Smoke River (3 page)

She wipes her eyes on her forearm and focuses.
Get angry
, she tells herself.
Don’t be so clouded by liberal pieties that you won’t name it, won’t do something about it
.

She wheels around to the dump-truck driver, whose face, pink with frustrated violence, hangs out the open window.

“Do you have a cellphone?”

He nods.

“Call the police. Get them over here. Now.”

Ella hears how ferocious she sounds. She is going to make things right. Justice will brighten her day.

As they wait for the cops to arrive, Shayna lets go of Helen’s hand and stares into the middle distance. The two men stay in the truck, listen to the radio, drink from a Thermos, and glare. The runner paces alongside the road.
That’s a type of woman
, Shayna thinks. Burnished like copper gold. Lean and hipless as a teenaged boy. There was a time when that kind of woman would walk into a room and Shayna would feel low, crawl into herself, pucker with contempt.

The police come and it unfolds the way Helen, whispering, assured her it would. The men are told to go home. They will need an injunction before the women can be arrested and work resume.

“In the case of treaty disputes—”

The jogger’s body spasms with disbelief. “It’s private property!” she insists.

The officer repeats with a flat drone that in cases involving land disputes with natives – a word he lowers his voice to use – all municipal detachments must consult with the region’s Policing the Aboriginal Community Team. “The officers from
PACT
have been informed and will be monitoring the barricade. If a resolution is not reached through negotiations or court orders,
PACT
officers will arrive to design a policing solution within a week.” He doesn’t make eye contact with any of them.

“A week. A week?” The jogger flaps her hands. Her voice thins. “That’s utter bullshit!” And then she turns on her heel
and runs off down the road. The brightness of the day burns the colour from her.

When the figure disappears and the truck barrels down the highway, Shayna’s shoulders drop. She walks into the development and surveys. The land is plucked, deboned, dried. She closes her eyes to see past the insults and breathes it in. At first there is nothing but the smell of overworked dirt, arid and ungiving. She concentrates, slows her breathing, waits. Finally it arrives, the slightest mutiny of scent: sweet clover seeds germinating in the backhoed earth, an insurrection of moisture beneath the drained and filled pond, an invasion of pollens breezing in off the river. Everywhere the nerve endings, the memory of life, of what has been. She smells him too: her boy, Pete-Pete. The way a child’s skin, flush with spring air, the excitement of catching frogs at the pond’s edge, was a universe of smells, the land and sky, the nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon of creation. Her people called the place simply
o’tá:ra
, their word for clay as well as clan, for everything that was land and family and how who you were and where you lived were indivisible.

With her eyes closed she sees the scrubby trees, brush, and sedge meadow that contained their summers and autumns of hiding-and-seeking; Pete-Pete somersaulting in the milk vetch and sweet pea, curling himself into a hummock of earth, imagining himself a fawn, scentless and hidden in plain sight. The first summer they played, he was three. She’d finish counting, open her eyes, and spot him almost instantly, his little denim bum poking up from behind a tree stump or his lime Ninja Turtle hoodie bright among the tangle of wildflowers. By the next summer he had improved. She resorted to instinct: thinking like a child, exhausting those spots first. By the third summer she had to look in earnest; sometimes an hour would go by but she didn’t want to give up. He expected her to try. Her tactic became to cover the territory as quickly
as possible, her quick breaths drying her tongue, hurting her throat. She started making rules – not beyond that tree or past the ditch by the road, or anywhere near the creek’s edge – fencing him in where there were no fences.

One October afternoon when he was five, she couldn’t find him after two hours of looking. She vowed that the game-playing would stop; he was too good. She began to call out. There was no answer. She broke into a trot, inspecting every tree trunk; she grabbed a stick and dragged it gently through the thickness of oat grass and goldenrod, hoping it would snag him. Then she was full-out running through the russets and dried seed heads, the wet mulch of fallen leaves and naked bramble. The sky became a gutted mackerel: grey-silver, lurid red.
Pete-Pete, Pete-Pete, I give up
. The wind threw back her voice.
Come out. It’s over. The game is over
. She jumped over stumps. Her knees hurt. It started to rain.
Where are you? Answer me. Answer me!

The worst was happening in her head; she began to run scattershot, back and forth over the same spots, wherever the compass of her panic directed her. She couldn’t see him, hear him, smell him. The clouds split open and she felt close to doing the same. Finally she stopped, bent over for a breath, and chided herself to calm down, pay attention. When she straightened, it was the flashing brightness of his eyes, his little grin that caught her eye. A hundred metres ahead of her was a patch of gooseberry bushes in the middle of the field, tough old things with sharp, unforgiving thorns and unpicked berries, overripe and burgundy brown. She’d run past it several times without looking, stared into it without seeing. He was there, still as a small animal, tucked in under the branches so as not to get scratched. There hadn’t been a moment when he was in trouble.

She ran to the patch, fell to her knees, pulled him into the cinch of motherhood. The rain wet his face so he was shiny as a
newborn.
Tomorrow. Can we play again tomorrow?
He was laughing – a sound that was joyful, at ease in its world. Each time she stepped on the land, she heard it again.

The first to arrive are teenaged boys, curious. They skid their
BMX
bikes to a halt on the gravel shoulder, let them fall to the ground. Al Miller, a traditional council chief, and his sons drive up in a pickup loaded with old mattresses and discarded lumber. They proceed to drag them across the site’s dirt-road entrance.

“Gotta make this barricade look serious, huh, Helen?” He winks at her.

“Minnie’s on the way with a cooler, sandwiches.”

Shayna scrolls through her cellphone address book, rhymes off names.

“No, not him. He supports band council,” says Helen.

“Jenny Hill?”

“Wish-washy.”

“What about the Porter twins? Their ma?”

“Good people. Longhouse. They’ll help out.”

Shayna clears her throat. “What about Ruby?”

Helen imagines the sheen of effort that forms under Ruby’s lower lip around this time of day, the first hour or so after opening the Three Sisters snack shack on Eighth Line, which the two have co-owned for a decade. (
Three sisters?
white folk always ask.
So where’s the third one?
) The last thing she said to Ruby: “Sure a little resistance might not be good for you?”

Her sister had smiled, looked wistful. She held up her coffee in a little salute. “We’re Mohawk, Helen. Resistance is a scouting party for a fight, nah?” Then Ruby turned back to the fry basket, gave it a wiggle. Bright beads of oil scattered in the sunshine as the door of the shack closed with a bang.

Helen shakes her head. “No, not Ruby. Not now. But what about those Johnson boys – they back from university?”

After the mattresses and lumber are heaped in front of the entrance to the Jarvis Ridge development and Minnie has distributed egg salad sandwiches and plastic cups of watery lemonade, Ryan Isaacs delivers two empty oil drums for fires at night. Al creates blocks of shade by stringing tarpaulins between lengths of pipe and setting out borrowed lawn chairs underneath; the half-dozen adults get out of the sun and settle into silence.

The teenagers tear through the obstacle course of surveyor stakes on their bikes, until one wheels towards the adults on the lawn chairs and shouts. “So, whatta we doing now?”

“We’re doing it,” says Helen.

The boy’s face is bright with impatience. “But you’re not doing anything!”

The adults laugh.

“We’re doing what we’re good at,” says Al. “We’re waiting.”

Helen watches the teenager jump back on his bike and make circles around the barricade. She smiles and wonders when it will all go to hell.

F
rom her vantage on a bench outside, Cherisse has yet to see a single customer walk through the doors of Curiosities ’n’ Collectibles and set off its teeth-grating chimes. Yup, that’s weird, even for the overpriced junk shop. And inside, the woman behind the counter has opened her cash drawer a half-dozen times, bumping it closed with her hip as if the contents were tea leaves she was trying to shake into a different reading.

Cherisse looks around. There are three unclaimed parking spots outside the Main Street shop fronts, on a Saturday morning. That never happens. Another oddity: there’s an entire stack of fresh ciabatta loaves remaining in the window of Paulsen’s Bakery and it’s past eleven a.m. For a couple of years now she has watched the pale-faced big-city refugees who buy the large homes on Doreville’s outskirts go batty for fresh-baked bread – as long as it’s called anything but bread.
Migod, there’s ciabatta in this little town! Pain ancien! Baguette! Focaccia!
Not today. People are avoiding
the town. It hasn’t been a full week since her crazy aunties got their barricade up in everybody’s face, but there’s no denying Main Street is already a whisper less welcoming for a girl like her.

She gets up and moves towards the junk shop. Within sight is the treasure she has been stalking this past month: an atomizer made from crystal, cubed like a chunk of river ice, the blue white of winter light caught within it above a shadow of smoky topaz. Cherisse stops and leans against the Curiosities ’n’ Collectibles window, studying the atomizer displayed there – its engraved Steuben crystal orb, its threaded puffer, its swan-necked plated pumper.
Nothing special there
, she thinks. But the crystal, the contradictions of its colours, they make her breath catch. So, how to get it for the money stuffed in her pockets?

She opens the shop door and her shadow elongates in the banner of sunlight that precedes her. The owner looks up; her hands crab across the counter, seize upon her eyeglasses. And Cherisse is waiting for this, the moment when her black hair, brown skin, cut of jaw register and the woman’s shoulders slump with disappointment. Ah, there it is.
Let the games begin
, Cherisse thinks.

Because now the owner has a dilemma: how not to appear overtly suspicious while at the same time not letting the native girl out of her sight. Just in case. So many things – the vintage Stratton cigarette case with the creamy enamelled front, the Baccarat hand-cut crystal powder dish with the Bakelite lid – could be slipped into a pocket or a purse. Cherisse gravitates to those things just to make the woman flutter about like an injured bat.

“Can I help you?”

The owner has moved in close, and she blinks as if startled by the abruptness of her own voice. Cherisse loosens her grip on the cranberry goblet she’s holding. In a flash, the woman’s hands have taken it from her, placed it back on the crewel-edged runner with the rest of the set.

“If there’s something in particular you’re looking for, I can tell you right away whether or not I have it. Might even know somewhere else you could find it.”

When Cherisse asks to see the atomizer in the window, the shop-owner’s face tightens; she draws her shoulders up like a scarecrow, and in that half-second Cherisse can tell the woman might resist selling it – to
her
. But the woman exhales a lungful of stale breath, shuffles over to the window display. Instead of handing the atomizer to Cherisse to examine, she walks past her to plunk it on the counter by her cash register.

“It’s delicate,” she says.

Cherisse comes over and stares down at it, runs her finger along the glass, squats by the counter so she is eye-level with it. When she depresses the pumper, she sees the shop-owner flinch.