THE TRICKSTER

by Muriel Gray

  “What time did Sam sign off?”

  “That would be about, let’s see, uh, around one-thirty, I think. Yeah. One-thirty.”

  “OK, Karen. You see this guy in the Indian outfit at all?”

  “Yeah. I put him on the quad on the way to the top of Beaver. Listen, I just can’t believe that poor kid’s dead, I mean…”

  “That was before the fun run?”

  “Yeah. That was just at twelve, I guess.”

  Daniel became aware of a man watching him from the door into the kitchens. A tall fair man, with very blue eyes, leaning against the door frame, staring straight at him. There was something in that gaze he didn’t like. It was more than just the patrollers’ sulky sneers and childish remarks as they sauntered up to the table when called by Hawk or Bell. It looked like hatred. Deep, unfathomable hatred.

  Daniel noted the chillingly dangerous look in his professional mental file and vowed to make sure he, and not Bell, got that guy to interview. You don’t look at someone that way without reason, and Daniel wanted to know what that reason might be.

  “You notice anyone suspicious? Anyone looking at the boy, maybe? Following him? Anything like that?”

  “Nah. He was acting like a geek, but nothing we don’t see every day, know what I mean?”

  He knew what she meant. Try police-work, lady, he thought. He looked up at the door of the kitchens again. There was no one there. Why had he looked across there? He struggled to remember. Was someone there before, he wondered? He had a vague memory of seeing a figure there, but he was mistaken. The door was empty.

  “And his friends. Were they with him at the time? On the quad, I mean.”

  “No. He was alone.”

  “OK, thanks, Karen.”

  “Is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  When Hawk looked up again to call up the next interviewee, he would have thought you were crazy to have said there had been a tall, fair man in the doorway shooting hate at him with aquamarine eyes. Daniel Hawk always remembered a face, and he didn’t remember seeing anyone like that. Would swear to it.

  “Les Ivan, please.”

  Daniel wasn’t surprised at all that his staff sergeant wanted to come with him to interview Sam Hunt. He’d been interested that the groomer driving the chair had gone home sick almost half an hour after the time of the boy’s death, but he became like a pointer dog spotting a wooden pigeon when Daniel threw in the fact that Sam was an Indian. An Indian who grew up on Redhorn with him.

  The detachment had never seen anything like this in its history. Edmonton had a team on its way. They would be there by midnight. The same fucking team that should have been in Silver days ago to investigate Joe’s death. Craig winced when he heard how fast they were getting here. So now they were hungry to help, were they? On the trail of not just one cop killer, but a seriously psycho serial killer. Craig figured they liked serial killings in Edmonton. Made them feel like Harrison Ford instead of ordinary policemen doing routine donkey work to find what usually amounted to a drunk who’d made one violent mistake.

  Craig didn’t want to waste any more time. He would have to go public with this soon. So when he’d wandered over to the big table and asked Hawk and Bell the standard “Anything stink yet?” and got the snippet about Sam, he wanted to move fast.

  “OK, Constable Bell. Yardly will sit in with you for the rest of the interviews. Hawk, you come with me. You got Hunt’s address?”

  “Sir.”

  “Get the Ford out front. I’ll be right there.”

  He’d parked at the edge of the trees, well away from the lodge. He always did that at an incident—parked a distance away to leave room for whatever needed to get close in there. Ambulances, fire trucks, whatever. Courtesy, really.

  The Ford was a dark square by the trees, its presence betrayed only by a snow-dusted roof, courtesy of another flurry, and the reflections of the winking red and blue lights on those surfaces not dulled by mud or frost.

  As he approached the shape and put a hand out to open the door, Daniel heard a sound. A low, ugly, animal sound about fifteen or twenty feet away from the car. He paused, his hand an inch away from the chrome handle, his heart starting to beat a little faster. The noise stopped. He listened, not breathing, his hand losing interest in the door handle and instinctively creeping toward the gun at his hip.

  There it was again. A snarling, low, throaty growl accompanied by a tearing sound. It was straight ahead of him. The back of Daniel’s neck crawled. He was sure he was being watched. He could feel it. Something malicious was looking at him, assessing him, weighing him. He tried to deny the sensation, asking himself where that ridiculous abstract concept of being watched comes from? How do the prey of the world’s greatest predators know when the lion is in the grass or the snake is hanging from the branch? They do. Some sixth sense, some ancient inherited skill tells the dinner that the diner is reading the menu, and Daniel Hawk could feel it right now.

  The noise ceased again, but he could sense it was merely an intermission. Slowly, carefully and quietly, Daniel opened the car door and slid inside. With the door still open he turned the ignition key and the lights burst into life.

  Two saucer-shaped red eyes reflected the light back at the car. A coyote, ripping its way through a trash bag left carelessly at the side of the lot, was glaring at the car, its head as still as stone, ears up like antennae, body poised to fight or flee. Still hanging from its jaw were the remains of a burger, the soggy bun dangling like a stomach lining. Daniel laughed, breathed easy, and pumped the horn. The animal leaped sideways and fled from the headlights like a bad comedian being booed offstage. Hawk was still smiling as he slammed the door shut, started the engine and drove off toward the lodge.

  Jeez, but he was getting jumpy if a scavenging coyote could scare him. He smiled to himself, feeling foolish as he bumped the big Ford over frozen ruts of snow. He was still smiling as, high in the pines overhead, the tiny bird that had been watching his every move with glittering eyes watched some more, then settled back into its roost.

  23

  The logs were hissing in the grate. Sam stared vacantly at the weak tongues of flame that danced impotently around the wet birch bark. Jess curled up on Sam’s lap, her head leaning on his chest while her father’s arms made a secure hoop of flesh around her small, chubby body.

  Billy was watching TV. Katie was watching her husband.

  “I could have it printed on a T-shirt if that would help.”

  Sam looked down at his wife, all legs and woolen sweater as she sat on the floor at his feet beside the hopeless, hissing fire.

  “Huh?”

  She swallowed a mouthful of coffee from a spotted mug. “It’ll say, ‘You’re not going mad and you won’t lose your job. You just need a quack check.’ Save me telling you every time you get that look on your face.”

  She won a weak smile in response.

  “Will the T-shirt be wet?”

  “Soaking.”

  “Let’s get this sack of tired bones to bed first. Then you can tell me some more.”

  He stood up, Jess still a floppy dead weight in his arms. Katie leaped to her feet and scooped the girl from him in a practiced, fluid movement that didn’t let Jess stir as she was transferred between parents mid-air.

  “Give it here. You relax by this roaring log fire, if you can bear the heat.”

  Sam sat down again, heavily. Gratefully.

  Katie glided toward the door, stabbing a finger in Billy’s shoulder as she passed.

  “And you get ready too, Billy boy. We don’t forget you’re there just ‘cause you’re quiet.”

  Billy looked across at Sam. “OK.”

  Katie halted in the doorway. “Now, there’s a result. Take a note of whatever it is I said there, Sam. Sure beats the cattle prod.”

  But she’d lost him again. His eyes focused through the flames on something that was beyond sight. Katie looked at him thoughtfully for a second and padded upstair
s with her sleeping burden.

  Billy wasn’t really watching the flickering screen in front of him. It was only a TV movie—some pile of junk in big houses with one of the actresses that used to be in Charlie’s Angels. He was looking at his dad. He’d listened from the sidelines to everything Sam had told Katie about his day. The rude man that his dad had been rude back to, and who could lose him his job. The buzzing head and the fainting. The hours in between when Sam had walked along the railroad in the snow before coming home.

  And he didn’t know why his mom was being so cheerful. He was real worried about his dad, even if she wasn’t.

  He turned off the TV with the remote and trotted over to Sam’s chair. Billy slid his little hand beneath the large, rough, weathered one that was resting limply on the arm of the chair and smiled as the big fingers closed around his.

  “Guess the logs got wet when I dropped them.”

  “Guess so.”

  Billy let go of his smile and studied Sam’s face.

  “Dad?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Is everything going to be OK?”

  The adult concern in the child’s voice snatched Sam out of his reverie. He sat forward in his chair and took Billy’s other hand. “ ‘Course it is, Billy. Nothing’s wrong. I’m just tired, that’s all. Come here, you.”

  He pulled his son up on a lap that was still warm from his daughter’s body heat, and kissed Billy’s smooth forehead through his hair.

  “Why don’t we go to Calgary soon? Catch the Flames.”

  Billy lit up. “Yeah? You can get tickets?”

  “Probably not. Doesn’t stop us from trying.”

  “Crucial!”

  Billy bounced off Sam’s knee, his anxiety momentarily forgotten as he danced a series of mimed hockey passes on the hearth rug. That made Sam laugh. Felt like he hadn’t laughed in a long time.

  “OK, Wayne Gretzky. Get to bed.”

  “Who’s Wayne Gretzky?”

  “You taking a correspondence course in how to make me feel old?”

  Billy surged forward, kissed his father on the mouth and ran out of the room. The wet ghost of that kiss stayed there for minutes after the boy had left, and Sam savored it as its sweetness slowly evaporated from his lips.

  His children. His wife. The things he lived for. He wasn’t going to lose them. He couldn’t lose them. Sam leaned back into the old recliner and looked at the ceiling. The firelight, weak as it was, made a shadow of the mantelpiece flicker on the plaster.

  It wasn’t as though he didn’t deserve what he had. Sam thought he more than deserved it. Nothing had come easy to Sam Hunt.

  Even this house that wasn’t really his. Sometimes, when he caught sight of some corner he hadn’t yet made his own, some little physical reminder of holidays another young family used to share in this house, the memory of meeting its owners nearly a decade ago was still ripe.

  He’d known by Katie’s face, that night ten years ago when he came home from work into the tiny plasterboard-lined room in the staff quarters, what she was going to tell him. She was shining. Joy was dripping from her like syrup. He’d put down his battered tin lunch box on the bed and held her before she even spoke.

  “Sam.”

  Her voice was muffled, her face pressed against his chest.

  “Katie.”

  “I’m going to have a baby.”

  Then they’d kissed and laughed and kissed again. They’d lain on that sagging old bed and carefully done again what made it happen in the first place. Afterward, Katie said it was time to tell her parents everything. Sam knew she’d been in touch with them plenty and was glad. The boy in him would have fought anyone, friends, foe or family, to the death to keep her. But the man wanted her to have all the old securities she enjoyed in her Vancouver life. His love was passionate and deeper, he thought, than even Katie realized, but unlike Tom’s, it wasn’t suffocating. He was pleased that she wrote her parents weekly. She wrote and told them everything she could, on postcards of bears and porcupines she swiped from the free guest carousel in the hotel. Told them she loved someone called Sam Hunt, told them how good he was for her, but no more. Told them she was working, assured them the hotel shop job was temporary, and most important told them she was fine, loved them madly and missed them. She replied to the mail that she picked up weekly from the empty house on the hill where they thought she was living and never revealed otherwise.

  Time, she thought, to put things straight. She hadn’t been deceiving them deliberately. Katie had just been caught in that happy time-warp lovers find themselves in, where nothing matters except that other precious person. Now, though, they were going to be a serious family.

  She sat down that night and wrote them a note. Sam read it over her shoulder, nuzzling her ear, his hands on her belly that was still flat and hard.

  Darling You-Two,

  I am now Mrs. Sam Hunt. I am also Mrs. Sam Hunt who is going to have your grandchild. We don’t live in your house. I just get the mail from there. We live at 281 Lynx Trail, room 5. I miss you both terribly. Will you come and see us? You’ll love my husband. I do. All my love, Peach.

  P.S. I’m so happy.

  She mailed it off and in their joy forgot all about it.

  Two days letter they got a telegram: KATIE. ON AIR CANADA FLIGHT 127 2:45 P.M. TOMORROW. CONGRATULATIONS MY DARLING. US-TWO.

  The telegram, like an omen of goodwill, had been addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Sam Hunt. Katie was thrilled. Sam was nervous.

  “Have you told them anything about me?” he asked her that night in bed, as they lay like spoons.

  “Of course I have. Lots.” She snuggled in, muttered, “You’ll love them,” and fell asleep.

  Sam had lain awake, thinking. A darkened door creaked open in his head that let a sliver of memory about his own parents escape. He slammed it shut again. Any whiff of his past was like noxious gas. He thanked God the woman in his arms would never peek through into that terrifying world. Never encounter those two walking nightmares that had called themselves his mother and father. More important, he would never have to protect whoever was inside Katie’s womb from the kind of mind-numbing horror they had inflicted on him as a daily ritual.

  That was in the past. Another life. A different Sam.

  With Katie he could live again. He wished shamefully at that moment he could change his skin. He stayed awake until dawn, waiting for the light to spill through the thin ragged curtains, feeling her stir, listening to her breathe.

  Sam took an honest half-day off work and Katie phoned in with a dishonest sick headache and they took a bus into Calgary Airport to meet his new family.

  Those sliding doors. Those unthinking, impassive sliding doors behind the metal barrier. They opened every few seconds, spewing out busy people, tired people, but mostly happy people who were met and embraced. A human lottery. Who would come through next, and who would claim them? They seemed to glide open in slow motion for Sam as the two elegant, elderly people spotted their daughter and waved like children on a ride.

  What must it be like, he wondered, to be greeted with such smiles? The smiles of parents who love their child so much their hearts ignite on sight of that face. No one had ever ignited like that for Sam the child. Not ever.

  And this time was no different. He was invisible. They didn’t see him at all. He stood right beside Katie, his shoulder touching hers, and yet they didn’t see him. Not until he let Katie wrap herself around her mother’s neck like a shawl and he stood behind her waiting to pick up her father’s case. There was a beat. A second’s pause while Frank and June Crosby looked at him and assessed the situation. Their faces were still happy, open, as they looked at him with that grateful expression polite liberal people reserve for workmen. He knew then they thought he was a cab driver. He heard Katie say in a distant and faraway voice, full of a pride that seemed so misplaced, This is Sam. My husband, and he watched those faces change.

  Mrs. Crosby’s hand went into a small fist
between her breasts, and Mr. Crosby stood with his legs apart, looking at Katie like she’d dropped her panties in public.

  Katie was still smiling up at Sam with love.

  No one moved. Sam put a hand out to Katie’s father. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. Crosby. Katie’s told me so much about you both, I feel I know you.”

  If Sam thought that talking in white middle-class cliché was going to help, he was on the wrong lawn. Frank Crosby looked at the calloused brown hand on offer and then at Katie again. Katie said “Dad?” in a small, quiet voice. Not small and gentle with pleading, but loaded with a warning Sam had never heard.

  Her father looked back up at Sam’s face and took his hand. He didn’t speak. He nodded once and then let the hand go. Sam looked at June Crosby and decided not to put her through a handshake with an Indian. He lifted their two cases and stood waiting for Katie to drive the situation.

  She slid between her parents and took their arms in hers, marching them toward the exit. Unwittingly, despite the smile she flashed him, she left Sam in the role he’d been cast, a servant, following behind the family with the cases.

  Sam knew the driver on the bus, of course. It was Henry. He greeted Sam like a long-lost friend even though they’d shared a pizza only yesterday at lunchtime. Katie was pleased, her parents less so. Sam didn’t introduce anybody to Henry. Sam had fallen pretty silent. The new family unit sat at the back of the bus, Sam at the window and Katie in the aisle so that she could touch and speak to her parents sitting stiffly on the two seats opposite.

  He held Katie’s hand all the way back to Silver as though she were his protector. And in a way she was. He knew how to deal with ugly prejudice when it came from strangers. His tongue and fists had been his defense for long enough. But he was lost when it came from two people he wanted desperately to like him. He sat and watched out the bus window as the prairie turned into mountains and the hopes and dreams of success for their only child turned to dust for two retired, middle-class Canadians.

  At the Crosbys’ house, he waited alone in the parlor for its owners to settle back in. He heard Katie speak to them in the kitchen, after a long silence where the only sound had been of tins being moved around in shelves and plastic bags being rustled into drawers.