Smoke River (2 page)

In the crack of morning light peeking through the bedroom’s custom-made blind, Ella Bain notices a small figure quit the Stercyx farmhouse. Who but a lover leaves at such an hour? She sits on the edge of the bed and tries to focus, but there is no more detail to squeeze from the bright morning. It is none of her business. Plenty of lovers must have come and gone in all the years Stercyx has lived alone at the farmhouse, but this is the first she’s witnessed. She wishes she could see what kind of woman he would take to his bed. Certainly there was plenty of speculation around Doreville when he first moved back. She listens to her husband’s contented breathing behind her, leans closer to the windowpane, just for a second. Then she pulls herself away. If she rushed into her running gear, took her normal route in reverse, she might get a look at the mystery woman. But that was a lot of effort. What would it be like to sleep in? Better still,
what if she slipped her hands under the drawstring of Mitch’s pyjamas and started the day sticky with saliva and semen, her stale mouth ransacked by his stale tongue. She imagines Coulson’s salt still on the skin, the lips of the woman leaving his farmhouse. Would a small change in routine redraw her life? She turns to look at her husband, curled into a cetaceous hump on the other side of the bed, and wonders if she has a duty to risk it. And then why it feels like a risk. Or a duty.

Just recently, after a second glass of wine, Marguerite from her book club confessed she makes love with her husband every morning.
Doesn’t it become routine
? Ella asked. Marguerite – who pronounces her name with a tarty French accent, though she can’t speak a word of the language – curled up in her chair and smiled like some sort of feral cat.
No, darling. I don’t think I could start the day without it now
.

If only she could see his face within the swaddling of bedsheets, she might press her cheek against his neck, probe his ear with her tongue, discover if they still have the imagination for unscheduled pleasure. But Mitch shifts jerkily, nests more bedding around him, and settles into a phlegmatic, gape-mouthed morning snore. Ella turns again to the blinds; the sunlight pokes around their edges, sulphur-bright, slightly hectoring. The figure that left Stercyx’s door has disappeared. Ella heads to the washroom.

Twenty-five minutes after her feet hit the pavement, she leaves behind the figure eights of houses with their backyard gazebos and pergolas, their saltwater swimming pools and engineered waterfalls, routes around downtown Doreville, and arrives back on Highway 3, near where it cleaves the Stercyx farm from the strafed two hundred acres of the development. Her project. The western and southern edges have been calved from the reserve by a winding creek that empties into the river; the northern boundary is marked by a county road leading into the reserve.
Mitch doesn’t want her haunting the new development. But she is unsettled by the woman leaving Stercyx’s farmhouse, by Mitch’s snoring, the way he dodges her questions about the development like a welterweight. And the new billboard is up. She’s curious to see it.

The sun turns the asphalt into crushed crystals, and Ella, who dreads more fine lines pleating her eyes, wishes she’d worn sunglasses. She turns away from the brightness and notices Stercyx’s handiwork – the neatly tilled furrows, the tender green of immature tobacco plants – keeping pace with her on her right. Tobacco. Mitch wanted it in the name of the new development, but Ella balked. Her immigrant parents had picked, stitched, and graded the crop. During its harvest, her father’s skin was freckled with the leaves’ tar and her mother’s ankles swelled. Tobacco juice stained their fingertips yellow-brown despite the rigours of nightly scrubbing. At night they dragged their humiliation and grit across their rented bungalow’s threshold. And Ella left out the back door.

Tobacco Valley Estates
, Mitch said.
It’s the history of the place
. She shook her head, crossed her arms.
They’re using it in all the new men’s colognes
. He wasn’t going to let it drop.
And besides, smoking’s cool again. It’s got a whole retro masculine appeal
. That was going too far.
I’ll take every cent of my money out of the development
, she told him. His cheeks had gone flaccid.
Geez, Ella, lighten up. You can’t go making ultimatums every time you don’t get your way
.

Two weeks later, the development was christened Jarvis Ridge Country Club Estates. She’d found history they could both live with: the surname of an early colonial administrator; a nod to the glacial silt and sand that had forged the interlake delta, made it decent enough for agriculture, ideal for a small golf course and a man-made lake.
You
can
change the history of a place
, Ella thinks,
with the right packaging
.

The billboard is within view, but Ella doesn’t raise her eyes until she is close enough to take it all in. She slows her pace, looks up, and the images come into focus.
Let them do their job
, Mitch had insisted. But Ella had ideas. And now she wishes she’d been more forceful. The gigantic sign depicts a slim, athletic, vaguely thirty-something couple.
Too big
, Ella thinks. The woman a bland, over-plucked yoga mummy. The man with a motivational speaker’s klieg-light smile, pomaded hair. Each holds a flute of sparkling wine.
We’re not selling houses
, Mitch insisted.
We’re selling people a vision of themselves
. But as she comes to a stop underneath it, Ella wonders whether people don’t have more originality and better taste. The billboard couple hover over a monoculture of dirt welted with tire tracks. An 80%
PRE-SOLD
! banner hangs over a corner of the sign. Mitch has assured her that, while not quite true in the purest sense, it meets industry standards.

Realizing anew how much of her carefully hoarded, smartly invested money buoys the mortgage on the land makes her breath suddenly shallow. She’s supplied the regular cash flow by doing the thankless missionary work of the Doreville and District Tobacco Diversification Office for the past two decades. She saved 10 per cent of her yearly earnings even as successive governments tired of the office’s mandate, clawed back funding, first for educational conferences, then publications, then secretaries, and finally leases, leaving Ella as a one-woman operation with an Execushare cubicle above the strip mall’s EB Games emporium. And when one day Mitch pointed to a new listing for the property across from Stercyx’s farm, raised his eyebrows, and said,
Whaddya think?
she’d surprised herself as much as him when she said yes. Yes for a project that would make Doreville an estimable, desirable place to live. Yes to making money faster than her more conservative investments could. Yes to being part of something constructive, forward-looking, tangible.
Now, take a deep breath. Trust that I’ll take care of this
, Mitch had said.
Because
I’m the one who knows real estate
. In the first several months she’d said yes to that too, she really had. But now her money has become an acreage of mud, a smarmy billboard, a bunch of unanswered questions cooling their shared bed.

Ella adjusts her eyes to the glare coming off the paved highway, unhitches the water bottle from her belt, and takes a long draw. And there it is, another thing that’s amiss. A dump truck has turned into the Jarvis Ridge development’s entrance but has not advanced beyond the first few metres of dirt road. The driver and his passenger have clambered out. Ella hears alarmed voices. She moves closer, but there is the problem of how close she should get, how involved. Already she can hear Mitch’s reproach, as if she were breaking a trust.

Two women are standing with their arms linked and their legs apart, blocking the development’s entrance. Ella’s mouth dries. She leans forward, brings her head to her knees, calms her laboured breath. Sweat slides from her forehead and chin.

And what comes into her head, as it hangs in the morning heat, is not a strategy for this unexpected situation but a vision of a room in her home, corridor-shaped and banked with windows, set off from the rest of the house like a design hiccup and used for overflow during all those years she and Mitch spent making the rest of their home a showpiece. It had never occurred to Ella that she had plans for the room, that she’d integrated it into some imagined future self who’d make things, add beauty to the world. Not until Mitch bought an awkward antique railway partners desk, plopped it in the middle of the space, and winked when he found her standing in the doorway with her arms crossed.
Squatter’s rights
, he said.
I need a new office
. Ella has told herself that Mitch’s use of the back room is temporary, until the development gets into full swing and he rents something in town, as she does. Except “full swing” is taking a while.

At this very moment Mitch will be slipping on his khakis, dusting his clubs, rehearsing his pitch to the hesitant city couple he is to meet at a sister development, the Northbrook Golf and Lifestyle Community, to sell them on their future happiness in Jarvis Ridge. He needs the model home finished by its planned completion date. He needs the lots cleared and staked. They both need this success.

“Ladies, I’m going to give you one more minute to get the fuck out of our way,” says the truck driver, a ruddy young man in a T-shirt. “Then I’m getting back into my truck and I’m driving through.”

“This is disputed land. You won’t be getting through today. Or tomorrow. Not unless the dispute is settled.”

Ella recognizes that the older woman who answers him is Helen Fallingbrook. For the past three years Ella has bought a ticket for the annual powwow from Helen. True, she never intended to go. But surely this was evidence of her overall friendliness towards the natives, some diplomatic immunity she can leverage.

The other man, bowlegged and beer-bellied, pulls off his cap and throws it to the dirt at their feet, raising a rainbow of dust. “You have to be fucking kidding! What is with you people? Didn’t win enough at bingo?”

Disputed
, Ella thinks.
Disputed
. Surely not. Mitch assured her that every clause, every rider, every possible contingency or claim has been scrutinized, plugged.
Airtight
, he said.

His cap abandoned in the dirt, his face red, the older man climbs back into the dump truck, this time on the driver’s side, and pumps the gas so that it whinnies like an upset mare. His younger co-worker scrambles into the passenger’s seat. The truck edges towards the women. They pull their joined arms taut and thrust their faces forward. The woman who holds Helen’s hand looks around Ella’s age. She is radiant in the loose
man’s shirt she wears, the weathered blue jeans, her beauty free and unmannered. For a second, something hard and sore suspends itself in Ella’s chest.
It’s her
, she thinks.
That’s Stercyx’s woman
. The idea feels like a vice, makes it impossible to think. This other woman laughs once, brief and throaty.
No, surely not
, Ella decides, and she’s surprised to feel so relieved. Stercyx loves his land with a kind of chivalric fidelity; he would not keep company with someone so blatantly disrespectful of property rights.
And this is baldly unjust
, Ella thinks.

She’s one of the tolerant ones. She smiles at Bobby Horse even when he is staggering drunk in the middle of town. If her neighbours express discomfort with the natives, Ella reminds them how they all buy their cheap smokes up on Highway 3. She forces herself to read the tidbits of history tucked into news coverage: treaty rights that date back to the 1780s, stalling by government lawyers. Migod, she even turns her dial to the aboriginal station now and again. She loves Susie Stonechild! – she can sing a few bars of her new single!

The dump truck inches forward. Helen and the younger woman are both silent now, but Ella’s pulse yammers. Something unsavoury is about to take place, the kind of incident that could taint the project, make it seem unsteady or leaky. Suddenly she is very much interfering, in a way that Mitch wouldn’t sanction, in a way that puts her whole body between a moving truck and two hand-holding native women.

“Stop! Stop!”

Ella’s right hand slaps the hood of the truck and she looks through the windshield to catch the driver’s eyes. She sees what a surprise she is – the trim redhead in jogging gear suddenly leaping in front of his custom grillwork. When he turns off the engine, she turns around to face the two women.

“Helen, we know each other. This is vandalism. It’s illegal. And I want it to stop.”

She regrets using the word
vandalism
. She tries to calm herself, keep her manner open and receptive. Helen Fallingbrook is a small woman, corded with hard work and decency.

“What’s legal and illegal is a bit tricky, eh, Mrs. Bain,” she says.

“Helen! This is private property. It belongs to my husband and me. We’re
good
people who have a lot of money invested in it!” Worms of panic begin twitching under her eyelids.

“It belongs to us,” says the other woman.

Ella looks towards the unfamiliar voice. “Do I know you?”

Ella holds out her hand, but it hangs unmet in the air. The woman looks Ella up and down, makes her wish she’d worn older gear. Her Lycra tank, the coral running shorts are so new, so obnoxiously bright and pricy.

She turns back to the older woman. “Helen?”

“I think you should go, Mrs. Bain. I think you are out of your depth.”

Ella feels the flush on her face. What to do, what to do?

She’d tried not to be rankled when the back room became crowded with a scanner, a printer, some lumbering bookshelves, and the smell of stale cigars. Then it was painted, a horrible shade of brown. Just like that – Mitch Brown – without a moment of consultation.
Havana Gold
, he called it. And before she could let out a squeak of protest, he raised his hands and said, Terra nullius,
Ella. This room has been empty for years
. Still it isn’t until right now, her sweat puddling in the small of her back and the humiliation of being asked to leave yet another place soaked with her money, that she feels the measure of what has been stolen from her, and how hard it will be to reclaim.