The Trickster

They drove to the restaurant in near-silence, Katie staring ahead, Tom smiling and humming. She’d been to Denton’s only once but the head waiter greeted them as if they were long-lost friends. Tom took Katie’s arm and halted her in the marble-floored, plant-filled lobby.

‘You go in, darling. I’ll be there in a minute. I love you.’

He held her face and kissed her deeply. She was stunned. Weird behaviour, but the head waiter was already guiding her through the lobby into the restaurant before she had time to ask Tom what the hell he was playing at. Big shock. Her parents and Tom’s widowed mother were sitting at a big round table for six. They stood up and greeted her. Katie was completely and utterly lost. The restaurant was full, faces looking at her as she sat down heavily on the blue velvet seat pushed into the back of her knees by the waiter.

She looked open-mouthed and helpless at her mother for an explanation, but Mrs Crosby put a finger to her lips and smiled at something behind Katie’s shoulder.

The lights in the restaurant were dimmed, and behind her she heard Tom’s voice. My God, he was talking to the whole restaurant. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, there’s someone very special here tonight.’

She was going mad. What was happening? Her mind tossed in a frenzy to make sense of it. Had Tom somehow read her thoughts? Was this mockery of her first meeting with Sam to punish her, to make her pay for her betrayal? How did he know? How could anyone know her secret?

She spun round. He was standing with a guitar in his hand, his best friend James at Tom’s side holding a lit candelabra.

Tom continued while Katie looked on with the expression of a witness at a road accident.

‘I’m sure you’ll forgive me for interrupting your meals, but I’m hoping that this special person here, Miss Katie Crosby, is going to say yes to what I’m going to ask her in a moment.’

There were noises of people going aw, and ah, and before Katie could move or shout no, her horror was completed as Tom started to play the guitar. It was a clumsy attempt at Harry Nilsson’s ‘Can’t Live if Living is Without You’. She only barely recognized it. Katie’s easy-listening habit stretched way back and Tom naturally scorned her for it, but occasionally relented and bought her albums she liked, always among albums he thought she should listen to. She didn’t, however, like Nilsson. If Tom was being generous, he was misdirecting his energy. He started to sing, becoming embarrassingly and comically way off his limited vocal range when he came to the chorus.

Katie had descended into Hell. The nightmare of a song went on for about ten years, and then it stopped. There was a burst of applause from the diners, and Tom dropped onto one knee while James grabbed the guitar. He took Katie’s limp hand in his and said it.

‘Katie. Will you marry me?’

There was a cheer from some of the more inebriated diners who were clearly enjoying this spectacle.

Katie’s parents beamed and Tom’s mother dabbed at an eye with her napkin.

She thought then that she would like to die. Time stood still for Katie Crosby at that moment. It seemed that all the faces staring at her had frozen in the middle of some action, like an edition of the Twilight Zone. Surely Rod Serling would walk in any moment with a cigarette, and introduce the first story?

She saw through the dimmed light a fat man in the corner with a fork raised half-way to his mouth. There was a woman leaning her head on an elegant hand by the window, grinning with the slit of a red-painted mouth. A couple who were holding hands at the next table smiled at her as though she were their daughter graduating from high school. But she could hear nothing except the beating of her heart and the buzzing of her own blood in her ears, and there was Tom’s face, still gazing up at hers in theatrical expectation.

Katie stood up. Her mother made a happy O shape with her mouth over at Tom’s mother.

She spoke quietly, but nobody in the restaurant missed a word. ‘No. I won’t marry you, Tom. I love someone else and I’m going back to Silver tomorrow to ask him to marry me.’

There was a tiny scuffling noise from the table, but mostly silence.

‘I’m sorry. I really am.’

She pushed back the chair and walked calmly from the room. She walked more quickly through the lobby and by the time she got to the street she was running as hard as she could in her high green silk shoes. She ran gasping down the sidewalk, tears of humiliation and horror streaming down her face and she didn’t stop until she got the ocean in sight.

She cried like a child for at least five hours, walking the streets until she could have dropped, before she dared hail a cab and go home. By the time she crawled out of the cab and stumbled up the front porch steps she looked like a hooker on a busy night: her jacket mangled and creased from being clutched to her chest and her face streaked with make-up that had dissolved hours ago in salty tears.

There were no recriminations from her parents – she loved them for that – they were just glad she was safe. But there was talking to be done as her father put it, and never mind them, he thought Tom deserved an explanation.

So she wrote it all down in a letter and posted it to him. Nothing about Sam, just about her and Tom and why it could never work, then packed a bag and made a rail reservation. She didn’t tell her parents who she’d fallen for. She wanted to see if it was enough for them that she needed to be free, that she yearned for something else other than a middle-class life in a Vancouver suburb. And it seemed to be. They asked no questions. They gave her the keys to the house in Silver and kissed her goodbye. When Katie Crosby stepped on that eastbound Via Rail train she had never felt so free in her life.

The miracle was there. Sam was at the station.

Katie saw him from the window before the train stopped, a tall, solitary figure leaning against a wooden parcel trolley. She was completely unable to decipher the emotion that the sight of that patient, hopeful man standing alone on a train platform stirred in her. It was more than love and gratitude. It was more than the very real need to weep. It seemed as though he had always been there, waiting for her to realize who she was and come and find him. But even that could not fully explain the complexity of her passion.

She stepped down from the carriage and waited motionless for him to see her, her bags at her feet.

Katie watched as Sam scanned the crowd of passengers weaving their way from the train to the street. He saw her. The invisible beam of light between them set fire to his face, but he walked rather than ran to her. They said nothing for nearly a full minute as he held her, then he held her face in his hands. ‘I thought I’d check the trains every day for a month.’

That was his explanation. Simple.

‘And then what? What about the fifth week?’

He looked down into her eyes, milky blue jewels, swimming with tears. ‘And then I’d check them for another month.’

They married nine days later, and Mr and Mrs Hunt started married life in the tiny staff accommodation room that Sam rented from the bus company. He wouldn’t use the Crosbys’ house and Katie respected his wishes. It wasn’t hard for Katie to get a job in Silver. Everyone knew Frank and June Crosby’s girl, and within a month of having run out on Tom, Katie was a happily married woman, selling fossils and loose gemstones to Japanese tourists in a lobby arcade shop in The Rocky Mountain Chateau, the massive Canadian Pacific hotel on the edge of town.

Of course there was tension on the day they picked Frank and June up from Calgary Airport, but it was a lot for the Crosbys to take in at once. She forgave them, like she hoped they would forgive her.

And two beautiful grandchildren had subsequently softened everything. Now, her parents liked to think of themselves as shining white liberals, proud their daughter had rejected the shiny prize of North American conspicuous consumption for love.

Oh it was love all right. A deep, enduring, growing and generous love. He had never once let her down in any aspect of their life, and she hoped he could say the same of her. She loved Sam and her children more than anything in the world, and the snarling female wolf downstairs would have tough competition from Katie when it came to who was more terrifying in defending their family.

Which was why her antennae were twitching now. Sam wasn’t himself. It wasn’t just the blackouts, it was as though he was fighting some secret battle.

Katie ran a hand over the top of the model mountain’s glass case and then walked to the wall to unplug the cable.

The snow was piling up outside and she looked forward to kicking her way home through it, letting the big flakes settle on her hair and the cold making her cheeks blush with cold. Katie Hunt loved the snow. But Katie Hunt did not love secrets, which was why she was going to keep a watchful eye on her family. The stuffed wolf continued to bare its teeth silently downstairs, in a lifeless tableau of female solidarity.

Eric Sindon’s formidable rota hadn’t taken Sam’s involuntary stop-over at Stoke into account. There were no points for getting stranded in the snow, and certainly no favours for manual groomers, a species regarded by Silver Ski Company as only slightly further up the food chain than lichen.

Sam found his welcome back to a full day at the depot consisted of being assigned to the bottom station of the Beaver chairlift, on the day of the fun-run. The Beaver run, an easy green trail, was in shade all morning until the sun crept up and hit it around two-thirty. The geeks in fancy dress would come down then, racing for some dumb prize, dressed like morons. Another idea of Pasqual Weaver’s. But that wouldn’t happen until the sun came round. That meant Sam had to freeze his balls off in the shadow of the mountain for six hours while he loaded untidy, grouchy herds of beginners onto the creaky old chairlift. Meanwhile, the lucky guys who drew a longer straw with Sindon basked in the sun on the south-facing slopes, saluting happy passengers on the high-speed quads, and topping up their tans.

As Sam shovelled more snow onto the chair run-up platform, Eric Sindon’s rota of injustice was far from his mind.

Dreams were one thing. Blackouts that left you unable to account for your actions were another. Sam had wrestled with his damaged memory since waking at Stoke, trying in vain to recall how he came to be in the truck. The part of it all that stung him hard was the blood. There was no escape from the fact. His face, his chin to be exact, had been covered in thick, dried, blackened blood. Sam had woken in the warm truck to find himself half-way up the pass from Stoke, on the edge of the highway with the engine running. He had sat in the cab for at least five minutes trying to figure out what the hell had gotten him there, until a glance in the rear-view mirror let him catch sight of his face. Everything below his nose was black with it. It caked his face like a kid’s first chocolate brownie at a party.

His first thought was that he was dying. The panic that rose in his breast sent images of Katie and the kids whirling in front of his eyes, and although he wasn’t aware of it at the time, he had croaked Katie’s name as his hands flew to his face.

But the blood was old, and Sam was not wounded. Half-falling from the cab into the road, he scrubbed at his face with handfuls of snow until the blood, and what felt like most of his head, had finally disappeared.

Now, faced with the grinding normality of the first of the morning’s skiers clattering onto the chair, the incident felt like a distant and vile nightmare. Except that Sam knew it had been real.

The cold was real, too. And the conditions were hellish. All this snow might be good for business, but only if it would damn well stop. It was clear right now, but the blizzards had been rolling in and out of Silver like they’d been ordered. Huge dumps aren’t much use if the pass keeps closing. This morning, it was minus twenty at the lodge and Sam shovelled like a fevered gold prospector to keep his circulation going.

The Beaver took three-at-a-time on a chair that should have been junked ten years ago. Skiers were arriving at his hut in ones and twos, warming up with the first run of the day down what the instructors called a pussy run. This was where Sam was supposed to say have a nice day and enjoy your run as he steadied the chair for them and swept the snow off the seat with a broom. Today, it was unlikely Sam would win bonus money for being employee of the month. In fact, the skiers would be lucky if he looked at them. Sam Hunt was in a very far-away place.

Two early morning ski patrollers, Baz and Grant, who’d been laying the slalom poles for the fun-run, skidded up to the chair, coming to a halt with whoops in a high spray of snow directly and deliberately aimed at Sam, with the misguided intention of making him laugh. Mistake.

‘Go fuck yourselves,’ Sam barked at them from beneath his new mantle of snow, like a snowman possessed by a demon.

‘Hey. So the customer relations course went well then, Sam, huh?’ Baz laughed with an abandon that came with the knowledge he’d soon be skiing in the sun with girls looking at his butt.

‘Sure. Soon as I see any customers I’ll give ’em a hug and ask them back home for dinner. Meanwhile all I see are assholes with backpacks.’

Grant smiled. ‘Whoooeee, Baz! Let’s hope Mr Hunt don’t break a leg when we’re on duty. So long, Sam. Keep smiling, you hear?’

They slipped forward onto a chair that Sam kicked as it moved off, leaving the boys rocking their way up the hill, their laughter dying in the deeper shadow of the pines.

Sam ran a hand over his face in exasperation. No point taking it out on his buddies. He already regretted the exchange, but it was too late to do anything about it now, short of growing wings and flying after Baz to apologize. What would he say anyway? Sorry guys. On edge today. You see I’ve been blacking out lately, and yesterday I may have just gotten into the habit of packing away a live coyote for a snack while I’m out cold.

He leaned on his shovel and looked out towards the mountains of the back bowl. The peaks of the Rockies looked back at him with a beautiful indifference. Sam turned the key in that little space at the back of his mind for a moment, allowing himself to wonder what his ancestors dreamed, planned and worried over as they moved about these peaks and valleys.

He knew what his immediate ancestors thought about. A bottle of fortified wine in a brown bag. But the ancient ones, the ones who told stories round fires instead of shuffling out of their prefabs to play bingo for liquor money, did they ever guess that life would be so different, so impossible, for the grandchildren of their grandchildren?

As if in answer, a chill wind with a cargo of drifting snowflakes eddied round the hut and tugged at Sam’s jacket. He resumed his shovelling without looking up to greet the couple of skiers who climbed onto the Beaver in a miserable silence that echoed his own.

12

He had seen that movie, The Wizard of Oz, many times before. It was always on at Christmas, when they would sit round the big old teak-boxed TV in his sister-in-law’s place, drinking beer solemnly and silently.

Calvin Bitterhand thought it was a pretty special movie, but the bit he liked the most was when the woman with the braids saw the big green city for the first time. Viewed it across some poppy fields as far as he recalled. The first time he saw Calgary he thought it was just like the green city. Not on account of being green, which it wasn’t, but the way the big tall buildings stuck straight out of the prairie, huddling together as though height was a crime on such a pool-table flat land. But then maybe all cities looked like that. This was the only one he’d ever been to. It sure didn’t look much like the green city when you were inside it though.

Right now, as he leaned against a mail-box on Centre Street, watching passers-by alter their route to walk round him like there was an invisible fence in a semi-circle ringing his sixty-one-year-old body, he thought it was a cruel and terrible place.

Five hours to go before the hostel opened up. That meant five hours trying to panhandle a few coins that could get him inside somewhere out of the biting cold that was threatening to lose him a few more fingers. The fact that it was around minus ten even here on the sunny street meant nothing to these folks. They’d just stepped out of a heated car or a heated building and were experiencing the cold as a minor inconvenience until they were back in their offices, their shops or their vehicles, and warm again.

To him the cold was a very real enemy. It had nearly killed him a couple of times. Worst one was two winters ago, in that alley in Chinatown. He’d hung around the trash cans behind a restaurant, hoping the men who came out of the kitchens for a smoke would give him food, tobacco, or in his wildest dreams, a drink. A Chinese guy in the hostel told him they sometimes did that. Didn’t tell him that they only did it for other Chinese, that they shooed Indians away like rats. The manager had come out, shouting at the smoking men in a burst of short, fast, staccato noise and then, seeing Calvin, pushed him roughly against some crates by the wall. Calvin’s tank was already reading full on a vicious moonshine he’d bought from another hostel Indian, Silas Labelle, and the push had made him topple and fall heavily behind the crates. That’s all he remembered.

The Eagle woke him up. Told him he was going to die if he didn’t try and move. Of course he didn’t want to move. He was comfortable and warm there, lying on the ground in the alley, but his spirit guide was real insistent. They flew together for a while, low over the reserve, where the children were playing by the river, and then high up into the mountains, circling in the sun with the snowy peaks glittering beneath them, until the Eagle said it was time to go back.

And he had come back, drowsy with hypothermia, two of his exposed fingers lost forever to frostbite, but alive. He’d stumbled from behind the crates, out of the alley into the street, where someone had found him and called the cops. Calvin’s left hand was now like a pig’s trotter, a remaining thumb, first and little finger serving him as best they could.

But then it was never required to do much more these days than hold the brown bag while he unscrewed the top of a bottle. Not like the old days, when his hands had had many tasks to do. Then, they gathered herbs for his magic in the woods. They cast bones and mixed powders. They took the gifts that people brought and handed over the potions they needed. Often they ran over his wife’s body and gave him pleasure. But they never held his children. The Eagle had told him many times that there would be no children. Maybe children would have stopped what had happened to him on the reserve. But maybe not.

Two businessmen were getting out of a cab on his side of the road, and Calvin hoped they would come this way and give him money. He held out his hand as they passed and the older man hesitated, put his hand into his big, warm, brown coat pocket in a hurried gesture, and threw him a dollar. The men looked away, embarrassed, as the tossed coin tinkled onto the sidewalk and Calvin bent his stiff, sore body to retrieve it. A drink would help him now, easing both the cold and his humiliation, but he hadn’t had a drink in a week. The Eagle had been quite clear about that. He had to be strong now. There had been enough self-pity, enough hiding in the sweet, deadening anaesthetic of alcohol. He needed thinking-time to decide what he was going to do about the Hunting Wolf boy.

Forty years ago of course, there would have been little to consider. He wouldn’t have taken a week to think and act: he would have known exactly how to handle this emergency. Calvin Bitterhand had been the only medicine man on Redhorn, the twenty-five square miles of Kinchuinick reserve. His house was right in the middle of Redhorn, the central village, and he had another cabin high in the hills, where he spent months practising his art and gathering herbs. They were all believers then. Sure, the white man had corrupted the tribe with his bribes and lies, turning the chief and his flunkies into puppets for their own political use. But the rest of them, the five bands who lived out their lives there, they were still Kinchuinicks, still knew who they were.

Life had been good for Calvin. He’d learned his art from the greatest of medicine men – a shaman – Eden Hunting Wolf. When Calvin’s prayers at puberty for a spirit guide had brought him the Eagle, Eden James Hunting Wolf had sought him out and taken him away from the Bitterhand band to train as his assistant. There was never any question that Calvin would be the next medicine man. Not with the Eagle choosing him. Hit Eden’s son, Moses, pretty bad though, and Eden had to sit Moses down and explain that the spirits chose whom they wished. Moses said he’d dreamed the Eagle had been his guide too, but Eden said he was lying, and Calvin could see from Moses’ face that he had been. Eden had been harsh with his son.

‘The wolf is your guide, son of mine. The wolf and nothing else. You deny him at your peril. Go now, fast for four days and run with him across our land, listening to what he tells you, seeing what he shows you. Then return and we will speak again.’

Eden had then dismissed his son and his protestations with a wave. But Moses did not build a sweat lodge or fast. Moses had sulked like a child half his age and grew distant from his father and resentful of Calvin. How he would laugh if he could see the great medicine man now, scrambling on the concrete for a thrown coin, nearly dead with cold, hunger and a liver that was ready to explode. But it was unlikely that Moses Hunting Wolf would laugh, unless laughter could come from the grave.

The wind, as if reminding him of the present, caught the hem of Calvin’s matted, stained coat and made it flutter like a diving kite.

No point in thinking about the old days and how he was respected and revered. It was now he had to think about, the last act perhaps he could perform for his people, and possibly the most important. Why, he had asked the Eagle, why would you ask an old drunk to do this? What use am I to my people? My powers have long since drowned in my impurity. But there had been no answer. It was essential. He was the only one left, and he must do it. He must do it soon.

Calvin held the dollar in his good hand and thought about how to spend it. There was a coffee shop over on First Street that wasn’t fussy who they let in. He would go in there and get warm. He needed to be warm to think.

Such great cliffs of mirrored buildings downtown, and not enough room in any of them to let Calvin Bitterhand in out of the biting wind and deadly creeping cold. The Calgary Tower peered impassively at him over the skyscrapers, standing sentinel like a white man’s totem, as he walked unsteadily along the street.

Calvin walked like a cripple, his feet dragging from ankles that were swollen and bitten by vermin, but he clutched the dollar, still warm from the businessman’s pocket, as though it held the secret to life.

The girl in the coffee shop thought about not serving him for a moment, then thought again and took his money. He found a stool in the corner and waited. She took her time, watching him out of the corner of her eye, and after what seemed like an eternity, sauntered down to his end of the counter with the jug and poured him his coffee.

Calvin cupped the mug in both hands, feeling its heat before he put it to his lips. He swallowed the hot liquid, savouring the delicious sensation as it slid down his throat into the freezing empty core of his body. He would be able to think now. He had to decide today. He knew he was already late.

It had been a week now. Seven days since he’d blacked out and had the vision; but its pungency had left a mark on his heart and on his dreams. The problem was how to get to Moses’s son before the evil went too far. That was his task. He’d flown with the Eagle to where Sam and his family lived in Silver, soaring high above the town until he’d spotted the Hunting Wolf boy going about his business, and he’d seen the great and terrible blackness there. It had been like looking down on a great black hole in the land, shooting up from the ground in a column that was growing and extending, threatening to darken the entire town. But it was two hundred miles away. And what use would he be if he got there?