THE TRICKSTER

by Muriel Gray

  “And believing the bits you want to. Because they make life more comfortable.”

  Katie pursed her mouth and lowered her voice. “And that’s so terrible, is it?”

  “It’s not helpful.”

  Craig was looking up at her with those tired, haunted eyes. Katie almost felt sorry for him. But she was the victim in this room, not him. Her anger rose again.

  “So you can sit there, smug in your policeman’s skepticism, disbelieving it all and that’s somehow helpful, is it? Forgive me for reminding you of four little words, Staff Sergeant. Back to square fucking one.”

  “That’s five words.”

  “Whatever.”

  “And you’re wrong.”

  “Yeah?”

  He looked at her steadily and there was no humor, no irony, no sarcasm in his eyes whatsoever when he said, “I don’t disbelieve it.”

  58

  Alberta 1907

  Siding Twenty-three

  Husband and wife looked at each other from a distance. In Hunting Wolf’s face there was no trace of bitterness or reproach. He looked through the curtain of falling snow at the woman kneeling and sobbing, and his weary black eyes filled with love.

  But there was no time now. Not for reconciliation or explanation. Time only to face what he had evaded, and in his doing so, had cost the lives of so many.

  His son stood at his side, his face registering triumph and fear. The man stretched out an arm and touched the boy’s thick black hair, and the small face tilted up to look into his father’s.

  Suddenly, both father and son turned their heads like startled deer toward the thick trees behind Singing Tree. The sound of voices, distant but approaching.

  Hunting Wolf let go of his son’s head and, without speaking or looking again at either of his family, turned and walked toward the tunnel. The woman and boy watched the tall, naked man go, then Walks Alone ran to his mother.

  There was no sound except for a lonely echoing drip. It took Hunting Wolf a long time to adjust his eyes to the gloom. He was still dazed, exhausted from his ordeals, but his spirit had purpose. He knew he had lost toes and patches of flesh the size of acorns on his body. He could see the whitened skin, the skin that the cold had destroyed, and knew that those innocent patches of numbness would kill, would turn black and diseased, bringing fever first, then death.

  But his family must live. That was what kept the fire in his soul. He stood silently, waiting until his eyes could see, and then when they did, prayed that they were wrong.

  There was a dark shape by the rough wall, splayed crazily over the fallen rocks like a doll.

  Henderson’s body lay in a dark pool of its own blood, and the shaman was glad that its face was turned to the wall, hiding the agony that he knew would be frozen there.

  “You die like worms on a thorn. You men.”

  The pale face was only a few feet from his dark one. It regarded him with a half smile, and behind the pale blue eyes it had copied inexpertly from that tragic trapper the clouds of desecration moved as if stirred by a stick.

  Hunting Wolf ignored the vision and bent to pick up Henderson’s totem. The cross lay by the body where it had fallen from his hand, and the tiny white figure was red with the Scot’s blood. The Trickster was not to be ignored. It flared beneath its disguise like a torch.

  “Your idiot cock-sucking son interrupted our work. He will die slowly for that irritation. I could have done so much more with this white dullard.”

  The shaman opened his medicine bundle, pressed the bloody cross to his forehead, where it left its mark, and dropped it into the leather pouch, his eyes still on Henderson’s body. The pale monster now boiled in its rage.

  “Look at me, you cunt!”

  Hunting Wolf closed his eyes and knelt down on the hard, freezing tunnel floor. He raised his hands above his head, swayed forward and back and chanted a prayer to the Thunder Spirit for purity. The monotone of his deep intonations bounced between the rock walls, returning to his ears almost as a chorus rather than a single voice.

  The darkness behind the pretense of pale flesh was losing its grip on the illusion. It watched the man with a hatred too intense to quantify, and its form shifted like sand.

  “Father! Father, I can speak. Help me!”

  Hunting Wolf twitched but continued chanting, his eyes closed in concentration.

  Then a boy’s scream, and the sound of flesh being torn and bones snapping. The shaman closed his eyes tighter and finished his prayer, the final blessing making him touch his scarred cuts unconsciously with a finger.

  When he opened his eyes the body of his son was lying before him, his torso ripped open and its guts lying fanned out like a display at a feast. He looked coldly on the apparition, then stood again and waited. He was pure now.

  Slowly the vision of Walks Alone faded, as he knew it would, and the pale man stepped back into view from the gloom.

  “Destroy me, or see all you love destroyed.”

  Hunting Wolf’s head was high. “How may I destroy that which is nothing?”

  The pale face was still, but the dark clouds raged. Its voice was no longer coming from the mouth, as it had lost its hold of the human illusion in its anger. Instead Hunting Wolf heard it as a screaming in his own head.

  “I am not nothing, you scum from the cunt of a whore! I am Sitconski!”

  “We give you that name. If it pleases us. We can make names mean what we please, for we are men. Now, here, it is the name for nothing. You are nothing, because I choose it.”

  “I am Inktomni!”

  “No. You are nothing. Only we are something. We have life.”

  There was mayhem in the tunnel for a moment as the air around Hunting Wolf’s head whipped and churned. Then it became still.

  The voice was calm and deep and inside the shaman’s head again. “You fear me because I am eternal. It is you who are nothing.”

  “I fear only that which has life and purpose. I fear the nettle more than you.” Hunting Wolf paused, then spoke in a softer, more thoughtful voice. “Why, when you were once in the light, did you choose eternal death?”

  There was sadness in the shaman’s voice, and in reply the darkness was hushed and still. It was a moment that the man had not planned or expected. He waited for a reply, and as he stood silently from outside the tunnel mouth there came a clamor.

  Men shouting.

  It was time.

  He closed his eyes and spoke a prayer inside his head.

  Oh, Great Spirit. You who make the dark and the light. I thank you for my flesh and bones. For my penis that gives life, and my heart that guides life. I thank you that my spirit that lives in the flower and the rock and the stream and the clouds that chase across the sky like horses lives too in the body of this man. I pray for the spirit that is in everything and I carry the joy of my thanks with me in my heart that I may embrace you in the next world.

  Hunting Wolf opened his eyes wide, lifted his amulet with a frozen, bloody hand and put it between his teeth.

  There was a sigh from the darkness, a deep unholy sigh like gas escaping from a corpse.

  “Ah! So we are to do battle! The dung-hole chief of shits will at last fight that which he calls nothing!”

  It laughed a throaty, delighted rattle and continued laughing as the keeper started the final portion of his ceremony. Outside, in the light, men of flesh and bone and blood howled for Hunting Wolf, and a woman and boy prayed for him.

  59

  In the dark, the lampshade hanging from the ceiling looked like a face. Billy guessed it was the bulb that made the nose, and the eyes and mouth were just shadows caused by the fringe that hung around the edge. He’d stared at it for a long time now, fighting sleep, and he was still wide awake, listening to the low voices of his mother and the policeman talking downstairs.

  The day had been more like a dream than the one he had last night. Except that wasn’t a dream. Not really.

  They’d stayed in all day, hiding
from the men outside with their cameras, Auntie Ann fussing around in a pretend-cheery way, and Billy had tried to make his mother stop crying.

  Maybe she would soon. His father was on his way home. He could feel it. He knew it. He needed to be awake to help him if he asked. Because they had to fight the dark thing together. Eagle Robe had said so.

  The thought of the dark thing made him close his eyes tight to try and push it out of his head. He couldn’t bear the memory of its fingers reaching for him. The dirty, scary fingers that had been wrapped so tightly around his father. He concentrated hard on ordinary things, things that would stop him thinking about the darkness and about… Bart.

  Too late. From under his tightly shut eyes, tears found their way between the long thick lashes and rolled onto his cheek. Why Bart? His beloved, barking, loyal, handsome Bart. He would never bury his face in that warm fur again. Never run laughing after the big animal as it bounded over the lawn and jumped the fence. He opened his eyes and his little mouth was set in a hard straight line. That dark thing would pay for what it did to Bart. It would pay dearly, and he and his dad would do it together.

  Somewhere in his heart Billy Hunt wished he could still be a child. He wanted his dad to come in and tuck the comforter under the edge of the bed like he used to, and tell him those dumb stories about when he played hockey that would make Billy laugh.

  But Eagle Robe had told him he needed to be a man now and he knew it was true. His mom had listened and cried again when he told her some of the stuff he’d heard when he walked with Eagle Robe. Not everything of course. This was Kinchuinick business, and Eagle Robe had said she knew some of this stuff in her head but not in her heart. Billy didn’t care. Her heart was good to the core, and he loved her so much he just wanted her to stop hurting. So he’d tried to stop that hurt by telling her the truth.

  Maybe she hadn’t believed it. It must have sounded pretty crazy. But she’d gone all pale and quiet when he talked about the Isksaksin, and he thought that maybe she knew he was telling the truth. So what? He loved his mom and dad, and he knew now his dad loved him too. That’s all that mattered.

  He wiped the tears from his cheek and took deep breath. Yes, he would be a man for now. The dark thing would be the one to cry next. It would cry plenty.

  It was in there, very deep. He probed around in his mind and touched that soft, thick area of consciousness that he had forgotten. Skills and secrets laid down in Sam’s head by Calvin over all those years when they prayed and conjured and explored the spirit world together. It was still there, its energy intact. Now it was time for Sam to dig into it and remember.

  He had no choice. It seemed like there were cops everywhere. The brushwood by the rail track was cover for now, but the moment he stepped out onto that wide road that led up toward town, they would see him. He’d watched two patrol cars glide by already, and he knew they would be all over town. They’d see him, all right.

  How could they not? Sam Hunting Wolf looked like a madman. His jacket was torn and filthy, and his face was a mass of cuts and grazes from his scramble through a dense piece of birch scrub in the dark.

  Yes, that had been dumb. Running like that from the figure of Marlene that stepped out in front of him between those dark trees. Her eye had hung from its socket, dangling on a sallow, sunken cheek, and when she had put a hand out to touch his face and rasped my baby at him, he had run. A mistake. But he was ready for its tricks now. He wouldn’t run again.

  At least under cover of night he’d been able to walk almost the whole way along the tracks, falling to his stomach between the rails when a car on the Trans-Canada briefly lit up the track with its headlights. His detour through the dense pines and back down that wall of rock was not necessary.

  But now he was back in Silver and it offered little cover for a six-foot-tall Indian with a bloody face and the clothes of a bum.

  Go unseen, Calvin had said, and he knew Sam had the power to do just that, stored somewhere in his dark locker of a brain.

  Calvin. Where was he? Sam could barely contemplate the options. He had no time to think about it. He had a task, and the difficulty of that task was the thing that was keeping him sane.

  Sam closed his eyes and reached into his mind. The prayer he offered was a chant in his head, a mesmerizing, droning thing that dulled the edges around his conscious mind and pushed him nearer to that well of knowledge and piety that he used to draw from unthinkingly as a teenager. Droning on and on and on until his eyes rolled back in his head and his breath came in short, panting bursts. He was numb now, oblivious to the outside world, where the snow fell on his concealed body behind the bushes and the wind howled through the telegraph lines above him. His mind felt sharp, alive, refreshed, and he saw as clearly as though it were yesterday the way to go unseen.

  His eyes rolled back into focus and Sam gave a grunt. Despite the cold, he was sweating. But he knew it would be OK. He was becoming pure again. He felt it. And although part of him kicked and screamed at the thought of what that implied, that he was becoming an Indian again, a Kinchuinick shaman again, he swallowed back his distaste and embraced the cleansing in his heart.

  Sam Hunting Wolf stood up, brushed the snow from his torn and ragged jacket and started to walk toward his home. He walked toward the bus depot and the main street that sprawled behind it. There was a driver clearing his side mirrors of snow outside the depot. Sam walked by. The driver continued his task.

  He turned into the main street, full of people as the bars and restaurants closed for the night. Couples ran to snowy cars and groups of young skiers threw snowballs at each other as they waited for one of the fifteen cabs in Silver to pick them up and bundle them back to their hotels; and there were the cops, strolling up the street like they owned it. And every one of the pedestrians, tourists going home, bar owners at doorways taking the air, cops killing time on the sidewalk, walked right past Sam Hunting Wolf as he strode up the street with his eyes fixed on the lights of Oriole Drive, which twinkled above the shop roofs.

  And as he walked, Sam saw the street, his own main street, where he shopped with Katie, greeted friends and looked in the windows of the stores at things they couldn’t afford but didn’t care, and he knew who he was.

  Hunting Wolf.

  The Kinchuinick shaman.

  The years of self-loathing, of wishing his skin would fall away like a snake’s and be as white as Katie’s, were such wasted years. Look at these people he had believed were so much better; people so far away from the invisible roots that connected them to this earth they stood on, so sure in their understanding of the world yet understanding nothing. The spirits moved among them, touching them with phantom fingers in their grief at being invisible to man, and yet they saw nothing.

  Savage. How many times had he heard that word fall from a white man’s lips? Hunting Wolf, the shaman, could have wept with joy when he realized that there need no longer be any shame, any horror at the Kinchuinick blood that coursed through his veins. He was no savage among civilized white people. It was he, and each one like him, who was civilized.

  His concentration was absolute as he walked tall in this modern street that was only a dream in the sleep of an earth gone mad. He felt his power come from the earth and the air and the trees that lined the street. And when the snow fell on him, each flake was a whispered prayer.

  Sam Hunting Wolf turned the corner and started up the hill toward home. A house on the corner burst into life as a couple said their farewells to friends and, with a sleepy toddler in their arms, walked down the drive toward their car.

  Neither the man nor woman noticed the big dark man who passed inches between them on the sidewalk as they put down the little boy and fussed with the baby seat.

  A small fist rubbed tired eyes as the four-year-old child stood on the snowy sidewalk waiting for its transport to take it back to a warm bed. The boy looked up and Sam turned around. He looked straight into Sam’s eyes.

  “Mommy. Look at the man!”
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  His mother looked in the direction the small finger was pointing. Sam Hunting Wolf stopped. His heart raced with love for that small white boy, a boy who could see what he should not see. The white man was lost only because he chose to be. The boy would be trained to be blind soon enough, to believe his TV more than his eyes and heart.

  “There’s no one there, sweetheart. Come on, get in.”

  Sam’s shoulders tightened. He turned away and, without looking back, walked on. Which is why he never saw the child wave happily at him from the back of the car as he slipped around the corner and walked boldly up his street.

  60

  Constable Jarvis Strang was playing with the tuning fork that lived in the car glove compartment for testing the radar.

  “OK, Eddie. Listen.”

  He banged it hard on the dash and put it up close to his companion’s ear, making him whip his head away in irritation. Jarvis chuckled like a kid as Eddie put a finger in his ear and waggled it about.

  “Quit that, you asshole!”

  Jarvis sighed and stared out the snowy windshield again at the press cars that sat in Oriole Drive. The occupants would be as bored as they were. Except folks kept bringing them stuff, like coffee and french fries. No one brought the cops anything.

  Jarvis sighed again, banged the tuning fork and hummed a harmony to it. The radio crackled. Eddie punched his colleague in the shoulder to shut him up.

  “Detachment Two Alpha Eight.”

  Eddie pressed “talk.”

  “Two Alpha Eight.”

  “Can you get Staff Sergeant McGee out of there and back to the detachment? Over.”

  “Sure. Now? Over.”

  “Yeah. Soon as you can. Over.”

  “Will do. Over.”

  Eddie reached over to the dash and grabbed his hat. Jarvis opened his door.

  “This don’t take two of us, Jarvis. I’m only going to ring the fucking doorbell.”