Thunderbird Spirit

by Sigmund Brouwer

  “Don’t get me wrong, Mike. I’m not trying to insult you or your car. It’s just that we’ve got a long way to go and get back by my curfew. My car is the one we should take.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  “You told me the two guys in the red truck were from Lillooet, right? Your friend in the police force traced their plates for you.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “While you were at practice, I went to a bookstore and bought a road atlas. I found out there’s a dam near Lillooet. That’s important because Dakota’s cassette mentions a dam.”

  “You’re actually going to let me listen to the cassette?” I asked her sarcastically. During our earlier meeting, she had told me about it, but not what was on it.

  “You are touchy, aren’t you?”

  I grinned. “Yup.”

  She grinned back. “Dakota didn’t show up for practice. That’s enough reason for you to hear it. Anyway, the other thing is that, according to the map, Lillooet is near where Dakota spends summers with our grandparents. It’s got to be the place. So, yes, I’m sure about this.”

  “You know exactly what I’m asking. Not which car we should take. Not if we’re headed in the right direction. But if it’s a good idea to do this ourselves. I think we should call the cops.” I grinned, briefly. “And believe me, I never thought I’d be saying something like that.”

  “Mike, once we’re driving, I’m going to play the cassette for you. Then you’ll understand why we can’t call the cops.”

  “Your parents? What about them?”

  “Look,” she said, “I’ve been going over the road atlas. It’s two hours to Vancouver. Another three hours to Carpenter Lake. That gets us there by five this afternoon. We look around for an hour. Then we drive back. It gets us in Seattle by eleven tonight. You don’t play until tomorrow night. On weekends, my parents want me home by midnight. I’ve left them a note telling them I’m out with a friend. So we have an hour to spare.”

  “But your parents should know about this. Wait for their plane to get in. Or at least leave a note saying where we’re headed.”

  “You should listen to the cassette,” she argued. “Then you’ll understand.”

  I still wasn’t ready. This seemed too crazy, even for me. She was sixteen, old enough for her driver’s license and a car, but not old enough to step in for the cops.

  I was seventeen. I’d driven here all the way from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. I’d spent time in a reform school. I’d lived on my own for two summers. A five-hour drive into British Columbia wasn’t a big deal. Except we were dealing with guys who shot rifles at trucks, burned trucks, tried to poison dogs and threatened to blow up arenas. I didn’t like the situation at all. I pointed all of this out to her.

  “It’s only a five-hour drive,” she repeated. “We’ll go straight there and back. What can go wrong?”

  Plenty, I figured, because plenty always seemed to go wrong in my life. I told myself to ignore her sad smile, to forget about how much I’d enjoyed it when she was happy with me for rescuing her dog. I told myself to finally do something sensible.

  She threw me her car keys. “You drive,” she said.

  Call me Crazy. I ignored my own advice and got behind the steering wheel.

  chapter sixteen

  “Before you listen to the cassette,” Kendra said, “there are a few things I want you to know about my brother.”

  I nodded but did not turn my head to look at her. We were headed north on Interstate 5, and traffic was heavy. I preferred Saskatchewan driving, where you saw another car only every five minutes. And I wasn’t comfortable driving a new car. The scenery was tempting to look at—both the countryside and Kendra—but I needed to concentrate on the road.

  “Ever since I can remember,” she said, “Dakota’s been serious...” She struggled to find the right words. “Not like he’s totally serious, because he is funny and finds a lot of things in life funny.”

  “But he’s serious,” I said. I kept my eyes on the bumper of a Cadillac in front of me. “He thinks about things.”

  “Exactly. Dakota could have had a Miata too, you know. I mean, my dad inherited a lot of money. Dakota wouldn’t take a new car. He said it was more important for him to drive what he could afford to buy himself.”

  “The old green truck.”

  Kendra sighed. “I think Dakota’s right. He was always prouder of his truck than I am of this Miata. It doesn’t really feel like it’s mine.”

  She sighed again. “I love my brother, but he can drive me nuts with his thinking. I remember Christmas when he was eight and I was seven. Dakota asked Mom and Dad why he should believe in Jesus. He said when he was little they told him about Santa Claus and Jesus. Since he knew Santa Claus wasn’t true, he wondered if they had lied about Jesus too.”

  “Good logic,” I said.

  “Exactly. Like how are little kids supposed to know the difference? Same with Easter and Easter bunnies. And remember, Dakota was only eight. But Dakota has always been looking for answers. That’s partly why he started calling himself Dakota.”

  “It’s not his real name?” I gunned the car to squeeze into an open lane beside a semi. The Miata took off like a cat with its tail on fire. Maybe I wasn’t as uncomfortable with a new car as I thought I was.

  “His real name is Stephen. You know, of course, my mother is Native North American.”

  “I had figured that out,” I said. “I didn’t think your hair was naturally blond and that you dyed it dark.”

  She laughed.

  “When Dakota was ten,” she continued a few seconds later, “he asked to be allowed to spend the entire summer with our grandparents on the reservation where my parents met. Dakota wanted to learn more about his heritage.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “I don’t look nearly as Native North American as he does,” Kendra said. “I think kids bugged him a lot more in school.”

  I heard sadness in her voice. I risked turning my head from traffic to glance at her. She was staring out the window.

  “Racism stinks,” she said. “People decide they hate you without even knowing you.”

  I figured saying anything would be as useless as when people told me they were sorry my mom had died when I was born. I concentrated on traffic, waiting until Kendra was ready to go on.

  “Anyway,” she said a few miles later, “Stephen decided to be proud of his heritage. He started calling himself Dakota. And he started trying to learn more about tribal religion. That’s what I mean. He’s always been serious. When he was ten, he asked Dad to explain the meaning of life.”

  “Tough question. What did your dad say?”

  “Dad said it was love and faith. Dakota said he would think about that. And he has, ever since.”

  I remembered how he prayed before each game. I mentioned that to Kendra.

  She nodded. “He started going to church again with Mom and Dad and me. Just like that. Out of the blue around Christmastime. He’s changed. Before then, he was tough, almost angry about life. But something changed him.”

  She hesitated and looked at the cassette. “I’m wondering if this has anything to do with it.”

  “You’re taking your time playing it.”

  “I wanted you to know a few things about Dakota,” Kendra said. “I wanted you to know that Dakota has been spending his summers in British Columbia with our grandparents—that he’s learned to be proud of who he is—and that he’s always been trying to figure things out.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, before you listen to the tape, I want you to know that Dakota hung out with tribal elders and with some of the younger people on the reservation. Some of those people are just as angry about racism as Dakota is. I think Dakota figured they had the answers, just because they believed in their own answers so much.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  Kendra put her hand lightly on my arm.
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  “Mike,” she said, “when you listen to the cassette, I don’t want you to think the worst of Dakota because of who he chose as friends.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “Remember I told you there is a dam on a lake near Lillooet?”

  “I remember.”

  “On the cassette, you’ll hear Dakota and his friends talking about the dam. It’s called the Terzaghi Dam. On Carpenter Lake. They want to blow it up. Tomorrow.”

  chapter seventeen

  I learned plenty by listening to the cassette, plenty that I didn’t want to know. The first part of the tape was music. The important part was a conversation at the end. Dakota spoke a couple of times. Mostly though, it was people I didn’t recognize. Some were excited voices. Some were angry. All of the discussion was about blowing up a dam on Carpenter Lake. The day they had picked was Sunday, tomorrow. That was the day the premier of British Columbia would visit Lillooet to make speeches and look for votes in the upcoming election.

  As the voices ended and the cassette began to hiss static, we passed a sign that informed us there were eighty miles left to the Canadian border. I wished we could turn around long before then. I wanted to return to a simpler world where all I had to do was worry about staying on the Seattle Thunderbirds hockey team. But now I understood why Kendra did not want to involve her parents or any cops. And why it was just going to be the two of us looking for her brother.

  “You want to protect Dakota. Right?”

  “I can’t believe he would actually go through with this. But why would he leave early this morning unless he was still involved?”

  I squinted as a ray of sunshine burst between a gap in the hills. I pulled the visor down and kept my eyes on the white lines that flashed by on the pavement.

  “Kendra, tell me again what he said when he gave you the cassette.”

  She shrugged, a movement I caught from the corner of my eye. “He woke me up just before I called you this morning. He handed me the cassette and told me to give it to you as a present. He said he’d be back in a few days. Next thing I heard was the door closing, the garage door opening and him driving away in Mom’s BMW.”

  “Why did you listen to the cassette if you were supposed to give it to me?”

  “Remember when you were joking about your car the other day? How you said your radio didn’t work and that you didn’t even have a cassette player?”

  I nodded. Over breakfast at the Smiths’, when I was listing all the things wrong with my car, I’d told them about singing the entire drive from Saskatoon, just to keep myself company.

  “Well,” Kendra said, “I wondered why Dakota would give you a tape you couldn’t use.”

  “I think I know why,” I said. “He didn’t expect me to listen to it. He just wanted me to keep it. It would be a safe place for it.”

  “I listened to it,” she said. “It wasn’t that safe.”

  “And there was a half hour of music at the beginning, right? He probably figured if you started it, you wouldn’t listen all the way through.”

  Ahead of us, beside the road, was a highway patrol car. I held my breath until it was far behind us. Kendra and I were not breaking any laws. We were not doing anything wrong. Still, with this cassette in the car, I was nervous.

  We crested a hill. I drove for a couple of miles in silence, deep in thought.

  “This is what I think,” I finally said. “Dakota is not involved. At least not the way you think.”

  I told Kendra about the rifle shots fired into Dakota’s truck. I told her how he had refused to go to the cops about it. I told her about the same two guys showing up to poison her dog.

  “I’m figuring they were trying to scare him into something.”

  “Into not blowing up the dam?” she asked.

  I shook my head no. “The easiest way to stop that would be to go to the cops. They could easily arrest Dakota and the other guys on this tape.”

  “Then what were they trying to scare him into?” Kendra asked.

  “Why would Dakota have this tape in the first place?” I asked her in return. “You think those guys taped their own conversations?”

  “That would be stupid,” Kendra said. “You heard what they were talking about.”

  “So it was taped secretly then, right?”

  “That makes sense.”

  “It also makes sense that Dakota taped it secretly. After all, he had the tape.”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “If Dakota really wanted to blow up the dam, would he let you or me get hold of the cassette? If the dam blows, he could spend years in jail.”

  “I think I know what you’re getting at.” There was hope in her voice. “Those guys were trying to scare him into giving them the tape.”

  “That’s the only thing I can think of,” I said. “Dakota is trying to stop them from blowing up the dam. Maybe he was in on it for a while and changed his mind. Maybe he decided to get it on tape and threaten to expose them if they went ahead. They started threatening him to get the tape back. When he saw they were willing to kill your dog and willing to make bomb threats, he decided to leave town to make sure no one else would get hurt.”

  “That sounds more like the Dakota I know,” Kendra said.

  “There’s only one problem.” I noticed I was gripping the steering wheel so tight my knuckles were pale. “If Dakota did go up there, he went to try to stop them. These are not nice guys, Kendra. Dakota is in a lot of danger.”

  She didn’t understand what I was thinking.

  “And if Dakota is in danger,” I said, “so are we.”

  chapter eighteen

  At the Canadian border, traffic was heavy. We had to wait in line for half an hour to get through customs and into Canada. From there, we followed the Trans-Canada Highway east. The broad flat valley of the Fraser River began to narrow. By the time we reached a town called Hope, we were in the mountains.

  I had been on this highway often, during road trips. Kamloops was ahead, and so was Prince George, home of the WHL Cougars. On this trip, though, I wasn’t sitting on a bus. I was behind the steering wheel of a Miata. On this trip, we wouldn’t be taking the normal route on the wide, smooth, four-lane Coquihalla Highway into Kamloops. Instead at Hope, we turned north, staying on the Trans-Canada Highway, following the Fraser River upstream. This road too, led to Kamloops, but it was a far older highway and a longer route.

  It was already three o’clock. We had roughly a hundred miles left—or, as the Canadian highway signs showed, a hundred and sixty kilometers. It was rugged, spectacular mountain country. This far upstream, the Fraser was a wild roaring river that cut through deep canyons. I was glad the skies were blue. I couldn’t imagine driving this road in rain or snow.

  Kendra and I talked about school and hockey. She told me funny stories about when she and Dakota were kids. We both did our best not to talk about the dam. It was like we wanted to pretend this wasn’t happening. So we didn’t talk about the plans we had made earlier. Once we got there, we intended to visit Kendra’s grandparents first, to ask them if they had seen Dakota. If we couldn’t find him that way, we’d drive the extra distance up to the Terzaghi Dam.

  At a town called Lytton, we swung onto a narrower highway toward Lillooet. There hadn’t been much traffic on the Trans-Canada. Most people took the four-lane highway because it was shorter and straighter through the mountains. Here, on the secondary road to Lillooet, there was even less traffic. It was five or ten minutes between vehicles.

  As we got closer and closer to our destination, I began to realize how stupid we’d been to think we could do anything about this. We were basically in wilderness—huge mountains and hundreds of square miles of forest and rock with no roads except the one we traveled. How could we expect to actually find Dakota, let alone know what to do once we did? And what if we had guessed wrong? What if Dakota was still back in Seattle and needed our help there?

  I kept my doubts from Kendra, though I thi
nk she had them too. The last dozen miles into Lillooet were very quiet.

  “Gasoline?” she asked when the first buildings of the town appeared.

  “Good idea,” I said. “My turn to pay.”

  She didn’t argue this time.

  We pulled up to the pumps of a small service station. I stepped out of the Miata and yawned and stretched, my first good stretch since stopping at the border. A longhaired guy in blue coveralls wandered out and began to unscrew the gas cap.

  “Fill it?” he asked.

  I nodded yes.

  Kendra came around from her side of the car.

  “Mister,” she said, “have you seen a black BMW today?”

  He shrugged.

  “This is the only road into Lillooet, right?” Kendra said. “There’s not much traffic on it. I was hoping you might have noticed. It’s a four-door black BMW.”

  He shrugged again.

  Kendra looked at me. “Well, it was worth a try.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Kendra and I stared down the road as we waited for the gas tank to fill. Lillooet was a small town—the map said less than two thousand people. It had a couple of hotels and a couple of restaurants, a small grocery store, weathered houses. Hills and mountains served as a backdrop.

  I shivered at a breeze blowing through the valleys. It was colder here than back in Seattle.

  Where was Dakota? What was he doing at this very moment?

  “Forty dollars,” the attendant said.

  I counted out the exact amount of money and handed it to him. He hurried back inside, moving faster than when he had approached our car.

  Kendra and I got back into the Miata. As I was pulling my seatbelt over my shoulder, I noticed the service station attendant was on the telephone.

  I didn’t think much about his hurrying back inside and getting on the telephone.

  Five minutes later, on the other side of Lillooet, I had a good idea why he had. And I had a good idea who he had called.

  Kendra had been right, of course. There wasn’t much traffic on the road, and it was the only way into Lillooet from the south. It should have been very easy to spot a black BMW. Almost as easy as it would be to spot a red Miata.