Smoke River (25 page)

His parents paid for Big Junior’s wife to come and take his body home. The woman sobbed with an ancient grief full of spit. She jammed the heels of her palms into her eyes. No, she didn’t want to press the police for more answers. She pushed a dog-eared photo of her children, their faces small and afraid, across the table, and Coulson saw the wasted beauty of their trusting eyes.

For years after he woke up in a sweat at night, cradling the bloodied, swollen face of their father, the weight of heartbreak,
anger, stigma pinning him to his bed. He knew from the way Big Junior had been thrown. He knew how it had happened. And this knowledge added to the wreckage of that summer: a skilled worker, a good man, a parent, had been tossed off the road like jetsam. The whole town, even the farm, was tarnished for him. He left eagerly for university that fall and stayed away as long as he could.

Coulson’s mouth dries. Before he arrives at Ramirez’s side, he can feel it already, something as light as a dented bike in his arms and himself running, running towards the farmhouse, Ramirez already yelling behind him,
The harvester! Take her back on the harvester!
In his imagination, his feet serve a master outside him. He is moving; that’s what matters. He won’t know if he is doing the right thing or if he is making things worse, but certainly his truck will reach a hospital faster than waiting for an ambulance.

He can picture the farmhouse getting closer, and when Coulson makes out the shape of the kitchen door, he sees his father there, waiting on the stoop with a morning cup of coffee in his hand, his expression hardening into denial as Coulson nears, carrying something queerly broken, the dog whining and yipping behind him. And Coulson sees again how his father, for whom action and thought were fused, in whom there was no muscle for hesitation, freezes instead of running forward to help.

His mother bursts through the door, takes something from his arms, and recognizing it, seeing the blood on his forearms, yells at them both to fetch cloths, blankets, water while she calls the police. It is she who charges into the fields: a woman fierce about accepting the sorrows of a place along with its gifts. His father remains still for seconds more, staring at his fields, his face painted with disbelief.

There’s a large oak in the middle of a southern field. Coulson never had the heart to cut it down; he’s arranged the tobacco to frame the tree so none of the plants languish in its shade. Underneath it are a broken Scotch bottle, a fieldstone firepit, heaped ashes, and cigarette packages flattened into the earth. The workers murmur. They stand back from an abandoned heap of clothes tucked into a furrow of earth surrounded by trampled tobacco plants. Coulson’s eyes catch the gloss of remarkable hair fanning across the dirt, reflecting sunlight. A girl. Swollen face, ripped shirt, jeans yanked down to the ankles, thighs striated in red, a stiletto heel torn from her boot, tossed liked a used wishbone. Ramirez is bent over her, his fingers on her neck.

“She’s alive.”

N
ate says, “Close your eyes,” and he grabs Stephanie’s hands, pulls her forward. “Take a step up.” She moves forward tentatively, letting each foot hover as if she could suspend this dependence on him for judgment, for safety. His hands are warm and firm around hers. His lips brush against the crook of her neck. “Not yet,” he whispers. “Just stand still.”

Stephanie is wearing new flats. The blockade is three days old. During the thirty-minute walk from their rendezvous south of it to a destination Nate won’t name, the shoes dug painfully into the backs of her heels, squeezed her toes. Now she can’t admit that her feet sting, she’s thirsty, and the screw-top bottle of wine she swiped from her parents’ rack is making her backpack purse sag, its thin straps abrading her shoulders. But she says nothing, just stands and keeps her eyes closed, because he asked. Love has turned her into someone she barely recognizes.

He moves away and she deflates a little at the loss of his proximal warmth. She hears rustling amplified in a large space, imagines field mice nesting in a tunnel. Then there’s a strike, a hiss, the whiff of sulphur. He’s lit a match. The idea of a fire starting somewhere nearby, while her eyes are shut, excites and unnerves her.

Her world is all combustible of late: Nate, the dairy bar, her family and home. The sharp way her parents talk to each other and to her. The tight suffocation of the house at night, in the morning. And worst of all, the family dinner table, when the few words spoken are dry sparks. Just this evening her brother reappeared at the evening meal after taking two days to sleep off an epic drunk. She watched his blond tendrils move as he ate, hiding, then revealing an angry sickle-shaped scratch, starting under his earlobe and curving along the side of his neck, stopping before the clavicle. The scratch had two parallel ridges: one raised, from something deep and sharp, and the other dragged alongside, breaking the skin in a ragged line. She couldn’t stop looking at it, was surprised that her mother’s eyes, which usually scanned the boy like a raptor’s, had failed to notice. But lately her mother ate staring down or off into space.

She debated mentioning it aloud, just to fuck her brother up and watch her mother’s eyes widen with alarm as she took in the breach of her son’s July-brown skin before running off in search of Polysporin. But before she could decide, Las pushed away from the table with a grunt and a
Gotta go
and was out of the house within seconds. Her mother looked up helplessly in the direction of the slammed front door, as if newly resigned to her children’s unexplained comings and goings. Before sneaking away herself, Stephanie noticed that her brother’s bedroom door was ajar. She couldn’t help herself. She slipped inside.

“Nate?”

“Soon,” he says. “One more thing.”

He comes back to her. She feels him gently lift the knapsack off her tender shoulders, pull the straps off one at a time, so that his fingers glide along her bare arms and her skin rises to his touch. Then one palm is in the small of her back, the other pressed gently against her eyes, and he guides her as if she were a blind dance partner, a few more steps. “Kneel,” he says. “But keep your eyes closed.”

She bends until her shins hit something thin and soft over a harder surface, and finally she topples onto her bum with a little yelp of surprise. His hands are there to steady her, to keep her from falling on her back, and when she is sitting up straight, his fingers encircle her ankle. He removes the left flat, then the right, and the cool night air is a salve to her flayed skin.

“Now,” he says, and she opens her eyes, at first to a mottled darkness and then, as she adjusts to the light of the candles he has lit around them, she sees that they are inside a cathedral-sized building. Liquefied colours move across the walls, up to the ceiling, with the dim candescence of stained glass. She looks down. The softness underneath them is an opened sleeping bag.

Stephanie puts her hand to her mouth, tries to focus. “Are we in a church?” she says.

Nate smiles. She stands up barefoot and turns slowly to survey the space. The walls reveal themselves: they are covered in dark adumbrations of figures that are realistic but half-finished, as if the night has eaten them away. Trees that bleed like severed limbs. Huge winged birds. A hideous child emerging from a woman’s armpit, another between her legs. A gallery of monstrous faces that are bug-eyed, their mouths twisting up grotesquely, framed with ropy hair – black or gold – that floats seaweed-like out from them. The colours are flat, saturated, comic-book bright. And connecting it all are words, a scrawling wild-style, up and over and under the images like some
funhouse helix. She thinks it’s graffiti, though it’s unlike any graffiti she has ever seen. It hurts her eyes; it exhilarates her. How could this be here in small, fusty, unworldly Doreville?

“I don’t understand. What is this? What is this place?” Stephanie asks finally.

Nate sits with his hands wrapped around his knees, surveying the work. “Studio, gallery, laboratory.” He shrugs. “Secret society. The building’s an old cheese factory, abandoned.”

“So is this your work?” She wants his hands, so easy with kindnesses for her, to be the instruments of this wonder.

“Yes, but not all. There’s a crew of us from the rez. We started coming here about eighteen months ago. And you know, everybody just found their thing – oil-based chalk, Krylon, Montana, acrylic. We worked out a manifesto. No stencils, no stickers, no copycat work. We look at the stuff from São Paulo, Berlin, L.A., New York. Find it on the net, in magazines. But then what we do is ours, all ours. We’re working out something that’s all our own, y’know.”

He nods his head at the work as if meeting a group of friends. Stephanie imagines the hours he’s spent here, laughing and collaborating with others, losing all sense of time. And what a space – how its bigness, its cold warehouse air, would quicken his lungs. She prickles with envy, the shame of her own evenings driven by boredom to television or the internet.

“Those are mine,” he says. “The Sky Mother, the Twins, the false faces.” He points to the largest depictions, disturbing and beautiful.

“They’re amazing. Too good for here,” she says, falling back to the ground beside him. “This fucking small-minded town.”

He moves closer and draws a finger from behind her ear, down along the side of her neck, to where her clavicle meets the top of her shoulder. “Thank you for saying that,” he says.
“Someone will find us soon enough. Tear it all down or paint over it. But for now, it exists.”

“No!”

“It’s the risk you take; makes the work better. This idea, you know, that it may be temporary.” His hand slides down the side of her arm and then his fingers circle, ever so slightly, at her elbow, and she realizes how very quiet it is, how alone they are.

Stephanie reaches for her knapsack purse. She has to pull out her camera to free the bottle of wine and the two plastic cups she pilfered. The wine is lukewarm, slightly sour, but after tapping their glasses in a toast she is suddenly nervous, eager to feel a buzz. She gulps hers down. Her hand falls to the side with her empty cup and brushes along the camera, which makes her start.

“My camera,” she says, and he looks down at it. “I can document all of this. Put together a portfolio. I’m good at that. I’m good with a camera.”

He considers it for a moment and then says, “I believe you.” His lips are travelling over her chin, down her sternum, towards the lowest ebb of her scoop neck. “I believe you’re good. We’ll help out each other a lot. We’re a team now.”

He snags the edge of her T-shirt with his teeth and pulls, pushing his lips in against the skin, nuzzling his face into her breasts, and with one arm bracing them both, he gently lowers her to the ground. Before she is completely under him, he stops and looks into her eyes. “This okay?” he asks. “I want this to be okay.”

Stephanie nods. Her skin feels damp, her heart a yammering tattletale, her limbs as pliable as fresh clay. Was she ever going to resist? Already she can’t remember.

The activist is up on the dais of St. Cuthbert’s basement auditorium telling those gathered in detail about the injustices they’ve suffered. Las feels disappointed. He abandoned a half-full dinner plate hoping for someone more imposing, heroic. This guy has a beakish face and a braying edge to his voice, not unlike a wheezy farm animal. Las looks around; there are about thirty others in the room, most of them middle-aged like his parents. There are posters on every telephone pole downtown. He expected a room full of hot-headed young men creating a swoon of adrenaline, imminent violence, not oldsters dressed for a mall walk or a Sunday picnic roast. But at least they seem impressed, willing to take the activist seriously, some of them nodding as the guy makes a point. That has to mean something.
He’s from the big city
, the pub owner, Will Jacobs, told Las when he came in, slapping his shoulder. Las wanted to ask why the citizens’ group wasn’t being organized by an actual Doreville citizen.
He says God wants him here
, added Will.
Oh, Jesus effin’ Christ
, Las thought to himself. He’d shot out of the house jonesing for anger, a desire for hard-fisted vengeance that mirrored and justified his own, not a candidate for the priesthood named Kenneth.

The basement is muggy and nobody has thought to put out chairs. Las recognizes Gordo’s mom hovering off to his left.
Not here officially
, she says over and over to anyone who approaches her.
Just curious
. Las nods at her and she looks surprised to see him.

Kenneth likes to talk. As his speechifying drags on, Las finds it hard to concentrate on all the ideas Kenneth insists should be attached to their outrage as upstanding Doreville citizens. Las already knows what to be mad about: wishy-washy policing, bleeding-heart judges, politicians running scared with their tails between their legs, entitled natives. Some of the people in the room begin to shift from foot to foot as if they have to pee. Las detects the rank ammonia of body odour and
scrunches his nose. He leans his chin into his shoulder for a furtive sniff of his armpits. Not him.