Smoke River Read Online Free PDF Page B

trumps him – the fact of his daughter, the ties to others who buried Montagne’s prospects under the weight of responsibility. Elijah doesn’t wave at the girl, or even nod.
    For years he’s caught glimpses of her haunting the places he haunted as a young boy, combing the river as if it were a constantly refreshed treasure hunt, first as a barely-there slip of a child, later a gangly girl with an awkward gait, then a teenager with a runaway’s eyes. In his head the sightings of her are fluid, intermingled with the first time he saw her mother, Rita, and learned how a wild, impulsive unhappiness makes some women even more beautiful.
You have more nerve than any man I know, Elijah
, she said to him on a hazy afternoon when they were lying half dressed on the riverbank, his hand lost in the silk of her hair.
But I’m not sure you have the heart for the likes of me
. So much truth in her laughing voice. And it’s because he had too much need for self-preservation, too little imagination, to take her on, to really love such a woman, that Elijah can’t feel superior to the man who did.

    “You know, I don’t get him. Don’t get him,” says Joe. “Guy runs his business like a white man. Bottom line all the way. Lays people off so he can automate. Then sponsors lacrosse teams andscholarships like he’s the friggin’ bank. Won’t even live on the reserve – too good for that. But he has no problem letting his factory runoff stink up the creek. Now in town he’s all native, all Warrior. Territorial rights! Fucking with ’em all the time. Don’t respect it. I don’t.”
    Cherisse is not listening. She knows Joe. He’s only getting started; he’ll barely take a breath before they’re home. She imagines jumping out of the truck, running in the opposite direction, never looking back; all the while her father would still be talking to her, talking at her, his mouth a squeeze-box of outrage. If she snapped,
At least Barton has money!
that would shut him up. But there isn’t much point hurting his feelings; he’d only get all hangdog and drive her more crazy.
    And now, on this summer day working itself into a remorseless heat, Cherisse has the cool weight of the atomizer to pin her in place, to get her through the hours in the smoke shack while she rings in the purchases and her father makes awkward chitchat with the customers that makes them leave sooner, buy less. It’s the inevitability of those hours ahead of her that sinks her lower in the truck. Some white person will want to know if there is Kentucky tobacco in the rollies – Jeezus, does she know, or care? – because Kentucky tobacco is too sharp for them or makes their head ache. And Cherisse might fake it, hold the Ziplocked bag up to the light and pretend that it’s all in the colour, muttering something about curing that she makes up but the customer might accept because she’s native and such knowledge is apparently inborn. But it’s just as likely the customer will persist, because even though they’re going to save $250 on their cartons, it’s not enough for them:
Would it be okay if I just light one up? I can tell right away
.
    Cherisse will nod. And a person who would never smoke inside their own home won’t think twice about filling up the little plywood shack with the rollie’s acrid stink, because thesun is beatin’ overhead outside –
hotter ’n hell, eh? –
and that will make him or her sweat. All she will have to keep her head cool is the atomizer, a piece of ice that never melts, a memory of what is gone.
    Several years earlier, she’d been leaning against a tree across the street from one of the beautiful painted verandahs of Doreville’s grand homes that lined the riverbanks. It was November and Daddy Joe was late picking her up, when she felt something soft brush up against her shin and looked down to find a low-lying cloud of white fluff, a tail that was no more than a furry rudder. The little dog had come to her unbidden,