Smoke River Read Online Free PDF Page A

Still, the sense of missing out dogs him like his bad tooth.
    Joe eases the truck over the McKelvey Street bridge, listening to the rattle of steel under his treads. He turns his head to see the panorama of the Smoke River breaking into foamy moustaches over the fast-moving shallows in the distance before slowing and pooling into sluggish greenish depths by the bridge.
    “No … you gotta be kidding … no … Jesus.”
    He slams his palm against the steering wheel. He can feel himself already adrift, already moving away from today’s target, because once he is over the bridge he is turning the car left, pulling it up to the river embankment, indignity making him gulp air like a drowning man.
    “I thought we were going straight home,” Cherisse says. She’s turning something over and over in her hands, something he doesn’t recognize. When she does things like this, odd things, it is easier to see her as an extension of himself, as he did when she was an awkward preteen, with bones too long and heavy for her meagre flesh, green eyes so big and bright they startled people. He’d wanted her to stay that way. And maybe, just maybe, it’s because of her, and all those ways in which she is increasingly like her mother – long gone but for the desperate phone calls asking for money – that he wants to be the hero of this situation.
    He stares out the truck window. “Unbelievable,” he says under his breath. “Un-fucking-believable.”
    Cherisse looks up when he opens the door of the truck, still cursing. Her hand grabs his forearm. “Whaddya doin’ there, Joe?”
    But she must know; she must recognize that the man wearing waders and standing in the middle of the warmed murk, casting flies as bright as jungle flowers in defiance of both community-mindedness and seasonal licensing, is Elijah Barton. It’s one thing for Barton to thumb his nose at people like himself – the man is richer than the whole alley of smoke-shack operators put together – but it’s quite another thing to be deliberately trying to piss off the townies, already made skittish by this barricade business at the development.
    Joe doesn’t care that it’s going to embarrass his daughter; he has to say something to the guy. He has to let him know that it isn’t okay. That there are regular guys like Joe who need the townies for business, need them to feel comfortable driving out to the reserve. His boots hit the soil before Cherisse can catch at his shirt. He slams the door to her plaintive “Don’t” and then he’s standing on the bank, fists jammed in his jeans pockets, clearing his throat.
    “What you catchin’, ’Lijah?”
    The man submerged to his knees in the river is shorter, his face pockmarked from teenage acne, his eyes small and hard. When he turns his head, his smile is the smile of someone with means, the smile of a man who doesn’t give a shit and has the money to ensure he doesn’t have to. Cherisse’s mother, Rita, had a thing for him once. Joe could see how Barton’s fuck-you attitude must have been attractive to a wild thing such as her, a woman who could never outpace her demons. Elijah raises his arm, pulls the rod over his shoulder, then flings it forward with enough wrist that the showy fly flirts with the surface of the water, skipping beside sunken logs, a tangle of submerged bracken.
    Nervy fucker
, thinks Joe.
He’s stalking a largemouth
.

    “Fish,” he hollers back to Joe Montagne. “I’m catching fish.”
    Elijah shakes his head.
That man
, he thinks. While shrewder smoke-traders have built expansive homes with hot tubs and satellite dishes, Joe still lives in a trailer and drives a rusty GMC , its missing hubcaps and gnarled front fender broadcasting his money woes as surely as his bad teeth. Yet Joe gets some things right. The guy wouldn’t irritate him so damn much if he didn’t.
    “You know the season hasn’t begun yet. You gotta licence?” Joe yells from the bank.
    Elijah ignores the