Thunderbird Spirit

by Sigmund Brouwer

  We had just turned onto a gravel road leading into the hills. No other traffic. Just us in isolation.

  Then a red 4x4 truck appeared in my rearview mirror.

  “Kendra, I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

  “Why?” she asked. “Remember, we’re only going to spend an hour here. If we don’t find Dakota, we go back.”

  “I hope so,” I said. She’d find out about the truck soon enough. “I really hope so.”

  The red 4x4 had pulled up behind us. It filled my entire mirror.

  The road was twisting and turning with trees on both sides. I couldn’t see much ahead of us. I couldn’t go much faster. Not on gravel.

  “Are there any other roads ahead? Any place we can turn?” I asked.

  Kendra still didn’t know the front-end grill of the truck was almost touching the bumper of her car.

  “No,” she answered, “this road goes for about ten miles before we get to my grandparents’.”

  “Great,” I said, not meaning it.

  Strangely, the red truck backed off.

  I wondered if this was good or bad.

  Much as I was trying to concentrate on the road, I risked another glance into the rearview mirror.

  I watched someone on the passenger side lean out of the truck. I hoped my eyes were fooling me. I hoped it wasn’t a rifle he was pointing at the back of the Miata.

  I hoped wrong.

  The bullet came with an explosion from the rifle and a popping sound from the tire. The steering wheel jerked itself in my hands, and the back end of the car started sliding in the gravel. He’d shot one of the rear tires.

  Kendra screamed. “What was that?”

  The car lurched as it slowed. “An order to stop,” I said. “And we don’t have much choice about it.”

  chapter nineteen

  The good news was that we found Dakota. The bad news was where we found him, how we found him and what he told us when we found him.

  “No,” he groaned as we climbed down a ladder, “this can’t be happening.”

  “Hey, Dakota,” I said. “Nice pad. Is the rent expensive? Do you get maid service?”

  Kendra, shivering in her sweater beside me, did not make any jokes about our new surroundings. Although this was the firsttime I’d been kidnapped, I’d guess that most of the time kidnappers shut a door behind you when they dump you into a room. Our kidnappers—the two men from the red 4x4—had forced us to climb a ladder down into a room. And they shut the door above us.

  It was an underground bunker. The hatch door at ground level was covered with sod, in a small clearing about a five-minute walk from a narrow road that stopped halfway up a mountain. Unless you knew exactly where to look for the clearing, you’d never find it. And once in the clearing, unless you knew exactly where to look for the door handle in the sod, you’d never find it, not even if you were standing on top of the door. From there, a round concrete tunnel—like an extra-wide manhole—dropped straight down. We had climbed down a ladder of iron bars stuck in the concrete. I had counted twenty steps down to the second hatch door, which opened to the bunker. The iron-bar ladder continued down the concrete wall of the bunker itself, letting us climb down to the floor.

  And that’s where Kendra and I stood—on the concrete floor, looking up at a concrete ceiling as a hatch door above us was closed and locked on the outside.

  The room was square, maybe twenty steps across. The walls were undecorated concrete gray. A single lightbulb hung down, throwing harsh light. An old couch stood in one corner, a kitchen table in the center, a battered stereo system in another corner. A refrigerator filled one more corner. I also saw a small door in the far wall.

  Dakota sat on the couch. He watched me check out the room. When I finally turned my gaze to him, he said, “It’s their hideout.”

  “Really?” I said. My sarcasm was lost on him.

  “How did you guys get here?” he asked.

  “Your friends in the red 4x4,” I answered. Friends was a term I used lightly here. A few days earlier, I’d seen them in the darkness when they visited Dakota’s house. Today, on the road, I’d seen their faces. One had eyebrows that almost grew together. The skin above his beard was pocked with old scars from pimples. The skinnier one had a ragged scar across his chin; his face and eyes reminded me of a ferret. Both of them stunk like month-old body odor. I’d almost been happy when they shoved us down into the bunker; at least now I could breathe through my nose.

  “I mean, how did you get here to Lillooet?” Dakota asked. “And why?”

  Kendra explained. Dakota could only groan and shake his head the entire time she spoke.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked him.

  “Long enough to know there’s nothing in here to help us escape,” he said, “and only one way out. The hatch.” He pointed upward unnecessarily. Kendra and I looked up. “It’s made of three-inch steel. In a hundred years, we couldn’t break through it.”

  Dakota caught me looking at a small door on the other side of the room.

  “A toilet,” he said.

  “Any windows?” I asked.

  He started to answer, realized I was joking and smiled.

  “No windows.”

  “Any good guys know about this place?” Nobody could rescue us if nobody knew where to find us.

  He shook his head no. “I didn’t even know about it, and I thought I was real close to the top of this group.”

  Kendra moved to the couch and sat beside him. “What group, Dakota? What’s this all about?”

  He closed his eyes and rubbed his face. “I hardly know where to start.”

  “You spent your summers up here,” I said. “Kendra told me you started visiting your grandparents when you were ten.”

  “Yeah. That’s a good place to start. I made friends. I came back each summer and hung out with them. There were a few in the bunch who, like me, really hated the way things were for Native North Americans. We’d learned enough in history books to know about broken treaties. Stuff like that. I could tell you nightmare stories about entire tribes being wiped out from starvation and disease when the white settlers first took away their land. Worst of all, it seemed that the government wasn’t willing to listen to our land claims.”

  “Land claims around here?”

  “Land claims all across the country. In Alberta, they built the Oldman Dam without caring what we had to say. I could give you a dozen examples where Native protests didn’t work: lumber companies moving in, hydro-electric companies taking over land. All that stuff.”

  I nodded. I didn’t pay much attention to newspapers, but even I knew there had been times when these things made headline news.

  “Well,” Dakota said, “last summer, it got more serious. My friends and I were always talking about how great it would have been if we’d been around to fight Custer. Then a couple of the older guys recruited us. Most of the tribal elders would have nothing to do with them, but I didn’t know that at the time. These few guys were promising big changes, if only we’d help them.”

  “Them?” I asked.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Mike. Lots of people around here grumble. But that’s all they do. They know there’re a lot of good things about life today too. They know they can’t go back a couple centuries before white settlers arrived. They know life needs give and take. They’re willing to work things through with the government. But there’s also this fringe group. And I discovered too late that it’s really weird about things.”

  “Weird?” Kendra asked.

  “These rebels are psycho. Like the two who brought you here. I think they’re using this whole race thing just to get a war started. They want to fight, just for the sake of fighting. I mean, look at this bunker. They want a battle. It’s like the crazies who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma. Nutso. They have military training and everything. Only I didn’t figure that out until it was too late.”

  “You realized it when they started talking
about blowing up the dam?”

  “Blowing up the dam is bad enough. Then they started talking about killing the premier of British Columbia at the same time. Tomorrow, when he gives his speech in Lillooet, a hundred square miles of Carpenter Lake is going to burst through the dam and come rushing down the valley. Even if the premier gets out in time, it will be close enough to murder to give them the press coverage they want.”

  “These guys are serious,” I said.

  “I knew for certain they’d kill me if I tried to back out. So I pretended to go along with them. I brought in a microre-corder and taped one of our discussions. Believe me, I was sweating. If they had found the recorder on me, I would have been cut into a hundred pieces and thrown into the woods as bear bait.”

  I nodded. “We listened to it on the way up.”

  He stared at me, his mouth dropping open in horror.

  “What’s the matter?” Kendra said. “I told you we listened to the tape.”

  “I thought you listened to it back in Seattle. If they find the tape in the car,” Dakota said, “all three of us are dead.”

  “Dead?” said Kendra.

  I couldn’t say a word.

  “I told you. These guys are psycho,” said Dakota. “Once I made the tape, I waited until I was back in Seattle. I called them and told them if they did anything, I’d release it to the police. Since then, they’ve done everything short of killing me to get it back. And you know why they didn’t kill me?”

  It was my turn to groan and close my eyes and rub my face. “Because they were afraid of who might get the tape.”

  “Exactly,” Dakota said. “Until now, it was a standoff. I didn’t want to take the tape to the police ahead of time, because I had been part of the planning. These rebels couldn’t do anything because if they did, they knew I would go to the police, no matter how much trouble it caused me.”

  “Why did you come up here?” Kendra asked. “I mean, it’s like going into the lion’s den.”

  Dakota took her hand. “They tried to kill your dog. They told me they would kill you next. Then Mom and Dad. I was hoping I could find a way to stop them. I mean, I got us into this mess. I was going to get us out. Having you give the tape to Mike was insurance.”

  “You said you used a microrecorder,” I said. “But we listened to a cassette. You’ve got copies.”

  “I do. I transferred the discussion onto a cassette from the microtape. I added a half hour of music at the beginning of the cassette just in case anyone accidentally plugged it in a stereo. I buried the original microtape in the backyard. But that won’t do us any good as backup.”

  “Why not?” Kendra asked.

  “Because without you or me as witnesses, even if the police do get the original microtape, they’ll have a tough time knowing where to start looking for the people whose voices are on the tape.

  “They already told me that tomorrow, when that dam blows, I go with it.” He bit his lower lip and corrected himself. “Now, I guess, we all go with it.”

  chapter twenty

  What do you do the night before the morning you think you’ll die?

  You think a lot. You worry some. But mostly you don’t really believe it’s going to happen. I had my own reason to hope, but I didn’t share it with Dakota and Kendra. It would be too cruel if nothing came of it.

  To avoid thinking or worrying, we told funny stories. Stories that had happened to us or around us. Dakota and I told our best hockey stories, and our worst.

  Still, time passed too slowly.

  Sometime close to midnight, we decided we would try to sleep. The old couch pulled out to a bed. Kendra and Dakota took it. I used the cushions from the couch to make a bed on the floor. There were no blankets or pillows. We settled back and hoped the clothes we were wearing would be enough to keep us from getting too cold.

  A few minutes after we shut the light off, Kendra spoke into the pitch black darkness.

  “I don’t like this. It’s too dark.”

  “They’ve got candles in here,” Dakota said. He turned the light back on, found the candles and placed one in the neck of an empty bottle. Then he lit the candle and set it in the center of the kitchen table before shutting the light off again.

  The candle made a nice warm glowing light. It was almost cozy. If only dawn would never arrive.

  After a few minutes of silence, Dakota spoke softly.

  “Mike,” he said, “let me ask you a personal question.”

  “Sure.” Normally I don’t like personal questions. But something about knowing you might die together makes it easier to open up.

  “What happened back in Saskatoon?”

  Kendra giggled. “He gave a guy a wedgie. A super wedgie. That was the best story you guys told all night.”

  I knew, however, that Dakota was asking about something that had happened before that game.

  “What did you hear?” I asked Dakota.

  “That there had been a ‘discipline’ problem.”

  “You heard right,” I said. I half hoped he’d leave it at that. I half hoped he would continue. It might be nice to finally tell someone the truth.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “You’ve got a temper, and you get a lot of penalties. But you don’t seem like someone who would hurt the team. And if you’d done something major, like break a guy’s head with a stick, we would have heard about it. Besides, you’d nearly spent the entire season with the Blades. I mean, before that, you really bounced around the league. For the Blades to keep you, they must have liked what you were doing there.”

  I was on my back, hands behind my head, with my eyes open wide. A few minutes passed.

  “I’m sorry,” Dakota said. “I should have minded my own business.”

  “No,” I said, “don’t sweat it. I’m just trying to figure out the best way to explain.”

  I saw in my mind the first day I’d met my Saskatoon billet, John Hummel, a captain in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He’d given me a big, gruff hard handshake. He’d introduced me to his wife and son—Matt, a guy my age.

  “Dakota,” I said, “the reason I bounced from team to team was because I was trouble. I loved hockey. I hated coaches, assistant coaches, principals, teachers and anybody who told me what to do. Saskatoon was different. My new billet...” I struggled for a moment, because I’d hardly admitted this to myself, let alone out loud. “He became like a father to me.”

  “But I thought—”

  “You’re right,” I said quickly. “My mom died when I was born. My real dad is still alive.”

  A few seconds of silence passed.

  “It’s like this,” I said before either of them asked anything else. My dad was no one’s business. “The day Captain John Hummel first shook my hand, he looked me straight in the eye and told me he knew my background, he even knew my juvenile record. He said it didn’t matter. He said it was where a man was going that mattered, not where he’d come from. And John Hummel played fair. He never made a promise he didn’t keep. He never made a threat unless he meant to back it up. He settled me down. I still had my temper, but I stopped looking for fights with coaches and teachers. Things were going pretty good.”

  “No kidding,” Dakota said. “You’re one of the top five scorers in the league. Saskatoon had a great shot at winning the league title until they traded you away. That’s why it seemed strange that they—”

  “Traded me away,” I said. “Remember? A discipline problem. One that had nothing to do with hockey.”

  I told Dakota and Kendra what had happened. I didn’t even like thinking about it. Early in February, thieves had broken into a fur store in Saskatoon, taking nearly a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of coats. It had been a headline story on all the radio and television stations. I hadn’t thought anything about it.

  The next night, there was a high school dance. I’d picked up a few guys from the team in my Toyota, and we had cruised toward the high school. In Saskatoon, the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police worked hard at cracking down on drunk drivers. Because of it, they often had what they called check stops—spots on the road where the cops stopped cars and checked the drivers to see if they had been drinking. They usually picked a spot around a corner or just over a bridge, where drivers wouldn’t have any advance warning and be able to turn around. For high school dances, they also set up check stops on the road leading to the school.

  The RCMP had made a point of letting students know the check stop would be there. That was John Hummel’s idea. He’d told me he didn’t want to catch and punish underage students who drank. That wasn’t his style. He respected kids my age. He said he wanted them to know about the check stop, so they wouldn’t drink and drive in the first place. If they knew a check stop was planned, they wouldn’t do anything stupid.

  So when we came around the corner and saw the flashing lights of parked police cars, I wasn’t surprised. Or worried. I hadn’t been drinking. Neither had my teammates. We knew it wasn’t cool.

  We pulled over and stopped. Through John Hummel, I even knew the cop who walked up and shone his flashlight into the car. He said hello, told us all that he was proud of the way the Blades were playing. Then he’d said that he needed to do a quick search of the car. He didn’t want it to appear that he was playing favorites because I lived with the Hummels.

  I walked around back to open the trunk for him. When I opened it, I was as surprised as he was. Fur coats, wrapped in clear plastic to protect them from dust and oil, filled my entire trunk.

  I paused as I told this to Kendra and Dakota. The feeling of disbelief and horror I’d felt to see those coats hit me as if I was still there, looking down on them.

  “I know you didn’t steal them!” Kendra exclaimed.

  “They radioed Captain Hummel to come down.” I laughed softly into the semidarkness of the concrete bunker. “You know what, Kendra? Captain Hummel said the same thing. He wasn’t going to believe I had taken those fur coats.”

  That was the exact moment I can remember thinking he was like a father to me. He took me aside and asked me how the fur coats could have gotten there. He hadn’t assumed that because I’d spent time in reform school, I was the thief. He trusted me and believed in me.