. She places it on her palm, where it lies on its back, kicking. “I can’t decide for you,” she says. But she blows ever so gently so it can get back on its feet again.

  Las is not sure where he is at first. It is dark. There is pounding. His temples. His foot. The sheets and pillowcases seem fresh, perfumed with fabric softener, still crisp from drying in the sun. But the air closes in around him, stuffy with the odours of antibiotic ointment and perspiration. The throb of his head, the throb of his foot, the familiar must of his room, the whispering coolness of the sheets make him want to cry. He feels a flutter under his palms, a frightened heartbeat that’s not his. Crying would only make the throbbing worse, would make it tighten around him like a chokehold.

  With the big toe of his undamaged foot, he explores the bandaged surface of the wrecked one. There is little feeling but he can tell that it is newly misshapen. There is a gap, and the gap is really an ending. He senses that the swelling has retreated to just below his knee, where it is hot and tender. He thinks he should feel sicker, but he doesn’t. Nothing can crawl all the way through to his insides.

  But there is something else that keeps him still, that makes him lie heavy on the bed. The shadow in his room. If he opens his eyes just a slit he can see it, smell it – faintly soapy, floral, and electric. His mother.

  “Las.”

  She has seen the small opening of his eyes. That acute vision so attuned to the smallest movement; even when he was a little boy, her awareness, her perceptiveness frightened the shit out of him.

  “Las.”

  He hates that she sounds so harmless, so trustworthy. Because he wants to believe that it’s that simple, giving himself over to the comfort of her protection.

  “Las, we need to talk.” Her voice wavers slightly.

  He is throbbing and numb, so he makes her into the mother he dreamed about as a boy, a double agent or the Queen of Darkness, a bird with a terrible wingspan. He puts her in line behind the numbness, the pain, the fading sensation of queasiness. She is just another shadow in a room crowded with them.

  Ella feels sick. She stands in her son’s room watching his prone body, and she sees a damaged work of art, something once beautiful that she had a hand in. There’s just no way, she thinks. There’s no way this boy did anything wrong. It’s circumstantial. A noose of inferences, weak associations, overactive imaginations. He got a little drunk with Gordo. The girl found her own trouble.

  “Las.”

  Her stomach is hot and acidic. A long shower has left her feeling dehydrated and she just wants to lie down. She wants to lie down beside her beautiful boy and forget what she has heard. Beside his bed, she leans towards him. Her eyes catch a small glint on the carpet.

  “Las.”

  Less than a week has passed since they brought him home from the hospital, Las half awake, his arms slung around their shoulders. Her husband could not look at her; she could not speak to him. They laid their son on his bed. She pulled off his top and shorts and brought in a bowl of warm, soapy water, washed the hospital’s chlorhexidine and iodine smells from his face, his limbs, while Mitch watched from the doorway. When she came to the boy’s injured foot, she started to cry softly, her tears dropping into the towel she was dabbing on his skin. She leaned and kissed her son’s foot at the ankle, above the gauze swaddling. Then Mitch was at her shoulder, yanking. That’s enough! He’s not fuckin’ Jesus. But he was innocent. He was misunderstood.

  “Las.”

  First impressions, the short brunette public relations professional said at a meeting with her and Mitch days earlier. You have two main issues and we’re going to get out in front of both of them right away – one publicly, one privately. She drew a rough flowchart, ripped it from a clean yellow pad, and handed it to Mitch. He didn’t do it, Ella interrupted. Just for the record. She wanted this woman in her prim summer shift and sling-back pumps to know she’d raised an exemplary young man, a good son. Mitch’s eyes blazed. The woman didn’t blink.

  What can a mother do but attend and hope? She’s done more. Too much, perhaps. But a woman such as she loves through action, through movement, through tossed car keys and extra bacon strips and credit cards, reassuring touches, and overindulgence. She doesn’t know what it means to withhold, to mete out praise or buy birthday gifts with parsimony. Still, what has her way wrought?

  “Las, we need to talk.”

  There is only silence. What has he done? Really, what? asked Mitch. They’ve stopped and started the conversation so many times under their breath, Mitch talking as if their son’s guilt is both assured and inconsequential. He had a few beers. He and a friend took a girl to a field. A native girl with a reputation bigger than the reserve she lives on. You don’t ruin a boy’s future over that. You don’t ruin ours.

  Ella bends beside the bed, kneads her fingers in the weave of carpet, where an object blinks at her. She pulls out something small and metallic and presses it into her palm. The pinch doesn’t register.

  Stephanie sprawls on her bed, wide awake, listening to murmurs down the hall. She touches the cheek that met her mother’s hand a week earlier. The morning after the slap, she’d gone back and forth to the mirror, waiting for the colour of crushed violets to seep under her skin, hoping for a lifted welt below her eye. But there was nothing, not even a redness that compared to rubbing her cheek hard with a hot washcloth. Her mother had a talent for getting away with bad behaviour.

  I see it, baby, Nate said that night. He smiled, traced his fingers under her eye. How dare she? How dare she touch my beauty’s face? They were naked on the soil between the tobacco stalks. The sand scratched her shoulders, the flesh of her hips. Night dew dripped from the tobacco leaves. Their bodies brushed up against the gummy stalks. Panting, Nate laid his head across her belly. Stephanie stroked his damp, matted hair, his skin the colour of earth against her paleness.

  You’re glowing again, he whispered in her ear. And she told him. The words crawled out of her like a parasite, something that didn’t belong inside her. Gordo in the basement. The scratch on Las’s neck. The girl’s broken nails. The kerchief and cap. Gordo’s custom tires. And the mayor gathering up her confessions like tinsel for a nest, ferrying them away before Stephanie came to her senses. That is why her mother slapped her, she told him. That is all of why.

  Nate’s skin cooled underneath her touch. His body went still. There was a cricket near her head, bleating like an alarm clock. Then Nate was on his feet, diving through the pockets of his pants, searching for a cigarette, leaving Stephanie’s skin damp where his warmth had been. She pulled herself up slowly, found her bra necklacing a tobacco plant, her panties underneath. He smoked and stared towards the blockade, then into the sky. And sometimes he pulled his hands to his head, as if he could keep it from breaking apart by squeezing and squeezing.

  You should have told me sooner. Fuck, you should have told me.

  She started to cry, and her tears bewildered her. Why had she told him at all? It’s not proof. It’s just suspicion and a few little details, she said.

  It’s worse than that, Stephanie, and you know it.

  He fell to the ground in a sprawl, then pulled up into a squat with his face right by her knees. Like a wrestler. She moved away from h
im.

  It’s okay, he said. I’m pissed, baby. Oh, I’m pissed. And I’m not going to lie – I want to kill those boys. I could fuckin’ run over there right now and strangle that bleached blond varsity champ asshole brother of yours. And enjoy watching him go blue.

  She crawled farther from him, still crying, and grabbed her T-shirt, her leggings, and yanked them on, the fabric dragging sand against the flesh of her underarms, her thighs. She got up.

  Steph, Steph, Nate said. He had his arms around her, tightening. Don’t go. Please don’t.

  The embrace loosened. He stepped away to finish his cigarette. Then he laughed. His head fell to his knees and he laughed. The tobacco leaves shook in the breeze with him, his mirth falling on them like hailstones. What are you doing? she said.

  He straightened again and she could see that he too was crying, or sweating, something shining his face like vegetable oil. It’s awful, but it’s better. You gotta see that. It is so much better. For my people. For the reclamation. For everything. It’s so much better that a white guy did this. His arms widened. He gestured her to come to them, to be enclosed, but Stephanie was frozen. He dropped his cigarette in the sand. It’s not better, Stephanie said.

  Now her hand is on the once-slapped cheek, kneading the skin for something lost. Her stomach fills with a clawing hunger. She’s been eating like an opossum, at night, whenever the chance to forage announces itself. Stephanie stands up, pulls at the waist of her pyjama bottoms, shakes them out, feels for extra roominess. There is that swoon again, that slightly blurry feeling that makes her lean on her desk for balance. She can’t think straight.

  Heading towards the stairway that leads to the kitchen, she hears a voice, small and plaintive, coming from her brother’s room.

  “Las.”

  Stephanie stops. The door is ajar. In the darkness, her brother’s misshapen foot dangles off the end of his bed. She sees the silhouette of her mother: her bent elbow, a hip jutting into the shadows.

  “Las.”

  Her mother’s voice sounds wobbly. Stephanie feels a pang of pity. That boy is breaking the poor woman’s heart. It makes her mad. It makes her spitting mad at all of them.

  “Las.”

  He is sleeping, or pretending to. In the house of the emotionally undead, her brother is the oblivious lamb. What a fucker. What a complete ass.

  “Las, we need to talk.”

  She hates the beaten sound of her mother’s voice. Don’t, she wants to counsel her. Don’t always prostrate before him. She opens the door farther just as her mother launches at her brother’s prone body. It is so demented that Stephanie freezes.

  “Talk to me! Did you do it? Did you do it? You owe me an answer!” Her mother is astride Las, shrieking and yanking his head by his hair, up and down. He moans but doesn’t fight back. She starts to slap his face. She starts to bawl. “You’ll wreck everything. Answer me! Did you do it?” His protests are indecipherable, gargled. Her mother pummels his chest with her fists.

  I should do something, Stephanie thinks. Her palms sweat. Her lips tremble. Where the fuck is Dad? She considers running to the stairs.

  Her mother jumps off the bed, but she is still a fury of movement, using her heel to thump Las’s side. “Tell me you didn’t do it. Tell me! Tell me, you coward! You self-sabotaging prick!”

  Then it happens. Her mother gives a hard, swift kick to Las’s injured foot where it hangs over the edge of the bed. His scream is high and girlish.

  Stephanie launches into the room, grabs for the waistline of her mother’s pants, and pulls. All those years of running have made the woman’s body lean and wired for fury. Her mother swings around, shadowboxing, one fist unfurling into slaps. Stephanie ducks, wraps her arms around her mother’s small hips, and pulls her into the hallway by falling backwards. Her mother’s other clenched fist opens and releases something, a metallic twinkle. It bounces off Stephanie’s cheek.

  They both sit there saying nothing, inhaling shakily. Las’s moans go quiet. Stephanie can see dust in the shaft of light the bathroom sends into the hallway. It moves upwards, defying gravity. She stares at it, trying to understand. There’s a suck of air, the sound of a door opening on the main floor. The dust races towards it.

  “Ella, where are you?” Her father, moving quickly up the stairs to them. The sound of his winded breathing gets louder. Her mother drops her hands, slouches. They both stare at the object on the carpet beside Stephanie’s hip. It is an earring, sterling and delicate. A dream catcher with dangling silver feathers, belonging to neither of them.

  “Ella, there you are. Didn’t you hear me? We got it, baby. We got it!”

  Her mother is slumped on the floor of the hallway, curling away from the light. Her father grabs Ella’s shoulders, pulls her to standing, looks into her eyes. His face is waxy with mania and he’s panting.

  “Ella, the government is making an offer. A big one – all of our money back. Enough to pay off the debts, plus our expected return. And more. Are you listening?”

  He pulls her into an embrace. She does not lift her arms. Her father is oblivious. He speaks into his wife’s coppery hair, kisses it wildly, whole mouthfuls of it sticking to his lips, and fails to register the woman’s inertness.

  “It’s over, baby,” he says. His voice cracks. “This nightmare is over. There is some justice in this fucked-up place after all.”

  The movement was like a flutter of wings, too fast to say for sure what it was – bat or bird, startled into flight. It was a happy surprise to be grabbed, to feel his hair pulling from the roots, the sharp anguish of his scalp, the uncomfortable crack in his neck as she pulled his head. The sheer physical strength of his mother has always been a wonder to him. Her slaps cut hard across his face; she had an athlete’s instinct for the physics of it, the tight weave of her fingers, the torque of her hips and shoulders, the way her hand connected with his flesh where she could deliver the greatest force. It would have been a relief if she’d just killed him. What a ride that would be – his mom beating him to death!

  Las had heard his mother cry out, but he turned off her words. He was glad she was pissed off, that she’d finally seen through him. He was glad there was no going back. Where could they go, now that she’d pummelled him hard, now that he’d felt her sharp knuckles break skin under his clavicle?

  It took him a half-second to realize that her weight was gone from his middle and the thumps along his side were from her foot. A thrill shot up to his throat – she really wanted to hurt him. She was going for it, that crazy bitch. When her foot connected with his injured one, he ceased to exist but for the pain. It broke him up. It shredded him. He deserved it, that much was true. He deserved every bit of it.

  Then splash, he was back in the pool. There was the cool, enveloping embrace of water. His arms in front, opening, pulling him through. His feet like motor blades, scything, scything. How whole he was there, all power and beauty. And the silence. The way the silence relieved him of being anything other than movement.

  CHAPTER 24

  Cherisse walks to the banks of the Smoke in a thin cotton nightie, the atomizer cool against her palms. Her feet are bare, and the soil, swollen with rain, squishes up between her toes, stains the edges of her soles. She hears murmurs all the time now. Now that Shayna comes to the house, the low throb of talking crowds out the sounds of midnight and late afternoon’s drowsy heat. It’s a small house. Discontent makes its thin walls hum. She hears words, fearful words, the held breath of Ruby’s sobs, the plosives of Shayna’s frustration, Helen’s quiet protest. Their murmurs fill her ears and she can’t shake them out. Money or justice. Money or justice. She won’t face the choice they would have her face, the one they can’t agree on themselves.

  The way you float, her mother said, you lie on your back, spread yourself wide, and you trust. Let the river do the work. The August she turned six, the last they spent together, her mother told her the story of a beautiful Mohawk princess captured by an enemy and held i
n their camp. In her captivity, the girl collected glass and shells to bead an intricate belt.

  Cherisse unties a headscarf from her wrist and lays it across a flat-faced boulder, places her atomizer on top, and searches the shore until her hands finds a rock with a beakish angle. Both her hands bring the rock smashing against the atomizer, again and again until the glass falls away from the gold-plated neck and puffer in small, ragged jewels with a fine, shiny dust underneath.

  In the story, the best of the enemy’s warriors were about to portage across the river to ambush her people’s encampment, when the princess slipped into the great river, wearing her belt, and floated on her back. The sun reflected from the beads. Their dance of colour and blinding rays bewitched the warriors. Instead of crossing the river, they put their canoes in the water and followed the beautiful lights, the witching lights. The princess understood the river’s tempers, but the enemies of her people did not. She floated into faster-moving water, her belt glinting, and the canoes followed. The current pulled her to the edge of a waterfall and carried her over. Branches tore her belt and scattered the beads, while her body fell to the rocks. It was too late for the warriors to change course. They too were dragged over the waterfall. Her people were saved.

  See the glint in the water, the way the sun makes diamonds in the river that are too bright for the eyes? her mother said. That is where the princess went to live; that is the princess’s unravelled belt. Her mother would reach a hand into the river and sprinkle water over Cherisse’s neck as she floated. Look at your pretty beads, she’d say. My princess.

  She pulls out the atomizer’s metal bits and tosses them into the forest, then wraps the broken glass in the headscarf, balls it in her hand, and wades into the water. The river in August is a warm brownish slumber that barely moves at the edges, so Cherisse side-strokes out to the middle depths, where there’s a weak current.