THE TRICKSTER

by Muriel Gray

  He was nearing the turnoff and the snow was drifting badly. If needs be, he thought, he could leave the truck and walk the rest of the trailway to the house. He’d done it often enough.

  But it was worth having a go. He could always dig himself free in the morning. He checked that he was in four-wheel drive and gave it a bit more gas. He wanted to get home.

  28

  It was taking longer than Billy had expected. Maybe it was because he’d had a regular dream first. He’d dreamed that he was the little freckled kid in that old sci-fi TV series Lost in Space they were always rerunning, and the big robot was waving his arms about shouting Warning! Warning! Really dumb. But he’d woken for a few minutes, just long enough to reprimand himself for not concentrating properly to bring the wolf. He’d closed his eyes and let his eyeballs roll backward under the lids, like he’d taught himself to do, and tried to find it. He never used to be able to do it like this, but then he hadn’t known that the wolf was his spirit guide. He knew that now. His teacher had taught them all about Indian stuff one afternoon during cultural studies, and Billy was proud that he and Cindy LaBelle were the only Indians in class. He could tell the other kids were envious. He’d gotten kind of bored with the part about treaties and reservations, but he was so excited about the spirit stories that he’d asked Uncle Gerry about it when he saw him in the corridor at lunch break.

  He’d looked at Billy with a raised eyebrow and then sat with him on the big steps in the atrium, watching Billy eat his sandwiches and telling him about animal spirit guides and the Indians’ love of nature and all kinds of stuff.

  Then he’d looked at him and said, “It’s some heritage, Billy. No matter what your dad thinks, and I’m sure he has his reasons, you should be proud of who you are, son.”

  Billy had nodded solemnly and knew it was true. It made him sad sometimes that his dad didn’t even like the word Indian being said in the house and that they never talked about it. He thought being an Indian would be neat. The stuff Uncle Gerry said about the animal guides made sense, and for a moment he’d almost told him about his wolf. But he didn’t. It was private. And he knew Uncle Gerry would think he was making it up. But he’d called the wolf that night with a new feeling of confidence, like it was all right to call him instead of waiting for him to come. He wondered if his dad had an animal guide.

  His dad.

  There was work to be done and he concentrated hard to begin it. No dreams this time. He felt his closed eyelids flicker as his eyeballs swiveled back in his head, and the soft waves of sleep started to break over him again as he snuggled into the warmth of his comforter.

  The Ford took a run at it but Daniel knew it was going to lose. At least six inches of snow must have fallen in the time he’d taken to get from the detachment to his turnoff and it wasn’t letting up. He’d managed to coax the truck about eight hundred yards up the drive before it had slowed down and slithered around like a puck. But a quick shovel around the wheels meant he’d got going again, and this time he had to keep her moving, and moving fast.

  It wasn’t going to happen. Another hundred yards and the gradient made a pact with the snow to defeat this manmade hulk of steel and its man.

  Daniel sighed and wondered about letting it slip backward, just so the useless box on wheels would be clear to join the main road again in the morning. But he was bushed. He wasn’t going to waste time and lose himself all that ground. The walk up to the house through this stuff would take about half an hour. He gathered his things, zipped up his storm jacket, pulled on his gloves and left the truck to its fate. With the flashlight, he checked there was nothing in the back he needed, then started the trudge up the trail to that beer and some centrally heated loafing. The snow was up to his mid-calves and he cursed the plowing he was going to have to do to clear this crap if the snow didn’t give him a break.

  On either side of the drive the trees formed a somber, impenetrable wall. He flashed the light in there from time to time to look into that dark labyrinth of trunks and its smooth, undulating white floor.

  As he swung the flashlight back onto the trail ahead, the beam clipped something dark, moving quickly behind a fallen trunk. He swung it back and stopped in his tracks. Whatever it was it wasn’t moving until he did. He switched off the flashlight and listened, waiting for it to break cover in the silence. Despite the snow, the darkness was profound, and for some reason Daniel Hawk began to feel uneasy. This wasn’t like him. He’d walked up and down this trail in the dark more times than Imelda Marcos had visited a shoe store and he’d never even flinched at the sounds of the night.

  Now, however, he wasn’t enjoying the dark at all. For a few seconds there was no sound at all, then a rustling noise came from his right, in the trees on the opposite side of the road to where the shape had been. He switched the light on quickly and swept the beam across the dark regiment of wood. Movement again. Behind a tree. Daniel was puzzled. Were there two animals in there, on either side of him? Nothing could have moved so fast as to reach the other side of the track and be well into the cover of the trunks in the time the flashlight was off. There had to be two. As if to answer him a branch ten feet up a pine rustled and bounced wildly ahead of him, shaking the snow from it in tiny waterfalls. It made him start, taking a breath of bitingly cold air sharply into his lungs. This was crazy. Animals both sides and something up there in the branches. Daniel wasn’t liking this. Animals didn’t roam around in little gangs, keeping abreast with humans, their most fearsome and universally loathed predator. Crazy.

  He put the flashlight under his arm, cupped his big gloved hands over his mouth and hollered, “Go on. Whooooo! Gerrroutta here!”

  He waited for the creatures to crash away, fleeing in panic from this bold declaration of his presence, but his shout was muffled by the oppressive weight of the snow all around him. If they’d heard the cry it hadn’t unduly alarmed them.

  He was being ridiculous. The stupidity of his fears suddenly overwhelmed him and he laughed at what a ridiculous figure he must cut, standing shouting at animals in the middle of his own driveway. The grim day’s events had really got to him, and he thought again how much he needed to be at home, chilling out and calming down. He grabbed the light and waded ahead with a new sense of purpose. The man in him felt he should walk on without the flashlight, just to prove to himself he was being an asshole, but somehow the feeling that eyes were boring into his back stopped his fingers from pressing that black rubber “off” button. Murders made you jittery. That was all. He kept the yellow beam on the trail ahead, and continued the muscle-wrenching trek to the house.

  Sam groped in his pocket for the keys and ran quickly and quietly over to the truck. The door wasn’t even locked. No one in Silver locked their car doors much. Maybe they’d start doing it now. And locking their porch doors real tight too. He kept his eyes on Marty’s windows as he started the engine, the noise exploding like a cough into the still, snow-laden air. No lights came on. Thank God. He chucked it into “drive” and moved away slowly down the block. If he took a left on Argyll the cops wouldn’t even see the truck. They might wonder where a Silver Ski Company truck was going at one in the morning.

  As Sam drove it down to Main Street, he wondered that too. This was a crazy scheme. But if Daniel could just tell him anything, anything at all that would help him understand what was happening, then he’d walk to the fucking North Pole in his flip-flops if he had to, even in this storm.

  So Joe Reader hadn’t died in an accident. That was what they were getting at, wasn’t it? Asking him about where he was that night. Jesus. His hands gripped the wheel like a lifebuoy. His thoughts were hot coals now, searing him as they insisted he heed them. Who was he? Was he Sam Hunt, loving and loved husband and father? Or was he really, and in fact always had been, Sam Hunting Wolf? An altogether darker proposition.

  What was it the Reverend Jenkins had said to him that time on the double black diamond? The time he wanted to go home after a bad fall. The thin wh
ite man had skied to his side, picked him up and dusted the snow off his cheap and frayed parka, despite Sam’s humiliated, tearful protests.

  “Sure, you can go back and give up now, Sam. But it’ll go back on the bus with you. You’ll wake up tomorrow and the fact you gave up will be right there with you. No escape. But if you get up and do that run again till you get those turns right, then that’s what you’ll wake up with. You can carry success around with you as much as failure. Which is it to be?”

  Stupid to think that he might not wake up some day from the dream of perfect happiness with Katie and still face what he’d tried to forget. The Reverend was right. Success or failure. Good or evil. You carried it right along there with you on the bus.

  He was on the forest road now, heading uphill gradually through a curtain of snow that made him dizzy watching it fly toward him like boulders. The road was treacherous and indistinct, without a single set of tracks to follow. He took a deep breath, wound down the window an inch to let some air in, and a few flakes swirled in and brushed his face. Only a mile or so before Hawk’s place, and he willed himself to concentrate. The end of Hawk’s drive could be missed so easily, especially in this weather, and he had to make sure he didn’t drive past. But God, the snow was making him feel bad. His head was buzzing and his eyes were narrowed to slits to see where the hell he was going. And then, without warning, his soul was being sucked into a twister, and the blackness came and took him.

  The sinister black shape of the log house changed instantly to the warm brown thing it was as Daniel broke the beam of the yard-light sensor and stepped onto the porch. Silently he awarded himself points for fitting that thing last fall. It was a marvel for switching itself on, letting you see what you were doing as you got out of the car in the dark before you opened up the house, but right now it had been better than a marvel. For the last quarter of an hour he’d felt like running. He knew he was behaving like a schoolboy, but that feeling of being watched—no, more than that, being stalked—had been living in between his shoulder blades the whole way up.

  Well, now he was home, and he was going to shake off his boots, get this jacket off that he was sweating like a hog under, and crack open a beer. He stamped on the wooden slats of the porch and turned off the flashlight. The house was warm as toast, the big oil-burning stove going like a dream back there in the kitchen. Daniel turned the hall and living room lights on, fingered a few letters Tess had left on the telephone table for his attention, and hung up his jacket. He let the yard light go out of its own accord. It had served its purpose.

  Lord, but he was tired now. He sat on the bench and pulled off his boots. Maybe it was too late for a beer and TV. Maybe he should just sleep and try not to dream of that mess of flesh he’d stood over in the woods. He put a hand out to the front door beside him and turned the lock. Never did that, but tonight he felt like it. One quick look at what was on the sports channel, he decided. He stood up and walked through to the living room. Something to help him unwind.

  The windows filled with illumination. The yard light had gone on. Daniel sat up. That happened sometimes when a big animal broke the beam. But not often. He’d fixed it so you had to be at least as big as Tess. Even Larry couldn’t do it. Only a big deer or a bear would make it read their movement, and neither made a habit of coming that close to the house. He went to the window, expecting, hoping, to see an elk blinking in the glare. Nothing. His heart started to beat a little faster when he looked at the thick snow, and one set of human prints, his own, meandering up to the porch, filling up quickly with the huge drifting flakes. No hoof prints. No paw prints. There was obviously something wrong with the sensor. He stood there for its forty seconds of light, until it clicked off again and the virgin snow in the yard was lit only by the square of light from his window, his figure making a bulky shadow in the center of the square.

  Behind him in the room the TV was shouting about someone getting the ball over the net. Daniel shook a shiver from his shoulders and sat back down.

  It clicked on again. He thought about ignoring it, but he couldn’t. He leaped up quickly this time, in case there was something fleet-of-foot evading his gaze, but the yard was as still as before. Daniel waited stiffly until it switched off into darkness again, then pulled the curtains roughly across the window. He wasn’t going to get up and down every time the damn thing went on. He’d look at it in the morning. Get a new sensor from Hardy’s tomorrow.

  From deep inside the house there was a low noise, a scuffling, growling sound. Daniel didn’t move. He waited, every sense heightened, and it came again. He still had his gun on. Thank God, it still hung there on his hip. Slowly, silently, he slipped off the sofa onto his knees and faced the door, with the big green cushions between him and the opening. He unclipped his holster and slipped out the gun, holding it to his chest as he listened. When the noise came again he could hear that it came plainly from the kitchen at the back of the house. It sounded like tearing. Something being ripped.

  He stood up and quickly got his back against the wall behind the door, his gun up at his shoulder and ready. He slipped the safety catch off and cocked it. He waited until he heard the sound again, then leaped through the doorway into the hall and slid along the wall to the kitchen door. The lights were on in the kitchen. They hadn’t been when he got in, but they were now. Jesus. He had an intruder. His mind worked fast. Maybe more than one. What if the sensor wasn’t broken? He whirled his head around to see if he was being trapped from behind. No one there. The hall was clear, the front door still closed and locked. Daniel Hawk took a gulp of air, closed his eyes briefly in a silent prayer, and leaped through the kitchen doorway.

  “FREEZE!”

  He landed crouched with his legs apart, both hands on his gun, pointing at the source of the noise.

  A coyote. A thin, leggy, hungry-looking animal tearing away at a broken and spilled plastic trash bag. It looked up at him, something white and wet hanging from its mouth. Just like the coyote in the ski car lot. Just exactly like it. A stupid, hungry scavenger, taking advantage of Tess’s sloppy waste disposal. He wanted to laugh with relief, and at the farcical sight he was creating, standing like a Secret Service marksman, pointing his hardware at a dumb coyote. And then he remembered the kitchen light. The one that had been turned on somehow since he’d got home. The animal grinned up at him with a leer.

  “Helps to see what you’re doing, doesn’t it, Daniel?”

  It had spoken to him. In a voice that was deep and dirty and disgustingly raspy. It had spoken in Siouan. And it had read his mind.

  Daniel was panting hard through his nose now, his hands starting to tremble. He let it have it. Three shots, two in the head and one to the body. It slumped to the ground, its legs buckling beneath it, the head a bloody mess where his bullets had torn away half the skull.

  Then as he watched with his mouth hanging open in horror, the body started to shift and quiver, being pulled up like a puppet on wires until the mess of gray fur and red blood was on its feet again. It was a foul thing. No longer an animal. A sack of fur and bones that had something else inside it, making it writhe and twitch like a body in agony.

  He was an Indian. He knew about bad medicine. This was really bad medicine and he had no tools in his hand or his heart to fight it. The thing in the coyote’s skin faced him again with a terrible grimace from its half-face. He could see the inside of its upper palate, the few remaining teeth glinting on a red sea of mucus and blood, the one eye hanging from its socket on a tendril of tissue.

  “Care to join me in my meal?”

  It made a jerky movement of its head, like it was struggling for control, and picked up the white-and-pink morsel it had been gnawing when Daniel burst in. A small shoe clung to the end of the dangling matter. Larry’s shoe.

  No. No. Larry and Tess were in Calgary. He’d spoken to her less than an hour ago. He was in bed, she said. Fast asleep. No. No. No. No.

  The coyote that was no longer a coyote pawed at the
black plastic trash bag. Something big and round rolled out of it across the white vinyl floor, leaving a trail of black-red sticky mush as it went. The eyes were dead and staring in the head, and the black hair stuck to his son’s severed head in matted points. It stopped between Daniel’s spread legs.

  Then the coyote that defied its place in the food chain smiled up at Daniel. Not a leer that dogs can make by panting, but a very real, very human smile.

  And it watched him as it laughed, a sound that filled the back of Daniel Hawk’s throat as if he were making the diabolical sound himself from a stomach that was rotting and on fire with disease.

  29

  He wasn’t there. His mom was sleeping in an empty bed. Billy sniffed around the place his dad’s head should have been and then around his mom. She was hurting inside. He could feel it. Something was churning around in her mind and she was wrestling with it even as she slept. Billy felt sad and worried, but he was anxious to find his father. The wolf was tugging him downstairs, and reluctantly he left his mother with the thought of a kiss on her cheek. She stirred as he left the room, as though feeling its phantom touch on her skin.

  They were hurrying now, through the town and up onto the road that went through the trees on the forest trail. There was something making Billy afraid. A huge, dark, sick feeling in him that made him want to stop and run back home. But the wolf was pounding ahead. The wolf that was there ahead of him, and yet he was the wolf. He was outside it and part of it. He could see the loping stride of the animal as it bounded through the thick snow, and at the same time feel the icy cold through his own paws, see the road ahead through the wolf’s eyes and smell the air with his keen and twitching nostrils.

  They were covering ground at a tremendous speed, and they were getting near the thing that was making him afraid. Too near. Billy stopped in his stride and the wolf that was him stopped too, the breath they shared steaming in the frozen air.