THE TRICKSTER

by Muriel Gray

  Sam sucked his fingers to warm them and scanned the rock for holds. There was a route between the huge aquamarine icicles that looked passable if he could stretch over the last, smooth section and grab some jagged rock at the top that might bear his weight. There was no choice. He took his fingers from his mouth and bent to remove his Sorels. The cumbersome snow boots served their purpose well, but not in climbing rock. That he would have to do barefoot, even though the day had produced nothing higher than minus fifteen degrees.

  He tied the boots’ laces together, stuffed them with his socks and hung them around his neck. He flexed his toes to keep the circulation going, shook his arms, then stepped forward and up onto the first foothold. Cold flesh slipped into the slit of the rough rock, but his hands had already found the next hold and he pulled himself up to a ledge below the bulbous blue ice. Four or five more moves and he would be there on the track.

  His feet were numbing now, but his strong toes retained their grip on the ledge, and Sam pushed his fingers into a new crack and tightened his shoulder muscles for another pull.

  He made it to a diagonal break across the slab, pushing his toes deep into the crack and crouching like a monkey on a palm trunk. The next hold would be on ice, and it would have to be no more than a fleeting lever to the six-inch overhang of rock he could see to the right, or he would fall.

  For a moment he let himself think about falling, about how his messy death would bring a sweet release and an end to a life that was no more than a shallow lie. It was an ugly thought but he was weary of being strong, and he let it lap around the edge of his pained consciousness. Sam looked down at the jagged rocks at the base of the slab and knew what would happen to flesh and bone hitting them from this height. It wasn’t high, but it was high enough. What was he running and hiding from? What good did his staying alive do his family?

  If he went back they would lock him away. He knew that. Like father like son. The murdering son of a murdering father.

  He gazed down at the sharp rocks beneath, protruding from the snow, as if he were in a trance. His eyes rested on his own footprints, which the falling snow was already trying to fill. In half an hour, if the snow kept up, it would be as if he had never stood there. If his broken body were to lie down there on the rocks, the snow would cover it as quickly. Then the animals would get to him. They would gnaw at his frozen flesh, carry bits back to their lairs and feast on it as a fresh, succulent delicacy. In spring, maybe a railroad worker would find the bones, but Sam doubted it. This was a place to disappear back into the earth. There was a purity to that thought, a delicious relief that his body was no more or less than the rock he clung to, no more than the trees and earth that were molded and round beneath the snow.

  Sam’s spirit knew in a giddy moment of joy that he was one with everything he saw and touched and breathed and stood upon, and for the first time he longed to be part of it in death, to give up his brief and tumultuous hold on being a man.

  Just the simple action of letting go. That’s all it would take. He felt his arm ache, the weight of his body pulling at the muscles as he stared dumbly down the face of the rock. Beneath his fingers he felt a vibration. Slight, but definite, and its throbbing snapped his attention back to the rock that held him. It was starting to quiver, vibrating with a deep internal pulse that was increasing in waves.

  Sam knew what that meant. He jammed his hand deeper into the crack and adjusted his weight, bracing himself for this piece of bad timing. If his mind had been contemplating the voluntary release of its life, his body had other plans. Its muscles and sinews tightened and adjusted, altering themselves subtly like a cat’s to best hold on to the rock and life.

  Sam looked up as the vibrating turned to thundering, and the train he had felt coming burst out of the tunnel entrance. From down here, the engine was massive, its yellow-and-black-striped snout pushing through the curtain of falling snow, its thrumming contents filling the air in Sam’s ears with a roar. He ground his teeth as his numb, bloody toes were being shaken from their sliver of a hold, and he wormed them back into the sharp rock with a grunt. The cars being pulled started to roll out of the tunnel, red and black, with their plain CP. Rail insignia of a forward-pointing white chevron mocking Sam like salutes as they passed.

  This train could be a mile in length. Billy would know how long it would take. He always knew. He could squint up at the tunnel entrance nearest Silver and tell his dad exactly how far away it was, and how long the train would take to reach them. But Billy wasn’t here.

  The thought of his son made Sam ache with longing. Before he could block it he saw that face again, the way he had last seen it, looking up at him from the gory mess of Bart’s remains, and Sam wailed out loud with despair into the thunder of the train’s bellow.

  Then the thought again, cutting through his pain like light. Just let go of the rock. Your family will never love you again. It’s over. He closed his eyes and felt the stabbing of the cramp that was gnawing at his arms and legs, and summoned his resolve.

  Yes. To die. It was the right time. It was the right place. Fitting that he would make a meal for a wolverine. Was that what Eden had meant about being born an Indian and dying like an Indian? If he could no longer feed his own family, then at least he could feed a beast. They were attached by an invisible bond to the earth, the Kinchuinicks. Time, perhaps, to make it more physical.

  He opened his eyes and gave one last glance up at the rumbling cars that were squealing and creaking by, indifferent to his agony. Slowly Sam unclenched the fingers of his left hand, pulling them from their jagged crack, and placed his palm on the rock. Simple. Now the right hand, and it would be over. The snow was flying in his eyes, thrown up in a crazy, whirling frenzy by the tons of passing steel.

  Sam flexed the fingers of his right hand inside the crevice of rock that held them and looked up through the flying flakes. The train was slowing. The car that was emerging from the dark arch was taking its time, but something about its progress made Sam narrow his eyes and lift his head. The car already free of the tunnel was a standard red freight box, CP lettering, white chevron. But already he could see that the next car was different. It looked normal at first, its CP logo gliding out of the tunnel, until its entirety emerged from the dark sheath of the arch. On the side of this otherwise ordinary boxcar were a series of huge hieroglyphics, painted carefully, beautifully, delicately, in gold.

  Sam was sweating on his agonizing perch, his mouth open, eyes narrow as slits. Of course he knew those marks. He had painted them on the canvas of Calvin’s sweat lodges many times. The arrow. The eagle. The buffalo skull. The symbol for a heart. So many more now before him, and all gleaming ridiculously on the side of a freight wagon snaking through the mountains, coupled between its mundane companions.

  Slowly Sam’s free hand slipped back into its crevice and took his weight again. He panted and pressed his face against the rough freezing rock. Above him the noise of the train continued its clamor and he fought to find breath as it masked his grunts.

  Yes, he had painted those marks in many different configurations. The pictorial language of the shaman. Sometimes they had meant war, the preparation for driving out evil and inviting the light of the spirits to battle with the dark. Sometimes they meant knowledge, and often they merely represented a season or a wind. But in this arrangement, the marks wrought in gold on the side of a boxcar, they meant something different.

  They had spelled the word love.

  Sam’s tears fell, and the hot line of salt water that ran from his cheek onto the rock to which it was pressed spread out like ink on blotting paper and joined the water that ran across the ice from the mountains.

  What did he feel?

  He had not even considered that on his journey. He watched the cars rumble by and knew that on the other side of this solid snake, Sam was walking along the track toward the tunnel entrance. He was safe. Alive. Calvin had stretched out his spirit and felt Sam’s pain and sorrow as he climbed that ro
ck toward the track, and knew that Sam’s heart was contemplating a dark and unthinkable deed. But his hurried prayer to the Thunder Spirit must have been answered, although he was not sure how, and Calvin had nearly wept when a small gap between the cars had briefly revealed Sam emerging over the top of the rock. He would wait now, until Sam settled in his purpose, choose his time and then approach.

  But what did he feel?

  Calvin rubbed at his disfigured hand with his good fingers and bent his head. All his purification, his return to the way of the spirit, his sweat and terror, had left him no time to ask himself that simple question. Now, he had tracked his prize to this place, and the question was burning in his heart.

  He stood in the great shadow of a tall pine, and with a mind that was clear allowed himself the luxury of honesty. He was still in love with Sam. His excitement that was almost swallowed by constant terror was the excitement of seeing a lost love.

  And how would this object of adoration, this boy that had grown into such a man, react when he viewed this old and broken nightmare from his past? He braced himself for the rejection that was inevitable, the violence that might occur.

  The tree above him rustled, dropping snow onto the drift in front of him with a dull thud. The shaman raised his head slowly and stared into the drooping, snow-laden branches of the lodgepole pine, searching for the creature that had betrayed its presence. There was no time to dwell on the pain in his human heart. It was not only Calvin who watched Sam Hunting Wolf with hungry eyes.

  He stepped back into the darkening shadow of the trees as the rumble from the tunnel indicated that the train was nearly through. It was just in time. The last car glided out of the dark arch and moved past with a diminishing screech, leaving the track in a sudden and unnerving silence.

  Calvin was alarmed to see Sam so near. He was standing only yards away at the entrance to the tunnel, his back to Calvin, staring out over the tops of the pines to the lower track, where already the front of the freight train had emerged from the second corkscrew inside the mountain. He stood barefoot in the snow, his boots still strung around his strong neck, and Calvin’s heart rolled in his breast at the sight of that thick, shining black hair and the set of those square shoulders. The branches above Calvin rustled again. It was time. Because there was no time.

  He stepped out slowly from the trees and stood on the edge of the rail, which was dripping and snowless from the passage of the train. He could see the breath from Sam’s mouth clouding around his head. Calvin clenched his fists, the good hand performing the act more neatly than the bad.

  “Sam.”

  He said it quietly, softly. And just as gently, as if Sam’s body was responding to the tone of the tranquil voice, he turned around. The face was bloodied where it had grazed the rock, but it was no less beautiful for its wounds. Calvin’s heart lost its light anticipation to become an organ of lead as those deep black eyes scanned his face with an expression of fear, hatred and suspicion. He spoke again, in Cree, with the same quiet tone.

  “Look into my face, Sam. You will see no darkness. This is flesh. Old and tired flesh, but the real flesh of a man.”

  Sam looked. He looked hard and long at the old man standing on the other side of the rail track. If this was another trick it was a horrible one. Calvin Bitterhand had been a handsome man. Tall, though not as tall as Sam, his long black hair braided and thick and his eyes always fiery with intelligence and purpose. This thing that stood before him now was nothing like Calvin. It was a wrinkled old bum, stooping and broken.

  But in Sam’s heart something was singing like a wire in wind. It was singing that this was no vision. No swirling black pilot drove its form. It was as the old man said, flesh. When Sam spoke, it was almost in the voice of a child.

  “Calvin?”

  The old man shut his eyes, his mouth moving slightly. Sam slumped to his knees, his legs no longer able to support his weight. He lifted an arm and pointed at the old figure, a painted saint naming the heretic. Sam’s head was shaking, denying what his eyes told him. “No. Not Calvin. You liar.”

  Calvin’s eyes opened and gazed at him with love. “Why would I lie, Sam? Who would make the pretense of being Calvin Bitterhand? Only a fool would pretend to be that which no man would gladly be.”

  Sam let his arm fall, and as the two men stared at each other for an age, the distant trumpeting horn of the freight train broke the silence, and the last light of the dark gray evening started to drain from the sky as if in response.

  Tendrils of smoke swirled in the dark and were sucked into the deeper black of the tunnel as the orange flames made the rough rock walls dance with life. Cracks and crevices waved crazily, making shadows against the untidy surface, the stone that hands had hewn, the living rock. Sam sat with his arms circling his knees, staring dumbly at the fire. Wasn’t it around such a fire that he had last seen Calvin? But that had been twenty long years ago, in the sweet summer woods with the scent of sap and pollen on the air. This was ten feet into the mouth of the upper Corkscrew Tunnel, a miserable fire at the side of the track giving little heat to combat the ferocity of the cold. Both fires, however, two decades apart, were hosts to misery.

  Calvin poked at the embers with a wet branch and flicked his eyes up to Sam’s iron face. He knew what the younger man was thinking. Knew what memories would be stirring in his heart, and he lowered his eyes to the flames again in his shame.

  So when Sam finally spoke, it startled Calvin. His voice echoed in the tunnel, joining the dripping rock in making the only sounds in this manmade cave lonely and empty things.

  “Why have you come?”

  Sam was speaking English, his way of denying Calvin, of forcing him to speak in a language that rendered him inarticulate and simple, and the shaman knew it. Calvin kept his eyes on the growing flame that his branch had stirred, grateful for any words, even ones that might wound. He answered in the tongue that Sam had chosen. An attempt at a bond.

  “I be told to.”

  He raised his eyes to Sam when there was no reply. It was an acid pause. Sam was staring at him with hate, then he too lowered his eyes as he replied, as though he could not bear to look for long into Calvin’s face.

  “By who? A lunatic? Why would I want to see you again?”

  “You know by who.”

  Sam said nothing, and Calvin gulped at the viciousness of his tone. He poked the fire again and tried to keep his voice steady.

  “That’s the reason. I be here, telling you things you already knows.”

  Sam put his forehead on his knees and remained silent for a long time. When he spoke again it was in a voice muffled by the thick material of his sleeve.

  “What do I know? I don’t even know if you’re real. I pray every day I’m making this up, that I’ve gone crazy.”

  “But you know you ain’t gone crazy. Don’t you, Sam?”

  There was a slight nod from the buried head, and Calvin lowered his own head in sympathy for the resigned agony that Sam’s tiny movement signified.

  He looked into the fire and decided to revert to Cree. There was much talking to be done and Calvin needed to talk with authority, in his own tongue. He could not be forgiven, he knew that now, and cursed his foolish heart for even daring to hope it would happen. Calvin Bitterhand, the man, was beyond Sam’s redemption. It was time merely to become the tool that the spirits had wrought.

  “He has shown himself to you?”

  Sam looked up, surprised by the sudden switch in language and the new authority in Calvin’s tone. He blinked at the old shaman through the flames and surprised himself further by answering him softly in Cree.

  “Yes.”

  “Then there is so little time.”

  Calvin crossed his legs, put down the branch and placed his hands on his bony knees. Sam watched like a mesmerized animal waiting for the snake to strike, and Calvin closed his eyes.

  “The spirits sent me, Sam. You know that. But like everything else you can feel and see with
your shaman’s eyes, you have pushed it away and denied it.” He opened his eyes suddenly and looked straight into the black shiny ones that fixed him with their steady gaze. “I blame my conduct for part of that denial. I know why you wish to forget who you are, Sam Hunting Wolf, but it is time now to remember. Remember only this of my error that night, that I love you dearly.”

  The object of his love continued to stare. Sam’s face was devoid of emotion, a silent oval of judgment. Calvin closed his eyes again. Sam’s gaze was burning him like a coal.

  “Even now he watches. He waits and watches for your weakness and then he will bring the blackness to you and do with your shaman’s powers what he must to become potent. You cannot stop him and you must end this before he kills again.”

  A branch cracked and spat in the fire and Calvin bowed his head, speaking more quietly now. “I am here because there is a stone in your spirit that prevents you from being pure. I am here to remove that stone. Without purity you will never defeat the Trickster.”

  The name. Sam took a sharp breath and flared his nostrils. The nightmare he had denied and would still be denying if this crazy old man had not returned to haunt him like a specter. Sam snapped from the trance Calvin’s soft words had induced. His eyes flashed and he clenched his fists, speaking in a tone that was more menacing than any shout.