Season of Storm

by Alexandra Sellers

  "I'm sorry," she whispered, because there was nothing else to say.

  "My Chopa name is Hawk Who Hunts in Winter. That name was given to me by my grandfather and the elders the day I went to Eagle's Nest for my mother's funeral. Everyone knew I would now never be allowed to return to the reserve. They told me I would be like the hawk who hunts in winter, that I would need to be tougher and harder than other children, that like the hawk I would live by my wits in a hostile landscape.

  "The Chopa people have a long tradition of changing their names as they make transitions. That day—the day after I graduated—my grandfather told me that the Indian part of me had made no growth, that I was still the Hawk Who Hunts in Winter.

  "He told me that, like our ancestor, Iniishewa, I had lost my soul to the white man's world, and it was my destiny now to wander apart from my people, searching for it. He told me an Indian could never find his soul in the white man's world, but that I had to accept the choice I had made.

  "I didn't realize until that moment that I had unconsciously thought of the reserve as my one fixed point in a changing world. I had imagined it always there, unchanging, my true home. Not that I had visualized myself as going back there to live, but they had always been there, the people who would always accept me for all that I was, with whom I could be truly myself."

  She had heard Jews speak like that of Israel. She protested, "But he wasn't right, your grandfather. You were accepted by white society long ago."

  "Yes," he agreed. "It's among my own people I've been trying to claw out acceptance."

  "None of it was your fault, anyway, Johnny. My God, a child of eight—what choice did you have?"

  "I didn't have to renounce my status. I had that choice."

  "Did you? With everyone in your world encouraging you to believe that was the great step in your maturity?" Smith demanded indignantly. "Did your foster parents think it was a good idea? I bet they did!"

  "Yes, they did." He rubbed his head again, then stroked her arm. "But I've never blamed them, Peaceable Woman. They acted for what they thought was the best. It was the prevailing wisdom. They couldn't know my past would rise up and claim me. How could they? I didn't know myself."

  ***

  Shulamith slept and woke in the comfort of Johnny's hold and smiled lazily at the rightness of things. "Do you remember that first morning," she asked him, "when we were sleeping down in the other room?"

  "And you moved over and snuggled up against me," Johnny said.

  "How do you know? You were asleep!"

  "With you curled into me?" he laughed. "Not likely."

  "I thought you were sound asleep—were you pretending?"

  "I was trying to convince myself that it was not my urgent desire to make love to you," he said.

  "Oh! Was it?" He smiled and kissed her, and her response tingled along her nerves.

  "We do have that, don't we?" she said. "I mean, temporary insanity, okay, but we do actually have a strong physical attraction to each other. I mean, you don't feel this with everybody?"

  "No," said Johnny, "I don't feel it with everybody."

  She said hesitantly, "Johnny, have you ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome?"

  "Captor bonding. Yes, I've heard of it," he said, and her heart sank.

  "Do you think that's what this...what it was?"

  He shrugged and his arms released her. He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. "It's a convenient explanation for what happened."

  "But do you believe it?"

  "Shulamith, I do not know." He turned to look at her over his shoulder. "Maybe. Probably. What happened happened. What difference does it make what name we give it?"

  "Because...do you ever think that...that it might be real after all?"

  His jaw tightened and his eyes were hooded. "No," he said. "I never do."

  ***

  "Hello, Johnny," said the old man drowsily. "Hey—it's Peaceable Woman! How you been, eh?"

  "Fine." Smith swallowed over a lump in her throat. Wilfred Tall Tree looked sick and pale and old. Two weeks ago she might have guessed his age at sixty or sixty-five. Now he looked eighty. "How about you?"

  "Not so good," he replied matter-of-factly. "Hey, Johnny, those guys are gangsters, eh? They called me a drunken old Indian, and they beat me up." He tried to waggle his eyebrows. He laughed feebly and instantly winced. "I told them I don't drink that white man's poison, Johnny. I said that even though I don't have any more land to lose to the white man I figured I was better not to give him any more advantage than he already had." He laughed again, a dry throaty chuckle.

  Johnny shook his head. "You got your licks in, then."

  "Yeah, but so did they, Johnny."

  "So I see. Do they know what's wrong with you yet?"

  "Oh, a little of this, a little of that—you never been laid into, Johnny? You got no imagination?"

  "Uh-huh," Johnny returned dryly. He was outwardly calm, but she could sense the angry tension in him. "How long were they working you over?"

  "No time at all, Johnny." Wilf grinned. "Not much pleasure in kicking an old dog," he said, as though he were quoting a proverb. "They must have hit something interesting right off, 'cause I fainted on them pretty quick."

  "Yeah," said Johnny dryly. "I can see that."

  They spoke to a doctor, who gave them a clearer account of his health but was unwilling to speculate about what might have caused Wilf's injuries.

  "Johnny," Smith said as they stood in the lobby about to part, "if we told them we were married, wouldn't they give up?"

  "They might."

  "Well, then...."

  He looked at her. "You've never thought of telling them the truth?"

  "If you mean, that you grabbed me that night, no."

  "If it gets too rough for you, Peaceable Woman, tell them the truth," he said.

  She was suddenly angry. Why didn't he appreciate what she had gone through to protect him? "Do you realize what you're saying?" she demanded. "You'd rather go to jail for kidnapping and extortion than let your people know you fell so much in love with a white woman—or thought you did—that you married her! Don't you see how ridiculous that is? Really, don't you see?"

  He was looking at her impassively. "Oh, to hell with it!" she burst out. "Do what you damned well want! Go to prison—and take me with you! I just don't care anymore!" And she strode away from him through the hospital doors.

  The phone was ringing when she got home. "Yes?' she answered abruptly.

  The voice at the other end introduced himself as a television newsman. "I'm wondering if you can tell us more about your father's condition?" he asked.

  "More about my...! Why, what's wrong with him?" And she had just been at the hospital and hadn't gone to see him!

  "Oh, you don't know? We've been trying to get a statement all morning. According to the hospital, your father is too ill to testify to the Cartier Commission this afternoon. The special convening at the Royal Georgia Hospital has been cancelled, and they've warned us to cancel our planned news coverage."

  She could hear him rattling paper on his desk.

  "I uh, look, I only just got home. I haven't seen my father yet this morning. I'll have to phone the hospital."

  Somehow she got him off the line and then with shaking fingers dialled her father's number at the hospital. A woman answered.

  "Are you a nurse?" Smith babbled. "Is my father—how is my father?"

  "Just a moment, please. All right, will you say something, please?"

  "Dad?" she asked. "Dad, are you all right?"

  "It's okay," her father said to someone, then his voice was in her ear. "Hello, Shulamith. Yes, I'm fine."

  "But they say you've cancelled your appearance at the Cartier!"

  "That's right."

  "But what's happened? How sick are you?" She was wondering guiltily if the things she had said to her father had brought on another attack.

  "Nothing to worry about," said her father. "The
doctor and I decided I might be better off without the excitement. And I'm sure the Cartier Commission won't flounder from lack of my testimony."

  "You mean, you're not going to testify at all?"

  "I don't think the public hearing is sitting beyond next week."

  She was confused. This wasn't like her father. He never let anything—including his health—stop him from doing what he wanted to do.

  "You're sure you're all right?" she asked again, and when he had reassured her there was nothing for her to do but hung up.

  The phone rang immediately. "Yes?" she answered guardedly, expecting another journalist, but it was Mel.

  "Lew tells me you've got quite a song," he said. "He wants me to listen to it this afternoon. Care to be here?"

  Smith laughed weakly. "Bring on hysteria!" she muttered to an uncomprehending Mel. Was this really her life that was going off like a skyrocket in all directions? Or had she somehow shifted into someone else's more tempestuous lifestream?

  "Of course I want to be there," she told Mel. "What time?"

  ***

  We didn't wait to fall in love

  We loved and then we met

  No promises

  No thought of time

  And no room for regret

  I feel you watch me in my sleep

  It's time for you to go

  Already you're a memory

  No one will ever know

  So wake me up to say goodbye 'cause now it's over

  I feel it in my heart and in your eyes

  We'll have coffee

  And for just a single moment

  We'll whisper "maybe" to ourselves

  Then say goodbye

  We both know it doesn't happen very often

  There'd be fewer lonely people if it did

  We shared a moment out of time

  But now it's over

  Now all that's left is how to end

  How to begin

  So wake me up to say goodbye 'cause now it's over

  I feel it in my heart and in your eyes

  Another place, another time, a better season

  But now it's over, all that's left is just

  Goodbye.

  It's kind of funny how it happens

  In the first place

  There seems to be so much to give

  All through the night

  But in the morning when you wake

  And know deep down

  It's a mistake

  You have to wonder if it ever works

  And hope it's not too late

  So wake me up to say goodbye 'cause now it's over

  I feel it in my heart and in your eyes

  I know it's all been done before

  And I won't ask for any more

  Please wake me up to say goodbye

  'Cause now it's over

  Smith and Lew looked at each other with wide conspiratorial grins as the tousle-haired, black-eyed woman looked up from the music and sang the last note in her smoky, sexy voice. Before anyone spoke the singer took a deep breath and smiled broadly.

  "Dynamite!" she announced. "Too much!"

  That was pretty exactly what Smith thought about this intense, pale, black-haired woman who had just sung the song as though she owned it. Who would have thought the words she had written could sound so significant, so real?

  They smiled at each other, and then, with one accord, Lew, Smith and the singer—whose name was Cimarron King—turned their eyes on Mel.

  "Like to do a single of it?" he asked Cimarron.

  Smith merely blinked. Things were moving so fast around her that sometimes she had to remind herself to breathe. Two hours ago she and Lew had been sitting side by side at the piano, singing the song to Mel. "Okay," he had said, "we've got a song." And then he told them about the singer he was grooming. "She doesn't write enough of her own stuff," he said. "We're putting an album together. I want Cimarron to hear this. I'd like to use it on the album."

  She had never dreamed it would happen like this. If she'd had time to think about the possible fate of her song she might have imagined they would send it off to an established singer and wait months or years to hear anything.

  So Cimarron had been summoned and had listened to the song; and now she had sung it and electrified them all.

  Cimarron looked intently at Mel. "Yes, can I? A single now, and then if it goes, maybe the title song on the album?" She and Mel exchanged a grin. "It's perfect," she said. "Thanks." She looked at Smith and Lew. "It's dynamite."

  The song had changed from that morning Shulamith had written it. She had heard that formless music in her head as she wrote, but Lew's music, very different, had brought the words alive. It was as though he looked at the song from an entirely different angle. She had adjusted her lyrics to suit the angle of his vision, feeling that odd perfection that collaboration sometimes gives—as though his music, his slant, were giving her a clearer view of what the song was meant to be.

  And now Cimarron King was throwing the light of her interpretation on it, making the vision even clearer. Shulamith was surprised at how much a singer could affect a song. "Do you want me to change anything?" Smith asked now. "If there's a lyric you're not comfortable with. . .."

  Cimarron laughed her smoky laugh. "Look," she said, "don't worry about this song. It's great. Just write me another, okay? Write two more—write ten!"

  Thirty

  "And a strange development," said the news announcer over the car radio as Smith drove toward the hospital, "in the St. John heiress no-kidnapping kidnap case: last night police searched the island home of well-known Vancouver architect Johnny Winterhawk and took Wilfred Tall Tree, a member of the Chopa tribe who lives on the island, into custody. Tall Tree was admitted to the Royal Georgia Hospital last night five hours after his arrest. A police spokesman said that Mr. Tall Tree, age 76, was found unconscious in his cell.

  "Mr. Winterhawk, whose home was extensively searched last night, and who accuses police of removing some property during the search, is the controversial architect who designed the new West Coast Cultural Centre. Photographs of the apparent aftermath of the search of his home in the Gulf Islands are appearing in the city's newspapers this afternoon.

  "Mr. Winterhawk says he is looking into the possibility of pressing charges against police under the new Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Police apparently searched his home under the power of a writ of assistance, a type of arbitrary search warrant which is rarely used nowadays and which has been under fire from civil liberties groups.

  "A police spokesman said that the alleged kidnapping of the lumber baron's daughter was still very much under investigation. The only article, apart from papers, seized from Mr. Winterhawk's home, the spokesman said, was a woman's bathrobe."

  Smith nearly went off the road. As soon as she could she got out of the stream of traffic and pulled into a no stopping zone. She sat trying to think until a traffic warden pulled up behind her, and then she moved back into traffic, changed her course and drove home. But her ideas were no clearer than before. What did Johnny expect her to do now? What could she do?

  The phone, of course, was ringing when she got home—the first of many journalists who wanted her version of events. She answered two questions repeatedly: she had not been kidnapped, and the robe was not hers.

  Was there some reason she might have publicly denied being kidnapped, while secretly telling police otherwise? she was asked by one.

  "No reason at all," said Smith. "I have consistently and repeatedly told the police that I was not kidnapped."

  "Do you know Johnny Winterhawk?"

  "Sorry, no comment."

  "Do you know why the police are connecting him with your disappearance?"

  "I did not disappear...."

  When she could hang up the phone without its instantly ringing again, she called her father.

  "Are you snowed under with reporters?" she asked him icily.

  "Not anymore," he said.

>   "You mean, not yet," she told him, the fact that her father had been left in peace making her even angrier.

  ''What's happened?"

  "You'll see," she said. "Or maybe you won't. You probably qualify for the Blind Man of the Year Award. If my homicidal rage cools down you may see me."

  "Good." said her father. "I've been—"

  "But don't hold your breath."

  ***

  On Friday she cleared out her office at the St. John's Wood head office. Her goodbyes were anticlimactic: she had only been back a few weeks and hadn't found her niche yet. But her secretary stood at the door and watched her pack up sadly.

  "I'm sorry you're going," Maia said wistfully.

  Maia had been upgraded from the typing pool, and Smith realized guiltily that now she would be going back. "I'm sorry. Does this mean you'll take a drop in salary?"

  "I don't know about that," answered the young woman, who was shy, but a very sharp worker, "but I'm going to miss you. People say it's horrible working for a woman, but it's not. I really liked working for you."

  Smith smiled, remembering her first week back, when she had handed Maia a cluster of tapes and notes she had made abroad—a complex collection of field reports and market evaluations that required cross-referencing and indexing and a great deal of concentration. She had come back from lunch to find the secretary bent over her typewriter in tears. "And it's too complicated, and I'm too stupid." Maia's distress had been mostly incoherent, but at last she had lifted her head out of her Kleenex. "And besides," she had wailed, "I've got my period!" Not the sort of thing you could confess to a male boss, Smith reflected now; or at least, not without risking his using it against you in future. She wondered mildly if it was that incident that had convinced Maia of the advantages of having a female boss and ensured her loyalty.

  Three copies of the completed report, spiral bound, colour-tabulated and impressive looking, were on her desk now, mute testimony to Maia's competence. She had finished it during Smith's absence, and Smith's last act as executive in her father's company would be to deliver the report to Rolly.

  "Good grief," said Rolly, when he saw the three-inch-thick report. "Didn't you take any time off to enjoy the sights over there?"