THE TRICKSTER

by Muriel Gray

  The man Henderson. A movement from a pile of rubble had alerted her to the injured man.

  It had looked as though he had been stabbed in the chest, and his broken frame was a hideous sight. He had raised his head and opened a mouth that was dribbling blood as a baby dribbles saliva. But he was alive. The action she saw was so slow, so elegant in its execution that she had been frozen to the ground, an intruder observing another’s nightmare.

  Walks Alone was running to the thing. The thing that was so terrible and yet seemed to be familiar.

  And the rock was falling in huge boulders. A thin white arm shot out like a lizard’s tongue and grabbed the boy by the ankle. He had fallen forward, so slowly it seemed to Singing Tree, his hands above his head, and as he did so Walks Alone had opened the mouth that had been empty of sound and screamed, “FATHER!”

  She had watched in horror as his head hit the ground and he had lain still. Her feet that had grown roots had been released and she ran to him like a cougar would run to its young.

  As she had cradled his bleeding head, the rock in this white man’s cave was falling on the things that could not be beheld, and the fearsome noise had seemed to her as if all the world was ending. She had bent her head in stark terror, praying to the Thunder Spirit to deliver them from this dark chaos, when the man Henderson had started to crawl toward the mayhem. He had gasped through gritted teeth at the effort of moving, blood oozing through the fingers of the hand that clutched at his blackened breast.

  She had not stopped him. The shame was still a hot iron in her. She was cradling her son, and she did not stop the man who had saved him.

  She had looked up only in time to see his fate. The thing that was a claw, ripping and tearing and rending his flesh. And the screaming, that hungry, venomous wailing that chilled the heart enough to make it stop. No animal had ever made such a noise. She had not known whether it came from man or beast.

  Then the rock had fallen. It fell on the abomination, and the man Henderson had made a lunge toward something in the chaos before throwing his torn body back away from the avalanche of stone.

  Singing Tree had howled from the torment of that noise and the screaming of the things that were trapped.

  The dust had been thick like smoke. She had coughed and spat, cradling Walks Alone to her body to keep him from inhaling the thick, acrid dust. And when she had been able to see and breathe again, both of the nightmares were gone. Lost beneath the mountain that had closed on its secrets again. But the white man’s upper body had been still visible, his lower half buried beneath the rock. His hand was clenched tightly, and from a ripped and mutilated face he had been croaking at her.

  Singing Tree had stared like a simpleton for what seemed an age, then gently laid her unconscious son’s head down and stepped cautiously through the rubble toward the dying man.

  She had knelt at his head and gently placed the bloody mess on her leg. Singing Tree had bathed his face before. Now there was no face to bathe. Part of a nose and a mouth, but hardly a face.

  He had been trying to speak. She had bent her head to hear.

  A dying man speaking in her tongue.

  “James… Jamesss…”

  She had held his head more gently, listening.

  “James goes Eden. Eden. Begin again, like Adam.”

  She had tried to soothe him, made noises as she would to a baby. He died with his last word as though it were a prayer.

  “Eden.”

  Then she had let down his head and stood up. His fist had been clenched, and from it there had peeked a piece of leather thong. She had bent down again and opened his fingers.

  It was Hunting Wolf’s amulet.

  But the thing… The thing he had lunged at…

  She had picked it up and held the bloody circle to her heart. Then she had walked to her son, lifted him in her arms and gone outside.

  Singing Tree shivered as she walked in silence. The sun was not warming her. Since they had broken camp at dawn this morning, she had looked constantly behind her, waiting for the men who would run behind and bring them down with guns.

  But they would not come after them now. Even with so many dead white men. What she had seen outside the tunnel had been just as beyond explanation as what she had seen inside. The Kinchuinicks would go back to the reservation and the white men would not follow. She felt it.

  The white man needed things he could see and touch to deliver his justice, and what could he see or touch to make sense of the things that happened to his kind in that hole in the mountain?

  She walked on with her head higher but her heart still aching from his loss. If only he had known that she believed in him. That she was shamed by her betrayal.

  Then he ran to her. Eden James Hunting Wolf.

  “I saw an eagle, Mother.”

  She nodded, reaching out for him.

  It was right to rename him. He was new. Saved by the thin white man who had tried to save her husband too. He spoke again. And he would be the keeper. Eden James wore his father’s Isksaksin.

  Singing Tree wrapped the boy in her arms and put her face in his hair. They held each other for a moment, then walked on with the solemn party of their people.

  The eagle they had seen flew high above them, watching the dark line of figures and horses moving east.

  64

  “WHY?”

  Fists clenched, head thrown back on his neck, eyes rolled inside his skull. Sam Hunting Wolf was naked, on his knees in the gravel of the tunnel, and as the agony of his shout returned to him, bouncing off the rock like a taunt, the clouds of vapor from his mouth died on the freezing air.

  Feathers brushed his sweating brow. The soft feathers of a forgiving eagle guide. One that had been denied for more than two decades, and even now was still being resisted. He unclenched the fingers of his hands and clawed wildly at the empty air as if to ward off an insect, then fell forward with a grunt, his rigid arms holding him off the rocky tunnel floor.

  He vomited once again as he crouched and remained still, panting, waiting for the nausea to pass.

  “Lap up your hot sick, Kinchuinick. Fitting food for a pig.”

  He stayed still, his eyes open now, staring at the undulations of the gloomy floor described by the daylight from the arched entrance. Gruffly into the rock-strewn ground, Sam spoke a question to himself.

  “What did we do to make you hate like this?”

  The laugh again, then a music-hall imitation of Sam’s own voice. “You breathed in and out.”

  The laugh became manic in its filthy, raucous rasping, and bile rose in Sam’s throat again. He closed his eyes, fought it off and pulled himself upright. He turned and slumped against the tunnel wall, oblivious to the sharp rock grazing his naked body, and as his eyes rolled back in a fevered head once more, Eden was back with him.

  It was a state of bliss. Sam sought it and opposed it at the same time. It was not a place he wanted to be, this land of spirits, that was reached only when the mind was clear and pure and the soul was that of a shaman. And yet who could resist this velvety, seductive haven?

  They were together in a sweet meadow, as they had been a few moments ago before Sam had cried out in anger at the eagle’s demands. He was young and straight and handsome, this Eden. Dressed in his robes with the sun glinting behind his head.

  “He hates because he is hate. Do not converse with him.”

  Sam felt the warm sun heat his frozen body. The sun darkened for a second as the great bird circled again, throwing its majestic shadow over Sam’s upturned face.

  He squinted up at the sky, then back at the shining figure of Eden. “If I cannot converse, how can I understand his nature to battle with him? To trick him, as you say I must?”

  Eden tilted his head slightly. “Tell me, Hunting Wolf. Tell me who you are.”

  Sam frowned. “I am Sam Hunting Wolf.”

  “Your happiness lies where?”

  Sam frowned again. “In my wife and my children.”


  “As it should. But in your ancestors, your elders? In your blood?”

  “No. Not there.”

  “Why not, my grandson?”

  Sam moved his warm shoulders and felt the grass at his ankles stroke the skin of his legs. When he spoke in this place it was as though his words were spun from his mouth like strands of sugar. Here, there could be no duplicity. No lies. Here the truth was that which was written on the heart.

  “I despise it. White men are right to despise us. Look at the legacy you’ve left, Grandfather.”

  Eden did not reply. There was a flap of wings above from the great bird.

  “Are you proud of a people who sit on their tiny pockets of token land, laughed at and reviled by the men who took the great plains and the mountains from them? Killing themselves and dooming their sad children to a life of despair. Why did you not fight? You and all your elders? Were you so foolish you couldn’t see that the concessions you won were in fact victories for the white man? He loves the Indian dying on his reservation, a rural prison where the Indian is his own jailer, a prison that keeps the white man’s child from playing with the Indian child. A sweetly wicked device to keep the Indian away from the things that could be his, and should be his. To make him think he’s different, that he wants a cabin instead of a home, a horse instead of a truck, a drink instead of a job.

  “I believe the Trickster, Grandfather. It is not he who is nothing. It is we who are nothing.”

  The sun darkened again. The eagle circled as though it had been listening, and then soared. Eden lifted his face to the bird and then looked back at Sam.

  “Then we are truly lost.”

  Sam bent his head, ashamed. His heart was heavy with sorrow. Eden stretched out his hand and lifted his grandson’s chin. The touch was like a feather brushing lightly against skin.

  “That is the hurt child who spoke, is it not, Hunting Wolf?”

  Sam blinked at him.

  “Now let me speak to the man.”

  “You’re speaking to the man.”

  “No. The child is the one full of dark anger. Of hate for himself and his people. But the man is a pure thing. The man has led his life in the light. We have watched him, and he is strong and pure and good. And his life is full of love, where there was none for the child. He has patched the holes in his heart where many would have made them bigger. This love is your inheritance, Sam Hunting Wolf. It is what you pass to your children and it is more precious and lasting than any land or horse or house.

  “We have kept what the white man could not take from us. We know how the earth lives. They tell us with science what the raindrop is made of. We know in the hearts of our shamans what the raindrop knows, where it has been and where its spirit lies when it twinkles in the sun and harbors its rainbow.

  “To forget our knowledge, to lose that great love of all that is alive, is when we become nothing. Now look at me, Grandson, and tell me that you have forgotten your shaman’s knowledge.”

  Sam’s eyes were moist. He looked into the face of his grandfather’s spirit and swallowed.

  “I have not forgotten.”

  “What does the raindrop know?”

  Sam looked up at the black, circling silhouette of his rejected guide and swallowed. “That it falls from a sky it is part of, onto a flower that it is part of, into the ground it is part of, to feed the fruit it is part of, that feeds the man it was part of long ago before it fell.”

  “And?”

  “It knows it will be a raindrop again as a man knows he will be a man again.”

  “And are your children, your wife, as nothing, like the Trickster says?”

  “No. They are everything.”

  “And you?”

  “I see my face in the raindrop. I am something.”

  Eden sighed. There was a flap of wings. The eagle Sam could never quite see was so close.

  “Listen now, my grandson. For you can stay no longer. You know I have nothing to tell you of the Isksaksin other than that you must have a pure heart to use it or you will be devoured. I know only what I saw, and that is not enough to know what the truth may be. For the truth is different for each shaman who becomes the boundary line. He calls only that which his heart can bear. But I may tell you of the Trickster.”

  The sun was growing cooler. Eden was right. Sam knew this state would not last for long. He listened to Eden’s beautiful voice, although the words made no sound that ears would recognize.

  “He once had a face that he saw in the raindrop too. He was cunning and vain but he ran on the earth and moved in the heavens with other spirits of his kind before men came, before the mountains were finished and the seas had gone from the plains.

  “And when men first came he played with them as a child would play with a newborn kitten. Sometimes roughly, cruelly, sometimes with affection, but always with curiosity and astonishment. But then the kitten became a cat and man grew wise to his games. He was played with by the men. They knew him and they delighted in using his other-world skills for their own amusement. The shamans among them learned to shape-shift from him. They learned to move things with their mind and transport themselves to the moon and the stars with their spirits as he could. They could see what he could see, both into the future and into the past, and he grew more vindictive and more angry as they toyed with his powers and tricked him for their amusement.

  “And his anger grew until he became a thing of great evil. Then men died trying to curb his dark, vengeful violence. Until Pitah Annes, the greatest of all shamans, called him and tricked him into telling of the others that walked the earth with him before man came. The others that were more powerful, darker, less interested in man and his company except as lowly conductors of dark forces. And Pitah Annes heard in the Trickster’s heart that he was as afraid of these dark ones as man had become afraid of the Trickster.

  “That is the lesson of life. The trick. Do you hear it? The others. The darker ones.”

  Sam nodded, though uncomprehending. Eden continued, his voice growing urgent as though time were running out.

  “The Isksaksin is from the skull of Pitah Annes, the shaman who tricked him away into his dark prison. But the Trickster has waited an eternity to realize his ambition. He wishes the earth to be free of men again. To be empty and violent with molten mountains, and storms that shake the earth, and floods that cover those boiling mountains. So that when the Great Spirit weeps for his creations, and makes man again as he must, the Trickster will not be fooled again. He will not let his kitten become a cat a second time. He means to destroy everything.

  “You, my grandson, are the descendant of Pitah Annes, as am I, as was your father, as is your son. The Trickster hates you and all of mankind more than he loves himself. Man has copied that hatred, too, without knowing it. Man does his will without the knowledge of it.”

  Sam was panting now, sweating, as he realized he was losing a grip on this world of sweet grass and sunshine. He reached out to Eden.

  “What is it I call with the Isksaksin? Eden! What do I call?”

  The image of his grandfather was fading and the sun was losing its warmth. He was beginning to see his breath once more and the light was turning to dark.

  “Eden!”

  Sam’s head snapped back, bashing his skull against the rock and drawing blood beneath his matted hair.

  Back in the tunnel.

  The daylight was bright now. It had been many hours since dawn and there was no more time. He stood up and stroked the rock that had struck his head with affectionate hands.

  A trickle of blood ran down the back of Sam’s neck as he walked to the center of the rail tracks, put the Isksaksin between his teeth, closed his eyes and raised his powerful arms above his head.

  She drove carefully away from the museum, letting the Crown Vic follow all the way to the busy junction of Campbell and Hector Avenue. Then she did that thing she’d seen in a movie once. She sat at a green with cars pumping their horns, and when it changed
to red she shot the light and sped off down Hector toward the four-way junction, leaving the squad car to negotiate the confusion of angry oncoming traffic. They’d be after her now for sure. But she’d lost them. Katie drove the Toyota into the cul-de-sac behind the lumberyard, where big trees and a high brick wall hid all the parking as if they were designed to. She got out without even taking the keys and abandoned it. No one would see it from the street, and unless the cops suddenly needed masonry paint or loft insulation, they weren’t going to find it in a hurry.

  It was only one block to Gerry and Ann’s and she walked it in case anyone checked out she was running.

  Saturday. Thank God it was Saturday. Ann opened the door still wearing her robe.

  “Don’t ask anything. Just lend me your car. Please.”

  Without speaking Ann disappeared inside and brought out the keys. She handed them to Katie, and as her hand touched her friend’s, she held it. “You want help?”

  Katie shook her head. She blinked back a tear, retrieved her hand and kissed Ann on the cheek. “This is help. You haven’t seen me.”

  Ann nodded and stood watching in the cold doorway right up until Katie threw the GMC Jimmy into drive and was way out of view. She passed a patrol car on the edge of town, but the driver didn’t give her a glance. He was talking into the radio. Talking, she guessed, about an eight-year-old beat-up blue Toyota.

  The viewing platform. That was the best place to get down to the tunnels. You could climb over the fence, scramble through the trees and get onto the track. But there were two tunnels. Long and dark. Katie would face that when she got there, right now she had to drive.

  There had been no fear like it in his life. Not even at the hospital, seeing Sylvia the way he had. Once, a guy they’d cornered had leveled a shotgun at him and stroked his finger on the trigger. The thing that had happened in his guts then, that metallic taste of adrenaline in his mouth, the tightening of his neck, none of it was like this. It had taken him hours to find the courage, and now, at the moment he’d decided to step into the tunnel mouth, he knew what fear really was. He could hear Hunt but he couldn’t see him yet. The curve on the tunnel meant there was light only from one end at a time. Craig McGee had now walked away from that light. It was a cave, a long, dark, dripping, terrifying cave. And above the eerie noise of Sam Hunt’s nasal chanting, which echoed like a priest’s droning in a cathedral, there was that moving air that was soundless and yet screamingly, terrifyingly loud at the same time.