by Muriel Gray
Wilber was confused and not a little pissed off. He wrestled his coughing under control, and blinked at the guy like he was crazy. Still hanging on the fence the man put his hand back into his pocket and spoke deliberately, in the manner of someone making an announcement.
“I am…” he paused as if for dramatic effect, and smiled, “… Sitconski.”
Wilber blinked at him again. He screwed the top back on his whiskey and stepped back slightly from the wire. “Yeah?”
The man stood perfectly still, waiting.
Wilber flicked through a mental filing cabinet of what this guy wanted. He took a guess. “You from Welfare?”
There was an almost imperceptible change in the man’s demeanor, but Wilber Stonerider picked it up. Was it anger? Why would a total stranger be angry at him? He’d done nothing. Well, nothing he wasn’t already paying for. But there it was in this guy’s eyes. Anger. Definitely.
This time the man spoke softly, and if Wilber were honest with himself, menacingly.
“My name is Sitconski.” He scanned the forty-two-year-old Indian’s face as if searching for a concealed message, a smile forming on his lips again. This time, an unmistakably cruel smile. “Moses Sitconski.” The smile gave way to a dry laugh, like ice cracking under a boot.
Wilber was out of his depth here. The guy was obviously a nut. And he was a nut interfering with the only serious drinking time he might grab this morning. Any moment now the foreman would walk out of the shed looking for him and it would be too late to take another swig. If he wasn’t here to pin something on him, this guy could get lost.
“Nice meeting you, Mr. Sitconski.” He turned his back on the guy and picked up his shovel. There was, after all, eight feet of wire netting between them. The voice that came back at him this time made Wilber freeze like an animal in headlights.
“Do you know my name?”
What was wrong with that voice? There was something horrible running beneath the syllables, like a sewer running under a sidewalk. Frightened, Wilber turned around slowly to face the man again. The snow was falling thick and silent between them, and Wilber’s breath sent white clouds billowing between the flakes. If the man was breathing at all it was like an athlete. There was no vapor from his mouth or nose. Wilber realized the hand holding the shovel was shaking and that he still held his bottle in the other. He leaned the shovel on the fence, unscrewed the bottle and took a long drink. Of course he could always run away, but something told him no one would ever run fast enough from this man.
The whiskey hit the spot and gave him back his voice. He laughed nervously. “Sure. Sure I know your name, Mister. You just told me it. Moses Sitconski.”
Wilber thought he saw ripples in the man. That was the only way he could describe it. Like the guy had something under his clothing. No, under his skin. And it was stirring, getting restless.
“Do you know my name?”
He wanted to cry now. What was this? Something was happening to the air between them, and all the alarm bells had just gone off in Wilber Stonerider’s brain. What did he mean? The crazy son of a bitch had told him his name about three times. He found himself looking to the side to see if anyone in the shed could see them from here, but he’d made sure they were well out of sight when he’d sneaked behind the bus. Through the wire, he could see the white blanketed scrubland on the other side of the road. In short, no one could see Wilber Stonerider and his insane visitor, Moses Whatever.
“Look, Mister. I don’t want no trouble. I know your…”
“DO YOU KNOW MY NAME?”
The force of the words, spoken quietly, almost gently, was so unexpected that Wilber fell back against the side of the bus. The voice had come from somewhere distant and dark, and although its volume was that of an explosion, he knew somewhere deep inside him that only he, Wilber Stonerider, had heard it. It contained so much malice, so much rage, it stunned him. He started to weep. There was something happening to the man, something Wilber couldn’t even begin to address. It wasn’t so much that he was changing, more that he was becoming what he was. The tears rolled down his cheeks as he pressed himself against the bus.
“Are you pullin’ your pecker back there, Chief?”
It was the foreman. Wilber opened his mouth to yell, but found he couldn’t. The thing through the wire looked back at him with a wrath that promised to erupt into frenzy. It whirled its head around to where the shout came from and, as it broke contact with his eyes, Wilber ran. He ran, skidding in the snow, around the bus and into the chest of foreman Taylor. They fell together in the snow, Wilber’s bottle smashing with a thud instead of a tinkle in the snow a few feet away. The alcohol melted a tiny patch of snow around the shards before it disappeared into the ground.
“Ah! You fuckin’ moron.”
Taylor, clad only in his work jeans and an ex–army sweater, tried to peel the jabbering Indian off him as he rolled on his back like a turtle. Wilber clutched at him like a two-year-old, making gasping noises and dribbling from the mouth and nose. Taylor pushed him off and struggled to his feet, leaving Wilber on the ground, his arms covering his head.
“Get up! I said get up, you drunken shit.”
Taylor was really angry. An Indian with DTs was not what he called help. He was cold and wet now, sweater soaked through, jeans covered in snow, and it was this sniveling idiot’s fault. How did the numbskull manage to get so sauced in such a short time? He’d handed him the snow shovel only twenty minutes ago and the guy had been sober. Look at him now.
Wilber peeled one arm from around his head and pointed to the bus. “He’s there. He’s goin’ to get me. Crazy guy. Keeps asking me his name.”
He was still weeping. Taylor swept the snow angrily off his thighs and marched over to where Wilber was pointing. Nothing. Of course. He came back around the front of the bus, stood over the wreck of a human being and hauled him up roughly by the arm. Wilber resisted, but Taylor was a powerful man and the Indian was on unsteady feet before he could protest further. Taylor shook him by the collar of his frayed and dirty parka. “Now, I don’t need to tell you there’s nothin’ over there. And I also don’t need to tell you you’ll be back with the RCs faster than you can say ‘I fuck dogs’ unless you pick up that shovel and shift this snow.”
Wilber looked toward the bus, then up at Taylor. “He gone?”
“Don’t give me that. Get shoveling.”
He let go of Wilber’s jacket with a push and stood with his hand on his hips until the sniffing man walked gingerly to the edge of the bus and peeked around. It was true. No one there at all. Just the shovel lying on the ground where it had slid off the fence.
He walked around the back of the bus, looking left and right as though expecting an ambush, picked up the shovel and scurried back into the foreman’s sight. Where did the guy go? There was no one in the road at all. Not even a car. Unless he’d run off into the scrub, he couldn’t have just disappeared. There were no tracks leading to the scrub, but then as Wilber looked back at the sidewalk on the other side of the fence, he noted that there were no tracks at all. Anywhere.
Taylor spat, and tramped back into the shed in search of dry clothes, leaving Wilber Stonerider with the horror that maybe it was true, the sauce was hitting him bad. He looked forlornly at the smashed bottle in the snow and scooped it up in the plastic snow shovel.
A large black bird was perched motionless on the wing mirror of the broken bus, and it stared at Wilber.
“What the fuck you lookin’ at?”
He resumed his shoveling.
The bird looked back at him for a long, long time, then flapped its waxy wings and flew off.
13
The blond boy stared up at the wolf with a mixture of awe and expectation. He jumped about three miles high when Katie spoke softly behind him.
“It’s a female. She’s protecting her cubs. See? Behind her there.”
The boy breathed out hard, whirling around to look at Katie.
“Did I g
ive you a fright? I’m sorry. Guess I shouldn’t sneak around like that. Do you like the wolves?”
The boy’s heart rate had slowed enough to speak. “Sure. They’re neat.”
“That’s the male over there. Do you notice he’s a bit bigger and a slightly different color?”
She had an arm around the boy now as they both stood looking up at the stuffed animals, whose dry, painted jaws gaped back at them in silent roars.
The boy’s mother appeared from behind a snarling grizzly bear to join them, her face registering curiosity when she saw Katie with her arm conspiratorially around her son’s shoulders.
“Will the male wolf eat the cubs?” The boy’s eyes were wide.
“Well, sometimes they can, but the mother wolf is a pretty strong force to be reckoned with. If I were him, I wouldn’t mess with Mom.” Katie looked around to greet her young charge’s mother. “Hi. Hope you’re enjoying the museum. Can I tell you that we’ll be closing in about twenty minutes? Don’t rush on out or anything, but if there’s something else you need to see, now’s the time.”
The woman smiled gratefully and politely. “Sure. That’s fine. We’ve just about covered it all. It’s been very enjoyable, thanks. Hasn’t it, Randall?”
The boy was awestruck by the wolf again. “Sure. It’s neat,” he said absently.
Katie smiled and left them to it. One quick circuit of the railroad display on the balcony to check everybody was out, and she could cram in a coffee and a sit-down before locking-up time. The wooden stairs to the balcony creaked in protest as she mounted them, but offered her a view of the whole ground floor as she climbed.
The vantage point told her that the mother and son were the last ones in, and if the boy could tear himself away from the stuffed wolves, she should have the place cleared in five minutes. Already she could hear the comforting sound of Margaret cashing out the register on the front desk, counting out the few dollars and cents that the handful of visitors to the Silver Heritage Museum had spent on postcards, pamphlets and bookmarks.
Katie cherished this time—the feeling of the museum having done its job. All visitors left delighted by the display of unpretentious, idiosyncratic mixture of local information that Katie had put together over the past five years. Stuffed animal specimens raged beside solemn Indian artifacts. Posters trying to win the custom of potential Canadian Pacific railway travelers in the 1900s were framed beside ancient and torturous-looking wooden skis. Fossils, millions of years old, sat happily in cases with blown bird eggs.
The Silver Heritage Museum wasn’t going to win any prizes for academic excellence, but for the entrance fee of a dollar it certainly gave its best shot at being value for money. And this year, Katie had managed to get a grant from the Alberta Tourist Board that would keep things ticking along financially for another two years.
The balcony that ringed the main ground floor space of the museum was a mixture of displays that hadn’t quite been rationalized. Katie had acquired some Victorian glass cases from an auction in Edmonton, and these were now filled with an assortment of items that couldn’t be crammed in downstairs. She had wanted the theme to be the building of the railroad in the late 1800s, and Silver’s important part in it. However, lack of space had made them include the history of the Kinchuinick Indians from the area; how they broke away in the eighteenth century from the larger Assiniboin and Stoney tribes to live here in the mountains. And although the native Canadians had no part in the building of the railroad, Katie dug up a tenuous historical tie-in about how tribe members had apparently hindered the largely Scottish railroad work gang during the final stages of building the Great Corkscrew Tunnel. The tunnel was the engineering feat of the century, a tunnel two miles long right through the center of Wolf Mountain.
In fact, the centerpiece of the balcony display was a working model of the Tunnel; a papier-mâché masterpiece they had commissioned from Calgary, where a tiny model train wound its way through the half-cut-away mountain when you pressed a red button on the side of the case. The kids loved it. They would stand for an age pressing and repressing the button, making the train spiral its way around the tunnel until a bored parent dragged them downstairs to the bird display.
With the mountain cut in half you could see exactly where the line went, a luxury not available in real life. The papier-mâché world was much easier to understand.
Katie knew the whole floor should have been railroad history, but she had all these great Indian domestic tools and artifacts to do with tribal worship and mythology to show and nowhere else to show them. So she banged them in the cases and hoped for the best. Sam, of course, called the Indian stuff junk. This contempt for his Indian past was something Katie had struggled to understand all their married life. Since it was virtually a taboo subject in the Hunt household, she didn’t reckon she would ever be permitted to cross that bridge into the secret place that fed Sam with his self-loathing. Nevertheless, she grieved for him when she saw it manifest itself.
Often she would look at the two unmistakably Indian faces of her children, Billy and Jess, and mourn that they would never enjoy the rich part of their heritage provided by their father’s blood. But Sam could barely say Indian or Kinchuinick without spitting the words, and she loved him too deeply to provoke the wrath he so readily turned on himself.
The beautiful carved bone amulet Sam wore around his neck, a very ancient Assiniboin charm, gave Katie her only tiny glimmer of hope that one day he would face up to his roots. She knew it had been his father’s, the male half of the dead parents Sam never spoke of, and the nature of her job told her it was valuable beyond its role of sentimental keepsake. But he offered her no explanation, no anecdotal family history, and he had taken it off only once, when he was forced to replace its leather thong after snapping it while swimming in the creek.
What kept her from prying too deeply were two things. First, she thought the ivory-colored circle of bone hanging on the tight brown skin of his hairless chest was the sexiest thing she had ever seen; and secondly, she loved him so much that anything that made hurt flit across his broad, innocent face made her die inside. So the history of Sam’s amulet was safe. Sam would never know she had located its origin in more than one book. She knew lots about that charm. One day she would talk to him about it, but not now.
Just before closing, before she turned the model off at the wall switch, she always pressed the Corkscrew Tunnel’s red button and smiled as the tiny train started its last journey of the day through the mountain of paper: her own ritual.
Ritual was important to Katie Hunt. Perhaps not quite as important as it had been to Katie Crosby, but it was still up there along with breathing and eating. But if that love of ritual had endured the years, lots of things had disappeared forever; and they started to disappear when the twenty-three-year-old Katie Jane Crosby had first gazed into the delicious, mischievous black eyes of Sam Hunting Wolf. Mostly bad things. Things she was glad to have shaken off like dandruff. Things like Tom.
That had been close. Whenever Katie thought back about how close, she shuddered.
It was Katie Crosby who used to practice signing Mrs. Tom Clark on the telephone pad when she was doodling during a long call. A real close thing. She recalled her parents’ faces that night. Expressions of almost catatonic shock, the night she let them all down. But also the night she set herself free.
It was her own fault. She should never have let Tom own her the way he did. But the things you know as a woman are different from the things you believe as a girl. He bullied her. She knew that now. Then, of course, she thought he loved her, was telling her things for her own good. Christ, she’d lied to herself all those years. Lied when she saw a line for a blockbuster movie she ached to see, when she and Tom were heading for the art-house theater to sit through a long, dark European film with subtitles. Lied to herself when Tom told her that her college friends were young and silly and he couldn’t tolerate them, that his boat-owning friends were more interesting.
But she had loved him. Slim, tall, handsome Tom. Tom who bought endless magazines about boats, who wanted to be thought an expert on books, architecture, design and civilized living, but really only knew about his resting pulse rate. Tom who was like a child, as a direct result of trying so hard to be a man. And she very nearly married him. Warning bells had been sounding long before she met Sam, but she hadn’t listened to them. Sex with Tom had started to be so infrequent and awkward she dreaded him even trying. His clumsiness made him treat it like a chore, and every bungled attempt left them beached farther apart on some strange shore. It was, after all, her fault. He told her so, often.
And all the time her parents welcomed him like he was the son they never had, never once noticing their happy-go-lucky only child growing increasingly more insecure, miserable and bitter.
Then there was Sam. The first time Sam had really made her laugh, she thought a floodgate had opened somewhere inside her. A joy so profound and delicious burst from her that she felt intoxicated. It was almost as if she’d forgotten how to laugh like that. Crying with mirth, sides aching from elation. With the laughter always came a stirring of sexual passion that made her light-headed.
And to think she nearly didn’t join her parents in Silver that year. Tom had asked her to forgo the yearly family vacation in Alberta and stay in Vancouver as his partner at some charity ball, and she had nearly said yes. Her parents didn’t expect her to come with them anymore. She was a grown woman, after all. The ball was tempting. There would be a marquee, and she could wear a taffeta ball gown and long silk evening gloves with a bracelet over the wrist. But somehow Katie wanted to be a little girl again for a few weeks. She longed to wear an old sweater and stack her dad’s woodpile neatly for him, the sensual touch and smell of the rough pine delighting her. Her routine. A routine that had survived for two decades. She wanted all that warmth and security that Tom seemed to provide but really didn’t. So she went to Silver with her delighted but surprised parents. And she met Sam Hunt.
