THE TRICKSTER

by Muriel Gray

  Duncan Muir looked into the woods where his tall companion had been looking and smiling. He saw nothing. All was still. The snow fell silently and sparingly between the trees. The trunks guarded the cathedral-like forest interior as if nothing alive had ever walked there before.

  “And can you smell a beast now?”

  The Scotsman was full of admiration for this man’s senses. In fact he was impressed with him altogether and wished Henderson could see the sense in listening to his wisdom.

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Muir. Something so stinking and foul it can only be a skunk.”

  Muir laughed. “Then I think we’ll let it be.”

  Sitconski returned his smile and walked on. “For the time being, yes. I think we shall.”

  46

  “Sam?”

  It was the second call, and there was still no reply. Katie dropped her car keys on the kitchen table and put Jess’s writhing rigid body into her high chair. She noted with pain that Billy was already cowering, as if he thought his father’s absence was a trick, and she slipped an arm around his shoulder, pressing his nose with a finger as though it were a button on a machine.

  “Want to get Bart organized?”

  Billy’s face lit up. He nodded his head, this stranger, this boy who was scared of things he used to love. She wanted to cry again but she checked the emotion, driving a spike of adult responsibility into her self-pity. Billy shrugged her off and ran to the big cupboard where Bart’s disgusting dog food lived. Billy would be busy for an age now as he tended his furry love. Katie hoped the vet was wrong. If Bart did anything to Billy…

  She canceled the thought. It wasn’t going to happen. In the meantime, where was Sam? She turned on the portable TV in the kitchen for Jess, who sputtered appreciatively as it blinked into life. A woman with a dark top lip was sitting in a chair on a talk show with a caption beneath her that read, BETH. PROUD OF HER FACIAL HAIR.

  Katie opened a packet of chips, handed one to Jess and, without taking her coat off, went to see if there were any messages or notes from Sam.

  The house was silent, some lights left on in places that suggested they’d been that way since she left this morning. She climbed the stairs quietly, aware suddenly that she was holding her breath. From the kitchen a shout from the TV as a man yelled, “Lady! You look like a man!” followed by a roar of indignation from the audience. Jess joined in with a shriek of glee, and Katie let her breath go and almost smiled as she reached the landing. The bedroom door was open but the light wasn’t on, and she walked up to it and stood in the doorway. The curtains were still closed and Katie clicked on the light.

  There was a mussed-up bed, her side no longer neat where she’d smoothed the covers before leaving her husband with a stony frown this morning. Sam’s side was thrashed and crumpled, like he’d been jumping around in there. But no Sam.

  She walked to his bedside table, switched on the small lamp and sat down on the bed, her hand smoothing the chaos of creases on the sheet as she gazed vacantly at the light.

  Hawk was dead. Killed on the night that Sam went for his walk around the block. Where was Sam now? Another walk?

  Katie’s body slumped a little at the corruption of her thoughts, and she dragged the hand that was stroking the sheet toward her. It touched damp cloth and her hand recoiled. Katie pulled back the comforter and looked at what she had touched.

  Urine. Her husband had wet the bed.

  As she stared at the oval yellow stain on the white sheet she heard Bart bark cheerfully outside, and a gust of wind sent snowflakes to rap gently on the window behind the closed curtains. Her hand returned to the sheet and clenched the wet linen into a ball in her fist as she closed her eyes as tightly as her fingers.

  Tricks. It was all tricks. He tried to focus his eyes through the falling snow to the cars parked in the street. Normal cars. Normal street. Sam had to keep remembering that none of this madness was real. Those figures in the gallery window display had not really been alive. He’d seen them before they started to move and they were just ordinary stick figures, playing their sad part on a piece of shit, phoney ethnic art. Loathsome junk for the tasteless wealthy but no different really from the bead key rings and trashy kids’ embroidered moccasins they sold in the gift shops as “Kinchuinick crafts.” But as he’d passed, he’d heard something call out to him through the window in what sounded like a chorus of tiny piercing voices. He’d turned his head slowly and gawked through the glass.

  The ocher stick figures had become expertly painted images of his family. Blinking didn’t help, didn’t clear the picture, but then, he knew it wouldn’t. So he’d looked. There was Katie, arms out trying to protect her children behind her, and they were crying out to him as they cowered from the great beast that towered above them, its jaws widened in an outlandish gape, drooling with the anticipation of its prey. They moved and squealed like tiny cartoons, but they were calling to him nevertheless.

  And he called back, put his hands on the window to show them he was there, until the tiny, painted nightmare beast turned to look at him and laughed a laugh like a death rattle.

  Sam had fallen to his knees, saliva drooling slightly from his open bottom lip, until the picture faded back into the dumb hunting scene it had been. No, not had been. Always was.

  Tricks. Just a bunch of tricks.

  He squatted against the rough wall now, fighting to compose himself. At the end of the street the barely visible Wolf Mountain stood like a portcullis. He narrowed his eyes at its gray, misty bulk, the top lost in the clouds of the snowstorm, and remembered a dream he’d had in which this mountain he loved became his captor. It was like he was in that dream now, but it couldn’t be. He was not a prisoner. He was free. Free and completely barking crazy. Sam ground his back teeth together and concentrated on truth.

  His heart was speaking to him now, and it was telling him that the thing in the bedroom was no trick. Yes, his Indian heart knew that much. He’d known long ago that the things he saw and touched and spoke to in Calvin’s sweat lodges were no trick either. Sure, he’d wanted to believe they were fake, particularly when they scared him, but his heart told him things back then too.

  But his head told him, as it had done for decades, that the Trickster was not real. Sam had battled his whole adult life to be more than a superstitious, spirit-fearing Indian. More than his parents. More than the heritage of misery and deprivation that formed him. To believe in the Trickster would be to believe in Sam Hunting Wolf the Indian, and in some ways that would be the worst part. Look what happened to Indians who believed in themselves, believed in their proud past and their spirit world: the jails were full of them, and only liquor-store owners rubbed their hands in glee when they saw them coming. He wasn’t one of them. Not Sam.

  He had a head that reasoned and saw the world the way it was, and it told him that things like that monster, that face in the crowd, couldn’t and didn’t exist.

  And the tricks, all the tricks today, they were fake. It was a trick when he woke an hour after his faint, ran panting from the house and saw Moses peering out from Billy’s bedroom window at him, waving at him with a leer when Sam turned his head to look up at the horror. It was a trick when the mouse-catching cat at number twelve turned its head lazily to watch Sam stumble past, as it licked its newborn kittens in the snug nest its owner had made from a wool blanket in a dry crevice in the log pile. He’d stopped in his tracks when he saw the dark thing swirling inside the cat, saw a glimpse of the real animal struggling to break free, then watched in horror as the cat slowly tore the heads off each of its helpless, screaming litter as if for Sam’s amusement. He’d stared at it, paralyzed, until the sight of the second to last kitten twitching as thick black blood pumped from its severed neck was too much, and he broke free and ran again. Tricks, perhaps, but he knew the mess of five tiny kitten bodies would still be there when the cat’s owner came home from work tonight, and even Sam could not wish that one away.

  And would these tricks pursu
e him to the grave? Right now it seemed likely. The thing whose existence he was trying and failing to deny was bent on his torment. He lowered his head and fought the urge to weep. He raised it again quickly when from the end of the street the howling of sirens rose and three police cars raced by, throwing snow up on the sidewalk as they passed. As the sirens died on the evening air, Sam could hear the blades of a chopper flying somewhere near the river, and his heart that was already encased in lead sank further.

  That thing in Katie’s chair.

  We must do some more of what we do best together.

  As he thought of its filthy attempt at a human mouth forming the words, he realized with a rising nausea that he knew only too well what that thing they did together was. There was no point pretending anymore. A scan at Calgary’s finest hospital wasn’t going to show jackshit in his head. Sam Hunting Wolf knew now why he was blacking out and he knew what happened when he did. So had they done it again, this team of two, this partnership from Hell. The RCs didn’t make that kind of show in this town for jaywalking, so it looked like the answer was yes. One hour. He’d been out this time for one hour. You could get a lot done in an hour, Sam thought. Especially if you’d waited nearly ninety years to do it.

  He looked into the street properly for the first time, with the keen eyes of a fugitive instead of a roaming madman. A glance up to the left rewarded him. Yes, it was there. It wasn’t a brown car anymore, it was a blue Ford. But the guys in it were the same two from yesterday. They were sitting on a double yellow in the tow-away zone trying to look like they had business being the only car there. Not so smart, these cops. Did they see what he saw? Of course not.

  But their presence sobered him, and he stood up on shaky legs with new resolve. He would lose them. It hadn’t occurred to him before, but it would be easy.

  He straightened up, emerged from his shelter and walked a few steps into the street toward the bookshop. The window was good and reflective, and he positioned himself until he could see the Ford in the glass. He waited until he saw in the reflection the men start the car up and move forward, anticipating Sam’s slow progress up the street. He waited until they were almost level with him, then turned and walked briskly back the way he’d come. They couldn’t do a U-turn on that side, so he marched past the gallery and slipped into the alley that ran between it and the sports shop. He stopped and waited there, watching his breath swirl around him like a spell. He knew they would drive to the top of Main Street, hang a left and speed around to where the alley emerged in Cedar Street. He counted to twenty and stepped back out onto Main Street. They were gone. Sam ran across the street and dived into the alley on the other side, which came out by the bus station. Easy. He’d be behind the terminal building and on the rough ground by the railway lines, where no car could go, long before they admitted to themselves their man had done a skunkeroo. As he went he cast one short guilty look over his shoulder into the street, and his heart started its pounding again.

  Another trick.

  Standing at the end of the alley was another inconceivable figure of his fevered fantasy. Sam held his breath and looked for the darkness swirling beneath its form, searching for its imperfection, which would give it away as a mask. It stared back at him, solid and immobile, hands by its side, letting the snow fall and rest on its preposterous, impossible head.

  Calvin Bitterhand. But of course it couldn’t be Calvin Bitterhand. Sam stared at the apparition, desperate at this new skill of the Trickster, that it was able to conceal its true form from his shaman’s eyes. The thing that could not be Calvin put his hand out to Sam and said his name in the croak of a tired old man. Sam hesitated for a beat, nearly fooled by those weary soft black eyes, full of what looked like relief and love, until he remembered how all the other tricks had resolved. He tore his gaze away from that face, turned and ran for his life down the alley, not stopping until he was past the bus station outbuildings, had broken free from the sight of roads and sidewalks into the birch scrub by the railroad tracks and fell to his knees in the deep, drifted snow.

  Far behind him, in Silver’s main street, Calvin Bitterhand stood still, staring into the alley as though he had lost everything a second time.

  47

  “One chopper buzzing the town doesn’t mean it’s another murder.” Pasqual was glaring at the Australian ski-shop assistant as she spat the words in his face, the face of someone who wished he’d never mentioned it. He shuffled his feet, not knowing what to do with his big body in his discomfort.

  “Yeah, well, maybe not, but like I say, the news crews camping out here went apeshit. Talking into their portables and shouting at each other to get to town fast. That’s all I know.”

  She leaned heavily against the shop counter with her back to him, knocking a stand of Oakley shades to the floor but ignoring it. “Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck FUCK!” She looked out the glass door at the darkened lodge-side area, where the lights had just come on, and clutched the edge of the counter behind her with hands like claws. “If that murdering cunt fucks up my celebrity ski, I swear I’ll find him before the pigs do and tear his balls off myself.”

  A man and woman looking through the ski suits exchanged looks, stopped feeling the ski suits and made to leave the shop. Pasqual watched them vacantly for a moment until she realized they were leaving without a purchase. As the door closed behind them, she turned slowly to the big, square-built, tanned boy on the other side of the counter and compressed her already tight face.

  “You know what would help me here, Donald?”

  “What’s that, Miss Weaver?”

  “Stop gossiping and sell some stuff, you prick.”

  He watched her go, expelled all the air from his lungs as she slammed the back office door, and thanked God that his fitness program would never let him get that screwed up. He came out from behind his counter and in a few seconds was swinging his hips and humming a Red Hot Chili Peppers track, dreaming of the powder he would shred with his snowboard tomorrow if the weather let up. In the back office a small dark-haired woman was being sick into her wastepaper basket.

  Becker looked defeated, and for the first time Craig felt something approaching sympathy as he watched the man replace the phone on its hook.

  “They’ve taken off. It’ll be less than an hour.”

  Craig moved his eyebrows. “Even in this weather?”

  “Yeah. They’ll be here.”

  Craig balanced a hip on the edge of the desk that used to be Martin’s and was now Becker’s, swung a leg and crossed his arms. “And what now? While we wait for the big boys?”

  “We find the son of a bitch and bring him in.”

  “On what charge?”

  Becker looked up at Craig with eyes that said go to hell, but his mouth was still driven by a policeman. The sympathy dropped from Craig like a silk scarf from marble as Becker answered him in a cool tone, “He was out of sight of our men for the entire duration of the three murders. He could have been in his house, but he could just as easily have not. He was then tailed, staggering around like a madman, acting like a grade-one crazy, until he deliberately and skillfully slipped that tail. That’s enough for me, and more than enough to stall any fucking reservation-bought lawyer who tries to get him bail on grounds of being another untouchable target of white victimization.”

  Craig thought of fighting, then thought again. “The press. They’ll burst vessels in their necks.”

  “So let them. I want that bastard off the streets. In an hour it won’t be our problem.”

  Craig knew that if that was true for Becker, it wasn’t the case for him. He lived here. He liked it here. He’d lost two men. Two friends. The whole fucking thing was very much his personal problem. He looked at the older man for a moment as if waiting for more, and when nothing came but a gaze of indifferent resignation, he stood up and left the room without a word. He could get to Katie Hunt before they started the search for her husband, and right now that seemed important. Important enough not to tell Bec
ker.

  The journey from the spare office Becker was occupying to his own was through a war zone. The phones rang like alarms, and the humans they alerted jumped and scurried from desk to desk as though the cheap teak tables were trenches affording cover.

  In the shifting chaos, an Edmonton cop was sullenly clearing out Daniel Hawk’s desk, putting the contents into marked plastic bags. Craig stopped and watched. The young policeman eyed his superior with caution as he scooped up a magazine and a packet of indigestion lozenges and bagged them with some papers.

  “Sir?”

  Craig was hardly aware he had been staring at the man performing his mundane task. “Huh?”

  “You need something?”

  Craig looked at him, then down at the drawers, and put his hands in his pockets. “Yeah. Give me a minute with this stuff, will you? Go grab a coffee.”

  The officer nodded, put his bag down on the desk, smoothed it like it was something precious and then left. The desk was an island in the babbling noise of the office and Craig sat down in Hawk’s chair with his hands on the desk in front of him. Was this what a man’s life amounted to? A few small things that could be put into bags and poked through by indifferent strangers?

  He pulled open the second drawer, feeling like a spy. Files were stacked in neat rows, the odd yellow square of sticky notepad paper stuck to the spines, marking something for Daniel’s attention. Notes to himself. Craig fingered them, his heart sore at the scribbled things that had meant something to the man who was never going to hug his son or wife again.

  Chateau. Inc. Thefts, and another, Int. Faccini bar fight. Bell’s witness, comp. Iit.

  Who knew what they meant? Who cared now? He flicked another file back, then stopped. A small yellow square was sticking up like all the others. Nothing unusual. Except Daniel’s scribbled message to himself on this one, unlike all the others, was not in English. It was not abbreviated notation, but quite obviously a word written in Daniel’s native tongue.