Smoke River (21 page)

He pulls two bottles from the refrigerator. “Well, then, I’ll have to drink both.”

Just as he hopes, she purses her mouth into a little dried apple as her gaze surveys the modest kitchen, finds his shirtless torso and then retreats. “You realize I’m here professionally.”

Coulson harrumphs. “You cut through my fields … Mrs. Bain.”

“I don’t like driving past the barricade. It’s awkward.” She coughs.

They look at each other. He takes his first sip of beer, and out of a habit from adolescence, swishes it in his mouth until wet glimmers on his lips.

“Coulson, there’s a new program I want to talk to you about.”

He puts the second beer on the table in front of Ella, leans against the kitchen sink, and rests his own beer on the lip of his belt buckle. “Guess the barricade’s not so great for the real estate business.”

She flinches slightly.
Ah, there’s the fighter
, he thinks.

Ella pulls her glance upwards from his knees until she meets his eyes. Then she reaches for the beer in front of her, holds it in the air in a toast, and takes a swig. “Truth is, it’s a real drag for us,” she says, breaking into a wary smile.

“So this program,” he says. “Lemme guess. Next spring the government wants to buy out my quota, and you’ve got it figured out that even with my investment in the kilns, the price is right and this would be an ideal time to move out of tobacco and into something else. So what is it now? Hemp? Asparagus?”

Ella straightens, clears her throat, opens her folder. She begins talking about Brazil’s cheap labour and better growing season and the folly of trying to compete with South American tobacco. She stops and stares at him with an expectant tilt to her head.

He says nothing, keeps her hanging there, her chin tipped sideways. Let her worry over whether he’s contemplating his glorious future growing cut flowers and sweet potatoes for bio-diesel or simply considering the freckles at the base of her neck. She might believe this shit, but he’s unconvinced. For now anyway. Finally he lets her off the hook. “Sorry, did I hear you say ‘baby vegetables’?”

“Mini cabbages. Broccolini. Rainbow silverbeet. The market research coming out of Australia is encouraging.”

“You want me to grow mini cabbages?”

“Coulson, after next spring, most of the other large growers who’ve held out will take this buyout. And the government won’t keep coming back with these offers. They’ve already completely shut down the eastern growers.” She hesitates, then adds, “You know, your property has huge agritourism potential too, being right across from a new golf course.”

Agritourism. Golf course. Adults in short pants pushing little white balls over a bent grass monoculture. It catches like a
splinter. Coulson puts on a fresh T-shirt that he grabs from a hamper sitting on the stovetop. Now the beer has worked his tongue loose, and he feels impatient with the game he plays with this woman.

“There’ll always be tobacco grown in the Interlake. The land’s made for it, Ella. And me, I’m not good for anything else either. Certainly not corn mazes and fuckin’ pony rides!” He wishes she could fathom the cruelty of a rogue frost, or how a spot of blue mould can crater a grower with worry. When you survive these things over and over with a crop, there’s a relationship, a level of trust and inborn knowledge that you don’t throw away the minute a pretty suburban wife wags a cheque at you.

He doesn’t have the energy to apologize. She’s already on her feet, her face screwed tightly with offence. “Tobacco really is over this time, Coulson,” she says quietly. “Call me if you have any questions.”

Then she slips out, leaving the report on his table. Coulson watches her through the kitchen window. At first she teeters through his fields in her high-heeled shoes, then she reaches down and slips them off.

And in that movement he sees again his ex-wife’s similar slim-hipped polish, and he remembers how much pleasure he derived from simply watching her, sitting in a small café on a Saturday afternoon. He remembers white linen napkins, the gleam of polished cutlery, his fingers looped around a tulip glass of Duvel, a book on his lap – often his well-thumbed copy of Marcus Aurelius’s
Meditations
. Two hours of quiet, surrounded by assurances that he’d done well for himself: the cool pressure of a fine watch on his wrist, the wild tobacco and bergamot drift of his cologne, the waiter bending to refill his water glass. And finally Marie, arriving with shopping bags, dropping into her chair with a slight flush on her cheeks, sweeping back her auburn hair with hands moving excitedly at her throat like startled doves,
telling him about misadventures in the market and the wine store. Her laugh as pale and delicate as the rest of her. Every moment of those afternoons was such a relief to him for its distance from a childhood scoured of leisure and good taste.

The thought of Ella’s primrose-polished fingers denting the folder she clutched reminds him of the things he left with Marie: his mother’s porcelain dishes, passed down by generations in her family; the antique set of leather-bound Shakespeare works bought on his first trip to London; his swimming trophies; a closet full of Savile Row suits. When a year passed without hearing from him, Marie had taken all his things and given them to Goodwill.
I had to do it in order to move on
, she said over the phone a month later.
Sorry
. It was this act of disposal that stung him most. He hung up, laid his head on the kitchen table. He’d always assumed she’d keep something of him – a neatly packed carton stowed away – the way he held on to the scent of her hair, the cream of her skin, the dry effervescence of her voice.

Coulson looks again towards the departing woman. With her sandals wound about her fingers, Ella starts to trot through the tobacco before breaking out in a full run, her bright hair flapping against the back of her neck. He picks up the report she left behind and reads every word.

“
T
he cops are coming tonight,” Gordo says. He’s made a habit of listening in on his mother’s phone calls, scanning her emails. “A riot squad from the big city and tactical units from three different counties. They’re gathering at the river. A tidy little massacre – should be fun.”

They work up an agenda for the evening: get drunk in Gordo’s basement, stay up until the sleepy lawbreakers at the barricade hit their pillows, head out to mess things up just as the cops arrive. Las goes looking for gear in his parents’ garage and stumbles upon three forty-ouncers of Dalwhinnie tucked among a subterfuge of caulking tubes and bottled mineral spirits. The idea of his old man hoarding liquor like some amnesiac squirrel cheers him. He swipes the bottles and shows up at Gordo’s basement door for six, holding out the Scotch as appeasement for all the ways their friendship has been weird of late.

Gordo’s eyes widen greedily. “Let the games begin!” he says.

They make their way through a whole bottle, then start the second one, mixing it with water, then Coke, and, as they get more drunk, chocolate milk.

There’s a pile of hockey sticks stacked in a corner of the room. Gordo was serious once but didn’t make the cut. Las knows not to bring up the subject. Still, the Scotch makes him feel strangely loose, incautious. Suddenly he’s up, grabbing a stick, pushing the old coffee table away with his shins. “Basement shinny! Let’s do it!’

“You giggle like a girl,” Gordo says, but he’s up too, moving chairs and boxes against the basement walls, picking his own stick. There’s no puck to be found, so Las grabs his friend’s plastic deodorant container from the bureau, drops it, and thwacks it with his stick so it sings across the laminate floorboards and hits Gordo’s socked feet.

The sight of his friend hunched over, coddling the deodorant with his stick, looking so small and serious, makes Las laugh. Gordo launches towards him, elbows first, pushing him back against the wall as the deodorant flies past his ankles.

“Goal!” Gordo shouts. He raises his arms in the air.

“All right, Fleury, I’m on it!” Las kicks off his flip-flops, gathers the makeshift puck, and charges for the old refrigerator on the other side of the room, holding the stick in front of him inexpertly. He senses that the purchase of his bare feet on the laminate is an advantage. He’s still laughing, but the mood in the room has changed.

Las is moving forward, but just as Gordo lunges at him, he dekes sideways. Gordo’s feet slide out from under him. He lands hard on his right hip. Las pushes the puck around the coffee table and takes a long, sloppy shot that makes the deodorant slide past the refrigerator nonetheless.

Las hoots. “One-one!” He turns and offers a hand to Gordo, who is still laid out like a beached sea lion. Then he fetches the
deodorant, holds it out to his friend. “Face-off at the crease.”

Gordo grabs the deodorant. “It’s cracked, you asshole. You’ve fuckin’ wrecked it.”

Las shrugs. “It’s not like you buy the good stuff.” He’s thirsty again. He drops his stick, falls onto the couch, and twists to reach his drink, resting on a milk crate.

“So, Las, my friend, you still keen on hurting something?”

Las has one hand around the plastic cup while the other pours a generous refill from the second Scotch bottle. He chuckles. That’s more like it. He feels lighter.

Then Gordo swoops towards him, holding his stick high and swinging it hard against Las’s side at kidney height. “Theo Fleury? I’m goddamn Marty McSorley, asshole.”

“Jesus fuck!” Las lets go of the Scotch bottle. It splashes, urine-bright, against the wall behind the lamp. He reaches his hands behind him, discovers the patch of hot, tender skin on his lower back, and groans.

Gordo laughs. “Stop being such a girl.” He pulls Las erect by his hair, looks into his face. “It’s easier to hurt something if you’re hurtin’ first.”

Fifteen minutes later, Gordo’s truck careers wildly up the lonely county road that avoids the barricade, heads north along the reserve’s western boundary, and turns east on Ninth Line. The last bottle of Scotch is clenched between Las’s knees. He lifts his shirt slightly to press the coolness of the vinyl seat into the long welt on the small of his back. There’s a sting, followed by an amplified beat of pain. He closes his eyes.
C’mon, man, it’s not that bad
. The worst of it is being suckered by Gordo, never seeing it coming.

When they approach the smoke shack, Las glances through the passenger window at the long, flat land south of Ninth Line. In the distance, the barricade is lit up like a bush party. He makes out the shredded carcass of the model home in silhouette. Smoke
hovers on the southern horizon like a swarm of dark gnats. “Fuckers,” he says under his breath, imagining the model home’s studs and subfloor fuelling the barrel fires. Las twists open the Scotch bottle, takes a large swig.

The truck slows and turns into the driveway of the last smoke shack. “Leave some of that for me,” Gordo snaps.

Ahead of them is the slight figure of the green-eyed girl, a cash box tucked against the lovely curve of her hip, as she cuts across from the shack to a nearby trailer. Las laughs at the sight of her. He doesn’t know why.

“Hey, girlie!” Gordo shouts. He hops out of the car, leaving the keys in the ignition, to cajole the girl into selling him cigarettes. Las follows.

She looks at them warily. “Kinda late to come here for smokes.”

“It’s okay,” Las says with the hunk-with-a-heart-of-gold voice he uses to offset his friend’s whiff of felony. Las points to Gordo behind his back, mimes guzzling a drink. “He gets like that.”

This seems to relax her. She smiles. “Whaddya smoking?” she asks Gordo and he holds up his empty package. When she turns back to the shack to open it, Gordo punches Las hard on the shoulder. But Las doesn’t care. He’s already moving past his friend towards the shimmer of perfect hair on a girl whose name he can’t remember.

Gordo pays for his smokes and slips behind the shack to take a piss. Las grabs the girl’s wrist lightly, leans into her with his best varsity athlete smile, the flash of his suburban teeth, and says, “Let’s play a joke on that asshole.”

And just like that they are wheeling down Ninth Line, Las behind the wheel and she shyly pressed against the passenger door, watching through the rear-view mirror as Gordo runs out to the road, one hand hitching up his fly and the other wagging a fist. It’s a joy ride. Pure and simple.

Shayna thinks of crows and the way they wait. She thinks of tree branches filled with birds like thick black leaves, silent on a breezeless night. How the quiet of their trespass belies the calamity of their flight. The hoarse irritability, the heft of wing. Sometimes she wants to be such a bird, to wear the wedge of onyx tail feathers, raise the fused wing bones, take her sustenance through a curved beak. Blink with the eyes of a thief. Helen once said that Shayna was like a crow, the blue-purple gloss of her hair, the intelligence of her eyes, how she’d become a messenger for their people. She’d groaned.
And aren’t they also tricky and unreliable?
They both laughed, dropped the subject.

But black birds are perching in the station between rest and waking. She feels them watching her. They know she aches to lean into the warm breast of sleep. Yet the cool, sunless air can’t be stamped out of her clothes, her skin, her sleeping bag’s thin layer of down.