The Trickster

She’d grinned, and hit him on the top of the head again, making his straight black hair flop over his eyes.

‘I like it, okay?’

‘Right. Maybe we can get your parents to tape the traffic reports from Vancouver and mail them over. That would sure make life a fuller all-round experience.’

She’d laughed and put the radio back on. Sam had winced, but out of the corner of his eye he had watched her singing and laughing, and suddenly Light 96 didn’t seem so bad.

Right now, though, it was more than he could stand.

The only solution was his cassettes, but it looked like she’d cleared them away again.

‘Dig in the glovebox, Billy, will you? Any music in there?’

Billy opened it and rummaged around. ‘Nah.’

‘What does she do with them?’

Billy smiled.

‘Help me choose some at the gas station?’

‘Sure.’

Sam turned the car into Silver’s main street and headed for the Petro-Canada. Cruising down the wide street, its verge piled high with wedges of old black snow, always made Sam feel like he was being covered in warm syrup. It was comforting. It was safe. It was also breathtakingly beautiful. At the eastern end of the street Wolf Mountain stabbed into the sky, a pyramid of seemingly impenetrable rock. Since Silver was nearly five thousand feet above sea level, and Wolf Mountain officially eight-and-a-half thousand, the stone cliffs that towered over the town were pushing four thousand feet. But its fortress was a lie. The climber braving those crags would be crestfallen to discover that the mountain was all bravado and had been tamed several times over.

Not only did the railroad run right through its guts, but its gentler western flanks were blanketed with ski trails and restaurants, hiding from the town as though Silver might notice the mountain had gone soft and lose its temper.

But to the non-skiing tourists wandering around the sunny sidewalks, looking in gift shops and killing time until their partners came down off the slopes, Wolf Mountain was picture postcard wilderness.

Sometimes Sam thought the mountain looked like it sealed off the street like a gate, even though it sat at least three miles away from town. In fact the very first night he and Katie spent in Silver together, he’d had a nightmare that he was running, lungs bursting, trying to escape from the town, or something in the town, and the mountain kept blocking his exit with a wall of living rock. Weird dream. Weird, since he loved Silver. And he loved Wolf Mountain.

They turned into the gas station and pulled in to a pump. Vince looked up from the till and waved a solemn greeting to them through the window. Billy leapt out and ran into the shop while Sam watched the pump eating up his dollars. Next time he looked he saw Billy inside, earnestly spinning the cassette rack.

A hand-written sign on top of the carousel read, Truck drivers’ delight. All country tapes half-price. This week only. We must be crazy!!!

Vince sure was making a mark on his patch. The customer might always be right, but as far as Vince was concerned the customer must also be blind. Day-glo stickers alerting the driver to the great offers now available in everything from mufflers to coffee speckled the interior and exterior of his booth like a fungus.

A woman waiting in the Chrysler New Yorker in front of Sam’s old Toyota was obviously unimpressed by Vince’s style. She glared at the man paying Vince inside, her face pinched and her eyes narrowed behind wire-rimmed spectacles. Sam smiled over as her gaze wandered in his direction, but the smile faded on his lips as she returned his greeting with a look of distaste. Second time today, he thought. You put out and you get nothing back. He was grateful that this time it was him getting the cold shoulder and not Billy. Sam looked in the booth to check out which poor sucker had to share not only the car but his life with the old snake.

There was a guy in a felt hat at the counter, who kept glancing back at Billy while Vince worked at his credit card. He mouthed a sentence to Vince and laughed. Vince smiled, then caught sight of Sam watching him. Vince saw something in Sam’s eyes and averted his gaze. The customer picked up the paperwork and left the shop.

Billy was still spinning the cassette rack when Sam came in to pay.

‘Anything?’

Billy looked thoughtful. ‘Whitney Houston?’

Sam made a fanning motion in front of his face like he was wafting away a bad smell.

Billy rolled his eyes and resumed his search, as Sam walked over to the desk.

‘How’s it going, Sam?’

‘Good. Good.’

‘Twenty-eight dollars.’

Sam fished the bills out of his wallet. ‘What did that guy say about Billy, Vince?’

‘What guy?’

Sam jerked a thumb in the direction of the man strapping himself into the Chrysler beside the wicked witch of the east.

Vince looked out. ‘Aw nothing. Just passing the time of day. Tourist.’ He held his hand out for the money. Sam put the bills on the counter.

‘What did he say?’

Vince sighed. ‘He said, am I getting old or are truck drivers getting younger? Funny guy, huh?’

‘That was it?’

‘That was it.’

Sam looked into Vince’s eyes and was confused by the message there. Vince picked up the money and opened the till.

‘Need a receipt?’

‘No. Thanks.’

Billy joined them, his head barely making it over the counter, his hand clutching a cellophane-wrapped cassette.

‘Okay, what about this one? Kenny Rogers.’

Sam put a hand on his son’s head, still looking at the man behind the till, and tried to repair the damage. ‘Jesus, Vince, your taste in music stinks.’

‘We aim to please.’

‘Catch you later. Give my regards to Nancy.’

‘Will do.’

‘Billy. Put back that box from Hell.’

Billy complied and they left the shop.

They had driven fifty yards before Sam spoke again. ‘What did that guy in the shop say to Vince? You know, the guy that was in before me?’

Billy was singing to himself looking out of the window. He stopped singing, and smiled up at Sam. ‘He said was he getting old or were truck drivers getting younger? He was meaning me.’ Billy giggled again. ‘Imagine thinking a nine-year-old kid was a truck driver. Just ’cause I was looking through the cassettes.’ He laughed again, and then got back to the busy task of singing to himself.

Sam felt sick. What the hell was wrong with him? That shit-kicking train driver had thrown him off balance by not returning Billy’s wave. Why did Sam have to look for prejudice where there was none? He was going to have to learn to trust.

Silver was a nice town. It was full of nice people. Sam thought he should maybe write that out a hundred times when he got like this. Stop him getting so cranky.

Yeah. It was full of really nice people.

He turned the radio on.

‘… not too hard, not too soft, just light. This is Daniel, Elton John …’

Truth. Silver was a nice town. Regular population eight thousand, twice that when the seasonal tourists poured in.

In summer they came in camper vans, bringing the main street to a standstill while the passengers peered at maps and pointed, and the drivers constantly wheeled round in their seats, either shouting at kids in the back or looking for somewhere to park like predators stalking game. They were a pain in the butt.

They turned the town into a zoo.

Winter, right now, was better. Skiers travelled by car or on tour buses, and somehow they weren’t so cheesy, didn’t wear so many shiny leisure suits, didn’t picnic in dumb places.

But then the winter trade was altogether different. Even the Japanese who skied all season, wearing identical white ski-suits like Elvis’s last days in Vegas, were different from the packs that roamed Silver in the summer. The summer Japanese were on tours, herded around by fierce guides, photographing pretty much anything their diminutive leader pointed at. The winter ones came in couples. They had more money to spend, stayed in the big Canadian Pacific hotels on the edge of town, and no one minded them a bit.

Winter also brought the ski bums, the Australian and American kids who worked just enough to buy a lift pass and ski the season away. They packed out the staff accommodation shacks hidden well out of sight of the tourists in the backstreets, revealing their residence by the stinking T-shirts and ski-suits they hung out their windows to air.

Sometimes Sam had to take the staff minibus and pick them up; all part of the menial work as an employee of the Silver Ski Company. Other company guys minded plenty when it was their turn, but Sam kind of liked it. The Aussies were funny. In fact last season he’d gotten real friendly with a guy called Bunny Campbell from Melbourne, who’d invited Sam, Katie and the two kids out to Australia for a vacation. They’d never go. Sam knew that. But he got the occasional card from Bunny and it made him feel cosmopolitan, knowing someone half-way round the world.

Jess loved Bunny, her two-year-old hormones already tingling to the six-foot, golden-tanned antipodean hunk. Occasionally he would come and drag Sam out for a beer after work, sweep Jess into his arms and do a mock tango while Sam fetched his jacket. Sam had watched Katie watching Bunny and preferred not to examine the emotions he felt. Bunny was a good guy. A friend of the family.

The last card had come from Hawaii where Bunny was surfing. There was a picture of a model with big breasts holding a surf board under her arm, which Bunny had defaced by drawing a beard on the girl’s chin. The card had been addressed to Sam Two-Dogs-Fucking-Big-Chief-Skis-Like-A-Cow, and after initial irritation, Sam had laughed and stuck it on the door of the ice-box where all the other postcards lived. He hoped Bunny would be back this season. Sam never thought he’d have friends like that. Big, funny, happening.

White.

That was the truth. White friends. That’s what made him happy. And unhappy at the same time. Real unhappy, remembering what big tanned guys like Bunny used to mean to him when he was young – a time that didn’t get head space – not if Sam Hunt could help it.

Still, winter was good.

Like most Silver residents, the Hunts preferred winter to summer, but whatever the season, it was a bitch of an expensive town.

When the grimy railroad workers had built Silver over a hundred years ago, original name Siding Twenty-three, it was nothing more than a collection of tin and wooden huts in a clearing cut in the pines.

Now, any real estate agent’s window in town would make the ghosts of those guys swoon. Photos of houses were displayed like pornography, their doors open wide, their interiors on show to the casual viewer. And printed below, in discreet blue type, were prices that read like telephone numbers.

Little surprise then that the big houses by the river were mostly holiday homes, owned by rich city people; people who dressed expensively, and seemed built on a different scale, the way the women’s bones were so fine and the men’s shoulders so broad and square.

You could sometimes see them in summer behind their hedges, the way you might glimpse a shy wild animal in the trees, catching them talking and laughing in low voices round rustic garden tables. But in winter the only evidence that they were in residence was the thin blue lines of smoke from their chimneys and the shiny hire cars sitting in the drives.

Since only the seriously rich owned nice property in Silver, the workers who kept the town ticking lived in Stoke, ten miles away, in cheaper accommodation. But the Hunts were lucky. Really lucky. Katie’s family had vacationed in Silver all their life, and when her father bought a holiday house in 1955 it had cost about the same as a good canoe. It was their daughter Katie’s house now, its holiday function forfeited so that their grandchildren could have a house and a home. And it was a great house.

Sam thought for possibly the ten thousandth time what a great house it was as he and Billy pulled into the drive.

It sat high on Oriole Drive, south of main street, looking across the roofs of smaller houses to the mountains that hemmed in Stoke. You could just make out the railroad as it appeared between the pines on the edge of town, but the Trans-Canada highway was hidden, reminding the Hunts of its presence only when an easterly wind brought the distant sound of trucks to their door. Sam had painted the two-storey, detached house powder blue last fall, a choice that Katie had first disputed loudly in the lumber store, then applauded when she was enchanted by the result. Yes, it was a great house, and for the most part its wooden walls echoed to adult laughter, children’s squeals and the good-natured barking of Billy’s husky, Bart.

Bart was out there before the car stopped, bounding round the Toyota, as Light 96 died with the engine and Sam stretched into the back seat to pull out the groceries.

Inside, Katie Hunt chopped tomatoes and silently rehearsed a grouchy reception for her tardy partner, while Jess earnestly dragged crayon across paper at the end of the table.

Sam and Billy had been rehearsing too.

Sam began.

‘Okay. You want an explanation. It was a dinosaur in the supermarket. Billy spotted it first, in the canned vegetable aisle. Took us nearly an hour to fight it off with a roll of kitchen wipe.’

Billy nodded, smiling.

Katie stopped chopping. ‘Aw come on, guys. I needed that stuff light years ago. They’ll be here in an hour and a half.’

Sam put down the brown bags and from behind circled his arms round his small blonde wife, and kissed her ear.

‘Sorry babe.’

She was softening, but not quite soft.

‘Yeah, well sorry’s not going to fix dinner for six.’

‘For sure.’

‘Where were you?’

‘The railroad.’

‘Dice those onions.’

‘Okay.’

Bart, outside, watched through the kitchen window as the Hunt family reunited and got busy. He whined once and lay down in the snowless patch at his kennel door to watch the sun slide away behind the peaks.

4

‘… okay, so let’s just get this straight …’

There was a communal moan from the other five diners.

‘Come on! This is serious.’

Gerry was leaning forward on the table, using his fork which still speared a tube of pasta, to emphasize the importance of his words.

‘We agree that Bewitched was a subtle statement about the rising threat to men from feminism in sixties America. We agree that Samantha was subduing her massive and powerful superiority over Darren in order to keep him, the man as child, happy, and the home stable. But we can’t agree whether the programme was pro-woman or anti. Am I right?’

Gerry’s wife Ann mumbled through a mouthful of food.

‘Of course it was anti-woman.’

Katie jumped in again.

‘No way. It was the most important piece of feminist TV ever made. It said men are weak, women are strong. Men only just manage by the skin of their teeth to keep women in their place by emotional blackmail.’

Across the table Gerry’s sister Claire threw her husband Marty a look, as if pitying Katie, and moaned again. Gerry waved his fork again, clearly deciding he was chairman of this debate.

‘Right. Right. But by portraying Samantha as an individual only interested in shopping and hoovering, was that itself not undermining the women’s movement? Saying quite categorically, it doesn’t matter how strong women may be, at the end of the day they just want a credit card and cushions that unzip for cleaning?’

Katie shook her head. ‘Totally wrong. Women understood the subtext of that show.’

‘I took it as an anti-woman subtext. Quite clearly, as a matter of fact,’ said Claire, raising an eyebrow.

Sam stood, dropped his napkin on the table and cleared two empty wine bottles from the centre of the debris. ‘Anyone for more wine?’

Marty chucked himself in. ‘You see, there was a lot of angst going down then. Guys didn’t know the score.’

Sam, realizing that grabbing their attention would be as easy as getting Bill Clinton to come and mow his lawn, took the bottle and walked into the kitchen. He opened the ice-box and pulled out another cold Chablis while the voices from the dining room shouted each other down. To the sober man, the drunk is a curious beast. Sam always wondered why alcohol affected people’s volume control. An hour ago they were all talking normally, but now five of them were shouting like they were trying to be heard over a baseball crowd. Sam couldn’t imagine why, but then Sam had never had a drink in his life. Worried about the noise, he sneaked out of the kitchen and upstairs, the bottle still in his hand, to check on the kids.

The shaft of light from the open door to Jess’s bedroom illuminated one tiny hand on top of the comforter holding the arm of a fun-fur monkey.

Sam waited until his eyes adjusted to the contrast of light and dark, and was rewarded by a glimpse of the small dark head of his daughter lying peacefully on its pillow.

As he watched her chest rise and fall beneath the cover, he heard a whimpering from next door. He backed out of the room and stepped quickly to Billy’s door. Pushing it open, he saw Billy writhing on the bed, his comforter lying on the floor in a heap where it had been thrown off. Sam put the wine on the floor, picked up the bedcover and laid it gently over his dreaming son.

Billy was obviously in some distress. With the door fully open his face was clearly lit. It was light enough to see he was suffering some imagined agony. Sam toyed with waking him up, hugging him and telling him his Dad was here, but his decision was made for him as Billy sat up suddenly with a yell.

‘Hey, hey, hey. It’s okay. Everything’s okay, Billy boy.’

Sam had him in his arms before the yell died on the boy’s lips. He held the small panting body close to his chest, rubbing his back with a large hand.

Billy’s tears came. ‘Dad. Make them stop. They have to stop.’

‘It’s just a dream Billy. Nothing’s happening.’

‘It is happening Dad. You have to warn them.’

Sam hugged him closer. ‘Okay. Okay. You tell me, and I’ll make them stop.’

Billy was sobbing, his whole body heaving under its Calgary Flames T-shirt. ‘They’re gonna let it go, Dad. You can’t let them.’

‘Who is, Billy? What are they going to let go?’

The boy started to cry again. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. The wolf told me. I just know it’s going to be bad. I saw them. Two of them.’

Sam rocked him back and forward, his hand now stroking Billy’s hair. He sat that way for a minute or more. ‘Sshhh now. I’ll stop them. It’s just a dream. Go back to sleep.’

But he was already asleep. In fact, Sam wondered if he’d been awake at all. Billy’s body was a dead weight in his arms, breathing steadily, arms hanging at his side.

Gently Sam let Billy back down onto the pillow and pulled the comforter up to his chin. He stood by the bed for a while, waiting to see if Billy would go back to the dark place he’d been in, but the crisis was over for now. From downstairs, a roar of indignation reminded him of his other duties, and he walked slowly out of the room, retrieving the wine as he went.

Looked like he hadn’t missed much. Ann was hard at it.

‘Well you can say that, but the kids I teach, and the kids Gerry teaches, haven’t a fucking clue what the whole movement was about.’

Katie was in a corner, holding the lions back with a chair. ‘Then it’s your duty to remind them. Unless you want all those little guys to grow up thinking they rule the world.’

Claire laughed sarcastically. ‘They do Katie. And they will.’

Sam picked up the corkscrew, opened the bottle and started filling glasses. ‘Yep, we do. Take it in turns as it happens. When it’s my turn I’m going to make it illegal to have waiters tell you their names before they bring the menu.’

Marty and Katie laughed. Claire was annoyed not to be taken seriously. ‘Yeah. Cute.’ She paused, taking stock. ‘Now I don’t know you Sam. In fact, this is the first time I’ve met you. But I’d say you’re an old-style kind of guy. Am I right, Katie?’

Claire picked up the wine glass that Sam had filled, and half-emptied it again.

Katie looked up at Sam with love. ‘No. You’re wrong. He’s cool.’

Claire was undeterred. ‘Gerry, Ann, help me out here. You’ve been friends with Sam and Katie how long?’

Gerry smiled and made a space between his palms that stretched, the way a fisherman lies about his catch.

‘So is this guy for or against women?’

Sam took his seat again, and looked cheerfully round the company with a smile of comic innocence. He beamed across at Katie. ‘Oh go on, honey. Tell them how I leave you the key to the chastity belt when I travel.’

Katie smiled again. ‘Yeah, but leaving it in the men’s washroom at the Bus Depot doesn’t count.’

Claire didn’t laugh. She folded her face into a mask of censure. ‘You know, in my job women have eighty-five per cent less chance of promotion than men. Eighty-five per cent. That’s no joke.’

Sam took a swig of soda. ‘Don’t that put you right off being a lumberjack then?’

Everyone laughed this time, and the fact that Marty sniggered into his wine let Claire out of the cage. She ran a finger round the top of her glass. ‘I would have thought that given your background, Sam, you’d be slightly more sympathetic to a statistic like that.’

Katie shot Sam a glance. Sam held Claire’s gaze.

‘Sorry. Not with you.’

‘No. I’m sorry. Sorry if I’m the one to remind you that Native Canadians don’t do too hot in the promotion stakes. That is if they can get a job at all.’

Sam looked steadily at her. ‘I got a job.’

Marty put a hand on Claire’s. ‘Claire.’

She pulled her hand away. ‘No, come on folks. Let’s face up to it here. What kind of a job have you got exactly, Sam? A good job?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Oh well pardon me once again. Gerry led me to believe you were a manual groomer. Not exactly executive status, unless Silver Ski Company’s started recruiting from Harvard.’

Sam said nothing.

Claire softened her voice, and if the intention by doing so was to paper over the cracks, it was wasted.

‘Look, all I’m saying is that I know how you people must feel. I’m a woman. I get shit on too.’

Sam looked into his soda like there was something dead in there. ‘I can believe that. The last part anyway.’

Marty wiped his mouth with his napkin. ‘Okay, time we were hitting the road. Listen, it was real nice meeting you. We’re staying with Gerry and Ann another week. Maybe we can all ski together.’

Katie was still looking at Sam. She slipped a hand beneath the table and wound her fingers between his. ‘Yeah. That’d be neat. I don’t know if we can take time off, but if we can, sure.’

Sam looked across at Claire. ‘If we can’t, I sure look forward to sweeping the snow off your car.’

Marty stood up, and the others followed his example, scraping their chairs on the wooden floor, and fussing over their possessions. Marty moved round the table, kissed Katie and put a hand on Sam’s shoulder. ‘No hard feelings, Sam. Lighten up. Everyone’s a little gassed.’

Sam nodded solemnly.

There were polite noises made and Katie herded everyone out without the assistance of her husband who remained seated, staring into the middle of the abandoned table. He heard the door close and their footsteps crunching in the drive, and was aware of Katie standing behind him, leaning against the doorframe.

‘She was a jerk. Wasn’t it enough to just let her be one and leave it at that?’

‘Should have been.’

Katie pulled up a chair beside him and put her head on his shoulder. He slipped his arm round her.

‘I didn’t even get to serve the after-dinner mints.’

‘I should do it for a living, huh? Dinner parties cleared in minutes. Call Freephone 0800 Sam Hunt.’