THE TRICKSTER

by Muriel Gray

  To see a white man, a Scot, so humbled before savages, was disgusting to McEwan.

  “If we are to discuss legality, perhaps you would care to mention to your new flock that their forebears signed a treaty concerning this railroad and its building many decades ago. Mention that approximately ten minutes from now, when we kick their bloody behinds off the mountain.”

  Henderson flushed slightly, giving new life to the broken purple veins the frost had drawn on his cheeks. McEwan often cursed to rile him. Not this time, though. This time there was too much at stake.

  “I’m afraid I cannot allow you to do that, Mr. McEwan.”

  McEwan looked interested, and mildly excited.

  “And how do you propose to stop me?”

  “I will have words with the men. If they are for me, who will do your kicking of behinds?”

  McEwan rose from the table and walked to the small potbellied stove at the back of the cabin. Turning his back to the minister he knelt down, opened the door and threw in a log. Facing the wall, he spoke in a low voice.

  “You underestimate these men. They want this job finished as much as you and me. The weather is against you, Henderson.”

  It was true. The blizzard that had been raging for over three weeks now had cut off Siding Twenty-three from the world. No trains had been through since the snow built an impenetrable barrier at the top of Wolf Pass, and McEwan had been there when a futile attempt was made to break through with a snowplow on the engine, bearing witness that passage was now quite impossible.

  But with or without communication, they would have to begin the initial blasting of this tunneling operation immediately, or the whole project would be in jeopardy. But it was not the snow holding them back; it was a band of thirty-two Kinchuinick Indians, taking it in shifts to squat night and day on top of the very rock that had been drilled, ready to receive the dynamite.

  When McEwan turned around to receive the minister’s response, Henderson had gone. He smiled. Well, let him try, he thought. There were nearly fifty cold, homesick railroadmen out there. Christians or not, they would not take kindly to being kept away from their families an extra month or more by a bunch of unwashed barbarians. Henderson would soon see how much authority his God had over men who dreamed nightly of their homes, tossing in their bunks and calling out the names of their wives.

  Through the tiny ice-coated window he could see Henderson stumbling through the snow to the gang of men hacking at rocks with picks, the wind tugging at his black coat as he went.

  McEwan resumed his seat at the table and flattened out the crumpled plans in front of him, the creases throwing flickering shadows in the light of a guttering lamp. Henderson could do as he wished.

  They would blast tomorrow.

  7

  Frank Sinatra was giving it all he had in the chorus of “It Happened in Monterey,” when Ernie Legat’s horny hand stretched out to the cab’s stereo and cut the cassette. Ol’ Blue Eyes was God to Ernie, but he liked to hear what the engine was up to when he hit Wolf Pass. In weather like this, with a full forty-ton load of frozen seafood behind him, he would be lucky to see second gear. That would be on the way up. On the descent into Silver, he could probably do with a parachute.

  The snow was coming at him in the headlights like a corny asteroid storm on Star Trek, hypnotizing him with flakes that became rods of relentless white motion as they streaked past the windshield. Despite the work of the snowplows, the road wasn’t giving away many clues as to where it stopped being road and started being ditch.

  Ernie coaxed the eighteen-wheeler into a first cautious gear change as the gradient started to introduce itself.

  “Come on, you bastard.”

  Ernie reached his paw out again to turn up the heater, figuring getting more heat in the cab would take some of it out of the engine. The truck was doing its best.

  In the back, two hundred lobsters bound for plates on the east coast slid backward an inch on their plastic pallets as the Peterbilt started its journey up the mountain.

  The snow was getting thicker with every foot Ernie climbed, making him curse that last coffee he’d had at Mabel’s. No wonder he hadn’t seen another truck for twenty miles. The sneaky sons of bitches waving hello to him back in Lanark must have known how bad stuff was up here and either left hours earlier or cut loose for the night in the parking holes down on the Trans-Canada. Not a sniff of trouble on the C.B.

  Well, shit on them. Ernie liked to get where he was going, and even though this was shaping up to be one of the worst winters he could remember, it would take more than a blizzard to knock the stuffing out of his schedule.

  He was getting near the summit now, and the old tub hadn’t put a wheel wrong. Nice and slowly, that was how to take it. Ernie could feel the road flattening out, and even though all he could see in the dark and through the snow was about fifteen feet of white featureless ribbon, he’d worked this godforsaken road often enough in daylight to guess he was right underneath the peak of Wolf Mountain. That meant at least two miles of even cruising before it was hang on to your hat for the slide down into Silver.

  The chorus of “It Happened in Monterey” started to form itself into a hum on Ernie’s lips. It died just as quick as he saw the figure up ahead. Standing at the side of the road was a man in a long black coat with his ungloved hand out, casual as you like, thumbing a lift. Ernie figured it must be at least minus thirty-five out there, but this guy was just standing in the snow like he was hitching a ride from some pals in a beach buggy on Sunset Boulevard.

  Ernie started to brake. It was real fortunate for the guy in the coat that the truck was on the flat. Braking in snow like this was jackknife city, but this was an emergency.

  What the hell was a guy in a coat doing up here near midnight in a snowstorm, at least ten miles from anything remotely resembling civilization? he wondered.

  The truck managed a standstill about twenty yards past the man, and Ernie watched in the rearview as the figure walked, not ran, but walked, slowly, up to the passenger door, his face lit only by the red side-lights.

  The company didn’t allow hitchers, but this was life or death, and the way Ernie saw it, he had no choice. He hadn’t seen another vehicle either way for at least two hours. How long had the man been standing there, casually waiting for his lift?

  Ernie braced himself for a hospital job, wondering how many fingers the guy would still be able to call his own after a minimum of two hours without gloves. He was already planning the detour to Silver’s emergency room when the cab door opened.

  A rush of cold air entered every part of Ernie Legat as the man held open the door and looked up at his driver.

  “Jesus Christ, buddy, get in and shut the fuckin’ door, will ya!”

  A pale, thin face held two ice-blue eyes that looked straight into Ernie’s soul. The man’s age was hard to place. A line-free face crowned with white hair, and skin that was almost translucent, belied a look in his eyes that seemed a great deal older.

  The only illumination, from the single, weak cab-light, was not doing much to help this guy’s bid to get a bit part in a beach movie, but despite his pallor the hitcher’s smile was disarmingly warm and charming. Not the smile of a man who has just cheated death.

  Ernie motioned to the man with a hand that was already losing feeling in the tips of its fingers, and as the stranger looked calmly around the cab like a man buying a secondhand car, the cold was becoming more than he could bear.

  “Silver?”

  “Sure,” he replied impatiently. “Get in.”

  Huge flakes of snow whirled into the cab, settling on the dumb kidney-shaped plaid cushion on the dashboard that Amy Legat had sewn for her husband, for use when his behind got numb after ten hours of nonstop.

  The man climbed carefully into the passenger seat, closed the door, folded his hands on his lap and looked straight ahead.

  The cab was colder than Hell and Ernie’s breath was coming out in fast, thick clouds. Fast, b
ecause for some reason he was a little breathless after the excitement of finding the guy way up there. Thick, because the temperature had dropped to something that would freeze the balls off a polar bear.

  He groped for the heater. It was already on full. The cab would heat up again once they got going. Once they got going. God, why was he driving at two miles an hour? Get this thing moving.

  The truck shifted a gear and picked up speed, but Ernie was driving without seeing. All he could think of was the guy in his peripheral vision, lit only by the instrument panel now, sitting silently three feet away.

  No explanation seemed like it was going to be offered, but Ernie was damned if he wasn’t going to be repaid for the rule-breaking ride with at least an interesting tale. “So what the hell you doin’ out there, fella?” Ernie settled back into his brown bead seat cover to enjoy whatever the hitcher had to offer.

  “Just working my way towards Silver. Thanks for the ride. Looked for a while like I was going to have to walk.” The man beamed across at his savior, and before Ernie could demand an expansion, the man continued in his soothing, pleasant voice. “Do you know Silver well, Ernie?”

  Ernie shot a surprised glance at him. “How do you know my name?”

  The man leaned over and tapped Ernie’s company ID, a plastic card hanging from a chain that also supported a tiny cowbell with Austria painted on it, that his daughter brought back for him from a school trip fifteen years ago. Ernie’s face glared out from the ID like that of a man in pain, and the real Ernie glared over at his passenger, his face matching his picture. “It’s right here. Unless that’s not you.” The man seemed pleased with himself. “Silver?” he reminded Ernie, who remained locked in his frown.

  “Oh, I know it well enough. Right now it’s choked with folks slidin’ around on the hills with wooden sticks stuck to their feet like damned fools, but in the summer it goes right back to bein’ the no-shit-happens, assholes-in-RVs, railroad town it always was. You got business there?”

  The man smiled and looked out of his window, his face turned away from Ernie. “Yeah. I’ve got some business to take care of there.” He turned back, beaming that smile again. “Thought I might pick up some work.”

  Ernie saw a chance. “Well, you sure would be plenty suited to skiing work, fella, being able to stand out there in minus God knows what without so much as a chilblain. How come you ain’t frostbitten, with no gloves or nothin’? And if you don’t mind me pryin’, how’d you get up there? Didn’t see no car.”

  The man picked up Amy’s cushion, turning it over in his soft white hands, examining it as though it were made of porcelain. “Got dropped off from another ride a few hours ago. Didn’t expect it to be so cold, so I dug a snow hole. Just off the road back there.” He looked across at Ernie, studying the driver’s face closely. “An old Indian skill I picked up years ago. Outside, forty below. Inside, warm as toast. Don’t even need a coat once you’ve sealed the entrance. Heard the truck coming and I just strolled on out to borrow the ride.”

  Ernie mulled it over. “So the Indians dug snow holes? Good to know the useless drunken bums could do somethin’.”

  “That’s a truth and no mistake,” replied the man with a new tenor to his voice.

  Ernie looked across at the man in his truck and his gaze was returned with an unfaltering stare that even in the dim light of the car Ernie could read as a warning.

  He changed the subject.

  “What kind of trucker would let you out there? It’s only ten more miles to Silver, and the road ain’t exactly goin’ no place else.”

  The man’s face creased into a smile. “Did I say it was a trucker? It certainly was not, Ernie. Like you say, no knight of the road would make such an uncharitable drop. It was a goon in a four-by-four pickup, and I guess he just got tired of my company. Driver’s prerogative. Still, mustn’t grumble. I’m going to get there anyhow.” He grinned. Hugely. “Thanks to you, Ernie.”

  Ernie grunted like an old dog in response.

  The truck was already well into its descent, nosing down the other side of the pass, and Ernie turned his attention to making sure his baby wasn’t going to end up a forty-ton chrome-and-steel toboggan, heading for Silver the short way, straight down the cliff.

  The heater was being a bitch. They’d been in the cab with the doors shut now for at least ten minutes, and Ernie could still see his breath. If this carried on he’d have to stop in Silver when he let his passenger out, get the thing fixed himself, or stop over until he could find someone who could.

  He shifted down a gear, as he felt a slight give under the front wheels.

  “Are there many Indians in Silver?”

  Ernie didn’t enjoy the last exchange about Indians. He wished he’d never brought the subject up. “Yeah. One or two.”

  “Assiniboin, Kinchuinick or Blackfoot?”

  “Kinchuinick mostly, I think. Hey, I don’t know, buddy. Do I look like Professor of Native North American Studies at Princeton?”

  The road, which hadn’t seen a snowplow for hours, was having one last go at slowing up Ernie Legat and his seafood, boasting a drift of at least three feet across the last serious bend before the run out to town. Ernie could see the lights of Silver just starting to poke through the blizzard, and decided to ram the sucker. Without touching the brakes, he slammed the eighteen-wheeler into the snow bank and hoped it was only this high for a few feet.

  Somewhere in one of the back axles, a set of wheels complained enough to shove the rig alarmingly to the left, but the truck held on and ten feet later they were clear. Silver twinkled ahead. Ernie knew his was the last thing on wheels that would get through that for a while. The plows wouldn’t even look at this until the storm calmed down, and nothing he could see was hinting at that. He would drop his passenger and head for the truck stop at Maidston Creek, five miles down the valley. It looked like he’d have to sit out this tempest for a day or two.

  “Well, that weren’t too tidy, but we made it OK. Where d’you want off?”

  “Town boundary’ll do fine.”

  They crawled up to the edge of town and the hydraulic brakes started hissing and puffing as soon as Ernie caught sight of the aluminum sign that read through a thin sheath of snow WELCOME TO SILVER. SKI A BIT OF HISTORY!

  “Sure this is it?” asked Ernie as the truck stopped by the sign.

  “Yeah. This is where I need to be. Thanks, Ernie.”

  He put the cushion he had held for the last few miles on the seat beside him, opened the door and hopped out, still holding the clutch-handle.

  “And don’t drive too long that you need Amy’s cushion now, hear?” He shut the door and moved off into the darkness.

  Ernie smiled at that. He picked up the cushion to put it back on the dash. He dropped it quickly back onto the seat. It was frozen into a solid, kidney-shaped block of ice.

  A blast of hot air from the heater hit Ernie in the face. Seemed it was working again in a big way, and the sudden rush of heat gave him goosebumps, then something approaching a flush.

  Suddenly Ernie Legat’s heart started to beat a little too fast. How did that guy know Amy made that cushion? How did he even know her name? He hadn’t said anything about it at all. Couldn’t explain that one from an ID in the cab.

  And there was something else, something at the very back of Ernie’s mind that had bothered him all the way down the pass, but he couldn’t get a handle on it. What the hell was it?

  He threw the truck into gear and started to move off, grateful, though he couldn’t say why, that the stranger had been swallowed up by the dark and the blizzard.

  It was three miles out of Silver that Ernie had it. Even though the cab had been colder than a whore’s heart, it was only Ernie’s breath that had clouded. He didn’t like to think about that. So he didn’t.

  It was twenty minutes after two in the morning that Staff Sergeant Craig McGee stood at the edge of the Trans-Canada highway, looking at the single set of truck tracks already fi
lled with snow, and realized that his sergeant, Joe Reader, was in big trouble.

  Joe had been due back around ten, after a routine call to Stoke, on the other side of Wolf Pass. The guys at the store in Stoke who’d called him said he’d left around nine, and since there was a radio in the pickup, he’d have called for help if he’d gotten stuck in the snow.

  Craig didn’t like this. Joe was a radio junkie. He’d call up his boss just to say he’d seen an elk in the road, and if he was out there in a drift, Craig would have had an irritating call every two minutes plotting the exact minute-by-minute progress of his entrapment. Of course the radio could be down, which meant that Joe had a cold night ahead, but the truck tracks were evidence that something had got through the pass in the last two hours. If that were so, why hadn’t Joe clambered from some trucker’s cab hours ago and shambled into the office with a sheepish grin? A trucker wasn’t going to ignore a stranded pickup, especially not one with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police logo painted on the doors and blue and red lights on its roof.

  The blizzard was approaching nightmare force, and Craig McGee could hardly stand against the might of the wind and the stinging bullets of snow. He ran back to the Cherokee, sitting off-road with its engine still running, and climbed back into the driver’s seat. There was no way a chopper could fly in this, and it would be crap in the dark anyway, even with the spots on. Nothing for it but to wait for dawn and hope that Joe’s wife, Estelle, didn’t go hysterical on him in the meantime.

  Craig turned the patrol vehicle around and headed back into town.

  The Indians called the gash in the rock that ran from the top of Wolf Pass down to the Silver Creek Makwi-ochpeekin, or the Wolf’s Tooth. Fifty feet from the bottom of the gully what was left of Joe Reader’s pickup lay wedged in the fissure of rock like a broken filling in a tooth. Joe’s head was almost severed from its torso but a stubborn sinew kept it hanging there, banging against the bare metal of the cab where it dangled upside down. The snow eddied around the remains of Sergeant Reader in tiny cyclones as the ragged, gaping holes in the vehicle allowed it access to the carnage.