THE TRICKSTER Read online

  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 balls out of the double black diamond run down Spangle Couloir. That’s where Lenny wanted to be.

  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 at a guy with a tan and thighs like iron.

  “Aw, Christ. What is he doing up there?”

  Lenny got off the snowcat, 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 Gore-Tex 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 fiber-filled breakfast cereal. Lenny’s last sight was of 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 toward 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 spiraling 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 around, and, ignoring the whining from his dumb-assed stockbroker 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 maneuver the shiny sliver of liquid metal into a hole. Every time Sam shoveled a son into a coat and herded him into the back of the Toyota, a daughter had taken her coat off and was back among 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 checkered 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 toward 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 nauseated. 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 the 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.

  “OK, I guess. How long have I been out?”

  Katie’s face bobbed back into view. “A big scary five hours, 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. Five hours. What made him black out for five hours? 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 OK 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 Dr. Harris’s car having big trouble leaving the Hunts’ icy driveway, Sam drifted into gentle, velvet sleep, quite unlike the cold, dark place he had been for the past five hours.

  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 on 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 five hours 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 had screamed, clutching Billy, and the car skidded off the highway, to rest harmlessly and mercifully on the curb.

  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, still worried that 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 light-headed 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 rerun.

  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 OK?”

  “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 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 reservation.”

  “Claire’s real embarrassed. She wondered if we could maybe have you all around 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 that teachers just practice 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, Dr. Doolittle. He won’t come in.”

  Gerry stepped into the blizzard again.

  “That’s huskies for you, huh? Bye!”

  Katie waved good-bye 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 toward Wolf Mountain as if it were made of prime sirloin.

  “Jeez, a dysfunctional dog. That’s all we need. Next stop Oprah.”

  Katie brushe
d the snow from her hair and shut the kitchen door.

  6

  Alberta 1907

  Siding Twenty-three

  “Well? Are they going to move?”

  Angus McEwan looked up from his makeshift table in the center 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 somber 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 naive 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.