THE TRICKSTER

by Muriel Gray

  The phone warbled again and she picked it up, still looking directly at Eric. “Silver Ski Company, Betsy speaking. How may I help you?”

  Eric got up and wandered over to Sitconski’s desk. Looked like he’d been working on the rota, very thoroughly indeed. Beside two names there were pencil marks. Of course there was nothing odd about making pencil notes beside names that needed attention. But these ripped through the paper and left shards of broken lead embedded in the paper like shrapnel.

  “Hey, hey, hey! Here comes Sean! Would you get that!”

  The high-speed quad delivered an eighteen-year-old boy on skis dressed inexpertly as an Indian chief. His gaudy feather headdress fluttered madly in the breeze, and a makeshift loincloth that was wrapped around tight ski pants was lifted to his friends in a burlesque gesture of vulgarity that passed as a greeting. Eight people hollered and fell about shrieking with laughter as the blond boy skied up to them performing a mock war dance with knees wreathed in neckties.

  The gang of laughing youths were in no position to mock.

  Two were dressed as cowboys; one as a clown; three girls attempted to look like Playboy bunnies, diminishing the effect by the thermal tops they had on under the bustiers; and the remaining two, a couple, had made little more effort than buying masks of a Jurassic Park velociraptor and ET.

  Sean’s was the best costume, which wasn’t saying much. But with the odd assortment of clothes he wore combined with that huge waving headdress, he was more like a real Indian chief than anything Hollywood could come up with. Apart from his pink Rossignols and ski boots, he could have stepped out of a sepia photograph from the town museum. Those long-dead men had sported the same ragbag inattention to detail that Sean boasted, though they were saved from ridicule by a glint of power and nobility in their eyes that was plainly absent from the boy’s. Yes, he looked like an Indian. The old folks lining up a few yards away thought so too. Their frowns and muttering indicated they were offended.

  One of them, a woman in her fifties dressed in Victorian skirts and a bonnet, skied over to where Sean was busy being slapped on the back by the cowboys and touching the heads of the genuflecting girls in front of him.

  “That’s in rather poor taste, don’t you think?”

  Eight young, golden-tanned faces looked at the woman, then at each other, and burst out laughing.

  The woman’s voice became shrill with anger and embarrassment. “Our Native Canadian heritage is not a joke.”

  She slid away, hot and bothered. “God help Canada,” she said in a loud voice as they retreated.

  “God help America, lady! We’re from California!”

  That sent them into a new wave of hilarity, interrupted only by Mike Watts, the ski patroller at the start line, clacking his ski poles together for attention.

  “OK, guys, welcome to the Silver Fun Run. Well, well, we’ve got some neat costumes here today.”

  The kids started imitating the patroller. Neat was not how they liked to be described.

  “Hey, Barney. Neat costume, man.”

  Hoots and shouts of mirth. The patroller smiled wearily and carried on. Kids. They could give him as hard a time as they liked. Soon as they started moving on those skis, Mike would have their respect. He could ski the fanny off any of them and they could shove their Californian tans. It was always the ones who made the most noise standing at the top of a trail who went very quiet on their way down the hill in the meat wagon, strapped into that stretcher after breaking their bodies in dumb accidents. Despite the temptation, Mike Watts never leaned over the stretcher and said I told you so.

  “Yeah, right, guys. We’re goin’ to start out from the line here…”

  The Californians were finding Mike’s Canadian flattened vowel sound on out the funniest thing they’d heard. From the group came lots of oowt sounds accompanied by cries of neat! Mike sighed before continuing. It was going to be a long day.

  “… and then the race will commence down the Beaver run, through the slalom poles you see there, ending at Beaver Lodge, where you’ll be judged not only on your time, but on the originality of your costume.”

  The old folks looked smug, their nods and smiles telling of their conviction that their Victorian skiing-party theme would win the day with dignity. The kids whooped and hollered neat!

  “So if you want to register here now, pick up a numbered bib, then there’s ten minutes for a practice run, just to get those legs warmed up. OK, everybody. Have a great fun run, remember to ski safe and good luck.”

  The older participants applauded Mike politely while a scuffle of wrestling and jostling kids ignored the end of his speech and hurried to the starting post to pick up their bibs.

  One of the girls in the pathetic bunny outfit brushed Mike as she passed, letting the hand not holding her poles run across his buttocks. “Sorry, Mr. Canuck. Hand slipped.”

  Mike swung his ski around in front of hers, making her jolt to a halt and caught her around the waist before she fell.

  He spoke in low voice, right in her ear. “Missy, if I fucked you, you wouldn’t sit down for a week.” He flashed a huge grin at the horrified girl as if he’d just read the snow report, and let her go with a gentlemanly flourish. “Have a nice one, you hear?”

  The flushed bunny hurried to get her number and hide in the sanctuary of her young companions. Mike smiled and pushed off down the trail to man his post at the slalom.

  The clown and the two cowboys were trying to step on each other’s bindings and unclip them while the girls tied each other’s bibs on. The Victorian party had already registered, been numbered and were pushing off for the practice.

  As Sean fooled around, registering with a tolerant patroller, two guys in Mambo suits slid past on Völkl P9s. They looked like pretty hot skiers. Sean turned to smile at them, maybe give them an OK with his thumb and forefinger to let them know he was part of the brotherhood of hot skiers too.

  The older guy looked back impassively. “Fun run, huh? Guess that’s goin’ to feature big in the next Greg Stump video.”

  His streamlined companion laughed and they slid past, making sure the costumed contestants, but not the patrollers, saw them when they slid under the ski-trail tape and jumped off the cornice.

  Sean squirmed with embarrassment. It had been his idea in the bar last night to enter this dumb thing. Thought it would be a hoot. But the old crumblies took it seriously, and the cool guy was right. This was for kids. “I’m not going to wear a dumb piece of cloth with a number,” whined Sean to Barney the clown, who had lost the bindings war and was trying to step back into his ski with a boot clogged with snow.

  “So don’t wear it, man. You won’t win anyhow. You ski like a girl.”

  Sean spat, squinting toward the cornice. “Yeah?”

  Barney looked where Sean was looking and understood. They checked out the patroller, busy putting a bib on a seven-year-old dressed as a witch, and pushed forward toward the tape. Beneath them, a double black diamond mogul field stretched all the way to the foot of Beaver, running parallel to the easy green trail. It was a bitch of a run. Bumps as hard as rocks, narrow and hemmed in on both sides by trees that kept its challenge out of the sight of the beginners on the green trail. The fun run wasn’t taking them anywhere near it, and it had been closed to stop the kids slipping in by mistake on their way to the start of the big safe highway down the hill. But it was nothing they couldn’t handle. Sean looked at the tracks of the two guys who’d just leaped in there, snaking through the bumps in perfect semicircles, then glanced across at his clown companion.

  “Let’s do it.”

  They slid beneath the tape and dropped in.

  Barney whooped and absorbed the first big bump with a grunt, losing it slightly but recovering in time to make a series of three small turns that checked his speed. The Indian chief on his heels was going for it in a big way. He wanted those guys to see him. He wasn’t a soft kid. He could ski the bumps like the best of them, even in this crazy cheap
headdress Shelly had got for him. He jumped off the top of the first bump and overtook Barney on the next, finding time in the air over the next to give him the finger.

  Barney was hot on his heels, laughing and shouting. “I’m there, man! I’m there!”

  Sean misread the next bump and it threw his weight back. His thighs screamed with the effort of recovery but it gave Barney the time he needed and put him ahead. They were halfway down the trail now, the Beaver Lodge and chairlift in sight in the narrow gap between the pines. Barney sliced on ahead and then Sean caught an edge. It was all over. He flew over the top of his skis, arms out like a genuine priest giving benediction, landing on his chin with a dull, wet thud, and carried on tumbling sideways into the trees. Sean’s world went white, sharp and ice-cold; he gasped for breath as the fall winded him, punching the air from his lungs with a frozen fist.

  The fall was short but violent, and Barney was gone by the time Sean finally came to a gasping, groaning stop between two tall pines well off the trail.

  “Jesus Christ!” He groaned and slowly and methodically checked that his limbs were all pointing the right way. Nothing broken. No harm done. He wiped his snow-covered face and started to laugh, lying where he came to rest, in a huge drift beneath the tree. Sean was thankful he was right in among the trees, but not wrapped around one with his skull smashed in. Lucky, lucky, lucky. No one would see him here. Not even if they were skiing past. The humiliation of one of those guys popping their heads over him and asking if he was all right would be more than he could bear. He was safe here. He pushed himself up on one elbow and started to brush the snow from his chest.

  Around him were all the sights and sounds of normality, the melancholy creaking and banging of the Beaver chair twenty yards away on the other side of these trees and the low voices of people talking on that chair. The pines above him swayed in a light wind, and faraway shrieks of laughter accompanied someone wiping out and enjoying it. Everything as it should be.

  He laughed at his plight, and shook his head, thinking of the tale he would have for the guys.

  And then behind him, in the trees, a dry rustling sound.

  He swung around to locate it and the feathers of his broken headdress turned with him, like the plumage of a wounded and frightened bird. His eyes widened, and the metallic taste of adrenaline coated the inside of his mouth as he distended it to make a sound that it had never made before.

  The Beaver chair was noisy, all right. So noisy that the people swinging up the hill on the gunmetal-gray seats didn’t hear Sean Bradford.

  Even though when Sean’s screaming started, he screamed for at least half a minute until the biological machinery enabling his scream was silenced forever.

  The big man from New York in a lemon-yellow one-piece ski suit was not pleased that the chairlift station was unattended. He turned to his wife snowplowing to a halt behind him with their daughter and made a face. “Guess they don’t go big on safety or service in Canada.”

  He unhooked his poles from two fat wrists and ushered his equally fat, sullen daughter toward the clanking chairs, turning solemnly on their own around the pylon and jerking empty back up the hill. The tiny wooden hut was deserted. There was no one around at all. No one to shovel the snow onto the mounting platform. No one to wipe the snow from the seats. No one to say, “Have a nice day, ski safe.”

  “I tell you, Marsha, if any of us fall getting on this contraption I’ll sue the balls off this resort.”

  Marsha nodded in agreement, too tired from following her portly partner around the mountain all day to argue or disagree. She and her daughter stepped herringbone fashion, clumsily like ducks, up to the snow-covered wooden plank that was the primitive mounting platform. Heads turned to look behind them; they waited for the next chair to scoop them up.

  It did so without incident, and the father slid forward to catch the next one.

  Out of the trees a man in a Silver Ski Company jacket stumbled toward the station. The father stepped back from the chair and let it go. He had a few words to say to this guy, all right.

  Sam Hunt gasped as he made it to the snow fence surrounding the hut, his head still spinning, his vision trying to sort itself out as his eyes swivelled in their sockets. He was going crazy. He didn’t even remember blacking out this time. Just waking up staring at the odd shapes of sky made by the gaps in the treetops above him. The branches had swayed and bowed, changing those shapes of sky for at least a minute, accompanied by Sam’s breathing and the sound in his ears of blood coursing around his body, before he had realized that he was on his back in the snow, in the trees above the Beaver chairlift station.

  Sam had felt like screaming. He had sat up and looked wildly around him as though something might be waiting for him to stir. But he had been alone. Alone and cold.

  He had stood up with difficulty in the thick drift and stumbled toward his station, tripping and being whipped by low branches as he’d waded through the snow-covered deadfall to where he was last conscious. When he saw the chairlift station and its one customer in a yellow suit, his vision was still swimming, and his heart was battering in his chest.

  The New Yorker looked at this man with distaste. An Indian. He might have known. He leaned on his pole and waited for the figure to reach the place he was paid to be. When Sam got there, his line of travel heading for the hut, a lemon-yellow arm with a pole barred his way.

  “Hey, buddy. Don’t you think you should shut the chair down if you want to take a leak?”

  Sam stopped and looked into the man’s face. Cold gray eyes looked back, full of contempt and aggression.

  Sam found his voice, and his manners, in that turmoil that was still churning in his chest and stomach. He took a breath. “Sorry, mister. Got sick back there,” he gasped.

  The man was unimpressed. “Sick, huh?”

  “Yeah. Sick.”

  “Sick as in ill, or sick as in loaded?”

  Sam swallowed. He fought back that dark feeling coming from the base of his spine and clenched his fists inside his work gloves. Not now. No hassle now. Please.

  “Just plain sick. Want a chair?”

  The man remained leaning on his pole, in the manner of a ski tutor instructing a class. “No, buddy. I want an apology.”

  Sam said nothing. He looked back up at the frees, his mind wandering back to what had happened to him. With his eyes still on the close-packed pines he said absently, “Sorry for any inconvenience. Have a nice day.”

  No use. Not enough. Lemon Yellow wasn’t budging. “You call that an apology?”

  Sam looked back into his scowling face. “Sure, I call that an apology.”

  The man stood up straight, taking his weight off the pole, and pulled back his shoulders like a bodyguard defending the hut. “Maybe you people don’t understand English so good. When white folks say apology they mean saying sorry for something.”

  Sam’s brow darkened. He spoke softly. “Gee. So that’s what white folks mean. Tell me, what do they mean when they say ‘Fuck off, you fat asshole’?”

  The New Yorker’s voice was bubbling with controlled rage when he replied. “OK, buddy. I’m not leaving this resort today until you’re out of a job. You sure picked the wrong wagon to burn.”

  He turned and skied off down the hill, clearly indicating he was off to the base lodge. Halfway up the Beaver chair his abandoned wife and child swung their way back up the mountain, unaware that they were on their own for the rest of the day. Sam watched the yellow suit disappear down the hill and lurched into his hut. Right now, he didn’t care about his job. He cared about his head. Sam Hunt didn’t want to die.

  Slumping heavily down on the folding plastic seat inside the hut, Sam bent forward and held his aching head in his hands. A brain tumor could be treated. He just needed a scan, that was all. Something to look in there and see what was wrong. Because Sam now admitted to himself something was very wrong indeed. Would he have to go to the hospital in Calgary? he wondered. What if he never c
ame out? It was time to tell Katie just how bad things were. He sat up. If that guy in the yellow suit did what Sam suspected he was going to do, he might have to tell Katie they were short of one salary, too. What did that matter, compared with the possibility that her husband, Jess and Billy’s father, might be dying of a brain tumor?

  It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been in trouble for losing his temper at a moron. His own mouth had been his biggest enemy back in the days of driving for Fox Line. The depot manager, Jim Henderson, had often pulled Sam in and had a word in his ear. He was a nice guy, Jim. Gave Sam the job in the first place. Meant well. But he didn’t know what he was talking about.

  How could Jim Henderson know what it was like to be born on the Redhorn reservation, to be a man treated like a child by the world on account of his skin? Or the hoops of fire children went through in that place on the way to being grown?

  Did he know what it was like to be in that cabin high in the aspen wood one night, age fourteen, standing over that thing on the rough wooden floor? The thing that had been his father. The thing that was cut open in a lake of blood, and had its organs in brand-new places. Places you wouldn’t dream of.

  No, no, no, no, NO! Jesus! Where did that come from? Push the thought away. Fast. It mustn’t come back. Sam was shaking in the hut. He knew now he was really sick. He’d kept that memory buried pretty successfully for over twenty years in a sealed black pit. It was a very deep pit, and for the most part it kept it quiet. How come it was crawling out?

  The walkie-talkie hanging on a wall peg crackled into life. “All stations, this is patrol. Can you guys look out for a skier from the fun run dressed like an Indian? His buddies are worried they haven’t seen him. Seems the dummy did the closed double black down Beaver. Anyone got a sighting? He could have just legged it off resort. Also, two manual groomers to the top station, please. We got a bit of a bare patch on the drag-tow needs shoveling. Over.”

  Sam looked at the radio numbly. He was too sick for this. He needed to go home. He reached up, unhitched the radio and pressed “talk.” “This is Beaver chair. Can someone relieve me? I need to go home sick. Over.”