by Muriel Gray
He drove a bus. That’s what Sam was doing when she first saw him. Katie remembered everything about that day. It was hot as Hell, and she was wearing khaki shorts, a plain white T-shirt, a tiny tartan rucksack on her back, making her way to Lazy Hot Springs for a hike. And she was waiting to board Sam’s bus in the depot.
A big sign on a stand read PASSENGERS WAIT HERE UNTIL DRIVER CHECKS YOUR TICKET, and so she waited by it. Funny thing was, everybody else just walked by her, out through the glass swinging doors to the sidewalk and got on the bus. It sure was filling up. There were lots of Japanese, a few hiking couples and some elderly tourists. But they were all getting on the bus before her. She saw the seat she fancied was already gone, the front one opposite the driver, where you can look out front from the big windshield, and she started to get annoyed. Where was the driver? Why didn’t someone in charge come and tell all these people to wait in line like the sign said?
Then a young man appeared in the blue company overalls, holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee. A young, impossibly handsome man. Sam was twenty-five, six feet tall, his black shiny hair swept back from a noble forehead. His blue tunic top was open by three buttons, revealing a T-shirt beneath and the suggestion of tight brown pectorals. He was obviously Indian and he was also undeniably gorgeous.
The driver stopped and looked at Katie, and then at the nearly full bus through the glass doors. Walking over to her he handed her the coffee. “Can you hold this, Miss? I’ll be right back.”
She took the cup, astonished.
He boarded his busy vehicle, and she could see through the doors people standing and milling about. In seconds the passengers were pouring off the bus, back through the doors into the depot concourse.
Sam was at their back, waving his hands and shouting, “Come on, that’s it… hurry along… quick as you can…”
The passengers milled around grouchily, complaining under their breath, in front of Katie. She was going to be last again.
Sam pushed his way through to where Katie stood, took her by the hand not occupied holding his coffee, and led her to the front of the line.
He cleared his throat, and clapped his hands together twice. “Could I have your attention, please, ladies and gentlemen?”
They grew silent, some fishing around in bags for the tickets they were now going to have to present.
“I’d like to introduce you all to a very special person.”
Katie looked at him, horrified. What was this? The crowd started to look curious.
“This young lady is unique in Canada and it’s a great honor to have her with us today. We, at Fox-Line Travel, always knew that one day she would grace us with her presence, but now it’s happened, and all I can say is that I’m humbled to find that I’m one of the people to witness it.”
The crowd started to buzz with low conversation, heads bobbing up to get a look at the woman this bus driver held by the hand.
Katie was blushing to her feet. What on earth was this man doing? Who did he think she was?
Sam held up a finger. “Now, I know there’s not much time for speeches or nothing, what with the bus already a few minutes behind schedule, but let me, on behalf of the bus line, just say this.” The crowd was expectant. Sam turned to Katie, smiling, and under his breath said, “What’s your name?”
Stunned by the warmth of his smile, she replied, “Katie Crosby.”
Sam looked to his audience. “Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Katie Crosby, the only, and I mean only, woman in Canada…” he paused. “Who can FUCKING READ!”
There was a stunned and shocked silence and then Katie burst out laughing. The crowd exploded into an irritated hubbub of noise, peppered with “Well, really” and “Cheeky son of a bitch.”
Sam smiled and stood defiantly by the sign, tapping it with a finger. He let go of Katie’s hand and waved her through. “Keep the coffee. It’s milk, no sugar.”
She smiled and got on the empty bus, into her favorite seat. Opposite the driver.
Through the window she could see Sam smiling at his frowning passengers, and lip-read him saying “Tickets, please” as though he hadn’t a care in the world.
That was a great journey. They talked, of course. All the way to Lazy Hot Springs, until Katie had to get off. She’d forgotten about a hike by then. All she wanted to do was stay on that bus and talk more to the handsome funny guy at the wheel. But she got up and made to leave, and when he asked her for her phone number she told him. He smiled, opened the hydraulic doors and said, “Fox Line wishes you a nice day.”
She laughed and waved good-bye, still waving as the bus pulled away, with windows full of glowering people staring at her like she was the Antichrist.
All she thought about on the hike was Sam. Her head was spinning and she walked farther than she intended, striding out in a trance. Why would she give a bus driver her number in Silver when she practically lived with Tom? But she didn’t regret it, and when the bus back that evening was driven by a middle-aged, potbellied man with a mustache, she was crestfallen.
The phone call came the next day, her father getting there first. He asked who was speaking in a very careful and deliberate way and then called Katie to the phone in the parlor. He held the receiver out to her as if showing a child something it had damaged, as if waiting for an apology.
“A Sam Hunt. For you.”
Katie’s heart started pounding. She was as excited as a sixteen-year-old on her first date, and her father could see it through her mask of indifference.
She took the receiver without putting it to her ear and said thank you. Frank Crosby understood the gesture and left the room.
With that first hello she knew it was over with Tom. She and Sam met that afternoon in town and walked up through the trail in the forest to the old fire lookout hut. And they had sex that nearly made Katie die with ecstasy. She’d known Sam for less than twenty-four hours, but her appetite for him was insatiable. As she lay in his powerful dark brown arms, she thought that she would never be able to live without him again. With Sam it was fucking, not making love, although each act contained more love than Tom had given her in her whole life. And they talked. They talked so much Katie felt she’d known Sam since she was born.
She didn’t tell her parents a thing. Her father never asked about the phone call, and neither of them seemed to show any signs of suspecting that each time she went out she was meeting an Indian bus driver who would alternately make her laugh until she cried, and then cry out again in pleasure when he peeled off her clothes, high above town in the pines, or in the tiny wooden bed in the staff accommodation hut behind the depot.
She knew the ugly name for it, of course. Indian-struck. That was what white people said when any white girl fell for a Native Canadian man. But Katie wasn’t Indian-struck at all. She was in love with Sam: the man, not the Indian, and she wanted to make sure he knew it.
The night before the Crosbys were due to leave she met him at the fire hut. She held his hands and looked into his black eyes very earnestly indeed.
She was going back to Vancouver, she said. She was going back to tell her boyfriend that it was over, and then she would come straight back to Silver and be with him.
Katie braced herself for Sam to be skeptical, to dismiss her as a middle-class girl who’d used him for some rough-stuff vacation fun, and to be angry and hurt. But Sam looked straight back into her eyes, and said, “I know you will.”
She thought about Tom on the car journey all the way back to Vancouver, about how she could tell him without hurting him.
She loved him still, in a nostalgic kind of way. She’d been his girl almost half her adult life. A life together was taken for granted. But now the thought of him even kissing her made her wriggle with discomfort.
There were no recriminations from her parents, and she loved them for that. But there was talking to be done, as her father put it, and never mind them, he thought Tom deserved an explanation.
So she w
rote it all down in a letter and posted it to him. Nothing about Sam, just about her and Tom and why it could never work, then packed a bag and made a rail reservation. She didn’t tell her parents who she’d fallen for. She wanted to see if it was enough for them that she needed to be free, that she yearned for something else other than a middle-class life in a Vancouver suburb. And it seemed to be. They asked no questions. They gave her the keys to the house in Silver and kissed her good-bye. When Katie Crosby stepped on that eastbound Via Rail train, she had never felt so free in her life.
The miracle was there. Sam was at the station.
Katie saw him from the window before the train stopped, a tall, solitary figure leaning against a wooden parcel trolley. She was completely unable to decipher the emotion that the sight of that patient, hopeful man standing alone on a train platform stirred in her. It was more than love and gratitude. It was more than the very real need to weep. It seemed as though he had always been there, waiting for her to realize who she was and come and find him. But even that could not fully explain the complexity of her passion.
Katie watched as Sam scanned the crowd of passengers weaving their way from the train to the street. He saw her. The invisible beam of light between them set fire to his face, but he walked rather than ran to her. They said nothing for nearly a full minute as he held her, then he held her face in his hands. “I thought I’d check the trains every day for a month.”
That was his explanation. Simple.
“And then what? What about the fifth week?”
He looked down into her eyes, milky blue jewels, swimming with tears. “And then I’d check them for another month.”
They married nine days later, and Mr. and Mrs. Hunt started married life in the tiny staff accommodation room that Sam rented from the bus company. He wouldn’t use the Crosbys’ house and Katie respected his wishes. It wasn’t hard for Katie to get a job in Silver. Everyone knew Frank and June Crosby’s girl, and within a month of having run out on Tom, Katie was a happily married woman, selling fossils and loose gemstones to Japanese tourists in a lobby arcade shop in The Rocky Mountain Chateau, the massive Canadian Pacific hotel on the edge of town.
Of course there was tension on the day they picked Frank and June up from Calgary Airport, but it was a lot for the Crosbys to take in at once. She forgave them, like she hoped they would forgive her.
And two beautiful grandchildren had subsequently softened everything. Now, her parents liked to think of themselves as shining white liberals, proud their daughter had rejected the prize of North American conspicuous consumption for love.
Oh, it was love all right. A deep, enduring, growing and generous love. He had never once let her down in any aspect of their life, and she hoped he could say the same of her. She loved Sam and her children more than anything in the world, and the snarling female wolf downstairs would have tough competition from Katie when it came to who was more terrifying in defending her family.
Which was why her antennae were twitching now. Sam wasn’t himself. It wasn’t just the blackouts, it was as though he was fighting some secret battle.
Katie ran a hand over the top of the model mountain’s glass case and then walked to the wall to unplug the cable.
The snow was piling up outside and she looked forward to kicking her way home through it, letting the big flakes settle on her hair and the cold making her cheeks blush. Katie Hunt loved the snow. But Katie Hunt did not love secrets, which was why she was going to keep a watchful eye on her family. The stuffed wolf continued to bare its teeth silently downstairs, in a lifeless tableau of female solidarity.
Eric Sindon’s formidable rota hadn’t taken Sam’s involuntary stopover at Stoke into account. There were no points for getting stranded in the snow, and certainly no favors for manual groomers, a species regarded by Silver Ski Company as only slightly further up the food chain than lichen.
Sam found his welcome back to a full day at the depot consisted of being assigned to the bottom station of the Beaver chairlift, on the day of the fun run. The Beaver run, an easy green trail, was in shade all morning until the sun crept up and hit it around two-thirty. The geeks in fancy dress would come down then, racing for some dumb prize, dressed like morons. Another idea of Pasqual Weaver’s. But that wouldn’t happen until the sun came around. That meant Sam had to freeze his balls off in the shadow of the mountain for six hours while he loaded untidy, grouchy herds of beginners onto the creaky old chairlift. Meanwhile, the lucky guys who drew a longer straw with Sindon basked in the sun on the south-facing slopes, saluting happy passengers on the high-speed quads, and working on their tans.
As Sam shoveled more snow onto the chair run-up platform, Eric Sindon’s rota of injustice was far from his mind.
Dreams were one thing. Blackouts that left you unable to account for your actions were another. Sam had wrestled with his damaged memory since waking at Stoke, trying in vain to recall how he came to be in the truck. The part of it all that stung him hard was the blood. There was no escape from the fact. His face, his chin to be exact, had been covered in thick, dried, blackened blood. Sam had woken in the warm truck to find himself halfway up the pass from Stoke, on the edge of the highway with the engine running. He had sat in the cab for at least five minutes trying to figure out what the hell had gotten him there, until a glance in the rearview mirror let him catch sight of his face. Everything below his nose was black with it. It caked his face like a kid’s first chocolate brownie at a party.
His first thought was that he was dying. The panic that rose in his breast sent images of Katie and the kids whirling in front of his eyes, and although he wasn’t aware of it at the time, he had croaked Katie’s name as his hands flew to his face.
But the blood was old, and Sam was not wounded. Half-falling from the cab into the road, he scrubbed at his face with handfuls of snow until the blood, and what felt like most of his head, had finally disappeared.
Now, faced with the grinding normality of the first of the morning’s skiers clattering onto the chair, the incident felt like a distant and vile nightmare. Except that Sam knew it had been real.
The cold was real, too. And the conditions were hellish. All this snow might be good for business, but only if it would damn well stop. It was clear right now, but the blizzards had been rolling in and out of Silver like they’d been ordered. Huge dumps aren’t much use if the pass keeps closing, he thought. This morning it was minus twenty at the lodge, and Sam shoveled like a fevered gold prospector to keep his circulation going.
Two early morning ski patrollers, Baz and Grant, who’d been laying the slalom poles for the fun run, skidded up to the chair, coming to a halt with whoops in a high spray of snow directly and deliberately aimed at Sam, with the misguided intention of making him laugh. Mistake.
“Go fuck yourselves,” Sam barked at them from beneath his new mantle of snow, like a snowman possessed by a demon.
“Hey. So the customer relations course went well then, Sam, huh?” Baz laughed with an abandon that came with the knowledge he’d soon be skiing in the sun with girls looking at his butt.
“Sure. Soon as I see any customers I’ll give ‘em a hug and ask them back home for dinner. Meanwhile all I see are assholes with backpacks.”
Grant smiled. “Whoooeee, Baz! Let’s hope Mr. Hunt don’t break a leg when we’re on duty. So long, Sam. Keep smiling, you hear?”
They slipped forward onto a chair that Sam kicked as it moved off, leaving the boys rocking their way up the hill, their laughter dying in the deeper shadow of the pines.
Sam ran a hand over his face in exasperation. No point taking it out on his buddies. He already regretted the exchange, but it was too late to do anything about it now, short of growing wings and flying after Baz to apologize. What would he say anyway? Sorry guys. On edge today. You see, I’ve been blacking out lately, and yesterday I may have just gotten into the habit of packing away a live coyote for a snack while I’m out cold.
He leaned on h
is shovel and looked out toward the mountains of the back bowl. The peaks of the Rockies looked back at him with a beautiful indifference. Sam turned the key in that little space at the back of his mind for a moment, allowing himself to wonder what his ancestors dreamed, planned and worried over as they moved about these peaks and valleys.
He knew what his immediate ancestors thought about. A bottle of fortified wine in a brown bag. But the ancient ones, the ones who told stories around fires instead of shuffling out of their prefabs to play bingo for liquor money—did they ever guess that life would be so different, so impossible, for the grandchildren of their grandchildren?
As if in answer, a chill wind with a cargo of drifting snowflakes eddied around the hut and tugged at Sam’s jacket. He resumed his shoveling without looking up to greet the couple of skiers who climbed onto the Beaver in a miserable silence that echoed his own.
14
He had seen that movie, The Wizard of Oz, many times before. It was always on at Christmas, when they would sit around the big old teak-boxed TV in his sister-in-law’s place, drinking beer solemnly and silently.
Calvin Bitterhand thought it was a pretty special movie, but the bit he liked the most was when the woman with the braids saw the big green city for the first time. Viewed it across some poppy fields, as far as he recalled. The first time he saw Calgary he thought it was just like the green city. Not on account of being green, which it wasn’t, but the way the big tall buildings stuck straight out of the prairie, huddling together as though height was a crime on such a pool-table-flat land. But then maybe all cities looked like that. This was the only one he’d ever been to. It sure didn’t look much like the green city when you were inside it, though.
