Smoke River (15 page)

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 pulls 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.

“Where you been, shithead?”

Gordo grins, takes a last, long drag of his butt until it is just an ember between the hard skin of his thumb and forefinger. He puts it out with his tongue. “Here and there. You?”

“Looking for you.”

“No shit.”

Gordo slides down the wall into a squat and Las joins him.

“Oh man, my head feels like it’s going to explode. My mom’s on my case constantly. Everyday there’s another email from the university. Register for this, pay for that. I can’t get a—”

“I’m not your therapist, faggot.”

Once, while they were sitting together drinking beers at the Legion, Gordo hit Las hard, right on the temple, knocked him out for no reason at all. Las missed a major swim meet while in the hospital waiting for test results to rule out a concussion. The lie he told never fully satisfied his mother, who thereafter stepped up her campaign for him to find better friends.

“What you got going on today, Gordo?”

“I’m doing it, dumb-ass. Shouldn’t you be in training, varsity-arse?”

“Done for the day.”

Las grabs a stick and starts skewering ants with it. He can’t imagine ever hitting Gordo first or even returning a punch. One counterstrike from him would be just the invitation his friend needed to go apeshit. And Gordo was a guy just one push away from apeshit.
That boy has no impulse control
, his mother said once.
He’ll go too far one day
. And Las remembers thinking she’d finally got something right.

Gordo saunters back to his truck. Las takes a deep breath, tries to stop the spinning in his head. He should leave. He should tell Gordo to go fuck himself. But, as always, there is some place his friend can take him that he can’t get to on his own.

Cherisse is pacing in the woods behind the smoke shack with her earbuds in. For the tenth time she focuses on the way Susie
Stonechild’s voice breaks, lingering on the phrase “her pain that no one knows” before her voice sails upward, floats into the refrain, “gravel dust ’tween painted toes.” It’s the cracked quality, the slight imperfection in Stonechild’s delivery that’s the heart of the song. Cherisse turns down the volume, replays it, and hears herself match the singer’s voice right up to “knows.” But what follows is not the same, nowhere near. She has the note right but not the ability to breach the note, to deliver its heartbreaking hitch. The song ends one more time and she punches the air in frustration.

She pulls out her earbuds and hears the door of the trailer slam shut. Joe Montagne shuffles from the trailer to the smoke shack, holding his aching jaw where there’s a molar he’s not dealing with, scratching his stubble with the other hand, and he doesn’t see her. “Cherisse. Cherisse, where are you? I can’t find the cash box.”

Cherisse pops in her earbuds and listens to the song again. She could get away with singing the note straight, but then what good would that be? All it would mean is that Susie Stonechild is an artist and she is a weak imitation, a pageant singer. Her father’s head bobs up like a prairie dog in front of her. The toothache must be getting to him; there are bluish pouches under his eyes, his lower lip droops. She’ll have to get a cup of coffee, a few Aspirins into him if he’s going to make it through the day.

“Cherisse, you drop-ass princess, get over here. It’s past nine. Where’d you stow the cash box? Day’s a wasting.” He turns and shuffles over to the smoke shack. She hears him discover the cash box, locked, on the third shelf. His head pops out. “Stupid, stupid! Cherisse, if Bobby Horse was sniffing around, he’d have this nicked for sure. Damn shack door is so flimsy.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She didn’t lock up properly the night before. She never does. All the cigarettes – cartons and boxes of them – are
still neatly stacked on the shack’s counters. It’s a pain dragging them back and forth to the trailer.

“For fuck’s sake, nobody wants to buy damp smokes. They have to overnight in the trailer, Cherry.”

Joe comes out of the shack carrying the cash box, plunks it on the picnic table outside.

Cherisse laughs. “Even you can’t smoke that throat-scalding shit. Aren’t those du Mauriers tucked in your back pocket?”

Cherisse makes to reach for them. Her father slaps her hand away. He opens the tin box stuffed with yesterday’s so-so sales, curses her again for leaving it in the shack all night, then counts the money, compares it to the piece of paper with his inventory list and does the math – twice. Cherisse considers simply telling him outright that she helped herself to a little something, but she hates to waste the possibility that he won’t figure it out.

His eyes narrow, his lips curl. “Thieving sow!”

She hoots. He taps his foot, lights up a smoke, appears to direct all his energy into sucking it ferociously. Already trucks are chewing up the highway; as they whiz by, she knows he is suffering a tremor of panic because she’s not waiting for them behind the smoke-shack counter, her long hair brushed out against her bare shoulders, a breakfast cigarette curling smoke between her shower-wet lips, her green eyes flashing, her bright teeth catching customers’ glances. She brings in business. She knows it. He knows it.

“Jesus Christ, Cherisse, you’re robbing me blind. What for this time?”

Cherisse smiles, leans down, and pulls up her pant leg, revealing a knee-high patent leather boot with a gold-tipped stiletto heel. “Makes me look like a rock star, huh?”

“How much?”

“You don’t want to know.”

She throws her head back with a taunting laugh, and then he’s yelling at her as if he’s stepped on a rusty nail. Cherisse slips inside the smoke shack and starts singing the Susie Stonechild line over and over again as she sets up for a day of charming money out of strangers.

“You’re bolder ’n shit,” Joe Montagne says, following her. “Like a pine marten. But scrawnier.”

“But with a pretty voice, nah?”

Say it
, she wills him.
Tell me I can turn a green peach gold with my voice. Tickle the dollars out of an old man’s fist. Get the fuck out of Dodge on the strength of my talent
.

“Your voice is a beauty, Cherry.”

She laughs, fills a jug with water – “I’ll make you coffee, Grumpy” – and she sees him smile despite the ache in his jaw.

Gordo pulls his truck alongside a ditch near a massive pin oak at the edge of Stercyx’s tobacco fields. He jumps out, reaches into the back for a grimy cooler, nods at Las to take a handle, and they climb down the small earth slope, carrying the beer-filled box to a spot that’s within spying distance of the barricade. That’s the plan so far: watch the natives, get shit-faced and even more pissed off.

“Here.”

They plant the cooler. Gordo lifts its lid, pulls out two beers, throws one at Las, then worms up the slope on his belly and digs his elbows into the dirt. “Can see the fuckers perfectly from here.”

Las steals a moment to press the coolness of the can into his forehead. Lately he feels anger in new places: the back of his head, crammed under his scapulas, tightening his hip flexors, his jaw. It’s a cramping, lactic acid kind of anger, numbing and
queerly alive. He imagines kicking the neighbour’s yappy Westie, pissing all over the banded cigars in the bottom drawer of his father’s desk, jumping that wannabe white boy Phil LaForme and hearing the satisfying crack of a nose, a wrist. He closes his eyes and guzzles the beer quickly for its analgesic effects.

The second and third, the same. It’s just past noon. The beer runs through him and he is up, fumbling among the young tobacco plants for a place to take a piss. He’s working a nice buzz, his neck already browned in the sun, his mouth clammy with alcohol.

Down at the end of the row of plants he sees a figure, bending and rising, stretching out a length of arm, drawing it back in sharply. Las steadies himself, focuses, and realizes he is looking at the back of Coulson Stercyx, planing a rectangle of wood steadied on two sawhorses.