She smoked too much. We all smoked too much back then: I smoked too much, our parents smoked too much, our teachers smoked too much, everyone smoked too much. It was 1980, and you could smoke on an airplane, in an elementary school, in the cancer ward of a hospital. It was the golden age for smokers, and everyone seemed to smoke, but Raina smoked more than anyone I had ever met. She was always wreathed in smoke, exhaling it, trailing a slow cloud of it wherever she went, so that in time it seemed like another part of her, like skin or hair, a voice, a song she sang, something she would be incomplete without. I kept track of her comings and goings by her clouds of smoke and by the sweet, tarry smell of her cigarettes: she smoked a brand called Red Chief that was manufactured by inmates in a prison out on the eastern edge of the state, near Milton-Freewater. It was maximum security, not far from a reservation, and most of the men there were Indians. Other prisoners in other places made blue jeans, key rings, license plates, pencils; it seemed to me like strange and almost perfect punishment that the men of Blue Mountain Penitentiary would spend their days manufacturing Tonto 100’s, Sitting Bull Cigarillos, Powhatan King Size, Sacajawea Peace Pipe Blend, and Pocahontas Lites. As far as I could tell, the only good thing about Red Chief brand was how little it cost—less than half the price of the second-cheapest brand, about fifty-five cents a pack back then. For this reason, they were the brand of choice for most of the citizens of Snowden.
I smoked Tontos, Shyla Pocahontas Lites, my father Sitting Bull Cigarillos, but Raina favored the least popular brand: Sacajawea Peace Pipe Blend, three or four packs a day, unfiltered. It was a sweet blend of good tobacco, red willow, bearberry, and sage, and it was Raina’s smell for as long as I knew her, and for a long time after that. Years later, sitting in a bar somewhere in Texas, in Washington, in California, I would smell the sweet spice and tar of Sacajawea blend and find myself, again, in high school, again at sixteen, stranded in that small town by the river, sitting on the gold velvet couch with Raina, stranded forever and ever in that perfect world of sweetly stinging smoke.