THE TRICKSTER

by Muriel Gray

  “Isn’t he fabulous?”

  Mrs. Crosby’s low voice. “You’re going to have to give us time, Peach. Married, a baby, everything. Let us catch our breath.”

  “Are you mad I fell in love with a Native Canadian?”

  A sarcastic laugh from Frank. “Native Canadian. Is that how we have to address them now?”

  “How would you like to, Daddy? Wagon-burners? Squaw-fuckers?”

  “Katie! That’s enough.”

  “No, it’s not enough. I know I’ve put you through it, what with running out on Tom and all.”

  Her mother sounded close to tears. “That’s a bit of an understatement.”

  “I know. I’m not sorry about any of it except the bits that hurt you. But you’re hurting me now. Is that what you want?”

  “Oh, darling. We don’t want to hurt you. Try and see this from our point of view.”

  Sam felt like a spy. He couldn’t help overhearing and he was rooted to the spot.

  “Which is?”

  “Which is we want the best for you. We always have.”

  “And you don’t think that sweet, darling, funny, generous, clever man out there is the best thing for me. Is that it?”

  Her father sounded tired. “What does it matter what we think, Katie? You’ll just do as you please, anyway.”

  There was a silence again. Sam could only imagine what was happening. He felt utterly and completely impotent. Katie sounded composed when she broke that silence.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought I was talking to the two people I loved most in the world all my life. Obviously there’s been an invasion from Mars and my parents have been replaced by aliens. ‘Cause you guys are sure making a good job of behaving like strangers right now. Can I just rewind a tape here, folks? We want you to be happy. That’s all. Ring a bell? You said it often enough. Didn’t you mean it? Well, let me tell you that for years I’ve been trying to make you two happy as well. Ever think of that? That it works both ways? Did I do anything wrong? Did I embarrass you or shame you? Did I disrespect or disobey you? Or did I love and cherish you both, as I do now?”

  Her mother was crying now. He could hear her sobbing. “Peach, darling, we’re not saying…”

  “No. Come on. Let’s face it. You let me down. You must have seen how unhappy I was with Tom, but you never said anything. You never said ‘We want the best for you, darling’ when he was ordering me around in front of you like I was a retarded child. Did you? Did you?”

  Silence. Sam held the windowsill. His hand brushed a pine cone animal, a little body and head made from different-sized cones, tiny feet made from wood shavings, mounted inexpertly on a sliced log. Katie Crosby, the child artist, on vacation in a different life. He touched it gently with the tip of his forefinger as he heard his wife continue on the other side of the door.

  “So I made my escape on my own, without your help. And now when I know what is good for me and I’ve never been happier in my whole goddamn life, you trot out the ‘what’s best for you’ crap. I thought you were better than that, Dad.”

  “Are you surprised?”

  “Gutted.”

  Her mother was sniffing. He heard Katie say softly, “Come here,” and knew she’d taken her mother into her arms. Her voice was gentle now, her temper spent. “Do you remember the time you took me to the rodeo on the Kalinka reservation one summer, Dad?”

  No response.

  “Well, I do. I remember it real well. You were so moved by those people’s horsemanship. That woman, remember, who rode around those barrels like she was nailed to the horse? I recall you picking me up and putting me on that high wooden fence to get a better view, and you said, ‘We owe these people a debt we can’t repay, Peach. We can just marvel now at how their dignity and nobility has survived. There it is out there for anyone with eyes to see.’

  “That’s what you said. I was so proud of you. I thought you were so compassionate and understanding and big-hearted. Now you’re standing here like you got a white pointy sheet on your head. What’s gone wrong, Dad?”

  “I guess I was being romantic, Katie. You were too young to see what was going on out of the arena. The drunks. The fights.”

  “Yeah. None of us have ever seen white Canadians get loaded and act like assholes at a rodeo. Right?”

  “We love you, Katie.”

  “Then love him too. He’s the father of your grandchild.”

  Another pause.

  “If you hurt Sam, you hurt me.”

  There was the sound of a chair scraping across the floor, and Sam imagined someone was taking a seat. The kitchen door opened and Katie’s father walked out, stopping abruptly as he viewed Sam, surprised to see him standing at the window. His eyes told the tale that he realized and regretted that Sam had heard everything.

  Frank Crosby crossed the room to his new son-in-law and stopped in front of him. Oh, God, thought Sam. Here it comes.

  Katie’s father held out a liver-spotted hand to him. “Sam. Will you accept my apologies for a rather unpleasantly cool reception into the family?”

  The kitchen door was open. Katie was standing in the frame looking at the back of her father’s head with blazing eyes.

  Sam looked down at the hand on offer, and back up at Frank Crosby’s face. I should lay him out, he thought. I should spit on his hand and walk out of this house a man.

  But he could see bits of Katie there. The fold of skin at the corner of the eyes that stopped them short of being almond, the pointed chin, albeit surrounded by a few more folds of flesh in this face, the small-lobed ears.

  He knew then that his love of his wife and unborn child was greater than any hurt that this confused, guilty and bigoted white man, or any man, could inflict. He loved Katie, and for her he would build a bridge over these white people’s ignorance so that his child could run between them all.

  His hand touched Frank’s and they closed their fingers together.

  When she had spoken to him that first day on the bus, he had waited for the letdown. The bit when all the white girls who got the hots for him broached the subject of his race and his past. Katie had leaned over to him and said, “Can I ask you something real personal?”

  He’d nodded, waiting for it. Would it be the tepee question? Say, did you ever really live in one of those pointy tents? Or maybe the other crappy one about some initiation rites they’d seen in westerns. That seemed to turn on some of the bimbos at the ski company, the ones he’d laid occasionally out of boredom and loneliness. He didn’t want Katie to be like that.

  Please, God, no. She had cleared her throat, and his heart had sunk in case this woman he felt he knew was going to let it all slip away.

  She’d looked serious, really studying his face. “You know the robot in Lost In Space? Were you frightened at the end of every show when he waved those arms around and hollered, Warning! Warning! Danger!?”

  Sam had looked across into her solemn eyes and held them with his own as long as he could without crashing the bus. “I used to shit my pants,” he replied.

  She had bloomed into a grateful smile and sat back in her seat. “There. I knew we were separated at birth.”

  That was who he took that handshake for. That was why two years later he accepted the gift of the house from that man who shook his hand. Was he to deny his wife and children a comfortable life to keep his fragile pride intact? No siree. Sometimes Sam Hunt felt like he didn’t have much to be proud about at all except his family. Fuck all that stuff about whose house it was.

  He leaned forward and stabbed at a log with the brass poker that leaned against the stone chimney. The wood hissed back at him like a snake.

  Katie went to draw the curtains in Jess’s room as quietly as she could, now that her daughter was safely in her pajamas, tucked up and asleep. With a hand on the blue fabric dotted with flying pink ponies, she hesitated as she looked out of the window. There were flashing red and blue lights way over to the east on what must be the Trans-Canada. She could ju
st see the dancing beams above the rooftops reflecting on the low, heavily laden snow clouds. There must be a hell of a lot of lights. Jesus, thought Katie. Looks like a pile-up. People drove like morons in the snow.

  She drew the curtains over the scene and hoped it wasn’t as bad as it looked. There had been a lot of sad stuff in Silver lately. More than its fair share. She had enough to worry about on her own doorstep without having to ponder what automobile carnage was happening on the edge of town.

  She crossed her arms and leaned against the windowsill, looking into the room at her daughter’s bed.

  It could be a tumor. It could be something simple. But if she had to knock him unconscious and drag him by his ear, Katie Hunt was going to get her husband into the hands of someone who’d take a look and help him out. She hadn’t seen him like this before. Sam was the strongest man she had ever known. Not physically, but in his resolve. He could take things on the chin that would knock most folks down like bowling pins. And he’d shared every rap, every blow with her since they met. Nothing was secret. This time, though, it seemed there was a fear he wasn’t telling her about. And that worried her more than anything else in the world.

  She crossed to the bed, kissed Jess and went next door to Billy. He was already in bed. “Ooops. Sorry. Wrong room. I was looking for Billy Hunt, but he’d still be dressed, playing with his computer.”

  “I’m tired.”

  She sat on the edge of his bed and put a hand on his brow. “Feel OK, B. Boy?”

  He smiled up at her, enjoying her cool palm on his head. “Sure.”

  “Good.”

  “Is Dad sick?”

  “I’m sure he’s fine, Billy. We’ll get him sorted out. Don’t worry.”

  Billy smiled up at his mom. She took her hand off his brow and fussed with his comforter. “Do you want Bart in here tonight?”

  “No. Not tonight.”

  That threw his mother. Billy turning down the offer of having that big ball of fur at the foot of his bed was as likely as him offering to sweep the yard. She was puzzled, but finished her fussing and left him with a kiss, too weary to pursue any more irregularities in the Hunt house. Billy turned over as she switched off the light and half-shut the door. He wanted Bart there, of course, but when Billy was the wolf he preferred to be alone. Just in case.

  24

  “Should we stop?”

  The tailback from the roadblock was solid. Horizon-to-horizon solid. A cop was waving Daniel and Craig on through the gap between patrol cars, but the pack of reporters had spotted them and surged forward. They were local. Craig recognized most of them. The networks hadn’t made it yet. But they would.

  He sighed. “Give me two minutes, then hustle me away. Any excuse.”

  Daniel Hawk pulled up on the verge. Craig stepped out and motioned to the two officers holding back the gaggle of storm-jacketed reporters to let them at him.

  “What’s going on up at the ski area, Officer?”

  “What are you looking for in this roadblock, Staff Sergeant?”

  “Have you heard that an elderly couple were helped from their car back there with the first signs of exposure? Care to comment?”

  Craig let them holler and hoot until they stopped, then he took his hand from his pocket and gesticulated up the mountain behind him. “I can tell you we have a serious incident up on the hill and we are continuing the block until we’ve cleared all vehicles that may have been in this area at that time.”

  Another burst.

  “What’s the nature of the incident?”

  “Is it a murder?”

  Then, “Was it another cop?”

  Craig looked over at the questioner to his right. A tall, blond woman.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Was the death another policeman? I believe you lost one of your detachment on Tuesday.”

  Craig’s heart sank. He looked her straight in her pale blue eyes. “I can’t at this time divulge the nature of the incident and I have no further comment. You’ll be kept informed. Thank you.”

  They went berserk. That woman had really stirred their blood. He glanced across at her as he turned to walk back to the car and the cops herded the shouting reporters away. A delicate creature, despite her height, dressed not in the Day-Glo shell jacket uniform of the regular press hound but in a long black coat. Nor was she shouting questions at his back. She was looking at him with an expression that was doing something to a very private part of his head and his balls.

  He was still looking at her as Daniel drove across the central verge and onto the empty slip-road to town.

  “Give them what they wanted?”

  “Nothing like.”

  They drove in silence for a few minutes while Craig wrestled with his reaction to that face. For a man who had been celibate more than two years, it wouldn’t make headline news, but it bothered him like hell. He filed it and dismissed it.

  “So. Sam Hunt. What do we know, Hawk?”

  “An apple.”

  “An apple?”

  “Red on the outside, white on the inside.”

  “What’s he done to deserve that slander?”

  “You think that’s slander?”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  Daniel shrugged. “He married white. His wife runs the Silver Heritage Museum.”

  “OK. I’ve seen her. So that’s his big crime, is it? Marrying someone who can’t hold their own in a chicken dance.”

  Daniel nearly smiled this time, then decided against it.

  “I didn’t say it was a crime. It’s a state of mind. If you want to live off-reservation, sometimes you have to work pretty hard at staying Indian. Sam just chose to forget it.”

  Craig studied Hawk in the illuminated gaps between the half shadows of the streetlights. His profile was unmistakably Indian. But his short black hair, cut like that of a sixties astronaut, was not helping give the cop the image of a Hollywood Comanche. If Hawk was working hard at being an off-reservation Indian, he needed to work harder still. He just looked like a cop.

  “How do you manage?”

  “It’s easier for me. My family are all full Kinchuinick. We talk Siouan at home. We keep up with a lot of the old ways.”

  Craig put his folder on the floor at his feet. To be honest, he didn’t care if Daniel kept up with the old ways or not. The old ways were gone.

  “You knew Hunt when you grew up?”

  “Nope. Met him for the first time in Silver.”

  “But you knew of him?”

  “Yeah. We knew all about his family.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  “Bad motherfuckers, every last one of them. His father was a shit on legs.”

  “Want to expand on that? I mean, how bad are we talking here? Jaywalking or international terrorism?”

  “We’re talking a Mrs. Hunting Wolf with a face so regularly rearranged by her husband that she lost an eye, and a son who spent most of his childhood roughing it in the foothills rather than go back to that cabin…” He paused, as if ashamed to have said so much. “So they say.”

  “Hunting Wolf. That’s his name?”

  “Was his name. He changed it when his father left. That’s all I know. Gossip mainly.”

  They pulled into Oriole and cruised up the snow-clogged street looking for the Hunt house.

  “And has Mr. Sam Hunting Wolf inherited his father’s special skills?”

  Daniel hesitated slightly.

  “No.”

  Craig picked up the hesitation.

  “Except?”

  “He hit someone once when he drove for Fox. No big deal. No charges brought.”

  “Drinker?”

  “Not that I know.”

  They were there. Daniel pulled the car a little forward of the driveway, parking it between the two properties. Made it more ambiguous which house they were visiting. A kind habit.

  The minute Katie Hunt opened the door and saw who it was, Craig realized she was thinking accident and bereavement
. He hurried to reassure her. He knew that feeling. “Just some routine questions for your husband, Mrs. Hunt, if we may.” McGee flipped open the ID no one ever bothered to look at. “We’re having to talk to everyone who was on the hill today. I’ll explain further.”

  Craig recognized Katie, all right. He’d wandered around her museum a couple of times. Seen her messing about there and around town. He didn’t recognize Sam when the tall man got out of his seat and greeted them stiffly.

  Craig looked around the cosy, simple room. A lot of books, a TV with one of those computer games plugged in, some car magazines and kids’ toys scattered on the rug like flotsam. It didn’t look like nasty stuff went on. But then psychos didn’t usually have framed photos of their hobby over the fireplace, or gory heads with an ax between the ears mounted on the wall. You had to work a bit harder than that to find them. Craig gazed longingly at a pickup enthusiasts’ magazine with a picture of a ‘56 Chevy on the front, and faced up to the fact that this was an interesting but frigging obvious lead. Craig suspected he was going to be disappointed.

  “Now that’s class,” he said, picking up the glossy and holding it out like a grandfather examining a high school photo of his grandchild.

  No one was going to agree or disagree with him.

  He gave it a second’s pause. Let the silence breathe. “I’m Staff Sergeant Craig McGee of the Silver Detachment and this is one of my officers, Daniel Hawk.”

  Sam nodded, suspicious. “What’s up?” he said wearily.

  McGee cleared his throat. Hawk opened a notebook.

  “There’s been a serious incident on the mountain, Mr. Hunt. Happened today. We need to talk to everyone who was there. See if you remember anything that might help us.”

  Sam withered. “What kind of an incident?”

  Craig looked to Daniel and then pulled at his face with a hand. “A murder. Kid killed in the trees.”

  Daniel Hawk raised an eyebrow. Since when did the interviewing officer reveal the nature of the crime to a suspect? His superior had obviously spent too long behind a desk and lunching with the mayor. He looked down at his notebook, annoyed.