The Trickster
Muriel Gray
He is a shape-shifter. He is as old as time. He kills without mercy.Life is good in Silver, a small town high in the Canadian Rockies. Sam Hunt is a lucky man. with a loving family and an honest income, he has everything he wants.But beneath the mountains a vile, demonic energy is gathering strength and soon it will unleash its freezing terror upon Silver. In the eye of the storm, one man struggles to bury the private horrors of his childhood. He knows nothing, yet seems to know everything: Sam Hunt.All he loves may be destroyed by an evil beyond imagining. An evil from the buried, hated past. An evil named the Trickster.
MURIEL GRAY
The Trickster
HarperVoyager an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk (http://www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015
Copyright © Muriel Gray 1994, 2015
Introduction © Mark Millar 2015
Cover photograph © Sverrir Thorolfsson Iceland/Getty Images
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Muriel Gray asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008158248
Ebook Edition © December 2015 ISBN: 9780008134730
Version: 2015-10-14
For
Hamish MacVinish Barbour
and Hector Adam Barbour.
With love.
Contents
Cover (#u4b972197-baa5-56e0-b2df-6da58cdf6127)
Title Page (#u5941e581-6c83-56ab-9e38-ac5b032d6281)
Copyright (#u79475d5c-3ba3-5052-a5a8-1fe28022e9f6)
Dedication (#u1da3b2c8-677d-5cc3-8783-37596d73e9ab)
Preface to the 20th anniversary edition (#ud1a5d3ec-170b-536f-b0b0-52db0eccceaa)
Introduction (#uf8968b88-8862-5fcc-9d34-3166d5b822c8)
Chapter 1: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three (#u5f1245f2-5bfc-58b4-a48d-b0ee76b13033)
Chapter 2 (#ue85f582d-1aa7-531b-b4e8-3a0f2e8159e6)
Chapter 3 (#u30da430e-35d1-59a0-bf68-fc2542d0a5d5)
Chapter 4 (#u15ddcadc-4ec9-5331-9651-10221051ef04)
Chapter 5 (#u643a908d-d15c-5d0e-80af-6312409b3a54)
Chapter 6 (#u8d0b4252-f720-5e9f-8950-29e28c13a345)
Chapter 7 (#ud52752ad-a28f-5f66-8cae-387b9a429333)
Chapter 8 (#u054b05a2-5b9e-5f0b-b4ae-87f35d60aba5)
Chapter 9 (#ue2f5d659-7e18-5021-9131-7f68ce93e6ec)
Chapter 10: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three (#u8e8b500c-2928-5a3d-bc2e-cc186d4a73ba)
Chapter 11 (#u66a2f165-cc28-5f09-8b7e-ff3cebb39eb3)
Chapter 12 (#ua7ed0a72-52e6-571b-a54a-dce57b7ea6a7)
Chapter 13 (#u2d128249-506f-5569-80d3-a963913fad34)
Chapter 14 (#u208fb7f7-f71a-54b5-909a-25f9e8a004a2)
Chapter 15 (#ub1514514-6839-556d-ae18-56db639b8b37)
Chapter 16: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 53: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 55: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 59 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 60: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 61 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 62 (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Furnace: Chapter 1 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also By the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Preface to the 20th anniversary edition (#ua9130066-d335-5b53-bc02-a13adf1139b6)
Here’s a confession. If The Trickster had been written today instead of twenty years ago it would probably be a much lazier book. There was no internet in 1994. Well, there was a sort of internet. It was called ‘a library’.
The story grew after a two-month winter stay in the Canadian Rockies, in and around the Alberta town of Banff, named after the Aberdeenshire town by the Scots who built the great railway that opened up Western Canada to the world. That fascinating historical connection, combined with the local Native Canadian lore and backdrop of fiercely beautiful, unforgiving mountain landscape, would set any imagination alight. And it did.
The history of the Canadian Pacific Railway alone is enough to fill a whole library of books, as indeed it has, as I discovered when I set out to find more, poring over volumes in Glasgow’s grand Mitchell Library.
But as the story evolved around the native people, whose land this had been long before the Scots and their Chinese labourers arrived to lay iron rails through previously unnavigable wilderness, it was clear there was only one way to gather accurate information. Go back and talk to them.
I was warned by local non-native Canadians that trying to gain access to the Stoney Indian Tribe, whose First Nation reserve lies to the east of Banff by the small town of Cochrane, was all but impossible. Wary of outsiders, with a depressing range of serious social problems, these were not people who would be instantly eager to share tales of their ancestors with a stranger from Scotland.
But since the clan motto ‘Hold Fast Craigellachie’ was the telegram sent to the team leader nearing exhaustion during the railway construction’s most challenging section, it seemed right to follow suit.
To meet a reserve resident you make a date and a place, and then you go and wait. They don’t turn up. Well, they do. They watch you from afar. And if you keep coming back at the right time and the right place then eventually they come too.
It took nearly two weeks. Same place, same time, every single day. And then suddenly, one day I was in. My guide was a young woman, Co-Co Powderface, a champion barrel-rider and hunter. We talked and talked. We visited her home, a corrugated iron hand-built house, the tiny shack of her grandmother, a non-English speaker, and the surprise was that everything about it was resonant of lives I’d seen as a child in Scotland, when travelling in the Outer Hebrides and the far north Highlands. Strangely familiar territory.
Over the days we spent with Co-Co, her grandmother, through translation, told tales of shape shifting, of travelling hundreds of miles in minutes, of the spirits and their lives, and miserably, of darker things in their community, horribly real and human and indisputable.
So it’s to her, her family and her people I dedicate this new edition. Had I been able to travel there by clicking the internet, to browse through their myths and legends, idly gaze at photographs of First Nations reserves and forums about cultural practices and problems, I would never have had the privilege of meeting them.
Twenty years seems a long time ago. But just think. To something dark, something ancient, evil and indestructible, something that existed on earth long before the first fish crawled from the sea on its journey to evolve into mankind, it would seem no more than the sideways blink of an eye.
Muriel Gray, 2015
Introduction (#ua9130066-d335-5b53-bc02-a13adf1139b6)
I’m very suspicious of people who read introductions.
In my experience the writer’s name in big, chunky letters is all I really need to pick up a book. If it’s a writer I don’t recognize, I’ll impulse buy on a title or a blurb or, if I’m being especially reckless, a beautifully painted cover. But if you’re still unsure whether or not to immerse yourself in the story ahead and need a further thousand words to completely convince you, then let me reassure even the most cautious buyer …
This is the best decision you’ve made lately and you’re in for an absolute treat.
Let’s go back in time ten years to when I first met Muriel Gray. No, scratch that. Turn the dial a further ninety degrees, crank up the handle and send your George Pal-era time machine back a full three decades and she’s starting her career as the coolest thing on the coolest show on television. She’s a presenter on the legendary music programme, The Tube, interviewing pretty much everyone you’ve ever heard of; fast-forward and she’s a kind of a famous TV producer and Britain’s most well-known mountain-climber and a member of the board at Glasgow School of Art (where she’s DOCTOR Muriel Gray) and an award-winning newspaper columnist and former rector of Edinburgh University. Oh, she’s also the patron of several Scottish charities, a respected art historian, an architecture buff, a professional illustrator, a marathon runner, a wife, a mother and a hugely successful business-woman too, in case you didn’t get the memo.
So when I first met Muriel ten years back and discovered she had a double life as a hugely successful horror novelist with three bestselling books to her name and deified by no less than Mister Stephen Edwin King of Portland, Maine, it really didn’t come as too much of a surprise.
The British are naturally suspicious of polymaths and we’re generally right. It’s hard enough to be wonderful at one thing and close to impossible to be brilliant at everything. Yet Muriel kind of is. Oh, and lest ye worry she’s jumping on some kind of genre gravy train when everyone is keen to flash their geek credentials let me assure you she’s very much the real deal. In an era where Hollywood pours money over precisely the kind of creative types they shunned and mocked for years, to the point where the word ‘Ferd’ has been created to identify ‘fake-nerds’, Muriel’s knowledge and love of all things horror is very close to unparalleled. This is a woman who knows her HP Lovecraft from her MR James and will liberally drop names like Machen, Matheson or Algernon Blackwood into even the most casual of dinner conversations. She’s as comfortable at a horror and fantasy convention in the rainy south-east of England as in a BBC studio in Television Centre, possibly even more so. You see, this is what she REALLY wanted to do while she was winning at all the amazing things she’s perhaps better known for and, trust me, it shows.
I remember sitting down to read The Trickster with that slight trepidation when you’re friends with the author. Two pages in and I was forty pages in. A hundred pages in and I was finished. How did that happen? It was so good I genuinely started Furnace the following day and finished off the week with the third of her excellent horror trio, The Ancient. Muriel is such a natural, her writing style so easy, that I can’t believe she hasn’t dipped her toe in these murky waters for precisely 1.5 decades. The Trickster was every weather-beaten paperback, every old comic book, every cult horror movie and every videotaped Hammer House of Horror she had ever stored away in the back of her brain and it literally exploded from her head into ours. She’d trained for it her entire life and she seemed to have a ball. I did too and, trust me, so will you as you read about Sam Hunt and his mysterious heritage and the thing beneath the mountains and all these terrible blackouts he’s been having at precisely the same time all these interesting corpses are showing up. Why in the name of Great Jehovah has this woman not written a horror novel in fifteen years? Why are you reading this introduction when there’s a monster of a book on the other side of the next page?
So if you only know Muriel from TV or radio or a familiar face up a Scottish mountain or that lady with the spiky blonde hair who sits across from you at the School of Art board meetings then you haven’t really, truly met the real her. This book in your hands is the closest thing to the Muriel her friends know and love and, to be honest, I’m slightly jealous you’re only just discovering what she’s really all about in this spanking new edition you’re holding right now.
She really is brilliant at everything, but the books, I would suggest, are her finest achievement and if you’re familiar with her in any way at all you’ll know that is a pretty damn fine recommendation.
Now stop reading the introduction. Turn the page and enjoy yourself.
Mark Millar
Glasgow, 2015
1 (#ua9130066-d335-5b53-bc02-a13adf1139b6)
Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three (#ua9130066-d335-5b53-bc02-a13adf1139b6)
When he screamed, his lips slid so far up his teeth that the rarely exposed gum looked like shiny, flayed meat. Hunting Wolf’s eyes flicked open and stared. There was a semicircle of faces above him. Silent. Watching.
For a moment he stayed perfectly still, allowing himself to regain the feeling of being inside his body, that dull ache of reality after the lightness of the spirit’s escape. Then the numbing cold of the snow beneath his naked back stabbed at his skin, and mocked him with the knowledge that he was firmly back in the realm of the flesh.
Sweat was still trickling down his breast, beads of moisture clinging to his brown nipples like decoration, and he stared up at the grey, snow-laden sky in hot despair.
The faces looked on. They would not step forward to touch him or help him in this state. The shaman’s trance was sacred and they had no way of knowing when it would be over.
But it was over, now. He had looked into the thing’s face. Oh, Great Spirit, he had. And the filthy darkness, the bottomless malice he had seen there, had been nearly impossible to bear.
The white men gathered by the mountain were insane. He had seen that, too. Their madness, their folly.
And what could he do?
The shaman got up from the ground with a swiftness that surprised his audience of watchers, and walked away. The faces regarded him for a moment, and then, one by one, followed.
2 (#ulink_41c46a43-c950-56e0-8d5c-0064ea24c11c)
‘The living rock.’
If Wesley Martell had caught the look his engineer threw him, he might have regretted the remark. As it was, he shifted his huge bulk in the conductor’s chair, leaned a flabby arm, its hand dimpled like a baby’s, on the sill of the cab window and said it again.
‘Yes indeed. Liiiviiing rock.’
Joshua Tennent, to whom the remark was principally addressed, returned his gaze to the track in front of them, his forefinger caressing the throttle handle as though it could make toast of his corpulent colleague. As the mouth of the first tunnel slid into view from behind a cliff crusted by aquamarine ice, Joshua felt panic mash his guts again.
How many times had he done this, for Christ’s sake? He’d pulled freight back and forwards through the Corkscrew Tunnel for nearly three years, and just because of one foolish, possibly imagined incident, he found himself nearly caking his shorts like a toddler every time that black arch yawned in front of him.
He’d guessed Martell would have a go, could tell by the way he had shifted eagerly in his seat as they’d climbed up the approach to Wolf Mountain. Joshua had hoped the lump of lard would doze illegally until they reached Silver, but he’d been alert and beady-eyed for miles. Those two serpentine tubes of blackness lay between them and town, and the conductor wasn’t in the mood for regulation-breaking sleep.
Joshua thought it best to ignore the bastard. Martell wasn’t the first to twist the knife and he wouldn’t be the last. Concentrating on smothering his fear was labour enough for now.
The conductor peeked across at his white-faced engineer, as he slapped the shoulder of the third occupant of the cab, a sullen brakeman called Henry. He gesticulated grandly towards Joshua, his two rodent-like eyes narrowing into slits of mirth.
‘Look, Henry. Hoghead’s got the jimmy-shits again ’bout goin’ through the Corkscrews.’
The brakeman disregarded both the slap and the remark, answering only with a barely perceptible upward movement of his head, the reverse of a nod. Martell was undeterred. This shift had bored the balls off him, with the brakeman sitting motionless and silent in front of him, his big ears sticking out like one of those Easter Island heads Martell had seen in a magazine once. And this damn engineer had no conversation either. Wasn’t much to ask that a man could expect a bit of parley at his work, instead of watching speechless as three hundred miles of Canadian Pacific track snaked beneath them in the snow.
There was nearly a mile of train behind them. Being in charge of a hundred cars of coal rumbling slowly across Canada meant big-time responsibility to Wesley Martell. He often pictured how his train looked from the air, a giant metal caterpillar picking its way through the mountains, the engine like the insect’s head, and himself, CP conductor, Martell, the brains in that head. This mile of hardware stopped, started or stayed at his say-so, and that made him feel good; made him more of a man than those jockeys braying into portable phones you saw on the sidewalks in Vancouver. No kid was ever going to look at those guys with big, wide, jealous eyes when they went about their business, least not the way they looked up at him in his cab, when he hi-balled his monster load through a station waving down at them like an oily Father Christmas.
But Martell didn’t get to be conductor, the big cheese on this buggy, without expecting a crumb of respect from his crew. Part of that respect was the civility to pass the time, jaw a little.
Seemed like this crew didn’t know the meaning of the word respect, sitting there like two dumb fucks, lost in their own dumb thoughts.
Wesley Martell didn’t much like to be left alone with his thoughts: too much track gazing and those thoughts had the habit of chucking up things he’d rather not meet again, thanks. Especially on a night haul, when the lights of the train illuminated a few yards of the track ahead, making it dance and gyrate on the edge of darkness like something alive. No, he’d rather talk. Talk was life. Silence was a kind of death, and he’d had enough silence on this journey.
Ten miles back Henry had said something to Joshua that Martell didn’t catch, and apart from that, nothing. Not a sound except the clacking of the wheels on the track and the throaty roar of the engine. So when the Corkscrew Tunnel rolled round, Martell took his shot.
Back at the depot, Joshua and his tunnels were the butt of an endless running joke amongst the local crews, and Martell was damned if he wasn’t going to use anything he could to get a little spark into this seven-hour bitch of a shift.
Joshua was still, quiet, and white. He had it coming.
‘Best keep a hand on that throttle, engineer. Think I saw something movin’ in there.’ He threw his head back and wheezed out a guffaw.
He laughed alone, but Henry turned his head slightly towards Martell before returning to gaze vacantly out of the window.
Joshua could feel his hands turning clammy. It wasn’t hard to ignore the fat guy. Ever since he’d confided in some brakemen from Toronto what had happened to him that day in the tunnel, he’d taken a ribbing that was now so obligatory it had practically entered the Canadian Railway Operating Rules Book.
What was hard, and getting harder every time they came through, was trying to resist jamming the dynamic brake handle on and jumping out of the train cab into the snow, before the three men and those hundred cars of grade one coal were launched into the gaping black mouth.
Funny to think that right now, on the wooden viewing platform up on the highway, tourists would be yelping to each other like excited coyotes, at spotting a freight train about to go through the famous tunnels. It was a Kodak-moment, all right: with a train as long as this one, the onlookers would see the engine disappear into the first tunnel, then double back on itself, only to appear to be travelling in the opposite direction to its freight before entering the second tunnel. There was a big painted illustration up on that platform for the real dumb tourists, the ones who stumbled out of a Winnebago and couldn’t figure out where they were, never mind what they were seeing.
Joshua had stopped on the highway once to look at the sign. It told him in kiddie-speak letters that they had blasted into the mountain ninety years ago, using the spiral design to avoid a wicked gradient through Wolf Pass. There were shitty pencil drawings of pioneers with big hats and moustaches, and a lot of bull about the early days of railway, but at least there was a diagram of how the tunnels worked inside the mountain. That was neat. You could see exactly how the Corkscrew worked, how it quartered the gradient with those two curly holes in the hill. Joshua had never thought about it much before then, and he didn’t think about it much after either. That is, until he had his fright.
It didn’t matter how many times he went over it in his head. He’d lain awake at nights in the CP bunkhouses and at home in Stoke, trying to figure out why he’d gotten scared. Worst thing was, it was a whole year ago, almost exactly this time last winter, and the scare hadn’t worn off.
Martell could go shaft himself. Joshua would tolerate all the fat fingers in the world poking him in the ribs, if he could just shake free of this paralysing, childish fear. He began to run through it again, the way he did every time they passed this way, trying to flush the memory away, make it safe.
The way he remembered it, they’d come through the lower tunnel, the engine just entering the second, when the End-to-Train unit had gone apeshit. There was a hot box back there and nothing for it but to stop. With the gradient they had to negotiate coming up before the higher tunnel, the last thing they needed was a car with screaming white-hot axles dragging behind them. Joshua recalled whistling through his teeth with exasperation as the whole damn hulk screeched to a halt and conductor and brakeman got up from their chairs and stretched their legs.
The boxes had stopped out there in the gorge, sitting in the thin wintry sunlight, leaving the cab of the engine about fifty yards into the tunnel, and Joshua knew he had to get back there and investigate. Barney the brakeman handed Joshua a thick black rubber torch with one hand and put the kettle on the hot plate with the other, saying clearly without words that the engineer would have their assistance when they were good and ready.
It was the delay that had pissed off Joshua. Just the time it was going to take to check it all out and put it right. It had been his homeward shift, taking him back to Beat River and Mary’s bed, a heavenly prospect after five nights in the bunkhouses, lying beside guys in their pits, snoring like they were sawing logs. He remembered thinking two things. The first was that at least it was lucky the cars had stopped outside the tunnel, and the second thought, like it had come from nowhere, was ‘the living rock’. Three innocent words, just sitting there doing nothing, going nowhere, meaning little. But there.
He took the torch and saluted sarcastically to Barney as he opened the cab door and left.
As he climbed down out of the huge red DRF30, Joshua touched the hand rail with an ungloved hand. Cold metal that has just rolled through the passes between the Alberta Rockies in minus twenty is not welcoming to naked flesh, and Joshua’s fingers stuck fast, forcing him to breathe on them to release his hand. It stung like crazy as it relinquished his grip and with a curse he sheathed it in a leather work gauntlet.
It was the only time he’d ever stopped in the tunnels, and yes, compared to the cement-lined tunnels that ran under the highways on the east coast, the rock was alive all right. So much for ‘a feat of grand engineering’. Seemed like the guys had just blasted the sucker and left. The walls and ceiling surprised him with their unhewn crudity, something he had never perceived by the weak light of the cab as they’d passed through here a hundred times. Ice hung from every crack in thin savage spikes and sporadically coated the rock-face with vast, glistening bulbous sheets.
And everything was dark ahead of the engine. Really dark. The curve of the tunnel meant that you could only ever see one entrance at a time. In fact, there was a point, right in the middle of the tunnel’s arc, where you couldn’t see any light at all; but he didn’t care to think of that right now. His breath billowed up in front of his face like steam, partially obscuring his view of the sunlit opening ahead each time he exhaled.
He should have been thinking about how they were going to get to the maintenance yard forty kilometres away without too much damage or time loss: he should have been thinking like an engineer. But he wasn’t. All he could hear, echoing in his head as though his skull were a tunnel, were the words, the living rock, the living rock.
He hadn’t needed the torch for the first few yards, the walls being lit by the cab interior, but by the time he drew level with the first car, Joshua had to use it, picking his way along the track trying not to pratfall over the sleepers half-buried in gravel. The arch of sunlight was clear ahead, its illumination extending barely a few feet into the dark, and already he was starting to regret he hadn’t insisted that Barney come with him. He touched the walkie-talkie hanging on his hip, annoyed that it hadn’t crackled into life. Clearly his two crew companions were treating this like a break instead of a breakdown. He was tempted to press ‘talk’ and shout horse’s ass at them as he passed the second car just to remind them he was there, but realized grimly that it wasn’t irritation making him keen to summon them, but apprehension. His hand left the radio, unclipped the ear flaps on his cap and let them fall. Joshua Tennent was suddenly very cold.
It wasn’t so much a noise he heard, more the feeling of a noise. That is, he sensed there was something scraping in the rock above him. Not scraping on the surface, like a bat or a chipmunk, but scraping inside the rock as if the stone itself was shifting, turning in its sleep.
But he didn’t hear it. He felt it. The tunnel was not silent: the idling engine hissed and clanked, dripped and cracked at random as he progressed along its metal flanks. Any rustling in the tunnel would have to work hard to make itself heard above the cacophony.
Even now, he still couldn’t say which sense was being alerted, but the memory of the feeling was pungent.
At first he ignored it. How could you feel a noise? Walking on, he realized that he hadn’t breathed for about six or seven seconds and corrected the oversight with a cloud of vapour. He struggled to free his body from that atavistic state of standby every child adopts in the darkened bedroom when they hear a creak from a floorboard; breath held, eyes wide open, body still and ready to flee. But why was he on red alert? There was nothing to fear in this situation, except the diminishing drinking time in Stoke, and the wrath of Mary, who even now would be soaking in a bath reeking of something made from coconut or peach.
He felt it again. It was above him, he was sure of that. Something stirring in the rock above the ceiling. But no, that wasn’t right. It was the rock in the ceiling itself that was stirring, moving above him like iron filings attracted to his magnet.
Joshua wanted to run then. He wanted to run very badly indeed. But from what? There was no sound, for God’s sake, nothing to hear but the train. If he gave in to his instincts, how would he explain to Barney or the conductor why he ran flailing along the track, stumbling into the sunlight like a fool? He kept that picture close as he walked more quickly towards the tunnel mouth, making himself visualize Barney’s face as he described how a sound ‘felt’.
‘You bin drinkin’ meths?’ he would say for sure. Barney’s favourite joke. A joke he used on anything he didn’t agree with, understand or like.
(Union official tells him there’s an overtime ban.
‘You bin’ drinkin’ meths?’
Wife tells him it’s time he got up off his fat fanny and put the trash out …
‘You bin drinkin’ meths?’)
You see Barney, you couldn’t hear it exactly, you could only feel it …
‘You bin drinkin’ …’
Enough. He would walk on like an adult and fix that fucking car. The sooner it was done, the sooner he’d be downing a cold one in The Deerbrush, with Mary perched beside him on a stool. He was only three cars away from the sun, and whatever else his heart was saying, his head was saying there is no noise. He had looked back then and been surprised by how far away the lights of the cab seemed.
All the way back into the tunnel Barney would be standing looking at the kettle with his hands in his pocket. All the way back there the conductor would be fishing down the back of his chair for his dog-eared novel. All the way back there the rock was still living. Joshua stopped breathing again and stood still. The noise, the feeling, halted with him. He waited. It waited. Then, it happened.
Like a released pinball, the noise, the feeling, concealed in its ceiling of rock, shot away from Joshua with a velocity that made him dizzy. He knew it was something alive, and he knew it was travelling the whole length of the tunnel’s arc to the other entrance. There was a fraction of a pause, the fraction of a pause you expect when something thrown very hard is bouncing off its wall. The pause before it starts to come right back at you.
It was darkness, and it was rushing up the tunnel towards him like water forced through a pipe. Again he felt it first, reeling from its shock-waves as they pushed him back towards the entrance. But when he saw it, the natural black of the tunnel’s sunlessness being obscured by a deeper blackness impossible to comprehend, he remembered to breathe. As the black tide swallowed up the cab of the train, breaking over it like a wave, he turned and ran, his legs buckling and floundering beneath him. He had to make the entrance. There was no doubt about that at all. Instinct had told his logic to shut the fuck up and run, and instinct was telling him that if that wall of rushing blackness reached him before he reached the light, he would never feel the sun on his face again.
He ran like a child, making involuntary grunting sounds as his feet gouged the gravel, chin high, eyes rolling in their sockets.
When he fell out of the tunnel gulping for breath, the last thing he remembered was the darkness slamming into the entrance, as though the man-made arch described an invisible prison door. He was sure the darkness screamed with fury. No sound again, just a visceral reading of a ripping, hungry, scream.
Joshua was sure he had just preserved his sanity. The brakeman and conductor were not so sure. When they found Joshua, he was lying in the snow jabbering, and the best they could get out of him was the living rock.
He was taken home by road and was back at work in a fortnight. The conductor and brakeman filed a report, recalling that there had been a short power cut in the cab at the time that engineer Tennent ran. Yes, they had experienced temporary darkness, and yes, that’s probably what spooked him so bad. No harm done. Everybody safe, and a whole new joke to pass around the bunkhouses now that the one about Joe’s bear encounter had worn thin.
But even now, a whole year on, and after a hundred nudges and grins when Joshua walked into the canteen, each time the Corkscrews loomed he toyed with trading his railway pension for steady work in a hamburger joint.
Martell was still chuckling as the cab entered the tunnel. ‘Rock still livin’, Tennent? Can’t hear no breathin’.’
He wheezed some more in Joshua’s direction, until he realized that neither his brakeman or engineer were going to respond. Martell was starting to get mad. A man making a joke deserves some kind of answer, even if the joke’s an old one. He’d put up with this silence too long.
The dark engulfed them, the yellow light from the cab flickering on the irregular shapes of the rough rock walls, but the entrance to the tunnel was clearly visible ahead.
Martell leaned forward in his chair.
‘Guess you’re keepin’ it shut ’cause you know that whole livin’ rock thing was a crock of shit, Tennent. That right?’
Joshua kept his eyes on the growing arch of light.
‘Guess so, Wesley.’
It was shaking a stick at a steer, a hoghead calling Martell by his first name.
‘Well let’s us just stop in the upper tunnel and check it out. Clear it up for good.’
Joshua dared not look at him. He sat motionless, his throat dry.
‘You heard. Hit the brakes. Now.’
He heard all right. Why not? Joshua knew it would get him one day. Every time he dreamed of that rushing, hungry darkness, he knew it would get him. Why not now? Now was as good a time as any.
Turning slowly to look at Martell, he pulled back the brake and watched the conductor’s florid face as the train began its laborious process of halting.
Forty-five seconds later, they stopped just inside the mouth of the upper tunnel.
Joshua Tennent held his conductor’s eyes in a gaze like a mongoose holding a snake. Martell twitched. Maybe the engineer was really crazy. Maybe this was where he went Charlie Manson and they’d all end up being stencils for a cop’s chalk outline. But then again maybe not. There was face to be saved here, and when all was said and done he was the guy in charge, and crazy or not, Tennent had better understand that, and understand it good.
Henry was open-mouthed, looking from Joshua to Martell and back again, as though the secret of why a substantial portion of BC’s coal supply came to be stationary in the mouth of the upper Corkscrew Tunnel, lay in the air somewhere between them.
‘Want to get out and say hi to the rock?’ The conductor spat the words.
A pause.
‘Sure. After you, Wesley.’
The delay in the reply was deliberate, the tone of voice imitating Joshua. ‘After you, son.’
Joshua stood. It would get him. Of course it would. He would face it now, it would get him, and the thing would be done. Over.
It would be okay. Better than all those bad dreams, and the feeling in those dreams that someday the sunlit arch might not be enough to stop it. His eyes never leaving those of the conductor, he walked to the cab door behind his seat, pushed down the thin aluminium handle, and opened it. Cold air poured in like syrup.
‘Coming? Or are you scared, Wesley?’
Funny thing though, Wesley Martell was scared. He kept thinking about the rock. The living rock. Even though he knew the whole thing was bullshit, his stomach turned a loop at having to walk out that cab door and stand three feet from the craggy wall. But he was still more mad than scared, and if that crazy shit-for-brains hoghead thought he was going to back down now, then he ate loony flakes for breakfast.
‘Oh sure, Tennent. It’s tricklin’ down my legs and fillin’ my boots. But I’m right at your heels, boy.’
Joshua inhaled a lungful of warm cab air and stepped out onto the metal platform to face the rock. Martell was at his side immediately.
Joshua waited. The two men stood silently, their backs to the light of the window, staring at the icy stone. Nothing happened. Joshua closed his eyes. Nothing. The only sound was that of the massive diesel engine chugging beneath a sheath of steel. Martell felt the cold settle on him like a silk cloak.
Joshua opened his eyes, his breast heaving with a mixture of relief and dismay. Did he really imagine it last time? Was he crazy? He’d dreamed of this so many times in the last year, tossing and sweating in his bed as the nightmare darkness swept him away, and yet he knew there was nothing here but rock. He couldn’t ‘feel’ any sound at all.
He looked at Martell with naked contempt. ‘Happy?’
‘Pleased as a baby at the tit. I guess the livin’ rock ain’t home today.’
He squeezed another laugh out of that box of phlegm he stored somewhere under his shirt and kept laughing as they re-entered the cab, closed the door and returned to their chairs.
The throttle opened and the train made a series of metallic screeches of protest as it inched away. It was the deafening noise of the engine that prevented the three men hearing the other sound.
The sound of two six-foot-long icicles shattering as they splintered onto the metal platform where the conductor and engineer had stood.
3 (#ulink_d6ce91ca-a696-5a99-ac9f-bf2ec88af7b8)
Billy broke the laws of physics every time he yelled. How a holler that loud came to be emitted from such a tiny frame would have given Einstein pause to pull his moustache in thought.
‘It’s coming!’
Sam Hunt made a mock ear-trumpet with his hand and leaned towards his son. ‘Sorry? Didn’t get that.’
Billy’s small oval face looked up at Sam and broke into a grin. ‘Sure you did. Feel. It’s coming now.’
Sam bent into a crouch and laid a palm on the freezing rail. He could feel nothing, but Billy, they both knew, was the expert here.
‘Okay then. Bird or Queen this time?’
Billy was thoughtful. He turned the pale yellow dollar coin over in his mittened hand and made a decision. ‘I’m gonna go for the duck. You put yours Queen-up.’
He leaned forward and placed the dollar on top of the rail track as carefully as if he were handling a rod of plutonium. Sam, smiling, positioned his dollar a yard further up the track, the profile of the Queen of England facing the direction of the oncoming train like she knew what she was in for.
From here on the edge of town you could just make out the entrance of the tunnel, looming above the pines about three miles off, but Sam was damned if he knew how Billy could feel the vibrations of a train that far away. But he did, and here it came, the headlight emerging from the dark hole right on cue.
‘Stand back, Billy.’ Sam stretched a hand out for the boy’s.
‘Aw get real, Dad. That’s not gonna be here for at least five minutes.’
Sam stood up and looked towards the tunnel mouth, his hand still extended to his son. ‘No, you’re right, Billy boy. Why don’t you just lie with your head on the rail, and if it gets cut off at the neck your Mom and I see what we can get for your bike at a jumble sale?’
Billy sighed and rolled his eyes. He stood up and took the large offered hand, and together they moved back from the track. Still holding hands, they squatted on the snowy embankment ten feet away to wait.
From behind the forest came the deep, long, discordant hoot of the train’s horn, filling Silver Valley with a sound so thick it resonated in the spine as well as in the ears. Sam lifted his head like a cat smelling fish.
‘You like that sound, Dad, don’t you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I like it too.’
Sam looked down at the face of the boy, framed now in his blue anorak hood, his black eyes glittering in a brown face. ‘What’s it make you think of, Billy?’
The boy looked solemn. ‘You.’
Sam was silent. He tightened his grip on the mitten containing his son’s small hand and resumed gazing up the track.
Billy smiled up at him. ‘Don’t you want to know why?’
‘Do I have a choice here?’
The boy giggled, a sound so sweet that Sam thought it might make primroses poke through the snow at their feet. ‘It just sounds like you, that’s all. I don’t know why.’
‘So I sound like a freight train horn, is that what you’re saying? Remind me of that if I’m ever tempted into a Karaoke Bar.’
But he’d lost his son’s attention. Billy had his timing wrong for once. The train was already in sight on the long straight leading into town, and it would be on top of their dollars in about a minute.
Billy yelped like a rodeo MC and jumped to his feet.
‘How big, Dad? How big? What’s the record?’ He was jumping on the spot.
‘Two-and-a-half inches. I think.’
‘Metric, Dad. What’s that in centimetres?’
Sam, legs drawn up to his armpits, his arms flopping lazily over the knees, looked down into the snow and laughed. ‘Got me there, Billy boy. Guess I’m not doing so hot today. Sound like a horn and can’t count modern.’
The rails were singing now as fourteen thousand tons of iron tested their rivets, and when the horn sounded again, father and son nearly felt it blow their hair.
Billy was right. Sam loved that sound. He remembered seeing a small ad in the Silver Valley Weekly that read, ‘Superior condo to let near ski slopes. Off highway and no train noise’ and thinking he wouldn’t much care for that, not if you couldn’t hear the trains. He also knew the advertiser was lying. There was nowhere in Silver, or anywhere in the whole valley for that matter, where you could insulate yourself from that melancholy trumpeting. Not even the grazing elk looked up when it sounded. As far as Sam figured, it was part of the mountains, a sound as natural as the woodpecker or the squirrel, and anyone who wanted a condo where you couldn’t hear it deserved a dunce cap.
The train was on them. They could see the men in the cab, sitting high in the dirty red-and-white-striped metal box. The engine looked like a face, the crew peering out of small windows that made eyes at either side of a huge snout housing the horsepower.
Billy waved up at the big metal face, yelling hopelessly, his voice lost in the roar of the thundering diesel engine, unaware that Sam held the hem at the back of his anorak protectively.
From one of the eyes in the iron face, the flesh-and-blood face of a fat man scowled down at them as the engine rumbled past. No one was going to wave at Billy today. Sam watched his son’s expression turn from excitement to disappointment as the cab slipped away and they faced nothing but a mile of coal cars, shedding ice as the sun got to work on them.
‘He didn’t see us, Dad.’
Sam knew they’d been seen all right. In fact he knew exactly what that fat face had been thinking, as it looked lazily out of its window and fixed its beady eyes on them. But he would do everything in his power to protect Billy from that thought.
‘Guess not. How’re the dollars doin’?’
‘Still there I think. I can see mine. Only about twenty cars to go.’
Man and boy waited patiently, man perhaps more patiently than boy, until the last car rolled by, and they watched the back end of the train slide away.
Billy looked down at Sam, who still squatted in the snow, lost in thought. ‘Can I get ’em?’
‘Yeah. Go for it. Remember they’re hot.’
Billy darted forward to the rail as Sam stood and stretched his six-foot body beneath its down-filled jacket: by the way his son was breathily mouthing, wow, he guessed they’d had a result. He joined him by the track.
‘At least eight centimetres, Dad. Look.’ Billy passed the flattened disc of yellow metal to his father, eyes wide in anticipation of approval as Sam turned the hot trophy over in his gloved hand.
‘Matter that it ain’t exactly round?’
Billy shook his head.
‘Then I guess it’s a record. Official.’
Billy cheered and snatched back the metamorphosed dollar. He ran to where Sam had placed his. ‘Sorry, Dad. Yours slipped.’
True enough. Sam’s dollar had fallen off the track before the train could do its business. He was glad the glory had all been Billy’s but he feigned a little hurt as he pocketed the unchanged coin. ‘Gee. This isn’t my day.’
Billy came up to his father, put his short little arms around Sam’s padded waist and hugged him. ‘I love you, Dad. You can have mine.’
If love could have weight, Sam thought that freight train would have trouble shifting his. He wanted to squeeze his son so hard his muscles ached at the restraint they were under. ‘I love you too, Billy. You keep the dollar. There’ll be plenty more. I’ll beat ya yet.’
Billy broke the hug and ran through the thick snow, stumbling like a cripple to the parked car, making a noise like a train as he went.
Sam looked at the retreating train, the distant sound of its bell clanging as it slowed up through town.
If that driver really had been thinking what Sam suspected, he thought at that moment, he might be inclined to pull the fat bastard from the cab and kill him. But how could Sam know that Wesley Martell was innocent? Martell wasn’t thinking That kid must be crazy if he thinks I’m going to wave at two stinking Indians. In fact Martell hadn’t even noticed them. Nothing had been further from his thoughts.
‘The light you can leave on all day. Light 96 CHFM. Stevie Wonder comin’ up next …’
Sam’s hand couldn’t get to the car stereo off-button fast enough. What the hell did Katie do with his cassettes? The radio would kick in if there was no tape in the player, and even after ten years of marriage, Sam still hadn’t learned to turn the goddamn thing off before he started the ignition. Katie always left the radio on, he should know by now. There were only two stations a car radio could pick up this far into the mountains, both of them beaming in from Calgary, and both of them made Sam long for legislation to shoot disc jockeys. He could just about stomach 107 Kick FM, pumping out dinosaur rock music until the signal broke up, but when Katie had been driving the radio mysteriously tuned itself back to this easy-listening nightmare.
He remembered how once, exasperated, he had turned it off while Katie was singing along to a Lionel Richie song, causing her to tut and smack him on the head, ignoring the fact he was driving. Sam had done a mock swerve. Billy and Jess in the back had laughed hard at that and he’d growled, and asked her why the hell she listened to it.
‘You get a traffic report from Captain Kirk, the chopper pilot.’
‘Yeah, but it’s Calgary traffic. The guy’s flying about above Calgary, Katie. You find it useful, knowing that there’s a tailback on Barlow Trail, when you’re sitting in the car in Silver, two hundred miles away?’
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 (#ulink_a967d99a-4ebf-51aa-81ed-f480da816275)
‘… 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.’
‘Tell me what’s wrong.’
Sam sighed. ‘I don’t know. I’ve been kind of cranky all day.’
Katie undid the top three buttons of Sam’s silk shirt, ran her hand over the bone amulet he wore round his neck on a leather thong, and let her hand rest on his warm belly.
‘In fact cancel cranky. Replace with asshole.’
‘Can I help?’
He smiled down at the blue eyes in her pale oval face; the face of a Victorian china doll.
‘Sure. You can load the dishwasher.’
She guffawed and bit his shoulder. He lifted her head and kissed her small rosy mouth.
When Sam and Katie Hunt got to bed an hour later the dishwasher was still empty. The cushions on the sofa however, were going to need some recovery time.
Billy heard his parents climb the stairs and lay awake in the dark listening to their hushed voices as they turned off the hall lights.
His forehead was beaded with sweat and his hands were fists, clenching and unclenching across his chest. He knew he’d had a bad dream, nothing more, but the taste of it was still with him. Lying awake now, he wondered why he didn’t call out to his parents, bring them into his room to sit on his bed and talk to him in calm voices. But he didn’t want to see his parents right now. He wanted to see Bart. The wolf had told him to trust Bart, but Bart was in the yard, banished nightly from the house. Billy waited until he heard Sam and Katie’s door close gently. He gave it a minute and then reached out and turned on his bedside light.
He paused to see if the light from his room would bring an enquiry from next door, and when it didn’t he slipped out of bed and pulled on his plaid jacket.
Finding a torch in the toy box and opening his door carefully, Billy picked his way downstairs and through the house to the kitchen door by the light of the slim beam.
The sky was clear outside, a million stars glittering behind the black jagged silhouette of the mountains. Bart was standing outside his kennel, ears high, nostrils blowing clouds of vapour, face staring towards Wolf Mountain. There was only a tiny twitch of recognition and a small noise from the back of the animal’s throat when Billy knelt beside him and put his arms round Bart’s thick spiky coat.
Boy and dog looked out towards the mountain. Upstairs man, woman and child slept.
5 (#ulink_9aad464f-e9d5-567b-a9a4-8adc556a8c80)
Lenny Sadowitz shifted a rogue piece of gum from between his cheek and back teeth before squinting up at the mountain, preparing to holler at his colleague.
‘C’mon, Jim. I got a life to lead!’
The word lead bounced off the rock, returning to his ears in a thin piping voice barely recognizable as his own. He watched his breath swirl in front of him, blew a few rings of frozen air, sucked the cold between his teeth and continued to chew. He leaned forward on the handlebars of the snow cat and watched his companion’s silhouette move silently between the other cat and the unexploded charge he was investigating.
Lenny hated being on avalanche rota. What was the point of being a ski patroller if you ended up miles away from the action on the trails, stuck in godforsaken gullies like this one with as much chance of getting some skiing in as Jim had of pulling that dreamboat waitress in T.J.’s Diner?
Having a white cross on your back impressed the public. It did nothing for the coyotes and the whiskeyjacks, and that was all there was for company in this part of the mountain.
This whole exercise was getting on Lenny’s tits. Why they should have to avalanche the cliffs on Wolf was anyone’s guess. If the loading slopes were a risk to the railroad, then the frigging railroad workers should come up here and blast them themselves. Lenny sure didn’t recall railroad maintenance as part of his job description when he signed up as a patroller.
He glared down the cliff at the thin track just visible between the tunnel mouths, and expelled a white globe of spit in its direction.
Lenny pushed his Ray-Bans up onto his forehead, narrowed his eyes and looked back up at his partner with disgust. The rule was that unexploded avalanche bombs get their location noted and then stay put until spring, when the patrollers simply wander over and pick them up out of the grass. Digging around in eight feet of powder for something the size of a shoe box is not a sensible course of action, especially when that shoe box could just blow your legs off. Not good enough for Jim. He knew where the bomb was and he was damned if he was going to let it lie there until the snows melted.
This was the second bitching day they’d been at this. Jim had thrown the charge yesterday, delighting in the formality of shouting fire in the hole! and then was puzzled and disappointed by its failure to detonate. He knew any danger of it exploding now was nil.
No, stubborn curiosity and a determination to put his house in order were the factors that made Jim decide to go and fetch that wayward bomb, before they carried on with their legitimate day’s work, to blast the bollocks out of the double black diamond run down Spangle Couloir. That’s where Lenny wanted to be, and that’s where Jim was stopping him being.
Jim’s fascination with explosives made Lenny despise him more. Jim was the incendiary expert in the resort but he was a pig on skis. Lenny and the two other guys who took turns to help out ‘lanching in the high season, got all the revenge they needed for being pulled off the trails to do this shit by scoring with any girl Jim looked at sideways. Girls don’t care much about dynamite when they get a chance of a guy with a tan and thighs like iron.
‘Aw Christ. What is he doing up there?’
Lenny got off the snow cat, sinking up to his knees in the soft snow, and cupped his gloved hands to a mouth ringed with white lip salve. ‘Jimbo! I’m losing toes down here. Get a fuckin’ move on!’
He saw the stooping figure of Jim look up, and then Lenny felt the explosion an age before he heard it.
Jim’s body dissolved rather than blew apart. His flesh pushed tennis-ball-sized holes in his Goretex smock, and the face that he had washed for twenty-six years and shaved for ten, remained nearly intact as the skull to which it had been attached splintered into a macabre approximation of a fibre-filled breakfast cereal. Lenny had just enough time to watch one of Jim’s arms windmilling through the air on its own like a stick you threw the dog.
Before the pieces that made up Jim McKenzie could attempt a landing, they were lost in the fountain of snow and rock that was heading towards Lenny. He didn’t run or shout, but then that would have been hard with only half a face left, the eye on the remainder of his face hanging uselessly down his cheek. The rock hit him on the left side of the head, knocking him sideways, and as his exposed brains quivered, ready to obey gravity, the snow melted into every orifice, as though it were disinfecting the wounds.
Six heli-skiers on their way to some dream powder in the back country saw the explosion from the air and thought nothing of it. The pilot, Abe Foster, thought a great deal about it. Avalanche explosions are small, and the avalanches they cause rumble, roll and then stop. This was a mother of a bang, with plumes of thick black smoke spiralling up from Wolf Mountain as though terrorists had hit an oil terminal. The whole hill seemed to be disintegrating.
Abe took the chopper up another five hundred feet and banked west to take a better look. It was bad. Christ help any poor sucker in the vicinity of a blow like that. Abe got on the radio and called patrol, then turned the chopper round, and, ignoring the whining from his dumb-assed stock-broker passengers, headed back to Silver.
Getting the kids out of the house was like playing with one of those mercury-filled hand-games where you tilt the piece of plastic until you manoeuvre the shiny sliver of liquid metal into a hole. Every time Sam shovelled a son into a coat and herded him into the back of the Toyota, a daughter had taken her coat off and was back amongst the wreckage of the breakfast table.
He was never very good at those hand-games, and he was no better at rounding his family up.
Sam Hunt was losing his temper. He stood in the driveway, his hands on his hips, as Jess waved happily to him from the kitchen window clutching a piece of toast in a starfish hand.
‘Honey. Jess isn’t ready. This happens every damn morning. Could we get Jess ready? Would that be too much to ask, that Jess’s ready? How hard can that be?’
Katie appeared at the door, wearing a wool, chequered coat and that smile she kept stored for occasions like this. The sight of her extinguished his ire.
‘It’s not hard, Sam. I’m the one who’s not ready. Just put her in the car and I’ll be right with you.’ She stepped out onto the drive and kissed him before flitting back inside on her mission to make him late.
Bart lay inside his kennel, his head on his paws, looking dolefully towards Billy inside the car.
Billy glowered back at him from between his Walkman earphones, rubbing a circle clear in the frosted window in the back of the car, whose engine was running unsteadily in an attempt to clear the windshields.
Sam, hands still on hips, shook his head and smiled, looking at his feet in mock defeat, when the explosion thundered in his eardrums. Katie stepped back outside, surprised. ‘That sure was a big ‘lanche blow.’
Billy poured himself out of the car, his mouth making an O shape.
‘Look, Sam. There’s smoke.’
A black plume rose from the cliffs on Wolf Mountain. ‘Lanchers didn’t make smoke. Just a bang and a rumble. There was a lot of smoke.
Jess was crying in the kitchen. Whether it was due to the explosion or because she had dropped her toast was unclear, but Katie went to attend to the matter.
Sam remained silent. He had felt that explosion somewhere very deep inside. Not just in the regular way that a loud noise seems to come from inside your head, but in a sick, unholy way, as if someone had whispered something filthy and inhuman to him.
His head was swimming and he felt nauseous. The smoke was still rising in a black column, its source hidden by the Hunts’ snowy roof. Sam could almost make out a form in the smoke. It was not a form he wished to look at for hours, the way he might look for shapes in the smoke of a log-fire, but it was the last thing he saw before he passed out.
Sam realized he was looking at the bedroom ceiling. Two familiar lozenge-shaped pieces of plaster that had been threatening to fall since the pipe burst last winter comfortingly filled his vision. He sometimes looked at those two shapes when Katie was on top of him, not irritated by the reminder of repairs to be done but soothed by the part they played in being bits of his house. The house they owned, well at least Katie owned. The house where he ate his dinner, watched TV, made love to his wife and brought up his kids. The house he had tried to make his own for ten years, lovingly patching its tiles, painting its flaky wood and scooping leaves from its gutters. Yes, his house. Their house.
‘Are you awake, honey? I think he’s awake, doctor. Sam, are you all right?’
Katie was bending over him now, obscuring the plaster shapes with her pale face. Sam smiled dreamily, remembering the photos they had taken in a booth in Calgary Airport, waiting for Katie’s parents to arrive from Vancouver. The booth’s exposure had been set for Katie’s fair white skin, and Sam’s dark Indian face had come out as a featureless brown blob. Katie had laughed hard at the four useless snaps of herself kissing what looked like an old brown football propped on the shoulders of a suede jacket. Sam had laughed too, but had stopped laughing when he saw the look on Katie’s parents’ faces as they realized that the Indian guy standing next to their daughter was not the cab driver waiting to relieve them of their luggage, but the man she had told them so much about. The man she had thrown it all away for. The man she had married.
‘Can you hear me, Mr Hunt?’
Alan Harris was leaning into Sam’s vision, bringing with him a faint smell of linoleum.
‘Sure. I hear you. I hit the deck, right?’
‘Right. How does the head feel?’ The doctor put his stethoscope to his ears and pulled back the goosedown comforter to put the cold metal to Sam’s chest.
‘Okay, I guess. How long have I been out?’
Katie’s face bobbed back into view. ‘A big scary fifty minutes, you wicked man. The doctor’s been in and out of here all day like he’s planning to move in.’ Her voice softened, and she put a hand to his brow. ‘We thought you were a hospital case. I can’t tell you what I’ve been going through or how glad I am to have you back.’
Sam closed his eyes again. Fifty minutes. What made him black out? His head was starting to hurt now, and the realization that he must have junked a whole day’s work was starting to make itself known in that area in the pit of his stomach reserved for anxiety. He opened his eyes abruptly. ‘Jesus, Katie. What about my shift? I was standing in for Ben. Did you call the office?’
‘Sure I called the office. They said they hoped you were okay and not to worry. And I called the museum, so I can take a few days off if you don’t feel like getting up right away. Stop chewing over it.’
Sam closed his eyes again, listening to the doctor making soft cooing noises to Katie about how everything seemed fine and when he was to take the painkillers and how she was to let him know if Sam’s head got sore and how were the kids and shit.
As he heard Katie closing the front door and the front wheels of Doctor Harris’s car having big trouble helping him leave the Hunts’ icy driveway, Sam drifted into gentle velvet sleep quite unlike the cold dark place he had been for the last fifty minutes.
Katie looked in from the bedroom door at her sleeping husband, his face no longer contorted as it had been since Andy next door helped her carry him inside, calm the children and call for help. For hours he had sweated and moaned as though someone were roasting him over a spit, but now he was just plain asleep.
His straight dark hair, damp with sweat, lay over the face she loved, and she exhaled lightly with relief that he was going to be all right.
But two things still bugged her. First, why he had passed out at all, and second, that for nearly fifty minutes of his blackout he’d been shouting and muttering in Siouan. Sam hadn’t spoken a word of Siouan since before they were married, except once when they’d had a minor car accident while Billy was a baby. He’d sworn briefly and violently in the ancient Indian tongue as Katie screamed, clutching Billy, and the car skidded off the highway, to rest harmlessly and mercifully on the verge.
He never used it again. The language of losers he called it. Whatever was bugging him in his dreams was powerful enough to turn back the clock for Sam and pull that long-abandoned language out of his past and into his mouth. It made Katie uneasy, although right now she couldn’t say why.
In half an hour she would go and collect Jess from Mrs Chaney, but now she could use a coffee and some time to herself. In the tiny kitchen, she switched the TV and the coffee machine on at the same plug. The local cable station was talking about the blast. Two ski patrollers killed, half the mountain gone above the Corkscrew tunnels, the railway blocked by rubble and ice. It was also a mystery. Some nervous reporter in a big anorak was standing in the car park beside Ledmore Creek stuttering that so far they could find no explanation for the size or violence of the blast but that theories included a pocket of methane gas detonated by chance.
Behind him blue lights flashed and people walked about pointing aimlessly. Katie poured herself a coffee, smiling at the ineptitude of local news, but deep down she was still worried why Sam had measured his length on the path not at the precise moment that pocket of methane had gone up, but moments later when they looked up at the smoke. The doc said it could have been the shock-waves if Sam was already feeling lightheaded from an encroaching infection. Katie didn’t think so. Shock waves don’t take that long, and Sam sure didn’t look like he was coming down with anything other than usual early morning grouchiness.
Katie had stomached enough of goddamn blasts and blackouts for one day. She switched off her worries, switched channels and sat down at the table to catch half an hour of a Green Acres re-run.
When Gerry turned up at the door, the snow was falling so thickly Katie could barely make him out. The snowman on the doorstep handed a conical shape to Katie and said, ‘Peace offering.’
She smiled, took the flowers already frosted with snow, and pulled Gerry in by the elbow.
Gerry shook himself like a dog in the kitchen. ‘Christ. This is going to make the ski company wet themselves.’
Katie already had the coffee machine back on. ‘Yeah. And not a whisper of it on the forecast. I want my money back from the weather channel. Grab a seat.’
Gerry installed himself at the kitchen table. ‘I heard from Billy at school. Is Sam okay?’
‘Yeah. He’s fine. We don’t know what all that fainting was about. Probably saw the hockey scores.’
She turned her back on Gerry and fished out a couple of mugs from the dishwasher.
‘Listen Katie … about the other night …’
‘Forget it, Gerry. It’s no big deal.’
‘It is a big deal. Claire’s my sister. Uptight corporate woman maybe, but my sister nevertheless, and I’m ashamed she upset Sam.’
Katie sighed and joined him at the table, toying with the defrosting flowers in their soggy paper wrapping. ‘You know the problem, Gerry. You’ve known us for nearly ten years. Sam just doesn’t think he’s an Indian.’
‘Kind of hard to forget. Especially when you look at Billy and Jess.’
Katie laughed.
‘I know. Sometimes I’m glad I can remember giving birth to them, or I’d think I had nothing to do with their creation at all. The Crosby DNA’s sure got mugged somewhere along the line by Sam’s.’
‘Is he mad at Ann and me for bringing Claire?’
Katie shook her head. ‘No. He’s mad at being born a Kinchuinick Indian and growing up on a reserve.’
‘Claire’s real embarrassed. She wondered if we could maybe have you all round to our place for supper before they head back to Montreal. But I guess if Sam’s not well …’
‘Let’s leave it, Gerry. But thanks for the thought.’
He nodded. The coffee machine gurgled its message that the brew was up.
‘So how’s school anyway?’
Gerry lightened up, his duty done. ‘It’s shit. As usual.’
‘The kids all talking about the explosion?’ She put two coffees in front of them.
‘And some. Of course now they’re also talking about this blizzard. They figure they’ll get time off if it keeps up.’
‘Billy seems distracted right now Gerry. Have you noticed?’
Gerry cupped the mug in his hand. ‘Can’t say I have. Was he upset by Sam collapsing?’
‘I don’t know. I just detect something disturbing him. Probably nothing. I thought you might notice, but I forgot teachers just practise riot control these days.’
‘Up yours.’
Katie laughed and drank her coffee. Gerry took one sip and stood up.
‘Look I really have to go. Just came to leave these.’
‘The coffee that good, huh?’
He kissed her on the ear and made for the kitchen door, then paused when he looked through the glass panel. ‘Hey, I think you should loosen up with the disciplinarian dog-owner bit and let Bart in. He’s carrying more snow than a blue trail.’
Katie came to the door. ‘I tried this morning, thanks Doctor Doolittle. He won’t come in.’
Gerry stepped into the blizzard again.
‘That’s huskies for you, huh? Bye!’
Katie waved goodbye, and looked over at Bart. Gerry was right. The dog was outside his kennel, almost completely covered in snow.
‘Here Bart. Come in boy.’ She patted her thigh.
Bart looked at Katie and then resumed his vigil, staring towards Wolf Mountain as if it were made of prime sirloin.
‘Jeez, a dysfunctional dog. That’s all we need. Next stop the Oprah Winfrey Show.’
Katie brushed the snow from her hair and shut the kitchen door.
6 (#ulink_12d987ec-609e-5caf-80d4-35dc6d9b4c95)
Frank Sinatra was giving it all he had in the chorus of ‘It Happened in Monterey’, when Ernie Legat’s horny hand stretched out to the cab’s stereo and cut the cassette. Ol’ Blue Eyes was God to Ernie, but he liked to hear what the engine was up to when he hit Wolf Pass. In weather like this, with a full forty-ton load of frozen seafood behind him, he would be lucky to see second gear. That would be on the way up. On the descent into Silver, he could probably do with a parachute.
The snow was coming at him in the headlights like a corny asteroid storm on Star Trek, hypnotizing him with flakes that became rods of relentless white motion as they streaked past the windshield, and despite the work of the snowploughs, the road wasn’t giving away many clues as to where it stopped being road and started being ditch.
Ernie coaxed the eighteen-wheeler into a first cautious gear change as the gradient started to introduce itself.
‘Come on, you bastard.’
Ernie reached his paw out again to turn up the heater, figuring getting more heat in the cab would take some of it out of the engine. The truck was doing its best.
In the back, two hundred lobsters, bound for plates on the east coast, slid backwards an inch on their plastic pallets as the Peterbilt started its journey up the one-in-fourteen pass.
The snow was getting thicker with every foot Ernie climbed, making him curse that last coffee he’d had at Mabel’s. No wonder he hadn’t seen another truck for twenty miles. The sneaky sons of bitches waving hello to him back in Lanark must have known how bad stuff was up here and either left hours earlier or cut loose for the night in the parking holes down on the Trans-Canada. Not a sniff of trouble on the CB.
Well shit on them. Ernie liked to get where he was going, and even though this was shaping up to be one of the worst winters he could remember, it would take more than a blizzard to knock the stuffing out of his schedule.
He was getting near the summit now, and the old tub hadn’t put a wheel wrong. Nice and slowly, that was how to take it. Ernie could feel the road flattening out, and even though all he could see in the dark and through the snow was about fifteen feet of white featureless ribbon, he’d worked this godforsaken road often enough in daylight to guess he was right underneath the peak of Wolf Mountain. That meant at least two miles of even cruising before it was hang on to your hat for the slide down into Silver.
The chorus of ‘It Happened in Monterey’ started to form itself into a hum on Ernie’s lips. It died just as quick as he saw the figure up ahead. Standing at the side of the road was a man in a long black coat with his ungloved hand out, casual as you like, thumbing a lift. Ernie figured it must be at least minus thirty-five out there, but this guy was just standing in the snow like he was hitching a ride from some pals in a beach buggy on Sunset Boulevard.
Ernie started to brake. It was real fortunate for the guy in the coat that the truck was on the flat. Braking in snow like this was jack-knife city, but this was an emergency.
What the hell was a guy in a coat doing up here near midnight in a snowstorm, at least ten miles from anything remotely resembling civilization?
The truck managed a standstill about twenty yards past the man and Ernie watched in the wing mirror as the figure walked, not ran, but walked, slowly up to the passenger door, his face lit only by the red side-lights.
The company didn’t allow hitchers, but this was life or death and the way Ernie saw it, he had no choice. He hadn’t seen another vehicle either way for at least two hours. How long had the man been standing here, casually waiting for his lift?
Ernie braced himself for a hospital job, wondering how many fingers the guy would still be able to call his own after a minimum of two hours without gloves. He was already planning the detour to Silver’s RCMP station when the cab door opened.
A rush of cold air entered every part of Ernie Legat as the man held open the door and looked up at his driver.
‘Jesus Christ buddy, get in and shut the fuckin’ door will ya!’
A pale, thin face held two ice-blue eyes that looked straight into Ernie’s soul. The man’s age was hard to place. A line-free face crowned with white hair, and skin that was almost translucent, belied a look in his eyes that seemed a great deal older.
The only illumination, from the single weak cab-light, was not doing much to help this guy’s bid to get a bit part in a beach movie, but despite his pallor the hitcher’s smile was disarmingly warm and charming. Not the smile of a man who has just cheated death.
Ernie motioned to the man with a hand that was already losing feeling in the tips of its fingers, and as the stranger looked calmly around the cab like a man buying a secondhand car, the cold was becoming more than he could bear.
‘Silver?’
‘Sure,’ he replied impatiently. ‘Get in.’
Huge flakes of snow whirled into the cab, settling on the dumb kidney-shaped plaid cushion on the dashboard that Amy Legat had sewn for her husband, for use when his behind got numb after ten hours of non-stop.
The man climbed carefully into the passenger seat, closed the door, folded his hands on his lap and looked straight ahead.
The cab was colder than Hell and Ernie’s breath was coming out in fast, thick clouds. Fast, because for some reason he was a little breathless after the excitement of finding the guy way up here. Thick, because the temperature had dropped to something that would freeze the balls off a polar bear.
He groped for the heater. It was already on full. The cab would heat up again once they got going. Once they got going. God, why was he driving at two miles an hour? Get this thing moving.
The truck shifted a gear and picked up speed, but Ernie was driving without seeing. All he could think of was the guy in his peripheral vision, lit only by the instrument panel now, sitting silently three feet away.
No explanation seemed like it was going to be offered, but Ernie was damned if he wasn’t going to be repaid for the rule-breaking ride with at least an interesting tale. ‘So what the hell you doin’ out there, fella?’ Ernie settled back into his brown bead seat cover to enjoy whatever the hitcher had to offer.
‘Just working my way towards Silver. Thanks for the ride. Looked for a while like I was going to have to walk.’ The man beamed across at his saviour, and before Ernie could demand an expansion, the man continued in his soothing pleasant voice. ‘Do you know Silver well, Ernie?’
Ernie shot a surprised glance at him. ‘How do you know my name?’
The man leant over and tapped Ernie’s company ID, a plastic card hanging from a chain that also supported a tiny cowbell with Austria painted on it, that his daughter brought back for him from a school trip fifteen years ago. Ernie’s photo glared out from the ID like a man in pain, and the real Ernie glared over at his passenger, his face matching his picture. ‘It’s right here. Unless that’s not you.’ The man seemed pleased with himself. ‘Silver?’ He reminded Ernie, who remained locked in his frown.
‘Oh I know it well enough. Right now it’s choked with folks slidin’ around on the hills with wooden sticks stuck to their feet like damned fools, but in the summer it goes right back to bein’ the no-shit-happens, assholes in RVs, railroad town it always was. You got business there?’
The man smiled and looked out of his window, his face turned away from Ernie. ‘Yeah. I’ve got some business to take care of there.’ He turned back, beaming that smile again. ‘Thought I might pick up some work.’
Ernie saw a chance. ‘Well you sure would be plenty suited to skiing work, fella, being able to stand out there in minus God knows what without so much as a chilblain. How come you ain’t frostbitten, with no gloves or nothin’? And if you don’t mind me pryin’, how’d you get up there? Didn’t see no car.’
The man picked up Amy’s cushion, turning it over in his soft white hands, examining it as though it were made of porcelain. ‘Got dropped off from another ride a few hours ago. Didn’t expect it to be so cold, so I dug a snow-hole. Just off the road back there.’ He looked across at Ernie, studying the driver’s face closely. ‘An old Indian skill I picked up years ago. Outside, forty below. Inside warm as toast. Don’t even need a coat once you’ve sealed the entrance. Heard the truck coming and I just strolled on out to borrow the ride.’
Ernie mulled it over. ‘So the Indians dug snow-holes? Good to know the useless drunken bums could do somethin’.’
‘That’s a truth and no mistake,’ replied the man with a new tenor to his voice.
Ernie looked across at the man in his truck and his gaze was returned with an unfaltering stare that even in the dim light of the cab Ernie could read as a warning.
He changed the subject.
‘What kind of trucker would let you out there? It’s only ten more miles to Silver, and the road ain’t exactly goin’ no place else.’
The man’s face creased into a smile. ‘Did I say it was a trucker? It certainly was not, Ernie. Like you say, no knight of the road would make such an uncharitable drop. It was a goon in a four-by-four pick-up, and I guess he just got tired of my company. Driver’s prerogative. Still, mustn’t grumble. I’m going to get there anyhow.’ He grinned. Hugely. ‘Thanks to you, Ernie.’
Ernie grunted like an old dog in response.
The truck was already well into its descent, nosing down the other side of the pass, and Ernie turned his attention to making sure his baby wasn’t going to end up a forty-ton chrome and steel toboggan, heading for Silver the short way, straight down the cliff.
The heater was being a bitch. They’d been in the cab with the doors shut now for at least ten minutes, and Ernie could still see his breath. If this carried on he’d have to stop in Silver when he let his passenger out, get the thing fixed himself, or stop over until he could find someone who could.
He shifted down a gear, as he felt a slight give under the front wheels.
‘Are there many Indians in Silver?’
Ernie didn’t enjoy the last exchange about Indians. He wished he’d never brought the subject up. ‘Yeah. One or two.’
‘Assiniboine, Kinchuinick or Blackfoot?’
‘Kinchuinick mostly, I think. Hey, I don’t know, buddy. Do I look like Professor of Native North American Studies at Princeton?’
The road, which hadn’t seen a snowplough for hours, was having one last go at slowing up Ernie Legat and his seafood, boasting a drift of at least three feet across the last serious bend before the run out to town. Ernie could see the lights of Silver just starting to poke through the blizzard, and decided to ram the sucker. Without touching the brakes, he slammed the eighteen-wheeler into the snow bank and hoped it was only this high for a few feet.
Somewhere in one of the back axles, a set of wheels complained enough to shove the rig alarmingly to the left, but the truck held on and ten feet later they were clear. Silver twinkled ahead. Ernie knew his was the last thing on wheels that would get through that for a while. The ploughs wouldn’t even look at this until the storm calmed down and nothing he could see was hinting at that. He would drop his passenger and head for the truck stop at Maidston Creek, five miles down the valley. It looked like he’d have to sit out this tempest for a day or two.
‘Well, that weren’t too tidy, but we made it okay. Where d’you want off?’
‘Town boundary’ll do fine.’
They crawled up to the edge of town and the hydraulic brakes started hissing and puffing as soon as Ernie caught sight of the aluminium sign that read through a thin sheath of snow Welcome to Silver. Ski a bit of history!
‘Sure this is it?’ asked Ernie as the truck stopped by the sign.
‘Yeah. This is where I need to be. Thanks Ernie.’
He put the cushion he had held for the last few miles on the seat beside him, opened the door and hopped out, still holding the clutch-handle.
‘And don’t drive too long that you need Amy’s cushion now, hear?’ He shut the door and moved off into the darkness.
Ernie smiled at that. He picked up the cushion to put it back on the dash. He dropped it quickly back onto the seat. It was frozen into a solid, kidney-shaped block of ice.
A blast of hot air from the heater hit Ernie in the face. Seemed it was working again in a big way, and the sudden rush of heat gave him goosebumps, then something approaching a flush.
Suddenly Ernie Legat’s heart started to beat a little too fast. How did that guy know Amy made that cushion? How did he even know her name? He hadn’t said anything about it at all. Couldn’t explain that one from an I.D. in the cab.
And there was something else, something at the very back of Ernie’s mind that had bothered him all the way down the pass, but he couldn’t get a handle on it. What the hell was it?
He threw the truck into gear and started to move off, grateful, though he couldn’t say why, that the stranger had been swallowed up by the dark and the blizzard.
It was three miles out of Silver that Ernie had it. Even though the cab had been colder than a whore’s heart, it was only Ernie’s breath that clouded. He didn’t like to think about that. So he didn’t.
It was twenty minutes after two in the morning that Staff Sergeant Craig McGee stood at the edge of the Trans-Canada highway, looking at the single set of truck tracks already filled with snow, and realized that his sergeant, Joe Reader, was in big trouble.
Joe had been due back around ten, after a routine call to Stoke, on the other side of Wolf Pass. The guys at the store in Stoke who’d called him said he’d left around nine, and since there was a radio in the pick-up, he’d have called for help if he’d gotten stuck in the snow.
Craig didn’t like this. Joe was a radio junkie. He’d call up his boss just to say he’d seen an elk in the road, and if he was out there in a drift, Craig would have had an irritating call every two minutes plotting the exact minute-by-minute progress of his entrapment. Of course the radio could be down, which meant that Joe had a cold night ahead, but the truck tracks were evidence that something had got through the pass in the last two hours. If that were so, why hadn’t Joe clambered from some trucker’s cab hours ago and shambled into the office with a sheepish grin? A trucker wasn’t going to ignore a stranded pick-up, especially not one with the RCMP logo painted on the doors and blue and red lights on its roof.
The blizzard was approaching nightmare force, and Craig McGee could hardly stand against the might of the wind and the stinging bullets of snow. He ran back to the Cherokee, sitting off-road with its engine still running, and climbed back into the driving seat. There was no way a chopper could fly in this and it would be crap in the dark anyway, even with the spots on. Nothing for it but to wait for dawn and hope that Joe’s wife Estelle didn’t go hysterical on him in the meantime.
Craig turned the patrol vehicle round and headed back into town.
The Indians called the gash in the rock that ran from the top of Wolf Pass down to the Silver Creek, Makwiochpeekin, the Wolf’s Tooth. Fifty feet from the bottom of the gully what was left of Joe Reader’s pick-up lay wedged in the fissure of rock like a broken filling in that tooth. Joe’s head was almost severed from its torso but a stubborn sinew kept it hanging there, banging against the bare metal of the cab where it dangled upside-down. The snow eddied round the remains of Sergeant Reader in tiny cyclones as the ragged, gaping holes in the vehicle allowed it access to the carnage.
Two crows perched on a tiny ledge on the cliff watched the meat hanging from its metal larder, swinging gently with the wind. Perhaps when they were sure it was safe, they would fly over there and explore.
But for now only the snow and the wind explored Joe and his vehicle, and from the look in his eyes, which were two frozen balls in his battered head, Joe Reader didn’t mind a bit.
7 (#ulink_2e19c0f3-a2e6-5eb3-ab23-c21fd06379d7)
When Katie Hunt’s phone rang, she jumped. She hoped it was Sam, and it was. Only two days back at work after his blackout and the ski company had sent him to Stoke for fencing in one of the worst blizzards she could remember. That seemed to Katie to be a slice of a raw deal, but the Hunt family had long since learned to lock away resentment at raw deals in a mental box marked Leave It.
Right now, she was just glad he was safe.
‘So where you going to spend the night, honey?’
Sam sounded tired. ‘Well it’s either the Stoke Hilton or I can bed down in the ticket office. I’m gonna go for the ticket office. Room service is quicker. Seems like I’m the only homeless one round here, so I get the place to myself. It sure beats the hell out of sleeping in the ski truck in a twelve-foot drift. You okay?’
‘Sure. You okay? No headaches?’
Katie heard Sam smile through his voice. ‘No. No headaches. No drooling down my chin like a lunatic. No writhing on the floor in a fit.’
Katie ignored his mockery of her concern. ‘When do you think you’ll make it home?’
‘If the blizzard lets up I guess the pass’ll be open by about noon tomorrow. You can wear my wool shirt if you get cold in bed without me.’
‘Sam?’
‘Yeah?’
‘I love you.’
‘I love you too, babe.’
Billy yelled from the other room, and Katie said her goodbyes and hung up. Some chat show host was smarming through his front of show stand-up, while Billy Hunt ignored him in favour of a hand-held computer game. He yelled again as Katie came into the L-shaped room that was the biggest living space in the house.
‘Nine thousand, Mom! I got nine thousand! Yeees!’
Katie stood behind her son, and ran one thoughtful hand through his straight black hair. ‘Bed, Billy boy. Now.’
‘You said I could wait up and see Dad,’ he replied without taking his eyes off the grey plastic block in his hand.
‘Dad’s stranded in the storm over at Stoke. He’s coming home tomorrow, so that means bed for you, right now.’
She leaned over and switched off Billy’s game.
‘Aw Mom!’
‘I said now, Billy. Your hockey kit’s at the foot of your bed. You forget to put it in your bag again tomorrow, then you’re on your own, kid. I’m not driving round to school with it.’ She turned to leave the room.
‘Mom?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Dad won’t be at home tonight at all?’
Suddenly he looked worried. Katie went back and joined him on the sofa.
‘It’s okay. Like I said: he’ll be back tomorrow.’
‘Can Bart sleep with me tonight?’
Katie tried to look hurt. ‘Oh, so Jess and I won’t do for company then? I keep forgetting, we’re just sappy girls.’
Billy put his hand in hers, and looked into her eyes with such concern she already regretted the joke. ‘You do fine. I just want Bart with me. It’s important.’
Katie squeezed his little hand. ‘Sure. If you can get him in. Good luck. You know what he’s been like.’
‘Great!’
‘Now go get ready for bed. I’ll be up in a minute.’
Her son bounced up and hopped on one foot to the door, singing as he went. His nine-year-old mind had already moved on to other matters. Likewise, Katie’s thirty-four-year-old mind had drifted back to her husband, worry and anxiety drilling into her. It was wrenched back to reality by the sound of Bart bounding up stairs with Billy, as the dog knocked over the frosted glass vase on the landing.
She smiled, and went to play at being stern.
When dawn came on January tenth it revealed the best snow conditions Silver Ski Company had seen for fifteen seasons. It also brought Estelle Reader the worst day of her life.
When they brought back what was left of Joe around one-thirty, Craig had been first at Estelle’s door, his face a grey mask of grief. Craig thought about the kind of suffering you see in the movies, where widows thank the policeman, squeeze his hand, and sit quietly in a chair absorbing the news. He thought about it as Estelle fell to her knees gurgling like a pig being bled, clutching at Craig’s jacket with fists like claws. She writhed on the floor and tore at the rug, saliva running from her mouth as she grunted and panted in the pain of her despair, until Craig hooked his hands under her armpits and lifted her onto a chair.
Life wasn’t like the movies. In fact life in Silver over the last week had been real bad.
Two ski patrollers killed in a freak explosion, and now Joe. He would, of course, have to tell Estelle that Joe’s death hadn’t been an accident, but not now. Time for that later, and time was going to bring her more pain. She would have to suffer the wait before they could lay Joe in the ground, while an autopsy was performed on the grisly remains.
From what they recovered in the gorge, there wasn’t much left to fit in a coffin, and after the forensics had been at him, Craig suspected a Safeway’s bag would probably be big enough to bury his ex-sergeant decently.
He waited with the moaning shell of Estelle Reader until her sister got there, then left and headed back to work.
Half a mile from the office, Craig McGee pulled off the highway into a back road, stopped the engine and cried like a baby. He would be all right in half an hour. Right now, he was broken up.
‘No kidding? Well if it’s a problem we can send a car to the airport to bring her luggage separately.’
Pasqual Weaver watched her own reflection in the office window as she spoke. An elegant, if angular, woman in her thirties looked back, the grey fleece zippered top with the Silver Ski Company logo embroidered on the left breast doing its best to undermine her executive status.
The hand unoccupied by the telephone played with the zipper at her neck.
‘Sure, we want her to be real comfortable. And can I say we’re already over the moon she’s even considering it.’
Eric entered the room and Pasqual mimed at him to sit down.
‘Okay James, you put those things to her and get back to us when you have an answer, but please tell her from us that we’re all huge fans and are really hoping she can make it. Okay, you too. Take care.’ She hung up, and gave the phone her middle finger. ‘Jesus. The fucking old bitch is acting like she’s still a star. Make my day, Eric. Tell me you’ve come to persuade me this celebrity ski week idea is a crock of shit.’
Eric Sindon had not come to say any such thing. ‘You’ve heard about the accident?’
Pasqual’s body changed shape. No longer lounging in her leather chair, it was now sitting forward like a cat watching its prey before striking.
‘Tell me.’
‘Craig’s side-kick. His truck went over the gorge on Wolf’s Pass last night.’
Pasqual sat back in her chair with relief. ‘Fuck. Don’t give me scares like that. I thought we’d had a fatality on the slopes. I think we can live with a cop in an auto accident.’
Eric looked at his boss with distaste. ‘It’s the third death in Silver in a week. I’m getting rumours that there’s more to it than just an automobile accident.’
Pasqual opened her top drawer and fished around until she found a packet of M&Ms.
‘Want one?’ She tossed the packet over the desk to Eric after filling her mouth with chocolate.
‘No. Look, I’m telling you this because I think it will have a negative effect on the resort. Skiers don’t get off on reading about death when they should be reading about snow reports.’
‘Eric, I think our visitors are big enough boys and girls to cope with the fact that sometimes people die in cars.’
‘What about Lenny and Jim?’
‘Accidents happen. They were patrollers for Christ’s sake.’
Eric looked at her and she knew that look. Pasqual stood up and turned her back to him, looking out of the window at the last of the die-hard skiers stepping out of their bindings beside the lodge after stealing the last run of the day.
‘What do you see out there, Eric?’
‘A lodge that needs a re-clad and a nursery area that needs two extra tows.’
She laughed, and threw another chocolate peanut into her mouth. ‘Well, maybe so, but I see the best fucking snow we’ve had in years, and a season that’s going to do business like a cold beer stall in Hell.’ She turned back to him. ‘Now what exactly are you worried about?’
‘Someone has to.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning you shouldn’t underestimate negative vibes in a fun resort, Pasqual.’
She sat down and smiled a wicked cat grin at him. ‘Are you telling me my job, Mr Sindon?’
Eric sighed. ‘Okay, forget it. Just thought it was worth mentioning.’
‘Thank you.’
Eric shoved some paper at her.
‘Here’s the shop stock-taking list, and there’s a guy outside looking for work. Do you want me to see him?’
‘Nope. I’ll see him. You fax more celebrities. Try and get something more famous than someone who voiced over an AT&T commercial. Remember the blackmail bit about the kids in wheelchairs. Lay it on as thick as you like. Where’s the guy?’
‘In the ski school.’
She emptied the last of the chocolates into her mouth, threw the packet in the waste bin and moved to the door. ‘Oh and Eric …’
Eric looked up expectantly.
‘No more drama-queen stuff unless a gondola full of customers spontaneously combusts. Right?’
Eric held her gaze without reply for a few more moments than was polite.
‘You’re the boss.’
‘Yes. I am. Aren’t I?’
She smiled and shut the door behind her. Eric looked at the door for a long time until the phone rang.
* * *
As Pasqual left the seclusion of her inner office, walking through the shop and past the ticket booths, she ran the gauntlet of questions and greetings from every member of staff in her path.
‘Oh Miss Weaver! Got a moment?’
‘Pasqual! Can you call the top station?’
‘Miss Weaver – any thoughts on this display?’
She loved it. She adored being pursued by a team of courtiers, anxious for her approval or instruction, and she treasured it all the more when the public saw her in the middle of it.
As she left the building and crossed the darkening nursery area to the ski school shed, she tossed her short brown bobbed hair, waved and shouted ‘Hi!’ to anyone who would respond.
The man was waiting inside. He greeted her with a smile.
‘Hi there. You’re the job hunter.’
‘Yeah. You must be Pasqual Weaver. Moses Sitconski. Pleased to meet you.’
He extended a lily-white hand, which she shook.
‘What kind of a name is that exactly?’
The man looked at her, neither offended or defensive. ‘My name.’
‘Well, Moses,’ she said, pronouncing the word as though it were a shared and intimate joke, ‘You’ve done your resort personnel homework. Now what kind of work are you after? We’re nearly half-way through the season, you know.’
‘Sure, I know. Looks like it’s going to be a great second half. Long time since I’ve seen snow conditions this good. I guess the powder in the back bowls is like spun sugar right now.’
He smiled, crinkling two ice-blue eyes in a face so pale Pasqual figured the guy had never been near a ski trail in his life. She was used to dealing with people with mahogany tans that stopped where their turtlenecks started, but the easy charm of this man was making up for the fact that he was obviously no ski bum. Nor was he dressed like anyone who wanted to be near snow. A long black wool coat hung over what Pasqual noted was a powerful frame. She wasn’t looking at a potential ski instructor, but maybe he’d be some use in the PR office.
‘You a skier, Moses?’
‘Sure. I can get down most things.’
‘So where have you worked before? And what as exactly?’
The man looked into her eyes very deeply indeed.
Pasqual was aware of an acute sexual stirring beginning around her nipples that shifted down over her belly to an area she didn’t have much time to explore these days. He was turning her on with those eyes, and she was ashamed. Why this encounter should have such an effect was a mystery, and made her squirm beneath her fleece with discomfort and irritation. After all, she was surrounded all day by pieces of meat on skis that she could have just by looking sideways at them. If she chose to, she could fuck any instructor on the resort, but sex was never high on Pasqual Weaver’s agenda. Right now, however, it was standing at the front door ringing the bell.
‘Tamarack. Two seasons. Manual grooming mainly.’
She looked at him suspiciously. How could he have worked out doors all day as a manual groomer and still have stayed as white as a baby’s ass? She wasn’t going to be bullshitted. Tamarack just happened to be Silver’s biggest rival right now. So much so, even the name got on her tits.
‘And who was the big white chief at Tamarack? Just in case I want to call him up?’
The man who called himself Moses smiled widely, revealing milky white teeth behind his pink lips. ‘I’d be glad if you called him up, Miss Weaver. His name is William Cole. We called him Hill Billy.’
She knew damned well it was Bill fucking Cole that ran the show over there. Same as she knew that Tamarack had stolen nearly a fifth of Silver’s day trip custom with three new high speed quads. She would drink piss before she would phone up Cole for a reference. The fact that the guy knew his name and his slang name, was enough proof for her he was telling the truth. Plus he would be useful in the office if he knew exactly what was going on with the competition.
‘So are you hoping for manual work again or does something with a desk and a fan heater blowing hot air up your fanny all day interest you?’
‘Anything you got really. I understand you lost a couple of your ski patrol.’
She frowned. ‘Yeah, well we’re on that one thanks. The rest of the guys are still cut up about it and I don’t think they’d take too kindly to me sticking a sits vac. ad in the local newspaper before they’ve got their two buddies in the ground.’
‘A real tragedy.’
‘It’s a dangerous job.’
His eyes were boring through her skull. She looked away, pretending to study the blackboard for tomorrow’s ski class rota. ‘Okay Moses, why don’t you come see me tomorrow at eight thirty and we’ll fix something up. Can’t promise ski patrol, but I’ll be honest and tell you we can use some extra help right now. Things are going to get real busy when the snow reports hit the cities.’
Moses stuck his hand out again and she took it without thinking. This time he held on to it a little longer than she would have liked.
‘Well that’s just great, Miss Weaver. I look forward to that.’
She withdrew her hand as the door threw open to admit five laughing instructors clopping in like carthorses.
‘Robbed the public blind today I hope guys?’ she said in a tone higher than she had planned.
‘Yo, you bet,’ laughed the biggest and brownest of the pack, unzipping his suit with a baroque flourish.
Pasqual smiled once at them, once at Moses, and left.
The tall pale man watched the flimsy wooden door close behind Pasqual and then glanced across at the five faces eyeballing him.
‘Hi,’ he smiled.
Only one nodded back.
Moses Sitconski put his hands back into his pockets without dissolving his smile, then followed Pasqual out into the night.
8 (#ulink_81243036-0026-5589-91a9-1e938b7629b6)
The ploughs went past with the invincibility of a fleet of Newfoundland trawlers putting to sea; lights flashing, funnels blowing out plumes of snow, their metal bows pushing back the ocean of white in huge, semi-solid waves.
Snaking behind these yellow leviathans was a line of nineteen cars, two trucks and a bus, and right in the middle Sam Hunt sat behind the wheel of the company pick-up.
As he drove slowly behind a big shiny Ford, Sam’s eyes were narrow slits of dismay. Not because his progress home was painfully slow, but because last night, alone on the bench in the ticket office at Stoke, he’d had another dream.
So far, it was the worst. Since his blackout three days ago, every night had furnished him with dreams so distressing and unendurable he was beginning to dread sleep. But last night was the pits. It was almost real.
It had been different in detail of course, but the creature was still there. Still fixing him with its unholy, vindictive, glacial gaze as it set about its grisly business. Always the business with the heart. That was the bit he couldn’t take.
There was more last night though. A lot more. Sam made a dry swallow as he remembered.
The office that smelled of wet floorboards and hot dogs during the day was a different place at night. Fierce heating dried the wood after the last customer had left, slowly evaporating the puddles caused by skiers dragging the snow in on their moonboots. For a while it made the room steamy and sour. But once it had dried, and the cleaners had done their stuff sweeping up discarded sticky backs from the lift passes, the office was a pleasant and inhabitable room, and when Sam had called Katie he was comfortable. There was, after all, something soothing about seeking refuge from the storm in a commercial rather than a domestic setting, appealing to that childish excitement of bedding down somewhere alien and forbidden.
The first time Sam had been in a church in Calgary he felt that way. He was fifteen years old and the luxury of the interior, the cool but ornate splendour, had astounded him. There had been no sense of God to the young Sam Hunt, just a million opportunities for making tiny living spaces in the dozens of marble and oak corners the building boasted. He sat on the hard pew, imagining creeping into that fabulous building when everyone was gone and unfurling his sleeping mat beneath the high, carved wooden pulpit. It was like a palace. What would it be like to run barefoot on that marble floor in front of the minister? Think of the feasts that could be laid out on those huge stone steps, and the dancing that could go wildly out of control in the vast empty space between pews and altar. The pragmatist in him figured that cooking could be accomplished quite safely on the stone-flagged floors, since the smoke would have ample space to rise and dissipate high above, amongst the barrel-vaulting. Sam knew he could live there like a king.
The Reverend and Mrs Jenkins were delighted by Sam’s expression of wonder and awe as he sat between them that day, his black-button eyes roving over the architecture like a blind man seeing for the first time.
They were not to know his thoughts were on a flight of fancy as to how he would live secretively in such a place, instead of an awakening to the glory and love of their God: but they often misinterpreted their young charge. They never really knew him at all.
The Silver Ski Company ticket office in Stoke was no comparison to the Calgary Church of All Saints on Third Street, but as Sam selected a place to sleep, his instincts were the same as those of twenty years ago. All these interesting nooks and corners to sleep in. Areas to make your own.
He had three blankets in the truck and found a long, foam seat cover from the back of the office where the staff took their boots off. More than enough for a bed. He made his nest beside the radiator pipes at the back wall, where he faced the big digital clock above the ticket windows.
Outside, the blizzard battered at the windows, the snow hitting the glass like shotgun pellets. Sam turned off the overhead striplight and wriggled, snug beneath his blankets. The big green digital numbers of the clock cast an eerie illumination on the room, reflecting dimly on the floorboards. They were reading 10.07 when he settled down, his hand beneath his head like a child. Sam had decided he was feeling better. Dreams aside, there had been no further blacking out, and it was that void of consciousness that held most terror for him. Brain tumour? Cancer? All the demons of modern medical knowledge had plagued him like a hypochondriac since that numbing collapse. But it was over now. He was well. Sure of it.
When he woke up after the dream and threw his load, the green digits were reading 10.45. Sam found himself on all fours, hunched like a dog over a pile of his own hot vomit. He was sweating and panting, and the stench of the wet bile beneath him made him retch again.
The memory of it made Sam clutch the steering wheel like a life-line. But it was what came after that was making Sam’s heart thump in his chest like a trapped bird. Nothing. That’s what happened after he woke over his own sick. At least nothing until he woke a second time. At 7.30 a.m. Fully clothed, standing outside his truck.
When Craig saw the guy that stepped out of the car he’d been more than disappointed. Not in his whole term as staff sergeant in Silver had he ever had to call in forensics from Edmonton, and this small bald man in a suit jacket covered by a cheap nylon parka didn’t look much like the cavalry.
That was six hours ago. Craig was going to give him the benefit of the doubt. Doctor Brenner had been working at Joe all day, talking into a tape recorder as he did so, and now he was standing in Craig’s office with a styrofoam cup in one hand ready to pronounce sentence.
Craig was calm as he offered the doctor a seat.
Brenner ran a delicate hand over the pate of his bald head and sat down heavily in the chair by the window.
‘How’s it looking out there?’
Brenner gesticulated with his coffee to the outside world behind him. Craig glanced out of the window.
‘It’s okay. Cold. What have you got for me?’
‘Time of death around 11.30 p.m. Cause of death, a violent blow to the head followed by lacerations to the chest. Further damage, probably after the initial blows, and due to the incisions, indicates massive loss of blood.’
‘Incisions.’
‘Incisions, Staff Sergeant. The cuts he made to get into the heart and remove the genitals.’
Craig looked at him, unblinking, forcing himself to believe what he was hearing. Yes, this was Joe they were discussing. Joe, who should have been in here glowering at Brenner, looking at his watch and making doe eyes at Craig to let him away for his bowling night. But Joe was never going to dog off early to go bowling with a cold beer in his hand again. Right now, Joe was the collection of meat cuts lying four doors down the corridor on a table covered in polythene sheeting, and how he died wasn’t making sense.
No witnesses except maybe whoever drove through the pass after Joe. They were on that one already. It wouldn’t be hard to find the driver that made the tracks Craig saw. It could only have been a truck, and there were three constables phone-bashing every trucking company in the book right now.
‘And the crash?’
‘Happened after death. The lesions and breakages incurred by impact with the falling truck all occurred after he died. The way the blood clots always reveals that. The truck must have been pushed over the edge by whoever carved him up.’
The doctor drained his cup, and met Craig’s horror-filled gaze full-on.
‘What about the mutilation?’
‘Looks like the murderer had plenty of time on his hands. The heart was so tightly compacted up the anus, even with the tiny incision he made to get it in, it implies someone took great care to make sure it would stay there. It’s a big organ. I’m amazed how the assailant achieved it. Must have been a turkey-stuffer.’
Brenner grinned at his joke, receiving nothing but silence, and continued more coldly as he lost his smile, ‘The penis was torn off rather than cut, and it appears to have been in the mouth, although it had fallen out by the time you guys finished hauling the body up.’
‘How do you know it was in the mouth?’
‘His teeth closed on it. Left tissue inside. I reckon if you guys send a climber down there you’ll find his pecker where it fell.’ Brenner stuck his nail into the styrofoam cup, making a popping sound that delighted him sufficiently to make him do it again. ‘Yeah, it’s an X-rated one this, all right.’
Craig responded coldly. ‘When will the full report be ready for our inspection?’
Brenner caught the coldness in his voice, and smiled. ‘The report will be ready soon as I get back to Edmonton to write it, but I’ll wager with a murder like this you boys will be playing host to a bit of city help. Guess they’ll read it first. Tell you everything you need to know.’ He stood up to go.
‘Sit down, doctor.’
He continued to stand.
‘Until we hear who will formally head this investigation, I’m the officer in charge and the sole officer to whom you make your report. There are plenty of facilities here for you to have your taped report transcribed and printed out before you leave. Now, I understand you must be tired, so if you like we can arrange for some hotel accommodation for you while we organize the paperwork.’
Brenner glared at Craig. ‘I was planning on getting back tonight, Staff Sergeant, if that’s okay with you.’
‘No, I’m afraid it’s not okay. Not until I know all the facts and can question you in detail about the autopsy. If that takes for the rest of the week then so be it.’
‘With all due respect, I work out of Edmonton. I’m not at your beck and call.’
‘In the time it takes you to get back to the city, doctor, our murderer could be hundreds of miles from here. Even worse, he could still be here ready to strike again. I’m sure as a senior member of the Edmonton forensics team you hardly need me to remind you that police work is a race against the clock. Now, can I organize that hotel for you while you give your tape to Holly?’
Brenner looked at Craig for a few seconds and smiled. ‘Very well, Staff Sergeant. I’ll just call my wife, then I’ll call my superior officer in Edmonton. Just to let him know what’s happening of course. May I use your phone?’
Craig waved a hand. Brenner came forward a pace and picked up the receiver and punched out the number.
‘By the way, I think you’ll find the murder weapon’s going to prove problematic.’
‘In what way?’
‘No traces to indicate any metal instrument whatsoever. There are usually tell-tale signs that can lead us to identify at least the nature of the weapon. You know, serrated or unserrated, steel or base metal and so on. Everything leaves minute particles behind. In this case, nothing. Yet the incisions were as fine as scalpel cuts … Barbara? It’s Larry.’
Craig waited expectantly, until Brenner put his hand over the receiver and turned to face him. ‘May I?’
‘Sure. Go ahead. I’ll be right outside.’
Craig McGee closed the door on his own hessian-lined office and poured himself a drink from the water cooler. From the other side of the door came the sound of Brenner laughing on the phone.
Craig McGee couldn’t phone home and laugh because there was no Mrs McGee any more to pick up the phone and smile at the sound of his voice. The phone would ring alone and unanswered on the blue painted table by the front door, secure in its secret plastic knowledge that Sylvia wasn’t ever going to come running out from the kitchen again, wiping her hands on a dishcloth and pick it up. Why phone home when your wife is dead? In fact if he didn’t have to feed her cats, Craig sometimes wondered why he went home at all. Everything there had her mark on it, her smell on it, her touch to it. Her absence mocked him, from the coffee jars full of shells she collected on holiday in Scotland, to the ridiculous carved magazine rack she bought at a heart foundation sale. Sometimes he woke in the night and stretched out to touch her neck, only to find the empty strip of bed as cold as marble.
He wondered if Brenner knew how lucky he was to be able to perform that simple but delicious act of phoning home.
Staff Sergeant McGee let his forehead rest against the wall above the cooler. He crushed the waxed paper cone in his hand and let it fall to the floor.
* * *
‘Don’t know why they don’t just send us out in a carton pulled by a sow. Be as much use as this heap of shit in the snow.’
Constable Sonny Morris was not enjoying trying to control the Ford Crown Victoria in the thickening blizzard, and his partner Dan Small made a nasal sound in agreement. Highway patrol was a joke in conditions like these. They’d be lucky to find anyone moving, never mind speeding.
‘You got to drive fast to keep control. I keep telling you. Drive fast.’
Sonny glanced sideways at Dan.
‘Uh-huh?’
‘Sure. It works. You see, the slower you go the more traction you lose. Tried it last winter in my wife’s Honda. Got the thing all the way up to Ledmore in one go. Three feet of fresh fall, and I made it in one go. You have to drive fast.’
The driver remained unimpressed, and maintained the stately twenty miles per hour that was taking them back to the detachment in Silver.
‘Like to have seen that.’
‘God’s truth. In one go.’
‘Nah. Not the driving bit. Just the fact you were in Moira’s Honda.’
Dan squirmed.
‘Hey come on. The pick-up was bust. I had to get to Calgary. What was I goin’ to do? Walk?’
‘Better than being in Moira’s Honda.’
Dan gave him the finger and was formulating a riposte when they saw the truck. Ahead, a tear in the white curtain of snow revealed an eighteen-wheeler sitting in the viewpoint parking bay. By the depth of the snow on it, and the fact that no tracks led from the highway to its current position, it had been there a long time.
Sonny brightened considerably, moving forward in his seat as though the action would turn the Crown Vic into a Land Cruiser.
‘Lookee here. Some rough-neck’s sure going to be glad to see us.’
They glided to a standstill behind the truck, and Sonny reached for his hat on the dash. Dan got on the radio. ‘Two Alpha Four Calgary. We’re ten-seven on the Trans-Canada, ’bout two miles west of Silver. Over.’
There was a crackle, a long pause and eventually a female voice. ‘Calgary Two Alpha Four. Read you. Over.’
Dan looked at Sonny.
‘Nice to know they care, huh?’
Sonny made a wide-eyed expression of horror. ‘Oh no! Could it be that here in Alberta we’re not as professional as the detachment you worked with in BC? Now I don’t think I’ve heard you mention that before.’
Dan grabbed his hat. ‘Yeah, well you’ll eat shit when you pull over a maniac one day and no one knows you’re out here or what the plate is. That’s all I’m saying. They should make you tell them. Run it through the computer. This could be a stolen truck. That’s all I’m saying.’
Sonny looked sardonically towards the Peterbilt. ‘You know you’re right, Dan. Guess we just don’t know the half of it way out here in the sticks. Never heard of a joy-rider stealing an eighteen-wheeler for kicks. Still, police work is a learning experience. Now shall I go fetch the poor stranded hauler, or do you think we’d better call for assistance? Could be a gang of Hispanic drug dealers using a twenty-ton trailer as cover.’
‘Fuck off, Morris.’
Sonny laughed and opened the car door to a flurry of huge snowflakes. Dan followed him from the passenger door, battling to open it against the wind.
There was little sign of life from the truck, which sported a two-foot crown of undisturbed snow. The blizzard whipped mini-storms under its belly, blowing the snow out between the axles in random but concentrated blasts.
Sonny approached the driver’s door and stepped up on the foot plate. The window was more ice than glass, impossible to see through. He shouted and tugged at the handle. Frozen. Dan walked round the front, kicking his way through a drift that had built up round the front wheels, while Sonny continued to tug uselessly at the handle.
Fishing in his breast pocket, Dan found his lighter and put it to the handle of the passenger door. The ice gave way in ungracious rivulets and when he pulled on the metal the door creaked open reluctantly.
It had been a man. Now it was ice. The eyes were swollen horribly, the result of their moisture freezing and expanding, and they stared, boggling, out of the windscreen into nothing. The tongue protruded like a gargoyle, long and pointed and white, and the hands still gripped the wheel as though this man of ice was shouting maniacally at a driver who’d just cut him up bad.
Dan stared at it for a long time, his own mouth open, almost aping the frozen figure he beheld. Sonny, unable to open the driver door, joined Dan at his elbow.
‘God almighty.’
Dan stepped down, still staring at the nightmare, and let Sonny in. He climbed up and touched the figure gingerly with a gloved finger. It was hard as rock.
Sonny looked round the cab. Full of snow. Snow on the floor, snow banked up on the seat against the door, snow in a cornice along the windshield. What the hell had this guy been doing?
Why would you let the cab fill with snow, shut the doors, and then sit at the wheel until you froze to death? He cleared the dash with the back of his hand and found the driver’s ID.
Ernie Legat. Fifty-five years old.
He sighed and backed out of the cab. Poor Ernie. The guy must have planned it like this. Probably had gambling debts or something. Sonny had seen plenty creative suicides, but they never got any easier to deal with. Poor Ernie.
9 (#ulink_a4ab988a-d770-58bc-952f-505260cbfc02)
Keeping the yard from clogging with snow was impossible. That was probably why Wilber Stonerider had been given the task. Flakes the size of golf balls were driving through the chicken wire in the compound as though his shovel were their sole target. No big deal. He would have a drink soon. He felt the half-bottle of whisky in his jacket pocket bumping against his thigh with every thrust of the shovel and let himself imagine the moment when he could slip behind one of the dismantled buses in the compound and take a long, delicious mouthful. Inside the shed, the engineers were clattering around their machines, shouting to each other and playing the radio loud, their noise echoing round the huge tin building as though they were in a drum.
The buses that ended up here were like sick animals. They stood passively inside the shed and out in the yard, waiting to be attended by the gang of mechanical surgeons who would strip back their bodywork and probe their insides. Wilber, meanwhile, got to sweep the yard. But then Wilber was not exactly a regular employee of Fox Line Travel. Wilber was putting in some community service hours, penance for being drunk and disorderly in the Empire Hotel when he managed to smash three chairs and assault a waitress called Candy.
He’d figured this would be preferable to a couple of days in the slammer but now, with the snow making his task Herculean, he wasn’t so sure. The RCs didn’t dare touch you these days. No way. The band had hired that fancy lady lawyer from Edmonton who’d throw the book at them if any Kinchuinick Indian came out of their custody with so much as a scratch. Sure, they would call you every name in the book and some that didn’t make it into the book, but they couldn’t break your face. She was the best thing the band ever bought. Even looked after off-reserve Indians like Wilber. All you had to do was use your one phone call to her and, bingo, she’d get you off the hook. Of course from Silver, calling the band office was long distance, but that didn’t matter none. So far Wilber had called the lady lawyer four times. He was really getting value for money. Okay, value for the band’s money. Except this time, he wished he’d taken the days in pokey. You got food and sleep, and it was warm. Of course there was no liquor or tobacco, and that was hard to go without for three days. He felt the bottle again on his leg and decided that he’d made the right choice. He ran his tongue over dry lips, catching a flake as it tried to fly into his mouth. Now was as good a time as any to step quietly behind the bus and have a small refreshment. He shovelled noisily towards the bus and slipped behind its great frozen flanks, out of sight of the open shed door. With his back to the chicken wire, he propped the shovel against the bus and fished in his light blue parka for the bottle. Even the warmth of his body hadn’t made any impression on the whisky, and it was as cold as a beer straight from the ice-box when he put it to his lips and threw his head back.
‘Tasty?’
Wilber choked on the liquid burning down his throat and coughed like a consumptive. His eyes were streaming as he pirouetted round to see who had addressed him from the other side of the wire.
A man, a man just like him, stood smiling from the sidewalk outside the compound, his eyes piercing Wilber like skewers.
‘What the fuck …’
The man put one hand up to the wire, coiled his fingers through the diamond-shaped hole and with the other hand put a finger to his lips to make a hushing mime, as if to a baby crying in its cot.
Wilber was confused and not a little pissed off. He wrestled his coughing under control, and blinked at the guy like he was crazy. Still hanging on the fence the man put his hand back into his pocket and spoke deliberately, in the manner of someone making an announcement.
‘I am …’ he paused as if for dramatic effect, and smiled, ‘… Sitconski.’
Wilber blinked at him at again. He screwed the top back on his whisky and stepped back slightly from the wire. ‘Yeah?’
The man stood perfectly still, waiting.
Wilber flicked through a mental filing cabinet of what this guy wanted. He took a guess. ‘You from Welfare?’
There was an almost imperceptible change in the man’s demeanour, but Wilber Stonerider picked it up. Was it anger? Why would a total stranger be angry at him? He’d done nothing. Well, nothing he wasn’t already paying for. But there it was in this guy’s eyes. Anger. Definitely.
This time the man spoke softly, and if Wilber were honest with himself, menacingly.
‘My name is Sitconski.’ He scanned the forty-two-year-old Indian’s face as if searching for a concealed message, a smile forming on his lips again. This time, an unmistakably cruel smile. ‘Moses Sitconski.’ The smile gave way to a dry laugh, like ice cracking under a boot.
Wilber was out of his depth here. The guy was obviously a nut. And he was a nut interfering with the only serious drinking time he might grab this morning. Any moment now the foreman would walk out of the shed looking for him and it would be too late to take another swig. If he wasn’t here to pin something on him, this guy could get lost.
‘Nice meeting you, Mr Sitconski.’ He turned his back on the guy and picked up his shovel. There was, after all, eight feet of wire netting between them. The voice that came back at him this time made Wilber freeze like an animal in headlights.
‘Do you know my name?’
What was wrong with that voice? It was a human voice. Was it though? There was something horrible running beneath the syllables, like a sewer running under a sidewalk. Frightened, Wilber turned round slowly to face the man again. The snow was falling thick and silent between them and Wilber’s breath sent white clouds billowing between the flakes. If the man was breathing at all it was like an athlete. There was no vapour from his mouth or nose at all. Wilber realized the hand holding the shovel was shaking and that he still held his bottle in the other. He leaned the shovel on the fence, unscrewed the bottle and took a long draught. Of course he could always run away, but something told him no one would ever run fast enough from this man.
The whisky hit the spot and gave him back his voice. He laughed nervously. ‘Sure. Sure I know your name, mister. You just told me it. Moses Sitconski.’
Wilber thought he saw ripples in the man. That was the only way he could describe it. Like the guy had something under his clothing. No, under his skin. And it was stirring, getting restless.
‘Do you know my name?’
He wanted to cry now. What was this? Something was happening to the air between them, and all the alarm bells had just gone off in Wilber Stonerider’s brain. What did he mean? The crazy son of a bitch had told him his name about three times. He found himself looking to the side to see if anyone in the shed could see them from here, but he’d made sure they were well out of sight when he’d sneaked behind the bus. Through the wire, he could see the white blanketed scrubland on the other side of the road. In short, no one could see Wilber Stonerider and his insane visitor Moses Whatever.
‘Look, mister. I don’t want no trouble. I know your …’
‘DO YOU KNOW MY NAME?’
The force of the words, spoken quietly, almost gently, was so unexpected that Wilber fell back against the side of the bus. The voice had come from somewhere distant and dark and although its volume was that of an explosion, he knew somewhere deep inside him, that only he, Wilber Stonerider, had heard it. It contained so much malice, so much rage, it stunned him. He started to weep. There was something happening to the man, something Wilber couldn’t even begin to address. It wasn’t so much that he was changing, more that he was becoming what he was. The tears rolled down his cheeks as he pressed himself against the bus.
‘Are you pullin’ your pecker back there, chief?’
It was the foreman. Wilber opened his mouth to yell, but found he couldn’t. The thing through the wire looked back at him with a wrath that promised to erupt into frenzy. It whirled its head round to where the shout came from and as it broke contact with his eyes, Wilber ran. He ran, skidding in the snow, round the bus and into the chest of foreman Taylor. They fell together in the snow, Wilber’s bottle smashing with a thud instead of a tinkle in the snow a few feet away. The alcohol melted a tiny patch of snow round the shards before it disappeared into the ground.
‘Ah! You fuckin’ moron.’
Taylor, clad only in his work jeans and an ex-army sweater, tried to peel the jabbering Indian off him as he rolled on his back like a turtle. Wilber clutched at him like a two-year-old, making gasping noises and dribbling from the mouth and nose. Taylor pushed him off and struggled to his feet, leaving Wilber on the ground, his arms covering his head.
‘Get up! I said get up, you drunken shit.’
Taylor was really angry. An Indian with DTs was not what he called help. He was cold and wet now, sweater soaked through, jeans covered in snow, and it was this snivelling idiot’s fault. How did the numbskull manage to get so sauced in such a short time? He’d handed him the snow shovel only twenty minutes ago and the Indian had been sober. Look at him now.
Wilber peeled one arm from round his head and pointed to the bus. ‘He’s there. He’s goin’ to get me. Crazy guy. Keeps asking me his name.’
He was still weeping. Taylor swept the snow angrily off his thighs and marched over to where Wilber was pointing. Nothing. Of course. He came back round the front of the bus, stood over the wreck of a human being and hauled him up roughly by the arm. Wilber resisted, but Taylor was a powerful man and the Indian was on unsteady feet before he could protest further. Taylor shook him by the collar of his frayed and dirty parka. ‘Now I don’t need to tell you there’s nothin’ over there. And I also don’t need to tell you you’ll be back with the RCs faster than you can say I fuck dogs unless you pick up that shovel and shift this snow.’
Wilber looked towards the bus, then up at Taylor. ‘He gone?’
‘Don’t give me that. Get shovelling.’
He let go of Wilber’s jacket with a push and stood with his hands on his hips until the sniffing man walked gingerly to the edge of the bus and peeked round. It was true. No one there at all. Just the shovel lying on the ground where it had slid off the fence.
He walked round the back of the bus, looking left and right as though expecting an ambush, picked up the shovel and scurried back into the foreman’s sight. Where did the guy go? There was no one in the road at all. Not even a car. Unless he’d run off into the scrub, he couldn’t have just disappeared. There were no tracks leading to the scrub, but then as Wilber looked back at the sidewalk on the other side of the fence, he noted that there were no tracks at all. Anywhere.
Taylor spat, and tramped back into the shed in search of dry clothes, leaving Wilber Stonerider with the horror that maybe it was true, the sauce was hitting him bad. He looked forlornly at the smashed bottle in the snow and scooped it up in the plastic snow shovel.
A large black bird was perched motionless on the wing mirror of the broken bus and it stared at Wilber.
‘What the fuck you lookin’ at?’
He resumed his shovelling.
The bird looked back at him for a long, long time, then flapped its waxy wings and flew off.
10 (#ulink_d736ff1b-a707-5cfd-933b-fc41b8571142)
Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three (#ulink_d736ff1b-a707-5cfd-933b-fc41b8571142)
‘Well? Are they going to move?’
Angus McEwan looked up from his makeshift table in the centre of the cabin, glaring past the man who stood in front of him as though speaking to a ghost at his side.
‘I fear it is more complex than that, Mr McEwan.’
McEwan allowed his eyes, raising them slowly and insolently, to find the face of the speaker. What an absurd figure the Reverend Henderson made. His considerable height, twinned with a slight build, made a mockery of the sombre black clothes he wore. He had the appearance of a gangly adolescent forced into ill-fitting Sunday best for a relative’s funeral, the white dog-collar rendering him almost comic, aided in its farce by a nose and cheeks turned purple by the cold. But he spoke these savages’ language, and the man was indispensable.
‘Complex in what respect, Reverend?’
Henderson stamped his great feet in a vain attempt to keep warm, and cleared his throat.
‘I have already explained their campaign to you. That is unchanged. I think it unlikely they will move at all. Not without force that is, and that would clearly be inadvisable, not to mention illegal.’
Angus McEwan paused to consider why he disliked this man so much. They were both from Scotland, albeit different parts of the country. Henderson was an east coast Church of Scotland minister, and McEwan was a west coast engineer. But there was little patriotic bonding between them, even though some such comfort would have been welcome in this distant, alien continent in which they both found themselves. It was Henderson’s stubborn and naïve allegiance to these base heathens that irritated McEwan so deeply. Any Christian man could see the Indians were not civilized beings, not fit to be treated as equals, and yet this ridiculous man treated them as though they were Lords.
To see a white man, a Scot, so humbled before savages, was disgusting to McEwan.
‘If we are to discuss legality, perhaps you would care to mention to your new flock that their forebears signed a treaty concerning this railroad and its building many decades ago. Mention that approximately ten minutes from now, when we kick their bloody behinds off the mountain.’
Henderson flushed slightly, giving new life to the broken purple veins the frost had drawn on his cheeks. McEwan often cursed to rile him. Not this time though. This time there was too much at stake.
‘I’m afraid I cannot allow you to do that, Mr McEwan.’
McEwan looked interested, and mildly excited.
‘And how do you propose to stop me?’
‘I will have words with the men. If they are for me, who will do your kicking of behinds?’
McEwan rose from the table and walked to the small pot-bellied stove at the back of the cabin. Turning his back to the minister, he knelt down, opened the door and threw in a log. Facing the wall, he spoke in a low voice.
‘You underestimate these men. They want this job finished as much as you and me. The weather is against you, Henderson.’
It was true. The blizzard that had been raging for over three weeks now, had cut off Siding Twenty-three from the world. No trains had been through since the snow built an impenetrable barrier at the top of Wolf Pass, and McEwan had been there when a futile attempt was made to break through with a snowplough on the engine, bearing witness that passage was now quite impossible.
But with or without communication, they would have to begin the initial blasting of this tunnelling operation immediately, or the whole project would be in jeopardy. But it was not the snow holding them back; it was a band of thirty-two Kinchuinick Indians, taking it in shifts to squat night and day on top of the very rock that had been drilled, ready to receive the dynamite.
When McEwan turned round to receive the minister’s response, Henderson had gone. He smiled. Well let him try, he thought. There were nearly fifty cold, homesick railroadmen out there. Christians or not, they would not take kindly to being kept away from their families an extra month or more by a bunch of unwashed barbarians. Henderson would soon see how much authority his God had, over men who dreamed nightly of their homes, tossing in their bunks and calling out the names of their wives.
Through the tiny ice-coated window he could see Henderson stumbling through the snow to the gang of men hacking at rocks with picks, the wind tugging at his black coat as he went.
McEwan resumed his seat at the table and flattened out the crumpled plans in front of him, the creases throwing flickering shadows in the light of a guttering lamp. Henderson could do as he wished.
They would blast tomorrow.
The man was coming again. Chief Hunting Wolf pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders and composed himself. His warriors said nothing as they watched the tall man in the flapping black clothes scramble up the rocks towards them, but Hunting Wolf sensed them shift uneasily beside him in anticipation.
When the Reverend James Henderson reached the small group of natives, he was battling for breath, sweating with the exertion of the climb.
‘Big walk I do,’ he gasped.
Hunting Wolf laughed internally. This man’s command of their tongue was quite preposterous.
‘Sit down then, Henderson. You will not regain your breath by remaining on your feet.’
The Reverend made a small and silly bow with his head and joined them in the shelter of a rock, where six of them were squatting in the snow. Despite being out of the wind, the temperature on the mountainside was unbearable. Henderson could never get used to this dry, biting cold, not after so many years in the wet and windy land where he grew to manhood.
He looked at the six dark men, sitting calmly in the snow with nothing more than buckskin and wool to keep them warm, and wondered at their constitution.
‘And is there news from the man McEwan?’
Hunting Wolf fixed him with his deep black eyes.
‘He big trouble with me. I no can tell him you think. He take rock tomorrow. Men come.’
Hunting Wolf took time to decipher this jumble of words from the frowning Scot, then spoke slowly and as simply as he could to help this white man’s poor comprehension. It was like dealing with a child.
‘This is very bad, Henderson. You realize that we cannot allow the mountain to be opened. I have explained. We will remain here. You must tell him that. We will remain.’
Henderson sighed, the cold hacking at him through his coat.
‘No more I do. Men with man McEwan. Danger for you. Please to come with me now.’
Fishtail and Powderhand exchanged looks of mirth, crushed quickly by a glance from their chief.
‘I am sorry, Henderson. We will remain. There is more danger for you if we do not. If we let you open the mountain, you will all die. This way, we save many lives. Not merely our own.’
Henderson looked deep into Hunting Wolf’s eyes.
‘You not change story? Trickster still?’
It was Hunting Wolf’s turn to sigh.
‘Yes. The Trickster, Henderson. We have told you plainly, many times.’
‘Think you about Great Spirit I tell you. Good Lord Jesus Christ?’
‘Of course. We have thought a great deal about your spirit and his teachings, as you asked us to. We do not believe this.’
Henderson looked as if he might cry.
‘Is truth. Is only truth. Jesus Christ your great Spirit. He bring love to you. You have must to him love. He save you. Save you from Trickster also. Trickster not true.’
Powderhand gave a snort and crossed his arms beneath his blanket, fishing under one armpit for a mite he could feel shifting in the warmth.
This time, he was not reprimanded by Hunting Wolf. Hunting Wolf was growing tired of the well-meaning foolish white man.
‘We thank you, Henderson, for your kindness and concern, but you must understand that we are well aware of what is and is not true. You should explain these things we know to be true to the man McEwan again. We will remain.’
The seven men squatted silently for a few minutes while Henderson wondered what he should do. He was a failure. A spectacular failure. Was God testing him? All he longed for in this life was to save more souls, gather more precious gifts for his Lord Jesus Christ. He knew he could save these people if they would just listen, just believe the words of joy he had to share with them. He’d learned the complex rudiments of Siouan, slowly and painfully from a logger in Montreal, in preparation for his task ahead. The task of bringing these people to Jesus.
But he was failing. It was James Henderson at fault, not the natives. An English Catholic had saved an entire band of Blackfoot Indians a few hundred miles away, building a mission school and converting every last one to Christianity. The Catholics were good at it. They used the weapon of fear, something these natives seemed to understand.
Henderson’s weapon of love was going nowhere.
No, it was Henderson’s own failure that was condemning these people to Hell, and he was finding it hard to live with.
Meg was right. Her words had been in anger and through tears, but she correctly predicted that he would achieve nothing here. Perhaps he should have listened to her and not to God, when she insisted he stay in Edinburgh, ministering to the souls as much in need there as here. But if she loved him she must have known how it was suffocating him, killing the spirit in him a little more every day, with the smothering middle-class indifference his parishioners had to the word of God and His purpose.
She had refused to come with him. A chance to do missionary work in the new world and she had refused. James thought of Meg, forever taking tea in Jenner’s on Princes Street with the ladies of the parish, gossiping over fine china and fresh cream confections, and admitted to himself for the first time that she did not love God in the way he did. He was quite certain now she did not love him either. If he were honest, he’d always known she had married him because he ministered in a fine part of the city, to people who had money and what Meg constantly referred to as ‘respectability’. She kept three servants busy maintaining their respectability, putting a strain on James’s church stipend, but she regarded it as a major part of being a minister’s wife. No wonder her world had been shattered when he had rushed home that breezy April day, cheeks burning with fervour, to hold both her hands in his and tell her of his plans to work for God and Canadian Pacific Railways. She pulled her hands out from his large fists and put them to her cheeks in horror. He had looked at her for the first time then. Really looked at her. Dressed in her heavy expensive skirts, her hair tied in a fashionable twist, her face lightly powdered and rouged, she was in every way a model of those hideous Edinburgh women who loved nothing but themselves and their position in some imagined pecking order of that ‘respectability’ James was not privy to.
So he had left without her. And now here he was, squatting on a mountain with six Indians, who not only refused to accept Christ as their saviour, but also harboured some insane superstition that was bound to result in violence. He had lost the love of Meg, and now it seemed he had lost the love of God.
Hunting Wolf spoke first, breaking the silence above the soul-chilling howl of the blizzard.
‘You should go now, Henderson. Night is falling. There is nothing you can do.’
Henderson looked tragic. ‘You pray with I?’
The chief smiled and looked to his warriors. They returned his gaze impassively. He looked back at the minister, huddling in the snow. He was like a crow that had been broken and smashed against the rock, the dark fabric of his big coat spread crazily around him.
Hunting Wolf spoke gently. ‘Can your prayers protect you? Do they have power against great and terrible evil?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then let us hear them, Henderson. We will join you.’
James Henderson stood up, raised his right hand, held his coat shut with his left, and closed his eyes. He spoke in English this time. What did it matter if these men understood him or not? He was praying for them, not with them. It was all he could do.
‘Almighty Father …’
11 (#ulink_ae00b301-53e6-5279-a935-b9244f4347c1)
The blond boy stared up at the wolf with a mixture of awe and expectation. He jumped about three miles high when Katie spoke softly behind him.
‘It’s a female. She’s protecting her cubs. See? Behind her there.’
The boy breathed out hard, whirling round to look at Katie.
‘Did I give you a fright? I’m sorry. Guess I shouldn’t sneak around like that. Do you like the wolves?’
The boy’s heart rate had slowed enough to speak. ‘Sure. They’re neat.’
‘That’s the male over there. Do you notice he’s a bit bigger and a slightly different colour?’
She had an arm round the boy now as they both stood looking up at the stuffed animals whose dry, painted jaws gaped back at them in silent roars.
The boy’s mother appeared from behind a snarling grizzly bear to join them, her face registering curiosity when she saw Katie with her arm conspiratorially round her son’s shoulders.
‘Will the male wolf eat the cubs?’ The boy’s eyes were wide.
‘Well sometimes they can, but the mother wolf is a pretty strong force to be reckoned with. If I were him, I wouldn’t mess with Mom.’ Katie looked round to greet her young charge’s mother. ‘Hi. Hope you’re enjoying the museum. Can I tell you that we’ll be closing in about twenty minutes? Don’t rush on out or anything, but if there’s something else you need to see, now’s the time.’
The woman smiled gratefully and politely. ‘Sure. That’s fine. We’ve just about covered it all. It’s been very enjoyable, thanks. Hasn’t it, Randall?’
The boy was awestruck by the wolf again. ‘Sure. It’s neat,’ he said absently.
Katie smiled and left them to it. One quick circuit of the railroad display on the balcony to check everybody was out and she could cram in a coffee and a sit-down before locking-up time. The wooden stairs to the balcony creaked in protest as she mounted them, but offered her a view of the whole ground floor as she climbed.
The vantage point told her that the mother and son were the last ones in, and if the boy could tear himself away from the stuffed wolves she should have the place cleared in five minutes. Already she could hear the comforting sound of Margaret cashing up the till on the front desk, counting out the few dollars and cents that the handful of visitors to the Silver Heritage Museum had spent on postcards, pamphlets and bookmarks.
Katie cherished this time – the feeling of the museum having done its job, as though all the exhibits were silently shaking hands, or paws, congratulating themselves for another successful day intriguing, entertaining and educating the visitors. During the winter, this was where the vacationing wives and children who weren’t skiing came to look round, while Dad perfected his parallel turns on the slopes, or the stray family and seasonal worker who passed by and entered on impulse. All left delighted by the display of unpretentious, idiosyncratic mixture of local information that Katie had put together over the past five years. Stuffed animals raged beside solemn Indian artefacts. Posters trying to win the custom of potential Canadian Pacific Railway travellers in the 1900s were framed beside ancient and torturous-looking wooden skis. Fossils, millions of years old, sat happily in cases with blown bird eggs.
The Silver Heritage Museum wasn’t going to win any prizes for academic excellence, but for the entrance fee of a dollar it certainly gave its best shot at being value for money.
This year, Katie had managed to get a grant from the Alberta Tourist Board that would keep things ticking along financially for another two years, an achievement that had spawned a hilarious celebration party for the staff amongst the stuffed animals that made Katie smile every time she thought of it.
If the stern Alberta Tourist Board woman who’d written the letter to her congratulating them had seen her with a glass of cheap wine toasting the museum from the back of a mangy bull moose she might well have changed her mind. She didn’t. Things were doing just fine.
The balcony that ringed the main ground floor space of the museum was a mixture of displays that hadn’t quite been rationalized. Katie had acquired some Victorian glass cases from an auction in Edmonton and these were now filled with an assortment of items that couldn’t be crammed in downstairs. She had wanted the theme to be the building of the railroad in the late 1800s, and Silver’s important part in it. However, lack of space had made them include the history of the Kinchuinick Indians from the area; how they broke away in the eighteenth century from the larger Assiniboine and Stony tribes to live here in the mountains. And although the native Canadians had no part in the building of the railroad, Katie dug up a tenuous historical tie-in about how tribe members had apparently hindered the largely Scottish railroad work-gang during the final stages of building the Great Corkscrew Tunnel. The tunnel was the engineering feat of the century, that saw CPR blast that mad doubling-back tunnel two miles long right through the centre of Wolf Mountain.
In fact the centrepiece of the balcony display was a working model of the tunnel; a papier-mâché masterpiece they had commissioned from Calgary, where a tiny model train wound its way through the half cut-away mountain when you pressed a red button on the side of the case. The kids loved it. They would stand for an age pressing and re-pressing the button, making the train spiral its way round the tunnel until a bored parent dragged them downstairs to the bird display.
With the mountain cut in half you could see exactly where the line went, a luxury not available in real life. The papier-mâché world was much easier to understand.
Katie knew the whole floor should have been railroad history, but she had all these great Indian domestic tools, and artefacts to do with tribal worship and mythology to show and nowhere to show them. So she banged them in the cases and hoped for the best. Sam, of course, called the Indian stuff junk. She had watched his face as he walked round the display for the first time with her and the clouds of emotion that blackened his normally smooth brow were hard to fathom.
This contempt for his Indian past was something Katie had struggled to understand all their married life. Since it was virtually a taboo subject in the Hunt household she didn’t reckon she would ever be permitted to cross that bridge into the secret place that fed Sam with his self-loathing. Nevertheless, she grieved for him when she saw it manifest itself.
Often she would look at the two unmistakably Indian faces of her children Billy and Jess and mourn that they would never enjoy the rich part of their heritage provided by their father’s blood. But Sam could barely say Indian or Kinchuinick without spitting the words and she loved him too deeply to provoke the wrath he so readily turned on himself. If he thought the valuable Indian artefacts were junk, they would just have to agree to disagree. She made sure that all her Kinchuinick studies were done at the museum, keeping the facts to herself and her burning interest in the past of her husband’s race a jealously-guarded secret.
The beautiful carved bone amulet Sam wore round his neck, a very ancient Assiniboine charm, gave Katie her only tiny glimmer of hope that one day he would face up to his roots. She knew it had been his father’s, the male half of the dead parents Sam never spoke of, and the nature of her job told her it was valuable beyond its role of sentimental keepsake. But he offered her no explanation, no anecdotal family history, and he took it off only once, when he was forced to replace its leather thong after snapping it while swimming in the creek.
What kept her from prying too deeply were two things. First, she thought the ivory-coloured circle of bone hanging on the tight brown skin of his hairless chest was the sexiest thing she had ever seen; and secondly, she loved him so much that anything that made hurt flit across his broad innocent face made her die inside. So the history of Sam’s amulet was safe. Sam would never know she had located its origin in more than one book. She knew lots about that charm. One day she would talk to him about it, but not now.
Katie walked clockwise round the cases, completing her little ritual. She wandered past the display of beaded cradle-boards, noting that the model baby, strapped into the most ornate example was starting to go yellow on one side of its face. Dummies were a pain. They never looked real, and when they did there was something frightening about them. This mangled thing wasn’t going to fool anyone, but Katie had insisted on the baby, just to educate the public about the human side of her objects. It wasn’t enough to show visitors the old crumbling piece of wood and beading and make them admire the handiwork. You had to make them stop and think. Think about what life was like. Think about how their life was much the same as our life. Even make twentieth-century Mr and Mrs Leisure Suit consider that although things were harder for the average eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Kinchuinick Indian, in some ways it was better then than now. She looked at the flaky yellowing face of the plaster baby. The real thing would have been strapped into one of these cradleboards from the moment it was born and taken out occasionally to stretch and kick and be cuddled, then strapped back in and attached to its mother. Secure. Loved. Cherished. Forest moss for a diaper, with the plant’s chemicals providing a natural barrier to diaper rash and a whole tribe providing love, attention and security. Pretty different from the Kinchuinick babies now. Nothing about their modern lives would sit happily in a mahogany case. The plaster baby looked back at her as if it mourned for them too. Needs a clean, she thought. Get rid of that yellowing with some turpentine. It went on her mental list.
Then on to the medicine bundles. Strange, small leather pouches full of herbs, used by shamans for good and bad medicine. All present and correct, except maybe one of the bad medicine bundles was responsible for a label peeling off at the back of the case. Bad medicine plays havoc with glue. Note two on the list. A stroll past the eagle feather wands and pipes completed her circuit, and ended, as always, with the model.
Just before closing, before she turned the model off at the wall switch, she always pressed the Corkscrew Tunnel’s red button and smiled as the tiny train started its last journey of the day through the mountain of paper: her own ritual.
Ritual was important to Katie Hunt. Perhaps not quite as important as it had been to Katie Crosby, but it was still up there along with breathing and eating. But if that love of ritual had endured the years, lots of things had disappeared forever; and they started to disappear when the twenty-three-year-old Katie Jane Crosby had first gazed into the delicious, mischievous black eyes of Sam Hunting Wolf. Mostly bad things. Things she was glad to have shaken off like dandruff. Things like Tom.
That had been close. Whenever Katie thought back about how close, she shuddered.
Was it really her who thought a Friday night barbecue at Tom’s sailing club was the height of sophistication? Yes it was. And it was Katie Crosby who used to practise signing Mrs Tom Clark on the telephone pad when she was doodling during a long call. A real close thing. She recalled her parents’ faces that night. Expressions of almost catatonic shock, the night she let them all down. But also the night she set herself free.
It was her own fault. She should never have let Tom own her the way he did. But the things you know as a woman are different from the things you believe as a girl. He bullied her. She knew that now. Then, of course, she thought he loved her, was telling her things for her own good. Christ, she’d lied to herself all those years. Lied when she saw a line for a blockbuster movie she ached to see, when she and Tom were heading for the art-house theatre to sit through a long dark European film with subtitles. Lied to herself when Tom told her that her college friends were young and silly and he couldn’t tolerate them, that his boat-owning friends were more interesting. Lied about liking to push weights, ride expensive mountain bikes and go roller-blading with the big muscle-bound dumb geeks Tom admired. She ate low cholesterol food to please him, and agreed with Tom that bed by ten-thirty was a good thing to help with a personal training programme.
A whole series of lies and self-deceit. It had left her awash and confused, wondering who the hell Katie Crosby was. Did she like Sylvester Stallone or Ingmar Bergman? Would she rather go to the private view of an exhibition of Corbusier drawings, or go and fly a power kite in a storm? Why did she long to skip ‘training’, sit up until 4 a.m. drinking beer and arguing with friends whether Kojak would look like Barbra Streisand if he grew hair? Her confusion had made her pretend she was full of certainty, boasting to her friends that she was settled and sure of life, that she had the answers. She was grown now and the answer was, she could like anything she wanted. No reasons necessary. But then, the answer had to be Tom’s way. It wasn’t his fault. It had been hers. She didn’t think she was at all pretty, and no one changed her mind. In fact everyone remarked on how handsome Tom Clark was. She was ‘lucky’ to have snagged him. He said he loved her because she was funny and bright and full of life, but in private moments, in subtle ways, he made it clear that one of them could have anyone they wanted, and the other one should be damned grateful.
He treated her degree in archaeology and anthropology as a curious and charming little hobby. It was his yacht chandlery yard that would keep them solvent, and she needn’t worry about a thing.
But she had loved him. Slim, tall, handsome Tom. Tom who bought endless magazines about boats, who wanted to be thought an expert on books, architecture, design and civilized living, but really only knew about his resting pulse rate. Tom who was like a child, as a direct result of trying so hard to be a man. And she very nearly married him. Warning bells had been sounding long before she met Sam, but she hadn’t listened to them. Sex with Tom had started to be so infrequent and awkward she dreaded him even trying. His clumsiness made him treat it like a chore, and every bungled attempt left them beached further apart on some strange shore. It was, after all, her fault. He told her so, often.
‘You never initiate making love.’
She hated that term, ‘making love’. Sounded like a school’s sex education lecture. It took the lust, the dirt, the fun out of it.
‘That’s the problem,’ he would say. ‘You have to start it sometimes.’
But for some reason she didn’t want to start it. She wanted him to want her more, to grab her like a plumber in a dirty movie and make her ache for him. But that was never going to happen. Remember, Tom could have anyone he wanted. She was ‘lucky’.
And all the time her parents welcomed him like he was the son they never had, never once noticing their happy-go-lucky only child growing increasingly more insecure, miserable and bitter.
Then there was Sam. The first time Sam had really made her laugh, she thought a flood-gate had opened somewhere inside her. A joy so profound and delicious burst from her that she felt intoxicated. It was almost as if she’d forgotten how to laugh like that. Crying with mirth, sides aching from elation. With the laughter, always a stirring of sexual passion that made her lightheaded.
And to think she nearly didn’t join her parents in Silver that year. Tom had asked her to forgo the yearly family vacation in Alberta and stay in Vancouver as his partner at some charity ball, and she had nearly said yes. Her parents didn’t expect her to come with them any more. She was a grown woman after all. The ball was tempting. Tom’s friends and business acquaintances were rich. There would be a marquee, and she could wear a taffeta ball gown and long silk evening gloves with a bracelet over the wrist. She would drink sparkling white wine and maybe break away from his iron-pumping idiot pals for a moment to find someone who would talk about something more than their own flesh and how they were keeping it healthy. But somehow Katie wanted to be a little girl again for a few weeks. She longed to wear an old sweater and stack her Dad’s woodpile neatly for him, the sensual touch and smell of the rough pine delighting her. Her routine. A routine that had survived for two decades. And she wanted to sit with her Mom as Mrs Crosby in her silly cotton hat made another futile attempt to capture Wolf Mountain in watercolour from the porch. She wanted all that warmth and security that Tom seemed to provide but really didn’t. So she went to Silver with her delighted, but surprised parents. And she met Sam Hunt.
He drove a bus. That’s what Sam was doing when she first saw him. Katie remembered everything about that day. It was hot as Hell, and she was wearing khaki shorts, a plain white T-shirt, a tiny tartan rucksack on her back, making her way to Lazy Hot Springs for a hike. And she was waiting to board Sam’s bus in the depot.
A big sign on a stand read Passengers wait here until driver checks your ticket, and so she waited by it. Funny thing was, everybody else just walked by her, out through the glass swing doors to the sidewalk and got on the bus. It sure was filling up. There were lots of Japanese, a few hiking couples and some elderly tourists. But they were all getting on the bus before her. She saw the seat she fancied was already gone, the front one opposite the driver where you can look out front from the big windshield, and she started to get annoyed. Where was the driver? Why didn’t someone in charge come and tell all these people to wait in line like the sign said?
Then a young man appeared in the blue company overalls, holding a styrofoam cup of coffee. A young, impossibly handsome man. Sam was twenty-five, six feet tall, his black shiny hair swept back from a noble forehead. His blue tunic top was open by three buttons, revealing a T-shirt beneath and the suggestion of tight brown pectorals. He was obviously Indian and to Katie’s surprise, he was also undeniably gorgeous.
This driver from the planet sex stopped and looked at Katie, and then at the nearly full bus through the glass doors. Walking over to her he handed her the coffee. ‘Can you hold this, miss? I’ll be right back.’
She took the cup, astonished.
He boarded his busy vehicle and she could see through the doors people standing and milling about on board. In seconds the passengers were pouring off the bus, back through the doors into the depot concourse.
Sam was at their back, waving his hands and shouting, ‘Come on, that’s it … hurry along … quick as you can …’
The passengers milled around grouchily, complaining under their breath, in front of Katie. She was going to be last again.
Sam pushed his way through to where Katie stood, took her by the hand not occupied holding his coffee, and led her to the front of the line.
He cleared his throat, and clapped his hands together twice. ‘Could I have your attention please, ladies and gentlemen?’
They grew silent, some fishing around in bags for the tickets they were now going to have to present.
‘I’d like to introduce you all to a very special person.’
Katie looked at him, horrified. What was this? The crowd started to look curious.
‘This young lady is unique in Canada and it’s a great honour to have her with us today. We, at Fox Line Travel, always knew that one day she would grace us with her presence, but now it’s happened, and all I can say is that I’m humbled to find that I’m one of the people to witness it.’
The crowd started to buzz with low conversation, heads bobbing up to get a look at the woman this bus driver held by the hand.
Katie was blushing to her feet. What on earth was this man doing? Who did he think she was?
Sam held up a finger. ‘Now I know there’s not much time for speeches or nothing, what with the bus already a few minutes behind schedule, but let me, on behalf of the bus line, just say this.’ The crowd were expectant. Sam turned to Katie, smiling, and under his breath said, ‘What’s your name?’
Stunned by the warmth of his smile, she replied. ‘Katie Crosby.’
Sam looked to his audience. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Katie Crosby, the only, and I mean only, woman in Canada …’ he paused. ‘Who can FUCKING READ!’
There was a stunned and shocked silence and then Katie burst out laughing. The crowd exploded into an irritated hubbub of noise, peppered with well really and cheeky son of a bitch.
Sam smiled and stood defiantly by the sign, tapping it with a finger. He let go of Katie’s hand and waved her through. ‘Keep the coffee. It’s milk, no sugar.’
She smiled and got on the empty bus, into her favourite seat. Opposite the driver.
Through the window she could see Sam smiling at his frowning passengers, and lip-read him saying tickets please as though he hadn’t a care in the world.
That was a great journey. They talked, of course. All the way to Lazy Hot Springs, until Katie had to get off. She’d gone off the idea of a hike by then. All she wanted to do was stay on that bus and talk more to the handsome funny guy at the wheel. But she got up and made to leave and when he asked her for her phone number she told him. He smiled, opened the hydraulic doors and said, ‘Fox Line wishes you a nice day. Driver Sam wishes you a shitty one for not taking him with you.’
She laughed and waved goodbye, still waving as the bus pulled away, with windows full of glowering people staring at her like she was the Anti-Christ.
All she thought about on the hike was Sam. Her head was spinning and she walked further than she intended, striding out in a trance. Why would she give a bus driver her number in Silver when she practically lived with Tom? But she didn’t regret it, and when the bus back that evening was driven by a middle-aged pot-bellied man with a moustache, she was crestfallen.
The phone call came the next day, her father getting there first. He asked who was speaking in a very careful and deliberate way and then called Katie to the phone in the parlour. He held the receiver out to her as if showing a child something it had damaged and waiting for an apology.
‘A Sam Hunt. For you.’
Katie’s heart had started pounding. She was as excited as a sixteen-year-old on her first date and her father could see it through her mask of indifference.
She took the receiver without putting it to her ear and said thank you. Frank Crosby understood the gesture and left the room.
With that first Hello? she knew it was over with Tom. She and Sam met that afternoon in town and walked up through the trail in the forest to the old fire lookout hut. And they had sex that nearly made Katie die with ecstasy. She’d known Sam for less than twenty-four hours but her appetite for him was insatiable and she thought as she lay in his powerful dark brown arms between all that rapture, that she would never be able to live without him again. With Sam it was fucking, not making love, although each act contained more love than Tom had given her in her whole life. And they talked. They talked so much Katie felt she’d known Sam since she was born.
She didn’t tell her parents a thing. Her father never asked about the phone call, and neither seemed to show any signs of suspecting that each time she went out she was meeting an Indian bus driver who would alternately make her laugh until she cried, and then cry out again in pleasure when he peeled off her clothes, high above town in the pines, or in the tiny wooden bed in the staff accommodation hut behind the depot.
She knew the ugly name for it of course. Indian-struck. That was what white people said when any white girl fell for a Native Canadian man. But Katie wasn’t Indian-struck at all. She was in love with Sam: the man, not the Indian, and she wanted to make sure he knew it.
The night before the Crosbys were due to leave she met him at the fire hut. She held his hands and looked into his black eyes very earnestly indeed.
She was going back to Vancouver, she said. She was going back to tell her boyfriend that it was over and then she would come straight back to Silver and be with him.
Katie braced herself for Sam to be sceptical, to dismiss her as a middle-class girl who’d used him for some rough-stuff vacation fun, and to be angry and hurt. But Sam looked straight back into her eyes, and said, ‘I know you will.’
They did what their bodies told them they had to do about four or five times, and then, exhausted, crawled back down the trail to town. Sam said goodbye at the end of her street, and walked away as if there was absolutely no doubt they would see each other again. Katie knew that was the truth.
She thought about Tom on the car journey all the way back to Vancouver, about how she could tell him without hurting him.
She loved him still, in a nostalgic kind of way. She’d been his girl almost half her adult life. A life together was taken for granted. But now the thought of him even kissing her made her wriggle with discomfort. She would tell him the moment they got back.
He called twenty minutes after they returned and said he’d made a dinner reservation in Denton’s. Where better to tell him, she thought, than in the best restaurant in town? Her parents seemed excited, asking her ridiculous questions, like, what time Tom was picking her up and what was she going to wear? Perhaps if Katie’s mind hadn’t been on Sam Hunt’s brown body and warm lips, she might have detected something was up in the Crosby household, but she slung on her green dress and grabbed a jacket when the door chimes announced Tom was there.
Tom held her and kissed her on the lips the moment she answered the door, as her eyes screwed in a grimace that he couldn’t see.
‘God, I missed you, you hick.’
She gave him a weak smile.
‘Let’s eat.’
He was looking unusually smart. He wore a grey Italian suit and a silk tie that she hadn’t seen before, and as he opened the passenger door of his Volvo for Katie she saw him raise his head and wink up at her father waving from the bedroom window.
They went to a wine bar first and Katie let him talk for three-quarters of an hour. He talked about the ball and how everyone had missed her. He told her about the trouble he’d had with his new PA and how James had a new car. He told her that she should enrol in this new health club on the coast that everyone was joining. It would do her good. Get her in shape. She watched his mouth move but struggled to concentrate on what the words meant. Katie was back in Silver, smelling the pines, hearing the woodpeckers knocking out a rhythm in the distance, feeling the rough dry earth beneath her back and buttocks as Sam blocked out the sun above her with his body. But here she was. Sitting in a bar full of vacant young men in crumpled designer suits and women pretending to be young and cool until they could revert to their true suburban colours the moment they hit thirty.
As she gathered the courage to say what she had to say, he motioned to the barman for the check and told her it was time to go. It could wait, she thought. She would tell him at dinner. Give him time to take it in.
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 (#ulink_eb481774-d071-5f75-98e7-9a989c8f273f)
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?
Calvin looked round the room from behind his mug of coffee. None of these people would ever be safe again if he didn’t act. That darkness would reach them all eventually, one way or another, once it had been released for good. Did he care? They certainly didn’t care about him. He saw himself through their eyes. A useless, drunken old grey-haired Indian, stinking of his own dried urine, a face lined by abuse and tragedy, wearing clothes that were like diseased and peeling skins instead of fabric. He was no saviour. But the Great Spirit, he knew, cared about them all; the girl behind the counter, the two surly young men in the corner in leather jackets and jeans, the working man on the next stool wearing the overalls of an elevator company, and Calvin Bitterhand. Loved them without question or prejudice. Prejudice was man’s invention.
Yes, even though the people in this room would never know that he thought of himself as their brother, it was his duty to act on their behalf. What else could he do? To ignore the Eagle and stay would mean life would go on as normal. He could peacefully spend the last few years of his life as scum on the streets, drinking himself nearer death and crying himself to sleep in doorways.
He must go to Silver and he must go now. But he was not pure enough to face what he knew was waiting for him. Nineteen years had passed since he’d left the reserve, and in all those years he’d never performed a sun dance, or fasted, not even prayed. He was tainted with self-abuse. Broken by booze. There was only one solution. Penance. He would walk. If he didn’t make the two hundred miles, then the Great Spirit had other plans for him. But he was going to try.
Calvin swallowed the last of his coffee and managed a weak smile at the girl moving some cakes around the display.
‘Want another, chief?’
He shook his head, climbed slowly and painfully off his stool and walked over to where she stood on the other side of the plastic-covered counter. She stopped toying with her cakes and straightened up to confront him. Calvin put his hands on the counter to steady himself, noticing her eyes flicking to the gaps where his fingers used to be. He held up his head and spoke to her softly.
‘I have a long journey now. No more money. You give me food?’
The waitress, Marie-Anne MacDonald, looked back at him and found herself hesitating. Normally she gave old bums the treatment they deserved. If they couldn’t pay they hit the street. You slipped one of them an old danish or a doughnut past its sell-by, and before you knew where you were you had a string of them hanging around the door expecting to be fed like dogs. It was her butt on the line and if Jack came in and saw her giving charity to any old scrounger it would certainly be her who’d get it in the neck. Okay, it wasn’t a great job, but it was a job. The shop shut at four so she had all afternoon to watch the soaps and then get ready to go out with Alan. Suited her fine, and she wasn’t going to lose it for a bum. Anyway, these people could work if they wanted to. They just didn’t want to. Look at her. She had to work didn’t she? Sure, she’d like to stand around all day drinking, but she came in here at seven-thirty every day to earn her crust, and she hated these Indian bums who thought life owed them a living. She let them in so she could take their money off them, the money they’d begged from some sucker, and then throw them out when they got comfortable. Marie-Anne sometimes wished she could teach the useless pigs that white people weren’t all one big welfare cheque.
At least that was the rule she lived by normally. This guy was different. When he looked at her just then, his black shiny eyes fixing her with a stare, there was no self-pity in them, no pleading or cajoling. More like defiance, as if he were ordering her to do something she knew she had to but had forgotten.
And she caught a strange scent from him, not of piss and liquor, but of a fresh wind and trees, the way washed sheets smell when they’ve been out on the line blowing in the spring breeze.
Made her think of when she was little and she and her father picnicked on the Bow River, way out of town. The mountains were like a jagged cut-out in the distance, and she would run through the pines, laughing as she fell in the long grass in the clearing between the trees. The smell was the same. Green, wet, fresh, delicious.
Marie-Anne, still looking into Calvin’s watery black eyes, put a hand absently into the refrigerated display case in the front of the counter, scooped eight cling-wrapped sandwiches into a bag and handed it to him.
Calvin took it, nodded to her and slowly, wearily, left the shop. She watched him go, transfixed as his hunched figure pushed the door open and shuffled past the window out of sight.
Eight sandwiches. She was in for it if she couldn’t account for how eight sandwiches walked right out of the cool shelf. Each one was worth a dollar sixty, in fact one had been a jumbo shrimp mayo, worth two dollars seventy-five. Without thinking she went into her pocket book under the coffee machine, took out thirteen dollars and put them in the till. Jack would never know. The elevator maintenance man called for another cup of coffee and Marie-Anne went to pour it, with a smile on her face that would last her until closing, although then, as now, she couldn’t tell you why.
13 (#ulink_4e264565-b592-5ff1-b14b-491432f57afc)
It would be out of his hands in a few hours. The worst thing, as always, was that the media would go apeshit. Craig stared at Brenner’s slim report as if it told him he had a week to live. Instead, it told him loud and clear that Joe hadn’t died in a car accident, told him that Joe had been ripped apart and then tipped over the gorge as an afterthought.
There had been some grim excitement when the truck driver had been found, the one who kicked his own bucket on the highway. But when they hauled in the body there had been absolutely no sign of blood, a weapon or even a struggle. Zilch. The guy was clean as a whistle. In short, that poor bastard was certainly the last guy over the pass and probably the only witness they were going to get; but Craig was sure that no way did he murder Joe Reader.
He put his hands to his face and mashed the skin round his eyes. They would send someone from Edmonton now. The rules said you couldn’t lead an investigation if you were personally involved, and boy, was he involved. The guy who did that to Joe would know how involved if he ever found himself in a room with Craig.
He let his gaze wander from the document of doom on the desk to the window, where the falling snow was thicker than the fake stuff they used to chuck around on a John Denver Christmas special.
How to deal with the media. That was the next big one. Craig could just imagine how the ratings-hungry louses were going to cover this. What made better copy than a murder in a tourist town, where the biggest stink is usually some skis getting stolen, or some guy winning a busted face in a bar brawl? Suddenly, there’s a jackpot; two patrollers dying in a freak avalanche explosives accident, then a murder that would make Stephen King say yuk. All against a backdrop of folks having winter-wonderland fun in the snow. Christ, it would have the American networks circling Silver like crows round a carcass.
Bad thought. It made him see Joe again. Or what had been left of Joe. Craig sighed and replayed the tape in his head one more time. Joe’s pick-up was the second last vehicle to cross the pass that night. The truck came after. He was sure of that. Seen the tracks himself. The murderer couldn’t possibly have survived up there without a vehicle, so either he was in Joe’s car, or Legat’s.
Or both. Craig’s mouth opened slightly. Or both. In Joe’s truck as far as the gorge then hitched a ride in the Peterbilt. He got excited. Then he stopped getting excited. Joe’s truck had been pushed over the edge. Something really powerful had pushed it. A single killer and some old truck driver with a dodgy heart couldn’t possibly have done it by themselves. It would have taken either ten men or another vehicle, at least another pick-up. The snow that had fallen relentlessly for at least ten hours after the event made sure they would never know the answer to that one. A murderer couldn’t have chosen better conditions to cover his tracks. And anyway, why would someone like the Legat guy have taken part in such a foul deed? His records showed he was just a regular trucker: no record, nothing untoward, and strangely, for someone who just took the coward’s way out, nothing to suggest he would want to. The suicides Craig had dealt with in twenty years of policing were usually caused by drink, gambling debts, sexual problems or mental illness. Ernie Legat didn’t seem to suffer from any of them. Was he forced to do something despicable? Was that why he had committed suicide? Didn’t make sense. He would have just driven straight to the RCs if there had been any funny business and he’d survived. Craig pulled himself up. Legat wasn’t murdered, remember, just died of the cold. For the hundredth time he asked himself what the hell were they dealing with here.
The local TV and radio stations had covered the ski patrol deaths and Wolf River Valley Cable had run some crap about the dangers of avalanching. But this was the real thing. A bloody, messy, unexplained, motiveless cop-killing, bound to go network, and he shrank at the prospect. If their man was a psycho, headline news wouldn’t help. Where was the piece of shit now? That’s what he needed to know. The son of a bitch could be walking round town collecting for the blind as far as Craig knew, since right now Silver had more strangers than residents. That was, if he was still here. What if he was going the other way? To Stoke. He dismissed it. Instinct told Craig McGee the murderer was headed towards Silver.
He pushed the button on his phone. ‘Holly, I’m going out for an hour or two. Tell Sergeant Morris to hold the fort.’
It crackled back. ‘He’s out here already. There’s some messages. Do you need them now?’
Craig smiled. His wife used to say Holly was like something out of Twin Peaks. Even if he wanted to dispute it, his secretary gave him cause every day to give in and agree.
‘Well that’s for you to say. You know what they are.’
‘I guess they can wait.’
He released the button and grabbed his storm jacket from the peg.
Outside the privacy of his room, in the open-plan office, the place was buzzing. All eighteen constables were on duty, leave cancelled, and what looked like most of them were milling round the operations board like they were waiting for something to happen on its own. It seemed like colour marker pens were more fun than getting out there and doing some police work.
Craig searched for Morris. He saw him sitting on the edge of a desk talking into a phone like he was a Hollywood theatrical agent, holding the phone beneath his chin and gesticulating to whoever was unfortunate enough to be on the other end with both hands. Not today, thought Craig. Today he couldn’t find the energy to play boss with this herd. Constable Daniel Hawk was at his desk studying the photos of Joe’s truck. Craig flicked him on the shoulder as he passed.
‘Going up to the pass to look round the site again. You want to get me up there in your Ford, constable?’
Daniel got up without speaking, put on his hat and followed his superior officer out into the car park.
The snow was getting silly now. Ploughs were doing their best, with the skiing traffic crawling behind them like ducklings after their mother, but it looked as if the snow would win by dark. Silver was going to be blocked off again. At least by road. A long discordant hoot from the distance sounded like the freight train on its way down the mountain was laughing at the cars. The tracks were clear now after the explosion, and those mile-long iron snakes of coal kept rolling through like nothing had happened. Daniel drove slowly and silently, accepting his place humbly in the line of cars.
Craig glanced across at him. ‘So how many colours have we managed to get on the wipe-clean?’
Daniel smiled. ‘We’re working on ten. But there’s still a debate about whether the truck driver should be pink or green.’
‘I wasn’t being funny, Hawk. I was expressing displeasure.’
‘I know, sir.’
Craig looked out the window, paused a while. ‘How are the guys coping with it? The fact it was Joe, I mean.’
Daniel made a little shrug, his eyes fixed on the white mess ahead. ‘They cope. You know. Angry I guess, but they figure we’ll get him.’
‘And you?’
‘The same.’
Daniel was putting up a defence shield. Craig could feel it, but he carried on.
‘Joe wasn’t seeing anyone else or anything, was he?’
‘Not to my knowledge. You knew him as well as me.’
‘Sure. But you bowled with him. He would have said if anything was wrong.’
Daniel took his eyes off the road for the first time, and shot his staff sergeant a look. The traffic slowed behind the plough in sympathy.
‘Why don’t you just say what’s on your mind, sir?’
‘And what’s that?’
‘That Joe was half-blood Cree and I’m full Kinchuinick, so we must have been best of buddies. That’s what you’re getting at isn’t it? The only Indians, even half-Indians, in the detachment, and we’re bound to stick together.’
Craig lowered his eyes. ‘Come on, Hawk. That’s not what I meant.’
‘I think it’s exactly what you meant. Sir.’
Daniel Hawk was right of course, but Craig wasn’t going to let his clumsy mishandling of the constable stand in the way of what he wanted to know. ‘Okay.’ He gave in softly, paused again, thinking. ‘I just wondered if there was anything cultural, anything particular to Native Canadians I wouldn’t know. Something that might have escaped me.’
Daniel Hawk continued to look straight ahead. Craig, over his embarrassment now, was starting to get annoyed. ‘Aw Christ, Hawk. I’m fucking sorry if it’s not politically correct to notice the fact that you and Joe happened to share some Indian blood.’
‘We didn’t. I repeat. He was half-Cree. I’m full Kinchuinick.’
‘Whatever. Quit acting like I just swindled Manhattan off you for a dollar and answer the question. Was there anything going on with Joe I should know about?’
Constable Hawk threw him that look again, then decided he’d turned the knife enough. He looked at last like he was thinking instead of brooding. ‘Nah. Nothing. He was pretty stable with Estelle and all. I didn’t notice anything weird.’
Hawk’s boss nodded solemnly. It was just as Craig thought. He’d have known if there had been anything wrong with his sergeant. It was just that niggling little maggot of insecurity that white cops have when dealing with Indians that made Craig even bring the topic up. He was sorry he had to. He never thought of Joe as anything but Joe. And whether Daniel Hawk believed it or not, he thought only of him as a damned good constable. So what that they’d been the only two Native Canadians in the detachment? The detachment also boasted one Sikh, a German and a half-Japanese. It was worth checking. Anything was worth checking. They had precious little else to go on.
Daniel drove on in silence but he was still thinking. Craig could practically hear the wheels turning in there.
‘What? There’s something. Isn’t there?’
Hawk shook his head. ‘Nah. It’s nothing about Joe. It’s the cultural bit that made me think of something.’
‘Tell me.’ Craig was hungry for it. Whatever it was.
Daniel looked grim, fighting to analyse whatever it was he’d conjured up.
‘Okay, like I say, it’s probably nothing. In fact, given the time involved it’s absolutely, definitely, nothing. But the way Joe died. It made me think of something else. That’s all.’
Craig turned his body towards Daniel. ‘Go on.’
‘I saw something like it. While I was policing on Redhorn. But it happened around twenty years ago.’
Craig tried to work it out. Daniel Hawk was only thirty-five years old, tops. How could he have presided over a murder at the tender age of fifteen? They were recruiting young into the Mounties, but not that young.
‘I don’t understand, Hawk. What do you mean you saw it?’
‘I said the murder happened over twenty years ago. That’s what the forensics guys came up with. We only found the mutilated remains of the body six years ago. It got dug up by some white construction guys who were pile-driving for the new rodeo centre. Course if it’d been found by Indians it would never have been reported. That’s the Kinchuinick way. Keeps the reserve a tight community. Makes police work almost impossible. The person, whoever it was, hadn’t even been reported missing.’
Craig tried to work this out. ‘So you uncovered an old body killed over two decades ago that was similar in its disfigurement to Joe’s injuries?’
‘Not similar. Identical.’
‘Indian?’
‘They couldn’t say for sure. No dental records or nothing.’ He looked across at Craig. ‘Contrary to popular white Canadian myth, we’re kinda the same as you under the skin.’
Craig ran a hand over his mouth, ignoring the dig. ‘Why didn’t you mention this?’
‘I only thought of it recently. I’ve been wondering if it’s relevant.’
Craig exhaled. ‘Fuck.’
‘Sorry. It just didn’t seem that important.’
‘Where are the Native Police files kept, Hawk? At Redhorn?’
‘Yeah. The Tribal Administrator keeps them, but since the Mounties from Stoke were called in they got them too.’
‘Remember the year?’
‘Sure. Larry was born that year. 1987.’
Craig drummed the dash impatiently, his desire to have that file on his knee right now, eating at him like a hunger. The traffic was as terrible as the snow. The tailback behind the plough stretched for at least a quarter of a mile, every vehicle apart from theirs revealing by their ski racks that they contained humans in the search for fun and thrills in this white stuff. Daniel looked across at him and read his discomfort.
‘You still want me to head for the site?’
‘No. Carry on to Stoke.’
Daniel nodded as if reprimanded and fixed his eyes on the road again. He wasn’t looking forward to seeing those photos again, but it served him right for bringing back the whole sorry affair. Maybe the Kinchuinick way was best. Maybe he should have kept his trap shut. But then he wasn’t really a Kinchuinick any more. He was a policeman.
Constable Benson, stamping his feet in the snow, raised a heavily-gloved hand to the Ford as they cruised past the taped-off site. Daniel waved back. It was wilderness up there. The Trans-Canada and the rail track sneaked over this high pass like intruders, as if they knew man had little right to be here and should think twice about leaving his mark. This was the highest point, and from here they could cruise all the way back down to Stoke, still trailing the city skiers as they slid about after the plough.
Craig had driven up and down here about two dozen times since the murder. If he was waiting for that movie-cop’s moment of divine inspiration he was going to have to wait a long time. Nothing about being there, about experiencing the physical presence of Wolf Pass and its inaccessibility to the pedestrian, lit a fire under his cold, empty ignorance.
This was new territory. There had only ever been one murder in his time in Silver. A pathetic, sad murder: a summer tourist battered to death in a rage by a drunk redneck from the mines up north, allegedly for insulting his girlfriend. Ugly and savage. Sylvia’s death had been neither. It had been what they described as peaceful. Craig disagreed. There was somehow more peace in brutality, a natural order where the ripping or tearing of flesh logically and visibly resulted in the escape of the human life-force from its prison of solid matter. The insidious creeping death in which the body was attacked from within was to him a thousand times more violent. He did not associate the hollow white cheeks of his once rosy-skinned wife with any form of peace.
When the doctor had told him, in that stupid pink-carpeted room in the hospital, full of plants and shit as if that made what got said in there any better, that Sylvia’s cancer was in the womb and that it would be a matter of days, he’d experienced a kind of elation. It was anger, and unimaginable grief, but it fired him up. He would go in there and get that cancer the way he went out and pulled in a thief. Yes, it would all be okay. Staff Sergeant Craig McGee to the rescue. We Always Get Our Man. Except you couldn’t arrest cancer. She’d died so doped up with morphine Craig doubted if she’d even known he was there. But he was. He held her cool thin hand as she let out one small breath and never took another. That was her death. Banal and pointless. He didn’t even call the nurse, just sat and looked at her, knowing it was over, that she’d gone. What was that garbage some writer said about not really dying, just going into another room? She was dead. There was, as far as Craig was concerned, no other room. This life was the only room there ever was, and Sylvia had left it and shut the door quietly behind her.
He envied Estelle Reader her grief. The grotesque and spectacular end to Joe’s life seemed to have a drama, a showmanship that gave it meaning. He could never say it to anyone, but he felt it. Sylvia’s death meant nothing to anyone but him, and even then it was more about his grief than her life. Lots of people died of cancer. The hospital in Calgary checked them in and out like library books, and nothing made those guys in white surgical trouser suits raise an eyebrow. But they would have raised an eyebrow if they’d seen Joe Reader. That made Joe’s death special and Sylvia’s ordinary, and sometimes Craig could hardly bear to think that anything about Sylvia could have been ordinary.
If anyone was ordinary it was him. At least he had been. Now though, he could hardly remember the thick-skinned unthinking cop he’d been for nearly two decades, letting the extraordinary events of life and death that were unavoidable in his job float past him as though he were immune. Not the kind of immunity that made him feel immortal. More as if he didn’t really notice he was alive. Taking things for granted. That time in Scotland, they’d walked on the beach in the Outer Hebrides and Sylvia had lain down on the cold wet sand, sifting through some shells. She’d picked ten tiny, delicate half-moon pink shells and laid them out in front of her.
‘Look. Babies’ fingernails.’
He’d crouched down behind her, his arms round her neck which was swathed in woollen scarves against the ridiculous weather, and looked at those beautiful fragile things.
She reorganized them earnestly, as though the order mattered. ‘Our baby will have tiny nails like that and you can bite them for him. Stop him scratching his face.’
Yes, he’d thought. That’s right. We will. No doubt about anything. The McGees were married, they would have children and they would grow old and proud of those children. That’s how life went.
Craig was not superstitious then and nor was he now, but the memory of the gust of wind that ripped across the sands on that huge, freezing, empty beach, came back to him often, the wet wind that had whipped away those paper-thin shells and made Sylvia laugh as she tried in vain to gather them up again. He thought about that a lot now. His life, no longer on those invisible oiled rails that carry a person through without having to ponder direction, was now as fragile as those shells. The wind would come, he knew, and swipe him away too. And what kind of wind would it be? Joe’s had been a hurricane. A huge, angry hurricane. That’s the way Joe went, and he was jealous. Joe, Joe, Joe. Must keep thinking about Joe.
The murder on the Redhorn reserve could be nothing or something. But he was anxious to know, and by the time they viewed the squat grey town of Stoke beneath them, he was bursting with impatience.
Daniel had been quiet throughout the journey, the pair of them sitting like eavesdroppers as the police radio occasionally spat out other people’s conversations. When he spoke, they had been silent for at least three-quarters of an hour.
‘You ever police a reserve, sir?’
Craig was hauled back from the pit of his thoughts.
‘Nope. Ten years in Vancouver, two in Banff, eight in Silver.’
It was Craig’s turn to be defensive now. ‘Why do you ask? Does it make me a bad cop ’cause I didn’t spend twenty years chasing illicit whisky stills and locking up wife-beaters?’
Daniel didn’t smile. ‘Guess not. It’s just a different kind of police work, that’s all.’
‘And you’re saying this because …?’
Daniel made a dismissive movement with his shoulders. ‘Sometimes what white cops think is abnormal on a reserve is pretty normal for the Indians who live there.’
‘Like wife-beating and child-abuse.’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Bull shit. Violence and abuse isn’t normal anywhere, Hawk. I don’t give a damn if it’s an Indian, a Caucasian or a fucking Martian. Anyone who jumps the bones of their five-year-old needs locking up till they rot.’
‘Sure. But they don’t see it that way.’
‘Big deal. Who cares how they see it? They have to learn to stop doing it.’
Constable Hawk sighed and shifted in his seat. ‘Yeah, but that attitude’s not going to help you if you have to get them to co-operate.’
Craig snorted and put his hands up in mock surrender. ‘No. No you’re right. Hey, it’s okay to beat your woman into a pile of bloody mush if you just tell me everything you know about this corpse. Is that what you’re saying? Is it?’
Daniel shook his head as if Craig was a lost cause. ‘Listen, I’m no social worker. I just know a lot about these people since I am one of these people.’
‘No you’re not, Constable Hawk. You’re a Kinchuinick Indian, but you’re not a filthy piece of scum who fucks kids and hits women. Try to separate the two. Native Canadians don’t have exclusive rights to those crimes. Whites do it too.’
Daniel looked impassive. ‘And a lot more besides.’
‘Yeah. A lot more besides. But our behaviour doesn’t excuse theirs. We’re all human. We’re all trying to be better at it.’
They were arriving in town and Daniel gratefully peeled off from the traffic and headed for the Stoke Detachment. It was a low, modern building in the centre of town, the compound piled high with snow that wasn’t going anywhere until spring. Daniel pulled up to the line of Crown Vics abandoned outside and stepped on the foot brake.
‘You want me to wait here sir?’
‘No, constable. I want you to come with me.’
Hawk reached for his hat and put it on while Craig studied his face.
‘You don’t want to see this stuff again, do you?’
‘Part of the job I guess.’
They left the car and walked up the concrete ramp to the door. Part of the job, yes. But Constable Hawk could have lived without it.
‘That’s it, Craig.’
The file, a thin one, slapped onto the table.
Sergeant Cochrane rested his hand on the metal back of Craig’s chair, looking over his shoulder at the pastel green cardboard cover.
‘Thanks, Bob. Any chance of a coffee?’
‘Sure. Dan, you know where it is. How’s about it?’
Daniel Hawk took the hint gratefully and left the interview room. Bob Cochrane sat down on the other chair as Craig flicked open the file.
Hawk was right. Not similar. Identical.
The photos and the autopsy report told the same story. The corpse, found in a buckskin sack, had been slit up the spine, the organs removed, the heart stuffed up the anus, the penis in the mouth. Twenty years had concealed a lot of detail, but miraculously the body was mummified and still sufficiently intact to tell a tale. A man. They thought about fortyish and possibly, though not definitely, Indian. Interviews with almost every family on the reserve and surprise, surprise, nobody knew anything.
The ground the body had been buried in was unusual in two ways. Firstly, in its extreme dryness – almost pure sand, in fact. A geologist would recognize it as the million-year-old, raised dry remains of the Horn River bed, whose modern course now ran peacefully only a quarter of a mile away. That had been the factor that left the poor bastard looking like Tutankhamun. Even Craig knew that extremely wet or arid land leaves bodies even hundreds of years old whole enough to shake hands with. This corpse’s skin was stretched tight like parchment with barely an inch tainted by decay or infestation, leaving the grisly evidence of what had happened to it well preserved. The other unusual factor was that the ground was sacred. That was interesting to Craig. There had been big trouble from some of the elders when the chief had chosen that ground as the sight of the rodeo centre. It had been in the local rag. Everyone knew Chief Powderhand was a corrupt old piece of ass-wipe and the money he would cream off the rodeo centre made the sacred nature of the ground a joke. What chance did the spirit world have against the mighty buck? Powderhand drove a big shiny Buick and wore suits, and no amount of protest from the elders and their supporters could stop him if he wanted to do something. He held the purse-strings and even though the visitor could be forgiven for thinking Redhorn was one of the poorest places in Canada, it was a pretty full purse. Strange how none of it got to anyone on the reserve. Not until the chief’s elections rolled round that is, when suddenly there was a lot of coinage kicking around to those who voted the right way.
He was one irritated chief though, when the white workers dug up that body. Apparently he’d offered them money to keep quiet and bury it again. The Mounties at Stoke thought about prosecuting the old stoat for that little indiscretion. Then they thought again. It didn’t do to go upsetting the chief of the local tribe. Not with the government breathing down your neck. Keep them happy, keep them poor, keep them drunk, keep them quiet. The unwritten constitution of Canada.
So the file was opened and closed. With no reported missing persons on the national computer who even remotely fitted the vital statistics of the corpse, and no one in Redhorn with anything to say at all, the file was stacked away as an unsolved.
This was bothering Craig a lot. The use of the organs was the worst part. Methodical. Repulsive and methodical. Two murders, within twenty years, but more importantly within one hundred miles of each other, and the same bizarre, nauseating outrage. It had to be the same person. And it looked as if Joe might have died for being half-Indian. Only problem with that was why the Indian-hating killer would wait twenty years to strike again. It wasn’t as if there was a shortage of Native Canadians to tempt him to take one out. Why now? Why Joe?
Bob Cochrane interrupted Craig’s nightmarish thoughts. ‘You think there’s a connection?’
‘Of course.’
Cochrane leaned back on his chair, swinging on the two back legs. ‘Heck of a long time ago. You’d think if it was a serial killer, he’d have killed again before now.’
‘Maybe he has. But not here. Can we run this on the computer?’
Cochrane leaned forward, his chair coming back to earth with a thump. ‘Craig. I know how you feel but you know you’re not supposed to be doing this.’
‘I haven’t been told who’s going to be the investigating officer from Edmonton yet.’
‘But you will. Leave it for him. You were too close to Joe.’
Craig looked across at Bob Cochrane. He had known Joe too. Yet it would be deemed suitable for Cochrane to investigate and not Craig just because they were in different detachments. It was stupid.
‘So what would you do, Bob? Just leave it if you thought you had a lead?’
‘Yeah. I think you should. You don’t want your wrists slapped. This isn’t much of a lead anyhow.’
Craig laughed in a hollow sarcastic way. ‘You think an identical murder only a hundred miles away, albeit twenty years ago, is no lead?’
‘We came up with nothing last time.’
‘So we have a chance to nail the bastard this time. Joe’s body wasn’t lying there for twenty years. It’s fresh in the morgue, Bob.’
Daniel came back in with three coffees and a sad little plate of cookies.
‘Don’t like to hurry you sir, but the pass’ll be pretty much blocked when the ploughs stop.’
Craig snatched a cookie from the offered plate while still looking angrily at Cochrane. ‘Can I take this file, Bob?’
‘You know you can’t, Craig. It’s here for when the investigating officer needs it.’
Craig crunched his cookie and nodded. It wasn’t the investigating officer who was going to have to go back to Silver right now and fob off the press with maybes and don’t knows, while all the time knowing they had something that looked like an Indian-killer on their hands. An Indian-killer who’d got away with it maybe more than once and then made a big mistake. He’d killed a cop.
Craig kicked back his chair and shut the file. ‘Thanks, Bob. We’ll get back to you.’ He looked across at Daniel Hawk, holding the cookie plate like a mother at a child’s birthday party. ‘Through the proper channels, of course.’
He made to leave, and then hesitated. ‘Incidentally, how long from the discovery of the body until they stopped investigating?’
Bob Cochrane swung back on the chair again. ‘Two, maybe three months. Like I said, there was nothing to find out.’
Craig looked across at Daniel Hawk, then back at Cochrane.
‘They closed it because it was just an Indian, didn’t they?’
‘No. Like the file says, they can’t be sure it was an Indian.’
‘The file says the body was wrapped in a stitched buckskin sack. Is that an Indian burial, Hawk?’
‘It’s an old way. It’s pretty unique to the Kinchuinicks. Usually used for someone important. They use pine boxes now like everyone else.’
‘And the investigating officers at the time knew that?’
‘Sure they knew it. I worked on this case, remember?’
Craig grunted and looked back at Cochrane.
‘Doesn’t mean it was an Indian. We got no proof of that.’
‘Get real, Bob.’
Bob looked at Daniel with some embarrassment. Both Craig and Daniel saw that it was true.
The two men left the room, bracing themselves for a fight through the snow back to their homes on the other side of Wolf Mountain, and for the storm that they felt brewing between those green cardboard sheets.
14 (#ulink_e25aae92-022f-5a37-a374-5af93e4a8622)
She was always waiting at the window and Katie always pretended to hide behind the big Engelmann spruce in Mrs Chaney’s front yard. Katie peeped from behind the trunk and saw Jess laughing behind the glass, while Mrs Chaney approached from behind with her tiny coat as though it were a net in which to snare her.
Jess was all dressed and ready with her mittens on when Katie stomped the snow off her boots in the lobby of the big old house, its floorboards thumping to running feet, and the high rooms booming with the shouts and shrieks of the other children still waiting to be picked up.
‘Here she is, Mrs Hunt.’
Katie swept her daughter into her arms. ‘Thanks again, Mrs Chaney. Have you been good, sweetheart? Have you had a nice day, huh?’
‘We don’t speak through the children at this crèche, remember, Mrs Hunt?’
Katie was so desperate to laugh she buried her face in Jess’s coat. Sam did an impersonation of their fierce childminder that blew her away. So she was an old ratbag to the parents, but she was all they could afford. Jess liked her and the climate of chaos caused by dozens of children running wild in a big house, but Katie and Sam reserved the right to think the woman was a jerk. The phrase Elsie Chaney just delivered was the one Sam used when he wanted to crack up his wife. Sometimes he would duck beneath the comforter in bed and re-emerge as Mrs Chaney.
Katie recovered and withdrew her face.
‘No you’re right, Mrs Chaney. I’m sorry. Has Jess been good?’
The wide fifty-year-old woman crossed her hands in front of her and smiled. ‘This little pixie has been a perfect gem. A perfect gem.’
Jess shrieked in delight at the bare wall over Katie’s shoulder, deafening her mother in the ear nearest the outburst.
‘Okay. I’ll just pay you now if I can, Mrs Chaney. I think we owe you for last week too.’
‘No, your husband settled up last Friday thank you. Just this week is due. Shall I?’
She held her arms out for Katie’s wriggling child, so that her customer could get to the cash in her pocket-book.
Katie handed over the beaming Jess and dug around for her dollars.
‘I believe this blizzard is one of the worst I can recall.’
Katie was still fumbling.
‘You’re right, Mrs Chaney. It’s a stinker. But you have to admit the snow’s real pretty.’
Mrs Chaney wished to admit no such thing. ‘Claimed a life a few nights ago I hear.’
Katie looked up. ‘Oh?’
‘Joe Reader. You know. Estelle Reader’s husband.’
‘My God. What happened?’
Katie was horrified. She knew Estelle Reader to nod to in the supermarket, no more, but she was genuinely shocked to think of her being widowed so young.
‘Few nights ago, Tuesday it was, his pick-up went over the cliffs at the top of Wolf Mountain.’
‘My God,’ repeated Katie.
‘That’s the blizzard for you. For all his conceit, man hasn’t a chance against the forces of nature you know, Mrs Hunt. We have to learn to respect it.’
Katie handed over eighty dollars in twenties and scooped Jess back into her arms. Jess, however, had other plans. She’d spotted a small frightened-looking child in the doorway and struggled to be let down to go and greet it. Katie released her.
‘You know, that was the night that Sam was in Stoke. He got stuck on account of that storm. Thank God he stayed put or … well …’ She trailed off, shrugging, and watched her daughter trying to hug the small boy behind Mrs Chaney’s bulk.
‘Or it might have been him? Yes indeed it might have been, Mrs Hunt. And well might we thank God. He moves in mysterious ways. Mrs Reader’s loss, your gain.’
The childminder tucked Katie’s money into the big pocket on the front of the apron she never took off.
Katie got annoyed. ‘Hardly, Mrs Chaney. I don’t think that was the deal. I’m sorry to hear about it. Please tell Estelle we’re thinking of her if you see her.’
Her attention was focused on Jess now, and she used it to change the subject. She didn’t want to discuss poor Joe Reader with this woman any more. ‘Hey. Is this a new man in Jess’s life?’
Elsie Chaney looked down at the two children. ‘That’s the Belling boy. You know.’
Katie didn’t know, but she knew she would be told. ‘No. I don’t believe I do. He looks a bit lost.’
‘The son of that man. You know.’
Katie still didn’t know.
Mrs Chaney sighed. ‘Put away. For abuse.’ She mouthed the words as if they were too foul to be spoken aloud.
Katie’s heart dropped down a rib or two in sympathy.
‘Oh. The poor darling.’
She leaned towards Katie.
‘Welfare pays his bills here. The mother can barely cope. Heartbreaking, though, to know it’ll all happen again.’
‘You’re kidding. You mean they’re letting the guy see the boy again?’
Elsie Chaney looked at Katie as if she were one of her children. ‘No no. He won’t be back. I mean when the boy grows up he’ll repeat the sins of the father.’
Katie looked open-mouthed at the innocent blue-eyed mite, now having one of his cardigan buttons sucked by her daughter. ‘You can’t say a wicked thing like that, Mrs Chaney. He’s a tiny child for heaven’s sake.’
Mrs Chaney was clearly irked by the accusation of being wicked. She straightened up, no longer keeping her tone soft. ‘Seems you don’t know your social psychology, Mrs Hunt. The abused always becomes the abuser. Text book.’
Katie held her gaze for a moment, itching to challenge her. But this was the only crèche that suited them. She couldn’t blow it. She bit her tongue and went to pick up her daughter.
The little boy backed away as she bent down to Jess. Katie looked into those frightened eyes and wanted to cry.
What had they seen?
‘It’s okay, pumpkin. I’m Jess’s Mom. Would you like a hug?’
He turned and ran. Jess shrieked in delight again.
Mrs Chaney looked triumphant. ‘Same time tomorrow, Mrs Hunt.’
Katie hesitated, still looking into the empty doorframe where the boy had stood. ‘Yes. Same time.’
Elsie Chaney went back into the cacophony of tiny voices, smoothing her apron as she went.
Katie’s mood was very different now as she walked along the snowy sidewalk with her daughter kicking the snow up and hanging on her hand. Scary thoughts were bouncing around in there. Thoughts about how it could have been Sam’s truck losing control and crashing in the dark.
But it wasn’t, and it wouldn’t be. She got rid of that one before they turned into their street. The one she couldn’t shake off was still there when they reached the house. The abused always becomes the abuser. The stupid woman. The stupid, stupid woman.
15 (#ulink_487cbabc-710e-5862-a747-d8f0e75fbd62)
Only three trees felled. That had been Don Weaver’s boast and marketing slogan when he started the Silver Ski Company back in ’sixty-eight, for the absurd investment of a hundred and twenty thousand bucks.
The turn-over now in ’ninety-three was in the millions, and they’d sure felled more than three trees in the last twenty-five years. But the picture of Don that hung in Eric Sindon’s office was the photograph of a principled man with dreams, who despite the changes that had happened to his fantasy resort, would not be happy to be remembered as anything other than ‘three-trees-felled Weaver’.
Eric was sitting back thoughtfully in his canvas-covered office chair, gazing up at the picture of Don. He saw a black-and-white, ten-by-eight photo of a tanned young man on long wooden, hinged binding skis, smiling in front of an almost unrecognizable Beaver Lodge. Eric grimaced as he scanned the picture of the old lodge with its Alpine porch and cute carved window-boxes. The present-day lodge was more like a bus terminal but it did hot business and what shareholder would want window-boxes over profits?
The tree Eric wanted felled real bad was laughing its head off on the other side of the thin partition separating their offices. If he’d known that Don’s daughter Pasqual was to come in and run the company after Don died, Eric would have tied his spotted hanky to a stick years ago and headed for another resort. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been made offers. There had been plenty, but he hadn’t jumped. Like a fool he stayed put, trusting in Don’s judgement and friendship, only to find himself number two yet again, but this time to a privileged, brainless bitch who couldn’t run a shoe-shine stand.
The big question was what to do now. He was forty-seven years old and time was almost up. Pasqual had been running the resort for a season and a half and things weren’t going to get any better for Eric.
She knew what he thought of her and he was just as sure she was going to make a move soon to pluck him out like a bad tooth. Sure, the resort would suffer, and sure, she would be sorry when she discovered the guy who really ran the place had gone. But it would be too late. He would be pushing fifty with no shareholding partnership in the business he’d helped build up from nothing, and Miss Dumb-ass would be moving some twenty-six-year-old business school graduate into his office.
He remembered Pasqual two decades ago when she was a cute kid, hitching a ride on the back of her Dad’s skis down to the lodge, squealing with delight as she hung on round his broad waist. If he’d known that apple-cheeked kid would one day turn into the hard-faced vixen, who overturned every good decision he made in this resort, he might have done something about it.
Eric sat upright in the elderly chair. What did he mean by that, he wondered? He felt suddenly uncomfortable.
He swivelled the chair round to face the desk again and shuffled some papers around. Next door, Pasqual was shrieking down the phone, not a business contact by the sound of it.
‘C’mon. He did NOT!’ She guffawed like a horse snorting.
Eric got up and left the room. If there was no business that needed to be done in the front office he would make some up. He had to get away from that farmyard braying or he would do something he might regret.
The administrative block of Silver Ski Company was labyrinthine and depressing, a series of what amounted to no more than concrete sheds, growing at random from a central two-storey lodge like barnacles on a shipwreck. Eric stalked through its corridors on his way to the front office, his fists clenching and unclenching in frustration.
When he arrived, only one person was where they were supposed to be. Betsy was on the phone, the new guy Sitconski, gone from his desk.
‘Where’s the rest of the shit-hot team?’ Eric addressed the question to the empty desks.
Betsy gesticulated sternly that she was listening to someone on the line. She cupped a hand over the mouthpiece. ‘The fun-run. They’re all up at Beaver.’
Eric made a small noise of discontent, more because he’d forgotten than that he disapproved of their absence, and sat down heavily in an empty chair. Two lines rang simultaneously. Betsy hung up her call and answered both of them before he could make it to any of the phones on the desks.
Eric left her to her ridiculous martyrdom of efficiency and let his eyes wander round the empty office. A pile of posters lying on a desk for the fun-run that was already under way suggested that the publicity department hadn’t been bothering their ass much. Eric was annoyed. He’d put that poster together with the designer. Two colours, advertising the fancy-dress race down Beaver, prizes highlighted in red. Why bother? The lazy bastards obviously hadn’t distributed them to the local hotels and shops as ordered. They’d be lucky if anybody showed at all, even with this tiny break in the weather. Betsy finished one call, punched up the other, dealt with it and hung up.
Eric pointed at the posters. ‘So are the public just expected to come in here and take one? I thought a poster meant you posted it someplace.’
Betsy looked at him with disdain, sliding a pencil behind her ear. ‘They’re left-overs.’
‘So they posted them all over Silver?’
‘All over Silver and Stoke. Even took some to Calgary.’
Eric gave in. If he needed someone to take out his temper on today, Betsy wasn’t going to let it be her.
‘That new guy up at Beaver too?’
‘Guess so.’
The phone warbled again and she picked it up, still looking directly at Eric. ‘Silver Ski Company, Betsy speaking. How may I help you?’
Eric got up and wandered over to Sitconski’s desk. Looked like he’d been working on the rota, very thoroughly indeed. Beside two names there were pencil marks. Of course there was nothing odd about making pencil notes beside names that needed attention. There was plenty wrong with making marks so hard that they ripped through the paper and left shards of broken lead embedded in the paper like shrapnel.
‘Hey, hey, hey! Here comes Sean! Would you get that!’
The high speed quad delivered an eighteen-year-old boy on skis dressed inexpertly as an Indian chief. His gaudy feather head-dress fluttered madly in the breeze, and a makeshift loincloth that was wrapped around tight ski pants was lifted to his friends in a burlesque gesture of vulgarity that passed as a greeting. Eight people hollered and fell about shrieking with laughter as the blond boy skied up to them performing a mock war-dance with knees wreathed in neck-ties, then toasting them with a bottle of cheap whisky he fished surreptitiously from his pocket.
‘Shit on you white men. Me pray to um spirit for heap big powder. Me drink fire water. Make me win dumb fucking race.’
The gang of laughing youths were in no position to mock. Two were dressed as cowboys, one as a clown, three girls attempted to look like Playboy bunnies, diminishing the effect by the thermal tops they had on under the bustiers, and the remaining two, a couple, had made little more effort than buying masks of a Jurassic Park velociraptor and ET.
Sean was the best, which wasn’t saying much. But with the odd assortment of clothes he wore combined with that huge waving head-dress, he was more like a real Indian chief than anything Hollywood could come up with. Apart from his pink Rossignols and ski boots, he could have stepped out of a sepia photograph from the town museum. Those long-dead men had sported the same rag-bag inattention to detail that Sean boasted, though they were saved from ridicule by a glint of power and nobility in their eyes that was plainly absent from the boy’s. Yes, he looked like an Indian. The wrinklies lining up a few yards away thought so too. Their frowns and muttering indicated they were offended.
One of them, a woman in her fifties dressed in Victorian skirts and a bonnet, skied over to where Sean was busy being slapped on the back by the cowboys and touching the heads of the genuflecting girls in front of him.
‘That’s in rather poor taste don’t you think?’
Eight young, golden-tanned faces looked at the woman, then at each other, and burst out laughing.
The woman’s voice became shrill with anger and embarrassment. ‘Our Native Canadian heritage is not a joke.’
The kids laughed even louder and kicked up the snow, until the woman’s husband in Victorian plus-fours and a motoring cap skied across to rescue her. ‘You guys are way out of order. Try and show a little respect. Come on, honey.’
She slid away, hot and bothered. ‘God help Canada,’ she said in a loud voice as they retreated.
‘God help America, lady! We’re from California!’
That sent them into a new wave of hilarity, interrupted only by Mike Watts, the ski patroller at the start line, clacking his ski poles together for attention.
Sean hid the whisky.
‘Okay guys, welcome to the Silver Fun-Run. Well, well, we’ve got some neat costumes here today.’
The kids started imitating the patroller. Neat was not how they liked to be described.
‘Hey, Barney. Neat costume, man.’
Hoots and shouts of mirth. The patroller smiled wearily and carried on. Kids. They could give him as hard a time as they liked. Soon as they started moving on those skis, Mike would have their respect. He could ski the fanny off any of them and they could shove their Californian tans. It was always the ones who made most noise standing at the top of a trail who went very quiet on their way down the hill in the meat wagon, strapped into that stretcher after breaking their bodies in dumb accidents. Despite the temptation, Mike Watts never leaned over the stretcher and said I told you so.
‘Yeah, right, guys. We’re goin’ to start out from the line here …’
The Californians were finding Mike’s Canadian flattened vowel sound on out the funniest thing they’d heard. From the group came lots of oowt sounds accompanied by cries of neat. Mike sighed before continuing. It was going to be a long day.
‘… and then the race will commence down the Beaver run, through the slalom poles you see there, ending at Beaver Lodge, where you’ll be judged not only on your time, but on the originality of your costume.’
The wrinklies looked smug, their nods and smiles telling of their conviction that their Victorian skiing-party theme would win the day with dignity. The kids whooped and hollered neat.
‘So if you want to register here now, pick up a numbered bib, then there’s ten minutes for a practice run, just to get those legs warmed up. Okay, everybody. Have a great fun-run, remember to ski safe and good luck.’
The older participants applauded Mike politely while a scuffle of wrestling and jostling kids ignored the end of his speech and hurried to the starting post to pick up their bibs.
One of the girls in the pathetic bunny outfit brushed Mike as she passed, letting the hand not holding her poles run across his buttocks. ‘Sorry Mr Canuck. Hand slipped.’
Mike swung his ski round in front of hers, making her jolt to a halt and caught her round the waist before she fell.
He spoke in low voice, right in her ear. ‘Missy, if I fucked you, you wouldn’t sit down for a week. So if you’re really gagging for it, you best stick with these faggots if you want to go home with your buns still touching.’ He flashed a huge grin at the horrified girl as if he’d just read the snow report, and let her go with a gentlemanly flourish. ‘Have a nice one, you hear.’
The flushed bunny hurried to get her number and hide in the sanctuary of her young companions. Mike smiled and pushed off down the trail to man his post at the slalom.
The clown and the two cowboys were trying to step on each other’s bindings and unclip them while the girls tied each other’s bibs on. The Victorian party had already registered, been numbered and were pushing off for the practice.
As Sean fooled around, registering with a tolerant patroller, two guys in Mambo suits slid past on Volkl P9s. They looked like pretty hot skiers. Sean turned to smile at them, maybe give them an O with his thumb and forefinger to let them know he was part of the brotherhood of hot skiers too.
The older guy looked back impassively. ‘Fun-run, huh? Guess that’s goin’ to feature big in the next Greg Stump video.’
His streamlined companion laughed and they slid past, making sure the costumed contestants, but not the patrollers, saw them when they slid under the ski-trail tape and jumped off the cornice.
Sean squirmed with embarrassment. It had been his idea in the bar last night to enter this dumb thing. Thought it would be a hoot. But the old crumblies took it seriously, and the cool guy was right. This was for kids. ‘I’m not going to wear a dumb piece of cloth with a number,’ whined Sean to Barney the clown, who had lost the bindings war and was trying to step back into his ski with a boot clogged with snow.
‘So don’t wear it, man. You won’t win anyhow. You ski like a girl.’
Sean spat, squinting towards the cornice. ‘Yeah?’
Barney looked where Sean was looking and understood. They checked out the patroller, busy putting a bib on a seven-year-old dressed as a witch, and pushed forward towards the tape. Beneath them, a double black diamond mogul field stretched all the way to the foot of Beaver, running parallel to the easy green trail. It was a bitch of a run. Bumps as hard as rocks, narrow and hemmed in on both sides by trees that kept its challenge out of the sight of the beginners on the green trail. The fun-run wasn’t taking them anywhere near it and it had been closed to stop the kids slipping in by mistake on their way to the start of the big safe highway down the hill. But it was nothing they couldn’t handle. Sean looked at the tracks of the two guys who’d just leapt in there, snaking through the bumps in perfect semi-circles, then glanced across at his clown companion.
‘Let’s do it.’
They slid beneath the tape and dropped in.
Barney whooped and absorbed the first big bump with a grunt, losing it slightly but recovering in time to make a series of three small turns that checked his speed. The Indian chief on his heels was going for it in a big way. He wanted those guys to see him. He wasn’t a soft kid. He could ski the bumps like the best of them, even in this crazy cheap head-dress Shelly had got for him. He jumped off the top of the first bump and overtook Barney on the next, finding time in the air over the next to give him the finger.
Barney was hot on his heels, laughing and shouting, ‘I’m there, man! I’m there!’
Sean misread the next bump and it threw his weight back. His thighs screamed with the effort of recovery but it gave Barney the time he needed and put him ahead. They were half-way down the trail now, the Beaver Lodge and chairlift in sight in the narrow gap between the pines. Barney sliced on ahead and then Sean caught an edge. It was all over. He flew over the top of his skis, arms out like a genuine priest giving benediction, landing on his chin with a dull wet thud, and carried on tumbling sideways into the trees. Sean’s world went white, sharp and ice-cold; he gasped for breath as the fall winded him, punching the air from his lungs with a frozen fist.
The fall was short but violent, and Barney was gone as Sean finally came to a gasping, groaning stop between two tall pines well off the trail.
‘Jesus Christ!’ He groaned and slowly and methodically checked that his limbs were all pointing the right way. Nothing broken. No harm done. He wiped his snow-covered face and started to laugh, lying where he came to rest, in a huge drift beneath the tree. Sean was thankful he was right in amongst the trees, but not wrapped round one with his skull smashed in. Lucky, lucky, lucky. No one would see him here. Not even if they were skiing past. The humiliation of one of those guys popping their heads over him and asking if he was all right would be more than he could bear. He was safe here. He pushed himself up on one elbow and started to brush the snow from his chest.
Around him were all the sights and sounds of normality, the melancholy creaking and banging of the Beaver-chair twenty yards away on the other side of these trees and the low voices of people talking on that chair. The pines above him swayed in a light wind and far away shrieks of laughter accompanied someone wiping out and enjoying it. Everything as it should be.
He laughed at his plight, and shook his head, thinking of the tale he would have for the guys.
And then behind him, in the trees, a dry rustling sound.
He swung round to locate it and the feathers of his broken head-dress turned with him, like the plumage of a wounded and frightened bird. His eyes widened, and the metallic taste of adrenalin coated the inside of his mouth as he distended it to make a sound that it had never made before.
The Beaver-chair was noisy, all right. So noisy that the people swinging up the hill on the gunmetal-grey seats didn’t hear Sean Bradford.
Even though when Sean’s screaming started, he screamed for at least half a minute until the biological machinery enabling his scream was silenced forever.
The big man from New York in a lemon yellow one-piece ski-suit was not pleased that the chairlift station was unattended. He turned to his wife snowploughing to a halt behind him with their daughter and made a face. ‘Guess they don’t go big on safety or service in Canada.’
He unhooked his poles from two fat wrists and ushered his equally fat, sullen daughter towards the clanking chairs, turning solemnly on their own round the pylon and jerking empty back up the hill. The tiny wooden hut was deserted. There was no one around at all. No one to shovel the snow onto the mounting platform. No one to wipe the snow from the seats. No one to say have a nice day and ski safe.
‘I tell you, Marsha, if any of us fall getting on this contraption I’ll sue the balls off this resort.’
Marsha nodded in agreement, too tired from following her portly partner around the mountain all day to argue or disagree. She and her daughter stepped herring-bone fashion, clumsily like ducks, up to the snow-covered wooden plank that was the primitive mounting platform. Heads turned to look behind them, they waited for the next chair to scoop them up.
It did so without incident, and the father slid forward to catch the next one.
Out of the trees a man in a Silver Ski Company jacket stumbled towards the station. The father stepped back from the chair and let it go. He had a few words to say to this guy all right.
Sam Hunt gasped as he made it to the snow fence surrounding the hut, his head still spinning, his vision trying to sort itself out as his eyes swivelled in their sockets. He was going crazy. He didn’t even remember blacking out this time. Just waking up staring at the odd shapes of sky made by the gaps in the tree-tops above him. The branches had swayed and bowed, changing those shapes of sky for a least a minute, accompanied by Sam’s breathing and the sound in his ears of blood coursing round his body, before he had realized that he was on his back in the snow, in the trees above the Beaver chairlift station.
Sam had felt like screaming. He had sat up and looked wildly around him as though something might be waiting for him to stir. But he had been alone. Alone and cold.
He had stood up with difficulty in the thick drift and stumbled towards his station, tripping and being whipped by low branches as he’d waded through the snow-covered deadfall to where he was last conscious. When he saw the chairlift station and its one customer in a yellow suit, his vision was still swimming, and his heart was battering in his chest.
The New Yorker looked at this man with distaste. An Indian. He might have known. He leaned on his pole and waited for the figure to reach the place he was paid to be. When Sam got there, his line of travel heading for the hut, a lemon-yellow arm with a pole barred his way.
‘Hey, buddy. Don’t you think you should shut the chair down if you want to take a leak?’
Sam stopped and looked into the man’s face. Cold grey eyes looked back, full of contempt and aggression.
Sam found his voice, and his manners, in that turmoil that was still churning in his chest and stomach. He took a breath. ‘Sorry, mister. Got sick back there,’ he gasped.
The man was unimpressed. ‘Sick huh?’
‘Yeah. Sick.’
‘Sick as in ill, or sick as in loaded?’
Sam swallowed. He fought back that dark feeling coming from the base of his spine and clenched his fists inside his work gauntlets. Not now. No hassle now. Please.
‘Just plain sick. Want a chair?’
The man remained leaning on his pole, in the manner of a ski tutor instructing a class. ‘No, buddy. I want an apology.’
Sam said nothing. He looked back up at the trees, his mind wandering back to what had happened to him. With his eyes still on the close-packed pines he said absently, ‘Sorry for any inconvenience. Have a nice day.’
No use. Not enough. Lemon Yellow wasn’t budging. ‘You call that an apology?’
Sam looked back into his scowling face. ‘Sure I call that an apology.’
The man stood up straight, taking his weight off the pole, and pulled back his shoulders like a bodyguard defending the hut. ‘Maybe you people don’t understand English so good. When white folks say apology they mean saying sorry for something.’
Sam’s brow darkened. He spoke softly. ‘Gee. So that’s what white folks mean. Tell me, what do they mean when they say fuck off you fat asshole?’
The New Yorker’s voice was bubbling with controlled rage when he replied. ‘Okay buddy. I’m not leaving this resort today until you’re out of a job. You sure picked the wrong wagon to burn.’
He turned and skied off down the hill, clearly indicating he was off to the base lodge. Half-way up the Beaver-chair his abandoned wife and child swung their way back up the mountain, unaware that they were on their own for the rest of the day. Sam watched the yellow suit disappear down the hill and lurched into his hut. Right now, he didn’t care about his job. He cared about his head. Sam Hunt didn’t want to die.
Slumping heavily down on the folding plastic seat inside the hut, Sam bent forward and held his aching head in his hands. A brain tumour could be treated. He just needed a scan, that was all. Something to look in there and see what was wrong. Because Sam now admitted to himself something was very wrong indeed. Would he have to go to the hospital in Calgary, he wondered. What if he never came out? It was time to tell Katie just how bad things were. He sat up. If that guy in the yellow suit did what Sam suspected he was going to do, he might have to tell Katie they were short of one salary, too. What did that matter, compared to the possibility that her husband, Jess and Billy’s father, might be dying of a brain tumour?
It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been in trouble for losing his rag at a moron. His own mouth had been his biggest enemy back in the days of driving for Fox Line. The depot manager, Jim Henderson, had often pulled Sam in and had a word in his ear. He was a nice guy, Jim. Gave Sam the job in the first place. Meant well. But he didn’t know what he was talking about.
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